Free Farm Girl by Karen Jones Gowen

spell the most words right and stay up the longest. Sometimes we had cipher-downs at the blackboard. Two boys in my class, Desco Lovejoy and Irving Brooks, and I would try to beat each other. Whoever got the problem right first stayed at the board until someone else beat them. Sometimes I stayed until the end, sometimes Desco or Irving.
    Whenever we had to learn anything new, like the multiplication table, my dad practiced with me at home with a slate or paper and made a game of it. He and Mother had gone to their country schools, Dad in New Virginia and Mother in the Norwegian community. Mother had gone through sixth grade; Dad through the eighth or ninth.
    Neither had gone to high school, and they wanted me to get a good education. Sometimes he and I would have our own spell-down. I liked school and always got the top grades in my class, making my dad proud of me. He’d say, “I wish I had four more just like you.”

With the doll

Oil painting by Julia Marker

Chapter Nine:
Our Cather Connections

    All country school students had to take county exams and pass them in order to go on to high school. You started them in seventh grade, and if you didn’t pass, you took them again in eighth. The teacher had samples to test us, then we’d go to the county courthouse in Red Cloud to take the exams, with about 80 or 100 kids from all the country schools in our county. The Webster County superintendent handed out the exams, made up entirely of essay questions, no multiple choice. Multiple choice weren’t even considered worthy of an exam back then, because that gives you the answer.
    I passed all my exams in seventh grade with the second highest score in the county. The highest score belonged to Annie Pavelka, the granddaughter of Antonia, who Willa Cather had written about in her novel My Antonia .
    That novel also had another character my family knew, the moneylender Wick Cutter. He was M.R. Bentley who held the mortgage for a time on my grandparents Hans and Sofie Walstads’ homestead.
    Everyone knew the stories about that ruthless man, how he went after the Scandinavian girls so that his wife couldn’t keep any help in the house. And how he was so quick to foreclose on property if the people couldn’t pay.
    As a girl, my mother always ran and hid when she saw his buggy coming down their lane. Mother said when her parents would see his fancy buggy coming, they’d all go run and hide, parents and children. If anyone was there and couldn’t pay, he was heartless, he’d foreclose. So if they were unable to pay, they’d go hide rather than face him and risk foreclosure. If Mother was there alone, she feared facing Mr. Bentley, because he would kind of sidle up to her and want to get ahold of her, pretending like he was such a nice man. He had a bad reputation among the young Scandinavian girls.
    If homesteaders were desperate for money, they mortgaged their place. They’d mortgage their farm, then pay it off, then when they needed money again, they’d mortgage it again to whoever would give them the loan. This scoundrel, M.R. Bentley held the mortgage on the Walstad place for awhile, I don’t know how long.
    My father’s parents had to mortgage their farm in the early days, too. On the Marker deed, there are a lot of different names of people it was mortgaged to.
    Since Annie Pavelka and I got the two highest grades on the county exams, we became good friends. If Mother, Dad and I went to Red Cloud on a Saturday night, I’d find Annie and we’d walk up and down the streets together.
    Mother would go to the grocery store and Dad would find someone to talk to on the street. I’d see Annie someplace in town with her mother, and we’d walk around arm in arm, like girls did back then. We were both in eighth grade, she lived out on a farm north of Red Cloud, in the Bohemian community.
    Annie would tell me about everything going on in her family and in her community. Her life seemed so much more exciting than mine. The