Chapter 6

It may have been something Bob said to one of the town fathers about Millie's situation and how the two women had been required to fix up the schoolmarm's house all by themselves. Or it could have been that word got out about her circumstances, and that she was going to teach school. Whatever it was, people began to respond to Millie's plight and needs. The next day, a wagon arrived in front of her little house. In it were three women, mothers of some of the children who would be coming to the school when it opened. They had brought a few meager gifts for the new teacher, including some clothing. Annie Buckminster also drove a wagon over, with a load of straw and an empty mattress sack. The women stayed to help Millie get the mattress stuffed and comfortable. Some other women from town also showed up. One brought a pot, another a broom and two others some provisions, including flour, bacon, beans and some eggs. A man came and left without a word, dropping off half a wagonload of split wood, though it was left in a pile rather than being stacked.

But Millie felt welcome, and she was grateful for everything she received. It made her want to be the best teacher she could be. She told everyone she saw that day that she would be opening the schoolhouse the following day.

The school itself, as it turned out, was in much better condition than the old schoolmaster's house had been. It was tighter, and less dust had accumulated. It would need some work, but Millie felt like she needed to get things started. From her perspective, the town had turned out to help her, and had given her a chance. She felt like she owed it to them to move ahead with her new job.

For her part, Millie simply thought all she'd do was teach reading and vocabulary, along with basic mathematics, and teach the children to write basic things. It didn't occur to her that some of the students would be more ... or less ... knowledgeable about these things, and that practically nobody would be on the same page in terms of their scholastic levels.

She got her first inkling that things might be more complicated than she thought, when the children arrived for their first day of school under her tutelage.

There were two hours between the times the first and last arrived. Some walked, and some rode horses.

Millie stood, surveying the room. Boots had stationed herself at the back of the room, behind the seated students. She said she was there to keep order, but Millie suspected she was just curious about how the new schoolmarm would handle things.

Her final tally had twelve children on it. The five youngest students were seven, eight, ten, eleven and twelve years old, respectively. There were four thirteen-year-olds, including the three boys who were responsible for her being there, but of course she didn't know that. The last three on her list were fourteen, fifteen and seventeen. In all, there were five girls and seven boys.

The eldest, a girl named Amy Hawkins, walked with a pronounced limp, the effect of a badly set broken leg when she was very young. Amy was resigned to being an old maid, because she wasn't married yet, and was quite sure no man would want a lame wife. The other side of that particular coin was that Amy had had access to books, and she spent time with those instead of the things hale girls were required to do on the frontier. As a result, she was the best educated student in the school, and was destined to become Millie's assistant.

It was, in fact, Amy who suggested that the first order of business should be for the children to spruce up their own one room schoolhouse. She offered to supervise that while Millie spent a few minutes with each child determining his or her level of education.

The kids all had skills, but they were usually skills like finding fuel for the fire, when to plant various things in the garden, or getting a cow to go where you wanted it to go. One boy was proud that he knew which snakes could be caught and played with, and which were to be left alone.

It soon became clear that each of her twelve students would need her individual attention to actually move forward with their education.

While Millie was dealing with her first day of school, four men sat around a table in the dining room of the Beaverton Hotel. One was Ralph Dugway, who owned the hotel. The other three were Mayor Robinson, Sheriff Miller and Claude Simpson, the storekeeper.

"No inquiries yet?" asked the mayor, looking at Sheriff Miller.

"Nothing over the wire," said Ralph. Harvey Watkins, the part-time stationmaster, also worked part time for Ralph at the front desk of the hotel. As a result, Ralph always knew first when something came over the telegraph, which was in the train station.

"Hasn't been time for anything to arrive by train," said the sheriff.

"What's Doc say about her injuries?" asked Simpson.

Miller spoke again. "She ain't got no memory of who she is or where she came from. He had to do some stitching on her, but you can't tell it by lookin' at her. She gets around all right."

"She's a looker," said Simpson.

"She's trouble," said Dugway. "She said anything about lawyers yet?"

"Nothing I've heard," said Mayor Robinson. "Hopefully, if we can keep her happy, that won't come up."

"Oh?" asked Simpson. "How do we keep her happy?"

"Well, I gave her a job for one thing," said Robinson. "And Ralph is giving her board."

Miller snorted. "You call one meal a day board?" He frowned. "Somebody's going to come looking for her, and when they do, they're going to find out she was assaulted, almost killed, and then bamboozled into being a slave laborer for the town. We'll be lucky if the whole town isn't burned to the ground."

"That's not how we're going to explain it," said the mayor. "She had a regrettable accident. Our town doctor treated her and, until her situation could be rectified, she was given something worthwhile to spend her time doing. This town isn't responsible for her upkeep. We helped her!"

Sheriff Miller wasn't impressed. "If your daughter was still here, and this happened to her, would you take that line of crap and call it all even?"

"Don't bring up my daughter!" barked the mayor. "And if I thought that line of crap was true, I would," said the politician at the table.

"Then we better sell that line of crap right good when somebody shows up," said Miller. "Because that girl is both beautiful and a product of breeding, and somebody damn powerful is going to come looking for her. I feel it in my bones."

"You just make sure Doc takes good care of her," said Mayor Robinson. "I'll take care of whoever comes to fetch her."

Millie was both pleased and surprised at how smoothly things went in her one room schoolhouse. While she might have lost the memory of who she was, and where she came from, she had not lost all memories. She knew the propensities of boys aged in the lower teens, and had expected the boys in her school to be a handful. That they were not was a profound relief to her.

Part of her good fortune, unknown to her, was that Boots was there. Also unknown to her was the fact that Boots had caught Michael and Benjamin peeking into the window of Doc Fisk's surgery to see what the condition of the victim of their prank was. She couldn't have known that Boots scared the crap out of almost all the children in town. Not only did this woman act and talk in ways that were completely unladylike, she had also murdered a man in cold blood, and walked away clean from it. Her story, over the five years she'd been in town, had morphed, as all stories do over time, and that story was truly blood-curdling these days. Boots was a living ghost story to the children of Beaverton.

So with Boots standing in the back of the class, order really was kept.

But Boots was only part of Millie's success. The other part was Millie herself. Children in a frontier society often lived in a world with only two stimuli. One was adults disregarding them as ignorant children, incapable of doing anything worthwhile. The other was adults expecting them to perform tasks to adult standards. In other words, they were either ignored, or expected to perform like adults. Neither situation really satisfied the longing all children feel to be noticed, and cared for.

In all fairness, this was not because the adults were harsh and uncaring. Rather it was because the world they lived in was harsh and uncaring, and the adults around them had their hands full just surviving.

So when a beautiful, mysterious, interesting young woman took a personal interest in them, the children in her school room were enthralled. The boys in particular rarely had the opportunity to examine, at length, a good looking young woman. Three of them, responsible for her being there, felt a tormenting mixture of shame and embarrassed lust.

Suffice it to say tensions ran high in school for a few days, but those tensions in no way discouraged learning. If anything, the kids were eager to learn and display that learning to their teacher.

Basically, what Millie did was break children into groups to study either reading, writing or arithmetic. She used those who had a modicum of skill in each area as assistants, to supervise each group, while she went from group to group to give them instruction and tasks to work on. As a result, she had children of widely mixed ages in each group, because the abilities of the children were widely scattered, without regard to age. Some very young children could read better, because they had spent long winters shut up inside with parents who could read, and who owned one, or maybe even two books. Even families that weren't fortunate enough to be able to afford a book or two usually owned a Bible, so there was usually something to read, for those inclined to do so.

So it was math and writing that needed most of Millie's attention. And it was in one of those areas that she asked Boots to help. She was working with the math group when Rory Tucker raised his hand in the writing group. That group contained Rory, who was eight, as well as Luthor Simmons, Emily Simpson and Donny Walker. Luthor was fourteen, but had been kicked by a horse and was a bit addled. Emily was eleven and Donny only seven. Emily had never written a word in her life, and Rory could write his name, so he had been given de facto charge of the group to teach them how to write his name as well, and then try to puzzle out how to write their own. They had decided to start with Donny's name, and there was an argument about whether that name included two N's or only one.

"Boots?" called Millie. "Could you help them, please? I'm right in the middle of something here."

It was Boots who told them only one N was needed, which was how Millie found out Boots could neither read, nor write, nor cipher.

That being completely unacceptable (to Millie), and public instruction being embarrassing to Boots, she made arrangements to privately tutor Boots in the evenings.

While Bob was away on his circuit, Millie and Boots settled into an evening routine. Millie was allowed one meal a day at the hotel dining room for free. Since they planned on studying in the evenings, and since Boots didn't get to eat free, Millie ate breakfast at the hotel before school. After school, they prepared supper at Millie's house, and then Boots spent an hour or two "learnin' her letters," as she put it. At the same time, Millie learned some things too. Boots, for instance, cooked things in an entirely strange manner sometimes. Used to cooking over an open fire, for the most part, Boots was both ignorant of and a little suspicious of the big cook stove in Millie's house. The first two nights, Millie did all the cooking.

The next night, Boots brought with her a brace of rabbits she'd trapped and cleaned. Millie only had one nice dress, so when school was over she went into her bedroom and changed into one of her hand-me-down outfits. While she was doing that, Boots got a fire going in the firebox of the stove. The pump hadn't been repaired yet, so Millie took the bucket and went to the front of the saloon, where there was another hand pump next to the watering trough for the horses. When Millie returned, she found Boots had skewered the rabbits on a stick and thrust them into the firebox of the stove through the open door.