Page 64 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

By that time we were all on the verge of illness. I wrote a note and attached it to the door; “We have gone to McCracken’s house to have our lessons. The reason should be quite obvious.” Then we all trudged up the road to Mary’s to continue school. She said when I came in I was as green as a gourd, and I felt worse than that. Besides the terrible odor at close range, it made me heartsick to have to kill this poor animal that had done us no harm.
I think the children felt the same way. They were very serious in their work with none of the gleeful fun that normally occurred.
The county supervisor came that day -
wouldn’t you know it! But the evidence was quite clear.
Many people who lived in isolated places employed a governess to teach their children. Such a family was that of the sawmill owner, Mr. Thomas. He and his family lived out in the area near Dusty. Their governess was Bessie Bannerman who later married Marvin Ake.
One time Bessie asked me to go to Magdalena and Socorro with her in her car. We stopped by his place to pick up Marvin. I believe we went to a movie. We stopped in Magdalena and visited Marvin’s grandmother, a very charming and interesting old lady. Marvin’s teenage sister (I think her name was Winnie) was living with her grandmother.
Such a tragedy occurred in the Thomas family. Their young daughter, Joyce, was a good friend of Betty , the daughter of saddlemaker Tom Butterfield of Magdalena and his wife Bea. While Joyce was visiting
Betty one time, the two girls rode their bicycles out on the highway west. A tractor trailer, owned by Mr. Thomas and loaded with logs headed for the sawmill, met them at a curve in the road. As the tractor turned the curve, the trailer became unhitched and shot straight forward. One of the protruding logs hit Joyce and killed her.
There was some difficulty about getting my New Mexico teaching certificate renewed. I already had a Texas and an Oklahoma one and had previously taught three years, one in each state. It seems I had been issued only a temporary certificate to teach at Beaverhead, but I was not told of the problem until school started. It seemed that since I had never attended a college in New Mexico I was lacking a course in New Mexico history. I was not to receive my pay until I had completed a correspondence course. This meant I could not pay my board bill. Mary and Willie were kind and understanding - and patient - about it. I immediately enrolled in a correspondence course at the University of New Mexico and hurried through it as fast as I could.
When I finished the course after months of working and sent the proof of credit to the County Superintendent in Socorro (Miquela Apodaca), I was given all my past salary at once. I paid Mary what I owed and she thought she had a fortune, getting it all at once that way. It was only a small fortune for she was charging me only $15 a month for board and room.
When school was out, I took my newly received “wealth” and had my car prepared for traveling. It had been sitting by Dad’s cabin from November, 1932 until May in 1934. When it had a set of new tires, a