By Sofi Guven
There is a guest in our class today, and I don’t know what to make of her. She’s wearing a long brown dress, all the way to her feet, and a white apron looped in the back. She looks like she’s from the olden days, like a pioneer.
She’s standing in the front of our classroom, by the wall of March birthdays, with what looks like a large brown barrel. I have a March birthday, so I’m on the wall, but my name is now blocked by the barrel. It’s not really that large of a barrel, but it is large enough to block my name, even though it’s written in bubble letters.
I’m not too happy about my name being blocked. The pioneer-lady looks strange in our classroom, which is messy and brightly colored and has normal, present-day things in it, like markers and computers. And she’s wearing a bonnet, so no, she definitely does not look right in our classroom, and neither does the barrel.
Mrs. Lynn claps her hands together. She introduces the pioneer-lady as Mrs. Something-I-Don’t-Quite-Hear and the large brown barrel as a butter churn. Mrs. Something is going to be demonstrating the butter churn, which is how the pioneers made butter and important to know, apparently. The pioneer-lady says hello to us, and she talks as if she’s actually from the olden days. Some people in class start to get excited, but I don’t.
Mrs. Lynn tells us Mrs. Something is a historical interpreter, so she’s wearing a costume, playing a part, which makes sense, but is kind of a silly thing for a grown-up to do. I know that pretending can be a job, but I don’t know why she’d choose to be a pioneer over a cartoon character or Halloween zombie or something.
There’s a long stick jutting out of the barrel. A very long stick, like one you’d use for hiking or a handle for a broom.
The pioneer-lady drags it out of the barrel with a soupy pop. At the end of the stick, there’s a small pocked disk, seeped and dribbling with almost-butter. A few kids yell “GROSS!” The pioneer-lady tells us that she has cheated a bit, because the butter is already mostly churned. Real butter takes hours to make. She demonstrates the up-down motion of churning, which seems like hard, sluggish work, especially as the butter thickens.
She lets us each try churning. Mrs. Lynn has us line up row-by-row. While this happens, the pioneer-lady talks more about the history of churning, and tells us that girls mostly did the churning in the past. The boys in my class are allowed to churn anyway. I’m glad, because I know most of the real fun stuff in the olden days was boys-only, and I don’t want Mrs. Lynn to bring in a separate boy-pioneer to teach them how to fish or ride a horse.
Or how to shoot a gun, maybe, but I wouldn’t want to do that. We just learned about pioneers in Social Studies. Westward expansion, covered wagon journeys, the American frontier. I was excited to learn about something besides wars, but it turns out there was still a lot of fighting in the West. The pioneer-lady doesn’t say anything about that though.
My row is closest to the window, so we go last. The butter is already stiff and congealed by the time it’s my turn. I try to heave up the plunger. There is a kind of sucking sound, but the butter is unyielding. I wiggle the stick around a bit, but then I give up. The pioneer-lady is nice about it, but I think it’s unfair I didn’t get a real churn. Either way, the butter is finished.
I’m thinking “so, that’s that?” but then the pioneer-lady reveals loaves of bread in paper bags. She tells us we get to try the butter. Everyone cheers at first, but then Stevie P. starts whining because she knows she won’t like it.
Last month, David G. brought cookies for his birthday, even though we aren’t really supposed to, and Stevie went crazy. She ate three cookies, and when David told her she couldn’t have anymore, she started crawling under desks looking for dropped pieces of cookie. Then, she ate something under Alex A.’s desk which turned out not to be a cookie. She says she’s had a bad taste in her mouth ever since.
Luca F. also starts whining because he’s allergic to gluten, and Hayden R. starts saying he doesn’t like bread. It seems like half the class is complaining now, which is strange, because even though I’m not sure I like her at all, it was nice of the pioneer-lady to bring us bread and let us try the butter that she mostly churned herself.
Mrs. Lynn and the pioneer-lady get the bread out. It isn’t cut up, so they have to track down a knife, which is hard in a school, since knives aren’t really allowed on account of them being dangerous and not usually necessary for learning. Mrs. Lynn makes a call and another teacher shows up with plastic knives, then they kind of saw at the loaves with them for a while.
Eventually, there are pieces of bread, which are passed out to us, and we get plastic knives of our own to spread the butter. We have to line up again, because we have to go back up to the barrel and put our knives right inside it to get the butter. Mrs. Lynn lets my row go up first this time.
I butter my bread carefully, slipping my knife into the soft buildup towards the top of the barrel. The bread is dark brown, with bits of seeds and a blistery crust. The butter spreads easily and I make an even layer of it on my slice with just a few strokes. When I get back to my seat, I leave my bread on my napkin for a bit before I eat it, since I don’t want to finish it too quickly and have to watch other people eat theirs.
Alex declares that it is the best thing he’s ever eaten. There is a chorus of agreement. Almost everyone has their bread now, so I try mine. I’ve never really paid much attention to butter before, but ours tastes like salt and velvet. I finish most of it in just a couple bites.
The pioneer-lady stretches out her tired arms, folding one into the other across her body. The class is still marveling over the bread, oohing and aahing theatrically with each bite. Luca is licking butter straight off a plastic knife. Stevie starts taking tentative bites of crust. Social Studies is almost over, or maybe it should have ended a while ago, since the sun is creeping through the trees outside, leaf shadows shifting across our desks.
I like the butter a lot, but I also don’t know why the pioneer-lady wants to pretend she’s in the past like this, painstakingly fight the butter into existence, teach us something about history we don’t really need to know. If I had to pretend for a job, I’d want to be a Disney princess, like at Disney World, because with princesses, you don’t have to raise your hand and ask your teacher whether or not they’re the good guy in the story, you just know.
The class is quieting as the light outside gets yellower and yellower. I want to raise my hand and ask why, after why, after why, but then there’s a clatter. Stevie is standing up. She rockets to the front of the classroom, holding a mostly-eaten chunk of bread aloft. She wraps her arms around the pioneer-lady, then Mrs. Lynn, and then around the butter churn itself. All the while, she’s grinning, and she’s shouting, “it’s finally gone! The bad taste is gone!”
Sofi Guven is a writer and poet from Cincinnati, Ohio. She has previously been published by Wilderness House Literary Review and Cleaver Magazine and is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets prize through Bryn Mawr College.
