I asked Martha and Elsa Johnson up first. It was obvious they were sisters, given their matching yellow braids and wide blue eyes. Martha was sixteen and Elsa fourteen.
They could read well, having gone to school in their former town in Minnesota before their parents moved them to Emerson Pass. Second-generation Swedes, they spoke and read English fluently and had a reasonable grasp of arithmetic. Both were tall with good posture and proud, sturdy shoulders. I imagined there wasn’t much they couldn’t accomplish given the opportunity.
Martha reminded me that her parents owned the dry goods store.
“Do you like it here?” I asked.
She nodded, smiling. “I like wherever my family is.”
“And you?” I asked her sister Elsa.
“Me too.”
“The only thing we miss from Minnesota are the town dances,” Martha said.
“We’d looked forward to dances when we were old enough,” Elsa said. “But here, there are none.”
I could certainly understand why two young ladies would pine for a dance. “I think if we put our heads together, we might be able to come up with a few ideas for a town dance.”
“Really?” Martha asked.
“Give me a little while. If you two study hard and are good girls, I’ll speak with Lord Barnes about having one here at the schoolhouse.”
Their faces lit up as they nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, Miss Cooper. We’ll do our best,” Elsa said.
I asked the bigger of the two blond boys to come up next. He approached, looking terrified. Pale blue eyes watched me from under a fringe of hair so fair it was almost white.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Isak Olofsson,” he said in a thick Swedish accent. He pointed toward another of the students. “My brother. Can he come now?”
“Yes.”
Isak, in Swedish, asked his brother to join us. The younger of the two ambled up to the desk, looking equally frightened. “This is Viktor.” Viktor’s hair was the color of dried straw, a little darker than his older brother’s. Green eyes peered at me from his square face. I could already see the handsome men they would become.
“We want to learn English,” Isak said. “And to read from English books.”
Through an awkward exchange, I learned Isak and Viktor were recent immigrants from Sweden. They could not read but seemed to understand English when spoken to and could answer my questions for the most part. It was enough to work with, especially given their obvious keen desire to learn.
Next up were three sisters, who took it upon themselves to come up as a group. I didn’t chastise them. We learn from watching others, after all. The Cassidy sisters were Nora, age six; Shannon, age eight; and Alma, age ten. The girls shared the same green eyes and fair skin, but Shannon had dark curls whereas the other two had honey-colored hair as straight as a board.
“Have you been to school before?” I asked.
Alma spoke for them all in a lilting Irish accent. “I went for one year before we moved to America. Since then, no. But our mother taught us to read.”
“Not me,” Nora said. “Just my letters.”
“Letters are a great place to start,” I said.
The other two read competently from the first reader but struggled with a few words. They knew almost no arithmetic. I had a feeling they would learn quickly.
The Barnes children filed up one after the other. There wasn’t a surprise among them. They all read way beyond their grade level, even Cymbeline, who knew all the word
s from the early-reader textbook. Josephine read at an adult level, with Theo and Flynn not far behind.
“Are you going to make me read boring stories?” Flynn asked before returning to his desk.
“What kind of stories do you like?”