by Marlene Lee
“In my country,” said Agnes, “the government sends the militia to help the mine owners control the miners. Sometime I will tell you about the massacre near the mining camps where I lived as a girl.”
“The wealthy always want more,” said Zhu De. “The poor of the world are one family.”
Lily Wu had heard their voices and approached from her cave.
Zhu De smiled. “It is Saturday,” he said to the two women. “Tonight we dance.”
Agnes had asked her friend Margaret Sanger to send a Victrola to Yan’an for the Saturday night dances. Even before the hand-wound phonograph arrived, Agnes taught the Central Committee, the Red Army officers, and the actresses from Shanghai to square-dance in the Date Garden, a flat, clay-packed area near their living quarters. It was in keeping with the new China; with the new equality between the sexes. Still, the Chinese wives remained at home. Plain, unadorned women who had made the Long March with their husbands, they had little in common with the imported actresses and the western woman who laughed freely and spoke directly. Modernization was one thing, but dancing with their husbands was another.
“Yes, there will be dancing tonight,” Agnes said. Zhu De was an enthusiastic dancer, Zhou Enlai was graceful and inspired, but Mao Zedong moved with mechanical correctness as he pushed his partners up and down the dirt floor in determined circles.
While Zhu De and Lily Wu remained on the terrace, Agnes returned to her typewriter to transcribe her shorthand notes of this evening’s conversation. At the entrance to her cave she turned back and saw, aiming for the terrace, his large head pointed toward Lily, Chairman Mao emerge from the twilight.
5
Colorado 1908
In the mining camp near Trinidad, Mother did laundry for the schoolteacher, a red-headed young woman full of energy and ambition. The first time Agnes delivered clean clothes to the teacher’s boarding house half-way between the company store and the schoolhouse, the woman invited her in for a cup of tea.
“What are your plans for the future?” she asked.
“Plans?” No one ever asked her about her plans. She didn’t have any. She didn’t want to marry, and for a girl with no money for schooling, there were no plans.
Almost every week through that winter the red-headed school teacher poured boiling water over tea leaves in a china pot and asked questions as the steam rose around her. Agnes thought she was a silly, snooty woman; a bore. But Agnes wanted to have plans, so all through the winter she drank tea out of a hand-painted cup. She held it on her knee and watched the tea leaves drift through the liquid until they settled at the bottom.
“What do you like to do?” the woman would ask.
“Ride,” Agnes would say. “Hunt squirrel. Read.”
“What are you reading?”
“Nothing,” said Agnes. “No library up here. No speakers at home.”
“People who go to school say ‘books,’ not ‘speakers’.”
Agnes covered up her humiliation by draining the teacup. The teacher refilled it.
“Do you sometimes get down to the library in Trinidad?”
Agnes nodded. Whenever tea slopped over the edge of her cup and into the saucer, she was handed a linen napkin. She figured the more napkins she used, the more pieces of laundry she and Mother could charge for.
“What do you like to read?”
“Thick, dark books.”
“Dark books?”
“With small print.” Much of what she read she didn’t like, but she forced herself through difficult pages because she would learn more that way. She looked around the room. Above a cloth and silk flower bouquet hung a picture. She set down her cup and saucer and stood to get a closer look.
“Is that a picture of Mary and Jesus?” Under Mary’s feet, sticking out of some clouds, were two Cupids. She wasn’t sure if it was a Bible picture or a Valentine.
“Yes,” said the teacher. “It was painted by an Italian artist, Raphael, a long time ago. Do you like it?”
“Don’t you have any pictures of animals?”
The teacher rose and opened a desk drawer. From it she withdrew a postcard and held it out toward Agnes. On the front of the card a horse pawed the ground while a cowboy crept up from behind with a lasso.
“That’s better,” said Agnes. “My father has broke lots of horses.” She turned the postcard over. It was addressed to Miss Ramona Edmonds. Agnes thought it a most beautiful name.
“Dear Ramona,” said the postcard. “You don’t know how much—” but Miss Edmonds took back the postcard, put it away in the desk drawer, and returned to take up her cup and saucer again.
“Have you ever thought about teaching school?” she asked.
Agnes snorted. “I only went to fifth grade.”
“How old are you, Agnes?”
“Sixteen.”
Miss Edmonds tilted her head back and half-closed her eyes in contemplation. “In New Mexico you don’t have to graduate from high school to be a teacher,” she said. “You can take a test.”
Agnes swallowed some tea, weak brown water that wasn’t as good as the boarding house coffee she was used to. The room around them developed a beat, the beat of stillness and thought.
“What kind of test?”
“Reading, writing, arithmetic, history,” said Miss Edmonds. “I can help you prepare for it.” Agnes shifted on the straight chair with the embroidered upholstery. She wanted to get all objections out of the way, so that if the plan—for it was already forming itself into a plan inside her head—was impossible, the disappointment would be fast and she could forget about it.
“I don’t have good clothes.”
“You can borrow a skirt and blouse from me. We’re almost the same size.”
“I can already read,” said Agnes. She tightened her grip on the cupful of cold tea. “And I can write.”
“What about arithmetic?”
“Can’t do much with numbers.”
“Two plus two.”
“Four,” said Agnes.
“Next time you deliver the laundry I’ll have some word problems ready for you,” said Miss Edmonds. “We’ll work them together.”
Agnes stood up from the fancy chair and pointed to the laundry bag leaning against the door. “Throw in some extra pieces,” she said. “No charge.”
Before she and Mother even started on the next week’s laundry, Agnes rode her horse up to the big stone schoolhouse resting against the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos Mountain. She didn’t have to wait long for the recess bell. Miss Edmonds stepped outside with a line of children behind her.
“Hello, Agnes.”
Agnes lowered her eyes, then raised them. “Do you want to go riding?” she asked.
Miss Edmonds turned once to survey the children still behind her. “I don’t have a horse,” she said.
“I can get one for you.”
“Thank you. It would be a pleasure.”
“I’ll bring the laundry Saturday,” said Agnes. She glared at Miss Edmonds’ skirt. “Wear something to ride in.”
The next Saturday they followed the creek up into the canyon. The water murmured in its rocky bed, clear and cold from melting snow higher up, no silt to muddy the reflection of the blue sky. On one side of the trail cactus grew at the base of boulders that seemed to hang, suspended, over the two women. On the other, cottonwoods, willows and box elders, their roots crawling underground toward creek water, shaded a long, thin strip of canyon floor. While Miss Edmonds chatted, Agnes kept an eye out for horned toads or rattlesnakes sunning on the rocks.
“Do you ride up here often?”
“Yup.”
“It seems dangerous to be here alone.”
“I ain’t alone,” said Agnes. “I got my horse.”
“What time do you think it is?” asked Ramona after a silence.
Agnes squinted up at the sun. “Half past noon,” she said.
“Would you like to stop for sandwiches?”
Agnes shrugge
d. “Not hungry yet.” They rode on, single-file. When the canyon widened, Agnes held back so Ramona’s horse could come up alongside.
“When do they give that test in New Mexico?” she asked, surprised the canyon did not ring with the pounding of her heart.
“In April,” said Ramona.
Agnes pulled a thin book out of her saddlebag. “That gives me a month to study.”
When they stopped at a broad place in the canyon, Ramona spread a tablecloth on a flat rock and set out the picnic. Agnes began thumbing through the arithmetic book.
“Here’s where they lost me,” she said. “Fractions.”
“You won’t find that difficult,” Ramona said. “Look here.” She set four half-sandwiches in a row across the cloth. “How many sandwiches?”
“Whole or half?” said Agnes.
“Precisely.” Ramona moved the sandwich halves together to form two whole sandwiches.
“What kind are they?”
“Minced ham, but that’s not the point. Look here. One sandwich plus one sandwich equals two sandwiches.”
“Two minced ham sandwiches,” said Agnes.
“And if I want to divide this sandwich between you and me—”
“You can have the whole thing,” Agnes said. “I’ll take the other one.”
“—then I simply divide it in two. ” Here Ramona pulled the sandwich apart. “Now I have two halves.”
Agnes watched guardedly.
“So one-half plus one-half equals—” began Ramona.
“—one whole sandwich, ” said Agnes. “That’s easy. But fractions aren’t that easy, leastways not how I learned them. ”
“If you’re afraid of fractions,” Ramona said, “then you didn’t learn them.” They ate the lesson, then put their backs against the warm rock and began to study the book Agnes had stolen from the school in Trinidad.
On the third Saturday in April, Agnes told Mother she had to do some work for Miss Edmonds that would take the weekend. With the first sun touching the tops of pines and aspens on the west rim of the canyon, she tied her horse to the porch rail and carried fresh laundry up the stairs of the boarding house. Ramona was waiting for her with a skirt and blouse which Agnes folded and carried back down to her saddlebag. Ramona waved to her from the upstairs window. Agnes remounted and set out in a southerly direction for the state border and the teachers examination.
6
New Mexico 1908
Far back in mesa country stood a little schoolhouse that the District kept open from May to September.
“You’ll have to find another job in the fall,” the superintendent said to Agnes. His expression cast doubt on her examination score and stated age —eighteen. Still, she had passed the test and he needed a teacher for the school on the mesa where no one else wanted to go. “Snow gets too deep back in there for a year-around school. And I warn you, the people are rough. Miners and laborers.” He gave her another appraising glance. “You’ll have to build your own fire and cook your own meals.”
“What’s so hard about that?” said Agnes.
The superintendent turned her test results face down on his desk. “You’ll do,” he said.
Agnes moved into the little room at the back of the adobe schoolhouse. The mesa was as level as a rock table, its edges studded with boulders set on end as if to prevent the red dirt from breaking up and crumbling onto the plain below. Above timberline, it baked in the sun and lay flat for lashing rainstorms that swept over the mountain range.
Alone in the classroom late one afternoon, Agnes was studying the next day’s lesson when a curious mother dropped by to meet the new teacher. She gave Agnes a copy of McCall’s.
“You need something to do in such a lonely place,” she said.
“I’m not lonely,” Agnes replied. “I have my work, my horse, and the mesa.”
But that evening she took the magazine to her little room and read the stories. In back, behind articles on how to talk to a man, how to dress for a man, how to cook for a man, were ads for pen pals. An ad from a Mr. Robert Hampton caught her eye. This Mr. Hampton lived in a cultured eastern city: Columbus, Ohio.
She wrote him a postcard and he responded with a letter. Robert Hampton was finishing high school, a lofty achievement. He sent her some of his old textbooks. Agnes studied them, made notes, and sent them home for her sister Myrtle to read. She propped his letters up on her desk in the classroom at night and copied his handwriting; the rough edges of her own hand began to take on his elegant ovals. He was her secret handwriter, secret ideal, secret love whom she would meet some day because she intended to go to him. The words Columbus, Ohio were beautiful to her: she intended to travel there. Every week she wrote him, nearly as proud of her endless supply of paper and ink as of her new teaching position. Even without the forty dollars a month she made in salary, Agnes felt wealthy each time she went to the cabinet stocked by the school district and took out the lined sheets of writing paper, purple ink bottles, pencils, and erasers the color of the adobe earth outside. She wrote letters home in which she exaggerated her responsibilities — lying, Mother would have called it — self-conscious at expressing her thoughts, at having the leisure to write at all.
“Write me back,” she told them, and was surprised that the only person who did was Mother, her letters tucked inside the clean laundry done up and shipped to Agnes by train and wagon from the mining camp where the family now lived in the mountains above Trinidad.
“Your father is hauling goods,” she wrote Agnes. “I guess the wagon is good for something besides moving us from place to place. Thanks for the textbooks. I read slow. Maybe you can teach me something when you get home.”
Annoyed, Agnes took the letter outside and walked toward the burn can. She didn’t want to hear from Mother. She wanted to hear from Father. A flush crept up her neck. Along with irritation at Mother’s weakness and pity for her ignorance lay something that frightened her: longing.
Above, the sky glowed purple-black with an oncoming storm. The wind tore apart a thundercloud and for a moment the sun illuminated rose-colored sandstone and shale in gold light, more brilliant because it could not last. The first raindrops fell, sending up little clouds of pink dust where they hit. The world smelled of wet dirt and wet rock. The dark sky blossomed with bursts of light; split along a jagged seam that ended at the rim rocks behind the schoolhouse. In the midst of a thunder roll, when she had just spread her arms and lifted her face to the rain, the world cracked open. A bolt of lightning hit the mesa and threw Agnes to the ground. She lay motionless. Water running down her face brought her round. Her riding pants were soaked; her mother’s letter smeared.
Agnes crawled into the schoolhouse. By stages she reached her cot in the back room. Hours later, when she rose in the dark, built a fire, made coffee, she had the strong impression that Mother was standing beside her. She felt surrounded by Mother’s presence, cradled by a stubborn, glum, wordless love that was anything but weak. For days after, the recollection of Mother, life-giver, despised one, split Agnes as lightning splits rock. It struck her as a storm strikes the mesa, and left her flattened.
Colorado 1910
September came and Agnes had to find another teaching job. There was a school in a canyon above a mining camp called Primero. Her superintendent gave her a warning look.
“It’s not New Mexico,” he said. “It’s Colorado. You’re supposed to have a certificate from the normal school.” She gazed at him. “But since you have experience, and it, too, is a primitive school”—he cleared his throat and adjusted his pince nez which seemed an affectation in mesa country—“I have recommended you.”
It was there one day in February, 1910, in a canyon above Primero, where her landlord, Mr. Herrera, pushed through the snow drifting in front of the schoolhouse door and came straight up to Agnes who was at the blackboard teaching Mexican and Indian children the Pledge of Allegiance.
“Your mother very sick,” he said. “They say you come.”
Agnes laid down the chalk and moved mechanically to her coat and hat hanging in the corner. Without dismissing the children or saying a word to her landlord, she walked out the door. Mr. Herrera came running after.
“The train from Trinidad reach Primero two o’clock,” he said. “No time. You wait. Tomorrow I take you in wagon.”
“Where’s your wagon now?”
“Timber.” He waved his arm toward the top of the canyon.
“What time is it?”
“Eleven.”
“I’ll walk,” said Agnes. He shrugged and dropped back. Agnes reached the Herrera house, strapped her gun under her coat, and said good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Herrera.
“Too dangerous!” Mrs. Herrera called from the doorway, but Agnes did not reply. She set off up the canyon road and turned to take the short-cut across the divide. Snow came up to her thighs. Eventually she followed a path tramped to a thin layer of ice by herds of sheep. The wind bit into her lungs. She slipped often and pulled herself up by grabbing the tough scrub oak rooted in the frozen ground.
At the top of the divide she stopped for breath and looked far down at the smoke curling from the chimneys of Primero. In the thin, crisp air she could hear coal being emptied from ore cars. Without a thought of the train, of the cold, of breathing, without even a thought of Mother, she set off down the slope at a slow trot. She fell down and got up as matter-of-factly as if she crossed the divide every day. She pushed her body. Her mind was empty. She gained her second wind. Primero might have been far, might have been near, it made no difference. She could run to Primero, Secundo, Tercio; she could run to Denver, Kansas City, St. Joe.
With her breath deep and steady, she entered the coal camp, reached the company store, and turned to run past the mouth of the mine. She heard the train before she saw it. Sprinting the last few yards, she jumped onto the station platform and stepped up into the passenger car. Not until she had paid the conductor and thrown herself onto the plush seat did she notice her exhaustion. All the way up to Tercio she stared out the window at the white and featureless landscape. Home was at the end of the line. This is what all the striving comes to. Agnes leaned her head against the glass and, dry-eyed, grieved.
