RED PETTICOAT

By John King

 The tall, slender young woman is standing by her desk near the front of the empty classroom.  The fact that her hair is pulled back tightly cannot disguise the reality that she is barely out of her teenage years, and the severe cut of the gray dress, together with her sensible shoes, gives no hint that beneath it all she is wearing a red petticoat. 

   Ella surveys the room, which is her domain.  School is about to start on this crisp autumn day, as she once again thinks about how far Central Texas is from her home in Illinois, and from the Normal school that she attended there in order to get her teaching degree.  As she looks around the room, at the chairs and small desks for the twenty-three children she is teaching, she notices little Bobby Ellis peeking around the edge of the cloakroom door. 

            
“Robert, good morning.”

           
  Bobby is unable to speak, but looks shyly at his shoes.

           
 “Robert, since you are the first one here this morning, you get to ring the school bell.”  She smiles at her youngest pupil, wondering if he can actually reach the bell rope.  Soon she knows the answer, as the bell begins to peal, and her students, ranging from Bobby’s age of six years up to age fourteen, begin to trickle into the classroom.

          
  “Good morning, Miss Rodecker.”  As each child comes in, they wish her a good morning, and she promptly responds, calling them each by name.  The second year of teaching is much easier than the first.  It seems that the children are soaking up the knowledge she wants to give them so much more readily. 

            
After a few minutes, she manages to seat all of the children, wish them a good morning, instruct them to take out their books, and to open their daily materials.  As she turns to the blackboard, she notices the American flag centered above it, with its candy stripes and the forty-four stars in six rows.  The top row has eight, the bottom row has eight, and the other four rows have seven each.  The pictures on each side of the flag are of George Washington, President Cleveland, Sam Houston, and Robert E. Lee.   Every time that she sees the picture of Robert E. Lee, it gives her a little start, to think that she, the daughter of a Union veteran, should be teaching beneath the picture of the great Confederate general.  When she first took over her classroom, she had thought about taking it down, but the strangest thing had happened.  A man barely older than she had come to the schoolhouse one late afternoon and asked her if she was the schoolteacher, even though the answer was so obvious.  When she replied in the affirmative, he had asked if he could come later in the afternoons and if she would teach him to read and write.  At the time, Ella had met none of the local people her own age, and, on an impulse, agreed to mentor the young man.  On the second or third session, she had mentioned taking down Robert E. Lee’s picture.  He looked at her very seriously, and he said “Ma’am, it’s been barely thirty years since he surrendered at Appomattox.  People around here still think that Marse Robert is the greatest American hero.  In addition, not only are you a Yankee, but you have a German last name.  The Germans down at New Braunfels, just over fifty miles from here, tried to sneak through the Texan lines to join the Union army.  Some of them were caught and killed, and there’s still bad blood about that.  I would recommend that no matter how you feel, you should leave that picture in place.”

           
 Ella thinks back about that conversation and realizes once again what a strange place this Central Texas is.  As she looks at the third picture, she thinks about Sam Houston and Texas history.  Even though she obtained her teaching degree, she had had to study Texas history on the long train ride from Illinois to Austin so she could pass the teaching certification test as soon as she got there.  At the time, she felt so brave, leaving Illinois at age nineteen to go to a frontier state like Texas, but whatever trepidation she might have felt was quelled by her interest in history.  While in Illinois, she was not aware of the fact that Texas had been a separate country, nor that Sam Houston had been not only the president of Texas, but also its first governor when it was admitted as a state.  To make Texas seem even more quirky, she learned that Sam Houston had been the governor again in 1861 when Texas voted to secede from the Union, and that he refused to sign the secession papers, believing that Texas, after working so hard to become a part of the Union, should not leave it.  Houston was removed as governor, the lieutenant governor was promoted and signed the papers, and Houston died two years later, from what some said was a broken heart.

            
Ella hears the whispering behind her and turns around, glaring at the pupils.  The older pupils are a little bit hard to control, since they are within six years of her own age, but it still has to be done. 

           
 “Each of you take out the materials that I gave you for homework last night.  All of you older section students begin to read the third chapter of your book, and I want all of you younger section students to come sit down in this corner while we start working again on your ABCs.”

            
Ella begins the little ones on their ABCs, and then looks out the window, since there is dust drifting through and she can hear the sound of cattle going by.  She is aware that Texas’ economy is based on the cattle industry, and that American literature has already been infused with a new genre talking of the cowboys riding the trails from Texas up to the railheads in Kansas in order to ship the cattle east where they were so needed.  However, the trail drives are now a thing of the past, since the railheads have moved, and Austin itself, some twenty miles southeast of the schoolhouse, is a railhead, and cattle are driven from all the surrounding areas into Austin.  She watches the large herd of cattle going by, and smiles at the sight of the young cowboys, many of them teenagers, dressed up for the last leg of their journey into Austin.  It seems as if all of them have brushed their hats, buffed their boots, and have fresh bandanas at their throats.  She knows that this is only one of probably three or four groups that will go by that day, and each time there will be more dust sifting into the classroom.  Thank goodness it is Friday, because on Saturday the students’ fathers will come to the classroom and help her clean.  None of them can afford the full tuition, so part of the cost of having their children schooled is to give several hours every week to cleaning and maintaining the small one-room schoolhouse.

            
After the little ones finish the ABCs, Ella gathers them back with the older ones, and starts their civics lesson.

“Richard?”

 “Yes, Miss.” 

“Richard, can you tell us what we mean when we say that President Cleveland is the first President elected to non-successive terms of office?”

            
Dickie Johnson looks down at his slate, hoping that the answer will somehow appear, or, in the alternative, that there will be an earthquake where he will be swallowed up and not have to demonstrate to the other older children that he has no idea what the answer to the teacher’s question might be. 

            
Suddenly, Dickie feels the schoolhouse begin to shake, and the earth itself begins to tremble.  “Oh, my” Ella says, thinking how stupid it sounds to make such a statement in front of the children, and then “None of you leave your seats, stay right where you are.”  While the children begin talking among themselves, Ella runs to the door, and looks down the steps.  Coming toward her, several hundred yards away, is a mass of cattle, and what she knows is called a stampede.  Some of the young cowboys are trying their best to stop the cattle, but all they are doing is guiding them more directly toward the schoolhouse.  She knows she doesn’t have time to move the students, and she also knows that the clapboard building is too fragile to withstand the impact of several hundred large bodies. 

           
 She yells back through the door to the oldest boy, Glen, “Shut the door and lock it!”  She can hear Glen following her instructions and she looks again at the mass of cattle coming closer.  She is too concerned for her charges to think of her own safety.  She runs to the bottom of the steps, and, oblivious to whomever might be looking, raises her skirt and rips off her petticoat.  Once she manages to detach the garment, she waves it from one side to t he other and begins to scream like a Comanche Indian.  She screams as the cattle approach, she screams more as the cattle continue coming closer.  She screams and waves, waves and screams, until the front cattle begin to be spooked even worse than they were, and begin to part around her, and by definition, around the schoolhouse.  The young cowboys trying to turn the herd realize what is happening, and fan further away, to let the cattle part on either side of the schoolhouse.  They continue to race their horses as fast as they can in order to stop the herd before it damages something else further down the road.  As the last cow runs by, Ella collapses at the bottom of the schoolhouse steps.  She begins to shake so hard that she can no longer hold the petticoat in her hand.  Her only thought at that moment is that she will not cry.  She will not cry.

            
Suddenly, she hears another set of galloping hooves.  She recognizes the sound as only one animal, and looks up expecting to see one of the young cowboys.  Instead, the animal coming towards her is neither a cow nor a horse.  Its rider guides his mule within just a few feet, jumps off, and stands before her.  Unlike the cowboys with their shiny boots and their neckerchiefs, he is wearing a flannel shirt and a nondescript hat, a pair of patched overalls, and Brogans.  He looks like what he is, which is a young farmer.  When Ella sees him, all thoughts of crying are gone, and her eyes light up.  “Why, John Lawson King, what are you doing here?”

 “Miss Rodecker –"

             
 “John, after a year I think it’s time you called me Ella.”

“Well, then, Ella, I saw the cattle heading toward the school, and I just couldn’t get ahead of them.  I tried so hard, because I believed there was something in that schoolhouse that I couldn’t live without.” 

“John, what a testament to learning.” 

“I mean, Ella . . . you have to know what I am talking about.”

           
 Suddenly, John does not look like just a tall young farmer; he looks closer to the proverbial knight in shining armor.  And his mule, shaggy and gray, could just as easily be one of the finest chargers ridden by a knight of the round table. 

            
Suddenly, Ella realizes that the children had come to the windows, and are staring at the trampled ground, at her with her red petticoat at her feet, and the young farmer standing in front of her. 

“Well, John” she says, as she scrambles off the step and up to her feet, “I certainly appreciate your concern, and I think you need to come back to class later so we can talk about some of those verb conjugations you were working on.”

He looks at her, at the young woman he now knows is going to be his wife, feels a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth and says, “Yes, ma’am, I will certainly be here.  I couldn’t live without conjugating verbs – or parsing sentences.”  

John reaches down to pick up what appears to be a red rag on the ground.  Ella stops him, saying “If you touch that, I will slap your jaws.”  John jerks his hand away, mutters “Yes, ma’am,” and then gets onto the back of his mule.  “I will see you later,” he says, and rides away.

With that, Ella kicks the ragged petticoat under the steps, smoothes her dress and hair, and walks toward the schoolhouse door, pursing her lips to stop the smile she knows is coming.