The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  All of these Extras, and all of this constant news coming from Washington, Europe, and the Pacific, gave all of us in sleepy, tranquil Stay More the sense of being caught up in some cosmic storm of events that threatened to stir each of us out of our ordinary selves and make us feel as if we were participating in history. History was a subject in school that bored most of us to death, no fault of Miss Jerram’s, but now we were eyewitnesses to it, learning how to live with the fact that history kills—it takes from us our heroes and our neighbors and our friends, and it takes from each of us that self who had dwelled in a Golden Age of innocence and idyllic harmony.

  The onrush of that history thundered into our own little world of make-believe warfare and snatched us up. Whatever angels had been watching over our play decided they needed a vacation, a break from the chore of guardianship, and they went to sleep. The Allies, so-called, taking revenge upon Gypsy for their failure to kidnap her, kidnapped instead her mule, Old Jarhead, and drove it into the woods, and cornered it, and speared it, and beat it until it died.

  Chapter twelve

  When the rustling, the chasing, the trapping, the stabbing, and the brutal cudgeling of Old Jarhead were reported to us by Sammy, he was in a state of shock himself and had decided to quit the Allies forever. “If you’uns need a spy to find out their doings and their secrets, you’uns will jist have to git somebody else!” he declared, beginning to cry. “I don’t want nothing to do with them no more.”

  Eight boys and four girls, ranging in age from seven to seventeen, had committed felony criminal mischief by terrorizing and beating to death an innocent thirty-year-old mule, who had worked hard all its life for its human masters and had trusted them to be kind to it. Larry Duckworth had opened the mule’s gate in the Dingletoon shed and attempted to capture the animal, which had escaped and fled into the woods, where all the other members of the heinous gang called “Allies” pursued it, piercing it with their cane spears, driving it ultimately into a barbed wire fence where it became entangled and broke its leg. The Allies then proceeded to hit the mule with baseball bats and sticks. Jim John Whitter even stuck a stick up the mule’s nostril, inflicting such pain that one of the Allied girls, Rosa Faye Duckworth, fainted. Two other girls helped put the mule out of its misery by clubbing it upon the brain, causing the mule to lose consciousness.

  Nobody ever put out an Extra of a newspaper over the death of an animal, but I was tempted. That was my reaction, and the editorial was already writing itself in my head. Gypsy’s reaction to the loss of her mule and pet was greater grief than she had shown over the death of Mare; she was nearly hysterical in her sorrow and anger. Ella Jean’s reaction was to suggest that we ought to go to Jasper and get the sheriff and have all the Allies arrested and locked up—which, come to think of it, would probably have been the wisest legal course. Willard’s reaction puzzled me. He who had obtained the mule somehow somewhere in the first place as an anonymous act of charity for the Dingletoons, and who was seething with controlled rage not only because of that but because he was crazy about Gypsy and sharing her grief for her mule, said that we should leave the sheriff out of it, leave all of the grown-ups out of it, in accordance with our policy. I expected Willard, as commander of the Axis, to declare that we were now officially at war with the Allies. Never mind that we had been “at war” with them for years. All of that had been fun and games. We now existed in a state of real deliberate serious all-out wide-open take-no-prisoners War. But Willard just said, “Let’s not be hasty.”

  “Hasty, hell,” Joe Don swore, and went off to see the old hermit Dan and request the loan of his Winchester, the one serviceable firearm in town. I think Joe Don actually intended to inflict bodily harm upon each and every one of the Allies. He was upset not so much over the loss of an animal necessary for the Dingletoons to earn their livelihood—although spring plowing was long finished and they really wouldn’t need a mule again until first haying, and they could borrow someone’s mule for that—as over the senseless cruelty of the mule’s murder.

  But Joe Don returned from ole Dan to report that the hermit, after asking for and listening to Joe Don’s reasons for wanting to borrow the rifle, politely turned him down, arguing, quite rightly, that shooting any of the Allies would be criminal and would make Joe Don liable to imprisonment. And apart from the old saw that two wrongs never make a right, it wasn’t the best way of dealing with the matter, ole Dan counseled. “He just tole me,” Joe Don reported, “that his best advice was for us not to think about revenge but some kind of ‘victory that could be had through peace rather than war.’”

  “Huh?” Sammy said.

  “He tole me what ole Ben Franklin said one time,” Joe Don reported, “which is, ‘Whatever is begun in anger, ends in shame.’ He thought the best thing to do would be for us all to just cool off for a few days. He said that if we let our hatred make us violent, we sink below those we hate. We’d be worse than the Allies.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?” I asked. “Just pretend nothing happened?”

  “For a few days, anyhow,” Joe Don said.

  “I’m for that,” Willard said, “but I reckon we’d best take a vote on it.” We summoned all the Axis together and spent hours arguing the advice of ole Dan. Some of us still wanted to go around to the houses of each of the Allies and drag them bodily out of their houses and string them up. Some of us, however, were impressed with the wisdom of the old hermit, and argued that there could be a greater victory through shaming the Allies instead of destroying them. Finally, the vote was not in favor of Peace rather than War so much as it was in favor of Patience rather than Immediate Bloodshed. I could live with that, and didn’t need to bring out an Extra to announce it.

  “Just remember,” Willard concluded, “that the Allies don’t even know that we know about it. Not yet anyhow. Let’s not get Sammy in trouble by telling anybody we know.”

  But apparently the Allies expected us to have found out about Old Jarhead, and they were expecting our instant retaliation. The next day, all the Allies came to school equipped not only with whatever weapons they could lay hands on—their spears, their slingshots, their baseball bats, and the same sticks they’d used to kill Old Jarhead—but also they came to school equipped with Sog, who was no longer a pupil, having graduated. As everybody took their seats, each of the Allies cast anxious glances across the aisle at us, but we tried our best to look innocently ignorant of whatever they’d done. It was hard, because we held all of them in such contempt.

  “Well, Sugrue,” Miss Jerram said to the despot of the Allies, “I thought we got rid of you last year. To what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?” Her voice dripped with such sarcasm, particularly on that word “pleasure,” that I immediately suspected somebody may have told her about Old Jarhead.

  “I’m just here to watch out for my friends,” Sog declared, and gestured expansively with both hands at his fellow Allies.

  “How come you and all your friends is armed?” she asked, and stepped down from her platform to snatch up one of the sticks that an Allied littlun, second grader Troy Bullen, was carrying.

  “Just to pertect us from our enemies,” Sog said.

  “But looks to me like not none of your enemies is armed,” Miss Jerram observed. And for once in my life I had to admire the lady’s intelligence. She commanded, “I want each of you Allies to take your sticks and stones and such and pile ’em on my desk.” There was considerable hesitation and reluctance among the Allies, so she suggested, “You first, Sugrue. Put that ball bat on my desk now!”

  “I aint your scholar no more,” he declared. “You caint boss me around.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, “Sugrue Alan, you never were my scholar! You never had the sense to be in school in the first place. But you’re in my schoolhouse, and I’m giving ye a choice: put your ball bat on my desk or git out of here!” She pointed to show him where the door was, as if he were too stupid to find it on his own.

  So
g took his baseball bat and not-so-gently banged it down on top of her desk and left it there. One by one each of the other Allies deposited their weapons there, until they were spilling off onto the floor. I decided I’d had a secret crush on Miss Jerram all these years.

  Then a strange thing happened. Rosa Faye Duckworth, Larry’s thirteen-year-old sister, who supposedly had fainted during the torture of Old Jarhead, stood up and requested of the teacher, “Ma’am, could I move to the other side?”

  “Rosa Faye, you may,” Miss Jerram said, without meaning to rhyme.

  “Sis!” Larry Duckworth hollered as she collected all her stuff and came across the aisle. “You jist wait till I git you up to the house!”

  Miss Jerram informed him, “Larry, you have spoken out of turn without permission. Go stand in the corner.” Rosa Faye accompanied his progress there with the sticking out of her tongue at him.

  The only empty place on the Axis side was at my desk. You were sitting there, but you gladly stood because you knew I didn’t mind her sitting with me. Rosa Faye wasn’t much to look at, and I wasn’t accustomed to having a seatmate, but I scooted over a little bit so she could sit here. “Hi,” she said to me, and I returned the greeting. She had gathered up all her stuff from her desk—books, thick pencils, Indian Chief tablet, her homework, a yellow chiffon scarf, a broken chain necklace with a heart locket, a comb with broken teeth, a moldy apple, a length of licorice, a piece of broken mirror, a red plastic hair barrette, a rose shade of lipstick in a beat-up tube, and a tiny empty coin purse with a snap fastener—and we opened the top of my desk so she could crowd all that stuff in among my stuff.

  Two Allied littluns, Troy Bullen and his girl deskmate Suke Whitter, stood up and Troy said, “Ma’am, we’d like to move to the other side too.”

  “Well, your desk is screwed to the floor,” Miss Jerram observed, “and we won’t take the time to unscrew it just now. But you can sit temporary at the recitation bench.”

  So two more of the Allies defected. There were only nine of them left. “Heck,” Sog belittled the abandonment. “They aint nothin but two sissy gals and a yellow momma’s boy.”

  Sog’s sister Betty June, the former slut, stood and said, “Ma’am, there’s one more sissy gal wants to step across the aisle.”

  Sog grabbed her by the wrist and snarled, “Juner, you jist do that and I’ll kill ye.”

  She did that.

  He didn’t kill her.

  But there weren’t any empty seats on the Axis side. Since Sammy Coe had already returned to his desk on our side, Betty June had to sit temporarily with the littluns on the recitation bench, which, we soon discovered, wouldn’t be needed for recitation that day.

  “Well, boys and girls,” Miss Jerram said, and began rubbing her hands together. “We’ve taken up a lot of our time with this little business, so we’d best be a-movin on. We’ve got a lot to learn today. How would you’uns like to go on a little field trip?” It was an odd question, since we had never been on a field trip, not that anybody could recall, and weren’t quite sure just what a field trip was. Did she mean to have us tripping out across the meadow beside the schoolhouse? Or some other field? “It sure is a right nice day for it,” she observed, and grew lyrical. “It’s right sunny and warm and fresh and fragrant out there! The dogwood’s a-bloomin and the redbud’s still aflower, and all the world’s a-comin to bud and bloom and life! Let’s us just leave this musty old schoolhouse and traipsy off hither and yon up hill and down dale.” Her smile grew for a while longer, but then it disappeared. Her voice was elegiac: “But the purpose of our field trip is sorrowful as well as educational. We are going to conduct a funeral for a mule.”

  How had she known? Who would have told her? I glanced at defector Rosa Faye beside me, but she was just as astonished as I was. I looked back behind me at Willard and Joe Don, and they both were sharing my curiosity and surprise. But I think the possible answer occurred to them about the time it hit me. Ole Dan had told her! Could it be, I wondered, that unbeknownst to all of us, the old bachelor or widowered hermit had been “friends” with this spinster schoolteacher? For years perhaps? Nobody had ever seen them together. Had they ever spoken to each other? The idea of it, that our pretty but lonely schoolmistress was secretly the mistress of the strange but heroic recluse, was a story that not even Ernie Pyle could have told.

  Whatever the case, she knew that Old Jarhead lay brutally slain in the woods of Butterchurn Holler, and she conducted us on our very first field trip. “You lead, Sugrue,” she ordered Sog, and she walked beside him with the rest of us following two by two according to our classroom seating. Rosa Faye walked beside me; I didn’t mind, although she towered above me. As we made the trek, Miss Jerram talked continuously to us, including Sog, not about anything of interest seen along the route, not about tree identification or birds or the geology of the Stay More uplift, but about generosity of soul, kindness, and responsibility. “Nobody on this hike,” she said, “is Allied or Axis. Everybody on this little pilgrimage is a fair-minded human being without allegiance to any fellowship or creed or body or even desire. Even if we are naturally low and fell and dull—like you, Sugrue—we will pretend that we are wise and noble and kind. If we are so good at making believe that we are mighty warriors when we are not, then we can try with all our might to see ourselves as nice folk, seraphim and cherubim, angels, though we are not.” I decided that my crush on Miss Jerram all these years had not been secret, merely unexpressed.

  Sog’s face never took on the lineaments of a seraph or a cherub but remained sullen and defiant, as he led us out the Butterchurn Holler road and up the mountain to the woods where, at the edge of a field, lay the grayish-brown corpse of a mule. Buzzards with their huge gliderish wings circled overhead and swooped down to join various other forms of life that would have any use for a dead mule and were eagerly at feast: flies, maggots, rodents. Possibly a coyote or possum had already visited during the night. The air was stinky. The littluns held back. Gypsy held back. Other girls would not approach. “My my,” Miss Jerram said, standing as close as she could bear, “did anybody imagine that it would be so terrible?” Then she looked around at us with the glance she used at school to see who had the answer to a question. “Who owns this land?” she asked.

  Joe Don held up his hand and said, “Well, I don’t rightly believe it’s part of our forty, which we don’t own anyhow.”

  No one else offered any theories about the ownership. “I was about to suggest that the Allies be responsible for digging the grave,” Miss Jerram said, “but then I realized that I have already declared that none of you are Allies or Axis. So I will put it this way: whoever feels partly to blame for the death of this animal should participate in the preparation of the grave, and anybody else who is good-hearted should assist.”

  “Dig the grave with what?” Larry Duckworth wanted to know.

  “What did you kill the mule with?” Miss Jerram asked, and answered her own question: “Your hands. Your sticks. Your stones. Whatever you can find that will excavate the earth.”

  The ones formerly called Allies scouted around and found some rocks that were concavely shaped for scooping, and began digging. Those of us formerly called Axis pitched in and helped, taking turns. It was slow, and a lot of work. Ordinarily it would have been time for morning recess, but we didn’t take recess. We were hoping we could have it all done by noon dinnertime.

  A mule requires a pretty big grave, to get its legs and all underground. The mound of gravelly earth grew higher and higher beside the hole. The grave didn’t go down six or eight feet or whatever depth they bury people; it was just deep enough to bury a mule and cover it up good.

  Then came the tricky part. “Who will volunteer to help push the remains into the tomb?” Miss Jerram asked, and while she was trying not to discriminate between former Axis and former Allies, she directed these words primarily to the latter. But it required all of us—all who could bear to touch the infested corpse—to push
and pull on that body until we got it up to the edge of the hole and needed just one more concerted shove and tug to get it into the grave. Three boys were standing down in the hole pulling the mule’s legs, and when Joe Don shouted a warning, “Here she goes!” two of them scrambled out in time; the third, who was Sog himself, did not get out in time, and the mule’s body toppled into the grave, knocking him down and landing on top of him. The weight of that mule nearly did him in. I wish it had. He lay there screaming in pain for help.

  “Let’s just bury him too,” Joe Don suggested.

  But after a struggle, and prying up parts of the mule’s body with poles, we managed to extricate Sog, who was as ugly as his heart: covered with dirt, maggots, some abrasions, sweat, and guilt.

  “Are you all right, Sugrue?” Miss Jerram asked, and those were the first kind words she’d ever spoken to him. They were exactly what Ernie Pyle’s voice sometimes asked me. The gentle, caring tone of her voice tipped him over the edge, and he began crying uncontrollably. His own sister, Betty June, had to hold him until he could stop. I have never been able to decide whether Sog was crying because of the unexpected sympathy from Miss Jerram, because of his accident and the pain and chagrin of falling beneath the mule, or out of delayed remorse over killing the mule. Maybe it was an accumulation of all those plus a lifetime of being a holy terror. His fellow former Allies looked greatly embarrassed on his behalf, or, rather, they tried not to look.

  When Sog finally ceased sniveling and whimpering, Miss Jerram said, “Now class, I think we should each and everyone take a handful of dirt and each and everyone say something fitting to the occasion and then sprinkle the dirt atop the remains. I’ll start off.” She reached down and filled her hand with fresh earth and held it over the grave. But she stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What was the departed’s name?”