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“I can fix that,” said Sam.
The next time she saw him, she mentioned that “the door doesn’t hang straight,” and she got to spend another afternoon with him while he fixed the door.
By the end of the first semester, Onion Sam had turned the old run-down schoolhouse into a well-crafted, freshly painted jewel of a building that the whole town was proud of People passing by would stop and admire it. “That’s our schoolhouse. It shows how much we value education here in Green Lake.”
The only person who wasn’t happy with it was Miss Katherine. She’d run out of things needing to be fixed.
She sat at her desk one afternoon, listening to the pitter-patter of the rain on the roof. No water leaked into the classroom, except for the few drops that came from her eyes.
“Onions! Hot sweet onions!” Sam called, out on the street.
She ran to him. She wanted to throw her arms around him but couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead she hugged Mary Lou’s neck.
“Is something wrong?” he asked her.
“Oh, Sam,” she said. “My heart is breaking.”
“I can fix that,” said Sam.
She turned to him.
He took hold of both of her hands, and kissed her.
Because of the rain, there was nobody else out on the street. Even if there was, Katherine and Sam wouldn’t have noticed. They were lost in their own world.
At that moment, however, Hattie Parker stepped out of the general store. They didn’t see her, but she saw them. She pointed her quivering finger in their direction and whispered, “God will punish you!”
26
There were no telephones, but word spread quickly through the small town. By the end of the day, everyone in Green Lake had heard that the schoolteacher had kissed the onion picker.
Not one child showed up for school the next morning.
Miss Katherine sat alone in the classroom and wondered if she had lost track of the day of the week. Perhaps it was Saturday. It wouldn’t have surprised her. Her brain and heart had been spinning ever since Sam kissed her.
She heard a noise outside the door, then suddenly a mob of men and women came storming into the school building. They were led by Trout Walker.
“There she is!” Trout shouted. “The Devil Woman!”
The mob was turning over desks and ripping down bulletin boards.
“She’s been poisoning your children’s brains with books,” Trout declared.
They began piling all the books in the center of the room.
“Think about what you are doing!” cried Miss Katherine.
Someone made a grab for her, tearing her dress, but she managed to get out of the building. She ran to the sheriff’s office.
The sheriff had his feet up on his desk and was drinking from a bottle of whiskey. “Mornin’, Miss Katherine,” he said.
“They’re destroying the schoolhouse,” she said, gasping for breath. “They’ll burn it to the ground if someone doesn’t stop them!”
“Just calm your pretty self down a second,” the sheriff said in a slow drawl. “And tell me what you’re talking about.” He got up from his desk and walked over to her.
“Trout Walker has—”
“Now don’t go saying nothing bad about Charles Walker,” said the sheriff.
