Bridge to Cutter Gap / Silent Superstitions / The Angry Intruder (10 page)

Naturally, the schoolroom was in chaos— the girls giggling, the boys holding their middles and laughing so hard that one of them got the hiccups.

“Now,” Christy said, “let's begin all over.” She was trying her best to be patient, but who had ever heard of having this much trouble getting a few names on paper?

“Creed there put me up to it,” said the boy who claimed his name was Zacharias. “Said if I'd do it, he'd let me sleep with his coon for one night.”

Christy turned to Creed. “This is your raccoon, Creed?”

“Yes'm. Pet coon. Scalawag.”

“Might be a good name for you, too,” Christy commented. She turned to the boy in front of Creed. “All right now, let's have your real name.”

“Front name is Zacharias, for a fact, Teacher. You can just call me Zach. That ‘Jehoshaphat' now, that was made up. Back name is Holt. Six of us Holts in school.”

At last, she was making progress. With some effort, Christy obtained the rest of the information she needed. That brought her back to Creed, whose eyes glittered with— was it intelligence or mischief? Perhaps both. Quickly she decided that she'd better try to make friends this first morning.

“How old is Scalawag, Creed?”

“Got him from a kit last summer.”

“What's a kit?”

“Like a nest. He's most grown now. Sleeps with me.” Seeing the expression on Christy's face, he added, “Oh, he's clean all right. Coons wash every natural blessed thing before they eat. They're the best pets in the world. Teacher, come spring, maybe we could spy out a kit and get one for you.”

“Uh, thanks, Creed. Tell you what. Let me think about that offer. Now, about Scalawag and school—”

“Oh, Scalawag won't cause no trouble. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

What could she say without caving in this friendship before it got started? Suddenly Christy had an inspiration. “It's like this, Creed.” She lowered her voice. “This is just between you and me. Promise you won't tell?”

“Cross my heart.”

“Scalawag is such a 'specially fine coon—I can see that already—you know, so good-looking and such a little comic actor, that the children will want to watch him instead of doing their lessons.” She grinned.

“How about you and I make a pact? You leave Scalawag home after this. Then I'll let you bring him to the last social, the big recitation just before school closes. We'll fix it so that Scalawag will be part of the entertainment!”

“Honest, Teacher?” Creed's face was shining. “That's a sealed bargain, fair and square. Why, pretty much everybody in the Cove will see Scalawag then. Put it there, Teacher!” He stuck out a grubby hand.

Well, then. She'd handled that little crisis, at least. Christy gazed around her. Sixty-seven eager faces were waiting for her next move.

It was going to be a very long day.

Eleven

A
s the day wore on, Christy had a growing uneasiness about the big boy in the back row, the one David had pointed out named Lundy Taylor. She tried to tell herself that David had been overreacting, but it was true that the Taylor boy was uncooperative. He never joined in the singing, never took part in anything. Resentment of some sort smoldered in him. Already he seemed to dislike Christy.

There were so many other problems, too. The fire in the stove—it was much too hot close to it, much too cold in the rest of the room. The dripping noses, and the complete lack of handkerchiefs. The dirty, often smelly clothes, and the need for warmer ones. The mountain dialect was often impossible for Christy to understand. The fact that children who wanted a drink went back and forth to the cedar water bucket in the back of the room, everyone drinking from the same gourd—a good way to start epidemics.

And then there was the utter lack of books. How was she supposed to teach sixty-seven students without any materials?

During the noon recess, which the children called “the dinner spell,” Christy sat on the steps, watching the children and wondering how she was going to handle them all. She was surprised when Little Burl came up and sat down beside her like an old friend. He was eating his lunch, a biscuit split in two with a thin slice of pork between the halves.

“I'd be proud to share, Teacher,” he said.

“Thank you, Little Burl,” Christy said, “but I've already eaten.” It wasn't exactly true. Actually, she was simply too anxious to eat.

Just then a pair of black-capped chickadees fluttered to the tree nearest the schoolhouse entrance. Little Burl hesitated, then tossed part of his biscuit to the birds, who swooped down, devouring every last crumb.

“That was nice of you, Little Burl,” Christy said, knowing that the boy probably didn't get enough to eat as it was.

“They're pretty little birds, aren't they?”

“Eat upside down sometimes, chickadees do,” Little Burl said. He shook his head. “Crazy birds.”

“Isn't it great how many different kinds of birds there are, each one so special!” Christy exclaimed. “God must have cared about them, or He wouldn't have made them so beautiful.”

Little Burl thought about this, nodding as he finished his biscuit.

“He loves everything He's made—every bird, every animal, every flower, every man and woman, every single one of you,” Christy said. “Loves
you
extra-specially.”

Little Burl didn't answer. Suddenly quiet, he was staring off at something only he could see.
I'm trying too hard,
Christy thought.
Will I ever be able to reach these children?

Just then the background hum of high-pitched voices was shattered by a screech of pain and then violent crying. Christy ran around the corner, her shoes slipping in the snow. Vella Holt, a tiny five-year-old with auburn pigtails, was crumpled up on the ground, sobbing. The other children had gathered in a circle around her.

“Has a pump knot on her head,” a voice volunteered as Christy took the child in her arms.

The little girl did have a large bump. It was going to be a nasty bruise. What was worse, the blow had been dangerously close to her temple.

“What happened?” Christy asked.

No one answered. Christy looked up. The circle of faces looked too grave, too careful. “Someone has to tell me,” Christy persisted. “Did Vella fall down?”

“No'm,” Ruby Mae said softly. “She got hit.”

“How? With what?”

Someone thrust a homemade ball into Christy's hands. It was so much heavier than she expected that she almost dropped it. It seemed to be made of strips of old cloth wound round and round and then bound with thread. But when she pushed a thumb through the cloth, she found a rock at the center.

“Vella got hit with this?” Christy cried. “No wonder she has a bump on her head! Who threw this?”

Again, the silence. Then, out of the corner of her eye, Christy caught a movement. She turned to see Lundy Taylor and another older boy, Smith O'Teale, slinking into the empty schoolhouse.

“Did Lundy or Smith throw this?”

The children did not say a word, but their eyes told Christy the truth. She felt chilled and frightened. Could either boy have done such a thing on purpose? As she comforted Vella and put cloths wrung out in fresh snow on her bump, Christy struggled with the problem. She decided to make the boys stay after school and get to the bottom of things then, rather than talk to them before all the other pupils.

The rest of the day did not go well. To begin with, Christy was running out of ideas. She'd had big plans for lessons, but now it was clear that much of what she'd planned was impossible, with this many mismatched students. She was glad David would be helping with the math and Bible classes in the afternoon.

What subjects had they not touched on today? Penmanship. Happy thought! Christy was proud of her handwriting. It was a nice script. She would enjoy putting some sentences on the blackboard to be copied.

As she headed for the cracked blackboard, she almost stepped on several marbles. Automatically, she stopped to pick them up. But at that moment a child hurled himself toward her in a flying tackle.

“Teacher, don't touch them!” It was Little Burl, hanging onto her arm, shrieking at her.

She was startled by his ferocity. “Why not? I can't leave them on the floor. Someone will step on them and go scooting.”

The little boy looked at her, his face flushed and contorted. “Teacher, them marbles are hot. They'll burn you!”

“Hot?” What was he talking about?

Some of the pupils looked embarrassed. Obviously, there was something Little Burl did not know how to explain. In the back of the room, the laughter started again—Lundy Taylor and some of the older boys.

John Spencer, the fifteen-year-old son of Fairlight and Jeb, stepped forward. “Teacher, I'd thank you to let
me
pick up the marbles for you. Little Burl was afraid you'd burn your fingers. He's right. Them marbles are red hot.”

“How'd they get so hot?”

“They was put in the stove, ma'am.”

“You—did you—?”

“No, ma'am. Not me. Guess it was just foolery.”

Calmly John took a rag from his pocket, gingerly picked up the marbles one by one and then left them on the rag on Christy's desk.

This was too much. A low-down prank—ingenious, but mean, almost as bad as the one on the playground. “Look, a prank's a prank,” Christy said. “But this wasn't funny. There are tiny children in this room. What if some of them had stepped on red hot marbles with bare feet? They'd have gotten badly burned. You see, glass holds heat—”

“It sure does!” a self-assured masculine voice said from the doorway. “And your teacher's right.”

As David strode toward the teacher's desk, Christy realized how drained she was. The marble trick had been one problem too many.

“Recess time for you, Teacher,” David said.

Christy smiled gratefully. She hated to admit it, but she was as relieved as any child would be at the end of the school day.

She couldn't wait to leave.

The creek was running even faster than it had been the day she'd fallen in. It had warmed up slightly over the week, enough to melt some of the jagged ice that rose like frozen, miniature mountains from the stream.

The log bridge swayed like a baby's cradle, back and forth, back and forth, in the steady wind. Here, from the bank of the creek, the scene wasn't nearly as frightening—just a few logs over a stream that glistened in the winter light. It hardly seemed like a likely place to come face to face with death.

But then, maybe that's how many things were. Up close, things that seemed simple and straightforward could become complicated and frightening.

Coming to Cutter Gap was like that. She'd known it would be hard, teaching poor children in the mountains. But not
this
kind of hard. She hadn't bargained for mean students, nearly as old as she was. She hadn't counted on sixty-seven barefoot pupils, most of whom had never seen a book in their lives. She hadn't planned for the difficulties she would have in communicating.

She remembered, with a shudder, the “pump knot” on little Vella's head and the hot marbles on her classroom floor. She certainly hadn't bargained for that kind of meanness.

Christy brushed the snow off a boulder and sat down. She had her diary with her. She'd retrieved it from the mission house before coming here this afternoon. She opened to her list of goals and laughed out loud. Teaching French? Etiquette lessons? What had she been thinking?

She heard footsteps and turned, her heart pounding.

“I'd have thought you'd want to stay as far away as possible from this bridge,” David said, laughing as he approached.

“You know what they say—when you fall off, you need to get right back up on the horse.”

David frowned. “You didn't cross—”

“No, I'm afraid it may be spring before I cross that bridge again. I think I should let that particular horse thaw out a bit.” She moved over, making room on the boulder. “Were you looking for me? I didn't forget a meeting, did I?”

“No. I just happened to notice you when I came out of my bunkhouse to chop some wood. Thought you might need a little moral support.”

“Why's that?” Christy asked lightly. Had she done such a bad job that he'd already heard stories from the children?

“First days are always hard. And this is no easy job.” David tossed a rock out into the stream. It landed with a musical splash, like a tiny fish.

“Somehow I pictured—” Christy hesitated. There was no point in telling him. He'd just laugh.

“Pictured what?” David asked. When she didn't answer, he said, “Let me guess. You thought it would be easy. That the children, all of them, would welcome you with open arms. That they would be poor, but it would be a nice, clean, easy poor, not one that came with ignorance and filth and smells and superstitions and feuds.”

Christy met his eyes. They sparkled with humor, but there was something deeper there, too. “How did you know?”

“You forget. I haven't been here that long myself. I came to Cutter Gap with lots of high hopes about bringing the Word of God to these people, about changing their lives overnight.” He laughed. “I suppose I expected them to be grateful. Instead, they've been resentful and slow to accept me. That's when Miss Alice helped me out.”

“She did?”

“She told me I couldn't change the world overnight. That this place belonged to the mountain people and that I was the stranger. That it was up to me to understand them, not the other way around.”

“And do you?” Christy asked hopefully.

“Nope.” David shook his head. “But I'm learning.”

“Did you—” Christy gazed up at the bridge, which was shimmering colorfully in the sunlight like an earthbound rainbow. “Did you ever think about going home, giving up?”