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Three Years In a Teacherage - Introduction

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"Three Years In a Teacherage" is part of a 9 chapter serial fiction piece written by Wanda Molsberry Bates. To see all chapters, please select this link - Three Years In a Teacherage . The old teacherage isn’t there anymore. Once a home for school teachers, it is long gone. Someone sent us a clipping from the local paper soon after the fire; so I was, in a way, prepared not to find it. Still, it came as sort of a shock to see the schoolhouse standing alone on the hill, deserted and silent, without the square frame house that had stood at right angles to it, its back to the wind that never seemed to stop blowing and its face to the play yard and the farm lands that stretched endlessly away to the south. For a moment I thought we must have taken a wrong turn somewhere—but only for a moment—for, as I studied the squat brick building with its lower windows nearly obscured by weeds and its playground almost empty except for a rusted swing frame, I felt again the desolation and utter loneliness that I had known when I first saw it, and I knew I was back. I had talked occasionally to Charles and the children about my first job and the years I had spent at the teacherage, so they were not surprised at my eagerness to visit it again. On one of our vacation trips when the children were still young we arranged to stop at some of the places where I had once lived and worked. Jimmy even thought it might be fun to see the place where Mom had taught school. Charles left the highway and took the county road that angled past Loon Lake and the Ernst and Nelson farms and on up toward Windy Hill. For a moment after we turned into the driveway no one spoke, and then Jimmy said, “Gee whiz, Mom, did kids really go to school in little cracker boxes like that in the olden days?” I felt myself bristling as I said sharply, “It isn’t that long ago, Jimmy, and they did, indeed, go to school there. And they learned a good deal, and they put on plays and had box socials and played basketball and won spelling contests and learned to sew and to build furniture and put out a school paper and did all kinds of interesting things!” “Well, gee. I don’t envy them,” he said. ”I’ll bet our sixth grade wouldn’t hardly fit into the whole first floor of that little crate.” “Would hardly, Jim,” I corrected and then spoke to Judy. “Don’t you want to see where Mother used to teach school?” She lifted her eyes from her comic book for an instant, glanced idly around, and was lost again in her reading. That didn’t surprise me, for not even the Wisconsin Dells or the Little Brown Church had been able to compete for long with Donald Duck or the Chipmunks.—But somehow I had thought she would care just a little.—I glanced at Charles. “So this is it,” he said. “This is the renowned Greeneville Township Consolidated School. What do you know!—Too bad everything looks so run down around here. Well, these little schools have had to give way to progress. There’s no question about the larger schools doing a better job. Want to get out and walk around a little?” We did get out, and Charles walked with me up the path to the front door. We looked through the cracked, dirty glass of the door panels at the splintered steps that led up toward the classrooms and down to the gymnasium. Charles tried the door, but it did not open and we turned away to stand for a moment looking off across the fields with their tones of brown and green that lay about us in every direction. “This must be pretty good farmland,” Charles said. “The crops look good.” We moved back toward the car. “Well, have you seen enough?” he asked. “We’d better move along if we’re going to stop at that amusement park you were talking about.” Always able to select from any conversation that what she wanted to hear, Judy began shrieking, “Oh, Daddy, will you take me on the roller coaster! Mommy said they had one and a ferris wheel, too!” And so we drove away, and the tight little ache in my chest eased as I began to see how impossible it was for any of them to have any feeling at all for the place—to know or care anything about the three years of my life that I spent there before I even knew Charles. But I could not toss those three years away so lightly, those years that began in girlhood and ended in at least the beginning of womanhood, those years when I drew away from my family and became a part of a whole new life. And that is why I left them at Herman’s Park and drove back again to stand for a little while among the grasses at the windows and to look in at the empty seats and bare blackboards, at my old desk and the tattered curtain that once bumped and jerked down to close off the stage.