Prairie Evers (8 page)

It seemed pretty easy. Mrs. Hanson had said to be confident and friendly and take a deep breath before beginning to talk, which the articles said too. They also said to have an interesting story to tell, and not to apologize for making a mistake unless it was something really important. You were supposed to arrive early and make sure the microphone was working. Of course that didn’t apply to me, but I knew I could do everything else they advised: Practice. Be enthusiastic. Make eye contact. Smile.

The day of the speeches I volunteered to go first, mostly to get it over with.

Mrs. Hanson stood before the class at a lectern she had dragged from the back of the room. She said, “I’m pleased to introduce Ms. Prairie Evers as our first speaker. She’s going to tell us a little bit about raising chickens.”

I gave Mrs. Hanson a polite nod and walked up the aisle. I hoped it didn’t show that my legs were wobbling. At the lectern I reached out to shake her hand—the computer said to do that—and Mrs. Hanson looked surprised but she did reach out and shake my hand back.

I planted my feet. I took a deep breath. I set my index cards of notes on the lectern—notes in just single words, not full sentences, that’s what the advice said—and put my arms up there too. I looked at the audience—not all at once, but a person
here and there around the room—and took another deep breath, and commenced.

It went all right, I guess. I got from start to finish in about two minutes, which was only about three times as quick as I intended. My voice squeaked here and there and I forgot what some of the words on my index cards meant—like
soup
and
wdshvings
—and I made a sweeping movement and brushed all the cards to the floor at one point. I had to stop and gather them back up, but I didn’t apologize. I just kept plowing forward. Then the best part of the speech came. I ran to the window and signaled to Daddy that it was time. Mrs. Hanson frowned in a puzzled way but I just smiled confidently and said, “I have a visual aid. It’s coming now.”

Mrs. Hanson raised her eyebrows. I ran to the classroom door and opened it for Daddy. He was carrying Fiddle in a cage, and Fiddle was not happy. He was croaking and spluttering and hissing. I suddenly understood what the phrase
spitting mad
really meant. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of such an adventure striking him so amiss. It seemed like a good idea the day before when I talked Daddy into it. I admit I didn’t tell Daddy the whole story, but had only described our speeches as a show-and-tell day. I cleared my throat. I said, “This is my daddy. And this is my rooster, Fiddle.” I looked at my notes. They didn’t say anything, because I’d expected this part of the presentation to carry itself off on sheer interest value.

“I, uh—”

Suddenly I couldn’t think what to say. Half the kids started whispering and laughing, which made me freeze up even more.

“I—”

The talking and laughing got louder and more excited. Pretty soon Mrs. Hanson was going to have to come up and take over. I didn’t want that.

“I raised him from when he was a baby,” I said, and opened the cage door.

FLYING FIDDLE

Fiddle didn’t come out,
so I leaned down and looked in at him. I wiggled my pencil in front of his face to get his attention, and suddenly he came charging out like the pencil was a snake he had to protect the hens from. I yanked my pencil back, but Fiddle just kept coming. He ran smack into Chrissy Jones, who sits in front in the center aisle. She shrieked and Fiddle panicked. He ran down the aisle, and when he couldn’t find a way out, he began flapping his wings, which caused everyone in the two rows on either side of him to
shove out of their desks in alarm. Half the girls were squealing, and almost all the boys were
cock-a-doodle-dooing
.

I headed toward Fiddle, but he turned and ran back up the row, flapping all the way, and somehow he got up enough speed to lift off. He landed on the lectern. I took one step toward him and he made another desperate flight onto Mrs. Hanson’s desk. Daddy and I glanced at each other and began to go toward him from opposite sides. Daddy was speaking softly, trying to calm him, but Fiddle was too worked up to listen. He flapped his wings again and made it up onto the wide shelf that runs above the blackboard. He landed right next to the globe Mrs. Hanson keeps stored up there, and then, to my horror, he pooped.

Everyone in the room was shouting now except for me and Daddy and Mrs. Hanson and maybe Ivy Blake. Fiddle must have felt safe up on that shelf, or else he was just out of options. He sat there staring down at us, his chest heaving. His eyes were very bright. Mrs. Hanson tried to quiet the room down, saying “Class, quiet now” in her most no-nonsense voice. Daddy took his flannel overshirt off real slow and nodded toward Fiddle to tell me we should advance real careful toward him. “Hey, Fiddle,” I said in a gentle singsong voice. “It’s all right. It’s just me and Daddy. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Don’t try and fly now. Just sit still. Daddy’ll take you home if you sit still.”

Daddy followed right behind me and then with a soft, quick motion, he reached up and grabbed Fiddle’s ankles.
Fiddle exploded in a fit, but Daddy kept a good hold and pulled him down under his arm to pin his wings in and draped his overshirt over him and somehow he got him contained. Then before Fiddle knew what was happening, Daddy shoved him back into the cage and latched the door behind him.

The kids erupted again. There was whispering and laughing and shouting and clapping and
cock-a-doodle-dooing
and someone yelled, “Yeah, Fiddle! My man!”

Daddy draped his shirt over the cage and looked at me inquiringly. I knew what that look meant. It meant,
I think that’s enough now. Don’t you?

I gave him a weak smile. I cleared my throat. I said, quickly and as loud as I could to be heard over the noise, “Chickens are a fine animal to raise, they are friendly and interesting, they are a moneymaker, and you will find yourself getting more and more interested in them every day, once you begin. Thank you. And thank you, Daddy. I think we are done.”

He nodded at Mrs. Hanson, who nodded faintly at him in return, and picked up Fiddle’s cage and left. To my surprise, the kids began shouting “Good-bye, Fiddle! Come back again!”

Mrs. Hanson said, “Well.” She cleared her throat. “That was certainly very—interesting.”

I turned red. I said, “Thank you, ma’am.”

“If anyone else has a visual aid, I think they’d better run it past me first. And Prairie, climb up on a chair and clean off that shelf before you sit down.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
I could hear a lot of whispering and giggling as I wiped off the shelf, but when I walked back to my seat, a bunch of the boys started clapping and whistling through their teeth again. Aaron Childs even raised a hand in a high five to slap mine as I walked by. Things hadn’t gone exactly as I’d planned, but probably Grammy would’ve said that letting nature take its course was the best idea anyway.

THE TRAIL OF TEARS

Amabelle was
the next volunteer, and she gave a speech about her family’s trip to the Grand Canyon that didn’t get anywhere near the applause mine did. She finished and sat down, and then Chrissy Jones went, and then Aaron Childs. When Mrs. Hanson asked for another volunteer after that, nobody moved for a minute. But then Ivy Blake stood up and walked to the front of the room like she was walking to her doom. She got behind the lectern and stared down at the papers she’d carried with her.

“This speech is called ‘The Trail of Tears,’” she said. “It’s about Cherokee Indians.”

I sat up straight.

Ivy cleared her throat. I could see her hands shake.

“Very terrible things have happened in pretty places like North Carolina,” Ivy read. “When the white people first came here, they brought diseases with them. Right away a disease called smallpox killed a lot of Indian people. It killed half the Cherokees. The Cherokees lived in what is now the states of Georgia and North and South Carolina.”

There was a long pause while Ivy swallowed hard. I stared at her hands, willing them to stop shaking, but they didn’t.

Ivy cleared her throat again. “When Andrew Jackson got elected president, things got even worse for the Cherokees. They got sent away from their land, which was the most terrible thing of all. They loved their land. They were farmers and hunters who lived in the Smoky Mountains. They had lived there for a long time, but Mr. Jackson made them leave.”

I knew that; Grammy often spoke of it. There was no love lost between her and Mr. Jackson, although he was long dead before Grammy arrived on earth.

“In the winter of 1838 the Cherokee people got rounded up and marched out of their homes and into the territory of Oklahoma. Fifteen thousand people were rounded up and marched off. Maybe more.”

As Ivy spoke, I tried to imagine all those folks walking in a
long line toward Oklahoma, walking a thousand miles in the winter. I wished I had been there with my rifle when the soldiers came. But probably it wouldn’t have done any good.

“They weren’t supposed to have to go. The Supreme Court said they didn’t. But President Jackson made his soldiers round them up anyway. Some people were cooking food they had to leave on the fire. They had to leave their dogs with just a pat on the head. Most of them never even had time to get a blanket or put on their shoes.”

I sat very still, listening. I reckoned those were terrible times, times that put my sassing against going to school to shame.

“A lot of the people died on the way. Thousands and thousands. They were hungry and cold and worn out, walking all that way with no warm clothes and almost nothing to eat. That’s why it’s called the Trail of Tears.”

It surprised me how quiet the room was. Ivy cleared her throat again, and even though she was doing such a good job, her voice was shaky.

“There was some good news too. A few of the Cherokees kept away from the soldiers. They stayed hidden in the hills of North Carolina. They are now called the Eastern Band of Cherokee.”

I nodded. Those were some of my people, or so it was always said in my family.

“And the people who made it to Oklahoma set themselves up as a nation again and started over. They had an alphabet
thought up by a man named Sequoyah, and a constitution and a government and a newspaper and schools.”

Right after Ivy said that, she seemed to freeze, like she suddenly realized what she was doing: standing up in front of the class giving a speech. She took a deep wavering breath and said, kind of sudden, “The end.”

She’d been reading from her papers all along without ever looking up, which the computer said not to do, but it was a good speech anyway. Right after she said “The end,” she darted a look at me. Then she sat down.

When the next speech started (Randy Curtis talking about his favorite computer game, which was not interesting at all), I took the chance to pass Ivy a note. We’re not supposed to do that, but it was important. My situation was nowhere near as severe as that of the folks marching off on the Trail of Tears, but I had marched into a new territory in New Paltz, New York, and Ivy was the first person to act like a friend toward me.