The Year Of Miss Agnes - Hardcover

Hill, Kirkpatrick

4.18

6,355 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689829337 ISBN 13: 9780689829338

Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2000

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It's 1948 and ten-year-old Fred has just watched her teacher leave -- another in a long line of teachers who have left the village because the smell of fish was too strong, the way of life too hard. Will another teacher come to the small Athabascan village on the Koyukuk River to teach Fred and her friends in the one-room schoolhouse? Will she stay, or will she hate the smell of fish, too?

Fred doesn't know what to make of Miss Agnes Sutterfield. She sure is a strange one. No other teacher throws away old textbooks and reads Greek myths and Robin Hood. No other teacher plays opera recordings, talks about "hairy os," and Athabascan kids becoming doctors or scientists. No other teacher ever said Fred's deaf older sister should come to school, too. And no other teacher ever, ever told the kids they were each good at something. Maybe it's because Miss Agnes can't smell anything, let alone fish, that things seem to be all right. But then Miss Agnes says she's homesick and will go back to England at the end of the year. Fred knows what this is about: Just when things seem to be good, things go back to being the same.

How Fred and her friends grow with Miss Agnes is the heart of this story, told with much humor and warmth by Fred herself This is a story about Alaska, about the old ways and the new, about pride. And it's a story about a great teacher who opens a door to the world -- where, once you go through, nothing is ever the same again.

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About the Author:

Kirkpatrick Hill lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. She was an elementary school teacher for more than thirty years, most of that time in the Alaskan "bush." Hill is the mother of six children and the grandmother of eight. Her three earlier books, Toughboy and Sister, Winter Camp, and The Year of Miss Agnes, have all been immensely popular. Her fourth book with McElderry Books, Dancing at the Odinochka, was a Junior Library Guild Selection. Hill's visits to a family member in jail inspired her to write Do Not Pass Go.

Chapter One

"What will happen now?" I asked Mamma as we watched the plane take the teacher away.

"Maybe no more school." Mamma twitched her shoulder a little to show she didn't care. Mamma never went to school much, just a few months here and there when her family wasn't trapping or out at spring muskrat camp. She said she hated school when she was little.

The little plane circled our village and then flew low over Andreson's store and waggled its wings at us. That was Sam White, the pilot, saying good-bye to us.

It was Sam White laughing, too. Sam thought nearly everything was funny. He had just landed with the mail and there the new teacher was, waiting for him when he opened the door of the cockpit. She pushed right through the rest of us and started talking before Sam even got to say hello.

"Wait for me, it will only take a minute," she'd said. "Please. Take me back to town. I can't stay in this place for another second."

And he'd waited, and she'd come tumbling out of her little cabin, leaving the door open, leaving everything behind but the two suitcases she carried. It was kind of funny, how she looked. I could tell Sam thought so, the way he winked at us. And then Sam had helped her into the plane and the engine had roared and they were up and over the spruce trees and on their way.

I knew what she would tell Sam. She'd tell how Amy Barrington had got mad and had busted in her door because the teacher bought mukluks from Julia Pitka instead of her. And she'd tell about the big boys who didn't listen. And she'd tell about the fish.

When we brought our lunch to school, it would always be fish. Salmon strips or kk'oontseek, dried fish eggs, to eat on pilot crackers. Or half-dried fish. The oil would get on the little kids' faces and on the desks.

"Heavens, don't you ever eat anything but fish?" And she'd make us go to the basin and try to scrub the fish smell away with lots of Fels Naptha soap, and then with a bad face she'd scrub the oily ring from the washbasin.

That one time, she pushed Plasker away from her desk when she was helping him with his arithmetic.

"You smell of fish," she said, real mad, with her teeth together. Plasker looked scared.

"I was helping my old man bale whitefish," he said. He was pretty nervous, wiping his hands on his pants as if that would help.

The teacher told him to sit down, and she didn't even help him with his arithmetic. There were tears in her eyes. Right there we knew she was not going to stay with us.

We had a whole bunch of teachers since they started the school here, back when I was six. Some left before the year was over. Some stayed one whole school year. But none ever came back after the summer.

Sometimes we could see the look on their faces the first week they were here, cleaning out their little cabin, putting up pictures on the walls. The ones who looked mean from the very first lasted the longest. It was the ones who smiled all the time and pretended to like everything who didn't last.

Maybe they were running out of teachers and we wouldn't get another one.

But in just a week Sam brought us a new teacher.

I was helping Old Man Andreson in the store when Sam came in. It was my job to cross off every day on the calendar with an X so Old Man Andreson wouldn't get mixed up and forget what day it was. And it was the first day of a new month, so I had to tear that last month off, too. October 1, it was now -- 1948.

Sam was really big and tall, and when I was little, he always used to lift me up and make my head touch the ceiling. Now I was too big for that, so he just stuck me on top of the counter.

"Fred! I brought you a new teacher. I kidnapped her. What do you think about that?"

I had a bad feeling about that, so I asked him, "Is she nice?"

"Oh-ho," said Sam. "This one's got a little mileage. You kids are not going to get away with nothin'."

That didn't sound like she was going to be nice, so I wiggled down off the counter.

I wanted to go have a look at her.

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