"Miss Thomas! Miss Thomas!"
Before even looking out
the window, Emma knew it was Will and could picture him running across the
schoolyard with his gangly stride, making a path in the snow. He was the only
fourth grader in her one-room schoolhouse, but mentally he could barely keep up
with the first graders. It wasn't unusual for him to be shouting to her from a
distance for no obvious reason.
"Fire! Fire!"
his already high-pitched voice reached her.
She spun from the
blackboard to the pot-belly wood-burning stove sitting to one side of the room.
She'd gotten there an hour earlier to start the fire and warm the building
before her students arrived. Nothing looked amiss; the heat from the fire
innocently wafted to the front of the room.
"Fire! Fire, Miss
Thomas!" other children's voices pealed through the yard.
She grabbed her wool coat
from the back of her chair and hurried from the room.
Five of her nineteen
students huddled outside, staring at the school's roof. Flames were licking the
cedar shingles and spreading out from the chimney. Emma froze in fright,
uncertain what to do, how to stop it. The Johnson brothers lived the closest.
"Fred and Richard,
run home and tell your folks." They obediently turned and ran back to
their parents' farmhouse a quarter mile away.
"What should we
do?" Little Ruthie asked, her cheeks pink in the cold morning air.
"I don't know."
Emma had never felt so useless.
Suddenly inspired, she
dashed back into the building and grabbed the bell from just inside the door.
She rang it as hard as her arm allowed as more children gathered, followed by
their parents and neighbors. She rang the bell until the roof began to fall
into the building, until the windows burst, spreading glass onto the snow,
until nearly all of the area residents had gathered, even the aging former
headmaster, Mr. Langton.
When he saw what had
happened, he gently took the bell from her hand, shaking his head. Mrs. Brown
pulled her into her arms, stroking the young teacher's cocoa-colored hair and
whispering, "it will be all right, dear, it will be all right."
So begins my latest novel, “Prior to
Now”.
What happens to Emma next? Will the
town of Prior Gulch rebuild her one-room schoolhouse? Will we hear any more of
the Johnson brothers?
Click on the link to download the
e-version. I’m still working on formatting the paperback edition; it is always
a long, frustrating process. I’m so thankful for my techy son’s help.
Oh, and in case you didn’t know, the
picture above is of my grand-grandmother. She was never a school teacher, but I
picture Emma looking somewhat like this.
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