The Year of Miss Agnes Read online

  The Year of Miss Agnes

  Kirkpatrick Hill

  David Caplan

  Margaret K. McElderry Books

  NEW YORK ♦ LONDON ♦ TORONTO ♦ SYDNEY ♦ SINGAPORE

  Also by Kirkpatrick Hill:

  Toughboy and Sister

  Winter Camp

  The Year of Miss Agnes

  Kirkpatrick Hill

  Margaret K. McElderry Books

  NEW YORK ♦ LONDON ♦ TORONTO ♦ SYDNEY ♦ SINGAPORE

  Margaret K. McElderry Books

  An imprint of the Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2000 by Kirkpatrick Hill

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by David Caplan

  The text of this book is set in Adobe Caslon.

  Printed in the United States of America

  8 10 9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hill, Kirkpatrick.

  The year of Miss Agnes / Kirkpatrick Hill. p. cm.

  Summary: Ten-year-old Fred (short for Frederika) narrates the story of school and village life among the Athabascans in Alaska during 1948 when Miss Agnes arrived as the new teacher.

  ISBN 0-689-82933-7

  ISBN: 978-0-689-82933-8

  eISBN: 978-1-43913-179-4

  [1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Teachers—Fiction. 3. Athapascan Indians—Fiction. 4. Indians of North America—Alaska—Fiction. 5. Alaska—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H55285 Ye2000 [Fic]—dc21 99-46912

  In memory of Sylvia Ashton-Warner, and for all unorthodox teachers, especially Margaret Lay-Dopyera of Syracuse University

  Chapter 1

  What will happen now?” I asked Mamma as we watched the plane take the teacher away.

  “Maybe no more school.” Mamma twitched her shoulder a little to show she didn’t care. Mamma never went to school much, just a few months here and there when her family wasn’t trapping or out at spring muskrat camp. She said she hated school when she was little.

  The little plane circled our village and then flew low over Andreson’s store and waggled its wings at us. That was Sam White, the pilot, saying good-bye to us.

  It was Sam White laughing, too. Sam thought nearly everything was funny. He had just landed with the mail and there the new teacher was, waiting for him when he opened the door of the cockpit. She pushed right through the rest of us and started talking before Sam even got to say hello.

  “Wait for me, it will only take a minute,” she’d said. “Please. Take me back to town. I can’t stay in this place for another second.”

  And he’d waited, and she’d come tumbling out of her little cabin, leaving the door open, leaving everything behind but the two suitcases she carried. It was kind of funny, how she looked. I could tell Sam thought so, the way he winked at us. And then Sam had helped her into the plane and the engine had roared and they were up and over the spruce trees and on their way.

  I knew what she would tell Sam. She’d tell how Amy Barrington had got mad and had busted in her door because the teacher bought mukluks from Julia Pitka instead of her. And she’d tell about the big boys who didn’t listen. And she’d tell about the fish.

  When we brought our lunch to school, it would always be fish. Salmon strips or kk’oontseek, dried fish eggs, to eat on pilot crackers. Or half-dried fish. The oil would get on the little kids’ faces and on the desks.

  “Heavens, don’t you ever eat anything but fish?” And she’d make us go to the basin and try to scrub the fish smell away with lots of Fels Naptha soap, and then with a bad face she’d scrub the oily ring from the washbasin.

  That one time, she pushed Plasker away from her desk when she was helping him with his arithmetic.

  “You smell of fish,” she said, real mad, with her teeth together. Plasker looked scared.

  “I was helping my old man bale whitefish,” he said. He was pretty nervous, wiping his hands on his pants as if that would help.

  The teacher told him to sit down, and she didn’t even help him with his arithmetic. There were tears in her eyes. Right there we knew she was not going to stay with us.

  We had a whole bunch of teachers since they started the school here, back when I was six. Some left before the year was over. Some stayed one whole school year. But none ever came back after the summer.

  Sometimes we could see the look on their faces the first week they were here, cleaning out their little cabin, putting up pictures on the walls. The ones who looked mean from the very first lasted the longest. It was the ones who smiled all the time and pretended to like everything who didn’t last.

  Maybe they were running out of teachers and we wouldn’t get another one.

  But in just a week Sam brought us a new teacher.

  I was helping Old Man Andreson in the store when Sam came in. It was my job to cross off every day on the calendar with an X so Old Man Andreson wouldn’t get mixed up and forget what day it was. And it was the first day of a new month, so I had to tear that last month off, too. October 1, it was now—1948.

  Sam was really big and tall, and when I was little, he always used to lift me up and make my head touch the ceiling. Now I was too big for that, so he just stuck me on top of the counter.

  “Fred! I brought you a new teacher. I kidnapped her. What do you think about that?”

  I had a bad feeling about that, so I asked him, “Is she nice?”

  Oh-ho,” said Sam. “This one’s got a little mileage. You kids are not going to get away with nothin’.”

  That didn’t sound like she was going to be nice, so I wiggled down off the counter.

  I wanted to go have a look at her.

  Chapter 2

  I ran to the Nickoli house to see if Bertha was there. She was in the back of the house, helping her mother with a moose skin. They were twisting it and twisting it with a long spruce stick so it could get really soft. Good enough to sew.

  “Bertha, we got a new teacher.” Bertha’s eyes got big and worried.

  “Is she nice?”

  “I don’t know. Sam said she was strict.”

  Bertha dropped the stick and we ran, even though her mother was yelling after her to get back.

  We ran to the teachers cabin and then stopped short in the dusty road. There was a skinny woman whacking the dust out of a rug on the side of the cabin porch.

  She was wearing pants. We never saw a woman wear pants. Our moms always wore dresses, with thick socks and moccasins. And us girls, too. Sometimes if it was really cold, we’d have pants under our skirts. But never just pants.

  We looked hard at her to see what we could find out.

  She was strong, that was for sure. The way she whacked that rug. The dust was just flying. She was making an ugly face to keep the dust out of her eyes. Then she dropped the rug in the dead grass by the door and went back inside.

  We walked to her door and peeked in. She didn’t even hardly look up, but she saw us.

  “Good, just what I need. Two girls to give me a hand,” she said. She didn’t ask our names or nothing. Didn’t even smile or tell us what a pretty village we had or any of the other teacher stuff. She just handed the slop bucket to Bertha and told her to dump it out back. And then she stripped the blankets off the bed and told me to hang them out back on the line.

  We did what she told us for a while, and then she stopped and said, “We need some tea.” Just like we were grown women.

  She took the kettle off the back of the stove and poured water into a fat little brown teapot. I wanted to put my hands ar
ound that pot, it was so round.

  She got three cups down from the shelf and three saucers, and took three spoons out of the jar on the table. Then she took a little silver thing and poured the tea through that so the tea leaves wouldn’t get in our cups. I never saw that before.

  And that tea was good. She put as much sugar in hers as we put in ours. Then she opened a can of milk and put some of that in her tea. Bertha and I looked surprised at each other. We didn’t know you could put milk in tea. She saw us look and said, “Try it.”

  Bertha shook her head no. She never liked to do anything new. But I tried it. The tea was even better with milk than without.

  The new teacher drank her tea straight down and then poured herself another cup.

  “Thank heavens for tea/’ she said. She looked at us carefully. “Now then, who are you?” She had a funny way of talking, not like us. More short like. Like each letter made a hard sound.

  “You talk funny,” I said.

  “That’s because I’m English,” she said.

  I thought about that for a minute. English was what we talked. Mamma said she couldn’t talk English until she was married, because then they got a radio and she learned it from the radio. So it didn’t make sense, the teacher saying she was English.

  The new teacher went to the shelf over her bed and took down a big book. She showed us a map. She put her finger on one part and said, “This is Alaska, where we are.” And then she put her finger on the map on the other side. “This is England, where I come from.” Her finger covered the place, it was so small. She looked at me and said, “The people from England are English.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And the language we speak is called English as well.”

  “Oh,” I said again.

  I think she could tell I was still a little mixed up, because she said, “The English that we speak in England sounds different from the way you speak English here. But it’s the same language.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, and this time I knew what she meant. Like how you can tell when someone is from Nulato or Hughes just because they say their words different.

  “My name is Agnes Sutterfield,” she said. “What are your names?”

  “This is Bertha,” I said. “Bertha Nickoli. She’s really Bertha John, but Jake and Annie adopted her from her real mother, Sally John, because Sally had too many kids already. Sally lives at Allakaket.”

  The new teacher looked at Bertha. “I know your real mother,” she said.

  “You do?” We were very surprised.

  “I taught at Allakaket a long time,” she said.

  “And what’s your name?” she said to me.

  “Fred,” I said.

  “Fred,” said the new teacher. I could see she was waiting for something else.

  “Frederika, really,” I said. “There was this old man ran a store when my dad was little. Dubin, that’s his name. Frederika was his mother’s name. He told my dad to name me that when my dad was just a little boy. ‘You name one of your daughters Frederika,’ he told him. And my dad did.”

  “Oh,” she said, and smiled. “Dubin.”

  “You know him, too?” asked Bertha.

  “Oh, no. He was gone before my time. But I heard a lot about him.” The look she had made me wish she’d tell us about Dubin, but she stood up suddenly and said, “Well, you girls have work at home, I’m sure. I’m going to finish here and start in at the school. Be sure to be there tomorrow at nine. We have a lot of catching up to do.”

  Bertha went back to help her mom, and I went back to the store to see if Sam was still there. If I was helping in the store, he’d always buy me a candy bar.

  He’d already gone, but Old Man Andreson was talking to some of the men. Barney Sam and his big boy, George, and Clayton Malemute and them. They were buying shells for their guns, and other stuff they needed to go hunting. They never did their buying quick—they had to talk a long time. I wasn’t supposed to talk when grown people were talking, but I was too curious.

  “Jack,” I said to Old Man Andreson. “You know our new teacher?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That’s a good one. Agnes Sutterfield. She been in the country a long time, up at Allakaket. They like her a lot up there.”

  “That was my teacher,” George said. “One winter we was staying with my grandma up there. I was only in that school a little while before we went to spring camp, but she was a good one. She taught me how to read. She knows a lot. That’s a good teacher you got now.”

  Chapter 3

  This is how we came to get a school.

  First everyone in the village lived at Dolbi, that’s upriver. They never had a school there. It flooded so much at Dolbi that people’s stuff just floated away some years. And then everyone said we better move somewhere else not so low. So the whole village moved here where we are now.

  I wish I could remember that. Some of the houses at Dolbi they put on rafts and just floated them down here. I would like to have seen that.

  Then Grandpa said some other people moved here because this is a good place. Lots of game.

  Pretty soon the government said we had enough kids to have a teacher if we had a place to hold school. You had to have six kids or you couldn’t have a school. That was the law. So they made a school in Old Man Johnson’s cabin because he was dead and no one lived in it anymore.

  And that was how we got our school. And I’m glad we did, because I like school.

  When I got up in the morning, I looked out the window at the schoolhouse down by the bank. It was still dark, but I could see there was already smoke coming out of the chimney.

  The last teacher could never get the fire going. She had to wait for one of the big boys, Roger or Little Pete, to start it. Roger got funny one time and closed the damper when he started, so it just smoked real bad and we all had to leave the school. The teacher was so upset, she said no more school that day and she went to her cabin and shut the door. That Roger is just a nuisance.

  I was so happy to be going to school again. Mamma was mad. She was slamming things around. She didn’t see the use of school. It made her mad to have me gone all day when I could be helping her at home.

  Bokko was helping me get ready. I couldn’t find my clean socks, so she gave me hers, which were pretty clean even though there was a hole in the toe she never mended.

  I put them on when Mamma wasn’t looking, or she would have yelled and maybe kept me from school because I didn’t have clean socks and Bokko’s had a hole in them. And she’d yell at Bokko for not darning them.

  I was glad to be going to school, but I felt sorry for leaving Bokko. She didn’t go to school because she was deaf. She was born that way. She was two years older than me, twelve, and I was the only one who understood what she wanted to say. I could just tell somehow. Mamma wasn’t patient to understand her.

  It had snowed a little in the night, and I ran all the way to school with that good feeling you get when it first snows and the good feeling from going to school.

  The schoolroom looked really different when I got there. The sun was just coming up and all the windows were just shining. She’d washed them, even the corners that used to be gunked up. All the kids were there before me because of those socks.

  Miss Agnes had put a map on the wall, like the one she showed me and Bertha in the book. A big, big map of the whole world. It covered the whole wall, so the bottom was by my toes and the top was way over my head.

  I couldn’t keep my eyes off that map, it was so wonderful. Right away I went to it and I stood on a chair and I showed those kids, “This is Alaska, where we are now, and this is where Teacher comes from. It’s English.” The teacher looked at me with a quick look, and I could see she was pleased I remembered. On this big map my fingers didn’t cover the little English place.

  Miss Agnes had a record player that worked with batteries, and lots of records on the back table, and a whole bunch of big books we never saw before. She must have bro
ught them with her. There were some pictures on the wall by the windows, some kind we never saw before. They weren’t pictures of real things, but they were just lines and squares and shapes of bright, bright colors all put together, not looking like anything, but really happy somehow.

  Everything was way different from any time we’d come to school before.

  For another thing, the desks weren’t all lined up. Miss Agnes had put them in a circle, around the edges of the room, and there was the long table in the middle of the room. And her desk was just back in the corner, not where it used to be, in front of the blackboard.

  Desks in a circle looked like more fun someway. And a teacher’s desk in the corner looked more friendly like, too.

  Everything was different, but good different.

  Chapter 4

  All the kids looked different that first day, too. Like something good was going to happen.

  It was early October and the river was just slushing up, and there hadn’t been hardly any snow, so all the kids were there. After freeze-up lots of them would go to winter camp to trap with their folks and would be there till Christmas.

  There was me and Bertha, and the big boys, Jimmy Sam and Roger and Little Pete, and the littlest ones, Selina and Charlie-Boy, and the middle ones, Kenny and Plasker. Toby Joe, too. And Marie. She was the only big girl.

  Me and Bokko were mostly the only ones who stayed in town all winter. That was because we didn’t have a dad. He died when we were little. They sent him to a hospital for people who had TB. In Juneau. That’s really far away. But he didn’t get better.

  We have a picture of him tacked on the wall at home. It was when he went to Nulato one time. There was this priest there who had a camera, and he took lots of pictures of everyone.

  There’s my dad leaning against the wall of the old store with a bunch of other guys. He was real young then. He has this kind of old-time hat, squashed up like. All the guys in the picture do, too. Mamma said that’s the kind of hat they wore then, back in the twenties.