Free Nothing Daunted by Dorothy Wickenden

teachers were told. The logs were pasted over with newspapers, and the floor was bare. “The place was neat as wax,” Ros wrote, “but pitifully empty.” The Joneses had encountered rough times in Michigan and “came out here with nothing, ” Dorothy said, “and after 6 years they practically have no furniture at all.”
    Soon after their move to Elkhead, the entire family had come down with amoebic dysentery, and four-year-old Herbie didn’t survive . As Carpenter recalled, he and Mrs. Murphy , the able pioneer, had goneup to help. Sending the two oldest boys outside with water for the men digging the grave, Mrs. Murphy took a kettle of potatoes off the stove, threw the contents outside, and filled it with fresh water and some rice that she had brought with her. As the water boiled, she took out an old black underskirt and tore it into strips. She had the older girls use it to line the inside of the coffin, and fashioned two miniature pillows to cushion each side of Herbie’s head. In the absence of a clergyman, Carpenter presided over the service with his Bible, and he remembered the quavering voices singing the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee.”
    When Dorothy and Ros arrived at the cabin, Tommy’s parents had just gotten back from the school, where his mother had played the piano, and Herbert, the custodian, did some masonry. Ros wrote to her father that Mrs. Jones had played for seven hours—“practicing all her old pieces and had been blissfully happy at touching a piano again.” The Joneses insisted that the teachers stay for supper. “I never saw a finer spirit of hospitality,” Dorothy said.
    The two parents, the children, and their guests couldn’t all sit down at once. The kitchen consisted of a tiny stove, a rough-hewn table with two benches, and two chairs that had lost their backs. The table was covered with an oilcloth, a few china plates, tin cooking dishes, and a silver pitcher—a “relic of former prosperity!” The Joneses had no cows, and, Ros wrote, “they gave us their best for supper—poor things—they make flour and water do in place of the cream sauce Mrs. H. always cooks her vegetables in. I have three of the girls in my room—and they’re so nice and well-behaved.” Dorothy, who had sweet Minnie and rambunctious Tommy in her class, noted that Mrs. Jones kissed them goodbye and said such nice things about them that they almost cried.
    On the way back to the Harrisons’, Dorothy and Ros stopped at the Hayeses’ house. One of the teachers’ duties was to pay calls on the children’s parents, to get a better sense of the “conditions” at home. It was a less happy visit. “Mrs. Hayes is a gaunt, silent woman with the sadness of ages in her face,” Dorothy wrote. “She told us all the detailsof losing a little girl last spring. Ray and Roy hung on the door & were too shy to come in. Ray was a strange picture in overalls which had one leg torn off above his knee while the other dangled around his ankle,” but, she added, “He has become my strong ally and doesn’t give me any real trouble except for occasional wild bursts of tears. I tell you there is nothing monotonous about my days.”

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    D EBUT
    Dorothy and Ferry at Oak Point, 1916
    E very August, Ferry Carpenter held a birthday party for himself at Oak Point, transforming his quiet bachelor’s cabin into a boisterous all-night dance that drew more than a hundred guests, from many miles away. That year he saw the occasion as a “kind of coming out party” for the teachers. On the evening of the party, Dorothy and Ros stayed at school until seven-fifteen, and then had an hour’s ride to Oak Point, watching the sun set and the moon rise over the mountains. When they arrived, the party was well under way. Out front was a big bonfire of logs and brush, topped with an old washtub of coffee. The furniture had been moved outside to make room for the dancing.
    “I wish you could have seen that picture,” Ros wrote to