The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack

by Emily Cheney Neville

  “So that’s the latest, is it? A mechanic? Last fall it was a professional athlete. This spring an engineer. But for six whole weeks now all you’ve been able to talk about was the farmer you would make. That’s what you came out here for, wasn’t it? If I were a boy, I’d make up my mind once and for all what I was going to be. Then I’d stick, and I’d work, even if it killed me. Then, maybe, I’d get somewhere, even if I were a Morgan.”

  Charley lurched away from his sister in a half-crouching, entirely good-natured gesture of mock fear. Then he lapsed into silence, not of anger, but of complete unconcern. That was always the way with Charley. He wouldn’t be half so exasperating or so hopeless if he’d only get mad.

  Before the ‘Shake had covered another mile, Charley was his affable self once more. “Guess maybe I can swing Dad down into my other job.”

  “What other job?”

  “Told you I landed two, didn’t I? Got this one first, awfully easy, too, before I went to the garage. Nothing but half-day clerking in Hoskins’ general store. Dad could take that job, instead of me. Five dollars a week to be paid from the store’s stock. Still it would keep him partly busy while we’ve got to stick around here. We can’t get away without a cent, can we? And asking Aunt Mehitable for money to move with again right away won’t go. What’s eating you, Sayre? I’m darn lucky to have bagged these jobs!”

  Sayre checked the retort that sprang to her lips. Here she was, furious because he had not got a job on a farm as she had intended he should until time for school to begin. Unreasonable? If it were, she was not going to acknowledge it. Bossing things that weren’t any of her business was, of course, what he was always accusing her of doing. Oh, but this was her business. Only, he didn’t know it!

  Sayre did not like to own that she was not always fair to Charley. Getting those jobs, scarce as jobs must be around here, was so like his energetic, cheery, irresistible self. “If only he were as good at sticking as he is at getting,” she thought vindictively. She studied her brother a little out of the corner of her eye. The face above that short, compact, sturdy body was decidedly good-looking, and its bright, genial expression made it still more attractive. Yet something about it was a little too loose. She did wish Charley’s face had more of that quiet, firm look there had been on the agriculture teacher’s.

  Mentally she went right on making her own plans. That evening something happened that helped them out. Their neighbor, Mr. Nels Hansen, prompted by kindly curiosity, dropped in for a welcoming chat with Dad.

  Big, raw-boned fellow that he was, they all warmed to him at once because of the sympathy with which he listened to their story. His interest reminded Sayre of Mr. Kitchell’s; it went deeper somehow, than the mere Morgan part of the story. He and Dad were seated on the railless back step where shy Hitty had consented to be perched upon the visitor’s big knees. Sayre was watching and listening from the doorway behind, while Charley lay sprawled on the gray ground beyond.

  “You stick!” the monotonous voice of the visitor counseled. “You can make it to live here dis vinter if you can get a leetle yob.”

  “I’ve got the job,” Charley announced, and told him about the garage.

  “Dat, I t’ank, is only a summer yob. Ven Yellowstone Park shuts up for de vinter and no more tourists ride into Upham and out vonce more, de garage has not much business.”

  Inwardly mean enough to be exultant, Sayre watched the cloud descend over Charley’s mobile face.

  “And you haf dat good alfalfa,” the visitor went on slyly.

  “He wants to find out something,” Sayre surmised. Aloud she burst impulsively into the conversation. “Oh, that isn’t ours this year, except enough for a head or two of stock. Mr. Parsons owes it for a debt. But next year’ll be different.”

  “I haf a cow,” the visitor’s voice droned on. “I do not need it and nobody vill buy it. It milks easy. I vill rent it to you for feeding it. I vould like my cow”—the monotone broke into a sudden, irresistible chuckle—“to eat dat alfalfa!”

  “What a queer speech,” Sayre thought. “Why our alfalfa especially? I believe he likes to say things like that just to puzzle people.” Aloud she asked, “Why?”

  The tow head nodded sagely. “Yust for fun. Ve haf maybe de beginning of a little fight on alfalfa now in dis country. Ven you stay here, maybe you, too, can get into dat fight.”

  Was he offering them a privilege? Sayre’s blue eyes bubbled with laughter. Well, being “in” things was what she had always wanted for the insignificant Morgans.

  The bargaining going on between Mr. Hansen and her father was making her light-hearted. If Dad would work for Mr. Hansen in his spare time that fall during harvest, Mr. Hansen would pay him in winter stores. “I haf no money, but I haf plenty chickens and plenty garden; potatoes, cabbage, carrots, onions, squash, navy beans—plenty to eat. And ve ain’t shipping it much yet.”

  “And he’s one of the best natural farmers on the Pawaukee,” Sayre’s memory quoted.

  That night after their visitor had gone Sayre wrote a long letter to Aunt Mehitable all about everything. It contained the following paragraphs:

  “Things don’t look quite so bad tonight as they did yesterday. Perhaps if Charley and I can manage to go back to school again, even Dad may grow to feel that our coming out here was not such a ‘crushing mistake.’ That’s what he calls it now. He’s awfully blue, of course. But I’m not. I’ve got too many interesting things to learn and do.

  “I’ve got my heart set on getting into that part-time class. I’m going to see that Mr. Hansen who called tonight to talk to him about it when Charley isn’t around. He’s important on the school board. And I think he liked me. Besides, if Mr. Hoskins doesn’t want me, and I’m pretty sure he won’t, I think Mr. Hansen will work hard to get me in, because Mr. Kitchell’s willing.

  “I like Mr. Kitchell a lot, Aunt Hitty, and I did not like Mr. Hoskins a bit. So I’ve about decided that when I go to school I won’t try for that alfalfa prize even if it is one hundred and fifty dollars. I hope Charley won’t. Probably the Hoskins boy will get it anyway. It was plain that his father meant him to.”

  And her letter ended with these words:

  “Anyhow, it looks as if we were settled out here for a while, at least. It isn’t starting exactly the way we expected, you see, and Dad is still terribly disappointed. But I’m doing my best to manage things so that Charley will give up his garage job the first of September, and enter high school in the regular vocational agriculture course. Then, if I can just get myself into the new, extra part-time agriculture class, which begins in November, and is meant for people like me who can’t go to school for the full regular school year—Oh, we’ve just got to stay here, Aunt Mehitable, for two years at least! In that time Charley could graduate from high school, and I could finish the part-time course.”

  2

  The Plan Begins to Work

  The busy, satisfying weeks of late summer and early fall flew by for Sayre with amazing speed. Things seemed to go almost too well. How she worked! But nearly all she did was fun.

  Charley had “swung Dad down” into the afternoon job at the Hoskins store with surprising ease, almost as if Mr. Hoskins really wanted a Morgan in his employ, newcomers though the Morgans were in this hard-pressed community where so many people needed work. Dad was happy in that store; he liked the sociability of it. He received his pay every Saturday night in five dollars’ worth of store supplies: flour, sugar, coffee, rice, kerosene, gas, articles of any kind of merchandise the family happened most to need. It was fun each week-end for them all with heads close together to figure out just what he had better get.

  Mornings, most of the time, Dad worked for Nels Hansen, taking his pay in supplies from the flourishing Hansen fields and vegetable garden. Some of these vegetables Sayre canned; the rest she stored in the root cellar that Dad found time to dig according to Mr. Hansen’s directions.

  Taking Hitty with her, Sayre, too, worked for the Hansens
for ten days when Mrs. Hansen’s new baby came, her pay being pullet hens; the Morgans would have eggs that winter.

  In the same way, through Mrs. Hansen’s recommendation, Sayre did an occasional day’s work here and there on neighboring farms during the time when Mr. Hoskins’ big baler and its crew were busy baling the Pawaukee Irrigation Project’s one big crop, alfalfa hay. She learned lots of things as she worked: how, for instance, in a community like this, without ever having any real money, to live comfortably, in many ways better than they often had lived in the city; how to cook navy beans deliciously at this high altitude; how to bake in the altitude, also, so that muffins and cakes would not fall, and bread would be light. All this was fun.

  When the weather grew cool, as it does early in that country, Charley took what he had saved of his garage earnings and bought soft coal from the surface mines not many miles away. The coal was cheap; renting the truck to haul it cost as much as the coal itself. Charley and Dad stored it in one end of an open shed. There the white kitten that Hitty had found to mother cavorted over the pile gayly at all hours until its coat was more black than white. Hitty’s loving arms never rejected her pet because of that; she lugged it around and hugged it close until her clothes were often a sight to behold. To Sayre that was not so much fun. It sometimes made her decidedly cross.

  She really had almost too much to do for a seventeen-year-old girl these days, for in between times she was sewing: mending, patching and making over until the Morgan wardrobes, if not all they might be, were at least whole and warm. Then Aunt Mehitable’s fall box came, full of plain practical things to help out. The prettiest thing it held was a new school dress for Sayre, blue just the shade of her eyes, the most becoming dress she had ever had. She was immensely happy over it.

  She often felt thankful that she was so busy through the summer months; it kept her from worrying too much over what September would bring in the way of the need for decisions. Need for decision by Dad. Was he well enough satisfied with his job at the store to be willing to stay on, or would he get to talking about moving again? Need for decision by Charley. When the garage job was over would he want to find another? Or, would Mr. Kitchell be able to fulfill her hope by persuading Charley to give up work and enter high school? She was worried, too, by the silent unconcern with which Charley greeted every mention of her own plan to enrol in the part-time class in November. Indifference was his way of expressing disapproval, of course. Thank goodness, she would not have to rely upon Charley’s ‘Shake to take her back and forth when part-time class began. The part-time pupils were to be collected and carried home daily by a school bus.

  Then came the last Saturday in August, with Charley coming home and announcing, “The garage job’s ended.” Well, that was hardly news; they had known for a week that the proprietor would not need him much longer. This was not, apparently, his real news. He paused in front of his sister, who was sewing, to add with a carelessness behind which lurked both apology and defiance: “And Monday morning I’m starting into school again at Upham High School. Junior. Specializing in vocational Ag. Got acquainted with the Ag teacher. He’s been coming into the garage lately, and I’ve been working on his car. He’s a dandy guy—I sure like him. And he says they need a good half-back pretty bad on the high school football team. A—a fellow’s got to put in his time doing something.”

  For just a second Sayre looked up from the blue work shirt she was patching, while she tried to summon surprise into her face.

  “Well,” she conceded, “I suppose he has.”

  But acting a part was too unnatural for her to dare to keep up the attempt. She escaped back into concentration upon her work, stifling her desire to laugh. She knew perfectly well that Charley had expected from her a tirade about his changeableness. Later she had a most enjoyable private giggle over the situation. Charley was going to high school, after all!

  Charley took to it too, better than she had dared hope. If at home he was soon talking more about the football team than about his lessons, he was keen about the farm shop work. There was a class project under way there that greatly interested him, the converting of a large, old touring car into a commodious bus to carry the part-time pupils back and forth to school when the part-time agriculture class should begin. Charley worked a good many voluntary hours on the job.

  “I’d give my hat,” he remarked once to Sayre, “to find out who’s going to get to drive that bus.”

  “Mr. Hansen might know,” she suggested slyly.

  So the first Monday morning in November rolled around, the date set for the part-time agriculture class to begin. Sayre, up since dawn, wiped and set in the sun the pail that had held the milk from the Hansen-Morgan cow. She had put up the lunches and had got little Hitty ready for her usual morning at the primary school. Now there was nothing left to do but change her own dress. “I’ll be ready when you are, Charley.”

  Her brother lifted the refilled water pail to the bench near the door. “What you going to do with the kid after primary hours?” He did not look at Sayre.

  “I’ll manage.” If Charley could be exasperating, so could she. If he had any sense he would know that Dad would keep Hitty with him afternoons in the store until Sayre’s school was out. Charley had been silent all morning with that horrid indifference of his. Sayre understood it, of course. It was not until the last minute that he had accepted the fact that she had meant what she had said about going to school. His attitude made her furious. She had tried hard to take Mother’s place as best she could ever since that dreadful day three years ago when Mother had died; but this did not give Charley the right to act as if it were his mother who wanted to go to school with him. Wasn’t she his twin, exactly the same age as he was?

  Why couldn’t he act about her new plan the way dear old Dad did? “If you can find any way, Sayre,” he had told her some weeks before, “to make up for my neglect of you in the matter of education, no one will be more pleased than your father.” At which Charley had whistled a bar of “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” Sayre shut her mouth tight. She would have to watch out to keep that quick tongue of hers from defeating her own ends!

  Now Charley was bringing the car up for her and Hitty. But this time it was not the old Rattleshake. What Charley was driving so proudly was the improvised school bus. After all, there was stuff in Charley! The school board would never have appointed him the driver of this bus if some of its members had not believed in him. And they had even entrusted him with the care of it at night, so that it was kept at the Morgans’. This bus work was a pay job, too.

  For the next three weeks, however, while the football season lasted, Charley would not be able to drive the bus home in the afternoons. He would have to stay after school for football practice, and come home at supper time with dad in the ‘Shake. Young Nels Hansen, although slightly under age, had been given a permit to act for those three weeks as Charley’s afternoon supply, and drive the bus home each day after school at four o’clock.

  “Glad to take you in, Sayre, of course,” Charley was saying. “But your going’s simply crazy. You’re a girl. They’ll never let you register. Not in Ag.”

  “I can try anyhow.” Sayre dropped her eyes in a demure gesture which hid the gleam of triumph behind the long, dark lashes. She had paved the way for what she was doing better than he knew.

  The bus began to pick the part-time pupils up in small groups at the cross roads. All but two or three came from the foreign element among the settlers. In this Sayre read Nels Hansen’s influence, just as she read it in other things that had to do with school affairs. At one stop two stolid-looking fellows mounted the bus steps with heavy deliberation. Their round, visorless caps and the shapeless cut of their home-made clothes showed that they belonged to that clannish colony of German-Russian sugar-beet growers who the spring before had settled on some of the abandoned claims between Upham and Nels Hansen’s.

  “Hello, Ivan. So you got Boris to come. Bully for you!” Charley wave
d his hand cordially at the newcomers.

  Light kindled in the wide, patient faces.

  “Yess.” “Goot morning.” The careful gutturals were warm with friendliness. Shy uplifted eyes beamed at the young bus driver.

  “He actually knows them,” Sayre thought. After all, was there ever anyone like Charley, so friendly to everybody? Or as darling as Hitty? The little girl was smiling coyly at the last comers from out the refuge of Sayre’s arms.

  But Sayre did not smile at them. A sudden thought had gripped her with a puzzled sense of injustice. Could foreigners like these, if they were naturalized citizens, homestead on new land when her own father could not? Only at some such rare instant did Sayre any longer pause to realize that she and Charley were setting out to learn to farm on land to which they had no legal right; so like a home had Parsons’ eighty already begun to seem to her.

  Her hardest moment in that first school day came early, at the joint meeting that Mr. Kitchell called of all Ag pupils of both groups, regular and part-time. She was the last to enter the room. Just over the threshold she paused. All around her she sensed hostility. It took the breath from her like a cold plunge; color mounted into her cheeks. Then she thrust her head high, moved sturdily across the room, and seated herself, not next to Charley, but among the foreigners. They might be just as unfavorably disposed as the others toward having a girl in their midst, but they were too submissively impressed by their surroundings to show their feelings so plainly. Of all the glances that came Sayre’s way none was more hostile than the dark, brooding stare of the Hoskins boy. She eyed Mr. Kitchell nervously. To her relief he acted as if there were nothing unusual in the situation.

  After the meeting was over she approached his desk. “I can stay then? Even if I am a girl? The board’s willing?”

  She knew nothing of the eager brightness of her own face above the becoming new blue dress. She did know that the teacher’s half-playful nod and slow, cordial smile were full consent. She could scarcely wait for the moment when she could triumph over Charley. Before it arrived, however, another incident had overshadowed her sense of triumph.