The Year of Miss Agnes Read online

  So Little Pete was glad of that. And Miss Agnes gave him a little notebook and told him to write in it every day so he wouldn’t forget all he’d learned about printing nicely.

  A few weeks later Roger went to camp, too. Roger’s family was very big. There were nine kids altogether, and he was the only one still going to school. The oldest ones hadn’t gone very much. And there were the little ones who didn’t go to school yet. The twins were four, and Frankie was two years old, and there was a new one, the baby, Liza.

  There was a lot of hoorah in the village when Roger’s family got ready to go, because they were taking three dog teams. We all stood out in the street at recess time and watched them leave.

  All the dogs in town were barking and pulling at their chains, wishing they could go, too.

  Roger’s oldest brother was loading up the freight sled Roger was going to drive, and those dogs were just jerking in their harnesses and barking, wanting to get out on the trail. Roger was standing on the brake with both feet, and he could just barely keep the dogs from moving the sled. It was funny to watch.

  The sleds were piled high with bales of dried dogfish and food and all the stuff they needed at camp. They didn’t tie it down real careful the way most people did. It was just kind of thrown in there. They were a happy family, happy-go-lucky.

  Nearly every day some other family would go off to winter camp and the village was getting emptier and emptier.

  Soon Marie Solomon had to stay home from school to take care of the kids because her mom was going out to help her dad trap. Miss Agnes told Marie to come to her cabin at night and they could keep up their reading together.

  Marie was always having to stay with those kids. Her mom had one nearly every year, and there was another one coming. I knew there were two still in diapers, because I helped Marie hang out the washing when I had time. I liked to help Marie because she was always so happy.

  She had to do the wash every day in the old gas washer just to keep up with the diapers. That took a lot of water.

  We had to melt snow to get water in the winter. Sometimes Grandpa and the other men would cut big chunks of ice from the lake behind the village, too. Ice makes lots more water than snow. In the summer we all got water from the river.

  And Marie had to cook all the meals for those kids when her folks were gone, and make bread. It was a lot of work.

  Still, she had time to curl her hair in these rods she had from the Sears catalog, and she made it look like in the magazines, turned back away from her face. And she kept that house clean, too. The floor was always swept. My grandma thought she was a really good girl. She was just proud of her.

  But Mamma didn’t think much of Marie because she was always singing to the radio when you came in that house. Mamma thought work was too serious for singing. And because Marie was always the one who danced most and the longest when we had a dance. All of Roger’s big brothers and whoever was there from some other villages, they all wanted to dance with Marie. That made Mamma look sour when that happened.

  Miss Agnes didn’t like Marie having to take care of all those kids herself, I could tell. “You need to know how to read and write to get along in life,” Miss Agnes said to Marie. But I could tell Marie thought she already knew how to do everything she needed to know to get along in life. She was proud she could already do everything a woman was supposed to do.

  I think Miss Agnes worried about Marie because she didn’t learn fast. Or maybe because Marie was so good-natured, she’d do what anybody said. Anyway, she kept Marie at it, even if she wasn’t coming to school with us.

  Marie wasn’t the only one. Plasker’s father came to Miss Agnes’s cabin sometimes at night, and she helped him learn to read and write, and even Old Man Toby came to learn to write his name.

  Miss Agnes didn’t think school was just for kids.

  “You have to keep learning all your life,” she said.

  That was a good thing to think about, always learning something new. It wasn’t like you had to hurry up and learn everything right away before the learning time was over, it was like you could kind of relax and take your time and enjoy it.

  Chapter 10

  There were a lot of different things we did in school with Miss Agnes that were fun. More fun than we ever had in school before.

  She had a little squeeze box like some of the old miners had. A concertina hers was called. Theirs were bigger and square, and hers was little and sort of round with straight edges. She told us, but I forget what you call that shape.

  Sometimes, any old time of the day, we never could tell when, she’d take it out of its little case and we’d sing. She taught us “Polly Wolly Doodle” and “Barb’ry Allen” and “Loch Lomond” and a million other songs.

  We’d ask her for the new songs we heard on the radio, and we’d sing them for her, and she’d play those, too. She was really good at “Hey, Good Lookin’ and stuff like that. She’d put Bokko’s hand on the squeeze box while she played, and Bokko could feel the music, like.

  Sometimes at night on the weekends we have music and dancing in the community hall. Different times, like somebody’s birthday or when everyone came in from beaver trapping. Or a potlatch, that we have for someone who’s died. There are two or three nights of dances with a potlatch.

  Martin Olin always plays for dances. He has this violin he ordered from Sears, a really good one, and he could play like anything. Hog River Dan has a steel guitar and Bobby Kennedy has a mandolin, and they sound really good together.

  Martin has this one song, “Cindy,” that he always plays on the violin, and it’s so happy that no one can sit still and everyone’ll dance, and they’ll dance so hard that the dust comes up from the floorboards in puffs, like it’s keeping time with the music.

  Even all us kids dance, and Charlie-Boy is the best of all. All the old ladies like to dance with Charlie-Boy because he’s so lively. Bokko can dance just like anyone because she feels the music in her feet someway. Mamma dances, too, and sometimes she even smiles and laughs a little. Then she looks young almost.

  Almost everyone has a best song that they sing if the dance goes on long enough. Martha always sings “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and she makes her voice just whiny like Hank Williams on the record. And so sad. It’s really good, the way she sings that.

  This is how it is at a dance. The men line up on one side of the wall and the women on the other, and when a man wants to dance, he comes over and just kicks a woman on the leg, just a little bit, to show he wants to dance with her. And then they dance, and then there’s a circle, when everyone walks around with his partner around the room, and then they play another song and you dance again. That way you dance twice with the same person.

  Grandma says that’s the way they learned it from the old miners who came into the country when she was a girl. That’s how everyone learned to play the guitar and stuff, from those old-timers and from listening to the radio.

  When we had a dance, we’d go get Miss Agnes and she’d bring her squeeze box, and that way she could play and the guys who were doing the music could have a turn to dance. Boy, she knew some good ones, too, ones she never played us in school because they didn’t have words to sing. They were just like Martin’s songs, you couldn’t sit still.

  But Miss Agnes would never dance. She’d just watch us and laugh.

  Chapter 11

  One day Miss Agnes made a long line on the wall with skinny white paper from Andresons adding machine. And then she put numbers on that line to show how the years went. The numbers went backward till they got to the zero, and then they went forward. The picture of Robin Hood was at the 1100 number, and then whenever we had history, we’d put another picture up.

  Nineteen forty-eight, that was us today, and 1938 was a war picture. Miss Agnes made a picture of bombs dropping on England for that. And down at the other end she made a picture of cavemen, the long-ago people. And a picture of Russians coming to Alaska in the 1700 place.
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  It was good to have that line. We could see how long ago things were happening with it. It made my thinking go straight.

  When that line was almost filled up, we played time machine. We pretended we had a time machine like that guy in this book Miss Agnes told us about, and we’d pick a time to go back to, and we’d pretend to land in a long-ago time, and then we’d tell everyone what we saw when we were there, back in time.

  That was really fun. Kenny made us laugh and laugh when he talked old-timey like Robin Hood and them. “Methinks I see a damsel!” and stuff like that.

  But you had to know what we’d learned to play time machine, because everyone would ask questions and try to trip you up. Miss Agnes never gave us tests, she just had us do things like this that made us remember what we learned. So it was really harder than a test, but it didn’t seem like it somehow.

  Sometimes in the middle of anything she’d turn to one of us and say, “Name the continents,” or “What do you call animals without backbones?” Any kind of question she’d ask us from what we’d studied before.

  It made everything stick in our minds better when we knew she was going to do that any old time. Even the little ones could remember really hard things that way.

  After school sometimes I’d go over to Grandpa’s and I’d tell him about the stuff we learned in history and science. He really liked me to do that.

  I asked Miss Agnes if I could have some of that skinny paper, and I made Grandpa one of those time lines, too. I couldn’t make the pictures on it good, like my teacher, but after I told Grandpa, he knew what they were supposed to be.

  Grandpa never knew anything about the Romans and people like that. When I made that skirt thing they wear in my picture, he laughed and laughed.

  He couldn’t read hardly any, but he liked to look at that thing a lot.

  Grandma kicked up a fuss, though, and said she didn’t want that paper thing on her wall, and so Grandpa rolled it up and would look at it when she wasn’t there. He would show his friends when they came to visit, and they liked it just as much as he did.

  Grandpa put the year he was born, 1878, on the line, and his friend old George put the year we moved from Dolbi. The picture about World War I was the one they talked about the most because I’d written under it what Miss Agnes had put on our time line: ten million dead, twenty-one million wounded.

  They couldn’t get over that. Here they were trapping and hunting and raising their families, and away on the other side of the world this thing was happening, and they hardly knew, because there weren’t radios then.

  Grandpa doesn’t like to stay in the village so much. He likes to be out in the woods all the time, but he’s too old to go by himself. So he and the other old men sit around together and drink tea and talk about the old times. We like to sit and listen to that, us kids.

  Grandpa remembers when there were lots and lots of white men in the country. The ones who came to Wiseman and those places to get gold. The Indians helped lots of them when they got in trouble, like when they were out on the trail and they nearly froze.

  And sometimes those white men helped the Indians, too. Like when someone got sick, one of those men had the medicine for it. They got along good together, Grandpa says.

  A lot of people around here have grandpas who were those old miners.

  But Grandpa still works hard. He sets a net under the river ice in the winter, and he helps Plasker’s mom with her fish trap. People give him moose and caribou, but he snares rabbits and ptarmigan to eat. And he and Grandma go to fish camp with us in the summer.

  What he misses is when he and his father would go way up north to hunt mountain sheep. Or caribou and moose. Those were his best times, he says. There weren’t any moose or caribou around our village in the old days. They hardly saw them. So they had to travel a long way to get them.

  He tells us the stories his mamma told him, about before there were any white men in the country. His mamma and them used to make a sod house, half underground, and they’d live in there in the winter and be just warm.

  And they traveled all the time to find meat to eat. No villages then. When they started a school in Allakaket, his mamma told him to go to school. She wanted him to learn to read and talk English. She was smart that way, he says. She knew he would need to know that stuff, the way things were changing. And she thought maybe if he went to school, he’d have an easier life than she’d had.

  He went the first time when he was twelve. He says they didn’t use paper then, only slates to write on with chalk.

  He went there for a couple of years, just in the fall before winter camp, so he only got through just the first-grade work.

  That’s why he liked to hear about all the stuff he missed in the other grades.

  One of the best things of all was when Miss Agnes ordered a little microscope for us, and we could look down inside it and see things that lived in the water. That was a thing you could look in forever, even if it made your eyes feel sore and tired.

  With Miss Agnes the world got bigger and then it got smaller. We used to think we were something, but then she told us all the things that were bigger than us, the universe and all that, and then all the things that were smaller. Too small to even see. So people were sort of in between, not big or small, just in between. That was a really interesting thing to think about.

  Jimmy Sam brought in something every day to look at under the microscope. Miss Agnes told him there were much stronger microscopes that could see things even smaller than we could see with our microscope. Jimmy looked really surprised. “Where do they have those microscopes?” he asked.

  Miss Agnes told him that he could go to college in Fairbanks and study with those powerful microscopes. Jimmy looked like he didn’t really believe that, and I didn’t really, either. People from our village don’t go to college.

  Miss Agnes got kind of mad when we all looked at her like that.

  Just because he lived in a village all his life didn’t mean he couldn’t become a scientist, or anything else, she said. She started rattling off about this scientist or this artist or this writer who started out in a village like ours and went on to school. We were quite surprised, but Jimmy Sam was something different than surprised. His face was all red, and I could tell he’d made up his mind to do this microscope thing, right there when Miss Agnes was talking.

  In a way we weren’t surprised about Jimmy, how he started to think like that.

  He was quiet, so quiet he could be there all day and never say anything unless you asked him a question. He had this way of looking at things very carefully, even little things. He was always taking things apart and putting them back together. Anything he was curious about. He was just a little kid, Grandpa said, when he took apart his dad’s inboard motor. His dad got mad that time because he was ready to go to set the fishnet, and he had to wait for Jimmy to put his engine back together.

  Jimmy was like that with other stuff, too. Once I saw him looking at a fern under the spruce tree by our school, and he looked at it for a long time, and then he began counting the little leaves. I asked him what he was doing, and he looked at me, surprised because he didn’t know I was there.

  “They come out just right,” he said.

  “What?” I said. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Look,” he said, “on each row there’s just one more leaf less, until it gets to the top. How does the fern know how to do this just right?”

  I just goggled at him and shrugged.

  I think that’s why Jimmy didn’t talk so much, because no one could figure out what he was talking about. Just Miss Agnes.

  Chapter 12

  There was a record Miss Agnes used to play for us, from where she used to live in England. King’s Choir, it was called. These people were singing in a big, big church made of stone, so their voices would echo like when we yell down at the bluff. When she played that record, she looked faraway again. We could see she was homesick for that place.r />
  “My father was a teacher there before he died,” she told us.

  “In a church?” we asked.

  “No. At the college there. Cambridge.”

  “Did he teach kids like us?”

  “No. He taught mathematics to older students, college students. This church is there, right next to where he taught. I used to go there to listen to them sing when I was a child.”

  She will be happy to be back in England.

  After Robin Hood, Miss Agnes read us Greek myths. Boy, those were something. To think of all the mischief those old-time people could get up to, changing into trees and that.

  We loved the monster ones, and we drew pictures of the Chimera and the Hydra and the three-headed dog. That was a good one. And after that she read us the story about Ulysses, and that had more monsters. There was this one with just one big eye. I forget what you call him.

  After that she read us all the fairy tales in the big red book. Those were kind of like the stories Old Miss Toby and Grandma would tell us at night up at fish camp. Those old stories about raven and people who turn into animals and all that.

  We told Miss Agnes about those stories, and after that Miss Agnes would read us a fairy tale and then we would tell her one of the old-time stories. Miss Toby told them in Indian, so they sounded different when you tried to tell them in English. Not so good, somehow.

  But that was fun, those fairy tales. My best was “Snow White,” and Bertha’s, too. We liked to think about all those funny little men.

  Chapter 13

  When it was Christmastime, we had a tree in the school.