Prairie School Read online

  Delores looked at the bed. It was a cheap metal cot with sagging springs. The mattress was thin. “If you come to our house,” she said, “I’ll sleep on the davenport tonight, and you can have my bed. It’s wide and comfortable, and it’s got two featherbeds on it.”

  But Miss Martin was not listening. Back in the kitchen, she opened the door into the schoolroom. Six wide windows faced the east, and let in the only light. A large desk stood in front, two bookcases and a piano in corners. The children’s desks were arranged in three rows. Blackboards lined three sides of the room. Two doors led into the front hall, which served as a cloak room.

  “It’s not painted!” cried Miss Martin, looking up at the high ceiling. “Oh, they promised to paint it, didn’t they, Delores? Don’t you remember—at the picnic on the last day of school in May?”

  “I guess so,” said Delores, ashamed.

  “If the fathers would help, it wouldn’t be such a big job.”

  Delores remembered that her mother had offered to paint Teacher’s kitchen herself. Mama always had a paint brush in her hand. She was always painting something. But she had never found time to paint the teacherage kitchen.

  “Mama’s so busy…” Delores began.

  “I’ll have to sweep and dust before I can move in.” Miss Martin went into the front hall and down the steep cellar stairs. Delores went with her, and they looked in the coal bin. “A little coal left over from last winter,” said Miss Martin. “Maybe we won’t need so much this year.”

  “Papa says it’s gonna be a soft winter,” said Delores.

  They came up the stairs again and went outside. Darrell had unloaded boxes and cartons of books, brooms, mops and dustpans, groceries and suitcases, and piled them in a pile at the teacherage steps.

  “Won’t you come and sleep at our house tonight, Miss Martin?” asked Delores anxiously.

  Miss Martin looked across the prairie, again. The billowing smoke seemed to be coming closer. “Put the things back in the car, Darrell,” she said.

  “You’ll come home with us then?” asked Delores.

  “No, it’s quite safe to stay here,” said Miss Martin. She added, almost in a whisper, “I must get used to it again.” Then aloud:

  “I’ll only take in one suitcase and a box of groceries.” She pointed to them. “And the kerosene can and the five gallon can of water. I’ll leave everything else in the car for tonight”

  “Got anything to feed Spike?” asked Darrell.

  “Spike? He’d better go home,” said Miss Martin.

  “The Swartzes left Spike here when they moved to town last June,” said Delores. “Didn’t you know that?”

  “They’ve moved to town?” Miss Martin glanced at the deserted house. “I thought the house looked empty. Now I’ll have no neighbors at all.” She paused. “Here are some sandwiches left over from my lunch. Give them to Spike”

  Darrell loaded everything back in the car again. Then he brought Sugar around and climbed on her back. “Come along, Delores,” he said, “We got to be gettin’ on home. I got all the chores to do.”

  “Darrell, I’m not going,” said Delores. “I’m going to stay with Teacher tonight. Mama said if she wouldn’t come, I was to stay and sleep by her—this first night.”

  Darrell sniffed. “A lot of protection you’ll be. You’ll put out the prairie fire, I suppose, when it starts to burn the schoolhouse up.”

  Miss Martin laughed. She put her arm around the girl’s shoulder “But I’m not afraid, you know. Why, I’ve lived in a teacherage for so many years…”

  “Don’t you ever get lonesome—all by yourself?” asked Delores.

  “Lonesome?” Miss Martin laughed gaily. “I haven’t time.” She went in the bedroom, took off her hat and suit, and slipped on a cotton dress. “Let’s get the brooms and sweep.”

  Darrell rode off and the sound of Sugar’s hoofbeats died away. Miss Martin opened the windows, and she and Delores swept and mopped until they were tired. The light faded and the high ceilinged schoolroom grew dark. Miss Martin filled the kerosene lamp and lighted it. She opened a can of baked beans and another of apple sauce. She and Delores sat down and ate.

  To Delores, it was a strange meal. Teacher ate such funny things. She never baked kuga (cakes) or made casenipfla (cheese buttons) like Mama did. She just opened cans and warmed things up. She never fixed big dishes heaped high with mashed potatoes; she never made big bowls of brown gravy. She never ate wuerst (sausage) at all. No wonder she was so thin.

  “I must get some bedding,” said Miss Martin, after supper. But she did not go to her car. She stood silently on the back porch for a long time. Delores came and stood beside her.

  The prairie stretched so endlessly off in the distance. It was not “flat as a pancake” as people so often described it. It was rolling. It rolled and tumbled like the great waves of a mighty sea. There were no trees at all—how homesick a person could get for a tree! And yet there was a grandeur and a majesty about this barren landscape. The brown velour texture of the grassy prairie slopes was beautiful. Miss Martin took Delores’ hand in her own. Delores was a child of the prairie. She had never known any other life. The woman and girl felt very small in the immensity of sky and land before them.

  Miss Martin spoke softly: “Sometimes last year, early in the mornings, I used to see a mysterious house far away to the northwest, across the prairie. It was shining so white and beautiful…I wished I could go there…”

  Delores laughed. “It wasn’t a house, it was a mirage. There’s no house in that direction. Sometimes when I’m riding I see a beautiful town, with high walls and towers. Mama laughs and says it’s foolishness. Then, an hour later, it’s only the slope of a prairie hill.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Miss Martin. “I always wish I had time to stand and watch the mirage fade away…”

  “Are you afraid of the prairie fire, Miss Martin?” asked Delores.

  “No, Delores,” came the ready reply. “If it comes closer, we can get in the car and ride to your house…even in the middle of the night.”

  Night at the schoolhouse seemed very long. It was August and the air was hot and close. Delores wished she had gone home with Darrell after all. She could not sleep. The teacherage felt so strange, not cozy like home at all. She was lonesome for Mama and her little brother Christy. She could smell the smoke from the burning prairie grass and felt sure it was coming closer. She listened to Miss Martin’s regular breathing. Then all at once, she heard footsteps. Somebody was walking around the school building with heavy treads. Should she wake Miss Martin up?

  Who could be out there on the prairie, nine miles from town? There was no one at the depot or the elevator at night, and the Swartzes had moved into town. Maybe it was the dog Spike. If they fed Spike, he would stay at the school now. Spike was a good watch-dog. He would take care of the school.

  Then she smelled smoke again. The fire must have jumped the track. Maybe it was moving toward the schoolhouse. Delores heard the footsteps again—ka-lump, ka-lump, ka-lump. She burst into tears and Miss Martin woke up.

  “What’s the matter, Delores?”

  “I heard something…” the girl began. “Look!” she pointed to the window, where a dark form could be seen.

  “Who is it?” called Miss Martin, rising in bed in alarm.

  But the intruder did not answer.

  “WHO IS IT? GO AWAY!” said Miss Martin in a loud voice. She put her hand on the girl’s arm. “Don’t be afraid, Delores.”

  The figure did not move. Heavy footbeats could again be heard. The figure nuzzled against the window frame and gave a little snort.

  “Oh, my goodness!” cried Miss Martin, laughing. “It’s a horse. Delores, look. A horse is poking its head in our window. Good thing the window is so high off the ground—he might have walked in.”

  Delores had to laugh. Miss Martin got up and the startled horse went trotting away. She looked out at the teacherage door. “Horses!” she cried. “There�
�s a whole herd of them. They’ve come over here because of the grass fire. But it’s all died down now.”

  “I’m glad of that,” said Delores. She looked out the bedroom window and could see it still smoldering along the tracks, and knew the danger was over. She fell asleep quickly, and before she knew it, morning had come. After breakfast, she helped Miss Martin unload her car. Over by the elevator, she saw the herd of horses, eating grain, and recognized them as her father’s.

  “Eight o’clock,” said Miss Martin. “The children will soon be here.”

  The Sticklemeyers came first. There were six of them—Jacob, Fernetta, Sophie and Wilmer, one in each grade from the third through the sixth, besides the twins, Donna and Bertha, starting in the first grade. They drove up in their cart, a homemade box mounted on two wheels, pulled by their twenty-year-old horse, Buckskin. They all jumped out and Jacob took the horse to the school barn and unhitched the horse.

  Miss Martin was kept busy greeting everybody. Konrad Snider and Emil Holzhauer each came on. horseback. Ruby Englehart came riding behind her father on his big white horse, Silver. Ruby was eight and had blonde curls. She was pretty and knew it. Last of all, the little Hummels, Peter, seven, and Hulda, six, came in panting from walking two miles and a half across the prairie.

  “Is everybody here?” called Miss Martin at the front door. “What are Konrad and Wilmer chasing?”

  “It’s a goose,” said Sophie Sticklemeyer. “The Swartz’s goose.”

  “They left their goose here,” said Delores. “They left Spike, too.”

  “Here comes the Galloping Goose!” shouted Wilmer Sticklemeyer. The goose came up on the porch and the boys tried to chase it in. But Miss Martin stood in the doorway. “Is everybody here? Let’s go in.”

  “Everybody but Darrell,” said Delores.

  There was so much to tell Miss Martin, it was hard to settle down at first.

  “Miss Martin,” began Ruby Englehart, “my little sister Mamie fell in the water tank one day in the hot summer. She was throwing boards in and nearly got drownded.”

  “Oh no!” said Miss Martin. “How did she get out?”

  “My little brother Matt said, ‘Mamie you better get out,’ and Mamie got out,” Ruby went on. “My Mama found her standing by the tank all dripping wet. She got a blanket and covered her up. She almost got pneumonia, but the doctor gave her a pencil…”

  “A pencil?” The other children laughed.

  “Do you mean penicillin, Ruby?” asked Miss Martin.

  Ruby nodded. “One shot and she got well quick.”

  “I fell down out of our haymow,” bragged little Hulda Hummel. “I was doing the morning chores…”

  “You? The morning chores?” Miss Martin looked down into the six-year-old’s face. Long dark bangs hung into her eyes, and her face had a serious look. She was getting old before she was young.

  “Sure, we get up at four o’clock and do the chores,” broke in Hulda’s brother, Peter. “If Hulda hada hit the stanchion, she’da been killed.”

  “By golly, that’s nothin’,” said Jacob Sticklemeyer. “I fell in our dam once…”

  Delores Wagner could not keep still. “Me and Darrell fell off Sugar and Mama nearly had a fit…”

  “I went rattlesnake-hunting up on Thunder Butte,” said Emil Holzhauer, “and I killed ten rattlesnakes.” Emil was thirteen, the oldest boy in school this year. The little children looked at him wide-eyed, and full of respect.

  Only Ruby could match the rattlesnakes. “I nearly got froze to death in a snowbank last winter…”

  “There! There!” laughed Miss Martin. “I know that prairie life is full of many perils, but let’s not exaggerate.”

  “Exaggerate? What’s that?” asked Emil.

  “Make it sound worse than it was,” snapped Delores. “Don’t be so dumb. If you don’t know a word, go look it up in the dictionary.”

  “But I did kill ten rattlesnakes,” insisted Emil.

  “And I did fall in our dam,” said Jacob.

  “And I did fall down from the haymow,” said little Hulda. “I hit the cement floor so hard, for a long time I had to hold my arm-out to keep my side from hurting.”

  “She never told Mama a thing about it,” said Peter.

  “Well, we are all still alive and we are here safe and sound, to begin a new school year,” said Miss Martin. “Will you choose your seats?”

  A mad scramble followed, with a few pushes and shoves, before they all got located.

  “Where is Darrell, Delores?” asked Miss Martin. “Isn’t he coming?”

  “Maybe he didn’t get home with the cows,” answered Delores. “They graze about five or six miles from our place. Or maybe he has to work today. Harvest isn’t over and Pop’s short of help. Papa thought there wouldn’t be no crop at all. First we had hail, then drouth, then it rained and brought the green lice and the grasshoppers. But they’ve got to harvest what’s left.”

  “There goes Darrell now,” said Jacob Sticklemeyer. “He just thinks he’s smart. He’s showin’ off.”

  The noisy hum of a motor drew all the children to the windows. They saw Darrell driving his father’s tractor down the prairie road. It pulled a wagon load of wheat. The tractor skirted the school-house on its way to the elevator. Darrell lifted his arm and waved, grinning, as the children called to him.

  “Can Darrell drive a tractor?” asked Miss Martin, astonished. “He’s only eleven.”

  “He was twelve in July, Miss Martin,” said Delores proudly. “Papa made him wait till he was ten before he’d let him drive it, but he knew how long before that.”

  “My cousin drove my uncle’s tractor when he was seven,” said Konrad.

  “Darrell’s just showin’ off,” said Jacob Sticklemeyer. “That’s why he hauls wheat past the schoolhouse on the first day of school. I can drive a tractor too, but Pa makes me come to school.”

  Miss Martin thought of all the days of school Darrell would have to miss during the year. She sighed, but said nothing.

  The children settled into their seats again.

  “Delores, will you pass out the books?” said Miss Martin.

  Another school year had begun.

  CHAPTER II

  The Fair

  “MAMA, THERE’S A WAGONLOAD of Indians out there,” said Delores. She came running in the kitchen door of the Wagner farmhouse. It was Monday, Labor Day, a week later. “They’re going to the Fair, too. It’s Charlie Spotted Bear and his family.”

  “Now what do they want?” asked Mrs. Wagner.

  “He wants some money for the land Papa leases from him, and Papa won’t give him any. He told him he paid the rent for this year to the Indian Agency at Fort Yates, and he might not want Charlie’s land again next year.”

  Mama Wagner shook her head. She was a plump, good-natured, soft-hearted woman. “Here, take this bread out and give it to them. Get the eggs from the chicken coop for them too.”

  Delores brought the eggs and bread to the wagon, where two Indian women and several small children were waiting. They smiled and accepted the gifts gratefully. Then Charlie Spotted Bear climbed up on the wagon seat, and the two skinny horses started off.

  “Have they gone?” called Mama from the back door. “Let us go then if we are going.”

  “Darrell, hurry up, you old slowpoke!” shouted Delores.

  Darrell drove the farm truck up to the back door. Mama climbed into the cab and Delores lifted three-year-old Christy up to her lap. Then she climbed in herself. The boys, Darrell and Philip, his older brother, and Emil Holzhauer, who had come over the night before, jumped up in the back. Papa Wagner slipped into the front seat, started the engine and drove off.

  Bouncing up and down over the prairie road they went, making three or four turns, until they reached the highway. The country looked brown and barren in the fall of the year. The prairie grass had been cut and stacked in large haystacks in the hayfields, for winter feed for the cattle. Most of the wheat and
small grains had been harvested, leaving fields covered with short dry stubble. On the highway, called the Yellowstone Trail, the Wagner truck was only one of a stream of trucks, cars and Indian wagons drawn by horses, making their way to town for the annual Fair.

  “Papa,” begged Delores, “can I have some money to spend?”

  “I want candy,” cried little Christy. “Buy me candy bar.”

  “Money, ach!” snorted Johannes Wagner. “Always money the kids are asking for. What you do with money?”

  “Ride on the merry-go-round, buy some ice cream and some Rooshian peanuts,” said Delores. “You gave Darrell fifty cents and Philip a dollar.”

  “I pay the boys for their work,” said Johannes.

  “You make them work too hard,” said Mama. “They are yet too young—Darrell only twelve and Philip but fifteen.”

  “Too hard, nothing,” said Johannes. “What are boys for, but to help their father? At ten, I was working like a man to help my father on that first claim of his west of town. I never got to go to school except when there was no work to do at home. I never had no money to spend.”

  “I want candy,” cried Christy. “Buy me candy bar.”

  “Those were the hard times,” said Mama. “Grandma Wagner, she keeps on telling us how hard it was in 1909, when this Dakota country was opened up, and they let white people settle on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. It took her a long time to get used to it, but now she is no longer homesick for the old country. She likes it in town, where she can see her friends and have her kitchen in the latest style.”

  “And all her eight children and thirty grandchildren to come and visit her,” added Johannes, chuckling.

  “Will we go to Grandma Wagner’s?” asked Delores.

  “We go first to Lavina’s,” said Mama, “to see how she gets along with her two little boys. Then to Grandma’s, but if her head hurts, we not stay but a minute.”

  The truck crossed the railroad tracks and came into the town, which lay sprawled out on a flat plateau, surrounded by flat-topped buttes and rugged hills. It was a shabby, dusty town, unsheltered from the glare of the hot September sun. At its edge stood a lofty black water tower, on which the town’s name was painted in white letters. Beyond were two tall aluminum grain elevators, shining like silver; at their feet, dozens of cylindrical grain bins filled to overflowing with recently harvested grain. Several great mountains of wheat were piled nearby on the ground.