KATHERINE TO THE WINNEBAGOS
Dec. 3, 19—.
Dear Winnies:
Hurray! I’m not fired. Why, I wasn’t I never will be able to figure out, but it’s so. A week after the Picnic the Board sat, but not on me. For a while I lived in hourly expectation of forcible eviction, but nothing happened, and I heard from Justice, who stands high in the favor of Elijah Butts and gets inside information about school matters, that nothing was going to be done about it. If Justice had any further details he wouldn’t divulge them.
Justice is a queer chap. Although he talks nonsense incessantly, you can get very little information out of him. And the way he puts up with all kinds of inconveniences without complaint is wonderful to me. He must be accustomed to far different surroundings, and yet from his attitude you’d think his little cabin out beyond the stables was the one place on earth he’d select for an abode. He never even mentioned the fact that the roof leaked badly until I went out there to fetch him and discovered him on top patching it. Then I went inside to see what else could be improved, and the bare, tumble-down-ness of the place struck me forcibly. Light shone through chinks in the walls, the door sill was warped one way and the door another, and there was no sign of the pane that had once been in the window. It was simply a dilapidated cabin, and made no pretence of being anything else. How he could live in it was more than I could see. No light at night but a kerosene lamp, no furniture except what he himself had made from boards, boxes and logs; no carpet on the rough, rotting floor. Why did he choose to live in this cell when he might have taken rooms with any of the school board members over in Spencer?
It was on this occasion that I saw the rough board table under the one window, strewn with pencils, compasses and sheets of paper covered with strange lines and figures.
“What’s this?” I asked curiously.
“Nothing, that amounts to anything,” replied Justice, with a queer, dry little laugh. “Once I was fool enough to believe that it did amount to something.” He swept the papers together and threw them face downward on the table.
“Tell me about it,” I said coaxingly, scenting a secret, possibly a clue to his past.
Justice stared out of the open door for a few moments, his shoulders slumped into a discouraged curve, his face moody and resentful. Then suddenly he threw back his head and squared his shoulders. “It’s nothing,” he said shortly. “Only, once I thought I had a brilliant idea, and tried to patent it. Then I found out I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, that’s all.”
“What did you invent?” I asked.
“Oh, just an old electrical device—you probably wouldn’t understand the workings of it—to be used in connection with wireless apparatus. It was a thing for recording vibrations and by its use a deaf man could receive wireless messages. I worked four years perfecting it and then thought my fortune was made. But nobody would back me on it. They all laughed at the thing. I got so disgusted one day that I threw the thing into the sad sea. Four years’ work went up at one splash! That was the end of my career as an inventor.”
Poor Justice! I sympathized with him so hard that I hardly knew what to say. I knew what that failure must have meant to his proud, sensitive soul. The first failure is always such a blow. It takes considerable experience in failing to be able to do it gracefully. I could see that he didn’t want any voluble sympathy from me and that it was such a sore subject that he’d rather not talk about it. I didn’t know what to say. Then my eye fell on the sheets on the table. “What are you inventing now?” I asked, to break the silence that was growing awkward.
“Just working on bits of things,” he replied, “to pass the time away. You can’t experiment with wireless now, you know.”
The confidences Justice had made to me almost drove my errand out of my head. It was rather breathless, this having a new side of him turn up every little while. I returned to my original quest for information.
“I came for expert advice,” I remarked.
Justice looked up inquiringly. “Shoot,” he said.
“Do you suppose,” I inquired in a perplexed tone, “that they’d enjoy it just as much if the costumes have to be imaginary?”
Justice’s face suddenly became contorted. “They’d probably enjoy wearing, ah—er imaginary costumes if the weather is warm enough,” he replied, carefully avoiding my eye.
“Justice Sherman!” I exploded, laughing in spite of myself. “You know very well what I mean. I mean can we have a Ceremonial Meeting in blue calico and imagine it’s Ceremonial costumes?”
Justice scratched his head. “It depends upon how much imagination ‘we’ have,” he remarked. “Now, for instance, I know someone not a hundred miles from here who can imagine herself in her college room when it’s only make believe, and can do wonderful work in French and mathematics. She——”
“That’s enough from you,” I interrupted. “The matter is settled. We’ll have a Ceremonial Meeting. We’ll pretend we’ve gone traveling and have left our Ceremonial dresses at home. We’re a war-time group, anyhow, and ought to do without things.”
There now! The secret is out! Your poor stick of a Katherine is a real Camp Fire Guardian. I wasn’t going to tell you at first, but I’m afraid I will have to come to you for advice very often. I have organized my girls into a group and they are entering upon the time of their young lives. Make the hand sign of fire when you meet us, and greet us with the countersign, for we be of the same kindred. Magic spell of Wohelo! By its power even the poor spirited Hard-uppers have become sisters of the incomparable Winnebagos. Wo-He-Lo for aye! We are the tribe of Wenonah, the Eldest Daughter, and our tepee is the schoolhouse.
Of course, as Camp Fire Groups go, we are a very poor sister. We haven’t any costumes, any headbands, any honor beads, or any Camp Fire adornments of any kind. I advanced the money to pay the dues, and that was all I could afford. There are so few ways of making money here and most of the families are so poor that I’m afraid we’ll never have much to do with. But the girls are so taken up with the idea of Camp Fire that it’s a joy to see them. In all their shiftless, drudging lives it had never once occurred to them that there was any fun to be gotten out of work. It’s like opening up a new world to them. Do you know, I’ve discovered why they never did the homework I used to give to them. It’s because they never had any time at home. There were always so many chores to do. Their people begrudged them the time that they had to be in school and wouldn’t hear of any additional time being taken for lessons afterward.
As soon as I heard that I changed the lessons around so they could do all their studying in school. Besides that, I looked some of the schoolbooks in the face and decided that they were hopelessly behind the times, Elijah Butts to the contrary. They were the same books that had been used in this section for twenty-five years.
“What is the use,” I said aloud to the spider weaving a web across my desk, “of teaching people antiquated geography and cheap, incorrect editions of history when the thing they need most is to learn how to cook and sew and wash and iron so as to make their homes livable? Why should they waste their precious time reading about things that happened a thousand years ago when they might be taking an active part in the stirring history that is being made every day in these times? Blind, stubborn, moth-eaten old fogies!” I exclaimed, shaking my fist in the direction of Spencer, where the Board sat.
Right then and there I scrapped the time-honored curriculum and made out a truly Winnebago one. It kept the fundamentals, but in addition it included cooking, sewing, table setting, bed making, camp cookery, singing of popular songs, folk dancing, hiking and stunts. Yes sir, stunts! I teach them stunts as carefully as I teach them spelling and arithmetic. Can you imagine anyone who has never done a stunt in all their lives?
We rigged up a cook stove inside the schoolhouse—if you’d ever see it! The stovepipe comes down every day at the most critical moment. Besides that we have a stone oven outside. Every single day is a picnic. As all of us have to bring our lunch we turned the noon hour into a cooking lesson, and two different girls act as hostesses each day. The boys bring the wood and do the rough work and are our guests at dinner. They all behave pretty well except Absalom Butts, who is given to practical jokes. But as the rest of the boys side in with me against him, he gets very little applause for his pains and very little help in his mischief. The noon dinners continue to be the chief attraction at the little school at the cross roads. Hardly anybody is ever absent now.
I arranged the new schedule so that while I am teaching the girls the things which are of interest to them alone the boys have something else to do that appeals to them. I give them more advanced arithmetic, and have worked out a system of honor marks for those who do extra problems, with a prize promised at the end of the year. Then I got hold of an old copy of Dan Beard’s New Ideas for Boys and have turned them loose on that, letting them make anything they choose, and giving credit marks according to how well they accomplish it.
You see what a job I have ahead of me as a Camp Fire Guardian? In order to teach my girls what they must know to win honors, I have had to turn the whole school system inside out, and then, because I couldn’t bear to leave the boys out in the cold while the girls are having such a good time, I have to keep thinking up things for them to do, too. It stretches my ingenuity to the breaking point sometimes to get everything in, and keep all sides even.
One afternoon each week I have the girls give to Red Cross work. Every Saturday I drive all the way over to Thomasville, where the nearest Red Cross headquarters branch is, for gauze to make surgical dressings, returning the finished ones the next week. Here’s where dull-witted Clarissa Butts outshines all the brighter girls. She can make those dressings faster and better than any of us and her face is fairly radiant while she is working on them. I have made her inspector over the rest to see that there are no wrinkles and no loose threads, and she nearly bursts with importance. For once in her life she is head of the class.
While they fold bandages I read to them about what is going on in the war and what the Red Cross is doing everywhere, and we have beautiful times. The worst trouble around here is getting up to date things to read. There isn’t a library within fifty miles and the only books we have are the few I can manage to buy and those that Justice Sherman has. Would you mind sending out a magazine once in a while after you have finished reading it?
We had our first ceremonial meeting last night in blue calico instead of ceremonial gowns, but it didn’t make a mite of difference. We felt the magic spell of it just the same and promised with all our hearts to seek beauty and give service and all the other things in the Wood Gatherers’ Desire. That is the wonderful thing about Camp Fire. It makes you have exactly the same feelings whether you learn it in a mansion or in a shack, in an exclusive girls’ school or in a third-rate country schoolhouse. If Nyoda only could have seen us! Of all people to whom I had expected to pass on the Torch, this group of Arkansas Hard-Uppers would have been the very last to occur to me. Was this what she meant, I wonder?
Yours, trying hard to be a Torch Bearer,
Katherine.