The Longest Road (12 page)

The week before school started, Rosalie had Laurie try on her two dresses. She could scarcely wriggle into them but Rosalie, after some study, thought wide gussets under the arms would solve the problem for a few months and if the hems were let out all the way, they'd
almost
cover her knees.

“Rickrack'll hide the old hemlines,” Rosalie said. “But you're goin' to have a new dress for the first day of school, honey, and so's Belle. You can pick out the material when we go to town Saturday to get shoes and schoolbooks.”

Before that expedition, there was a great sorting of last year's books. Only Everett and Laurie would need “new” secondhand ones since Ernie's second-grade texts went to Buddy and his first-grade books, much worn after having been handed down by Everett and Billy, had been saved for Belle, who was somewhat consoled for the tattered condition of her primer and speller by the promise of the biggest box of crayons in the store.

Rosalie judged, after pinching to see if the prospective owner's toes had room, that new heels, half-soles, and some stitching would allow handing down of all the boys' shoes except for Ernie's, which had already been worn by Billy. That meant that Everett, Laurie, and Belle got shoes—and also that there were no movies or hamburgers that Saturday. Rosalie had emptied all her egg and cream money into her purse but she didn't buy any magazines and the children got a penny each instead of a nickel.

“Please, I don't need a dress,” Laurie told Rosalie when urged to pick from the array of many-colored bolts in the dry-goods store. She bit her lip, lowering her eyes. “Daddy hasn't sent any money. You shouldn't have to dress us on top of everything else.”

“Don't talk silly,” Rosalie adjured. “You've worked like a full-grown woman all summer. By rights, we'd be payin' you on top of board, and some board it is, sleepin' with Belle's feet in your face! You pick something out or I will. This blue-green sateen print would just match your eyes.”

Touching the lustrous cloth with its peacock-feather pattern, Laurie gave in. It was the prettiest dress she'd ever had, with puffed sleeves, a ruffled neck, and a flounced skirt to which another flounce could be added as she grew, and Rosalie had bought her two pairs of the long-desired anklets for school. No more ugly mustard-colored long cotton stockings!

In spite of the new dress and shoes and anklets, though, Laurie's stomach was a tight knot as they set off on the two-mile trudge to school with their books and lunches in lard cans. Laurie had packed their lunches, a boiled egg apiece, bread and jelly, and molasses cookies. The boys all ran ahead so Laurie arrived with Belle, who started crying when they came in sight of the building.

“I wanta go home!”

“Well, you can't,” Laurie said roughly, to herself as much as to the whimpering little girl.

“I-I'm goin' to wet my pants!”

“You run to the toilet,” Laurie ordered. “It's the closest one. I'll take your books.”

Belle streaked for the privy that had
GIRLS
painted on the door. There weren't any trees or cover between it and the
BOYS
twenty feet away, and the playground, with a couple of swings and a teeter-totter, was between the two-room frame schoolhouse and the toilets.

How awful, to have to go to the building with the boys watching! Worse, at recess, there'd probably be a line. Laurie resolved to try to only go once a day, during lunch hour, when the boys might be too busy playing to notice. Belle emerged nervously from the toilet and stood there as if the boys playing crack-the-whip were cannibals.

“Belle!” Laurie called in exasperation. She had to go take the child by the hand. “Don't be a baby! You won't be the only one in first grade. Just remember to go to the toilet at recess and lunch. Look, there's the teacher! Doesn't she look nice?”

“I—I like Mama better!”

“Of course you do, silly, but you have to go to school so you won't be an ignorant heathen or go in the wrong toilet because you can't read the sign.” As she urged Belle toward the school, Laurie wished she could run away herself.

Three girls who looked close to her age were chattering and laughing. The blond one in a pretty pink dress with matching hair ribbon and anklets pointed to her and said loud enough for Laurie to hear, “That one's an orphant who's living at her grandpa's. He's one of Pa's croppers.”

“Hope she won't sit next to me,” said a pig-tailed redhead. “Mother says croppers lots of times give you head lice and the itch.”

Burning with mortification, Laurie pretended not to hear. There had been a few sharecropper children in school at Prairieville. It had always been some consolation that poor as the Fields were, they weren't croppers. Now even that was gone. The hardest thing she'd ever done was to walk into the school.

“You're a new pupil?” The teacher's black hair was bobbed and her sharp black eyes, quick motions, and the way she kept her head tilted reminded Laurie of an inquisitive bird. “Do you have last term's report card?”

“Yes, miss, and I have my brother's too.”

“I'm
Mrs
. Evans. Call me that or ‘ma'am.'”

Laurie dipped her head, fumbling for the cards tucked in her reader. “Yes, Mrs. Evans. And Belle here, she's starting school this fall.”

Mrs. Evans scanned the cards. “Kansas,” she sniffed. “Almost Yankees. Well, we'll have to see where you fit here. According to this, you're ready for seventh grade, but since you're the only one, you'll have to either do eighth-grade work or drop back to sixth. Your brother's grades aren't very good. I'll begin him in third but if he can't keep up, he'll have to take second over.”

“He'll keep up,” Laurie promised. Buddy didn't like school anyway. If he were put back a grade, he'd completely quit trying.

“Put your lunches on the shelf at the back and find desks that aren't taken,” said the teacher. She jerked the rope that rang the bell that hung from a crossbar on the roof and a swarm of children streamed into the room.

Some were smaller than Belle but the two biggest boys were taller than the teacher. They sat in the largest desks at the back of the room. The girls Laurie had overheard slid into desks in front of the boys. After she saw Belle settled in one of the little desks at the front, Laurie took the only empty large desk, which was across the aisle from the girls. She tried to control her anxiety by counting the students and looking for someone with whom she might be able to make friends.

Her heart sank as she saw that the only girls near her age were those who'd talked as if croppers were some kind of animals. Most of the twenty children looked to be about the ages of Everett and his brothers. Several of the boys didn't have shoes and wore heavily patched overalls. They were sure to be croppers, but if they had sisters, they were among the younger girls.

Laurie's hope that her new dress, shoes, and anklets would make her acceptable withered like a plant in the blasting sun. The girls across the aisle were all friends. One of their fathers owned the land Grandpa farmed, even the tarpaper house, and they thought croppers had lice and itch. There were no possible friends here and it was clear that the teacher didn't like having two more cropper children in her school. The knot of misery tightened in Laurie's chest.

If only Daddy had taken them with him! Whatever California was like, it had to be better than this! Of course she was used to not fitting in at school. Those long stockings and belonging to the tabernacle had made her different in Prairieville, but she'd gone to school with mostly the same children since first grade, and she had a definite place, as they all did. Hers was as the smartest, poorest kid in the class who wore long stockings because of her religion. Thinking of her class back in Prairieville deepened Laurie's misery, though she wouldn't want to live there now, not without Mama.

Woodenly, Laurie stood up with the others and mumbled the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. Then they sang “My Country 'Tis of Thee” and “Dixie” before Mrs. Evans called the roll, separated a few of the boys who had already begun to whisper, and told everyone to study their readers and then work the arithmetic problems on the pages that she'd write on the blackboard for each class.

Except for three first-graders, Buddy and Laurie were the only new pupils. Mrs. Evans called Buddy to the recitation bench at the front and frowned as he stumbled along in the third reader. After a few minutes, she said curtly, “You'll be in second reader. Go to the board and work some problems.”

Head hanging, Buddy seemed to shrink as the sharp voice rapped out subtraction and addition. Laurie was sure he knew most of the answers he now got wrong. No wonder, having to stand up at the board right after being set back in reading!

“You'll be in the second grade,” Mrs. Evans ruled. “Take your seat now and study this second reader.”

Poor Buddy! His mouth trembled and he kept his brown head ducked as he took the reader and went back to his seat. Laurie scourged herself for not having made him study that summer. When they hadn't been working, he'd gone off with the boys, but she should have just made time to get out his old books and drill him.

“Laura Field!”

It took Laurie a moment to realize that she was being summoned. Instead of the seventh reader Rosalie had bought for her, she was handed the teacher's eighth-grade reader. As she finished the third page without making any mistakes, Mrs. Evans snapped, “That'll do. Go to the board.”

She gave Laurie long division, fractions, and decimals and finally shrugged. “You will start in eighth. If you can't keep up, you'll be back in sixth.”

Dismissed to her seat, Laurie saw the startled looks on the faces of the landlord's daughter and her friends change to annoyance. They'd have had more use for her if she'd been stupid. At recess, Laurie was glad to see that Belle was being tugged to the swings by another little girl and Buddy had joined in a game of red rover. His setback might weigh on him but the other boys didn't care so long as he was tough and quick in playing. The four biggest boys played softball, monopolizing the center of the dusty playground.

Sylvia Hart, the blond landlord's daughter, strolled arm in arm with her friends, pig-tailed Bonnie MacAfee and Janice Redmond, whose lower jaw thrust so far forward that it gave her a bulldog look. Though she was in sixth grade and Janice in eighth, Sylvia was plainly queen of the school just as her older brother, Dan, led the boys. His fair hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes, were bleached silver and he had pale green eyes. The only boy who wore Levi's and boots instead of overalls, he had, according to enviously teasing remarks, driven Sylvia and Bonnie to school in the new red truck parked at the edge of the playground.

Too old for the swings, Laurie walked along the edge of the clearing, pretending great interest in the sunflowers, purple gayfeather, and rust and orange Indian blanket that bloomed in a swath of uncut buffalo grass stretching between the school-grounds and surrounding fields of cotton. A meadowlark winged up, yellow breast catching the light, and bees hummed at the violet flowers of tall owl clover. The grass rippled in the wind, now rosy, now lightest, softest green.

Daddy had told her that much of the prairie had still been like this when he was a boy before the war. Far as the eye could see, the different kinds of grasses stretched, grama and bluestem and buffalo grass, and in spring, the buffalo wallows were spangled with flowers, black-eyed Susans, lilylike wild onions, Johnny-jump-ups, and daisies.

In hard years, Daddy had picked up buffalo bones around those wallows and in the draws and sold them in Dodge City, where they were shipped east to make buttons and corset stays. Daddy had never seen a wild buffalo but twenty-five years before he was born, they had covered the plains from Canada to Mexico. Grandpa had been Buddy's age when his parents came to homestead in western Kansas in 1873, the year of the greatest slaughter. Great-grandfather had become a skinner to earn some cash money. By the next year, only a few scattered beasts were left on the southern plains, though those in the north lasted a while.

Along with the herds vanished the Plains Indians' whole way of life—food, shelter, clothing, and household goods. Their world had ended, just as the farmers' world was now blowing away in the dust of those once grassy, flower-scented prairies. Only here and there was a patch left. Like this one.

Laurie closed her eyes, imagining. That grass and flowers covered all the broken, ruined powdery earth, the cotton and wheat fields and all the plowed land; that great-humped buffalo roamed the gentle slopes, pronghorn antelope skimmed them, and no house or fence or road or town broke the sweep of a prairie vast as the sky, free as the wind.

She would never see it. But she opened her eyes to this small strip, this one piece of deep-rooted, lasting sod. Maybe someday people would let it grow back, reclaim the pulverized ground. Maybe—

The bell pealed harshly. Laurie tried to capture the little prairie in her mind, take it inside with her. As she turned, she saw Belle trotting from the
GIRLS
. Thirsty though she was, Laurie didn't fill her tin cup from the dipper when she went inside. She had to hold out till noon or undergo the humiliation of holding up the three fingers that Mrs. Evans told them would signify that they needed to be excused to go to the privies. Only one child could go at a time, she warned, and anyone who hadn't taken advantage of recess and lunchtimes would stay in and study fifteen minutes for each time they asked to go out.

Janice, Dan, and sandy-haired, flat-nosed Bob Matlock were the other eighth graders. They had reading and spelling before recess, studying at their desks when not called forward to perform for Mrs. Evans, and then worked arithmetic problems till noon.

The lunch period was an hour. Belle and the littler girls took their buckets to the swings. Loitering with the younger boys on the grassy plot around the pump, Buddy seemed to have forgotten his humiliation. Dan and his cronies sat in the truck and Sylvia's trio occupied the steps while Mrs. Evans brought her chair out on the small cement porch and lunched while keeping an eye on her students.