The school inspector looked distinctly uncomfortable. "He wants to get away but feels guilty about leaving me here." Janey thought, with a flash of empathy. "You've done all you could." she assured him. And he had. All during the drive from town -- all forty miles of it along the rough dirt road -- he had talked warmly, pointing out from among the surroundings those things he endeavored gamely to make into points of interest. Janey, always restrained around authority, had deemed it unnecessary to tell him that he needn't have bothered. She had been far too busy assessing the changes in the land itself, since she had seen it last. It was now early spring, and all the remembered desert-like bleakness had disappeared. Fields of stubble interspersed with freshly turned earth were now encroaching on what, in Janey's childhood, had been vast stretches of unfenced, rock-strewn pasture land with wild rose bushes climbing its crevices, and sage and cactus peppering its undulating plains. Grain storage bins had sprouted where none had been before. One in particular had caught her eye, about halfway into the day's journey. Suddenly, by the side of the road -- windows boarded up and a small pile of wheat by the door -- appeared the schoolhouse of her childhood. An alien building, alongside other, more traditional granaries, it was now relocated in an alien place, removed from its old home in the middle of unused land in the school quarter some miles from this main road to town. "Transplanted," Janey thought, "like me. But now I've come".

Nonetheless, a feeling of dismay and regret at her decision had built up steadily in Janey, as the drive progressed. Seven years it had been, since her family had walked hopelessly away from the drouth-stricken farm which was now merely one among the many cheerless places that the road to her new school wandered wearily past. Why had she come back here, with her War Emergency Teaching Certificate clutched in her hand? Why, when she had met with this cheery, chattering man during recruiting week at the new University of Calgary, had she let him talk her into it? Had it been merely the promise of a secure eighty dollars a month for the year to come? How had she succumbed so easily to the fear of joblessness? After all, this was 1946, with the war over and the Depression well behind. Surely she could have done better? Or had she been driven by a sense of responsibility to some little girl such as she herself had been: someone trapped in a lonely, isolated place, with no hope of a teacher capable of opening doors to a brighter future? "Who knows what motivates our choices?" she thought.

The drive, in the intense heat and dust of an early spring, had been tiring. But the arrival was worse. Only after the car had parked in the treeless yard had the terrible isolation of the school and teacherage really hit home. Not a single farmstead to be seen, in any direction! And the schoolyard -- so strangely bare of grass! "Horses," said Mr. Fraser, in answer to her unspoken question. "Horses?" she asked, picturing wild herds stampeding by her door. "Your pupils all have to ride or drive horses to school." he explained, "They live too far away to walk. And they've been attending school here at Prairie View, all through the war, doing correspondence courses under the care of one of the farm women."

Mr. Fraser must have sensed her dismay at this news of the long-term teacher less state of her charges, for he had bustled about even more cheerily from that point on -- helping her unpack her few belongings, opening the teacherage and school, and showing her the barn and two outdoor toilets. Smells greeted them at each location: the sickly sweet odor of dead mice in the teacherage; that familiar mixture of stale sweat and chalk in the schoolhouse; horse manure in the barn; and the unspeakable fumes issuing from the two dirty holes in the wooden toilet seats.

As if to make up for it all, Mr. Fraser had been more than helpful. He had carefully engineered the pumping-up and lighting of the gas lamp, making sure that she could repeat the process. He had tackled the pile of uncut wood, splitting a week's supply for her cooking, he said, and he had shown her how to light the fire in the school's pot bellied heater, just in case the weather changed.

"As for the smell in the teacherage," he said, with an air of reassurance, "At least you can be sure it's not rats. Even though you're only a few miles from the Saskatchewan border, this area is rat free. Alberta hires a rat man who does nothing but patrol the entire border area, poisoning all the rats that wander in." Somehow this information did little for Janey's peace of mind. "What if the poisoned rats wandered into these buildings to die?" she asked, expecting no answer.

Now it was clear that the time had come for him to go. He took a few steps toward the car, and stopped. Retracing his steps, he reached out to pat her head, then chucked her under the chin. "Keep smiling," he said, and rushed away without looking back.

Janey decided the time for a careful reconnoiter was at hand. Her situation seemed precarious to say the least. There had been no mention of a telephone, and she saw at once that no poles or wires of any kind lined the narrow dirt road which passed the school. And, of course, she had no means of transportation. Only now, in the absence of any sighting of a neighboring farmstead, did she recognize her car-less state as a possibly serious problem. She had several weeks' supply of non-perishable groceries and canned goods, but Mr. Fraser had told her that the nearest village was fifteen miles down that lonely road. Walking for provisions would simply not be feasible.

Some other vague worry had been nagging at her ever since their arrival. Something important that she should have asked about. Suddenly it came to her. Where was the water? She began to run, scrutinizing every corner of the large enclosure. No sign of a pump anywhere. Not even an open well with a pail on a rope. Exhausted from the sudden fear that had almost overwhelmed her, she came back to the teacherage. Only then did she notice the small, covered barrel at one corner. It was empty, but there were signs of moisture. Surely it had contained water fairly recently. There was hope, then.

Going inside, she chided herself. Why the unaccustomed panic? Tomorrow was Monday, the first day of school after the Easter holiday. The children would know about a water source. Three families there were, according to Mr. Fraser: all immigrants from Europe in the decades before the war. Two, the Roehbels and Schmidts, had come from Germany. They provided seven of her eight pupils. And there was a grade nine student who would enter the town high school next year, if he passed his departmental exams. His parents were from Rumania, and his name was Mike Kondor. All spoke English, the school inspector had said, but with heavy accents. Thinking of them and memorizing their names cheered Janey, and she decided to get busy cleaning up the place before night fell.

On closer perusal Janey found the teacherage still smelly but adequate. She examined the two small rooms with walls bare of plasterboard, furnished sparsely with bed, dresser, clothes closet, kitchen cupboard, table and chairs and a wood-and-coal-stove. Next came the schoolhouse. It was patterned on a thousand others. There was the outside door leading into the cloakroom with its shelves for lunch pails and pegs on the wall for coats. There was the large classroom with pot-bellied heater in the center; the blackboard covering the front wall; the desks lined up in four neat rows; and the windows on one side.

By dark she had accomplished everything that could possibly be done without water. Fresh earth had been shoveled into the toilet holes, and the school and teacherage swept clean of mouse droppings and the winter's dust and mud. Her beginning day's teaching plan was ready. Locking her door with two knives inserted into the jamb, she made up her bed and slept.

The first week of school was a mixture of wild contrasts: moments of blissful gratification interspersed with endless hours of sheer terror. The Roehbel family arrived each day in a horse-drawn buggy, with (oh the relief of it all) a cream can of fresh water with which to refill the little barrel. They were gems -- the entire five of them. None could read with any facility (not even the boy in grade five). However, thought Janey, what was that but a worthwhile challenge to her newly minted teaching skills? And Mike, the grade nine student, was intelligent, ambitious, and boundlessly appreciative of her efforts. What more could a beginning teacher ask?

Well, for one thing, Janey decided after the first day, one could ask not to be burdened with the Schmidt boys. Nothing in her brief term of teacher preparation had prepared her for anything remotely as daunting as Bernard and Wilhelm Schmidt. With the first recess period she realized that they had been operating a reign of terror in the little school for years. The other children told her that their "sitter' had been so afraid of the two large teenagers that she had closeted herself in the school during recess and noon-hour breaks, refusing to intercede no matter what happened. Janey knew she must do the opposite, and pounce like a hawk at the slightest sign of bullying. This had meant not a moment of relaxation away from her pupils, not even for lunch, and numerous head-to-head clashes in which she was forced to assume a forbiddingly strict persona which clearly proved more frightening to herself than to the Schmidts.

By the time classes were over on Friday Janey could scarcely wait for the children to leave. She waved them off, watching until they were out of sight in case the Schmidt warriors doubled back and attacked the Roehbels from some hidden foxhole along the road. Each family lived in a different direction from the other two: the Roehbels to the south of the school, Mike to the north, and the Schmidts (fittingly, she thought) five miles to the east, toward what she now pictured as rat-infested Saskatchewan.

She had learned by then that the two German-Canadian families were long-time enemies. This seemed to have something to do with the fact that the Schmidts spoke high German, had left Germany only a few years before the war, and were committed Communists. The Roehbels' native tongue was low German; they were established immigrants, and somehow had come to associate Communism with Nazism. To them, the Schmidts (totalitarians all) were supporters of the madman who had destroyed their homeland and the reputation of all Germans.

Janey wasn't sure how this strange confusion had occurred, but decided that it had something to do with the propensity of the Schmidt boys to draw swastikas on all available spaces. They began flaunting these on Monday morning, decorating every page of work assigned, obviously waiting with hopeful anticipation for the expected outburst of shock and horror. Her intuition (gained through long experience with numerous brothers) told her to ignore the decorations, which she had already noted on the walls and doors. The two would-be Nazis kept up their game but, as that first week wore on with no response from her, it had seemed to Janey that the swastikas became a shade less prevalent.

Now she was alone, with a blessed weekend ahead for rest and preparation. "A nice cup of tea!" she decided, "And a good book with nothing whatsoever to do with teaching!" With her usual awkwardness at the unfamiliar task, Janey eventually managed to light the stove and get the wood burning. Dipper and tea kettle in hand, she rounded the teacherage, toward the water barrel. And stopped. Something was decidedly different. A long moment passed before she recognized what was wrong. The lid was on the ground, and the barrel had been flung on to its side. The marks of horse's hooves indented the surrounding ground. Heartsick, Janey realized that not a drop of water remained, and the long, dry, isolated weekend loomed ahead!

Janey's head felt dull and heavy, as heavy as the kettle in her hand. Heavy? She saw that there was a cup or two of water at the bottom of the kettle. Thank goodness! If worst came to worst she could last on that. But why hadn't she thought to check her precious water supply before the Roehbels had left? And why hadn't she stored a few jars of water in the teacherage each day, as insurance against just such a calamity?

Jars of water! A memory from long ago resurfaced in Janey's mind. There was a farm, some thirty miles to the north of here, where she had come into the world -- the first non-aboriginal child to have done so in that forsaken place. There had been only one other baby born there, a few years later, and it had died. It was the child of her aunt and uncle, who had taken over the original family homestead. Few of the relatives ever returned to visit, for Aunt Miriam had "gone queer" they said. It was years now since she had been "put away" in an institution in Ponoka -- that town whose very name evoked a vision of madness in the minds of most Alberta residents. The interminable drouth, and the death of her only child, had taken a terrible toll on Aunt Miriam.

Janey remembered only one visit to her birthplace. That memory was now upon her and with it, the precise form that the poor woman's "queerness" had taken. The little house had been jammed with bottles and jars: all filled to the brim with water. All through those dark years of the Great Depression, her Aunt Miriam had saved water! It had been the saddest sight of her childhood: a sight so hurtful that she had never dared to face the memory of it. Until now.

"She's saving for a rainless day," Janey's father had quipped. "But every day is rainless now," Janey recalled admonishing him. "Maybe it's just that she was once very, very thirsty for a long, long time." And the strange woman had indeed looked as if she yearned for water. The pale eyes, perpetually searching the cloudless sky, had seemed as distant and barren as the vast expanse above. "It's enough to give you the shivers," said Janey's mother.

Janey's own family had never been thirsty. It was true that, during the dry summers when there was no snow for melting, they had been forced to skimp on water for cleaning and washing. But for drinking they had used the pump in the yard. Because it was always on the verge of going dry, they had doled out the well's precious output carefully -- sharing it with the school horse and milk cows. They had sometimes been hungry, but they hadn't been thirsty. "Who knows," Janey had wondered, in sorrow for Aunt Miriam, "what being thirsty might do to you?"

By Saturday afternoon Janey's tiny store of water was long gone. She had sat by the roadside most of the day, hoping to flag down a passing farmer, but the road remained unused. "Seeding time," she reminded herself. "No one goes to town on Saturday in the midst of seeding". One other option occurred to her. The Roehbels had identified a reclusive bachelor, living about three miles down the road, as her closest neighbor. "But he's afraid of women!" volunteered Jimmy, the oldest boy. "He don't mind kids though. He fixed our buggy wheel once, when we broke down near his place."

After a supper of a can of peas in their precious juice, Janey set out -- a covered Roger's syrup pail from the school cloakroom in either hand. At the end of an hour's walk, she was thankful to find a light showing through the window of the small shack in the ramshackle yard. She approached as noisily as possible, so the old bachelor would get a chance to see her coming, and then knocked at the door. And knocked and knocked. Occasionally she heard movements within, and once she saw a moving shadow near the curtained window. She tried to explain loudly what had happened to her. No response. Finally, she resorted to begging pitifully for a drink of water. All to no avail. "That man really is afraid of women, " she complained into the darkening night, returning drearily school-ward.

By Sunday evening, in the midst of slurping down her last can of tomatoes, Janey was finally able to laugh at the situation, and to marvel at the exaggerated dimensions of her fears. On Monday morning the Roehbels were aghast and apologetic when they arrived with their full cream can and were told what had happened. Mike looked sympathetic while the Schmidts were clearly disappointed to see her still capable of wielding chalk and yardstick. Janey ushered them all into the school and began to follow. Then she stopped. For ten minutes, she decided, the Schmidts could wreak whatever havoc they desired. She returned to the teacherage, and began to gather empty containers from the cupboard. Rounding the corner several times, she filled her jars and bottles from the little water barrel, and lined them up along the wall. "There's room", she murmured confidently, "for plenty more."