Page 10 of Thunder Pass

“But why, Auntie Ruth?” he whined.

“No whining.”

She didn’t want to be here either. But who cared what she wanted? She’d thought her days of homeschooling were over.

“At least let me go to school,” she’d begged Luke. “How am I supposed to teach them things I don’t even know myself?”

“You aren’t. You know enough already. They don’t need to know any more than you do.”

“But the State?—”

Luke had raised his hand to cut her off. “They have no say anymore. It’s up to me.”

Ruth wasn’t so sure about that. Now that the Chilkoots were on the State of Alaska’s radar, it might be harder to get away with that old lackadaisical approach to education.

Maybe they were glad to be rid of the situation, and especially the need to send caseworkers all the way out here. Did anyone really care what one isolated group of settlers did in the mountains?

Sitting cross-legged under the open window, Sarah looked to be on the edge of tears. When Ruth tried to catch her eye, she busied herself with buttoning her cuff. What was there to say? For a brief moment, freedom, in all its disorienting glory, had blown through their lives. It had been both terrifying and intoxicating. And now it was over.

Not everyone minded. Little Seth, seven years old, seemed unfazed by the change. Thirteen-year-old Miller was delighted that he didn’t have to sit in a classroom with a bunch of kids who were ahead of him in math and English. “Who cares about that stuff anyway?” he’d said a few times. “I just want to work with the other men. Why do I have to be stuck inside?”

“Okay, everyone put down your pencils. We’re going to try something a little different,” Ruth said. She was the teacher, right? That was the job Luke had assigned her. Shouldn’t she decide what to teach? “We’re going to exercise our imaginations today with some creative storytelling.”

Sarah looked up, her woebegone expression turning to interest. Even the freckles scattered across her nose seemed to brighten. “Like writing? I loved writing in my journal in Ms. Maura’s class.”

“Yes, but we’re not going to write anything down.” If Luke got hold of it, he’d be furious that she’d strayed from the approved curriculum of the 3 R’s. “We’re just going to say it. That’s how storytelling began, before there was paper or pens. I’ll start, and then we’ll go around the room and everyone gets to add onto the story. You can say whatever you want, as long as it’s not a bad word, of course.”

She had the attention of all the kids now, and her heart swelled. When Luke had laid down the law about her new role, which was the same as her old role, she’d experienced a flash of such despair that a shocking thought had occurred to her.

She could leave. She wasn’t a prisoner here.

Immediately, she’d dismissed it. What would the kids do without her? She’d been their pillar of stability for the past year. She couldn’t just walk away from them.

“Okay, I’ll start us off. Once upon a time in a land far, far away, there lived an ogre.” She’d intended to say “prince,” but the word “ogre” had come out instead. It prompted a flurry of questions.

She held up a hand for silence. “An ogre is big and ugly and scary, and some of them are green.”

“What?” Miller scrambled to his feet. “You’re lying. There’s no such things as ogres.”

“This is a story, Miller. I’m making it up. It doesn’t have to be real.”

“What’s the point of that? This is stupid. I’m going out to work.” He stomped away before she could get another word out.

Maybe she should have stuck to multiplication.

“What about the ogre, Auntie Ruth?” Noah kneeled on his seat so he could see better. “Was it a good ogre or a bad one?”

“Well, do you want to take it from here, Noah? What do you think?”

“Bad ogre,” he decided. “He likes to stomp people.”

Now they were getting somewhere. In her experience, stories could be a way of processing emotions that were too difficult to manage otherwise. Without her secret stash of paperback novels, who knew where she’d be now?

Well, probably right where she was, she thought ruefully.

“Why does he like to stomp people?” she asked. “Anyone want to go next?”

Sarah raised her hand. “I’ll go. One day all the people who lived near the ogre decided to get rid of him because they were sick of getting stomped on. So they dug a big hole and filled it with bees.”

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