The Year of Miss Agnes Read online

  He has on those old kind of summer moccasins, the long kind that wrap up your leg a little ways. I know his mamma made those for him. She died before I was born, so she never knew about me and Bokko.

  My dad’s looking at the camera and he’s laughing, with his eyes all squinched up. Bokko looks like that when she smiles, too.

  I think he was a really happy kind of guy. That’s what everyone says. Always joking. If he hadn’t died, there would have been more laughing in our house. Mamma is not the laughing kind.

  Mamma works for Old Man Andreson at the store, cleaning and doing the washing and all of that. And she does sewing to sell, boots and mitts and marten hats. She sews really good.

  She never stops working. If she isn’t at the store, she’s home baking bread, making duck soup, or cooking ptarmigan or whatever we have to eat that day, and when that’s finished, she’ll take out her sewing. Mamma thinks working hard is what everyone’s supposed to do, and so she thinks school is just a waste of time.

  Grandpa runs a little trapline out of the village, and he gives Mamma skins from the marten and rabbits he traps to make hats and mittens. And sometimes he gets a wolverine for ruffs, the fur trim around the hood. Wolverine is best for that because it doesn’t frost up like other fur.

  It’s a lot of work, sewing. First she has to scrape those skins with a special little knife until they’re soft and there’s no fat left on them. Then she washes them and hangs them up to dry on the line by the door. Not too near the stove or they’ll dry too fast. While they’re drying, she keeps twisting the skins so that they won’t dry stiff. Me and Bokko have to do that part, mostly.

  Mamma makes mittens out of lots of different kinds of skins. Otter and wolf are good ones, and she gets a lot of money for those. The mittens have long, braided harnesses so you can tie the mittens up behind you, so they won’t get in your way if you’re working. And so they won’t get lost.

  Those harnesses are made of three different bright colors of yarn, and they’re prettier than anything you ever saw. They have big pom-poms on them for decorations.

  Mamma gets me and Bokko to wrap the yarn around a piece of cardboard about a million times to make those pom-poms fat enough. We get tired doing it, but in the end when Mamma cuts the ends and fluffs them out, they look so pretty.

  She makes boots from caribou legs. Caribou is very warm, and the leg of the caribou is just the right shape already. When you skin the leg out, you just cut it carefully down the front and there’s a fur tube, just right for boots. Mamma makes an insole of caribou fur for inside the boots, too. And at the top of the boots she sews on a beautiful band she makes with beads. She always makes flowers on her bands.

  Grandma says in the old days they made the design on the bands with porcupine quills. You have to flatten the porcupine quill with your fingernail, and then you sew it flat to the band. Oh, first you dye the quills different colors. I’d like to see that kind of band, but no one makes it anymore. Too much work, I guess. They use beads instead.

  There’s a lot of stuff they don’t make anymore that my grandma tells me about, like the rabbit-skin underwear she had when she was little. Long ago you only wore what the women could make, but now people have got catalogs and the store.

  Mamma doesn’t make our parkas. She always orders them from the Sears, Roebuck catalog because she thinks making parkas is too much trouble.

  Grandma doesn’t like that ordering stuff. She grumbles at Mamma in Indian and calls her lazy. Grandma would make parkas for us herself, but she doesn’t sew very much anymore because her eyes are going bad. It doesn’t seem like her eyes are bad, because she sees everything me and Bokko and Mamma do, but that’s what she says.

  Grandma makes the sinew thread for sewing out of that big hump on the back of the moose, and she tans the moose hide with rotten moose brains. Boy, does that smell bad.

  She’s the one who taught me and Bokko to knit and to sew. Mamma doesn’t have patience for it. She always yells at us when we do something wrong, and then Grandma will frown at her and say, “Sikoya,” in this way she has, and put her arms out to us. That means “grandchild.”

  Grandma and Grandpa are too old to go out to camp much, so they stay in town all winter, too. They didn’t have any sons, only Mamma, so it’s bad for them that way. There’s too much hard work at the trapline for just women and one old man.

  There’s marten trapping in the winter, and after Christmas people go back out to their winter trapping camps for beaver.

  Spring camp, when people hunt muskrats, is just before the snow melts, and then we have fish camp in the summer. We all go to fish camp, me and Bokko and Mamma and sometimes Grandma and Grandpa, too. That’s because all our cousins and aunts and uncles go there, too, so there’s not so much work. We can all take turns, like.

  Grandpa misses going out trapping, but he says he gets more money making snowshoes than he would trapping anyway. Old Man Andreson buys those to sell in Fairbanks and other places, and he says he could sell as many as Grandpa could turn out, because Grandpa’s snowshoes are made of birch, so they’re real light on your feet.

  First Grandpa has to get just the right kind of birch. It has to be straight, with no knots. Then he soaks that birch in water until it’s soft, just right to tie onto the snowshoe frames.

  After they’re ready to come off the frames, Grandma fills in the insides of the snowshoes with those rawhide strips she makes from moose hide. It’s really hard to fill those snowshoes, all crisscrossed like a spider web. I want to learn how.

  There were lots of things we could learn at home, but I liked the stuff we learned at school, too, and I wanted to get good at reading so I could read fast like Old Man Andreson. When the paper comes in the mail from Fairbanks, he reads out loud in the store to everyone, and he goes so fast everyone tells him to slow down. I’d like to read that fast.

  So mostly I was glad we got to stay in town all winter.

  Chapter 5

  After we’d looked at all the books and stuff, Miss Agnes told us all to sit down. Little Pete and Roger pretended like they were going to sit in the same chair by Marie, and they pushed each other and wrestled.

  I waited for the teacher to holler at them and hit her desk with the ruler, but she just looked a look at them, with her eyebrow up and her mouth a little pushed to one side. It wasn’t a mean look, it was a smart look, if you know what I mean. So they stopped and sat down.

  It was no fun trying to get this teacher upset because it didn’t look like she could be upset. Miss Agnes was different some way.

  She told us to take all our old books out and put them on the desk. There were geography books and history books, and reading books and penmanship books you made little circles in. They were pretty beat-up. They weren’t even new when we first got our school, just hand-me-downs from other schools that didn’t need them.

  She had us put all those books away in card-board boxes, and she told Little Pete and Roger that after school they’d have to put them in the cache where we stored everything we didn’t need. She even put the ugly old grade book in the boxes. “I don’t believe in grades,” she said. Boy, that was good news.

  We sure never started school throwing books out before. We didn’t know what to think.

  Then the teacher put a big box on the long table, and we gathered around to watch while she unwrapped it. When she opened the box, it smelled so good, like new pencils. And that was because there were pencils in it. Not just the yellow kind we always had, but boxes and boxes of colored pencils, with every color of lead you could think of.

  And there were big yellow boxes of crayons, forty-eight in a box, the skinny kind, not the fat kind we had before. And a box of green pencils with dark lead, and lots and lots of tin boxes of paints. Each one had a little brush in it, and there was another bunch of little brushes tied together with a rubber band.

  And there was a wooden box with little metal tubes that Miss Agnes said had paint in them, too. I couldn’t
believe she was going to let us use all those beautiful things.

  But Miss Agnes started to lay the things out on the long table. And then she brought out paper from another box. Medium-sized paper, and some big paper, bigger than we ever saw before. “The first thing you must do,” she said, “is to brighten this school up. Everyone will make a picture for the wall.”

  Miss Agnes showed us how to rule a margin for our picture so there would be a white space all around. That was for a frame. She told us we could use the big paper or the little paper, and we could make a picture of anything we liked but we had to fill in all the white space inside the frame with color. Miss Agnes said that was the difference between a fine painting and a drawing.

  She showed us how to wipe our brushes carefully while we were painting. And then she helped the littlest ones, Selina and Charlie-Boy.

  They took the big boxes of crayons and made a dark line with every single crayon. They held the crayon so hard their fingers turned white. They wanted to know the names of every color. They had funny names, not like the plain names on our old fat crayons.

  We laughed and laughed when Miss Agnes said the names. Burnt sienna and magenta and periwinkle. Flesh. That was very funny.

  We all put that flesh crayon by our hands and laughed because our skin and that crayon weren’t anything like the same color. Even when we put it by Miss Agnes’s hand it wasn’t the same color. We didn’t know who would have skin that color. Miss Agnes sort of snorted and said, “No one.”

  Pretty soon everyone got just quiet, we were so happy making our pictures.

  Miss Agnes put a record on the record player. It was singing, only the voices were really high and sliding around like. Once I heard that same kind of music in Koyukuk. Dominic Carlotti, who owned the store there, played it on his record player, only Dominic’s was scratchier than Miss Agnes’s record, so it seemed old. This seemed new and bright. In some different language. The sunshine was filling the room from those bright windows, and that music was going up, up, in some kind of way. I felt excited inside, like when the stern-wheeler is coming up the river for the first time after the ice breaks up.

  “Dominic has that kind of music,” I told her.

  “Yes, he does,’ she said. “Dominic likes opera. It’s the favorite kind of music where he comes from. He’s Italian,” she said. I looked at the big map. She walked to it and said, “Here. This one that looks like a boot. That’s where Dominic comes from.”

  I had never thought of people coming from anywhere before, and now I knew two new places. English and the boot.

  When all those pictures were on the wall, we couldn’t stop looking at them. Everyplace we looked was some bright color.

  Little Pete made a picture of his dad’s trapline cabin out by Nicholi Slough. It was so good, with a blue sky and these good little snowshoes he drew with a pen the teacher gave him that you dip in black ink. He was proud of that picture, I could tell, because he kept making fun of it.

  And Selina made one of her baby sister in the new boots her mom made for her. That picture was funny because the baby was real small but the boots took up nearly the whole page.

  Roger made a good picture of Sam White’s airplane, and he asked Miss Agnes how to spell Gullwing Stinson so he could write that at the bottom. Roger really liked airplanes, and he knew all the different names they had and all about their engines and stuff.

  Kenny did the stern-wheeler, George Black’s Idler, that comes up the Koyukuk River every year with all our freight. It’s hard to draw it right, because there are a hundred paddles on the wheel that pushes the boat, but Kenny did it good.

  I wanted to make a picture of the music she was playing, but I didn’t know how, so I made a picture of Miss Agnes. It was hard to get her hair, some gray and some not gray, all flying around her head somehow, not pulled neat like Mamma’s or the other women.

  When it was time for lunch, I felt a little worried. The other kids did, too, I could tell. Plasker most of all.

  Miss Agnes had made some tea from the pot on the stove, and she told us if we all brought cups from home tomorrow, we could have some, too.

  She must have made a batch of bread after Bertha and I left her the day before, because she had a sandwich to eat with her tea. Peanut butter.

  We got really quiet while we were eating, and all the kids had their heads down, looking at their desks. Miss Agnes looked at us a little strangely.

  Finally I asked her. “Do you like fish, Miss Agnes?” It was very quiet. All the kids looked at her from under their eyebrows to see what she’d say.

  “No.” She made a face. “I hate fish.” That was bad. I tried to cover my fish strips with my hand. Miss Agnes looked at all of us with a question on her face.

  “Our old teacher didn’t like the smell of fish,” I said.

  “Oh,” Miss Agnes said. “Well, I can’t smell anything. I have sinus trouble.” We all looked at each other.

  So that was good.

  Chapter 6

  After lunch that first day Miss Agnes said she needed to find out how much writing we had learned. I was not happy to do this, because I hadn’t learned much.

  She gave us new pencils, and paper with lines, and told us all to write our names and the day we were born. The older ones were to write something about themselves, just anything to show Miss Agnes what we could do.

  We all looked at Bertha because Bertha was so good at writing. Seemed like she was writing all the time.

  Even before we went to school, she used to get a pencil from Old Man Andreson and she’d hunker down by the boxes in the store and she’d copy the writing. She’d write Olympia Beer and Pillsbury Flour and anything that was printed on the boxes. She didn’t know what the letters said, she just thought they were pretty.

  Old Man Andreson wrote the alphabet the way it goes on a piece of paper for her.

  “Bertha, you’ll be my secretary when you grow up,” he told her.

  She never let loose of that piece of paper. It was always in her pocket. She’d copy the letters in the snow with a stick, or in the mud on the riverbank. Bertha was funny that way.

  Miss Agnes stopped in surprise when she saw Bertha’s writing.

  “Well, Bertha.” She bent to look carefully at each letter. “It would be hard to improve on that,” she said. Bertha looked really shining like, having Miss Agnes see what a good writer she was.

  “I’ll teach you how to write cursive now. You’re ready.”

  I knew what that was, that curly kind of writing some grown-ups used, just flying across the paper, ninety miles an hour. I couldn’t wait to learn that, too.

  Marie looked like she was going to cry. She was fourteen, but she’d only spent a few months in school off and on. Her mom had all those babies Marie had to take care of when her mom went to help her dad on the trapline. She couldn’t write much at all. She put her head down.

  Miss Agnes walked around and looked at everyone’s writing. Charlie-Boy and Selina could write their names, but that was all.

  None of us were very good at writing, except Bertha.

  Miss Agnes took a roll of masking tape from her shelf and put a strip on each desk. She wrote the alphabet in printing on that strip with a pen. She wrote the big letters and then the little letters. Then she taped a paper on our desk with our name written in perfect letters. That was to help us remember. For Bertha she wrote the letters in cursive.

  Then she started to show the rest of us on the blackboard what each letter was supposed to look like, starting with the vowels, because she said you used one of those in every word, so the vowels had to be really good. Like if on a shopping list you wrote an o so it looked like an e, you might get a pet instead of a pot. She made it funny, showing us how awful letters looked when they were made silly.

  Miss Agnes called a sloppy o a “hairy o” because when you don’t write an o right, it looks like a little face with one hair sticking up on top. We really laughed at that. And she said the nose of a
n e was supposed to be sharp enough to prick your finger on. Then she drew a finger getting pricked by that sharp point on the e.

  We never tried to do it right before, we just wrote any which way. So we were surprised to find Miss Agnes was going to be so picky. She said if we wrote our letters sloppy, she would give us back our work and make us do it over.

  You’d think it would make me mad to do that, but it made me glad. Like when my grandma makes me do something over and over till I get it right. I feel like she’s going to make sure I learn it good, and so I don’t feel mad. That’s how I felt now.

  We practiced on our paper, making sharp-nosed e’s and perfect o’s that weren’t hairy, and straight i’s with the dot right smack on top, not drifting away somewhere. Charlie-Boy made us laugh, because he was practicing so hard his tongue was sticking out.

  It was fun the way we did it, and I wanted to make every letter just perfect. I could write as perfect as Miss Agnes and Bertha if I just practiced.

  While we practiced our printing, Miss Agnes read to us for half an hour, walking up and down in front of the windows while the snowflakes came tumbling down, that kind that’s real big and slow falling.

  It was a story called Robin Hood, about a man who stole money from the rich people and gave the money to the poor people who needed it. It was an olden-time story from when people had bows and arrows.

  When Miss Agnes read to us, she did all the people in different voices, and we forgot right away it was just reading. It got real, like being inside the book.

  I didn’t want Miss Agnes to ever stop reading. I felt as if I really was in that dark, deep forest with trees taller than you ever heard of, and when she stopped, I felt shocked, as if I’d come out of a dream.

  The boys were all excited to think of people fighting with big, fat sticks like that, like when Robin Hood and Little John were on the bridge. We don’t have any big sticks around here, just spruce poles.