His Prairie Sweetheart

by Erica Vetsch

  When they were in the buggy on their way to the Halvorsons’, Elias asked, “Are you nervous about tomorrow?”

  Savannah searched the horizon as thoughts of the school came flooding back. Should she be honest or bluff her way through?

  “Yes, very.” The truth slipped out, the confidence she’d gained racing across the prairie on Elsker drifting away like mist. “I’m more worried now than I was before church. What if the parents don’t think I can do a good job? If I’ve managed to put off all the mothers because I dress and speak differently, then will the children be put off, as well? What if, right now, they’re sitting around their tables wondering if Tyler made a big mistake? You seem to think he has, so why should they be different?” All his questions and comments about her lack of competence came charging back, all the more powerful when paired with her own misgivings.

  Elias pulled up before the house, his face grim. No doubt he still thought she’d make a hash of teaching here. She climbed down before he could help her, and disappeared inside without a backward glance.

  Chapter Five

  Savannah unlocked the schoolhouse door, her fingers chilly. Stepping inside, she inhaled. Though she’d expected the scents of soap and vinegar, another smell overlaid them. What was that? She entered the schoolroom and stopped.

  The floor gleamed in the early morning light. Not from the scrubbing she’d given it, but from a mirror-like layer of wax. From the depth of the shine, several coats of wax.

  Only one person could’ve done it, and she’d spent the past night disgruntled with him. Chagrin tugged at her lips. It must’ve taken him hours...all evening. The whole time she’d been fuming at Elias, he’d been here polishing the floor, doing her job for her.

  Small didn’t begin to describe how she felt.

  Glancing at the clock, she took a deep breath, pushing thoughts of Elias from her mind. She had too much to do before the students arrived to allow herself to be distracted.

  A half hour later, Savannah forced herself to relax...again. Should she greet the students at the door? Should she be seated behind her desk when they came in? Checking the clock for the third time that minute, she willed herself to remain calm.

  The cloakroom, that’s where she should be. To ring the bell. She hurried down the aisle, though it was only quarter to eight. Her skirt trailed the floor in a navy fall of tucks and drapes, and she smoothed the pin-tucked white blouse. She fingered the gold locket she’d put on this morning, her only jewelry for the day. Surely this outfit was sober and prim enough to satisfy any critic.

  Taking a moment, she flicked open the hasp on the locket to study the portrait inside of her beautiful mother. Savannah barely remembered her, being only five when she’d died, but she’d committed every feature to memory. Would her mother be proud of her for striking out on her own? If her mother were alive, would Savannah have left home at all?

  Closing the locket, holding it in her fist, she sent up a quick prayer. Lord, help me get through this day. Give me wisdom and strength to teach these children.

  Young voices reached her ears, and her eyes popped open, her heart kicking up a notch. Footsteps clattered up the stairs. Savannah put on a smile.

  Lars and Rut Halvorson.

  Relief had Savannah shaking her head.

  “Good...mor-ning, Miss Cox.” Rut beamed, remembering the English greeting Savannah had taught her at breakfast.

  Lars nodded, his blond forelock hanging nearly to his eyes. He glanced at the water pail—which Savannah had filled first thing this morning, remembering to prime the pump and fill not only the drinking crock but the pail—and grinned.

  Within moments, several more children arrived, chattering away to one another. The smallest, Ingrid, whom Savannah had met at church, hung back behind her older sister’s skirts, keeping her finger tucked into the corner of her mouth.

  As the hands on the clock hit eight, Savannah tapped Lars on the shoulder and pointed to the bell rope. He grinned and gave it a hearty tug. The mellow peel of the bell filled the air, vibrating in the cloakroom. The children filed into the schoolroom and found seats.

  They seemed to know just where to go, organizing themselves at the desks with the youngest in front and the eldest in the back rows. Savannah went to her desk, picked up her ruler and rapped it on the desktop.

  “Good morning, students.” She smiled. “Let’s open our day and our school year with prayer.”

  They stared back. She laced her fingers under her chin and bowed her head. Understanding dawned, and they followed suit.

  “Dear Father, we ask Your blessing on our work here. May we be diligent, kind and industrious. Amen.”

  Tyler had left a list of students, and she called each name, making a check beside each one, trying to match the name with the face. Several times the children corrected her pronunciation, smiling as she tried to wrap her tongue around the unfamiliar syllables.

  Her oldest student, Hakon, was sixteen, nearly grown, with broad shoulders and a sunburned fair face. He barely fit in the last desk. The youngest, Ingrid, sat alone on the front bench, her feet dangling inches above the board floor.

  After reading aloud Psalm 1, Savannah took her seat behind the desk. “First primer class, please come forward.” With so many children of different ages, she would need to assess where each was in their education and how to arrange them into classes.

  Ingrid remained in her seat.

  “First primer class.”

  Johann raised his hand in the back of the room. “Miss Cox, Ingrid is not speaking the English.” His broken speech sounded like music to Savannah. A student who could understand her, at least a little bit... She had to restrain herself from running down the aisle and hugging the boy. Elias had led her to believe her students wouldn’t know a word in any other tongue but Norwegian.

  “How many of you speak at least a little English?”

  Two hands went up, slowly. Johann and Hakon. The oldest students in the school. The ones who had attended under the previous teachers, perhaps?

  All right, not as many as she’d hoped, but two was better than none. “Johann, will you ask Ingrid to come forward, please, and bring her books?”

  Ingrid slid off her seat, gathered her two books and stood in front of Savannah’s desk. Savannah’s heart went out to the child, and she motioned for Ingrid to come to her side.

  The schoolbooks proved to be a speller and a primer, both written in Norwegian. Savannah pointed to the first word in the speller, but Ingrid shrugged and shook her head.

  Savannah sent her back to her seat, smiling to let the girl know she wasn’t displeased.

  But she was daunted.

  One after another they came forward so she could examine their supplies and books and get a feel for where they were in their schooling.

  Johann and Hakon helped, translating where they could, though their own English was limited. Johann had a history book written in English, and Hakon had a McGuffey’s Fifth Reader.

  By the end of the school day, Savannah had a headache and a heartache. The children were obviously frustrated by not being able to communicate with her or understand what she wanted. They had almost no books or tools, and she didn’t know how to reach them, to educate them when they couldn’t communicate.

  She dismissed the students, remaining behind as they streamed out the door as if being released from prison. What would they go home and tell their parents?

  Probably the same thing she was thinking herself: that she was the worst teacher in the whole world.

  * * *

  Elias rubbed his aching shoulder and tried to concentrate on the new batch of wanted posters he’d received in the mail. Hardly likely that any of these desperados would pass through Snowflake, but he liked to keep up-to-date on the latest news.

  His hands still
smelled like floor wax. What had compelled him to finish the floor at the schoolhouse last night? And by lamplight, no less?

  It certainly wasn’t to win favor with Savannah Cox. Or to apologize for speaking his mind on the subject of her unsuitability for the job of Snowflake, Minnesota, schoolteacher.

  He shuffled the papers into a tight stack and shoved them into his desk. The hands on the clock crawled toward three. Things were quiet here. Maybe he’d take a little ride.

  After all, he’d promised Tyler he’d look after the school.

  Buck waited at the hitching rail out front, and Elias swung himself into the saddle. They quickly left the town behind, traveling between the wheat and cornfields. The sun shone down hot, and from the nearly harvest-ready wheat fields arose the aroma of baking bread—one of Elias’s favorite scents in the world. Next week, every farmer would be scrambling to get reapers into the fields, and in a couple more weeks, threshers would arrive. Everything in the community would come to a halt until the wheat was threshed and sacked and stored.

  And after that, the corn would be ready. And if enough rain fell and the cold weather held off, perhaps another cutting of hay. Elias would rely more heavily on his deputy, Bjorn, to keep the jail while he helped his father on the farm.

  When the schoolhouse came into view, he slowed Buck to a walk. He was just in time to see the door fly open and a stream of children emerge, tumbling down the steps like lambs let out of the barn. He pulled Buck up at the crossroads and let the kids go by, greeting them as they passed.

  He walked his horse up to the school, but though he waited several minutes, Savannah didn’t emerge. How much after-school work could she have on the first day? Or maybe she had to keep someone behind? He hadn’t counted noses, so perhaps one of the kids was still inside with her.

  The door stood partially open, and he pushed it back with the flat of his hand. Nobody in the cloakroom. Then a faint sound caught his ear. Not conversation.

  It sounded like...crying.

  Soft, but for sure, weeping.

  His gut knotted.

  What should he do? He knew nothing about dealing with a crying woman.

  And yet leaving felt like deserting the field of battle.

  He eased around the partition. She sat at the desk, her head on her arms, her shoulders shaking. Sunshine fell across the desks and gleamed off the polished red oak floor. The room smelled of children and lunches and wax and chalk dust.

  Elias didn’t want to startle her or to intrude, so he eased back into the cloakroom, went to the door and closed it with a loud click.

  He heard stirring noises inside the schoolroom, sniffing and—he grinned—someone delicately blowing her nose.

  “Who’s there?” Her voice sounded watery and ended with another sniff.

  “Just me.” He rounded the divider again, sauntering in. “Thought I’d see how the first day went.”

  She blinked a few times and squared things up on her already tidy desk. “Fine.”

  Not a good liar.

  “Kids behave?” He stepped up onto the platform and perched his hip on the corner of the desk.

  “They were fine.” Her lashes stood out in damp points, and her eyes glistened.

  He waited—a trick he’d learned from his pa. Truth often came out of being quiet and giving the other person some empty space to fill.

  She stared at her hands, her desktop and out the window. He counted to ten, slowly.

  “It was awful.” Her blue eyes locked with his. “It was nothing like I imagined. How on earth am I supposed to teach them when we don’t speak the same language, we don’t have proper books and materials, and there are so many different ages?” She gripped her fingers together on the blotter, so tight her pale skin whitened even more. “My practice teaching didn’t look anything like this.”

  “You mean you didn’t train in a one-room schoolhouse where the students didn’t understand you?” He put a teasing lilt in his voice.

  “No.” She regarded him gravely. “I received my education at the Raleigh Women’s Normal School, and my classroom teaching experience was in a large city school. We only had one grade per room, and I taught children who could already read and write. I had a seasoned teacher in the room the entire time, which only lasted for two weeks. After that they gave us our diplomas and launched us into the world.”

  He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. It was worse than he thought. Two weeks of practical experience in a completely different environment.

  “And I never thought I’d actually be a teacher.” The touch of bewilderment in her voice caught his attention.

  “Why study to be a teacher if you didn’t intend to teach?” That was like studying to be a doctor and never treating any patients.

  She grew still, her face losing all expression, sadness invading her eyes, leaving them almost lifeless. “I went to school to fill time. My father would’ve sent me to a finishing school in Europe if I had desired, but I chose the normal school in Raleigh so I could stay at home.”

  Finishing school? He nodded as if he understood, and then asked, “What’s a finishing school? What do they finish?”

  “It’s a school for young ladies, teaching them all they will need to know to take their proper places in society. They teach deportment, dance, art, menu planning, equitation, elocution, decorating, needle arts, lots of things.”

  He covered his mouth with his fingertips. Finishing school sounded like a load of bog grass. Did anyone teach these ladies how to cook or clean or make clothes or milk a cow? Or anything about fending for themselves if the need arose? It sounded as if they learned just what they needed to snag a rich husband. “I think you chose a better path. At least with normal school training you could get a job and be useful, support yourself.” Though that training seemed to be lacking, too. At least to teach out here.

  “Most of the girls who go to finishing school have no need to support themselves. They are preparing for marriage.”

  “What about you? Didn’t you want to get married?” Didn’t all women?

  This time her eyes resembled blue flames. “I’d prefer not to discuss my personal life. I’d rather talk about this school. How did the previous teachers handle the challenges? I need to know what has worked in the past and how to get through to the children.”

  She could go from bunny-soft to porcupine-prickly in a flash of gunpowder. Elias picked up a pencil and rolled it between his palms. “The first one was a fellow from Saint Paul, and he left before Christmas. Said he got a job offer to work in a lumber camp at more than twice what we could pay him here.”

  Elias forced his jaw to relax. “The second one was a woman, also from Saint Paul. She didn’t last long, just took off one day with no explanation. Maybe she was bored away from the big city. Maybe she didn’t want to spend a winter out here, shoveling snow and toting coal buckets.” He tried to keep the bitterness from his voice. Britta had made some sharp comments about the “locals” when she first arrived, but he’d thought she would in time get used to the place and the people and the pace of life. He’d been willing to plan his whole future around that hope.

  “Anyway, they both ran and left Tyler high and dry in the middle of the school year.”

  Savannah’s spine straightened and blue sparks snapped from her eyes. “That’s terrible. How could they just abandon their responsibilities? Abandon the students? No wonder the children are still so uneducated.”

  Tilting his head to eye her, Elias set the pencil down. “Don’t be too quick to judge. This isn’t an easy job, and this isn’t an easy place to live come mid-winter. Wait until you’ve walked a mile in their snowshoes...literally. You might be singing a different tune by then.”

  She froze, studying his face. Her brows, slightly darker than her hair, arrowed toward one another. “What did you say?
”

  “I said this isn’t an easy job—”

  “No, you said ‘singing a different tune.’” She tapped her lip with her index finger, her eyes getting a faraway look. “A different tune.” Her bottom lip disappeared, and then she focused once more, snapping her fingers. “Oh, my, forgive my manners. A lady shouldn’t use such a vulgar gesture. But thank you all the same. I think you may have given me a little crack in the wall I’m trying to break down.”

  “How did I do that? What wall?” The schoolhouse walls looked fine to him. She hopped from one topic to the next like a grasshopper in tall grass.

  Her laugh surprised him. “Never you mind, Mr. Parker.” She pushed back her chair. “I wouldn’t want you to think I couldn’t do my job.”

  She rose, her skirt hem swishing along the floor, her little shoes tapping on the shiny boards as she gathered her belongings. Her handbag fell off the corner of the desk, and when she picked it up, her cheeks pinked. “My manners have deserted me completely. I meant to say thank you the moment I saw you.” She spread her hands, the bag dangling from her wrist. “The floors. They must’ve taken you hours. Thank you so very much.”

  Elias eased off the desk. The shine in her eyes and the color in her cheeks hit him in the chest like a burst of warm air from the stove on a freezing day. Last night while he waxed and polished, he’d called himself all kinds of a fool, told himself he was doing it for Tyler, for the children, because it was a neighborly thing to do. But in the privacy of his heart, he admitted he’d done it for her. To make amends for being so churlish? Yes, that must be it.

  “Are you telling me that my little brother waxed floors?” A familiar voice came from the cloakroom and then Tyler stepped through the doorway. Dust covered his checked suit and bowler. He wore an annoying smirk.

  Heat prickled across Elias’s chest, and his ears got hot. Great. “I thought you were in Saint Paul.”

  Tyler grimaced. “I never made it that far.” He turned to Savannah, removing his hat. “Miss Cox, so nice to see you again.” He surveyed the room. “You’ve got the place looking well. Though I can’t imagine how you got Elias to wax floors. He’d rather unload a wagon of wheat a grain at a time than use a scrub brush.” Tyler accepted her hand, holding it a tick longer than necessary, in Elias’s opinion.