The Lesson (6 page)

M.K. felt a little better. It was true; she had always kept on trying, she had always had to. Well, now she had to teach school.

“Remember when Sadie ended up with the job of tending chickens? And she just couldn’t bring herself to butcher one. You just picked up that ax and—” he made a cutting motion with his hand—“the lights went out on that poor chicken. You must have only been eight or so.”

“Seven.”

“And remember when Jimmy Fisher took his pigeons to school and accidentally released them inside the schoolhouse?”

M.K.’s head snapped up. “That was no accident! He let them go on purpose.”

“And you helped capture them.”

M.K. grinned. “Alice Smucker hid under her desk.”

“Now that is not something you would ever do as a teacher. You’re too brave.”

She put the bread dough into an oiled bowl to rise. Fern would bake it later this morning. She turned to her father. “Do you really think I’m brave?”

He patted her shoulder. “The bravest girl I know.”

At ten minutes to seven, M.K. couldn’t put it off any longer. She picked up her Igloo lunch box and left for school.

Jenny couldn’t believe her ears. “You mean you want me to lie to everyone and say that my last name is Yoder?”

“It’s for the best, Jenny,” Chris said. The two of them were eating together at the kitchen table. “This is kind of . . . interesting. I don’t believe I’ve ever had Cream of Wheat that looked like soup before.” He lifted his spoon and the Cream of Wheat slipped off like a waterfall.

Jenny may have used a little too much liquid.

She had learned a lot from Old Deborah, but mostly about gardens and herbs and remedies. Old Deborah’s healing work took up so much of her time that she didn’t cook or bake like most Amish women did. As a result, Jenny had never been much of a cook, but now, she realized, things were going to have to change. She had better figure out how to cook if they were going to eat anything that wasn’t from a can or a box. “Old Deborah would never agree to a lie. Using her name as ours is wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Chris added raw Cream of Wheat into the bowl until it resembled gray wallpaper paste. He took a taste and gagged. Then he put his spoon down, frowning. “Old Deborah raised us like we were her own. She would understand.”

Jenny sighed. She knew her brother well enough to know it was useless to try to reason with him. Stubborn. He was just so stubborn about some things. She picked up her brown lunch bag and walked to the door, dreading what lay ahead.

Three hours later, M.K. rang the bell to start her first day of school. Calling the cattle to the trough of knowledge was how she had always thought of it. Doozy took up residence on the front steps—as far as M.K. would let him come—and wouldn’t budge.

Before M.K. was a sea of polished wood desks. The children tripped over Doozy as they hurried inside the classroom and stared at M.K. She stood, ramrod straight, and faced all of those scholars.

There were so many! So many beady little eyes.

She racked her brain for what came next. Nothing came to mind.

For the first time in her life, her mind was a complete blank. Empty. She thought she might get sick. She might get sick and die, right on the spot. That, she thought, would serve the school board right.

From the back of the room, Jenny sized up the new teacher. She could see this young teacher nervously knot and unknot her hands. You could tell she didn’t know where to begin or which way was up. Her voice wobbled as she said “Good morning” to the students. Wobbled.

“Morning, M.K.,” said a few students.

A boy with big glasses raised his hand as high as it could go. “We should probably call you Teacher M.K.”

“Yes, of course. Thank you, Danny. Please call me Teacher M.K.,” she corrected, but her voice sounded uncertain.

What kind of a name was Emkay?

A big boy leaned over his desk and winked at Jenny. She snapped her head away from him. How rude! Boys were never rude in her old school. But then, there was an abundance of
girls in the upper grades. There was only one boy who was her age at her old school, Teddy Beiler, and he was frightened of the girls. Teddy had a permanently startled look on his face.

Then the new teacher tried to take roll and dropped the roll book. Twice. When she dropped it the second time, the big boys in the back of the room quickly changed their seats just to confuse her. And it did. When she straightened up, she looked thoroughly flustered.

“I’ll start with the first grade,” the teacher said. “Barbara Jean Shrock?”

A little hand shot up. “Here,” Barbara Jean said in a thin, piping voice. “But I’m not staying.” There was a whistle in Barbara Jean’s whisper because she was missing her two front teeth, so
staying
came out as
th-taying
. She sat primly, her purple dress pulled snugly over her small bony knees. The sneakers she wore dangled several inches above the ground. Her tiny hands were neatly folded in her lap.

“Well, let’s get through the roll, at least,” the teacher said. “Eva Zook?”

Another little girl raised her hand. “Here.”

“Now the second grade.” This went on for a few more minutes until something happened that interested Jenny. When the teacher reached the sixth grade, she called out, “Danny Riehl?”

“Here,” a boy said. It was the same boy who had spoken up earlier. He had a round face and wore big glasses with adhesive tape in the middle. His hair was the color of straw. He was earnest, Jenny thought. An earnest boy.

A tall girl in the back row stood up. “I’m Anna Mae Glick and I need to sit next to Danny Riehl.”

The teacher’s face shifted to a frown of puzzlement. “Why is that?”

“Because we’re going to be married someday,” Anna Mae Glick said smugly. “He’s already asked me. We’re going to get married when I’m twenty and he’s eighteen. It’s all settled.”

Danny, who was sitting a couple of desks in front of Anna Mae, froze. He looked at the teacher in panic. “No, Anna Mae, I didn’t say I would marry you,” he protested. “I never did.”

Anna Mae glared at him. “You did!” she said. “You promised! Don’t think you can break your promises like that.” She snapped her fingers to demonstrate Danny’s broken promises.

“No, I never did,” Danny repeated quietly. He looked troubled.

The big boys started snickering. One of them—the one who had winked so rudely at Jenny, said, “Anna Mae, you mean that
nobody
would ever marry you, not in a hundred years.”

“You mean that nobody would ever marry you,” Anna Mae retorted. “Any girl would take one look at you, Eugene Miller, and be sick.”

Yes and no. Eugene Miller did carry with him a strong odor. Pig farmers, Jenny guessed. You didn’t want to get downwind of him. And Eugene could be rude, but he wasn’t bad looking. He was man-sized and there was a rim of fuzz on his upper lip.

Anna Mae crossed her arms. “M.K., just so you know, Eugene Miller is a nuisance.”

Eugene Miller let out a room-shaking guffaw.

“Eugene and I are permanently mad at each other,” Anna Mae added. “Just so you know.”

“Anna Mae, you are in the eighth grade,” the teacher said, consulting her roll book. “You need to sit with your class.”

Anna Mae scowled but sat down in her seat, a few rows behind Danny.

Jenny began to wonder if this teacher was going to ever get the class to an actual subject before the end of this first teaching day.

Peering once more into the roll book, the teacher looked relieved at the prospect of getting roll call back on track. She read Jenny’s name but seemed puzzled when Jenny was the one who answered. “Shouldn’t you be sitting up front with your own grade?”

“I am sitting with my own grade,” Jenny said firmly.

Flustered, the teacher glanced at the roll book again. “How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

“I would have thought ten,” Anna Mae said loudly.

Jenny glared at Anna Mae. She crossed that girl off her potential friend list. That was unfortunate because there weren’t many girls in the upper grades.

“Are you new to Stoney Ridge?” the teacher said.

Chris had warned Jenny to think twice before she said anything. Anything at all. “Yes,” Jenny said, slowly and carefully.

The teacher tilted her head at Jenny, as if she was about to ask something else, but one of the big boys sent a paper airplane sailing across the room. It hit the window and fell to the ground. The teacher went to pick it up. Breathing a little hard, she asked, “Whose is this?”

Of course, no one would admit to it. They all kept their eyes facing forward, even the little ones. Teacher M.K. looked up and down the rows at the children, then threw the airplane into the garbage can. A big boy snickered. Eugene Miller. Jenny thought that boy had a saucy way about him. His face held a big grin as he looked right at the blackboard. And the silly teacher didn’t do anything. Not a thing.

At that exact moment, Jenny knew that this young woman
would never make it as a teacher. She didn’t want to be the boss.

M.K.’s armpits were wet and she felt like throwing up. She stared at the children, who were staring back at her.

Six-year-old Barbara Jean Shrock stood by her desk and tugged on M.K.’s dress. “I’m going home.”

“Barbara Jean, you can’t go home,” M.K. said, feeling a rise of panic. “It’s only nine in the morning.”

Barbara Jean planted her little feet. “You thaid I jutht needed to get through roll call.”

M.K. was ready to go home too. This whole experience, the full hour of it, was turning out just like she had thought it would.
Disastrous.
Each time she thought she had the classroom under control, something would happen that was entirely out of her control. The last something was a mouse. She strongly suspected that Eugene Miller had something to do with that mouse in the classroom, but she couldn’t prove it. When she told him to catch it, he said, “You’re not the boss of me, M.K. Lapp. I remember when you were in eighth grade and you put a black racer snake in Teacher Alice’s bottom desk drawer. She practically had a fatal heart attack, right then and there.”

And what could M.K. say to that? It was the truth. In fact, it was the essence of the problem. M.K. had been the worst offender of any pupil—by a long shot. Hadn’t she just been reprimanded in church for reading a book? How could she possibly try to act like she was in charge when she was known for being the ringleader of mischief? She knew these pupils, and they knew her. It was hopeless. And the thing was—she didn’t blame them one bit. She should not be standing here as their teacher.