Wild Rose. Ruth Axtell Morren

He put the pencil down and moved the paper toward her. She saw he’d added a little worm coming out of the apple. She looked up to find him grinning at her.

      “I don’t know why you bother with me,” she said with a shake of her head. “If I haven’t learned this stuff by now, I don’t think I ever will.”

      “Nonsense. People learn new languages every day, and it’s the same thing. It takes a lot of practice and patience. Now—” he took the paper back and began forming a new word “—B comes next. Ball, that’s easy to draw.”

      Geneva watched his fingers curve around the pencil, and knew exactly why nothing would come to her that afternoon. She could think of nothing but him sitting there so close to her. Her gaze traveled up to his head bent over the paper. The dark hair glinted reddish gold in places.

      She was going to have to stay up real late every night poring over those letters he was writing to make up for her wandering thoughts during lesson time.

      As if reading her mind, he said, “I shall have to get you a slate so you can practice making these at home. Now this one’s easy.” He finished printing the letters and moved the paper toward her.

      She stared at the letters, willing her mind to concentrate. “Kuh…Kuh,” she repeated. “Uh…rr…ll.” Then she tried putting the sounds together as the captain was teaching her. “K-uh-r-l. Cuhrl. Curl!” She looked at him in triumph, meeting the look of satisfaction in his eyes.

      “Good.” He wrote another word. “This should be familiar.”

      She looked at the three-letter word. “D-d…” She took a stab at the vowel, “aw…guh. Dawg. Dog!”

      “All right. Let’s try something harder.” Again he took the paper back and bent over it.

      That night she took out the list of words and copied them out on a separate sheet of paper by the glow of her kerosene lamp. She wrote each one and read it over and over until she knew it perfectly. As she sat on the edge of her bed in her nightgown, she took one last look at the paper, smiling at the captain’s pencil drawings. A curl of hair, a little dragon, its spiked tail curved upward, a flame coming out of its mouth. She traced the drawings with her fingertip. An oblong circle for an egg, a squatting frog. Silently she mouthed the words, vowing she’d master each lesson, if it meant receiving the smile of approval the captain had given her this afternoon.