by Richard Peck
My pouncing thoughts would run me crazy if I didn’t do something. I couldn’t wake Lloyd and tell him. I dared not put it into words. But to ease my mind, I could spook him. Spooking the p-waddin’ out of him almost always made me feel better. “Lloyd, you asleep?” I asked, loud enough to wake him.
“What,” he mumbled.
“I was just thinking,” I said in a thoughtful voice.
“What about?”
“Miss Myrt. With that nose on her, I wonder if they got the coffin lid down.”
“Oh.”
“And about Increase Whittlesey, of course.”
“Who?”
“Didn’t you hear anything at the funeral? He was the old schoolmaster before Miss Myrt’s time. Ten foot tall in his clawhammer coat.”
“So what?”
“Well, this is the first night Miss Myrt’s in her grave. Now Increase Whittlesey’s not the only teacher in the graveyard, pushing up daisies.”
“So what?” Lloyd said again.
“So it could make him restless. He could feel crowded. It could make him…walk by night. I thought I saw his shadow on the ceiling. I bet if you looked out the window, you might could see—”
“Oh, shut up, Russell.” Lloyd turned over, and I was alone with my terrible, pouncing thoughts. Sleep was out of the question now, and I dreaded daylight.
Chapter Seven
A Droning of Locusts, a Mourning of Doves
In time, the locust drone of the school board gave over to the mourning of doves in the eaves. I suppose I dozed. Pale light showed in the east. But I didn’t dream until after the rooster crowed. Then I was up to my knees in long-distance Dakota wheat fields, a sea of wheat bent by the breeze, halfway to harvest.
I was bolt awake now, sitting up on the bedroom floor, ripped from sleep by a smell from the kitchen. I couldn’t believe the evidence of my nose. It was mush frying. Cornmeal mush. Hanging over it was the sweetness of sorghum molasses coming to the boil.
Lloyd sat up in bed. “Did we oversleep?” he said, groggy, smelling the air. “Is it a school day?”
Because we never had fried mush till school started. Here we were, clinging to the last shard and shred of summertime, while downstairs Tansy was frying up mush like it was September. Like she couldn’t hardly wait.
Then I remembered.
We pulled on our overalls. Lloyd was towheaded, and his head looked like a haystack this morning. I didn’t have the heart to ride him about it, or tell him the news. Let him find out in his own good time. Let it come as a shock to him too. Just to make this like any old morning, I tried to trip him at the top of the stairs. He skipped out of my way as usual.
We went to milk, but didn’t tarry. You can only milk so fast, but we didn’t horse around, squirting milk into each other’s mouth and such as that. We milked out our half and turned the calves in for theirs and made for the house for our breakfast.
Dad was at his place at the table. Aunt Maud was just coming up the back porch. On the road between her place and ours she smoked a cob pipe every morning. But she never smoked before witnesses. You could hear her bang the ash out on the steps.
“She’s going to burn the porch off the house one of these times,” Dad often remarked.
Aunt Maud stalked into the kitchen. “That tumble I took out of the wagon yesterday shook loose every bone in my body,” she said. “If I sneeze, I’ll fly apart.”
Tansy was rounding the table with our plates of breakfast up her arm. She ended behind Lloyd and gave the back of his haystack a painful thump.
“Ow!”
“Do you have such a thing as a comb upstairs?” Tansy inquired. Me and him shared a comb, and I’d had the sense to use it this morning.
“You go around looking like one of the Tarbox clan,” Tansy said.
“It’s still summer,” said Lloyd, who never knew when to button his lip. “Who’s looking?”
Playing fair, Tansy gave me a painful thump too since she was still back there, handy to our heads.
“Ow!” I said. “I didn’t do nothing.”
“You didn’t do anything.” Tansy leaned into my ear. “We’re going to do something about your grammar this year. You talk like a Hoosier hayseed. And we’re going to have a look at your orthography.”
The thought of Tansy having a look at my orthography brought me near tears. It was almost the last thing you’d want a sister looking at. Dad was gazing away out the door, down the corn rows. He was on the school board. He could have put a stop to this.
“Let’s see those hands.” Tansy poked Lloyd. “And a clean handkerchief. It can be ragged, but you better hope it’s clean.”
“A clean handkerchief?” Lloyd said. “What is this, sch—”
It hit him like a ton of bricks. His eyes were already watery from the thump. Now they welled up. “No,” he whispered. “Say it ain’t so.”
But it was.
In their wisdom, the school board had hired on Tansy to take Miss Myrt’s place at Hominy Ridge School. They wouldn’t pay for a real teacher trained at the Terre Haute normal school. Probably Miss Myrt herself had never darkened the door of the normal school, or even been to Terre Haute. They could get Tansy for thirty-six dollars a month because she still had a year of high school to go. She’d no doubt talked them into it. But it wouldn’t have taken much. The school board dearly loved a bargain.
Seemed to me if they filled in the privies, locked up the school, and threw the key down the well, they could save some real money and do us all a service. But the school board was deaf to reason. Dad stared down the corn rows, hearing nothing.
Lloyd whimpered.
The mush was ashes in my mouth. But I was sure of my plan now. As quick as we got the potatoes dug and the winter wheat planted and I had a little money put aside, I’d be off to the Dakotas for the harvest. Me and Charlie Parr.
It was Lloyd I felt sorry for. I was going to get out of here or know the reason why. He was just a kid and had to stay. My heart went out to him. Tansy’d have him thumped senseless by Christmas.
“But what does she even know?” he said beside me in a small voice.
We never knew what she’d learned at high school. We wondered.
“They let you be teacher,” I mumbled back, “if you can count to twenty with your shoes on.”
“Quit that mumbling and eat,” Tansy barked from the stove.
“Amen to that,” echoed Aunt Maud.
What’s the hurry? We soon learned.
We’d meant to mow hay. We had twelve acres of alfalfa with timothy and red clover mixed in and some wild stuff that seeded itself. I liked mowing. It made a change from weeding, and the barn swallows followed to catch the bugs the mower scared up, so you weren’t eaten alive.
But Dad said, “After you boys see to the stock, take the morning off and walk down to the schoolhouse with your sister. Find out what needs to be done down there.” Dad didn’t look right at us. “The hay’ll wait on you.” Then he made his escape.
We slumped.
Tansy and Aunt Maud were back and forth between dish-board and stove, laying the groundwork for dinner. The whole deal kept dawning on me. Tansy wouldn’t be in Rockville for high school, so we’d have her day and night. But being teacher, she’d have to leave the cooking to Aunt Maud. It was the worst of two worlds.
Lloyd fetched up a sigh with a sob in it.
The three of us, me and Lloyd and Tansy, hoofed it down the Hog Scald Road to school. It was only about a mile, and uphill both ways, as the road to school always was back then. And we were barefoot, as we were all winter in our memories later. J.W. came too. He was regular in his school attendance and supposed this was the first day.
They hadn’t issued Tansy her box of chalk and new broom yet. She carried a bucket and a scrub brush from home. I had a scythe for the weeds. Lloyd was chunking rocks at fence posts and diving in and out of the ditch with J.W. The ditches were thronged with elderberry and dark with patches of mint down lo
w. Lloyd would pop up out of the ditch, chewing mint. He seemed to be in danger of forgetting the seriousness of the occasion.
I was too sulky to speak and took my mind off my troubles by recalling how Hog Scald Road got its name.
In pioneer days there was said to be a boiling spring around here. The early settlers ran their hogs into that boiling spring and let them jump out when they were half cooked. Then the farmers drove the hogs through a nettle hedge, so they were scalded and scraped all at once and ready to be gutted and carved into cutlets and tongue.
And if you believe that one, I’ll tell you another. I liked pig stories better than pigs. In fact, I didn’t care much for livestock of any kind.
The nearer to school, the better Tansy’s posture. She was ramrod straight. Was she getting up her courage?
The schoolhouse had lost some shingles and had the dry, webby look of a schoolhouse in summertime. Ragweed had taken the yard and tangled the privy paths. Somebody had sawed through a post on the pony shed. The door on the woodshed hung from a single hinge.
A plank was laid over the ditch to the front step. Tansy put her bucket down and stroked her throat in a thoughtful, womanly way. We both looked up at the bell tower. You could see from here the rope was gone. You couldn’t expect a bell rope to last the summer. Somebody would want it for plow lines.
Tansy counted silently on her fingers.
“What?” I said.
“The kids,” she said. “How many are we going to have?”
Well, there was me and Charlie Parr, at least for the time being. And Lloyd and Lester Kriegbaum and Flopears Lumley and Pearl Nearing. Six, unless there’d be new ones. We’d graduated three in the spring. And two or three had fallen by the wayside over last year. Orv Ogilvy had lit out for the Dakotas.
“We’ll need eight,” Tansy murmured.
“What?”
“I said we’ll need eight,” she snapped.
“Why?”
“Because the school board won’t keep school for any fewer.”
Oh, I thought, hope dawning.
They’d issued Tansy the key, but somebody had bunged in the lock with a stove length. The door swung open to a push. The lock was on the floor among splinters. We stepped into the coat room under the bell tower. There were nails for the boys’ hats on one side and nails for the girls’ on the other. And shelves for our dinner pails. The place smelled real bad, a warmed-over stink of mothballs and something like sheep dip.
Over the door to the schoolroom were nailed a pair of brackets. Miss Myrt stretched a beech switch up there, about four foot long, very supple and whippy. Us pupils walked in under this switch every blessed morning, and it was to put us in the right frame of mind for learning.
I followed Tansy into the schoolroom, which smelled worse. It wasn’t a big room, a little longer than it was wide. A row of windows on either side were set too high to see out of, so we couldn’t be distracted by the world. The desks were modern with inkwells, though carved up. Down front was the recitation bench, backless.
On a platform called the rostrum was Miss Myrt’s—teacher’s—desk. The bracket that held the map was there, but somebody had swiped the map itself, a good cloth-backed one with a lot of uses. The mud wasps had built their big nest against a ceiling rafter.
It was just the two of us in the schoolroom. Lloyd loitered outside with J.W. I had an awful vision of being up on the recitation bench with nothing between me and Tansy riding her desk like a bronco and cracking a beech switch in the air like a carriage whip. My mind shuddered.
“Tansy, what do you even know?” I braced for a thump.
“More than you,” she replied. A shadow crossed her eyes. “But I’ll be examined.” I’d never heard her unsure.
“What?”
“The County Superintendent of Schools will examine my…abilities. I’ll need a certificate.”
“Tansy, why do you even want to be a teacher? It don’t seem like good, honest work to me.”
She gave me a sidelong glance. “You’ll find out in the fullness of time.”
“Fullness of time” sounded like the way they probably talk at the high school.
At least there was some air in here. Three of the window lights were broken out. There were rocks on desks among the petrified yellow jackets, and glass on the floor right where you wanted to step.
“Tarboxes,” Tansy said.
I thought so too, though I doubted they’d stolen the bell rope for plow lines. They plowed but little. Still, the busted lock and the window lights and the missing map had Tarbox written all over them. Me and Tansy both looked at the library shelved under the windows. All six books were there, so it was Tarboxes for sure. They never went near books.
The hogs had clearly gotten in too, and that meant fleas.
“But no animal done that.” I pointed to a corner.
“No animal did that,” Tansy said, handing me the bucket.
Me and Lloyd went for water and took our sweet time about it. We fell over J.W. in both directions. He’d taken up residence on the front step and was scanning the road, wondering where everybody was.
The evening before school took up, me and Dad and Lloyd and J.W. rode down to the schoolhouse in the wagon with the long ladder from the barn. I was up on the board beside Dad with half an old bedsheet wrapped around my middle, hidden under my shirt.
It was an ideal evening without a hint of fall in it. As warm as July, too warm to be bound up like a mummy under my shirt. The hedges burgeoned, and the fields were heavy with bounty. It was an evening to inspire songs in praise of Indiana, of moonlight fair along the Wabash and the breath of new-mown hay from the fields and candlelight gleaming through sycamores.
“Pretty country,” Dad said.
And it was, though nothing I couldn’t leave behind as quick as I could get away. “Up in the Dakotas, some of them farms are so big, they have their own stern-wheel steamboats to carry their wheat to their own elevators at Fargo,” I told Dad.
“You don’t say,” he remarked. “That’s a big-scale operation.”
We patched the lock on the front door. Then Dad planted the ladder in the coat room and climbed up to hang a new bell rope. He put in new window lights too, from glass we had on hand. He was an artist with a glass cutter. He could look at an opening and cut the pane to fit. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. The skill lived in his hands.
When it was time to head home, he said to me, “You going to need this ladder?”
“Dad,” I said, “I am.”
“Well, lock up behind you,” he said. “And you and Lloyd can tote the ladder home between you. It’s heavy, but I guess it’s worth it to you. I’m making for home now. I don’t want to know.” He snapped his fingers. “All right, J.W., walkin’ or ridin’?”
J.W. decided to ride with Dad, rather than hoof it with me and Lloyd. We watched the wagon out of sight, Dad high on the board, J.W. at his side. I unwound the old sheet from around my middle, and me and Lloyd climbed the ladder to the bell tower like two squirrels up a shellbark hickory. Careful not to ring it, I wrapped the old sheet around and around the clapper till it was stuffed tight within the bell. You could yank on that rope from now till New Year’s and not get a tinkle.
“‘Curfew must not ring tonight,’” I said down to Lloyd on the ladder below me. This was a one-man job, but he wanted in on it.
“I thought it wasn’t supposed to ring tomorrow,” he said.
“‘Curfew must not ring tonight’ is out of a poem. I’m quoting.”
“Oh,” said Lloyd. “Did the Sweet Singer write it?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Anyway, when Tansy went to ringing that bell in the morning to call us inside, she’d get nothing but a muffled thump. It seemed like the least we could do for her first day.
It was pretty nearly dark on our way home. Because of the ladder, we took it easy and rested every whipstitch.
“Russell, I believe Dad knew we were up
to something with this ladder.”
“I think he did,” I said.
“How’d he figure we were going to pull something on Tansy for her first day?”
“You got me. Maybe it was the sheet. It gave me a new shape. Maybe Dad just knows how we think.”
The locusts were tuning up, and we walked on wordless a rod or two. Then Lloyd said, “You think Tansy knows how we think too?”
“She might.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Lloyd said in a small, sorry voice. “That’s what’s got me worried.” We walked on home with the ladder, stepping high over shadows, in a drone of locusts and the gathering gloom, the night before school took up.
Part II
THE JAILHOUSE OF SCHOOL
Chapter Eight
Called to the Trough of Knowledge
As arranged, me and Charlie Parr met early that next morning behind the boys’ privy. Our plan was to start out the school year by smoking a three-inch length of buggy whip.
I say early, but Tansy went off to school earlier still, along with her pointer and a new hat.
There was some mystery about the hat, though I gave but little thought to what women wore. It had turned up that morning in a fancy box on the porch. Dad brought it in when he came from plowing in the oat stubble. Tansy untied the fine ribbon and took off the lid and peered into the tissue paper inside. Then she drew out a hat.
Her breath stopped and tears formed in her eyes. It looked to be quite a good hat, with grapes on it, better than the one that got busted up in the accident. I’d have personally thought it was a three-dollar hat.
“Why, Dad,” she said carefully, “many thanks. It’s elegant.”
Dad opened his mouth to speak, but him and Tansy exchanged a glance, and he said nothing. Aunt Maud watched them both, narrow-eyed and thoughtful. And that’s all there was to that.
Tansy put on her hat, and Dad took her to school in the wagon for her first day. Me and Lloyd would hoof it. Catch us turning up at school alongside the teacher! We made the pigs last till Dad and Tansy were off the place.
