Mother made many trips overtown to choose curtains to harmonize with the elaborate wallpaper, which, if one studied the design closely, turned out to be exotic birds roosting on cauliflowers. She bought an overstuffed davenport and matching chair upholstered in scratchy taupe mohair, a covering popular at the time because it wouldn’t show soil and would wear forever. Dad bought from his brothers and sisters several pieces of antique furniture that had furnished the Yamhill house in his boyhood. He began to spend evenings refinishing them at a workbench in the basement.
Because I now had a longer walk to school, Dad bought me a secondhand bicycle. My Arizona uncle had sent me five dollars, which I spent on the sunburst pleated skirt in practical navy blue, the first new ready-made skirt I had ever owned. I enjoyed riding my bicycle in my sunburst pleated skirt past Ulysses S. Grant High School to Fernwood.
We were proud of the little white house with the porch box of geraniums and petunias and the green-and-white-striped awnings to shade the living room and dining room from the western sun that might rot our new overstuffed furniture. Mother gave a card party to show off our house to old friends who had once lived in Yamhill.
And then something frightening happened. On May 16, 1928, three months after we bought the house, a mortgage holder demanded his money. My parents were stunned. Inexperienced in buying property, they had not taken seriously the letter from their lawyer when they bought the house, pointing out that there was a mortgage against it “in the sum of $3,750.00 dated May 16, 1925, payable three years after that date.” What would we do? We no longer owned the farm. All three of us felt numb.
Finally Dad, through the bank where he stood so patiently on the marble floor, was able to refinance the house, taking out a second mortgage, and we were saved—for the time being. Saved, but pinched for money once more. After that, whenever Mother left the house on an errand, she walked halfway to the corner and then returned—to make sure she had locked the back door, unplugged the electric iron, turned off the water heater—as if she was afraid the house might have disappeared when her back was turned.
With our house safe, we were now free to enjoy the car. First of all, we drove to Yamhill, where we parked at the foot of what had once been our path. Dad sat looking silently at his boyhood home, the home he had not seen since we moved to Portland.
“It really is a beautiful old place,” said Mother with a sad smile. She could admire the house now that she was free forever from scalding the milk separator, cooking for harvest crews on a wood stove, and washing clothes on the cold back porch. To me, the house seemed almost as if I had read about it in a book, so many years—seven—had passed since we had lived there.
Next, as we drove around the small towns of the Willamette Valley, Dad appraised farmland with a practiced eye and pointed out property that had once been the Donation Land Claims owned by his aunts and uncles. Once we stopped to pick armfuls of fragrant wild trilliums, which grew in abundance in unfenced woods.
“See how each part of the plant is divided into threes: the leaves, the blossoms, the stamens, and even the pistil,” said Mother, always the teacher. I marveled at the symmetry of the perfect blossoms of such intense sweet perfume.
Mother’s interest in Oregon history was stimulated by our Sunday outings. “Just think—the names of these little towns tell how much this beautiful valley meant to the pioneers who braved the journey to get here,” she said as we drove through Garden Home, Harmony, Sublimity, New Era, and Sweet Home.
In Oregon City, Mother pointed out the falls in the Willamette River where my Great-grandfather Hawn built the mill in 1843. As we drove up the Columbia River Highway, we stopped to admire every waterfall along the way. At Multnomah Falls, Mother reminded me that here my great-grandfather and his cold, starving family had been blown ashore during the dangerous trip down the river. My father and I climbed through the cave of brown, slippery rocks behind the falls, a thundering curtain of water between us and sunlight dousing us with spray while frogs leaped from our path.
We drove the narrow, twisting road to Mount Hood, where we stood above the timberline, but below the snow line, transfixed by the panorama of forest, of snow-covered peaks to the south, and of the Willamette Valley. “What a beautiful sight this must have been to pioneers after the long, hard journey across the Plains,” said Mother in awe. “It really was the promised land.” In the foreground near a pop stand, a caged bear drank Orange Crush from a pop bottle.
When Dad’s vacation came, he wanted to return to the country he had run to when he was supposed to go to the meat market at the age of fifteen. He also wanted to visit his sister Dora, who lived near Prineville. Dad was concerned about her health because she had been ill with tick fever. We packed the Chevrolet with blankets and cooking utensils, which were not supplied by auto courts, and an army cot for me to sleep on and took off for two whole weeks of travel. At The Dalles, Mother reminded me that my Great-grandmother Hawn had built and run a hotel after the death of her husband and had survived both a flood and a terrible winter when horses froze standing up and Indians sliced off frozen flesh to thaw for food. Who cares, I thought, wishing Mother wouldn’t go on so about Dad’s grandparents. We turned south into scenery such as I had never known—and a country of sagebrush, juniper trees, and black lava rock. I had thought all of Oregon was as lush and green as the Willamette Valley, but of course I had never been a hundred miles from home before. We spent the nights in auto courts, where Mother always inspected the mattress for bedbugs, and Dad warned me to be on the lookout for rattlesnakes among the rocks.
Near Prineville, we turned off onto a dirt road so narrow that sagebrush clawed the car, bouncing over ruts and dipping through washes on our way to visit my beautiful Aunt Dora, the only female member of the family to resemble my grandmother. Aunt Dora taught in a one-room school someplace out in the brush. In good weather, older boys were kept out of school to work on ranches, so they continued in school long after city boys finished the eighth grade. When they did come to school, they were sometimes drunk. Dad felt his sister, weakened by illness, was working too hard.
Finally, covered with dust, we arrived at the two-room unpainted house on the small ranch worked by Uncle Joe, an uncle I did not remember having seen before. He was a handsome man with eyes so brown they looked black. During supper the adults all laughed about the bullet hole in the house. While cleaning his gun, Uncle Joe had accidentally fired a shot that narrowly missed Aunt Dora, who had been working in the kitchen.
After supper, while my father and his sister reminisced about their childhood, Uncle Joe saddled a horse—Aunt Dora’s transportation to her school—so I could ride around a freshly mown field. The horse ignored me, trotting around with my seat slapping on the saddle. Now and then, on some whim over which I had no control, it jumped haycocks. This was scary, but I didn’t mind. I was riding a real horse on a real, though very small, ranch. Wait till school started and I could brag to Ralph!
That night the three of us slept out under the stars, and during the night, coyotes howled. Very early the next morning, as the sun was rising over the mountains to the east of Prineville, we drove on along a narrow empty road. “I wonder,” remarked Mother, “if that bullet that came so close to Dora really was an accident.”
Dad was silent for a while before he said, “I don’t like her living out there on that place so far from anyone.” For some reason I did not understand, none of the family liked Uncle Joe, but everyone loved Aunt Dora. Uncle Joe was an intense, unsmiling man, different from my uncles related by blood, but he was kind to me. The family’s dislike puzzled me.
Suddenly Dad shouted and stepped on the brake. A mule deer had leaped out of the juniper trees and now stood in the middle of the road, staring at us. We stared back for one astonished moment before it bounded on into the junipers on the opposite side of the road.
“Well, I’ll be—!” said Dad.
“Wasn’t it beautiful?” said Mother.
We were
all silent, wonderstruck by that one frozen moment. Then we drove on toward Portland.
The Platoon System
When school started in September, girls discovered that boys, awful in the sixth grade, had become terrible in the seventh grade. They said bad words, some of which we did not understand. They tucked small mirrors under the laces of their Keds and stuck their feet under girls’ skirts.
Our class was supposed to be studying grammar, which included diagraming sentences from a tan book, Grammar and Composition, by Effie B. McFadden, with selections for seventh-grade study and memorizing. Many of us referred to this unpopular book simply as “Effie.”
“After all, this is a grammar school,” Miss Stone, our serious teacher, reminded us when we groaned at Effie and her grammar.
Instead of concentrating on Effie, my attention turned to a curly-haired boy named Allen who sat across the aisle from me and was more interesting than making skeletons out of sentences and labeling the bones with proper subjects, verbs, objects, and modifiers.
Allen was also more interesting than our arithmetic book, obviously the work of an educator who enjoyed torturing seventh-graders with “An ice cream can was 2/3 full. After 18 dishes had been taken out, it was still 1/16 full. How many dishes had been taken out?” Concealing Allen’s notes from Miss Stone, who threatened to read aloud any note she intercepted, was my exercise in problem solving.
Because boys usually went in pairs for protection when one of them was interested in a girl, Allen and his friend George sometimes walked home from school with me while I wheeled my bicycle. Except for chinning themselves on any handy branch, they were almost civilized. It was George who gave me his first manual training project, a breadboard nicely rounded at one end, with a neatly bored hole for hanging it on a nail. Mother put it away for me to use “someday,” and whenever she ran across it, she referred to it as “Beverly’s hope chest.”
In the seventh grade, changes took place, not only in boys but in the school curriculum. The platoon system was introduced. This meant we were taught some subjects—“Effie,” reading, arithmetic, and United States history—in our homeroom but marched off in platoons to other rooms for music, art, nature study, library, an oddly named class called “auditorium,” and double periods for domestic science or manual training. And, of course, gymnasium, where seventh-graders exercised with wands or marched while Claudine played “Napoleon’s Last Charge” on the piano.
Girls sewed in 7A and cooked in 7B while boys hammered, sawed, and sanded in another basement classroom. Many parents objected to the platoon system; schools should stick to basics. Mother felt the new system too strenuous. “It’s just rush, rush, rush all day long,” she said. At PTA she complained to Miss Stone that my handwriting had deteriorated and was difficult to read. Miss Stone replied that before long most people would use typewriters.
We now had a school library with a librarian, Miss Smith, a young, brisk, well-tailored teacher who also taught reading. She taught us how to use the library and once made us line up alphabetically by our last names, as if we were books on shelves. After that, I found a place on the shelf where my book would be if I ever wrote a book, which I doubted.
Miss Smith introduced an innovation to Fernwood. Until Miss Smith entered our lives, our teachers forbade reading in the classroom, except for old copies of the National Geographic. No one enjoyed this except the terrible boys who knew, by ragged covers, which issues contained pictures of naked women in African tribes.
Not being able to read in school had frustrated me. During the first week, I held my reader under my desk and read it all the way through, even though teachers said repeatedly, “Do not read ahead.” After that I hid books I wanted to read inside my geography, an ideal book, because of its size, for hiding other books. I was deeply grateful to Miss Smith, not only for letting us read but for letting me into the library first on the days when St. Nicholas magazine arrived.
Miss Smith had standards. We could read, but we must read good books. Cheap series books, traded around the neighborhood, were not permitted in her classroom. Miss Smith was also strict. She once made me stay after school until I could write on the blackboard, from memory and in order, all the presidents of the United States. I do not recall what I did to deserve this judgment, but I do recall thinking it more sensible than writing “I will not talk in gymnasium” one hundred times—a penalty once meted out by Miss Helliwell, our gym teacher.
Miss Smith also gave unusual assignments. Once, without warning, she said, “I want you to pretend you live in George Washington’s time and write a letter to someone describing an experience.”
Write something we had not learned in a book? This was unheard of. “But that’s not fair,” some protested.
Miss Smith assured us that such an assignment was perfectly fair. We knew she was right. Miss Smith was always fair. Strict, but fair.
“You mean now?” someone asked.
“Now.” Miss Smith was always firm.
“But how?” someone else asked.
“Use your imaginations,” said Miss Smith, unconcerned by the consternation she had created.
I was excited. All my life, Mother had told me to use my imagination, but I had never expected to be asked, or even allowed, to use it in school. After a moment of pencil chewing, I wrote to an imaginary cousin, telling how I had sacrificed my pet chicken to help feed Washington’s starving, freezing troops at Valley Forge.
The next day, Miss Smith read my letter to the class, praised me for using my imagination, and said everyone else in the class had to try again. At Fernwood any written work, even practice sentences, that did not measure up to teachers’ standards was rewritten—sometimes more than once. Smugly I read a library book while my classmates struggled with letters about their sacrifices of pet lambs and calves for Washington’s troops. Copycats, I thought with contempt. Mother had told me authors found their ideas in their own minds, not in the words of others. Besides, who ever heard of lambs and calves in the middle of winter? In Yamhill, they were born in springtime.
Next Miss Smith gave us homework: writing an essay about our favorite book character. This brought forth groans and sighs of resignation from most of the class. Nobody wanted to do homework, especially original homework.
That weekend, Mother happened to be visiting her parents in Banks, where Grandpa Atlee had bought back his store. (When he was seventy, after two years of retirement, he decided he was too young to be idle.) After I put together a Sunday dinner for my father, who gamely ate it and was enjoying his pipe and the Sunday paper, I sat down to write the essay. Which favorite character when I had so many? Peter Pan? Judy from Daddy-Long-Legs? Tom Sawyer? I finally solved this problem by writing about a girl who went to Bookland and talked to several of my favorite characters. I wrote on and on, inventing conversations that the characters might have had with a strange girl. As rain beat against the windows, a feeling of peace came over me as I wrote far beyond the required length of the essay. I had discovered the pleasure of writing, and to this day, whenever it rains, I feel the urge to write. Most of my books are written in winter.
As much as I enjoyed writing it, I thought “Journey Through Bookland” was a poor story because the girl’s journey turned out to be a dream; and if there was anything I disliked, it was a good story that ended up as a dream. Authors of such stories, including Lewis Carroll, were cheating, I felt, because they could not think of any other conclusion.
I was also worried because I had used characters from published books. Miss Smith had lectured us on plagiarism and said that stealing from books was every bit as wrong as stealing from a store. But how could I write about a favorite character without having him speak?
When we turned our essays in during library, I watched anxiously as Miss Smith riffled through the papers. Was I going to catch it? Miss Smith pulled out a paper that I recognized as mine and began to read aloud. My mouth was dry and my stomach felt twisted. When she finished, she paused. My
heart pounded. Then Miss Smith said, “When Beverly grows up, she should write children’s books.”
I was dumbfounded. Miss Smith was praising my story-essay with words that pointed to my future, a misty time I rarely even thought about. I was not used to praise. Mother did not compliment me. Now I was not only being praised in front of the whole class but was receiving approval that was to give direction to my life. The class seemed impressed.
When I reported all this to Mother, she said, “If you are going to become a writer, you must have a steady way of earning your living.” This sound advice was followed by a thoughtful pause before she continued, “I have always wanted to write myself.”
My career decision was lightly made. The Rose City Branch Library—quiet, tastefully furnished, filled with books and flowers—immediately came to mind. I wanted to work in such a place, so I would become a librarian.
Miss Smith, dear brisk lady who gave unusual assignments, astonished us again by announcing one day that we were no longer to call her Miss Smith. She was now Mrs. Weaver.
“You mean you got married?” we asked after this news had sunk in.
With a smile, she admitted she had. A teacher getting married was unheard of to us. Some were called “Mrs.,” but we thought they were widows. Our teachers never discussed their personal lives with their classes, but here was a teacher who had presumably fallen in love while she was a teacher. Astounding! Such a thing had never happened before and, in the course of my education, never happened again.
In addition to Mrs. Weaver and her surprising assignments, home economics and manual training were new to us. In sewing class, while boys were sawing away at their breadboards, girls in 7A were laboring over samplers of stitches and seams and putting them to use making cooking aprons that slipped over our heads and had bias binding properly applied to the neck and armholes, and bloomers that taught us to measure elastic without stretching it. In 7B, cooking class began by making white sauce without lumps.
A Girl from Yamhill Page 10
