Page 67 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

As usual I enjoyed her visit immensely, and really hated to see her go. That’s the last time I’ve seen her. We call each other occasionally, but haven’t visited since. She married and had two daughters. She is now a retired teacher still living in Iowa.
Some of my pupils were Bill Fisher, who had lost an arm in a sawmill accident and lived across the road from the school, five Ezell children, and two Parker boys.
It was after I had left that the Parker tragedy happened. The two boys, eleven and twelve, were at home alone on their ranch while the rest of the family went to Belen. The boys were scuffling over an ‘empty’ rifle, when it went off and killed the younger boy. The older boy picked up the body of his brother, refusing to believe he was dead, and started off to find help. The two boys were just about the same size, but the older one had carried the dead body of his brother over five miles when the returning family met him.
During the winter we had a heavy snow, and when I arrived at school, the snow had come in through the cracks in the wall. Snow lay in little drifts on the pupils’ desks and water in the bucket was frozen solid.
At Sanchez we of necessity provided our own fuel, for the fathers didn’t bring us wood as they did at Dusty. To make matters worse, there was no convenient forest to provide us with good wood, and no river to furnish us with the inferior cottonwood. The only thing the students and I could gather near the school was dead cholla cactus. This blizzard caught us short and no way to get any with the ground covered with snow.
I left another note (as at Dusty) saying we had gone to Fisher’s (just across the road) to have our lessons. Again (as at Dusty) the County Supervisor came, but this time she was accompanied by the State Elementary Supervisor, Mrs. Mary Watson, a well- known figure in state education. They disapproved of my moving over to the neighbors to have classes, but I couldn’t have cared less what they thought. I’d have sent the children home before I’d have allowed them to freeze.
Sampson came to see me from Dusty, and we drove over to a little village north of Mountainair, Quarai, where they were excavating a large ruin. It is now a national monument, along with the Abo Ruins and the Gran Quivira Ruins (west and south of Mountainair) making up the Saltillo Ruins. They are also known as “The Cities that Died of Fear.”
When we saw it, they were just beginning to excavate and had only a few rooms exposed. The church was the only thing wholly visible, but they had unearthed several skeletons in its floor.
I bought a “new” second had car while living with Bill and Ella. This time it was a 1932 Chevrolet Sport Coupe. It had wire wheels and a sporty looking free-standing trunk on the back - behind the regular trunk.
Bill and Ella moved to California and I lived in their house until school was out. Then I moved over to a small ranch with an old lady named Broom. Her husband was a switch engineer in the railroad yards in Belen and he stayed there, coming home only once in a great while.