How do you follow something as terrific as Eddie’s Chapter 24 post?
I’ll have to give it my best shot!
Christmas is tomorrow, but for the Ingalls family there will be no celebrating. They’ve decided that Christmas is just too sad without Mary there to enjoy it with them. I wonder, if it was that difficult for them, how must it have been for Mary all alone far away from home and family?
A week without school, but full of studying for Laura. There’s that teacher’s certificate and it’s almost within reach. Laura is only two months away from turning sixteen. Alas, studying just isn’t the same without Mary. Even Ma joins in, declaring that reading her church paper isn’t the same without Mary being there to read aloud to. Through all the sadness of missing her, they have to agree that Mary is doing well and being in school is a wonderful opportunity for her. They miss her, just the same.
Ma worries about money though…such a burden Laura has to bear, not yet sixteen, but feeling the need to help support the family and keep her sister in school. A more expected and accepted fact of life in that time. Laura assures Ma that she will be able to get her teacher’s certificate and earn some money. Ma hopes that the extra money will allow for Mary to be able to come home for a visit the following summer. Did they send her to school wondering if they wouldn’t be able to see her until she was done with school. All those years? I can’t even imagine…
Laura goes back to her studying and Ma to her paper when Carries announces that Mr. Boast is coming and bringing someone with him.
“That’s him now, at the door!”
“‘That is he,'” said Ma.
Ma, ever the teacher.
They’re not there for Pa, but Laura. The second man, Mr. Brewster, is looking for a teacher. Laura? A teacher?
Laura’s heart seemed to leap and fall back, and go on falling.
And so does mine whenever I read that.
Yes, we know Laura is not old enough. That seems of little importance to Mr. Boast. He and Mr. Brewster want to know if she will teach this school if she can get her certificate. Ma asks where the school is. Twelve miles south of them, and Laura’s heart sank even further and mine with it. Of course, the promise of twenty dollars each for two months of teaching seals the deal along with Mr. Boast’s assurance to Ma that he knew Mr. Brewster back east. Just how well did he know Mr. Brewster back east?
The realization of being paid that princely sum of forty dollars seems to have sent Laura’s heart back to her chest. She excitedly accepts the offer. Now to wait for the superintendent. Will Laura be able to pass? Ma gives her a pep talk until:
It was only a moment before Carrie exclaimed, “That’s him now—–”
“‘This is he,'” Ma said almost sharply.
“That’s he coming — It don’t sound right, Ma —”
“‘Doesn’t sound right,'” said Ma.
“Right straight across from Fuller’s Hardware!” cried Carrie.
Poor Carrie…she just can’t win tonight.
And so the examination begins. I wonder if Laura wishes her slate and pencil weren’t so conveniently laying out on the table. He gave her quite an examination for someone who didn’t really think it was necessary after hearing her at The School Exhibition the night before! He does skip the history portion though.
Certificate in hand, Laura is a teacher!
Every time I read the following passage I get a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. Every single time for the forty years that I have been reading that Pa says:
“That’s fine,” he said. “That’s pretty fine for a fifteen-year-old.” He meant to speak heartily but his voice had a hollow sound, for now Laura was going away.
Comments15
Beautiful commentary!
I wonder sometimes what kinds of sacrifices the Ingalls family made to send Mary to college. I wonder if their clothes were patched and re-patched, if all of Carrie’s dresses were too short, if they all had tight shoes and ratty underwear. I guess they could not have been too badly off, since there was pocket money for name cards and ice-cream socials, but maybe they just didn’t want Laura to feel deprived.
My sister-in-law and her family (husband and two little girls) all say “She don’t got none.” I feel just like Ma every time… I want to correct them but don’t want to give advice where it is not wanted. Still, they are not doing their children any favors by teaching them to talk like that.
Melanie,
The only expenses the family incurred to send Mary to college were rail fares and clothes — the territory paid her tuition. So, while it wasn’t free, they seemed to manage ok now that Laura was bringing in some money and Pa had interrmittent wage-work doing carpentry work around town.
I’ve always found the whole ‘They wouldn’t try again to have Christmas without Mary’ a bit strange. It sounds like Mary is dead … not off at college having a wonderful time. Really, if Mary HADN’t been at college, (and hadn’t lost her sight), at nearly 18 there’s a good chance that she’d be off teaching school many miles away, or married, or otherwise out of the house. And, of course, within a few years Laura herself will be married and out of the house, and soon after THAT off in Florida and Minnesota and Missouri. Children grow up and leave home. Life’s like that. So, did the Ingalls stop celebrating Christmas when Laura left home?
I can never remember where I read thinigs, but…. I thought I read that the Brewster school was actually December to January with the Cold Ride being around Christmas. (Who’s with me thinkin a Happy Golden Years Read along next? 😉 ) I’ve always thought Laura didn’t want it to appear that she was not going to be home for Christmas at such a young age, so the school term was moved, but that left it hard to describe Christmas since it would have been about being home when it the story she hadn’t left home.
Same thing with Mr. Boast and Mr. Brewster – either Mr. Boast was said to know him so it would help explain why fifteen year old Laura was allowed to stay with his family or Mrs. Brewster was a different person when living in a town with friends and family.
Certainly I think Mr. Brewster was an OK guy. He held the baby, did his chores, started the fire in the school house in the morning. He was poor, for sure, since he says the only things he has in the world are his claim and he can’t leave it because then what? His wife was probably a decent stand up woman when not isolated from her family and friends and stuck in an icy-cold claim shanty the size of a modern walk-in closet with her husband, new baby, and a stranger invading her “privacy”. Even with a large home, when I was a new mother, one more little thing could have set me off. And I had a car and could drive to Target. I would’ve thought, though, that Mrs. Brewster would have enjoyed having Laura in the house for a change of pace and some much-needed conversation. Laura could even bring back the news from town every week.
A big yes to a THGY readalong next 🙂 Thanks for organising this one, Laura, it’s been fab!
Wasn’t Mr Brewster really some relative of Mr Boast’s? I can never remember where I’ve read these things either. The older I’ve got, the more I’ve sympathised with Mrs Brewster. I obviously appreciate this was a terrible situation from Laura’s point of view, and I’m not saying knife-waving is a good way to act (!), but I would not have coped at all if I’d been in Mrs Brewster’s position.
Reading this chapter got me thinking about endings in the series generally, and I wondered which book’s ending (not which book as a whole) is everyone’s favourite?
I read somewhere that Mr. Boast and Mr. Brewster were cousins.
Really – when I read about Mrs. Brewster’s behavior, it sounds like paranoid schizophrenia to me. No kidding.
My favorite ending is probably “Plum Creek” … which is interesting because it’s about my least favorite book in the series otherwise.
Yes, there was definitely SOMETHING wrong with Mrs. Brewster (real name Mrs. Bouchie.) Something beyond ‘being lonely in a claim shanty in the dead of winter.’ If it was just ‘lonely’ she surely could have visited with the other women in the settlement, and would welcomed Laura as someone else to talk to. I’d lean more towards clinical depression rather than schizophrenia, though.
When you consider some of the things about Mrs. Bouchie, like http://www.pioneergirl.com/blog/archives/436 and the family like this http://www.pioneergirl.com/blog/archives/1889
I have to think there was more going on in the family than the more common ailment of women on the prairie being depressed.
I’ll play arm chair psychiatrist and go with post-partum depression coupled with seasonal affective disorder!
As for book endings, I don’t know. Each has its merits, but it’s not the books until DeSmet that leave me feeling any kind of happy at the end. I always wonder what/where/how their lives will be uprooted again…until the books where they are settled in SD.
It would be a bit late for PPD. Johnny wasn’t a newborn; he was about 3 at the time.
PPD can affect some women up to 5 years after a child is born. Coupled with living in difficult, cold, cramped conditions (and being that far north, only 7-8 hours of sunshine a day), it doesn’t surprise me she went a little nutty.
My 1970s, yellow-bordered copy of LTOTP suffered a long-forgotten mishap that tore off the last two or three pages and the back cover, so I haven’t been able to read anything past page 304 for the last 20 years or so. I don’t remember reading that quote of Pa’s at all, so I may have only read the book once or twice before it got ruined (still, I don’t want a new copy–is that weird? Or if I do decide to get one, I’d like the same version I already have), or most likely, as a kid, I just read all my favorite chapters (SEAT ROCKING!) but not the actual ending. Anyway I got a bit teary-eyed at Pa’s quote as well.
OMG, I recently re-read the Long Winter, LTOP and THGY, this is March 2013 and most of these posts are 2 years old, but l am so happy I found them because I CRIED at the ending of each of these three, why I dont know except I think maybe its because I know we all grow up and go away and then family members die…I guess these books really give me a sense of family and how important they are to us. I can just SEE Pa saying its fine, knowing all the while that it isnt, that his little girl is going away and he will miss her. Its just the same when Laura gets married, and she cant eat her wedding cake, for suddenly she realizes she is going away. Even though I know that life goes on for them and there are more books, the sadness is palpable.
Hallo,
I have always been wondering, why in the series Mary and Laura were always taken more seriously than Carrie and Grace.
There are several scenes in which Carrie (I think) and especially Grace are corrected or told not to speak so that they cannot tell something which is actually important for the family.
Here it is only Grace trying to announce the men coming – and Ma’s correction add a little comedy to the chapter – but it struck me as especially odd in the kitten chapter (3, The happy days).
Grace is told not to contradict when told not to step onto the kitten and gets almost no chance just to explain that she cannot find the kitten.
I wonder if Laura was making a point against such educational rules or wanted to emphasize the “good ol’ way” or simply to inform her young readership of the differences between their own and Laura’s (sisters’?) education.
Strikingly, SHE and Mary were never treated this way in the earlier books.
“I knew Lew Brewster back east”. He’d probably never met Mrs Brewster or only enough to be introduced. Winter had just started, she probably hadn’t started a mental breakdown yet. And even if she had, who would have told people their wife was nuts back then? SAD or PPD or severe depression weren’t things yet. Cabin fever was the only description.
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