said life’s more interesting and full of good stuff to . . . to fill the day if you know a lot of things. And life isn’t so interesting and not so full of good stuff if you don’t.”
Though these first days of teaching passed without event, Nell felt no relief. She would be on trial for a long time. With a child to provide for, she could not afford a misstep.
On the sixth of September, days after school had opened, President McKinley was shot, succumbing on the fourteenth of the month. News of his death arrived with the westbound train. On Friday, school was canceled.
“What’ll happen now?” Elvira asked at breakfast, her eyes huge with alarm.
“Theodore Roosevelt will be president,” Nell said, ladling out oatmeal.
“You think he knows how to be president?” Elvira pressed, ignoring the pitcher of milk Nell set in front of her.
“I believe he’s intelligent and well-educated. No one can know if he’ll be a good president.”
“My gran remembers when President Lincoln was shot. Those were terrible times, she says. Everybody thought the country was gonna come to an end. The country won’t come to an end now, will it?”
“No, no. I have a good feeling about Mr. Roosevelt.” Did she? “Anyway, President Garfield was assassinated, too, and the country kept on going.” She spooned a little brown sugar onto Elvira’s oatmeal. “Now, eat and stop worrying. I’ll look after you.”
Late in September, Elvira told Nell, “Hilly and I saw Father Gerrold outside the post office. He reminded us that the St. Boniface bazaar is next month. Will we go?”
“It wouldn’t be proper for me, so soon after Herbert’s passing,” Nell said, “but you must go and take a pie. I’ll give you a bit of change to put in your pocket for the wheel of fortune.”
Clapping her hands, Elvira cried, “You’re so good to me,” and ran to embrace Nell. “Nobody’s ever been so good to me.”
The night of the bazaar, Nell brushed Elvira’s hair, tying it back with red ribbon. “You’ll need a heavy sweater,” she told the girl. “Take mine.” Before Elvira stepped into the dark, carrying an apple pie, Nell dabbed vanilla behind the girl’s ears. “You’ll be the prettiest girl there.”
“Best-smelling, too.”
It was ten before Elvira returned, cheeks flushed. “Our pie was the best-looking one,” she rhapsodized. “And guess who bought it—Mr. Lundeen!”
The girl flung herself onto the screeching daybed. “We got to talking and he said they could use an extra hand at the dry-goods store on Saturdays, at least till after Christmas. And Mrs. Lundeen said yes, they were short-handed and they’d probably need me till after inventory, whatever inventory is.” She sat up. “Would you mind?”
“Saturday afternoon and Sunday are your time. If you want to work at the store, that’s fine. You can make yourself a little cash.”
“That’s what I was thinking. Wouldn’t Ma be surprised to get a store-bought present for Christmas?” Elvira hugged her little body.
“Now, tell me who all was at the bazaar,” Nell said. “Any likely beaux?”
“There was one kinda sweet on me. But he’s from the country, so that’s that.”
“I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!” Elvira said. “They let me write up a sale and ring it on the cash register. And I helped Mrs. Rabel find the thread she needed. I felt so grown-up, Cousin Nell.”
“There’s a little coffee left from supper,” Nell said. “I’ll heat it while you get into your nightdress.”
“Oh, don’t bother. It’s only nine-thirty. I thought I’d look in at the dance. I wish you’d come with me.”
Pulling on the old alpaca coat that hung to the floor and had once been a man’s, Elvira kissed Nell’s cheek. “I know, I know. It wouldn’t be proper for you to come.” And then she was gone.
Smiling, Nell drew the rocker close to the lamp and opened the copy of Sense and Sensibility she’d come across in Bender’s Second Hand while searching through used housewares for another iron skillet.
So much about Elinor in this book reminded Nell of herself. Her calm, her self-sufficiency. And wasn’t it a good thing to have an aspect of one’s nature illuminated by a character? A book could be a mirror helping one to understand oneself, accept oneself—maybe even one’s more refractory parts. We were ourselves probably the sphere we least understood.
On a typical afternoon, when the three-o’clock dismissal bell rang in the school tower, Elvira bundled Hilly up, walking him up Main Street and into the school. In the third-grade room, Nell corrected papers by a kerosene lamp and entered the marks in her grade book.
Impressed by the school, Elvira invariably exclaimed to Hilly, “Isn’t this the biggest building you ever saw?” While they waited for Nell to finish, Elvira carried the little boy to the windows, pointing to the rim of the western horizon where a spectacular sunset yielded to the icy blackness of a winter night. In the darkening village, lamps flared to life inside houses where wives tossed more wood into cookstoves.
Catching sight of the sudden flame of a freshly lit lamp, Hilly threw his head back, laughed, and pointed. “Light,” Elvira told him. He tried to repeat the word, but “light” was difficult, and every time came out as “wite.” Still, Elvira told him that he was a good boy.
Sometimes they helped Nell by picking up items fallen to the floor, or checking the cloakroom for lunch buckets and mittens. If the appointed monitor had failed to stay behind to wash the chalkboard, Elvira and Hilly carried the galvanized pail to the pump in the yard and fetched water to scrub it. “Isn’t this fun?” Elvira asked, and the lad clapped his hands.
On the way home, the three occasionally stopped in the pharmacy for aspirin or mentholatum. Inhaling odors edgy and foreign, Elvira lingered over exotic treasures, identifying each for Hilly. “Dr. Aspenwall’s Cure for Gout, whatever that is. We’ll ask your mama. And here’s Neat’s-Foot Oil. Ma puts that on her feet in the winter.” In the grocery store, shopping for potatoes, Elvira cooed, “Green beans in a can, Hilly, imagine that.”
Elvira soon became a familiar face in Harvester. She was a friendly little thing, eager to know everything she could be taught, whether it was the meaning of “gout” or the price of a railway ticket to Chicago. “Not that I plan to go there,” she told the depot agent, “But you never know . . . do you?”
The Lundeens were taken with her. “That girl knows how to work,” Mr. Lundeen told Nell when she ran into him in the meat market. “We’ll have work for her through January, maybe later. Juliet thinks Elvira’s the cat’s whiskers.”
By now, young George Lundeen had returned from his Grand Tour, a graduation gift from his parents. At the dry-goods store, he was training to take over management from his father, who was increasingly tied up at the new Square Deal Lumberyard across the street from the depot.
Sitting at the battered oak table one night, spreading apple butter on a slice of bread, Elvira told Nell, “Mr. George really hoped to go into the bank, but his pa wants to start him out in the store.”
“My goodness, how do you know that?”
“You hear things.”
“Have you met him?”
“Last Saturday. He’s very nice.