Chapter 4
The children of Red Willow Junction could not sing.
Clara had not much minded the singing her first Sunday; she had been looking at the front of the church and not listening.
Her second Sunday she listened, and every child in the front pews sang in a different key.
The Ott boys bellowed. A small girl two rows up sang the first verse over again through all four.
Behind it the old minister held to the rail and let it come, patient as a man standing in weather.
It stayed with her all week, because she had the time to let it.
Red Willow Junction was one street of low buildings between a water tower and a grain house, and she had walked its whole length her first day here and could have walked it blind by now.
Past the church the road gave out into prairie.
There was more country than town. The hours ran longer than they had in Kansas, where a day got cut up small into calls and mending and the minding of a mother's moods.
She took the question to the store, where a body could learn a good deal by talking a little and letting Mrs. Garrett weigh the sugar.
It was Mrs. Garrett who told her the singing had been an affliction since before the last preacher, and that nobody in the county had thought to mend it — said it dry, over the scales, and let Clara make of it what she would.
She held her peace until Wednesday, over the wash kettle.
"Somebody ought to take those children in hand," she said. "Sunday was an affliction. There's a little Ott who sang a different hymn from everyone else and looked pleased about it."
"Then take them in hand." Lydia fed a sheet through the wringer and did not look up. "You've reordered my kitchen twice and started on the barn. Nathan found his harness oiled and had to sit down. Go be busy at the town for a while. It can stand it."
Clara opened her mouth to argue and found she had already, somewhere underneath, begun sorting the children into rows.
After prayer meeting she put it to Reverend Ashworth on the church step, her hands folded so they would look calm.
The church stood empty six days in seven, she said. Two afternoons a week, the children only, and she'd leave the room as she found it. Somebody ought to teach them a little before another Sunday came round like the last.
The old man heard her out with his head tipped, watching her from under his white brows. He let the quiet run on a beat past comfortable, so that a body wanting a quick yes had to stand in the wanting a while.
"Mind the stove damper," he said. "It sticks half-open and eats a week of wood in a day. Reeve has the key."
That was all of it. She waited for the rest — the terms, the warnings, the we shall see — and there was none. Three steps down, she understood she had a school.
The key came the next morning. She was crossing from the store when she saw the preacher ahead of her at the church door, working the lock back and forth like a man who had argued with it before. He heard her step and turned.
"Miss Crowell." He held the key out on his open hand. "It wants lifting on the turn. I fought it a fortnight before Reverend Ashworth took pity on me."
"Thank you." She took it. It was heavier than a key had any business being, old iron, warm from his pocket, worn bright along the shank where thirty years of hands had turned it. "Reverend Ashworth said two afternoons."
"He told me." Cole looked at her a moment, straight, as he had on the train. There was no polite angle to look from and he had never learned one. "Tuesdays I'm out past the Otts'. Thursdays I'm at the parsonage if the stove beats you."
He settled his hat and went off down the street, and that was all he offered — not good luck, not the children will be glad, only where he would be if the fire got the better of her.
She stood on the step a while, turning the key over in her hand.
Then she went and tried the lock, lifting on the turn, and it gave.
The first Tuesday she came early and got the stove going, and it fought her the way she'd been warned, and the church was cold a good half-hour after.
Seven children came. They stood inside the door in a clump and looked at her, and she looked back, and none of them sat until she told them where.
Eleven came the second Tuesday, because in between she had mentioned at the store, in Mrs. Garrett's hearing, that there might be gingerbread for those who stayed the hour.
They were not musical. They were loud, and they were hers.
The Ott boys sang like their father drove cattle.
Sally Henderson had a sweet thin voice and no wind, and gasped at the end of lines like a landed fish, and the little Garrett girl would not sing at all but stood holding the hem of Clara's skirt the whole hour, which Clara counted as attendance.
She lined them up and moved them around — the loud ones to the back, the shy ones to the front — and taught them one verse of one hymn until it stopped being a stampede and became, for four bars at a stretch, a song.
Partway through the second Tuesday the door opened and the preacher came in with a coil of wire and a ladder-back of shingles under his arm. Eleven heads turned and said good afternoon, Reverend, more or less together.
"Don't mind me." He set the shingles under the water-stain and moved the tin pail a hand's width to where the drip fell. "The roof's on my list. The list is long."
He was gone ten minutes later. At the door he paused, half-turned.
"It carries," he said. "Clear down to the store."
"Is that a complaint?"
"It's a fact." The door shut behind him, and Freddy Ott, who missed nothing that was not addressed to him, asked whether they might learn a song with a wolf in it, and the hour went on.
Thursday she walked in early, the afternoon mild and the road drying at the crown, and at the edge of town she passed the neat house with the white curtains and the walk swept clean to the gate.
A boy stood at the fence. Eight, she judged, or a small nine, in a jacket buttoned to the chin though the day didn't ask it, running a stick along the palings with the flat of his wrist — tap, tap, tap — the way boys do when the day is long and nobody has given them any part of it.
"Afternoon," Clara said.
"You're the singing lady." He said it plainly, the way a boy names a thing he already knows.
Then, that business done with: "There's a killdeer nesting in the churchyard grass.
Right out in the open. You'd step on her before you ever saw her.
" He dug in his jacket pocket and produced a hawk feather, banded brown and white, held it up to be admired, and put it away again before she had properly done so.
"I can spit through my teeth. Tom Ott can't."
"Tom Ott has been singing at me a fortnight. If there's a thing he can't do, the town will thank him for it."
The boy grinned, and one of the teeth in question was missing, and for a moment he was nothing in the world but pleased.
She wished him good day and went on. A dozen steps on, the humming started behind her.
It was the hymn. Her hymn, the one the school had been mauling all week — but whole, every interval clean and true, the hard sixth in the second line taken like a stile a boy has climbed a hundred times. Not loud. Just true, all the way through, from a fence at the edge of town.
Clara stopped in the road and turned around.
"Who taught you that?"
"Nobody." The humming had shut off like a tap. He looked at his stick. "It comes down the street, school days. You can hear it from the yard."
"We sing it again in about half an hour. You could come hear it from inside."
The stick went still on the palings. He looked at the house behind him, quick, and his face changed while he did it, and then he looked at her, and he was suddenly much older than eight.
"I'm not let," he said.
She ought to leave it there. Standing in the road she knew it. But some people can walk past a child at a fence, and Clara had never been one of them, and she was too old to start.
"Then the fault will be mine," she said. "I'm the schoolmistress and I called on you specially. One hour. I'll walk you there and I'll walk you home after and I'll say so to whoever wants saying to." She held out her hand. "Clara Crowell."
He looked at the hand. He looked at the house once more.
"Willie," he said, and came over the fence rather than through the gate, and gave her hand one downward pump like a man concluding a horse trade.
The school was mid-verse when she brought him in, and it stumbled to a stop, one voice after another.
"That's Willie Pritchard," said Tom Ott, to the world at large. "He don't come to school."
"He's come to this one." Clara put him at the end of the second row, between Sally Henderson and the wall, and gave the note, and started them again before the room could form an opinion.
For half the verse he only stood in it, his chin down, his ears gone red. Then the second line came round with its hard sixth, and eleven children missed it as one, and Willie Pritchard took it clean.
The voice was small and it went through the room like light through a window.
Beside him Sally Henderson left off gasping to stare.
The Ott boys stopped. Even the little Garrett girl looked up from Clara's skirt.
Clara kept the beat going with her hand and did not stop the verse, and did not look at him any longer than she looked at the rest, because she had learned already that being looked at was the surest way to shut him off.
But her throat had gone tight, and she was glad of the singing to hide behind, because it was the truest thing she had heard since she came to Nebraska, and it was coming out of a boy nobody had thought to listen to.