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Elizabeth, Days of Loss and Hope, Daughters of Courage #2

By Donna Fletcher Crow

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Chapter 1
Elizabeth slipped out the back door of the farmhouse that had been home to her family for almost three generations now. The fresh morning hours were her favorite time of day, and May was her favorite month. She flung out her arms to embrace the dew-sparkled morning filled with bird-song.
Nothing could make her heart sing with more joy than the dawn chorus. No matter how full of hard work the day ahead loomed, she would have these moments to cherish. And in 1929 on a farm in Kuna, Idaho, hewn out of reclaimed sagebrush desert, in a large family—soon to be larger—the work never ceased.
She walked toward the big cottonwood tree in the corner of the yard. Her mother would be out in a minute. They would do a gardening chore, then hurry in to finish cooking breakfast, and the busy pace would begin. As the oldest daughter, Elizabeth had always been her mother’s right-hand helper, just as Clarey, her twin brother, was their father’s. An especially clear warble trilled above her head, and Elizabeth looked up into the thick, green branches, a smile at the corners of her usually firm mouth.
The screen door banged behind her, and she turned to extend her smile to her mother, walking across the grass in a flowered cotton housedress that was straining at the seams over her abdomen.
“Oh, Mother, how could you have lived here before there were birds?”
Kathryn smiled. “I was just seventeen—only a little younger than you are now when we came here, my dear, and we lacked so many things I seldom had time to notice there were no birds.” Kathryn ran her hand through her soft brown hair, which was just graying at the temples. “As I remember, I missed the crickets at evening more than birds. Crickets came as soon as the water did in the spring of 1909, but we didn’t get birds for a long time—not until the trees were big enough to shelter them. I don’t know— they say someday we’ll even have squirrels. I think I’d like that. I like watching the squirrels when we go into Boise.”
Kathryn bent awkwardly to pick up a small plant, a ball of soil held around its roots with sacking.
Elizabeth took the shovel leaning against the porch. “How come we’re planting this rosebush before the baby’s born, Mama? I thought you did the others after we came.”
“Yes, but I wanted to get it done before things get too busy with summer work, and it’s better for the bush to plant it in the spring before it gets hot.”
“Is this where you want it?” Elizabeth set her foot on the shovel.
“A little more to the right, closer to where your papa planted the pink one when Alex was born.”
Elizabeth turned a shovel of the soil, rich with volcanic ash, that had been producing such fine crops since irrigation water came to Kuna twenty years before—whenever there wasn’t a problem over water rights. “Trouble with planting early, Mama, you don’t know whether you need a red bush or a pink one.”
Elizabeth looked at the red moss roses sprouting new green leaves near the fence. They celebrated the birth of her twin, Merrick Clarence, Jr., and her sixteen-year-old brother, Boyd. The small pink bushes for Elizabeth and ten-year-old Alexandra grew closer to the house.
Kathryn smiled, making her eyes crinkle at the corners. “Maybe that was part of why I wanted to plant it early. I wanted an excuse to plant a yellow rose.” She set the root ball in the ground and held one green cane upright while Elizabeth filled the hole with water from a bucket and tamped in the dirt. “Thank you, my dear. Now you’d best hurry. With less than a month to graduation you don’t want to spoil that fine record of yours.”
Elizabeth started toward the house, then turned back. “I’ll be home late today, Mother. I thought after school I’d go downtown and apply for a job.” She bit her lower lip as she always did when she was nervous. “Mother, have you and Papa talked about this fall? If I can get a good job—I thought maybe at the pharmacy or the general store…”
Kathryn rubbed the soil off her hands before she patted her daughter on the shoulder. “Elizabeth, I know how much you want to go to college. And your papa and I think it’s a fine ambition. But with all that money we borrowed to buy new equipment when prices were so good during the War—and then the bottom dropped out of everything. . .” She sighed. “It’s been nine years now since we got a decent price for any of our crops—and costs just keep rising.” Kathryn shook her head.
“I know—and the first rights to a college education are Clarey’s because he’s an hour older than I am, and he’s a boy.” She walked toward the house.
“If only we could send you both,” Kathryn said to her back. “If we have a good harvest this fall…” But she didn’t finish because Elizabeth had closed the screen door, very quietly.

After their quickly eaten breakfast of oatmeal Elizabeth dawdled on the small back sleeping porch she shared with Alex. She knew that Boyd and Alex would scramble to sit beside Clarey on the spring seat of the wagon as soon as they finished the breakfast dishes; then she could sit alone in the less comfortable but more private back of the wagon bed.
Holding the dampened fingers of her left hand in the grooves of each wave of her rich, black hair, she smoothed every strand. When she and her best friend, Celia, had taken the plunge to have their hair bobbed three years ago, Elizabeth had chosen a mid-length style that stopped halfway between her ears and her shoulders, instead of the close crop at the back of the neck that most girls in her class wore. Elizabeth felt it was better for her since her eyebrows were heavy and her eyes dark—and since she was so tall. She was happy enough to have inherited her father’s luxuriant hair, even if hers was distressingly straight, but why she had to have his strong bone structure at a time when all the popular girls were tiny, “five-foot two, with eyes of blue,” like Celia—she sighed. Well, her mother had always told her life wasn’t fair. Which took her right back to the matter of college.
She heard the screen door bang on the back porch, so turned to pick up her books. She mustn’t make them late. Mr. Eastly, her history teacher, couldn’t abide having students come in during the Pledge of Allegiance. “Goodbye, Mother,” she called as she went out. She knew her father would be long in the barn by now—probably had the milking finished, since Clarey and Boyd had all the cows stanchioned and their share of the milking done before they ate breakfast, just as she and Alex had gathered the eggs and fed the chickens earlier that morning.
She sat on a box in the wagon as gracefully as her knee-length skirt and long legs would allow and looked at her brothers and sister in the front of the cart. Clarey—tall, broad-shouldered, with thick black curls spilling over his forehead. Mother never tired of recalling how that unruly hair and his dancing gray eyes reminded her of Merrick when she had married him, although in quiet moments she would admit that her husband had come much later to exhibit the gentleness that was so natural to Clarey. Sixteen-year-old Boyd sitting beside him on the spring seat pulled off his cap and ran his fingers through his limp, brown hair, which their mother always said he inherited from her, much to her sorrow. Boyd showed little evidence that he would reach his big brother’s height, but there was wiry strength and quickness in his slight frame that made it possible for him to outrun any boy on the school yard. Sometimes, when Elizabeth watched him run, she had the strangest feeling that he would simply keep running—his heels sprout wings and carry him on to the far horizons his blue eyes never quit scanning.
“Ouch! Clarey, you’ll bounce me out!” Little Alex clung to the edge of the seat as Clarey guided the wagon over a rutted patch of road. Alexandra might be the smallest child in the fifth grade at Kuna Elementary, but she was not the most pliable. Alex could always be counted on to toss her blond curls and let people know what was wrong in her world. And once she had made up her mind, nothing could shake her.
The wagon gave a final lurch and settled into a smoother rut. Clarey clucked to their horse, fancifully named Rosie O’Day for her strawberry roan coloring, and Elizabeth returned to her earlier thoughts on a favorite theme—the unfairness of life.
She understood that a college education would be nice for Clarey, helpful even, now that they were starting to use so many machines on farms, developing new kinds of seeds, and so much bookkeeping was required—Elizabeth never tired of hearing her parents talk about how much had changed since they first came to Kuna: What back-breaking work it was to clear the dry desert land, grubbing out the tenacious sagebrush that covered the land; How they had hauled all their water fifteen miles from the Snake River as soon as Indian Creek dried up in the early summers; How people died of rattlesnake bites. . .
But one fact remained. Elizabeth kicked at a clod of dirt rolling across the wagon bed, then wished she hadn’t when she saw the smudge it left on her black shoe. Still, the fact was, one could be a farmer without a college education. And Clarey had never wanted to be anything but a farmer.
Clarey was every girl’s dream of a brother: tall and handsome, always kind and helpful, fun and laughing. But he was not a scholar and not aggressive. Perfectly suited to quiet country life, he was happy enough to go to college since his parents thought he should, but it was not a major goal in his life. He wasn’t the sort that set major goals and struggled toward them—he left that to his twin sister.
So what about her goals? One could farm without a college education, but one couldn’t teach without at least a two-year normal school degree. And, as long as she was dreaming, it would be so wonderful to take a full four-year liberal arts degree. She thought of the catalog from Northwest Nazarene College she had on her dresser at home.
“Hi, Liz! Hurry up, or we’ll all be late!” Her friend’s voice and the jolting stop of the wagon ended her reverie.
Elizabeth looked up and waved, then jumped off the wagon when she saw that Celia Cottrell, accompanied as usual by at least three boys, was waiting for her at the bottom of the school yard. Elizabeth smiled absently, but didn’t join in the lively chatter about an ice cream social at the Methodist Church next Friday, as they walked up the hill to the fine red brick building that replaced the school that had burned just four years earlier.
By the end of third period Elizabeth was glad to be released from her commercial class. The clattering of the typewriters was giving her a headache, and, as at the end of almost every typing class, she was close to tears of frustration over having all the keys stack up on her carriage when she tried to increase her speed.
But then three short blasts of the superintendent’s buzzer brought all heads up.
“Well, it seems we are to have a surprise assembly today, class.” It was impossible to tell whether the crisp Miss Ponsonby approved of such goings-on. “You may take your books with you.” She made it sound like a privilege.
“Maybe Mr. Oldham’s giving the seniors the day off. I’d love to have a swim in Indian Creek!” Celia managed to talk to Elizabeth and bat her eyes at two different boys as they filed toward the study room, the only room in the building large enough to accommodate all 113 students and 6 faculty members that composed Kuna High School.
Elizabeth caught her breath. Maybe this was it. Had Mr. Oldham decided to present senior awards today? Now? Celia’s thoughts didn’t extend beyond time off school for flirting, but Elizabeth’s flew straight to the goal that was never far out of her mind.
Many of the awards carried cash prizes—some as much as ten or fifteen dollars. If she could get one of the big ones it might be enough money to send her preregistration to the college.
As soon as the shuffling feet were stilled, Mr. Oldham cleared his throat, glanced at the gold pocket watch hanging from a heavy chain across his protruding vest, and cleared his throat again. “As you all know, graduation is just one month from today.”
A murmur of enthusiastic agreement showed that little else was on his hearers minds. “In accord with this, I wish today to honor some outstanding graduates and to institute a new award to the outstanding member of the senior class.”
Raised eyebrows on faculty faces showed that this surprise had been undertaken solely on the superintendent’s initiative. But he proceeded first with the traditional awards: Five dollars to Whitmore Williams as best mathematician. Math was not a prize Elizabeth would be in line for, but next was best English scholar. She held her breath. If she could win this…
Five dollars and a bright, new Webster’s Dictionary went to Julie Pegmore. Elizabeth struggled not to show her disappointment. The announcements continued. Squeals and applause after each one. Elizabeth joined in enthusiastically when Mr. Oldham presented ten dollars to Celia as outstanding musician. As much as Elizabeth needed the money, there was no doubt that Celia was the better musician.
Elizabeth bit her lower lip. If the amounts increased, if she could win the top, could it possibly be as much as twenty-five dollars? She held her breath.
“And now, the new award—the Oldham Outstanding Senior Prize—which I shall award to a member of the graduating class who best represents the true ideals of character, leadership, and scholarship.” He paused for effect while everyone looked around to try to pick out the winner. “The Senior Prize for the Class of 1929 is awarded to Elizabeth Kathryn Allen for her positive approach, hard work, and success in her studies, in being captain of both the girls’ volleyball and basketball teams, and soloist with the glee club.”
Stunned, Elizabeth realized everyone was looking at her and clapping. Celia pushed her to her feet and gave her a shove toward the front of the room. She couldn’t believe it. She had hoped so hard. It was really coming true. He hadn’t yet mentioned how much the award was. She waited.
Mr. Oldham held up a heavy black cardigan. “Elizabeth Allen, this fine trophy sweater is yours to represent your hard work and success. Wear it with pride.” Mr. Oldham put the sweater into her numb hands. “Congratulations, Miss Allen. We wish you every success after graduation. We know you’ll make Kuna High proud of you.”
She realized everyone was waiting for her response. “Thank you,” she managed. “I hope—I—” she looked at the sweater “—I’ll wear it at college.” It was all she could think of to say, so she sat down.
After Celia’s hugs, Clarey was the first to congratulate her when Mr. Oldham dismissed the assembly. “Good for you, little sister. If awards for hard work are going around you’ll win every time. Then he said to the room in general, “Nobody works as hard as Elizabeth.” Everyone laughed and applauded when he gave her a brotherly peck on the cheek.
“Bet he wishes that was Mavis,” someone said from the back of the room.
Elizabeth smiled and returned everyone’s congratulations and agreed to stop in Miss Spencer’s room after school to have a photograph taken for the annual. But the rest of the day, even more than the satisfaction of winning and the disappointment of the prize not being money, two themes ran in her head: her own determined statement “I’ll wear it at college” and the comment of her handsome, less ambitious brother, “Nobody works as hard as Elizabeth.”
However appropriate it might be, it wasn’t the image she would have chosen. She would rather be popular like Celia, or pretty like Mavis Hendricks, or sweet like Edith Renfro, but she was hard working. And she supposed she’d have to make the most of that since it was the only way she knew to approach life.

As something of a talisman she wore her sweater that afternoon in spite of the heat. It was not easy for her to ask for anything, even for work, so the task of job-hunting she had set for herself was not one she looked forward to. The sweater gave her courage. Even if it wasn’t cash, maybe it would help her earn the money she needed.
With her head up, her broad shoulders squared, her long legs striding forward, no one would have known she was quaking inside as she entered Janicke’s Pharmacy. Bald-headed Mr. Janicke rubbed his hands on his white apron and leaned forward on the marble counter when she walked in. “Ah, now, what can I do for you, Miss Elizabeth?”
She hesitated.
He smiled encouragingly. “Is it an Oodles bar, then? Quite a spell since you’ve had one.”
Elizabeth firmly shook her head. Her favorite treat was a big, gooey Oodles bar, all chocolate and caramel inside with chunky nuts outside. But they cost five cents. “No, Mr. Janicke, thank you. I’ve come to apply for a job.”
“Oh, yes. Graduation just a month off. I expect lots of younguns’ll be comin’ around.” He shook his head. “Sure wish I could help you. It’s not that I couldn’t use a hand with the work around here, and I know you’d be a fine, hard worker.” As he talked he rubbed the counter with a towel, taking special care under each of the fountain heads where drips of fizzy phosphate had made pockmarks in the gray marble. “It’s just that I can’t afford to pay anyone else. A few years ago when farmers were getting $1.65 a bushel for their corn I had two assistants—but now they only get 50 cents, and that means they only buy the necessities.”
Elizabeth nodded as she backed toward the door. She knew all too well the truth of what he was saying. “Thank you anyway, Mr. Janicke.”
She looked at the bank, thought of her difficulties with mathematics, and walked on down the street. The millinery and dressmaking shop seemed likely. She had been helping her mother sew since she was old enough to know which end of a needle was sharp, but Miss Simms’s response was almost exactly the same as Mr. Janicke’s except that Miss Simms quoted the price of alfalfa, that being what her father had raised. Neither the general store, the hardware store, nor the bakery was any more encouraging. The woodworking shop and the barber shop seemed to require skills beyond her reach. That left the cafe. Surely they could use an extra pair of hands to make bread and wash dishes.
Mr. Parker, the manager, agreed they could, but they couldn’t afford to pay those hands—although they would be glad to provide two hot meals a day for ten hours of work.
Elizabeth sighed. There was no shortage of food at home. She would be of more use staying there and helping her mother prepare meals for their family.
With dragging feet she turned the brass doorknob on Griswold’s Printing Shop and newspaper office. A card in the window bore bright red letters, The Kuna Times Weekly.
Mr. Griswold wiped his inky fingers on a rag before he adjusted his small, round glasses. Surely it was the light glinting on his glasses that made his smile look like a leer, but Elizabeth couldn’t help taking a step backward in spite of his friendly greeting.
“Well, well, well. It’s Elizabeth Allen, isn’t it? And what can I do for you, my dear?” His thick black hair and mustache were as shiny as the pot of ink beside his printing press. They made his skin seem even more startlingly white in the dim room.
Elizabeth wanted to flee, but she glanced down and saw the sweater she was wearing. If she was to wear it at college this fall, this was her last chance. She held out no hope for getting a job at the livery stable, feed mill, or blacksmith shop. “I’ve come to apply for a job. I need work for the summer,”
Somehow she managed not to stammer. The fact that she was slightly taller than Mr. Griswold gave her a little confidence.
“A job?” He rubbed his hands together and considered, eyeing the stack of papers on his desk. “Can you type?”
Elizabeth nodded, ignoring her memory of tangled keys. “Yes. I’m taking a commercial course. We do typing and shorthand both.”
“Fine. Suppose you start on those letters there right now. If I’m satisfied, you can work Saturdays until school’s out, then three days a week.”
She took a step toward the desk then hesitated.
Mr. Griswold seemed to read her mind. The typing might take an hour, and her mother was expecting her home to fix supper. “I’ll give you a ride home, my dear. It’s no trouble. I go right by your front door.”
Elizabeth was halfway through the first letter before she realized he had said nothing about how much he would pay her. But she did have a job! If she could get these letters done. Fortunately Mr. Griswold was busy setting type in the back of the shop so he didn’t see how many sheets of paper she used up getting clean copies of his letters. She stuffed the ruined sheets in her book bag. She didn’t want him to find the wastebasket full.
She was well into the third letter when he called from the back of the shop, “Oh, by the way, my dear, did I mention that I want two carbons of each letter? You’ll find the carbon paper in the bottom desk drawer.”

The wooden buildings of Main Street and the sagebrush bordering the road were making long shadows when Elizabeth was ushered from the building by her new employer. He didn’t seem at all perturbed by her lack of typing speed, and he was effusively complimentary about her having caught two spelling errors of his.
He took her arm to help her into his little black Ford parked by the wooden sidewalk in front of the print shop. His hand felt warm even through the sleeve of her sweater. She put her books on the seat beside her and sat far to the outside. But as soon as they were started his hand cupped her right shoulder. “Better move over this way a bit, my dear. That door’s none too reliable. Don’t want my new typist landing in the dust.”
His laughter was jovial, and she moved over two inches. What did she know about her employer? Mr. and Mrs. Griswold had lived on the farm next to the Allens for as long as she could remember. It must have been Mrs. Griswold’s father’s farm, because people still called it the Foley place. No one ever saw much of her. It was rumored that she was an invalid and that was why they had no children, but she managed to run the hired man with a firm hand while her husband escaped to his printing and newspaper publishing every day.
The discomfort Elizabeth felt with Mr. Griswold must be in her imagination, she told herself, because he was one of Kuna’s leading citizens. A director of the Bank of Kuna, last year he’d been elected county commissioner.
But the truly overwhelming fact, the good news she couldn’t wait to share with her family, the thing that made her hang onto her seat to keep from shouting as their farm came into view, was that she had an employer—no matter what he was like. She had a job! She ran a hand down the sleeve of her new sweater. She would wear it at college.

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