Nevada Barr - Bittersweet

“Soon all your girls will be gone,” said a voice at her elbow.

“They are your girls too, Kate. What will you do with the summer?”

The principal settled her elbows on the sill by Imogene’s and looked to the mountains east of town. “I’ll be here most of it. The bishop has finally gotten the money to have the drive landscaped, and I want to be here when it’s done. Catch up on my back work. But I’m going back East for a month, I hope, to see my sister in St. Louis.”

A chair scraped, drawing their attention back inside. The chairscraper was a ten-year-old girl, small for her age, with an angular face and frizzy brown curls that pushed defiantly from under her hair ribbons. Her hand bobbed above her head and she periodically bounced herself several inches out of her chair, the increased height of her hand designed to bring the teacher more promptly.

From a small desk near the rear of the room, Sarah rose and crossed noiselessly to the little girl’s desk. Imogene and Kate watched the two in whispered conference for a moment before turning back to their former positions. Imogene smiled as she leaned near Kate. “This ought to be good for discipline, the principal and one of the teachers hanging out of the window after we’ve scolded the girls about it half a hundred times.”

“That’s why it is better to be a woman than a girl,” Kate returned. “Your new assistant seems to be getting on nicely.”

“Sarah Mary is good with little children.”

Kate glanced back at the young woman. “She will be a good teacher if she ever overcomes her shyness. The older girls adore her. How is she? It’s been five months since the little boy died, hasn’t it?”

“She seems better, but she’s so quiet, even at home. She doesn’t talk about it much.”

“You’re looking after her, Imogene. She’ll come back to herself.”

“Unless someone else starts working on her. Sometimes she talks of marrying Mr. Weldrick. He could press her into it, in the state she’s in now. She sometimes thinks Wolf’s death was God’s way of telling her she is living wrong.” Imogene smiled without humor.

“That’s nonsense. God isn’t a matchmaker.”

“Tell that to Sarah. She talks of marrying Nate one minute, and the next of how he put Wolf out in the rain. I don’t know how she will resolve the two things if Mr. Weldrick ever comes back.” Imogene looked across the hills, blue with sage, toward the cemetery north of town. Flowers were planted on the little mound, and it was free of weeds; Imogene tended the sad little garden religiously. “It was good of you and the bishop to agree to take her on as my assistant-I don’t like her to be alone.”

Kate laid her hand on Imogene’s for a moment. “She’s turned out to be a great help to us.”

Imogene looked at the watch pinned on her bodice. “All right, girls,” she said, turning back to her students, “time is up. Put down your pens.”

The Saturday after school let out, the Reno Wheelmen sponsored a dance, a fund-raiser, in the meadow south of town. Some of the older girls were allowed to stay at Bishop Whitaker’s an extra day to attend. The bishop promised to drive them to and from the affair himself with his wife, Miss Sills, Mrs. Ebbitt, and Miss Grelznik along to chaperone.

Saturday was beautiful. It was early summer, the grasses in the meadow not yet baked desert-brown and the wildflowers at their most abundant.

Fred Bone’s grocery wagon was full of picnickers. He and Lutie shared the front seat, Fred looking dapper in a new haircut, his mustache freshly dyed, and Lutie resplendent in yards of pale yellow gingham. Behind, in the open bed, Fred had arranged bales of hay in a square and covered them with canvas to form makeshift seats. Evelynne Bone sat on one bale, straight and proper and over-coiffed, bestowing flirtatious glances on her seat partner, Judge Curler. The judge, in his bowler and spectacles, a whiskey blush clowning the end of his nose, was as dignified as she. He was holding forth on the hair-raising adventures of a Wells Fargo employee. The latest hullabaloo, he said, had involved one of the remote stations: the wife of the stationmaster at Round Hole had gone out of her mind contemplating another summer in the Smoke Creek Desert. Dizable & Denning, the firm that leased the buildings at the stage stop, were searching desperately for a replacement.

Sarah and Imogene sat together on another bale. The two were turned around almost backwards in an attempt to ignore the scrutiny of the judge’s assistant, Harland Maydley. Several picnic baskets, covered with cloths to discourage the flies, bumped along between the bales. One of the Wheelmen, his starched collar gleaming white, his tie nattily in place, whizzed by them as they approached the meadow. At the sight of a man on a bicycle, the horses shied and showed the whites of their eyes.

Lutie clucked. “They just work their feet to death to give their fannies a ride!” she declared.

“Lutie Bown-yay! What language. And in front of a gentleman, too.” Lutie’s mother-in-law smiled coyly at the judge.

“It’s Bone, Ma,” Fred said mildly. “B-O-N-E. Bone.”

The meadow was already filling with wagons and carriages. Young girls in bright summer dresses dotted the landscape like wildflowers. Their mothers, only slightly less excited, stayed back in the shade of the carriages or under the canvas roof of the pavilion. Men wearing colorful shirts, unstained by their day-to-day labors, hair dark with grease and combed close to the head, mustaches dyed and waxed, visited in groups, admiring one another’s horses and equipage. The murmur of voices and the creak of wagons was punctuated by the staccato beat of the Wheelmen hammering together the dance floor.

As soon as the wagon rolled to a stop, Imogene excused Sarah and herself to find the bishop’s party. Harland Maydley invited himself along, but Lutie, seeing Sarah’s distress, called him back to help carry the picnic baskets.

In the afternoon, the Wheelmen, smart in their striped jackets and knickers, put on a show. They rode backwards, seated on the handlebars; four men got onto one bicycle, tangled together like affectionate acrobats, and pedaled an eighth of a mile down the wagon road; a line of cyclists coasted down a gentle slope by the creek, their bellies on the seats, their feet pointing out behind; they rode every way a person could contort and still manage to push the pedals and steer. The performance met with such success that they did several of the tricks a second time. Afterwards they gave free rides to the young ladies, filling their arms with chintz and white ruffled cotton as the girls tried to balance on the narrow handlebars.

Cowhands from the nearby ranches grew restless and green-eyed, watching the girls flock around the cyclists, crying prettily for another turn, and they set up a riding course of picnic baskets and tree stumps. Their show of fancy horsemanship brought the dimples and adoring glances back from the Wheelmen, but the cowboys’ opposing offers of free horseback rides were not so well received; most of the girls had grown up around horses. The cowboys were deluged with tots anxious to grow into cowboys themselves, and spent a disgruntled hour or so riding ecstatic children down the meadow and back.

Near sunset the musicians took their places on the completed bandstand and tuned up. The soft lights and the discordant sounds drew the picnickers in from the meadow and the fringe of evergreens that flanked it. By the time the first star of evening had risen in a mother-of-pearl sky, and the breeze had died away to a zephyr, the people were all gathered around the dance floor, their blankets spread on the grass.

Imogene and Sarah were near the steps opposite the musicians’ stand. Sharing their blanket were two of the bishop’s girls, Fanny May Enor and Emma Hazlet. When the call to choose partners came, the two girls feigned great indifference and talked animatedly between themselves, watching the comings and goings of booted feet out of the corners of their eyes. Under the pressure of being chosen or left to sit, Sarah grew as nervous as the schoolgirls and confined her eyes to her folded hands. Boys nudged each other and giggled, but they were the choosers, and those fearing rejection could choose not to take the chance. Girls had only the power to veto, and for the ugly and the shy it was no consolation.