Tisha by Robert Specht Page A

fixed or in winter you will freeze to the death. No, this will not do.” She reeled off all the other things that had to be fixed—sagging shelves, loose floorboards, crippled tables in the schoolroom.
    “You will work here,” she said to Fred, “and Father will do your chores at home.”
    Fred grinned. “Yes, boss.”
    “How mush work, you think?”
    “Oh … Couple months maybe.”
    She smiled. “You wish to open school when, Ahnne?”
    “In a few days if I can.”
    “You will do it in a few days, Frayd, no?”
    “I will do it, boss, yes.”
    Before they left Mrs. Purdy asked me if I’d like to come to supper that night. I couldn’t because Joe Temple was taking me over to the roadhouse, so we made it for the next night.
    A couple of hours later Fred came back driving a wagon that looked like a long thin buckboard. It had a load of rough boards on it and a big tool box.
    We were a little shy with each other at first, but after we worked together for a while we were gabbing about everything under the sun, from the Marines in Nicaragua to Lindbergh’s trip across the Atlantic. I told him I was surprised he knew as much about what was going on in the world as I did.
    “One thing everybody does plenty of around here is read,” he said. “There’s not much else to do at night.”
    By noontime he’d connected a stovepipe to the cook-stove and run it up through the roof. After we had a fire going in it I made lunch for the two of us—canned ham and-sweet potatoes. “There has to be something else people do here at night besides read,” I said while we were eating.
    “Every other Friday night there’s a dance. We’ve been having them at the roadhouse, but as soon as the schoolroom’s in shape well have them there.”
    “When will the first one be?”
    “You call it. You’re the teacher.”
    We decided on a week from the following Friday.
    While we worked people kept dropping by to lend me more things they thought I might need, a kettle, some spoons and knives, even an old encyclopedia. I told Fred that I knew people in Alaska were hospitable, but I hadn’t expected it to be like this.
    “Everybody wants to do what they can to make you stay,” he said.
    “Why should they think I won’t?”
    “For the same reason the teacher who was here last didn’t. This is tough country, especially for a cheechako.”
    “When do I stop being a cheechako and become an Alaskan?”
    “Maybe by the time the river goes out in the spring.”
    “What do you mean—maybe?”
    He looked at me almost the way Mr. Strong did that day when he’d ridden back to give me his army coat—as if I was a foreigner. Only Fred’s look was a little different. The only thing I could liken it to was the way one forest animal might look at another to see if it was its own kind. If it wasn’t there was no offense taken. The animal just loped off. It gave me a funny feeling.
    “Well,” he said, “some people never really become Alaskans. They never get to like it the way it is. They just tolerate it.”
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “It’s hard to explain, maybe because it’s something you have to feel inside. All these old sourdoughs around here—they’re real Alaskans. They came here way back before I was born, when there was nothing out here but raw land. They fought the cold and the rivers, built cabins and barely stayed alive. They were lonely and went hungry, froze their feet and their hands and hardly ever took enough gold out of the ground to keep themselves in grub, but they made it.”
    “You think I’ll make it?”
    “No reason why you shouldn’t. Just make sure you’ve got good footgear and plenty of warm clothes—and take people’s advice.”
    “When they give it to you, you mean. Up to now I keep finding things out hit and miss.” I told him about Mr. Strong offering me his old army coat back in Eagle. “When I turned it down he didn’t try to convince me I was wrong.”
    “That’s the way