Homesteading Woman

By Margaret Drake

In 1910, women could not vote. The romance of the western frontier still lured many people to adventure and the quest for wealth in the prairies. Homesteaders were enticed to settle the lands with the goal of civilizing the west. Miss Ruby Taylor, school teacher joined this flood of new settlers to the South Dakota plains. She took her chances in a land lottery. Money was a constant worry for her with her modest teacher's income. Living in the family of one of her students was a challenge as some families resented "boarding the teacher". Women were sought after for wives by the men who made up the majority of the homesteaders. Marriage meant giving up control over a woman's income as well as unavailability of birth-control which meant repeated pregnancies with high infant and mother mortality. When men begin to pursue Ruby, she was forced to consider all these factors. She is absorbed by overcoming the day-by-day barriers and problems in the life of a settler, a rural one-room schoolteacher and in being a single woman in a male dominated frontier. Successfully she fends off unwanted attention until one surprising attack.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 29, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595615292

Margaret Drake

Margaret Drake first moved to Hawaii in 1968 to teach. She returned to the US mainland in 1972 for occupational therapy education and worked in that field for thirty-two years. After retiring, she returned to Hawaii. Drake has written professional books and stories for adults and children.

Book preview

Homesteading Woman

Copyright © 2008 by Margaret Drake

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

ISBN: 978-0-595-50480-0 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-595-61529-2 (ebk)

Contents

Chapter 1     A Rural School Teacher

Chapter 2     Visiting Cousin Roberta At Augustana

Chapter 3     Packing Roberta’s Trunk

Chapter 4     Summer Of 1910

Chapter 5     Waiting To Hear

Chapter 6     At Last, A Way!

Chapter 7     More Letters

Chapter 8     The Plans

Chapter 9     August 17Th, Wednesday

Chapter 10   August 18, Thursday

Chapter 11   August 19, Friday

Chapter 12   Aberdeen

Chapter 13   Lottery Registration

Chapter 14   Preparing To Wait For The Lottery

Chapter 15   Waiting

Chapter 16   The Lottery

Chapter 17   Winners & Decisions

Chapter 18   Cap Robinson

Chapter 19   Aberdeen To Moreau

Chapter 20   A Job

Chapter 21   The Claim

Chapter 22   Moreau School-Preparing For Fall Term

Chapter 23   First Day Of School

Chapter 24   Buying A Horse

Chapter 25   Back To The Claim

Chapter 26   Waking Up On The Claim

Chapter 27   Supper At Edgar’s

Chapter 28   Trunk & Crate Arrival

Chapter 29   The Well

Chapter 30   Faith

Chapter 31   Gossip

Chapter 32   Claim Shack

Chapter 33   Henry Disappears

Chapter 34   Two Weeks On The Claim

Chapter 35   Winter Arrives In Moreau

Chapter 36   Letters Before Winter

Chapter 37   The Meeting At Moreau School House

Chapter 38   Mr. Radapt’s Relinquishment

Chapter 39   Christmas At Moreau

Chapter 40   December 26, 1910

Chapter 41   Edgar’s Intent

Chapter 42   The Train Comes To Faith

Chapter 43   Can Spring Be Far?

Chapter 44   The Dance

Chapter 45   End Of School 1910-1911

Chapter 46   Gardening

Chapter 47   The Aftermath

Chapter 48   Drought

Chapter 49   Another School Year Starts

Chapter 50   The Second Dance

Chapter 51   Heading Home At Dawn

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Language at the beginning of the 20th century was not politically correct according to today’s standards. For example, the word Squaw was commonly used by those of European extraction for Native American women. Cripple was a common term for someone physically handicapped. In order to be true to the era, I have used such language and hope that it does not offend.

To my cousin Mavis Williams Van Beek

who died in 2007 before she could read this story.

Mavis grew up in the area near where this story takes place.

Her mother Cannetha Hokenstad Williams was a woman who took

over someone else’s homesteading relinquishment and while the heroine

Ruby Taylor is not modeled after Cannetha, she certainly was the inspiration for the story as was Mavis who’s many

adventures on the prairies inspired the writer.

Acknowledgements

Cousins: Lois Geisler, Mavis & Harvey Van Beek, Phyllis Britton, Veneta & Warren Ewen, Sisters; Jean Bruning who remembered how to make clabber, Lela Goodell, Ann Wagner, Brothers; Wendell & Ron Williams, my grand nephew Noel Miller for consultation on kerosene, Friends: Ardis Haaland for directing me to appropriate books, Carol Johnson for allowing me to borrow from her books The Way They Were and Back When, Waverly Lyles who knows more about horses & guns than me, Mike Mallory who also knows guns, Melvin Hauser who owns my uncle & aunt’s place now. John O’Toole for description of well drilling from that era, J.D. Thompson for information about weather, etc., for Annette Thornberry for advice on horses and horse equipment, and for all the gang at the Faith Senior Center.

CHAPTER 1

6407.png

A RURAL SCHOOL TEACHER

Cold April rain pelted down on the rural school house as Miss Taylor finished up her preparations for tomorrow lessons. She looked around the room to check that her daily end-of-day tasks were completed before she donned an oil-cloth overcoat over her light weight thin well-worn spring coat. As she sloughed a mile through the mud and sprouting grasses toward the Belchers’ dreary farm house she contemplated her own motivations for giving up a steady job in a fairly prosperous farm community to gamble on such a risky move as homesteading.

What made a woman like herself throw up a career as a teacher in crop-rich Cedar County, Iowa and move to treeless South Dakota land? Even though Iowa school teachers did not get rich, they usually were warm enough in winter and free in summer. What made a woman like her choose adventure over marriage and protection? There had been plenty of opportunities to marry single farmers in the communities where she taught country schools as well as men near her Muscatine County birthplace. It was not that she did not like men or the eventual idea of marriage and family, but now at age twenty two, she desired adventure, not drudgery. She knew that most other women her age had husbands already and sometimes looked at her as an object of vague disdain. She never acknowledged or discounted their sympathies. For her right now, she knew she did not want to promise to obey anyone but the School Board.

Aunt Belle, her mother’s youngest sister from Michigan, had married an adventurer in the early 1890s when Ruby was a small girl. She barely remembered Aunt Belle’s last visit to the Taylor farm before leaving with her new husband. The newlyweds had stopped over to visit for several days before boarding a River Boat on the Mississippi to New Orleans. The whole Taylor family had gone to Muscatine to see them off. A letter from New Orleans came back to Mrs. Taylor informing her that they expected to board a steamship which would sail south around Cape Horn at the lower edge of South America. Later, her mother had a letter from her younger sister in which she reported being widowed when her husband died while attempting to mine for gold in Alaska in 1899. Another letter came telling of Belle’s remarriage to a hotel manager in San Francisco. The letters that followed were vaguer each year, but her aunt always said her life was splendid out in the west. Mrs. Taylor was not a woman to conjecture, though Ruby tried to get her to speculate about Aunt Belle’s life. She wished that her mother would allow her to write to Aunt Belle, but her mother discouraged this by seeming to hide the letters which had Aunt Belle’s address. However, Ruby kept the thought of Aunt Belle, the adventurer in her imagination. Perhaps it was Aunt Belle who was her inspiration for homesteading.

Ruby had read about the opportunities for women homesteaders in the newspaper The Des Moines Register and Leader, two years ago in 1908. The idea of trying this adventure for herself had been simmering in the back of her mind ever since. Whenever she heard about a woman who had tried it, given up and returned home, she tried to converse with the woman, to try to find out her reasons for relinquishing her claim and what she, Ruby, could expect out there. The successful ones seldom came back because either they were too busy or too poor to return to visit relatives. She knew there were successful ones because the ones who came back told stories about the other women in the West.

A few books of women pioneers had come into her hands. There was A Lady’s Life Among the Mormons by Fanny Stenhouse and Wife No. 19, or The Story of a Life in Bondage … Revealing the Sorrows, Sacrifices and Sufferings of Women in Polygamy. Ruby had surreptitiously purchased these two texts from an itinerant book peddler she met in Tipton one Saturday. She had had to conceal them under her mattress at the Belchers where she roomed. These accounts of polyga

mous wives were both titillating and educational. It showed Ruby of what she should beware, though Mormons were seldom seen in their region of Eastern Iowa, nowadays.

Because of what she had learned from the few returning homesteader women she had met, she had begun to save as much of her salary as she could, to practice shooting better, to learn how to sink a fence post, to wield a saw and hammer and to ride bareback. She paid more attention to how to set a duck’s eggs, help a cow birth a calf and teach a dog to herd.

Now that the school term would be over in a few weeks, she was considering how she could carry out this dream of homesteading her own land. She wrote a letter of inquiry to the Department of Education in the South Dakota capitol Pierre. She knew the capital was pronounced peer from teaching geography to so many children. She asked for vacant school positions in the Indian territories, newly opened for homesteaders. She also saw an advertisement in the Des Moines Leader & Register for an employment agency in Sioux Falls. The advertisement claimed that you would not pay the five dollar fee unless they found you a job. Just for insurance, Ruby wrote a letter to the address given though she hoped that the Department of Education would answer first. In both letters she mentioned her desire to homestead land though her emphasis was on her profession of teaching.

Ruby had grown up on a farm west of Muscatine, Iowa near the Cedar River. The family was mostly English in origins. Her mother and father, second generation immigrants from England, had met and married in Michigan and come to Iowa to carry out their own dream. It had been a hard scrabble existence for the first years. But as more children came and the older ones were able to help work the farm, they had been able to construct more farm buildings, raise more animals and buy some nearby properties when other farmers decided to give up and go back East. By the time Ruby, the last child was born, there had been a fairly substantial farm operation for her to thrive in. And being the youngest, she was slightly spoiled, or so her older brothers and sisters told her. They reiterated to her how much harder their childhood had been than hers. This repeated reminder that her life had been easy had helped push her toward adventures that would prove to them that she was just as capable of enduring adversity as they. She was the first of the eight Taylor children to go on from the one room country school with eight grades to an academy and to finish high school. The high

school diploma had qualified her to become a teacher herself at age seventeen. And so she did become one and helped her family financially in that way. But by the time she was able to contribute to the family coffers, they did not really need her money any more. The older children were all married or had gone west. Bert had fled west after a disagreement with their father. Thomas had answered an advertisement flier for work as a cowboy on a Montana ranch. He had sent one letter back to inform the family of his whereabouts, though his location frequently changed as in the case of many cowboys. Two other brothers had settled on nearby farms and worked with her father in the farming operation. The sisters had married farmers and moved to other farms with in the south east of Iowa. Thus was Ruby able to save her unused salary. She brought it home after each school term and placed in a separate account in the farmers’ bank her father favored rather than asking him to save it for her in his bank account. Ruby was aware that if she were to marry, she would lose control of this money. All such assets a woman brought into the marriage became the property of the husband to dispose of as he pleased. Most men she knew did consult their wives but ultimately the husband made the final decision. This situation made her quite uncomfortable when the idea of marriage was discussed.

Ruby was really free to pursue her career for her own self, an unusual situation for a woman in rural Iowa in this first decade of the twentieth century. Her older brothers and sisters viewed her as somewhat of a pet, her accomplishments as a teacher and piano player as superfluous to the real efforts in their world, raising crops and animals. Their disdain of her accomplishments were so subtly expressed that there was nothing obvious for her to complain about. Such was the accepted thought about ‘women’s work". This situation, as a person whose accomplishments were discounted, had led her to dreams of ways to prove herself to them.

During the school year when she was teaching, she usually lived with the family nearest the school house. Some families felt it was a burden to board the school teacher. Others acted as if it were a privilege to share their home with her. During the past five years, she had lived with four different families near three different schools in two different counties, sharing the room and often the bed of the daughters of the family. She had taken these opportunities to watch how different farmers conducted their business. These lessons had been taken to heart about how to sink a fence post, wield a saw and hammer and ride bareback. She learned from the farmer’s wife, how to set a duck’s eggs. She could have learned

these processes from her own farm family, but their view of her as an educated pet discouraged her from asking them. The older boys in the families in which she boarded, who were also sometimes her students, had showed her how to deliver a calf, probably testing her to see how embarrassed she was in this presence of this obvious sexuality. They also showed her how to train a dog to herd sheep and cows.

But adventurer that she was, even she knew that being a woman alone on the frontier was a risky business. Some of the homesteader women had given up and come back because of the disdain of men homesteaders or worse yet, unwanted amorous attentions which they were unable to fight off. Ruby was five foot four and weighed 110 pounds. She knew that if she was taken by surprise without her gun nearby, she too could become a victim of such unwanted attentions. Nonetheless, she still felt confident of her ability to deal with nature and with men. Teasing from her older brothers about possible suitors had hardened her to deal with this kind of adversity. If she capitulated to her brothers’ teasing, they took the opportunity tell her what she must do to toughen up to ward off such undesired notice by men. Growing up on a farm, guns had been part of life and she was comfortable with their care and use.

Occasionally, after a Farm Bureau meeting, there would be a musical program where everybody sang songs they all knew such as Home on the Range but one evening, there had been a traveling troubadour with a guitar that had played for them. The man had been traveling through the country by sneaking rides on empty railroad cars. He had been discovered by the railway police and thrown off the train far out in the country. The farmer’s wife where he stopped to ask for food in exchange for work had persuaded him to stay around until the next Farmers Union meeting to play for the assembled group. A free will offering was taken to pay him for his efforts.

One of the songs he sang was;

Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim

I am looking rather seedy now

While holding down my claim

And my victuals are not always served the best

And the prairie dog keeps barking so

That I can scarcely sleep

In my little old sod shanty in the West

Oh! The hinges are of leather

And the windows have no glass

While the board roof lets the howling blizzard in

And I hear the hungry coyote

As he sneaks up through the grass

‘Round my little old sod shanty on the claim.

And when I left my eastern home

So happy and so gay

To try to win my wealth and fame

I little thought that I’d come down

To burn twisted hay

In the little old sod shanty on my claim.

After the program, while the farmers drank strong coffee and ate sponge cake, Ruby had persuaded the musician to say the lyrics while she wrote them down. She thought she remembered the tune well enough to play it on the piano and planned that she would teach it to the children next week. She knew that teaching something imprinted it on her memory better than anything.

CHAPTER 2

6407.png

VISITING COUSIN

ROBERTA AT AUGUSTANA

The school term ended the first week in May so that her pupils could help with planting the new crops. Upon the invitation of her cousin Roberta Brumfield, she detoured on her way home to the family farm in Muscatine County to visit in Davenport with Roberta and her parents. Roberta was just one year younger than Ruby. She had been attending Augustana College, run by the Lutherans, across the Mississippi River in Rock Island, Illinois. Because of her love of travel, developed during the teaching of geography, Ruby would first go to the campus and accompany Roberta back to Davenport. When Roberta started to attend college at Augustana, the privilege had been available to women for only twenty years. Ruby was jealous of her cousin for having this experience but Roberta was an only child. Her father could afford to pay for her tuition. Even though Ruby’s parents could have paid for her to go to college, their habit of thrift never allowed them to consider that they might send their youngest child to college when none of the other children had been sent. So Ruby had to be satisfied with her academy education. It allowed her to have her own career and her own money since her parents no longer needed their children’s income.

Roberta’s father was a Lutheran banker, thus making it possible for her to be enrolled at Augustana. Roberta’s mother was the younger sister of Ruby’s father. Ruby’s family religion had been at the nearby Methodist church with whatever itinerant preacher was passing through. Religion had not been as dominating influence in their lives. However, their lack of earnestness about religion did not make them conspicuous in the community. They bowed their heads when public prayers were offered. They knew the words to all the commonest hymns sung at community gatherings such as funerals. They said a hurried grace at meals but otherwise, religion was just given the flimsiest nod of recognition required by the Methodist church for Ruby’s family.

The previous spring, Ruby had crossed the river and stayed several days with her cousin in the women students’ boarding house near the Augustana campus. She had been able to walk over the campus with her cousin and hear about Roberta’s adventures there. Ruby had vicariously enjoyed the stories of competition with male students for grades, of being courted by several male students. Ruby’s own courtiers were mostly farmers’ sons who were often socially clumsy and preoccupied with their crops. Roberta’s suitors were from a different class of men, Ruby thought. She also envied her cousin the opportunity to hear the lecturers that came regularly to campus but she did not envy Roberta’s obligation to attend daily chapel services. During that first visit, they had attended chapel daily. Ruby found that the sermons had little to instruct her about living in the modern world of the twentieth century. The lecturers on the other hand stimulated her thoughts with topics of the recently waged Spanish-American War, John Dewey’s theory about education and women suffrage.

This trip across the Mississippi in the spring of 1910 was by the railway bridge. After a ride in the farmer’s wagon with her trunk full of winter-clothes and school books, she had boarded the train at the station in Iowa City. Roberta had been waiting at the train station in Rock Island to meet her. She had hired a porter to bring her trunk by wheelbarrow to Roberta’s boarding house near 30th and 6th Avenue. Together the girls had lugged her trunk up and pushed it against the wall in the hallway outside Roberta’s room as the room was too small for it to be stored there. She wouldn’t be here long enough to empty it and drag it to the trunk storage in the basement and then back up to the second floor. Roberta’s roommate had already left the college so Ruby was able to sleep in her place in the big double bed with her cousin. And in the hallway, there was a bathroom with a toilet and big enamel bathtub. Such luxury was uncommon for Ruby. Few farmers had indoor plumbing except possibly a hand pump by the kitchen sink. That was the situation on her own family’s farm west of Muscatine.

The first afternoon, Roberta was busy studying for a final examination in geography. This exam tomorrow would be her last duty of the spring semester. This was Roberta’s next to the last year before she would graduate with a baccalaureate of science in home economics. Meanwhile, Ruby walked on the campus admiring Wallenberg Hall and the tower of Old Main. By accident, she discovered the library and went in. She told the male librarian that she was visiting her cousin Miss Roberta Brumfield. He allowed her to come behind the wooden railing and peruse the shelves of books. It was the first time in Ruby’s life that she had ever seen so many books together in one place. Previously when she thought of a library, she thought of the four shelf bookcase built into the wall of the main study hall of the academy from which she graduated. Each of the country schools had had a shelf of books loosely referred to as the library but none in any way, gave a hint of what this college library contained. The new P.M. Musser Library had just opened in Muscatine a few years ago. Ruby had visited it a few times but it could not compare with this richness of knowledge. Ruby was mesmerized by the labeling on the shelves; world history, American history, geography, mathematics, psychology, hygiene, home economics, industry, transportation, engineering, law. She saw shelves of encyclopedias, atlases, and dictionaries. There were racks of newspapers firmly secured by one wooden rod clasped over the newspaper to another rod which sat in a small notch. Eventually, after her initial excitement at viewing this wealth of knowledge contained in books subsided, she selected a volume on overland transportation in America. This exactly suited her loosely assembled plan for homesteading in the West. She looked in the table of contents and saw that it started with the history of the westward movement before the Revolutionary War. It moved decade by decade up until 1900. The etched pictures of the various kinds of overland travel were interesting. Though the book was about overland travel, it included pictures of the boats which ferried people and cargo down the Erie Canal, across rivers or Lake Michigan. Eventually, she laid it aside and examined the shelves again. She knew that she was indistinguishable from any other female student attending school here. In fact, she felt as if this were a new kind of home. This thought made her consider the fact that she would probably not see such a plethora of books again if she were to actually carry out her plan to homestead. As she struggled with this conflict, she discovered on the shelf of law books a newly bound book of Homesteading Laws: State by State. She gingerly slipped it out between the other books on the shelf and hefted it over to a nearby table. She pulled out the oak chair and sat down before opening the weighty tome. The first chapter described the history of homesteading in North America. It included descriptions of Canadian homesteading as well as in the USA. Then the book was divided into chapters about the states of the United States; North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana & Idaho. It gave the dates of the various homesteading acts and described which were still in effect. Ruby pored over this book until the librarian touched a switch to turn on an overhead electric globe. This startled Ruby out of her concentration as she realized she had sat reading all afternoon. She closed the book and thanked the librarian as she hurried back across 30th Street toward the boarding house.

Roberta had her geography examination early next morning. She said, I want to go to sleep early tonight. I have studied so hard all afternoon; I am afraid the facts will fall out of my head unless I lay it down and keep it down.

Ruby laughed at this joking way of saying don’t bother me. Don’t worry about me. I have a book to read. But I am hungry. When do we eat?

Roberta laughed and hugged her cousin. Follow me. She led Ruby down to the dining room of the boarding house where other female roomers were also assembling for dinner.

Ruby had already paid Roberta’s land lady, Mrs. Moeller, three dollars for the meals she would be eating there and the opportunity to sleep in Roberta’s room. There were only two other young women in the dining room for supper. This boarding house had six bedrooms with two female students in each. Like Roberta’s roommate, many had already finished their examinations and left the campus. The ones still remaining were seniors who would be graduating at the end of the week. Ruby felt it would have been fun to see this kind of graduation but Roberta was eager to leave Rock Island and return home to Davenport.

The dining room was a large oblong room with a window seat on one side and a built in sideboard with a mirror above it on the other side. The reflected light made the room seem larger than it actually was. The light filtered through the cream colored organdy curtains which were somewhat stained and ready for ‘spring cleaning’. The landlady did a thorough cleaning and laundering of curtains between each college term. The room had a nice friendly feeling that encouraged confidences.

Next year when I graduate, then you can come to my commencement, Roberta assured Ruby.

Who knows where I will be at this time next year, Ruby retorted. I am seriously thinking about homesteading in South Dakota. I may already be on my claim by this time next year.

Roberta looked at her with incredulity. I know you have been talking about homesteading for years it seems, but do you know how hard it would be? Do you realize how hard those people work? Could you build your own self a claim shanty or how would you feel about living under ground like a mole?

Well, I wouldn’t start out doing all the work at once. I’ve been thinking that they probably need school teachers out there, too. I have already written to the South Dakota Board of Education to see if there is some place where they need a teacher and then I can file a claim near there. Then I could live with a family during the week while I teach school and just spend my weekends on the claim Ruby said thoughtfully.

Roberta continued to look at her skeptically as she finished spooning up her potato soup. I think it would be dangerous to live out there all by yourself. You must have read about the wild men that assault women.

Well I would only be alone on the weekends, if I am able to find a teaching position like I said. Besides, I have been practicing shooting at targets. Out near Tipton, I have had plenty of time to learn more about shooting and other skills that will help me in homesteading, Ruby said a little belligerently while remembering not to wipe her mouth with her sleeve as the farmers did. She reached into her lap and brought the muslin napkin to her lips. The thought flashed through her mind about how she had developed some pretty bad manners living with farm families.

Don’t you want to get married? Roberta questioned as she rose to go to the sideboard to help herself to the bread pudding dessert.

Ruby wished Roberta wouldn’t talk so loud because she saw one of the other women at the other end of the large rectangular oak table look at her curiously. She waited until Roberta sat down before she replied in sotto voce. "Of course, I

want to get married someday, but not for a while. You wouldn’t believe how I have seen some of these farmers treat their wives. Your parents have always been gentle with you. But I have heard husbands say really mean things to their wives. When you have to live in the homes of strangers, you hear things you never would have heard at home and it gives me a different view on marriage. I won’t marry just any old man, that’s for sure." It was hard to be emphatic in a voice almost like a whisper but she could see Roberta observing her with a shocked look.

When we get upstairs, you have to tell me about it. Roberta folded up her napkin and slipped it into the brass napkin ring.

Ruby decided to forego the dessert as telling Roberta about the husband and wife of this last family she lived with was a more inviting activity. She had had few opportunities to discuss it when she had weekends at home. Ma would say If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all every time she tried to describe what happened between the Belcher couple. She wondered why Ma didn’t want to hear her stories but she acquiesced in silencing her descriptions.

CHAPTER 3

6407.png

PACKING ROBERTA’S TRUNK

Upstairs in Roberta’s room, the two women talked as they packed Roberta’s trunk which they had dragged up from the basement after supper. Roberta asked Ruby to pack her books and notebooks across the bottom of the trunk. While Ruby did this, Roberta folded up all her stockings, under-things, hair brush, soap, curling iron and waists. She placed the piles on the bed, ready to put into the trunk as soon as the books were all stowed away. Between their tasks, they carried on a running conversation.

What about these Belchers that you lived with this winter and spring? What did they do that so turned you away from marriage? asked Roberta.

Ruby wondered where to start on this saga but she started in talking, knowing she would just backtrack and later tell any details she forgot the first time. "After Christmas with my folks on the farm, Dad drove me up to the Belchers. I had been staying with the Schmitz before I went home at Christmas. All these families have a lot of children, but the Schmitz were kind, just not friendly. Now the Belchers, they were neither kind nor friendly. At least I was teaching the same children as before, so it did not mean I had to get used to new students and a new family at the same time. Never-the-less, getting used to the Belchers was difficult. First of all, they didn’t have any