Love Forevermore by Madeline Baker Read Free Book Online

worst of all. He was a handsome boy, about five feet, six inches tall, with dark skin, shoulder-length black hair, and dark chocolate eyes. Loralee was certain it was Short Bear who left the little surprises in her desk drawer each morning. A dead scorpion the first day, a half-eaten rodent the next, a live snake the third. Loralee tried not to let her revulsion show as she bravely removed the creatures, both dead and alive, from her desk and tossed them out the window into the brush.
    Slowly she gained the respect of the boys. Her sincere affection for the children, coupled with her obvious admiration and respect for the Apache people as a whole, won most of the children to her side.
    As time passed, the frogs and lizards and other repulsive creatures stopped making an appearance in her desk drawer, and Loralee felt as though she had achieved a major victory.
    She set apart an hour of each day to let the children teach her, and gradually she picked up a few Apache words and phrases. It was a harsh, difficult tongue to master, but she learned that ugashe! meant go, dye meant son, cima meant mother. Nahleen meant maiden or young girl, chelee meant horse. Besh-shea-gar meant iron-that-shoots.
    Loralee listened to their stories, played their games, admired their drawings, and never gave up hope that more of the children would come to school.
    Short Bear remained a problem she could not solve. He would not read aloud. He would not answer questions. He would not do the sums she wrote on the chalkboard. She often wondered why the boy continued to come to class at all. He spent most of his time staring out the window, a sullen expression on his face.
    When she learned that Short Bear was Zuniga’s cousin, she told Zuniga of the problem she was having with the boy, but Zuniga only shrugged.
    “I made him agree to go to your school,” Shad had said, shrugging, “but I cannot make him learn.”
    It was sad, Loralee mused, sad that progress and civilization had swept over the Apache, changing their way of life, routing them from their land, putting them under the thumb of the white man, whom they distrusted. In the old days, Short Bear would have become a warrior. He would have known who he was and what was expected of him. He would have learned to hunt and fight and live off the land. Now, he needed to learn to read and write and cipher. But he did not want to learn. Still, like it or not, the Indians’ only hope of survival was to be integrated into the white community, to learn to live and think like the whites.
    And Loralee wanted to be a part of that change. She knew the older Apaches were reluctant to try new things, stubbornly clinging to the old ways, but she was here to teach the young, to help them learn the language and culture of her people, to help them increase their knowledge of the world, a world that was rapidly changing. Even Loralee found it hard to believe some of the things she had seen and heard in the last few years. Who would have thought that anyone could invent a machine that was actually capable of flight? And who would have guessed that motor cars would be more than just a passing fancy for the very rich? Even more fascinating than flying machines and horseless carriages was the advent of moving pictures. She had watched, mesmerized, as The Great Train Robbery , filmed in the wilds of New Jersey in 1903, unfolded before her eyes. Fully twelve minutes long, it had been the most amazing thing she had ever seen, and well worth the five cents it had cost for admission. Loralee had been on the edge of her seat the whole time. How ironic, she had thought at the time, to sit in an Eastern theater to watch a movie about a train robbery when trains were still being held up in the West, and men were still dying in gunfights on the streets of Western towns. But the movie was only make-believe, and it had been thrilling.
    Most of the Indians living on the reservation would probably never see a flying machine or a