Western Christmas Brides

by Lauri Robinson

  Christina gulped. She hadn’t attended church since she was nine years old. However, she was not about to confess that to Verena Forester. Some things were private.

  “I’m afraid I must spend today preparing my lessons. School starts Monday morning.”

  The dressmaker shot her a sympathetic glance. “Well, good luck to you. Won’t be easy, I’m thinkin’.”

  When the woman left, Christina indulged in a calming cup of tea and nibbled thoughtfully on the six oatmeal cookies Uncle Charlie had left on her doorstep early that morning. Why won’t it be easy? she wondered. Were the children badly behaved? She knew that the previous teacher, Eleanor Starks, had left abruptly when the term was over last June; apparently she had eloped with the head of the schoolboard, and in Oregon a married woman was not allowed to teach school.

  Was there more to it than that? Had the students been too unruly to handle? Perhaps they hadn’t liked Miss Starks and...

  Her breath caught. Oh, Lord, would they like her? Will they laugh at me?

  She had wanted to teach school ever since she could remember. She loved learning, and after Mama died and she had gone to live with Aunt Lettie, she had spent the last of the meager inheritance from her father to attend the St. Louis Teachers Academy. She had excelled at her studies, especially music.

  But she had to admit she had not excelled at conquering her fear of standing up in front of people and—she shuddered—talking to them. And never once in her teacher training had she faced a room full of schoolchildren who would stare at her.

  Face it, Christina. It is learning you love, not people. Especially not a whole classroom full of wriggly, boisterous students.

  She poured another cup of tea and tried to control her shaking hands.

  * * *

  Ivan looked up from the counter as the bell over the door clanged and Thad MacAllister stepped into the feed store. “Need ten pounds of seed corn, Ivan.”

  “Is not too late in the season to plant corn, Thad?”

  “Maybe. But you know me, I like experimenting with crops.”

  Ivan nodded. Rancher Thad MacAllister’s venture into growing winter wheat was the reason every farmer in Oregon now sowed a winter-wheat crop, and why Ivan’s boss, Abraham Stockett, was getting rich selling them seed.

  “Say, Ivan, you fancy comin’ out to the ranch for supper tonight? Leah’s making cabbage rolls, and I know you Russkies love cabbage.”

  Ivan hefted the bag of seed corn onto the wooden counter. “That most kind of you, Thad, but I cannot. That will be two dollars.”

  Thad slapped some coins onto the counter. “Don’t do much socializing, do you?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Oughtta think about it. Might be you’d want to get married someday.”

  “Not marry yet,” Ivan said quickly. “Something there is I must to do first.” He knew Thad MacAllister was too well-mannered to ask what that something was. Maybe he would tell the friendly rancher some day. MacAllister could keep a secret. “Yes, perhaps I will marry someday.”

  Thad gave him a quizzical look. “You keep sayin’ that, Ivan, and ‘someday’ will never come.” The rancher lugged his purchase out to the wagon waiting in the street, and Ivan locked the door behind him. Then with a tired sigh he climbed the back stairs to the bachelor quarters over the store Stockett had let him have. Inside the small room, he brewed a pot of strong coffee, buttered three slices of day-old bread from Uncle Charlie’s bakery and settled down at the battered oak desk under his front window.

  Ah, what was this? Directly across the street, in the apartment where Charlie had lived all the years Ivan had been in Smoke River, a lamp flared to life and he saw a dark head bending over a desk. It was the girl he’d seen leaving the bakery that morning! He forgot all about his bread and coffee and began to watch her.

  Half an hour went by, and the girl didn’t stir. She was writing something, dipping a pen into what must be an ink bottle and leaning over a paper or something on her desk, but never once did she raise her head. He wanted her to look up so he could see her face.

  But she worked on and on while his coffee grew cold and his curiosity warmed up. She couldn’t be Uncle Charlie’s new wife from China, could she? No, she didn’t look Chinese. Besides, a Chinese woman wouldn’t wear a pretty wide-brimmed straw hat with a blue ribbon hanging down the back.

  All at once he understood. Charlie had rented his quarters over the bakery to the new girl in town. And from the looks of it, he guessed she was writing a long, long letter to someone. He watched as long as he could stay awake, then gobbled his three thick slices of bread and took himself off to bed.

  In the morning he gulped the dregs of his cold coffee, toasted his last slice of bread and tramped down the stairs to open the feed store. He glanced out the front window to the apartment across the way, hoping to catch another glimpse of the girl, but now the blue curtains were closed.

  For the rest of the morning he straightened shelves and reorganized the heavy burlap bags of feed behind displays of new plows and hoes and garden rakes. Townspeople drifted past on their way to church, and an hour later they drifted back again, some stopping in to purchase chicken feed or tomato seeds. Edith Ness stepped in from her father’s mercantile store across the street to buy more red nasturtium seeds, and Billy Rowell, the sheriff’s nephew, rode past on his red pony, delivering his newspapers.

  He watched the churchgoing stragglers, hoping to catch another glimpse of the blue-ribbon lady, but the long, lazy Sunday afternoon gradually drew to a close without a single glimpse of her. It was a good thing Uncle Charlie’s bakery stayed open on Sunday; around closing time, Ivan strode across the street to get another loaf of day-old bread.

  Chapter Three

  Christina twitched the folds of her gored brown poplin skirt one last time and picked up her satchel. She was ready.

  Oh, no, she wasn’t the least bit ready. She would never be ready to face a room full of strangers—even half-grown strangers. Large—or even small—gatherings of people had always made her nervous. From the assembled well-wishers listening to her college graduation speech to crowds of townspeople singing carols at Christmas, she had always felt ill at ease among strangers. She was shy, Aunt Lettie said. But inside she knew she was more than shy; groups of people frightened her. Books didn’t frighten her, but people did.

  However, sooner or later she would have to walk into the lion’s den, so she might as well get it over with. She sucked in a fortifying gulp of air, smoothed her skirt one last time and started off.

  The schoolhouse was half a mile from town. She had glimpsed it from the train window when she’d arrived, a pretty little red building with lots of windows, nestled in a grove of pine and maple trees. The leaves were starting to turn gold and orange.

  It took her a good twenty-five minutes to walk the distance at her halting pace, and on the way she concentrated on calming her nerves and trying to remember her opening speech. To add to her anxiety, beyond “good morning, students,” she couldn’t recall a single word. She prayed it would all come back to her when the time came.

  The gardens along the way were beautiful—roses and asters and bushes covered with tiny white daisylike flowers; she admired the gardens as she passed by. The air was soft and warm and smelled of grass and baking bread. Her stomach rumbled. She’d been too nervous to eat anything before she left her apartment.

  At the schoolhouse she unlocked the door and stepped inside. Three rows of wooden seats faced a large oak desk at the front of the room. Light from the bank of windows splashed across the floor and over the blackboard on the wall, illuminating the pull-down map roll and the wall clock. A small black potbellied stove stood in one corner, flanked by an empty wood box and a wooden water bucket with an iron dipper. Nails for coats and mittens were studded along the wall nearest the door.
A battered box of McGuffey’s Readers and a single volume of Tennyson sat in one corner of the room; all the books looked well-worn at the corners.

  At one minute until nine she opened the schoolroom door, stepped into the doorway and clapped her hands sharply. “School is starting, children! Come inside.”

  She retreated to her desk and waited as a tumult of bodies spilled into the room and banged into their seats. Shoes thumped on the polished wood floor. The double-seat desks filled up rapidly, and squabbles broke out over who would share a seat with whom.

  The cacophony of voices rose until Christina could scarcely hear herself think. Merciful heaven, this is bedlam. She stood up, pondering what to do, and then she sucked in her breath, purposefully edged out from behind her desk and stood facing the students. They merely stared blankly at her. She would stare them down, she decided. She waited, arms folded across her midriff, until she caught the eye of every single one of them.

  It worked. As her gaze connected with that of first one, then another of the worst troublemakers, the noise level gradually began to recede. Some of the girls began shushing their companions, and then the loudest of the boys fell silent as her gaze—steely eyed, she hoped—moved from one student to another.

  Finally, finally, it was quiet. “Well,” she said in her most carefully controlled voice, “is this how you behave at home?”

  “Sometimes,” a tall, rugged-looking boy with a shock of blond hair answered. “When I can get away with it.”

  That brought snickers from the other boys and a few giggles from the older girls.

  “Really,” she said as calmly as she could manage. “And what does your father do about it?”

  “Ain’t got no pa!” the speaker retorted.

  One of the girls laughed, then clapped her hand over her mouth. Christina swallowed and clenched one fist in the folds of her skirt. “My name is Christina Marnell. You may call me Miss Marnell.”

  Dead silence. “Where you from?” a wiry boy with red hair and a torn collar blurted out. “You talk funny.”

  “I am from St. Louis, Missouri. I guess I ‘talk funny’ as you put it, because I went to school in the East.”

  He nodded, pursing his lips.

  “You talk funny, too,” she said.

  He shot her a startled look. “Oh, yeah?”

  “It’s ‘Oh, yeah, Miss Marnell,’” she enunciated clearly. She waited four heartbeats, then went on. “Now, students, I am not here to teach you good manners. I am here to teach you other things.”

  “Yeah?” the red-haired lad said. “What things?”

  Christina studied him. “Things you don’t know.”

  “Like what?” the blond boy snorted.

  At least she had their attention. Now she had to figure out how to keep it! “Like exactly how far your proboscis is from that of the girl across the aisle from you.

  “Whatza ‘proboscis’?” a boy called.

  Christina drew in a long breath. She had them. Almost. Anyway, it was a beginning.

  “Well, now, I would guess that you are all very intelligent boys and girls, so why don’t you tell me what you think a proboscis could be?”

  “A thing that tells time!” someone shouted.

  “A nose,” a resonant voice from the back of the room said.

  Christina narrowed her eyes. “Who said that?”

  A slim, dark-skinned boy with a shock of black hair over his forehead half raised one hand. “I did.”

  A murmur ran around the room.

  She met the boy’s hostile black eyes. “And your name is?”

  “Sammy Greywolf.”

  “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Greywolf. You are correct.”

  The dark eyes flicked down and then up again. This time they were shining. Suddenly she realized she didn’t have to make an opening speech. She simply had to pique their curiosity and go from there. She pivoted and walked back toward her desk to retrieve her notebook and pencil and heard a collective indrawn breath.

  “Golly Moses,” someone exclaimed. “Miss Marnell is crippled!”

  Chapter Four

  No sooner had she turned her back and started for her desk than the whispers turned to murmurs and then to a loud buzzing. She ignored it, opened her notebook and pointed at the girl at the head of the first row. “Your name, please?”

  “I’m Roxanna Jensen, Miss Marnell. I’m nine years old and I live on a ranch out of town. I have my own horse.”

  Christina quickly wrote the information down. “Next?”

  Then came Billy Rowell, twelve years old, whose uncle, Hawk Rivera, was the sheriff. Last was Sammy Greywolf. He was Indian, Christina noted. Age eleven and very smart.

  “And now I will tell you about myself,” Christina announced.

  The class suddenly sat up straighter.

  “I am from St. Louis, where I attended college. I am twenty-three years old. And I am going to teach you many things. Are there any questions before recess?”

  A hand stabbed into the air. “Miss Marnell, how come you’re crippled?”

  From that moment on, Christina’s first day of teaching went downhill. The fact that she walked with a limp somehow undid the control she thought she had managed to establish, and during the lunch hour she watched surreptitiously through the window as the older boys clopped gleefully around and around the school yard in exaggerated parodies of her gait.

  She had endured such taunting for years; in fact, she had grown so good at ignoring the barbs and cruel comments they scarcely registered any longer. But seeing her halting gait imitated in the exaggerated, mean-spirited actions of her students cut her to the quick. She tried her best to eat her lunch of cheese and a ripe apple, but her throat was so dry she found it hard to swallow.

  After an hour all the students clattered back into the classroom. Christina took a deep breath and pasted a smile onto her stiff face. While she assessed her students’ reading and arithmetic skills, the rest of the class buzzed and fidgeted. The girls whispered and giggled, and occasionally she heard the purposeful, uneven clumping of heavy boys’ boots on the plank floor. She knew it was done to annoy her.

  At the end of her grueling first day of teaching she stood up and looked over her students. “Class is dismissed,” she said with a sigh. She was exhausted. Her temples pounded as if little men inside her head were shoving wagon wheel spokes into her brain.

  The schoolhouse quickly emptied, and in blessed silence she sank onto the chair behind her desk. Never, never had she expected teaching school to be so difficult. Or so tiring. She felt as if she were staring at a mountain of ignorance and disinterest in front of her, and she was heartsick. She had wanted to teach so desperately, but after today it looked...impossible. The thought of an entire school year made up of days like today made her physically ill.

  She locked the schoolhouse door and managed to limp slowly across the grassy yard until she reached the main street. With her last ounce of strength she stopped in at Ness’s Mercantile. The short, narrow-faced man behind the counter pinned watery blue eyes on her.

  “Kin I help you find somethin’, ma’am?”

  “Oh, I do hope so. I need an umbrella, and—”

  “You sure? Ain’t rainin’ yet.”

  “Yes, I am quite sure. Eventually it will rain, and I wish to be prepared. I also need some sort of bell for the schoolhouse.”

  “Might try a cowbell. If that don’t get the kids to school on time, they must be hard of hearin’.” Not even a hint of a smile crossed his thin lips.

  “Then I will need two, no, make that three boxes of blackboard chalk, a large bottle of ink, a stout ruler and...” Her mind went completely blank.

  “And?” Mr. Ness prompted.

  She added four ripe apples, a block of y
ellow cheese and a tin of tomatoes and one of beans.

  “That’ll be, let’s see, a dollar and forty-seven cents all together. You wanna open an account?”

  Christina nodded, and Mr. Ness wrapped her purchases in brown grocery paper and bid her an unsmiling farewell. She gathered up her parcels and on trembly legs slowly headed for her apartment over the bakery.

  Maybe I will never, ever be able to teach anything to anyone’s children, ever. All the chalk and ink in the universe can’t bring about miracles.

  * * *

  Ivan reached over the glass bakery case to shake the owner’s pudgy, flour-dusted hand. “Thank you, Charlie. When you want window added to your new house?”

  “Bride come this week,” the Chinese man said with a grin. “Put window over sink in kitchen. I pay you many loaves of bread.”

  “Good.” He gathered up the two loaves of stale bread Charlie had set aside for him today and turned toward the door. Just as he reached for the knob, the door burst open and a young woman with shiny dark hair caught in a loose bun at her neck and a blue-ribboned straw hat clutched in one hand barreled straight into his chest. Her armload of packages skittered onto the floor, along with his precious loaves of bread. She gasped and looked up at him with desperate, dark blue eyes that were brimming with tears.

  A sharp-toothed saw bit into his heart. God in heaven, she was beautiful! He stared into her startled face until she blinked, and he remembered to close his mouth. Her eyes were magnificent! And he could not pry his gaze from the sprinkle of tiny freckles over her nose. Little-girl freckles. But she was not a little girl. She was a woman all grown up. The enchanting contrast sent a bolt of hot steel into his belly.

  “Oh! I am terribly sorry!” She turned her face away, but he saw the shimmer of tears on her pale cheeks. He swallowed hard.

  A dark stain seeped through the brown wrapping paper around one parcel and something oozed across the floor. Ink! He scooped up the paper and dumped it into the metal wastebasket Charlie held out. Then four red apples rolled into the muck.