Farm Girl

by Karen Jones Gowen

  Francis tickled it with the stick, even though the teacher told him not to. He got sprayed and had to walk home alone, about 2½ miles. Oh, did it stink around there.

  One of the older girls had perfume, so the teacher put some on a handkerchief and held that over her nose all day. Our teacher, Alice Whitaker, was a town girl from Red Cloud and not used to all the country things.

  In 1926, they built the new school on the same land, while we were still going to school in the old one. The new one had a basement and two rooms on the main floor. They thought they might have ninth grade there but never did. The library was a third room, then there was a coat closet in the entry for the boys and a separate entry and coat closet for the girls. The basement had a furnace and another room for coal. The little ninth grade room had a stage, with folding doors that were almost always open. The stage was built up about a foot higher than the rest and we’d have programs there.

  I started fifth grade in the new building. The seventh and eighth met together, fifth and sixth together, and third and fourth. First and second were together some of the time, but the first graders had to learn to read so their classes were often separate. One teacher taught all the classes. No teacher ever stayed longer than two years, hardly even a whole school year. Sometimes they left to get married or to have a baby. One teacher left early because she couldn’t keep discipline.

  In fifth and sixth I sat and watched the seventh and eighth graders diagram sentences on the board and do their long division and fractions. Once I finished my work, I listened while the teacher explained lessons to the seventh and eighth graders. By the time I got to seventh, I knew how to do all their work. I loved to work at the blackboard and couldn’t wait for a chance to go.

  About that time the Mattison kids, Myrna and Dallas, who lived up by Uncle Ford, didn’t want to play with me anymore. They were good friends of mine until sixth grade. Myrna played with Theola Lambrecht, and Dallas got to liking Theola. Those three teamed up against me that year and called me names.

  Myrna was the worst. She’d sneak up behind me and say something mean, like “Red face!” because I blushed a lot.

  Or she’d say “Smarty pants! Smart aleck! Think you’re smart don’t you?”

  Pretty soon I stopped trying to be her friend and just kept away from her. We had been good friends before, but then she wanted to hurt my feelings every chance she got. I never knew what was back of it.

  Then the Mattisons moved away, and I was glad. If we’d still been friends, I would have been sorry. I always liked Myrna’s brother Dallas, too. He had a round face, a pug nose and light brown hair. Myrna, Dallas and I had played together a lot growing up. The Mattison kids used to drive a cart with a Shetland pony to school in bad weather.

  Most kids walked to school. On bad weather my dad took me on horseback, with me riding behind him, over the pasture and over the field, then I’d climb over the fence and run the rest of the way. Hardly ever did any cars come to school, unless there was a special occasion when someone had to leave early and their parents came by in the car to pick them up.

  When it snowed we played Fox and Geese. You made a big circle with four crisscrosses in the center, like cutting a pie. In the center you were safe. Someone was the fox and chased everyone on one of the crisscross paths made in the snow. If the fox caught you, then you became a fox and you’d have to help him catch the others. The idea was to make everyone a fox. The winner was the last goose left when the bell rang.

  Everybody played these games, the teacher, boys, girls, all ages usually played. Unless there were little ones too small to take part, then they’d play by themselves.

  Another snow game was playing angel, making angels in the snow. Boys liked to make big forts and throw snowball fights. We had two fifteen-minute recesses and one hour at noon. There were twenty-six to thirty students all the time I went to school, with eight in my class.

  A nice-weather game was hockey played in the dirt with sticks and tin cans. Another one was Pom Pom Pull-away. Kids lined up in two lines, we drew two lines in the dirt, 100 feet apart. The one that was It would call “Pom Pom Pull-away, if you don’t run I’ll pull you away.”

  Everyone ran and whoever got caught was It, and they had to help catch the others. The last one caught was the winner. A game similar to that was Jail, where you lined up and had to run. When you got caught you were in jail. You had to go stand inside the square of the windmill, that was jail. The others who were free tried to touch the ones in jail and get them out.

  There was farm machinery called discs, that in the spring was run over the ground to break it up for planting. Sometimes they would break or get dull, and then boys brought them to school to use for our bases. They made good baseball bases. They were about 18 inches in diameter, the sharp end would go into the ground so it wouldn’t slide.

  The windmill at the school pumped water that ran slightly downhill a little ways. One Friday someone left the windmill on and it ran all weekend. The water kept on running down the hill, under the fence, into the pasture, and then down the pasture hill, making a long frozen path about two feet wide.

  On Monday recess, we took the discs, even the sharp sides were pretty dull, and sat on them, sliding down that hill on the ice path. Since we had only four base discs, everyone had to take turns. The next day some of the kids brought their sleds to school and we sledded all recess.

  On Friday afternoons after recess, we had art or fun time. We did art projects or spell-downs, with everyone lining up to see who could spell the most words right and stay up the longest. Sometimes we had cipher-downs at the blackboard. Two boys in my class, Desco Lovejoy and Irving Brooks, and I would try to beat each other. Whoever got the problem right first stayed at the board until someone else beat them. Sometimes I stayed until the end, sometimes Desco or Irving.

  Whenever we had to learn anything new, like the multiplication table, my dad practiced with me at home with a slate or paper and made a game of it. He and Mother had gone to their country schools, Dad in New Virginia and Mother in the Norwegian community. Mother had gone through sixth grade; Dad through the eighth or ninth.

  Neither had gone to high school, and they wanted me to get a good education. Sometimes he and I would have our own spell-down. I liked school and always got the top grades in my class, making my dad proud of me. He’d say, “I wish I had four more just like you.”

  With the doll

  Oil painting by Julia Marker

  Chapter Nine:

  Our Cather Connections

  All country school students had to take county exams and pass them in order to go on to high school. You started them in seventh grade, and if you didn’t pass, you took them again in eighth. The teacher had samples to test us, then we’d go to the county courthouse in Red Cloud to take the exams, with about 80 or 100 kids from all the country schools in our county. The Webster County superintendent handed out the exams, made up entirely of essay questions, no multiple choice. Multiple choice weren’t even considered worthy of an exam back then, because that gives you the answer.

  I passed all my exams in seventh grade with the second highest score in the county. The highest score belonged to Annie Pavelka, the granddaughter of Antonia, who Willa Cather had written about in her novel My Antonia.

  That novel also had another character my family knew, the moneylender Wick Cutter. He was M.R. Bentley who held the mortgage for a time on my grandparents Hans and Sofie Walstads’ homestead.

  Everyone knew the stories about that ruthless man, how he went after the Scandinavian girls so that his wife couldn’t keep any help in the house. And how he was so quick to foreclose on property if the people couldn’t pay.

  As a girl, my mother always ran and hid when she saw his buggy coming down their lane. Mother said when her parents would see his fancy buggy coming, they’d all go run and hide, parents and children. If anyone was there and couldn’t pay, he was heartless, he’d foreclose. So if they were unable to pay, they’d go
hide rather than face him and risk foreclosure. If Mother was there alone, she feared facing Mr. Bentley, because he would kind of sidle up to her and want to get ahold of her, pretending like he was such a nice man. He had a bad reputation among the young Scandinavian girls.

  If homesteaders were desperate for money, they mortgaged their place. They’d mortgage their farm, then pay it off, then when they needed money again, they’d mortgage it again to whoever would give them the loan. This scoundrel, M.R. Bentley held the mortgage on the Walstad place for awhile, I don’t know how long.

  My father’s parents had to mortgage their farm in the early days, too. On the Marker deed, there are a lot of different names of people it was mortgaged to.

  Since Annie Pavelka and I got the two highest grades on the county exams, we became good friends. If Mother, Dad and I went to Red Cloud on a Saturday night, I’d find Annie and we’d walk up and down the streets together.

  Mother would go to the grocery store and Dad would find someone to talk to on the street. I’d see Annie someplace in town with her mother, and we’d walk around arm in arm, like girls did back then. We were both in eighth grade, she lived out on a farm north of Red Cloud, in the Bohemian community.

  Annie would tell me about everything going on in her family and in her community. Her life seemed so much more exciting than mine. The Bohemian community had dances every Saturday night that anyone could attend. I begged and begged my parents to take me to those dances, even just once.

  My dad always laughed and said, “Oh, that’s not for us.”

  My mother agreed with him, and besides she was happier staying home and working on one of her many projects than going out to a social event.

  Annie and I always planned to go to a movie and finally one time we got to go. If she saw someone in town she knew she’d tell me about them, and she liked to tell me stories about her family. I was quieter and never thought my family ever did anything exciting or went anywhere interesting. So I liked to hear what other people did.

  We talked about our schools and teachers. She was going to high school in Red Cloud, like most of the country students planned to do. I was embarrassed to say I’d be going all the way to Lincoln for high school. No one understood that, even when I explained about my two aunts living there.

  They would say, “What do you want to do that for?”

  Where my family lived was called the New Virginia community, because people came from Virginia and settled there. George Cather, Willa Cather’s uncle, was one of the first settlers, so it was called Catherton Township. My grandmother’s brother, Albert Wilson, had worked for George Cather in Virginia, and George came out to Nebraska to homestead. About this time, Albert disappeared from the Wilson farm, and no one knew where he’d gone. Later they found out that he had come out to Nebraska with George Cather. He was only fifteen at the time, his parents wouldn’t have let him go, so he just left without telling anyone. In Nebraska, he worked for George Cather for a few years, then he filed a claim, paid his five dollars, and lived on that claim. Albert Wilson lived there awhile, got married, then went back to Virginia to talk his brothers into coming out.

  Other families left Virginia for Nebraska as well, a Larrick family, and then Henry Williams came later. All these families and the Cathers made up the New Virginia community in Catherton Township.

  When I went back to visit my cousin in Winchester, Virginia in 1939, I attended a party given by Edward Marker’s daughter for 4-H. When each one went around giving his or her name, I heard so many familiar names from where we lived in Nebraska. There were Markers, Williams, Cathers, Wilsons and Larricks. I felt right at home.

  Willa’s father, Charles Cather, brought his family out to Nebraska later, after his brother George had come. The Charles Cathers spent the winter with the Cather parents who lived out in the New Virginia community. Willa was about ten then, she and my dad were the same age, born in 1873, and they were in the same class in the country school. Dad remembered Willa Cather being in his class for one year, when her family was living with the grandparents. Charles Cather tried farming with his dad, but that didn’t work out as he didn’t like farming, so he moved his family to Red Cloud.

  While they were living in the country, one of the Cathers, I believe it was Willa’s mother, got awfully sick. Mrs. Lottie Lambrecht walked over there, across the pasture about a mile and a half, to help take care of Mrs. Cather. Willa never forgot that service.

  Later, whenever she was back after a trip, she would come out to see Mrs. Lambrecht and give her a present. One thing Mrs. Lambrecht had was a pretty, fancy silk scarf with flowers on it.

  One day Mother and I went up to see Mrs. Lambrecht, and Willa had just left before we arrived. Mrs. Lambrecht showed us the scarf and other gifts she’d received from Miss Cather.

  No one around there thought highly of Willa Cather because she was so different, wearing men’s clothes. She was supposed to be a lady but she always acted like a man, at least in her earlier years. Aunt Elizabeth had been county superintendent in Red Cloud and knew Willa fairly well. I never heard her say anything, but others thought she was a hermaphrodite, a half-man, half-woman.

  I never heard anyone in the area mention her very highly, until a young doctor came to town, to Red Cloud. His wife, Mildred Bennett, was very literate and thrilled about living in the town where the author had grown up. She wrote a book, The World of Willa Cather, that helped to raise the status of Willa Cather in the local area.

  When one of Willa Cather’s books would come out, the community gossiped about who might be in it. My dad had told me about a young man infatuated with a young married woman and they were shot by the husband. Willa put that in one of her books, and my dad remembered the incident well, knew the people involved and when it had happened.

  In One of Ours, Willa described the George Cather home, and of course, everyone in the New Virginia area was very familiar with that home and with the young man killed in the war portrayed in the book. Willa would change the names, but everyone knew who they were, as she’d keep the stories close to truth. People recognized the characters and loved to gossip about what was in the books, identifying the different characters and happenings.

  Despite the high interest and the gossip about her books, they never thought very highly of her, I suppose because she was so different. Now all that has changed, and Willa Cather is big business for Red Cloud. There’s a Willa Cather Seminar every spring and people come from all over the world for that. Many tourists out West stop over in Red Cloud because of the famous author. There’s the Gift Shop, a museum in the old bank, the house where Charles Cather moved to when they came to Red Cloud. You can get a map and tour places like the New Virginia Church and the George Cather home.

  My mother worked for George Cather and his wife Frankie for a couple years before she married my dad. The Cathers had a large farm and a lot of hired hands. Their home, huge and very elaborate for that area, had four or five stories, with a sub-basement, a walk-in basement, a main floor, a second floor and the attic floor. George Cather was quite a wealthy man. I remember him, a dapper old fellow with a big moustache, back when men didn’t wear moustaches, the kind that came out and then turned up a bit.

  Mother told me about working there, that Mrs. Cather didn’t know much about housework. She knew all about flowers and read lots of books. She had girls there to clean house and girls to cook. Back in Virginia they probably had Negroes, and when they came to Nebraska, they hired Scandinavian girls to work for them.

  Mother said that one time Frankie Cather didn’t know what to have for a meal, as there wasn’t any meat ready. They always had milk, bread and eggs, so Mother suggested having French toast. They served French toast to the family and the hired hands, and Mother said Mrs. Cather thought that was such a good idea and so delicious.

  In high school, my senior English teacher was Elsie Cather, one of Willa’s sisters. Oh, she was hard on me. She didn’t care much for anything I wrote and it
was in her class that I got to thinking I wasn’t a very good writer.

  There were two boys in the class whose writing she really admired. Whatever assignments they wrote, she praised so highly and read out loud, or had them read it to the class. She thought they were such good writers. On my work she would just say, “Okay,” when she handed it back. I worked so hard in that class to please her and get praise for my writing, but the highest grade I ever got was a “B.” I left her class with the idea that I had no writing talent.

  Another of Willa’s sisters was Jessica Cather, who married the banker Bill Auld. The Aulds lived in a beautiful, large, yellow brick house with white pillars that we saw when we drove into Red Cloud. That house is now the building for the Webster County Historical Society.

  They divorced when he left her for a younger woman, and Jessie moved out to California.

  Jessie Auld did a program there on my mother’s paintings and poetry, then sent me a copy of her talk. It is a beautifully written tribute to my mother:

  Julia Marker, 1882-1964

  “She was born of Norwegian parents who came to the United States from Norway during the 1870’s to take up land under the homestead settling act. The Walstad family acquired homestead sites near Campbell, Nebraska, and it was here the two Walstad girls were born and grew up. Mathilde and Julia were brought up much the same as all the farm girls of that time and locality were. Brought up to work diligently both inside the house with its many duties and to help outside when needed. But they differed a bit in their outlook. In fact Julia differed from most all of the girls in that part of the country at that time. She saw the hills and dales, the flowers and birds in their beauty and put it down somehow to keep. She wanted to paint them, to write about them and about happenings in her life.

  “Well, it so happened that while her sister Mathilde was working in the home of some very fine people in the nearby town of Riverton, a young artist came to visit there and in cleaning his room she saw his works and all his utensils, his studies and instructions. My how she wanted the instructions for Julia, so while he was out, she copied them and brought them to Julia on her next visit home. So with the purchase of paints and brushes her art lessons began, and on paper and canvas she caught the colors of the sunrise and sunsets, the sunflower and the goldenrod, and all the beauties of the Great Plains.