by Richard Peck
Another thing I liked about summer was that the pigs foraged free. You had to bring in the cows and milk them, but pigs saw to themselves. You just had to be sure they found water. Then you walked the shared fence lines to watch they didn’t get through to root up your neighbor’s pasture. That’s all there was to it. The old sow would farrow her young in the out-of-doors. They’d spend their days at leisure in the hog wallow and nest in dry leaves by night. They liked summer better than being penned up. That’s where me and pigs agreed.
“Dagnab it, I forgot matches,” Charlie said with the buggy whip already between his teeth.
But I knew he would and drew a couple out of my overall pocket. He lit up. We were to our kneecaps in weeds and pods back here because I hadn’t worked this far with the scythe.
From our outpost behind the privy we could see Lester and Lloyd and Flopears standing around in the yard, throwing their pocketknives at the ground. Lester wore short pants and a Buster Brown collar that could spell trouble for him in a bigger school. Flopears wore a patchwork shirt made out of old Bull Durham sacks. Lester was a bookworm, and Flopears could just about read, though he had to point at each word. Lloyd was somewhere in the middle. They were all around the same age.
“You get the bell wadded?” Charlie inquired, inhaling.
“I got that bell wadded tighter than a tick. Tansy wants us in school, she’ll have to come out and pick us off one by one.”
Charlie exhaled black smoke. “Boy, that’s buggy whip!” he said, and passed the smoldering mess to me.
Pearl Nearing was making for the girls’ privy. I nearly took her for a newcomer. She’d be about eleven, twelve, and she’d shot up over the summer. Though the smoke cut Charlie’s eyes, he squinted through it at Pearl.
“Don’t she have a different shape up above?” he wondered, and she seemed to. In the spring she was a skinny little thing who’d jump in puddles. Now she simpered along and picked her way to the privy, prissy.
She swung open the door to step in, screeched, and tripped herself backing out. “Who do you think you are?” she hollered into the privy, planting her fists on her new hips.
Me and Charlie watched. I wasn’t inhaling the buggy whip. I didn’t want to see my breakfast again. Not Aunt Maud’s mush.
By and by, a small bonneted figure crept forth from the girls’ privy. Her skirts were tucked up by mistake into her drawers behind. She didn’t look hardly old enough for school, and she’d been crying.
“Well, what did you think you were doing in there?” Pearl demanded. “You weren’t using it. You’d yanked up your drawers.”
She’d been hiding in there, as any fool could see. You could tell from here her little chin was quivering.
“That makes seven of us,” I said to Charlie, “unless she’s a minnow we have to throw back.”
“Ah,” said Charlie, whose arithmetic never added up to much.
To my consternation, we heard a bell ring. It jangled the morning and summoned us to school. It wasn’t the bell-tower bell. I’d seen to that. It was a cowbell. Tansy’d be standing smug in the front door, calling us cattle to the trough of knowledge.
“I blame Dad,” I told Charlie. “He let me use the ladder to wad the bell. Then he must of give Tansy a cowbell from the milking parlor to even the score. He was playing fair again.”
“Ah,” said Charlie Parr through a screen of smoke.
In the olden days of schoolmaster Increase Whittlesey, the girls sat on one side, the boys on the other. The old chinky log schoolhouse had separate entrances for the sexes.
It was like that this morning. Pearl sat as far from us boys as she could get. Lester and Lloyd and Flopears were in a bunch at the same desk. For Lloyd’s school haircut Aunt Maud had used the same bowl she used on me. She cut our hair by moonlight so it wouldn’t grow so fast. Lloyd looked like a toadstool between Lester and Flopears. I must have looked similar.
Me and Charlie Parr sat close enough to converse on the back row. Even for the first day, he was almost suspiciously well barbered. His neck was shaved far above his shirt. He’d even shaved his face. His chin was smooth as a baby’s bottom.
In those days it wasn’t unusual to find scholars of twenty and even twenty-five doubling back for more schooling. They were liable to be older and meaner than the teacher. Some of them returned when they found out that if you couldn’t sign your name, you had to pay cash. But today, me and Charlie were the old men of the group.
Even seen from back here, Tansy loomed large on the rostrum. It seemed to bow beneath her. Though she wasn’t a welcome sight to me, I admit she cut a teacherish figure. She was strictly business in a starchy shirtwaist and shoes. Her hair was up, and that made her an adult right there. She was sure big enough to be a teacher—husband-high, as we said back then. And then some. Husband-high and teacher-tall. In her hand was the same pointer she’d dragged from the death grip of Miss Myrt.
The pointer had passed.
But you could tell Tansy didn’t know where to begin. With a wobble in her voice, she said, “Good morning, pupils.”
“Morning, Miss Myrt!” Flopears sang out because change came slow to him.
“Hey, Tansy,” some said.
“Miss Tansy,” she said.
I was condemned to eternal perdition if I was going to be able to call my own sister “Miss Tansy.”
She’d made a note and consulted it. “All right,” she said, “rules.
“There’ll be no marble playing inside the schoolhouse, even in bad weather, and there’ll be no playing for keeps, anywhere.”
That law was directed to Lloyd and Lester and Flopears.
“Number two,” Tansy said. “Chewing gum is strictly forbidden.” Chewing gum was a girly thing to do. No boy would, so this rule was aimed at you-know-who.
Tansy faltered then, seeming to have only two rules.
“Right about now we generally sing,” Charlie prompted.
Tansy raised her pointer, and we broke into our usual,
When bright the day is breaking,
And school day bells are waking,
With joy our homes forsaking,
We hail our pleasant school.
This was far from my favorite song, but Miss Myrt always made us start the day with it, often conducting with a switch. Charlie had a pretty fair baritone.
Now Tansy wracked her brain for what came next. She cleared her throat and counted us, but it took up very little time. Six, we all saw her say silently.
“And one in the privy!” Charlie sang out.
Shut up, Charlie, I thought. If there aren’t enough of us, maybe we could just call it quits right—
“In the privy! Who’s in the privy?”
All us boys turned up our hands. It wasn’t our privy. Tansy turned on Pearl.
“Just some little chit of a girl,” Pearl pouted, “and she has nothing to do with me.”
“Go get her.”
Any boy in the room would gladly go, just to get outdoors. Pearl smoothed her skirts and pulled in her lips. “Getting her is not my job, and you’re not the boss of me, Tansy. I remember when you were one of us, and how long you took to get through the third reader.” Pearl preened.
Tansy’s eyes closed to a pair of dangerous slits. She stepped heavily down from the rostrum and pointed the polished pointer at Pearl. It came this close to her nose.
“Get her.”
We all watched while Pearl lost the staring match. She flounced out, and you could see right there she’d reached the troublesome age, which is always worse with girls.
We waited without rioting. We cut Tansy some slack. When Pearl came back, she had a grip on the little kid who didn’t want to be anywhere near here. Her bonnet hung by its strings. Her dinner pail scraped the floor. She kept setting her bare heels. “Turn me loose,” she squawked. “I don’t wanna, and I’m not gonna!”
Pearl pushed her toward Tansy and resumed her seat.
Tansy pulled the small girl’s sk
irttails free of her drawers and settled her skirts for her. But it was too late. Forever more, she was known as “Little Britches.” Even unto the distant day of her wedding. Besides, come to find out her real name was Beulah.
“Who are you?” Tansy asked with an arm around her.
“I ain’t sayin’,” said Little Britches. “I ain’t stayin’.”
“Then whisper who you are in my ear before you go.”
Little Britches whispered. It would turn out that she was a Bradley. They were a family who hadn’t had anybody in school for some years. Little Britches was an afterthought. “I’m goin’ on home now.” She wiggled free of Tansy. “Pleased to meetcha.”
“Well, you can go home at noon,” Tansy told her. “Till then just wait up there at my desk. You can…help me be teacher.” Tansy stuck her in the crook of her arm and climbed the rostrum to settle her in teacher’s chair behind the desk. Little Britches’s nose just cleared the top of it. She stared with suspicion back at us all, especially Pearl. Her eyes were still glassy with tears. Tansy was flushed from lifting her first pupil.
“Now there are seven of us,” Charlie called back with the score, “and none in the privy.”
“On your feet for the Pledge of Allegiance,” Tansy said, remembering it. As in Miss Myrt’s day, we turned to the place an American flag would hang if we had one and pledged our allegiance. Little Britches didn’t, but her eyes were wide now. She was taking everything in.
The pledge lasted little longer than counting us. But we took our sweet time settling back down. Tansy pondered, then said, “Arithme—”
“Better not,” Charlie called out. Though I wished he’d shut up and quit helping, he was right. Arithmetic wasn’t Tansy’s long suit. She knew her mathematics to the Rule of Three, but whether she could cypher into fractions, I had no idea. I knew I couldn’t. Anyhow, arithmetic isn’t any way to start the day.
“Spellin’ School!” Charlie suggested. I’d never known that boy be so helpful. He ought to sit up there at the desk instead of Little Britches, being teacher’s pet. Tansy strode to the library shelf and pulled out the blue-backed Webster speller.
Elsewhere, they called them spelling bees. We always called it Spelling School. As a school study, it was known as “orthography.” It was the most important subject in the education of that time. You may not have anything to say, but you dadburn better know how to spell it.
“Divvy them up into two teams,” Tansy told Little Britches.
She’d pulled her bonnet back on because she wasn’t staying. She blinked out of it at us. Pointing a tiny finger, she said, “That boy at the back with the round hair.”
That’d be me.
She pointed again. “That boy with the ears.”
That’d be Flopears. Lloyd and Lester Kriegbaum fell in with him. That left me and Pearl and Charlie Parr on our side. Having Flopears on the opposing team made up for having to have Charlie on ours.
We pushed back the desks and squared off. Pearl didn’t want to take part, but she recalled how close that pointer had come to her.
Tansy opened the Webster in front of Little Britches, who gazed down at it like a small owl. “Point to a word,” Tansy told her.
“What’s a word?”
Tansy showed her.
Little Britches pointed, and Tansy boomed out, “Russell Culver, asinine!”
“Asinine,” I said. “A-double S—”
“Wrong!” Tansy grabbed up the cowbell on her desk and rang it over her head, introducing a new tradition to orthography.
“What’s wrong with it?” I whined.
“Find out!” Tansy barked.
Little Britches pointed out another word.
“Lester Kriegbaum, ascend.”
“Ascend,” Lester said, “A-S-C-E-N-D. Ascend.” So that put their side one ahead.
Little Britches pointed at the page. She was beginning to feel her power now.
“Pearl Nearing,” Tansy said, “asphyxiate.” Tansy smiled slightly.
“Tell her to pick shorter words,” Pearl snapped.
“Asphyxiate.”
“Oh, all right. Asphyxiate. A-S-F—”
The cowbell clanged.
Little Britches pushed back her bonnet, and bounced in teacher’s chair. She scanned the page for another word, the longer the better.
“They don’t all have to start with A,” Tansy remarked.
“What’s A?” Little Britches asked.
Tansy looked out at us. “Flop—Floyd Lumley, ascend the rostrum and write the letter A on the blackboard.”
The blackboard wasn’t anything as grand as slate. It was just a part of the wooden wall painted black. Flopears shambled forth. He picked up the chalk, pointed at the blackboard, and wrote a large, crooked A. Turning in her big chair, Little Britches gave him all her attention.
“Write, ‘A is for apple,’ Floyd,” Tansy said, and Flopears printed:
A IS FOR APPEL
And so it went. The morning melted away as we spelled each other down and taught Little Britches her ABC’s. Tansy said we had to look up the meanings of the words too, though we’d always thought just spelling them was plenty.
“Miss Myrt didn’t have us do it that-a-way!” we bleated, as we were so often to do in the days ahead.
I believe Little Britches would have settled in for the day if things had turned out better. We’d made it to M when she looked up from Webster and said, “I smells smoke.”
An autumn haze drifted across the stifling late-August schoolroom. From out on the front step, J.W. began barking his head off. It was a regular cacophony out there. Cacophony was one of our C words. Now we all smelled smoke.
Beside me, Charlie stroked his smooth chin and suddenly jerked. He kicked his way out of the desk and sprang through the front door on his storky legs. We all followed.
As we rounded the schoolhouse, J.W. took the lead. Tansy was coming up hard from behind. The fire had a head start, and flames shot up from the back of the boys’ privy. It was burning merrily in a nest of unscythed dry grass. Few things in this world smell worse than a privy on fire.
Thinking quicker than he ever did in school, Flopears was at the pump, pumping water into his hat for all he was worth. Tansy was pounding up with the pail. Everybody was running into everybody else, except for Pearl, who didn’t think anything to do with the boys’ privy had anything to do with her. J.W. was generally underfoot.
Me and Charlie Parr? We were pointing to the cloudless sky and ducking, saying it must have been a lightning bolt, and were we the only ones to hear that clap of thunder?
Chapter Nine
One Lucky Boy
School didn’t keep the full day. Still, I was worn down to a nub by bedtime, too tuckered to sleep. As always, Lloyd was taking his half out of the middle.
“Shift over,” I said. “I’m not telling you again.”
“Quit your twitchin’,” he said.
A sour smell of privy smoke rose off his hair, and probably mine. Apart from everything else, we were in Aunt Maud’s bad books. She’d made us new feedsack shirts for the first day of school. She was handy with a needle. Lloyd had burned a hole in his shirt the size of a silver dollar. I’d burned a cuff off mine. It was all in a good cause, of course—putting out the fire before the privy could burn down to the seat.
I was just about to drift off, catching that first glimpse of the Dakota wheat fields in the Red River valley, when Lloyd said directly into my ear, “Russell, you figure anybody found the buggy whip?”
That brought me back to life. “What buggy whip?”
“The buggy whip you and Charlie were smoking behind the privy this morning, and one of you dropped it in the weeds where it smoldered till it caught—”
“Who says we were smoking buggy whip?” I mumbled like a man talking in his sleep.
“Pearl and Flopears and Lester and—”
“All right,” I mumbled. “All right.”
“In fact, everybody bu
t Little Britches, who was in the other privy. People who weren’t even at school know by now. They probably know in Montezuma and Rock—”
“There’s no evidence,” I said. “It was a hot fire while it lasted. It burned all the undergrowth just about back to the grove.”
“Russell,” said Lloyd, “do you need evidence when that big a crowd catches you in the act?”
I snored then, the soft snore of first sleep.
But I was wide awake, so I noticed a random moonbeam strike the doorknob as it began to turn. Lloyd may have seen too. The door banged back. We bounced in the bed.
Tansy filled the doorway with a coal oil lamp and her hair down. In her nightdress she looked like an avenging angel. In fact, two avenging angels. She advanced on the bed, and we scrambled to the headboard, clutching our feather pillows before us.
She stood at the foot. Her lamp made fearful shadows in all the hills and hollers of the bed. It was Tansy-our-sister now, not Teacher Tansy. And there were no witnesses.
She waited while we cowered, another of our C words. The terrible silence undid me, and I began to babble in the night.
“We done pretty good in tamping out the fire, then raking up. Me and Char—the other boys will build up the back wall of the privy as quick as we can filch—find the lumber. I will myself personally shave enough new shingles to patch the roof…”
I ran out of things I was going to do as quick as I could get to them. Still, Tansy stood there. The lamplight flickered on her face.
Next to me, Lloyd was half his natural size, almost completely concealed by his pillow.
I wracked my brain for what else I better do. “And I’ll get the wad out of the bell,” I said. “…whoever done that…”
After a time, Tansy broke her silence. “Oh yes, you’ll do all that,” she said. “And more. You’ve had a narrow escape. You’re one lucky boy. What if the fire had spread into that sugarbush grove? Do you happen to recall whose particular grove that is?”
Helpful Lloyd spoke from behind his pillow. “Aunt Fanny Hamline.”
“That’s right,” said Tansy. “Aunt Fanny Hamline.”
