A COOL, RAINY MORNING GLOOMS OVER MUCH OF NORTHWESTERN NORTH DAKOTA IN EARLY APRIL 1946. Helen Vacek thumps down from her upstairs farmhouse bedroom, arrives for breakfast in a cloud of silence. She slumps her lithe, tall frame into a kitchen chair and props her elbows, straddling a plate, on the table. Her robins egg-blue eyes fixate on the rain through one of two eastern windows. Helens cropped chocolate hair remains tousled from its nocturnal battle with her pillow. Her stomach hurts.

Helens thirty-ish, well-proportioned mother, Emma, flips pancakes on the propane stove. She slides one on her daughters plate. Helen stabs into the steamy warmth of the pancake for a moment, then blurts: Im not going to high school.

Helen will celebrate her fourteenth April on the seventeenth. Shes scheduled to graduate from grade school at the end of May.

Ed Vacek, Helens father, attacks his usual mountain of pancakes drowned in a syrup of chokecherry jelly and cream. His face wears a four-day stubble and his greasy chestnut hair springs in wild abandon. He shouts, Be quiet! Ed turns his better ear toward the RCA Victor, strains to pick up the morning news. Emma whirls from the stove, spins the volume knob of the radio down.

Listen to Helen! Emma commands.

Ed reaches to rebut the move, but Emma slaps his hand, then pulls her own swiftly back. She rarely confronts Ed but this time she judges her move necessary.

Ed looks up from his pancakes.

Im not going to high school, Helen repeats, this time in a softer tone, as she stares at her mostly untouched pancakes.

The hell you say. Eds fork stops in mid-jab. Why not? Ed conquered only minimal parts of a few grades( through several false starts(and lacked the requirements to graduate from grade school. This paucity of education deeply disappoints Eds father, Dr. Adolph Vacek, physician and surgeon who practices in Tilburg. Eds arguments with his father usually resulted in his doing the opposite of his fathers wishes, which included not pursuing education.

Emma, on the other hand, graduated from eighth grade. Eds union with Emma bore only Helen(and no sons. But even if she was a girl, Ed vowed she would be educated better than he or Emma. He wouldnt admit to his father, but Ed realized that his path toward scarce schooling led nowhere.

Before Helen can reply to Eds question, a car horn blasts twice. Leo Rodahl, the school bus driver and neighbor, slides into the farmyard. He was hired by Benson Township to transport a few farm kids to and from the school at Benson. The township can afford him but not a bus, so Leo hauls his charges in his 39 Chevy. Helen, rescued from having to answer her father, grabs her coat, books, and lunch bucket; tugs on her overshoes; and bursts through the entryway door into the rain. The eldest of the riders, she scoots into the front seat. Helen slams out the beating rain to welcome the inside warmth, and tunes in to the flip-flop of the windshield wipers.

Reckon your dadll give me the dickens for tearing up his muddy approach road, but since you werent at the mailbox I thought Id come on in. Leos lived through thirty-eight rainy Aprils. He hunches his six-foot frame, and grips the steering wheel with large, work-worn hands that extend from powerful arms and shoulders. An easy smile lights his pleasant face. His ultramarine eyes shine. Both features blend well with his ebony, side-parted hair.

Helen likes Leo, sometimes wishes he were her gentler father. She notices hes shaved this morning.



This dismal Monday morning Helen plods up the concrete steps of the multi-roomed school, diminished since its heyday in the thirties. Until 1940, the school served both high school and grade school students, but the high school closed as the town withered. Now most rooms are locked and gather dust except for one classroom and another room remodeled to house the live-in teacher. The school still boasts a hardwood basketball gym floor in the basement, now silenced forever from cheering fans. With the high school closed, the gym only provides space for exercise and tomfoolery during recess on inclement days. In essence, Benson School is a one-roomer.

Helen hangs her coat on a hook in the hallway, drags to her desk along the windowed east side of the room on the teachers right. This morning she remains almost oblivious to the other 13 students, and doesnt fight her reluctance to work. She just sits, her jaws propped with hands and forearms, elbows on the desk(as she did at breakfast.

Helen stares, trance-like, at the portraits of George Washington and Abe Lincoln, wonders why grade schools display only these two presidents. At visits to other schools, shes seen the same Washington and Lincoln gazing down at the students. Lincoln, although stark and homely, otherwise seems normal. Washington, on the other hand, peers down with serene calm, but also exhibits an air that says he wouldnt tolerate any guff. Helen wonders about those ridiculous white curls on the sides of his head and the billowy clouds across his chest. They are clouds, arent they? If clouds, why clouds?

Helen, are you simply waiting for the school term to end or are you going to work some before it does? When I finish with the third- and fourth-graders, I will speak privately with you in the hallway. Miss Halvorson often practices less tact than she could. Still trim in her mid-fifties, her once dark hair shows obvious signs of frost. Her steel blue eyes glow such that her gaze pierces students(or anyone else(when shes upset.