Sarah Shepard
The station master's wife in Missouri who took Hugh McVey in, taught him to read, and told him his family were poor white trash.
To get out, and upward, and to take her boy with her. She promises her husband every year that something will happen and he will be called up into a position of power: “We won't be compelled to stay in this hole of a place very long.” She says a version of it to Hugh every afternoon for five years.
The book
At a glance
- Wife of Henry Shepard, station master at Mudcat Landing, Missouri; Hugh McVey's foster mother and only teacher
- New England stock, raised on cut-over timber land in southern Michigan
- For five years at the front-room table, from six schoolbooks bought in one morning
- Her standing phrase for them is “poor white trash” — lazy, shiftless, and not to be associated with
- In October, for the Michigan farm her father cleared and left her, having given up on her husband's prospects
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeSarah Shepard is small, sharp-tongued, tireless and good-natured, and she hates Mudcat Landing and everyone in it. Her people were New Englanders who came west after the Civil War to clear cut-over timber land in southern Michigan, went into debt for it, and stayed cheerful about the debt; she worked in the fields beside her father and grew up believing that hard work is treasure laid up against the future. Married to Henry Shepard, a short, fat, easy-going station master with no ambition whatever, she has spent years telling him that if he does small things well a railroad presidency will follow.
She has no children. When the fourteen-year-old son of the town drunk turns up to sweep the station platform, she scolds him all day long, teaches him how to hold a fork, and then one morning watches him sweep the same boards for three hours with a broom that has come apart in his hands, understands what she is looking at, walks to the store, and buys six schoolbooks. She teaches him herself for five years and will not send him to the town school in case the other boys laugh.
How the book draws them
- The scoldingHer first method is to scold him steadily from morning to night, about his hands, his fork, his posture and how to speak to people who come to the house. Her husband finds it so funny that he stands in the doorway calling advice to the boy to keep on the jump or she will bite him.
- The six booksA geography, an arithmetic, a speller and two or three readers, bought in one trip when she works out that his stupid persistence at the broom is not stupidity. She comes back and tells him she has made up her mind to take him for her own boy and does not want to be ashamed of him.
- The lesson underneathEvery afternoon, after the day's arithmetic has been gone over until his mind is exhausted, she talks: her own people as an honest, frugal, god-like race, and his own condemned outright. She pities him for the blood in his veins, and she calls his slowness a moral fault: “It's a sin to be so dreamy and worthless.”
- The stumpsThe book compares her method to her father's, working the stupidity out of a boy's head the way he worked the stumps out of Michigan land. She sees no difference. She scrubs, kneads, irons, knits socks while she listens to him read, and sings while she does it.
- The formulaThe advice she has given her husband for years and hands on to Hugh on the station platform: “Do everything neatly and carefully,” she said. “Show yourself worthy of the trust that has been given you.” To her husband she puts it as a promise — do the task given you perfectly and you will be given a larger one, and some day, when you least expect it, something will happen.
- The morning she stopped believing itOn the platform, leaving for Michigan, she starts to promise the boy that faithful work brings promotion, and cannot say it — because her husband has done that same work for years without praise or blame. The two of them stand in silence staring at the porch floor. She kisses him on the cheek for the first time, and then, out of habit, says the formula anyway as she walks to the train.
Sarah Shepard never reappears in the flesh after the second chapter, and she governs the rest of the book. Hugh writes to her once he is rich, offers her and Henry money, and cannot resist telling her what the Governor of the State said about him — adding wistfully that at any rate they must think he amounts to something. Her sentences come back to him at every turning point: when he decides that inventing is the safe way of life, when he is ashamed of wanting a woman, and above all on the night he takes Clara to the county seat and thinks the smell of his father's fish shack is still on him.
The novel's judgement on her is not simple. She pulled a boy out of a shack and gave him a mind. She also gave him a lifelong conviction that he was inferior stock, and the phrase that sits on the cover of the book.