Free Tisha by Robert Specht Page B

schoolhouse.”
    I’d been right about which building it was. When we stepped up onto the porch, Angela Barrett moved to the closer of two doors. It was studded with mean-looking nails that stuck out about three inches. “This here’s the schoolroom,” she said, opening it. “The other door there’s to your quarters. Watch out for them nails.”
    As I followed her in my heart sank. The room was big, but it wasn’t like any schoolroom I ever saw, and it was in a shambles. A few assorted tables and chairs were piled in one corner, and some boxes in yet anothercorner held old books and papers. Piles of dust and dirt were everywhere, and a few yellowed papers littered the floor, mice droppings all over them. The plank flooring was buckled and warped, higher in the center than it was at the walls. The tables and chairs all sat at an angle and I felt seasick just looking at them. Light came in through windows fogged with smoke and grime.
    “Needs a little cleaning up,” Maggie admitted, “but I’ll give you a hand with it.” Her broken nose made her look tough, but I had a feeling she was pretty decent. I guessed she was about forty.
    The other room was neater, the same size as the schoolroom, but except for a brass bed that had no mattress, two chairs, and a big potbellied stove, it was empty.
    “How do you like ’er?” Angela Barrett asked. She must have weighed two hundred pounds and she towered over me. Her voice was rasping, and there was a red rash on her nose and all around it. I tried to think of something nice to say.
    “It’s a good big room.”
    “Glad you feel that way,” Angela said. “You’re the one’s gonna be livin’ in it.”
    “Do you think it will take much time to get it ready?”
    “What do you mean ready?” Angela asked. “It’s ready now.”
    Both women were staring at me as if there was something wrong with me. I was almost afraid to ask the next question. “Don’t I have to have a mattress?” I said. “Or blankets, or a table?”
    It took a moment before they seemed to realize that I had a point
    “Where’na hell’d it all go?” Angela said, as if she’d turned her back for a minute and somebody had snatched everything away. “It’s your fault, Maggie, you’re the school janitor. It’s your responsibility.”
    “When there’s no school there’s no janitor,” Maggie said tartly, “and there ain’t been a school here in well over a year.”
    “What are we gonna do?” Angela said.
    Maggie thought for a minute. “Come on,” she said finally.
    Angela and I followed her outside. At the post office, almost all the pack animals had been unloaded. The stuff everyone had ordered was lying on the ground: boxes of candles and flashlight batteries, sacks of flour, crated gasoline cans and cans of kerosene, tied-up bundles of dried fish and a whole bunch of packages of parcel post.
    “How about my cornflakes?” the bearded old man who’d tried to help me was saying to Mr. Strong. He could just straighten up enough to look Mr. Strong in the eye. “I had a dozen boxes of cornflakes on order an’ you didn’t bring ’em.”
    “They’ll arrive in due time, Mr. Spratt.”
    “That’s what you told me the last three times. I ordered them cornflakes by parcel post four months ago an’ they should be here. You got ’em stuck there in the warehouse at Eagle, now don’t ya?”
    A lot of people were beginning to mutter that the old man was right, and Mr. Strong was getting mad. “You heard what I said, Mr. Spratt.”
    “I heard you. An’ I know you ain’t brought’m ’cause it don’t pay you to bring’m out with the rest of the parcel post right now—take up too much space on them precious horses a yours. Well you damn well better bring’m out next time, or I’m writing to Washington D.C. You got a mail contract says you bring out
all
the mail—not what personally suits ya.”
    “Uncle Arthur, hold on a minute if you can,” Maggie broke in. “We got a