When the Meadowlark Sings
The Story of a Montana Family
Nedra Sterry
Smashwords Edition
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-60639-047-4
Copyright © 2003 by Nedra Sterry.
Published by Riverbend Publishing, Helena, Montana.
All rights reserved.
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This book is available in a printed edition.
Cover photo: Nedra Sterry, circa 1938
Cover design by DD Dowden, Helena, Montana.
Riverbend Publishing
P.O. Box 5833
Helena, MT 59604
1-866-787-2363
Dedication
To my mother, Adelia Frances Hanson
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my family for their unflagging faith and support. To Rick, for the hours of editing and for his optimism and boundless enthusiasm; to Craig, for reading and editing and for his loving encouragement; to Alan, Sandra, and Jill for sharing the tears and the laughter; and to brother Bill for the memories.
A most grateful thank you to David McCumber, who took time from his busy life to read the manuscript and empowered me to believe I could write the book. To John Daniel, why gently but honestly showed me the way. To Chris Cauble and Martha Kohl for helping to put the manuscript into final form. To Pat Wallace, who listened, and to the “Ladies of the Club.”
“Without stories, in some very real sense,
we do not know who we are or who we might become.”
William Kittredge, Hole in the Sky
Autumn
I can still picture the rural Montana schools where Mama taught and where we lived. There was always the tiny, one-room teacher’s quarters—the “teacherage”—a coal shed, two outhouses, and a white schoolhouse. Sometimes there was a set of swings with weathered wooden seats that left splinters in our bottoms. Although most of the schoolhouses sat on a treeless corner, fenced in with barbed wire and surrounded by miles of empty prairie, we were always anxious to explore. There were abandoned homestead shacks containing old magazines, bits of letters, and even clothing—dust-covered testimony of failed dreams. They held a great fascination for me. Who were these people? Where did they come from? Where did they go? Onto Washington or to the Oregon coast? Maybe they went back home to their relatives in the East. Once we found a big cardboard box with long skirts, ruffled blouses, and a fur-trimmed cape. No woman would leave without her best clothes. Maybe she died of flu or childbirth. There were no end of stories to be imagined.
We grew up in schoolhouses all across Montana. Nearly every year we moved to another school in a different part of the state. “Isn’t this a lovely place, children?” my cheerful, optimistic mother would say. “This time I know we’ll stay. I just feel it in my bones.” But, as usual, we would burn up our winter’s fuel allotment by Christmas. A single teacher would only have had to heat the teacherage at night, but we didn’t all fit in the one-room dwelling. Instead, we four girls took turns sleeping with Mama, while our brother, Billy, and the other girls slept in the schoolhouse. We would put up a borrowed bed along with Billy’s old army cot in the schoolhouse and make a fire. The school budget didn’t include money for fuel for two fires, and by spring the school board members would be grumbling, and Mama would be looking for another teaching job.
“I know what we’ll do next Saturday, children,” Mama would say when the coal bin began to get low. “We’ll have a picnic and fill our gunny sacks with buffalo chips on the way home.” Of course, there hadn’t been any buffalo roaming the prairie for many years. Mama knew that, but she thought it sounded better than “cow pies.” We did a lot of walking and tried not to come home without a broken piece of fencepost or a branch from a dead cottonwood tree.
At each new school district we stopped at the local store in the nearest town to establish credit and buy our winter supplies. I remember the boxes of peaches and plums Mama brought home to can for the long winter months ahead and the baskets of concord grapes with their special pungent odor. We ate a lot of macaroni and cheese, but there would be dried apricots, apples, prunes, and raisins. Mama’s raisin pie was a delectable treat. We would use up two hundred pound bags of flour and a huge bag of navy beans by spring.
Friday night we would sort and wash a big kettle of navy beans. If by some stroke of luck we had extra money, we’d have bacon rinds to cook with them. The beans were set on the back of the stove to soak while we all carried water to fill the tub and boiler for the weekly wash. We took turns at the washboard, the littlest kids scrubbing the socks as the white clothes bubbled on the stove. Saturday has always reminded me of the mingled smell of soapsuds, bean soup, bread baking, and wet wooden floors.
We all had our special jobs. Mine was washing the lantern and lamp chimneys, trimming the wicks, and filling the lamps. One of my clearest memories is the smell of Mama’s Ponds cold cream as she cleaned her face at night and the acrid odor of the kerosene wicks as the lamps were blown out.
I enjoyed the winters as we snuggled down inside the schoolhouse while the storms howled around the buildings. One of the first things we did after filling our ticks with straw from the nearest straw stack was to pack straw around the base of the teacher’s quarters and shovel dirt over that to keep the chill winds from blowing in. Then, after the first snowstorm, we would shovel snow over the dirt to keep the wind from blowing both the dirt and the straw away.
We watched while Mama set her yeast right after supper, and then before going to bed at night she’d stir in some flour. By morning it would be a bubbling pan of sponge. I can see her now, up to her elbows in flour and bread dough, eyeing the clock as she kneads and then covers it with a dishtowel. At noon she would pinch off handfuls of the risen dough, stretch it out thin, and fry it on top of the stove. We dipped it in a mixture of sugar and cinnamon and it was wonderful. Then she rolled the rest of the dough into loaves and it would be ready to bake by last recess. That was my sister Irene’s job, keeping the fire just right, and taking the bread out of the oven to cool on a rack in time for supper.
Irene, the oldest, was small for her age, and she had other problems, too. Although she learned to read well, it took her longer than the rest of us. She never made it past the third-grade level, and when she was ten years old, Mama gave up and let her just sit and read in the classroom. I always thought of her as one of the little girls because she was small and she liked to play dolls with the little sisters. Betty Lou, the baby, stayed with the aunts in Minneapolis more than she stayed with us. She had chronic kidney trouble that affected her all of her life. Two years younger than I, Donna was the pretty one, with blue eyes and thick hair, and I always envied her. We were never close, not even after we grew up. Maribelle was four years older than I and ambitious. She planned to be a nurse from the time she was a little girl, and as soon as she was old enough she stayed in town, working for her room and board. Two years older than I, Billy was the only boy and my best buddy.
The first school I remember was the one at Eagle Butte, southwest of Fort Benton, where Mama taught in 1920 and 1921. I clearly remember the barren, moonlike landscape covered with a fine lava rock and mica that glistened in the sunlight. We brought home chunks of mica to carve into shapes and hang in the windows to catch the sun. The Eagle Butte school district was a last resort for a teacher looking for a position. It had a bad reputation for truancy, and few teachers lasted out the term. It was already November when we arrived there. The last teacher, a young man, had left in October and we were just beginning to find out why.
On the first day of school the school board chairman looked Mama over. “Now we want you to learn these younguns some-thin’,” he said. “If they give you any trouble, you just beat ’em and we’ll give ’em more of the same when they get home.”
There were six first graders, about half of whom were probably under the legal age. You couldn’t blame those mothers for wanting to get them out from under foot for a while, but it was tough on the teacher, especially when she had babies of her own. There were nearly twenty kids in that school, and the oldest boy was sixteen years old. Some of the boys had voices deeper than their fathers and were already shaving. They had been taken out of school for butchering, spring seeding, and hauling grain, and they were rarely ready for the eighth grade exams in the spring. They thought Mama would be an easy target. Mama was a small woman, five foot two, but I never saw the time when she wasn’t in charge. She had blue eyes that never missed a thing, and she had most of the kids pretty much under control after the first week.
By noon the first day a half-dozen twenty-two shells had exploded in the pot-bellied stove, the crockery drinking fountain had been tipped over, and a bucket of coal had been spilled on the floor. The next morning when Mama tried to start the fire in the little cook stove in the teacherage, smoke began to pour into the room, and we all ran outside in our nightclothes coughing and choking. Mama lifted Billy onto the roof, and after a brief struggle he pulled balls of twine and snow from the chimney, and the smoke came billowing out.
“Don’t any of you say anything about this,” Mama told us during breakfast. “Not one word, even if they ask you. We’ll just pretend nothing happened.” But she had a plan.
The kids came to school the next day with bright eyes and expectant faces, but nothing changed except that Mama didn’t read to us at noon, and recess time was cut in half. At four o’clock, the bell signaling the end of the school day was silent. Mama took the key to the schoolhouse out of her desk drawer, locked the door, and put the keys in her pocket. Then she went to the blackboard and wrote in big letters: “I HELPED STOP UP THE TEACHER’S CHIMNEY.”
“When the guilty parties have all signed their names you may go home,” she said. There were nervous giggles, whispers, and shuffling of feet, and the clock ticked on. Finally one of the big boys stood up. “If we ain’t home to do the chores my Pa’ll be mad and you’ll get fired.”
Mama jingled the keys. “We’ll see,” she said, and waited—and waited, until all but the smallest boys had signed their names. When at last the sound of a wagon was heard and an irate father pounded on the door, Mama unlocked it and let him in. Before he could say a word, she pointed to the blackboard. He looked, he read, and then burst into a booming laugh.
“By golly,” he bellowed. “I tink we got us a teacher dis time.” Mama had gambled and won. There were other tries at getting rid of the teacher, but they were half-hearted and only to keep in practice.
Before Eagle Butte
I am trying to think back to a time when Mama might have had a normal happy life. I don’t think she ever did. She just made the best of things. “Tell us about the olden days, Mama,” we would beg, and the stories she told were not happy ones.
Mama was only four, one of ten children in Madelia, Minnesota, when her mother died of a stroke at the age of forty-seven in 1887. The younger children were taken into various homes around the community. She remembered her father as a dour and surly man she rarely saw. The family that took my mother wasted very little affection on the small orphan. Their only child, a boy, teased and tormented Mama unmercifully, and she was often punished for things he had done. They told Mama outrageous stories about the Indian massacre that had taken place in Mankato thirty years before and threatened to let the Indians have her if she didn’t carry out her tasks to their satisfaction.
She was doing the work of a grown woman by the time she was ten. She carried the water for the family baths and weekly washing, helped cook the meals, and washed the dishes when supper was over. They gave her fifty cents a week, and she would need every cent of it to pay for teacher’s college when she was old enough. When she was fourteen she answered an ad in the Mankato paper placed by a family with six children who needed her as much as she needed them. She worked there until, at the age of seventeen, she began teacher’s college in Mankato. Working part time she earned her teacher’s certificate and set off on her own.
She rolled her hair into a bun and borrowed a pair of pince-nez glasses in an effort to look older when she had her picture taken and then started applying for a teacher’s position. She was told over and over that she was too young, and was almost ready to despair when she was hired to teach in the Hanson school district. That school was considered undesirable because the teacher had to board with the Hanson family and share a room with one of the three sisters. By that time Mama wasn’t too choosy, so she accepted the position, and the die was cast.
It was there that she met my father, the youngest of five siblings. Although his sisters told my mother that Will was spoiled, selfish, and had a nasty temper, she fell in love, and they were engaged by Christmastime.
Will and his older brother Fred brought home pamphlets about the rich land in Montana that could be had for the taking. They decided to marry their sweethearts and seek their fortunes. In 1912 they found land north of Fort Benton, Montana, filed and began to build their homestead shanties. It was hard, grinding work breaking and planting the new prairie land, but in some places the crops grew so high that only the men’s heads and the top of the women’s hats showed above the burgeoning wheat.
In the first good years my parents borrowed money from the bank and planned to build a house and barn when the wheat was harvested and sold. After all, the land was new, the wheat grew tall and lush, and there was promise of better things to come. The next spring they plowed and seeded the fields, their optimism boundless. Then came long weeks of sun and soft winds, and the wheat grew tall and bountiful again. In another week, harvest would begin, the threshing crews were spoken for, and all was in readiness.
Uncle Fred and Aunt Ella had decided to wait to build their house, and that turned out to be the right decision. The black clouds came bringing hail that second year. Then the merciless sun and hot winds finished what was left. Grasshoppers, drought, and other pestilence followed the next few years, and the grim-faced bankers finished the dream.
One farm can be totally wiped out by hail while another farm three miles away can survive untouched, and so it was that my Uncle Fred became the owner of my parents’ homestead in 1914, for hail is a capricious thing. My father worked then for other farmers more fortunate than he had been. Luckily my mother had her teacher’s certificate, and the country school was just two miles from the homestead. The school needed a teacher, and she got the job. With Mama teaching, Mama and Papa continued to live in their house on the homestead until they moved to Fort Benton the fall of 1916.
Before they moved, Papa found work with a transient threshing crew. He went to town one day with a wagonload of wheat that had been gleaned and thrashed, which he planned to sell to buy provisions to last while he was away. It was all that was left from the ruined fields. When he didn’t get home in time for supper that night, Mama walked the floor and worried, finally getting to sleep at first light. The sound of a motor in the yard awakened her. The sun was high in the sky already, and she hurried to dress. When she went outside, there was Will, wearing a black leather helmet and boots, spinning around the yard, sending up a hail of pebbles and a cloud of dust. He had sold the team and wagon to buy a shiny black motorcycle and sidecar. Mama cried that day, but Will was like a child, admiring the way the handlebars caught the sunlight.
“I’ll be able to come home more often now,” he said, smiling the boyish smile that had won her heart.
“Oh, Will.” She covered her face with her hands, trying to stop the tears, and then hopelessly turned her back and started for the house.
“Come on, get in and I’ll take you for a ride.” She shook her head.
“For Christ sake, what are you bawling about?” He jumped off the machine and ran after her. “Come on, Deely. Come on, now,” he wheedled. “You know I need transportation. Come and look at the groceries I got you. The storage compartment is full of stuff for you and the kids.” Irene and Maribelle were up now, circling and admiring the shiny machine.
“You know a good thing when you see it, don’t you, my pretty little girls? Come here and Papa will take you both for a spin.” He buckled them into the sidecar in spite of Mama’s protests and tore up the road and over the hill. Climbing on the hitching post, she could barely see them in the cloud of dust going past the schoolhouse and up the road toward Uncle Fred’s place. It was much later when he returned.
“I had to take her over to show old mealy-mouth Fred,” he said. “Boy, was he jealous.” Then, unbuckling the girls, he unloaded the groceries.
“What have you got for breakfast, woman?” he asked.
After they left the farm the family lived in Fort Benton in a small rented house. Mama was “expecting” again, this time with my brother, the only one of the children to be born in a hospital. Mama had a kerosene incubator in the cellar and went down early one morning to turn the eggs. She tripped on the hem of her bathrobe and dropped the lantern, starting a fire. Ripping off her robe she beat out the flames, but by this time her nightgown was on fire. She raced up the stairs, grabbed a blanket, pulled it around herself, and ran outside, rolling on the ground. Luckily Papa was still there, and he roused the neighbors to watch the girls and help him get Mama to the hospital. My brother, Billy, was born there and was a healthy baby in spite of the trauma. Mama was badly burned and carried dreadful scars from chest to thigh for the rest of her life.
The family stayed in Fort Benton for four years. I was two years old when Mama, my sisters, my brother, and I left for Eagle Butte, and Papa went with a threshing crew looking for work elsewhere. We didn’t see him so often after that. He would come to visit us once in a while, roaring up on his motorcycle with candy and presents and tall tales, but I didn’t like him. I remember the arguments and Papa’s loud voice, and I was always glad when he went away again.
Trains
The summer of 1922 we lived in Big Sandy, a small town between Great Falls and Havre, while we waited for school to start in mid-October at the nearby Lone Tree School. Big Sandy remains vivid in my mind. It is where I gained the thick, white scar still visible on the heel of my left hand.
The day I received the wound that gave me that scar, Mama was in bed. She never stayed in bed, so I thought she was sick. The neighbor lady was there, and she told Maribelle to take us kids down to the station to see the circus train.
“And don’t bring them back until someone comes to get you,” she said. “This shouldn’t take too long.”
Maribelle was shepherding us even though Irene was the oldest. Irene never got to be the boss because she ran away sometimes, and we all had to watch out for her. I was four that summer and didn’t like being bossed by anyone. The sky was a vibrant blue, and we could smell the smoke from the train as it sat on the track. I ran ahead when I saw that some of the doors to the circus cars were open even though I could hear Maribelle yelling for me to wait.
There were bars across the doors of the railroad cars, but a darling little monkey was reaching through them. He was so cute I thought he wanted to shake hands with me. Instead he grabbed my hand and in a flash bit it clear to the bone. I remember the metallic taste of blood, the screams, and the pain. “Take her home,” someone said, and someone else said, “No, you can’t take her home, her mother is having a—.” A third voice said, “Shush,” and I watched the blood soaking my dress and screamed, “Mama, Mama.” Remembering this, I can still smell the Lysol and see the cloudy water turning red.
A large lady with hairs growing out of a wart in her chin tore strips from a dishtowel and bandaged my hand. “You poor children,” she kept saying. “You poor, poor children.” When we were allowed to go home, there was a new little baby in bed with Mama. “This is your little sister Betty Lou,” Mama said.
That summer a boxcar overturned on the railroad tracks. It was loaded with Easter eggs that scattered on the ground. Kids from all over town filled their pockets. I filled my skirt and we ate and ate those candy eggs, finally just licking out the marshmallow centers. I guess that’s why I still don’t like the taste of vanilla.
The very best memory of that summer in Big Sandy was the time Mama sent me to the neighbors to borrow some coffee, and when I smell freshly ground coffee, I think of that sunny morning. When the lady let me in the door, I gasped with delight as I stepped into a kitchen filled with dancing rainbows. It was the prettiest kitchen I had ever seen, and when she saw how enthralled I was, she took me by the hand and led me over to the window. “This is a prism,” she said, “and when the sun hits it just right, this is what happens.” And then she let me hold it. I thanked her and went home, but I knew I had been given much more than coffee. I watch the rainbows dancing on my ceiling today and feel like a little girl again.
Not long after a young couple came to stay with the neighbors next door. The lady came often to visit with Mama. One day I heard her crying, so I stood by the door and listened. She said she couldn’t have babies, and her husband was talking about divorce. She brought him to see the new baby Betty Lou. “Why do we have to fool around with diapers and sleepless nights,” he said, “when we could have a cute one like her?” Then he picked me up and swung me around.
The lady came over to our house every day. She asked if she could take me downtown shopping. She bought me an ice cream cone and took me home with her and curled my hair. I liked the lady. She felt soft and smelled nice when she hugged me. Once when she came over to visit with Mama, I was reading the funny papers, and she laughed. “Look, she’s pretending she can read that.”
“She can,” Mama said.
“But she’s only four years old,” the lady said as she gave me a squeeze.
“Bob has to see this.” She ran home and came back with her husband. She told me to read the Katzenjammer Kids to him, and then they both laughed and told me I was smart. One day she took me to the Big Store and bought me a red dress and brand new patent leather shoes. I had never had new shoes before. You only went to the Big Store if you had a lot of money. You could buy eggs and potatoes and overshoes and underwear and lots of other things. Mama never went there.
One night Mama packed a little suitcase with my new clothes. She put her arms around me and cried and then she rocked me to sleep. I can only remember snippets after that. Nothing really connects. I do remember the lady saying that I was to call her Mama. I knew that saying it wouldn’t make it so, so I decided to play make believe and not mean it.
Why was I going away from Mama? My stomach felt like a fist, but I swallowed hard and didn’t cry in my new red dress and shiny shoes. Then I was on a train in a sleeping car. My clothes were in a green mesh bag on the wall above the little bed. I felt the swaying of the train and listened to the clicking wheels. The next morning I was walking in the train to the dining car with the pretty lady and the tall man with curly black hair. He said, “You’re going to spoil our little girl, Mary, before we even get her home.” He picked me up and tickled me until I was out of breath.
I remember the man’s rough whiskers, the lady crying, and loud angry words. Then I was on a train again. This time I was not sleeping in a little bed with my clothes in a basket over my head. This time I was sitting in a hard seat and traveling with a grouchy woman who smelled of tobacco smoke and garlic. She hardly spoke to me, but I didn’t care. I was going home to Mama.
It was night, and a young girl was waiting at the train depot. She told me that she was the hired girl for the school board chairman’s wife and would take me home to Mama in the morning. I snuggled up to her generous bosom, but I hardly slept at all. I was so excited about seeing my family again. We had breakfast while it was still dark. Then, just as the sun came up, we started off in the buggy. The wind was cold. The girl lashed the horse, and her long hair streamed behind her as we tore along the rocky prairie road.
She couldn’t go too fast for me.
Sweetheart
Harvest was in full swing when Mama decided to go back to Eagle Butte and get our things herself. The rent was due on the house in Big
Sandy, and she wanted to get settled in before school started. Some of the school board members had promised to have the moving job done but had put it off, and now they were all too busy. “All I need is the loan of a team and wagon,” she said. “You will all be busy shocking the wheat, and we’ll be back long before you need them.”
Everyone but the littlest kids worked in the field during harvest. We had always helped with this part of the harvest when we were asked, and I enjoyed how important I felt when I was allowed to help. I remember the fragrance of the newly cut wheat and the shattering sun on our backs. To my best recollection, this was how it was done. We picked up two sheaves of wheat, balancing them on their flat bottoms like a tepee, then two more, slapping them together for the hayracks to pick up. We would have tiny slivers of straw in our arms and legs when we were through. We girls wore dresses, of course, so we had more slivers than the boys. It would be days before they festered and we could get all of them out.
Lars and Jens were earnestly trying to talk Mama out of going without a man to help. “Yah, you got to be real careful fordin’ that river,” Jens told her. “That ain’t no job for a woman. She’s pretty low now, though, what with no rain this summer.” Lars nodded his head. “You better wait another week. Low or high, she’s a devil to cross.”
“I’ve driven a team of horses,” Mama said, shaking the dust from her skirts. “Yes, and I have forded a river, too. I’m sure we’ll be fine. Now let’s go look at that team. I want to get started early in the morning.”
She came out of the barn looking pale. “My heavens,” she said. “It’s a mule and a horse. Will they work together?”
“Yep . . . name’s Bob, the horse that is. Now that beauty there, name’s Sweetheart, and there ain’t an animal in the county more deserving of the name.”
Mama blanched and then lifted her chin. “Well then,” she said, “I guess I had better start getting acquainted with . . . uh . . . Sweetheart.”
The next morning they all gathered around as Sweetheart and Bob started out of the yard.
“Oh wait.” Jens was smiling. “I forgot to tell you. She does get a little stubborn sometimes. If she does, the best way to get her moving again is holler her name good and loud, and maybe swear at her a little bit.” Martha Olson whispered in Mama’s ear and then hugged her and laughed as she helped her into the wagon.
They loaned Mama a tarp to cover our household goods, and Martha Olson hugged her again. “You just leave the little ones with me, and I promise that they will be as safe as my own.”
This time I would rather have stayed behind and helped shock wheat. Those Norwegian women were great cooks and did their best to outdo each other with the lunches they served. I thought of the platters of fried chicken, bowls of potato salad, and the wonderful pies, and my mouth began to water. But Mama said no, so off I went.
Mama packed a big lunch and took blankets along for us to sit on, and it was a beautiful day with no clouds in the sky. She thought we might get back by suppertime, but the team was tired, and she didn’t want to stir up any bad feelings between herself and Sweetheart. As always, Mama turned the trip into a family outing, and we sang most of the way.
We were almost to the river by noon. Mama had said we would picnic there in the shade of the trees, but then the sun slipped behind a cloud and a wind came up. The trees along the bank of the river were changing color. Leaves were beginning to blow into the water, and the sky was slate gray now with the wind stronger and cooling fast. We were looking forward to getting out of the wagon and running around, but Mama decided we had better eat our lunch on the way. The horse snorted and almost jerked the reins out of Mama’s hands when she started driving across the ford. Although the river was quite low and only about forty feet across, the noise spooked the horse so she had to use the whip.
“Bob,” she yelled, “you there, Bob,” but he just shook his head and snorted. Sweetheart finally bent her neck and started across, so Bob had to go along.
“I’m hungry,” Irene grumbled. “And I gotta go.” Billy and I agreed that it was time to eat, so despite Mama’s worry about the change in the weather, she pulled the wagon off the road. More clouds were gathering and the wind was colder now. The team needed to be fed and watered and given a rest, or Mama never would have stopped. We gave them half of the oats we had brought along and then got on the road again.
What had begun as an adventure was fast becoming an endurance test. Without any warning, the sky opened up and it started to rain. Mama drove the team under some trees, and we dragged out the tarp and spread it over us. Mama got soaked and the animals were getting balky again. The roads were becoming slick, and the wheels gathered mud, making it harder for the team to pull the wagon. At last we could see the schoolhouse in the distance. We never thought we would be happy to see that place again, but we were glad of the shelter when we finally stabled and fed the team and got inside ourselves.
Irene and Billy brought in some wood from the shed, and we got a fire going. We ate the rest of our picnic lunch, saving some apples for breakfast, and made beds on the floor. We went to sleep to the music of rain on the roof, a sound the farmers had waited for all summer. The floor got pretty hard by morning, but when we woke up the rain had stopped. There were puddles in the yard, and it was messy getting our things transferred to the wagon. We all helped. I got the small boxes and the lighter loads. We watered and fed the team and were soon on our way.
The mud was a sticky gumbo now that built up in the wagon spokes, so it was slow going. We had to stop and scrape the gumbo from the spokes almost every mile. When we reached the river it was plain to see that it had risen, and the water was running faster. The team approached the edge of the ford and stopped. Mama yelled and cracked the whip, and still they wouldn’t move into the river. “Sweetheart,” she yelled. “Come on you kids, yell!” We all hollered, “Sweetheart, get going there,” but old Bob was trying to head upstream, and the water was up to the hubs now. I could imagine that cold muddy water closing over our heads, and I was scared. We were flatlanders, and none of us could swim.
“All right then, Sweetheart, you son-of-a-bitch!” Mama yelled, and that mule laid its ears back against its head. Its eyes rolled, and it pulled ahead, dragging Bob along to the riverbank and plunging and heaving up the other side. We all looked at each other with astonishment. We had never heard Mama swear before. She climbed down from the wagon and walked around in front of the team, her hair loose from its knot and her skirt wet and muddy. Tears were running down her face as she patted Sweetheart on the nose and told her she was the best damn horse in the country.
We made it back to the Olson’s before dark, and the whole family was out in the yard to greet us. Martha and Mama looked at each other and smiled. “I guess you used the magic word,” Martha said, and Mama laughed.
We were all settled in a few days, and Mama had the respect of the entire community of Lone Tree that year.
Wooza
Mama had stood her ground in 1925 and was the first teacher in years to make it through the term in Whitewater, a small town north of Glasgow, and—wonderful news—she had been asked to come back the following year. The kids still tried her patience, although she had to laugh sometimes at their schemes. One involved Horst Strindmo, a bachelor farmer in the community whose hopes rose anew each time a new lady teacher arrived. The homeliest man I have ever seen, with a build like the Neanderthal man in the National Geographic, he was determined to find someone to share his life, and he set his sights on Mama. Some of the big kids decided to encourage his ardor. Mama had earned their grudging respect, but this was just too good an opportunity to miss. They sent him valentines and signed her name and left love notes in his mailbox.
One night there was a mighty knock on the door, and there stood Horst with a sack of candy in one hand and a gunnysack in the other. He gave the candy to my little sister and tossed the gunnysack on the floor. Suddenly it began to jerk and flop. Pandemonium broke loose. We girls shrieked and jumped on the bed for safety as Horst untied the string.