"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

was why none of the flyers or posters we'd seen had mentioned Fort Wrangell.
We got to the end of Front Street and I saw a sign pointing toward the Mission
School for Girls, and gave Doc leave to go back to a tavern he had eyed longingly. It was
Saturday, so the school would probably be deserted, but I was curious. Doc protested that
we'd seen some rough-looking men on the street. I opened my purse and showed him the
Pinkerton man's revolver.
I didn't see any men, rough-looking or otherwise, on the ten-minute walk to the
school. It was a peeled-log structure with a tarpaper roof, and had seen better days.
There was no sound inside, but when I pushed on the door, it creaked open.
"Hello?" a woman's voice said.
It took my eyes a moment to adapt to the darkness within; the few windows were
small and cloudy. A slight, gray-haired woman was seated at a desk opposite the door.
"Sorry—I didn't mean to intrude. . . ."
"Oh, please do intrude. I'm grading tests."
I walked over and took her hand and introduced myself. She was Grace Loden. I
told her we had something in common: I'd been teaching Sunday school to Arapaho
Indians in Dodge City.
"Mine are less fierce," she said. "The Tlingits haven't scalped anybody in almost
fifty years. And those were Russians." She stood up. "Let's go outside. I've been sitting
here for hours."
We compared notes. The Tlingit, despite their sometimes fierce appearance, aren't
especially warlike, and although they weren't easy to convert, they did seem interested in
Christianity, and were glad to have her teaching their daughters. The sons were another
matter; they were taught by the island's elders and shamans.
Grace seemed about my age but looked older, her face seamed with lines of
fatigue and worry. Her carriage was stooped. We went to a log propped on two boulders
and sat.
She gestured at one of the monuments. "You know the expression 'low man on the
totem pole'? That's me. The church that sponsors the school is in Sitka, four hundred
miles away. They have their own concerns, including their own school. They do get some
education money from the Territory, but it's sporadic and unpredictable. And even once I
have some money, I can't just walk down the street and buy books and pencils and paper.
"Sometimes we peel bark off the beech trees and write on it with ink made from
berry juice. The children enjoy that but it's distracting and makes a mess."
I told her that we'd be stopping at Sitka for several hours, and asked whether I
could deliver a message from her. It's easy to file a letter away, but a person standing in
front of you has to be dealt with.
 She was effusively grateful. We went back to the mission school, and she lit an
old-fashioned oil lamp, just a rush sitting in oil, and took it to her desk. It gave off a
greasy, disagreeable odor, reinforcing the general smell of the place.
"Seal oil," she said as she sat down at her desk and took out a sheet of paper. "Sit
anywhere, Rosa. This will only take a minute."
About forty small desks were grouped in three sections, clustered around a central
potbellied stove. A chalkboard behind the teacher's desk, and another on the opposite
wall.
There were charts with the alphabet and times tables, and, oddly out of place, a
periodic table of the elements. Maps of Alaska and the world. Some student drawings
pinned up, most of them crude, but a couple at one end, ink renderings of totem poles,
showed a lot of care and skill. Their complex shapes would be hard to draw; I'd thought
about doing that when we docked, but decided they would take too long.