A Time to Bloom (Leah's Garden #2)(32)

Del kept her frown at bay. “Thank you.” How should she handle this? Lord above, help. She leaned closer to John. “Can you hear me?” The boy nodded and sneaked a glance at her.

“Good. I’m going to show you some things, and you need to answer me.” She held up a page of letters and pointed to the K. “What is this letter?”

No answer.

“Point to the K.”

He did.

“The R.”

She did the same thing with numbers. He knew them all. Bethany did too.

Del opened the textbook beside her and handed the open book to Bethany. “Read me the first page.”

Bethany read it without hesitation. “We learned to read from Ma’s Bible. We memorized verses too.”

That’s surely more difficult than the McGuffey Readers, Del thought. But how do I get him to talk? She looked at John. “Can you talk?”

A look of terror whipped across his face before he set to studying his hands again. Del looked to Bethany, who shrugged.

“All right. You will both start in the fourth grade, and we’ll see how that goes. You may go back to your seats.” And, John, you are going to learn to talk with me.

She excused the children for recess and met Elsie bringing Josie back with a big smile on her skinny little face.

“All is well?”

Elsie nodded, then bent to tell Josie to go play with the others. “Mrs. Brownsville gave Josie a pair of drawers and socks and told her she could keep them. She said she’d rinse Josie’s out and bring them over before school is out.”

“Thank you, Elsie.” Thank the Lord for Forsythia.

“Someday I’m going to be a teacher like you.”

“You will make a good teacher. Now, you go play and enjoy your recess.”

Del sat down at her desk and looked through her notes from talking with parents. The two missing students were Timothy and Iris O’Rourke from one of the homesteads. Their resistant father said the two older boys were needed on the farm and would not be attending school anymore. While she hated to accept that, the law said children had to attend only up to age twelve. But why were the two younger children not in school today? After school, she would ride Starbright out to their homestead and find out, as much as she disliked confrontation. But perhaps Mr. O’Rourke would be out in the fields, and she could visit with his wife.

———

By dinnertime, all the testing was finished and the stack of papers on her desk attested to her pupils following instructions to write about their break. She planned to read them aloud after noon recess.

“You may all fetch your dinner pails and sit back down to eat before you go outside for recess. Walk, don’t run in school, and if you need to use the outhouse, after you eat is the time.”

“Miss Nielsen?”

She looked up to find one of the boys in front of her. “Yes, Curtis, what is it?”

He leaned closer to whisper. “John and Bethany don’t have no dinner pails.”

Del looked up and, sure enough, the two children were sitting silently. “Thank you.” She wrapped up her sandwich and two cookies and took them to the children. “Here, I have plenty. Tomorrow you will know to bring food for dinner.”

“Thank you, Miss Nielsen.”

She watched them eat as if . . . I wonder if they had breakfast before they came. While she drank her coffee—cold now but still welcome—she flipped through the tablet pages, interested in seeing what the students had written with so little instruction. Several made her smile. Not all of them had names on them, as some had obviously forgotten, and what could she say, since she’d forgotten to remind them?

She rang the bell to call them in from recess and waited until those lined up at the water pail found their seats. “When I hold up a paper, you recognize which is yours and come up here to read it. Everyone understand?”

At the first one she held up, Betsy Jorgensen raised her hand.

“Please come up here and read.”

“‘My name is Betsy Jorgensen, and I live on a farm. Our cow had a calf, and my pa said I could name the calf. Since it is a heifer, I named her Daisy. We once had a cow named Daisy, but she died. She was a good cow, so now we have Daisy again.’”

“Thank you, Betsy. You did well.” Del held up another paper, this one without a name. No one moved. “Thomas, isn’t this your paper?”

The boy nodded.

“Please come up and read it.”

He dragged himself off his bench as if he were stuck to it with dried paste. He took the paper and, without looking at anyone or anything, read it. “‘Pa and me went fishing. I caught three fish. He din’t catch none.’” He nearly ran back to his seat, the paper clutched so tightly in his hand that it ripped in one place.

Someone snickered. Del glared at where she thought it came from.

Once they’d all read their papers, she sent them out for recess again. She’d considered skipping this recess, but it was important to set the schedule for the year. When she rang them back in, Del was more ready for the day to be over than the children.

“Will you read to us like you did last year?” asked Elsie.

“Yes, if everyone has done their work for the day. Since this is our first day of school, I thought we would start out right. Our first book for this year is Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe. This was one of my father’s books, and my brother brought it here on the train just so I could read it to all of you.” She sat down in her chair and opened to the first page. “‘Never any young adventurer’s misfortune, I believe, began sooner or continued longer than mine.’”