The Teacher's Funeral

by Richard Peck

  Her face was tucked into his shoulder, and her back hair was coming unpinned as they swooped from railing to railing. If she threw a shoe, we’d have to shoot her. Tansy looked on from the crank, smiling privately.

  Lloyd was shocked senseless. I didn’t know whether to look or look away. Seemed like Eugene Hammond had gone too far this time. And he was hanging on around these parts like a summer cold.

  “Dad,” I said, low, “what does it mean?”

  “It means he’s stepping up his pace. Now he’s courting the whole family,” Dad remarked. “He’s one serious suitor, and he’s proving it this minute.”

  “Dad,” I breathed, “what had we better do?”

  “Son, I don’t know.” Dad stifled a smile. “Do you think we ought to take steps?”

  We butchered two or three Saturdays after that. By then a raw wind rattled the empty corn shocks, and we were wearing shoes to school.

  Hallowe’en had fizzled out, what with Charlie’s hand keeping us from mischief. Lloyd and Flopears and Lester went out one night and stuffed a given amount of road apples into people’s mailboxes. But that was about the size of it. Everybody naturally steered clear of Aunt Fanny Hamline’s place. We weren’t as dumb as we looked.

  Butchering day was as big as Thanksgiving to us. Our neighbors came to help and for the sociability of the thing. Aunt Maud had come down the road in the darkest reaches of the night, behind her glowing pipe. Her and Tansy bustled by lamplight in the kitchen because there was a world of sausage and scrapple to be made, and breakfast, and a noon dinner for the multitude. Me and Lloyd had a fire going under the big barrel out in the lot. It was cold as charity that black morning of butchering day.

  And on this particular occasion, Dad had invited Eugene Hammond to take part.

  I had the idea Dad had invited him to the butchering to call his bluff and show him up. Being a city slicker, he’d no doubt turn tail and beat it back to Terre Haute when we started bleeding out the first hog. Which was fair enough. Anybody who was husband fodder for a country gal like Tansy would have to stand up to butchering day. I myself wouldn’t have put a nickel on Eugene Hammond’s chances. So I was pretty sure I knew what Dad was up to.

  Before daylight’s first streaks, our neighbors came jangling up the lane. Everybody turned out except Tarboxes. Charlie Parr came. His hand rendered him next to useless, but he wouldn’t have missed seeing how Eugene Hammond took it when we started lopping the heads off hogs.

  Then here came the blazing headlamps of an automobile. Eugene Hammond had taken up Dad’s invitation with alacrity, as we said in Spelling School. An automobile at a butchering like to take everybody’s mind off business. But we had our way of observing the day, and we stayed faithful to it even in the age of the motorcar.

  The water seethed in the barrel, under the tripod where the hogs would hang. The women gathered on the back porch to watch. The barn lot wavered in firelight. Dad had hitched Siren and Stentor to the rock sled, so they’d be ready to drag the carcasses up to the fire.

  The three hogs were out of their pen now and in the grove. Dad had his. 22 caliber Springfield rifle in hand. Everybody stood by to see who he’d invite to shoot the first one. You never shot your own hogs. You honored a friend with the pleasure of that. Dad handed off the rifle to Mr. Jimmy Leadill, a near neighbor of ours.

  Mr. Leadill turned to Eugene Hammond, who wore a mechanic’s overalls over his houndstooth suit. I decided right there Mr. Leadill was in on Dad’s plan.

  He was something of an orator, and said in a carrying voice, “Mr. Hammond, as a welcome stranger among us, you’re to have the first shot.” He held out the rifle. The other men turned their grins aside. The women gazed from the porch in rare silence.

  “But I have to warn you, Mr. Hammond,” Mr. Jimmy Leadill went on, “it’s one shot per hog. If you don’t drop your hog with the first squeeze of the trigger, we can’t be responsible for the safety of the neighborhood.”

  That was a lie, but he told it well.

  Eugene Hammond looked surprised to find the rifle in his hands. All Indiana held its breath, and somebody raised a lantern aloft. Quicker than telling it, he shouldered the rifle, sighted down it, and the morning exploded. He’d squeezed off a round and nailed the hog between the eyes.

  Blood blossomed from her brow. She sank to her knees, rolling sideways, legs working. Eugene Hammond thrust the rifle back into Mr. Leadill’s hands and pulled a pig sticker out of his own polished boot. Before an audience stunned to silence, he strode forth and grabbed a front leg. He inserted the knife into the throat and slashed down to the heart to bleed out the hog in a single move. It kept the blood from clotting the meat.

  It was a first-class, professional job. Dad himself couldn’t have put down a hog quicker or neater. There hadn’t been time for a squeal. Lloyd and Charlie stared. I looked back to the porch to see how Tansy took it. She was just turning back to the kitchen. The neighbors shuffled and cleared their throats. It wouldn’t have been polite to show shock.

  I was dizzy with amazement. But now it was business as usual, and we all fell to. We hoisted the carcass up on the tripod and fixed the hind legs with the gamble stick. With the block and tackle we worked it up and down in the boiling water. After that, we swung it around, hooked it from the mouth, and dipped the hindquarters. Then we stretched it out to scrape it, and hung it again to rinse it, many hands making light work.

  We went right at it, and Charlie did what he could. When it was time to take the head off that first hog, Eugene Hammond somehow had a bigger knife in his hand. Again he stepped forth and in an elegant circular swipe, he sliced around the hog’s neck. He dropped the knife, grabbed hold of the ears, and wrenched the head free of the body. Once more quick, neat, and sure. Which I personally thought was close to showing off. Lloyd gaped afresh, and Charlie looked a little hopeless, somehow.

  Seemed like Dad’s plan to show up Eugene Hammond had backfired on us all. I myself was provoked, but not quite sure why. Didn’t I want Tansy off our hands? She was old enough. Our own mother had married Dad when she was seventeen. It would get Tansy out of the teaching trade and off our backs, with any luck before we got to long division. There was naturally a law against a married woman teaching school.

  After all, Eugene Hammond wasn’t near as ignorant as your typical city person. From his butchering, he’d been a country boy. He gave good presents too. You couldn’t fault him there. Thanks to him, we marched into school these mornings to John Philip Sousa strains. We no longer had to start the day with that dumb “We hail our pleasant school” song from Miss Myrt’s time.

  But handing Tansy off to Eugene Hammond didn’t sit right with me. My thoughts were deep but confounded.

  After noon dinner in a landscape of steaming innards, coiling sausage, and long pans of scrapple, Eugene Hammond was suddenly before us, drawing on his driving gloves, lowering his goggles.

  “How would you fellows like a ride in an automobile, just a spin down as far as the schoolhouse and back?”

  “Would I!” Lloyd sang out before I could put a lid on him.

  Charlie held out a little longer. But when Eugene Hammond offered to let him crank the automobile with his good hand, Charlie caved in.

  Since he’d gone over to the enemy, so to speak, what choice did I have but to follow?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Fatal Friday

  The days grew shorter, along with Tansy’s temper.

  By now, we knew way more than we wanted to. We could tell you the capitals of countries nobody had ever heard of, and their principal exports. Even those of us whose mouths moved when we were reading our own names knew the multiplication table up through times twelve. Seemed like Tansy was looking high and low for any little leftover opening in our heads she could cram knowledge into. And with a heavy hand growing heavier.

  Finally, I had a word with Dad. We were down with the pigs one time when I told him Tansy was getting intolerable, one of our Spelling School
words. “Dad,” I said, “I wish to heaven your plan hadn’t blown up in our faces.”

  “What plan?” Dad was clipping needle teeth on the pigs, so I didn’t have his full attention.

  “Your plan to show up Eugene Hammond as a tenderfoot at the butchering,” I said to refresh his memory.

  “Was that my plan?”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “In fact, it wasn’t.” Dad gripped a snout. “I invited that young fellow to meet our neighbors in case Tansy was taking to him. It didn’t surprise me he was a crack shot. And he mentioned to me himself that he’d come from a rural district over by Gas City, so I supposed he knew his way around a hog.”

  “Dad,” I said, discouraged. “Were you playing fair again?”

  “I was trying to,” he said. “Son, I’ve seen you confused before, many a time, but never more than now. If your sister’s getting intolerable, why wouldn’t you want Eugene Hammond to have her?”

  Dad had found the flaw in my argument. I kicked a small hill of pig manure, saying, “Well, why can’t she pick Charlie Parr? A fellow would like his sister to marry his best friend, and Charlie’s good-hearted. I know he’s not broke out with brains. If brains was dynamite, he couldn’t blow his nose. But I personally don’t think he puts himself forward enough.”

  Dad pondered. At last he looked up from his task, saying, “I’ve just thought of a plan, and I think it’ll work.”

  I was all ears.

  “Let’s let nature take its course.”

  Glenn Tarbox had helped me put up the school stove. He was still faithful in coming through Aunt Fanny’s sugarbush grove every morning, though she’d threatened us all with sudden death if we trespassed. The stove, a front-loader, stayed in the woodshed through warm weather. It weighed about half a ton, but Glenn needed very little help from me to heft it all the way into the schoolhouse.

  We set it up by the rostrum on a square of asbestos. We had to hang the stovepipe from the ceiling with strap iron. The pipe rambled across past the mud dauber wasps’ nest to a hole in the chimney. Took us two mornings to get it up and fired. Glenn was bringing his noon dinner and his breakfast too in a Karo syrup pail now. I remember one morning he had a right good-looking slab of sour cream apple pie. Though on the quiet side, he was easier company before Charlie got to school.

  As for learning and knowledge, I myself thought we were all making pretty fair strides. But did that satisfy Tansy? My head rang around the clock from that cowbell clanging at my spelling.

  Then on Thursday morning Mr. George Keating came into the schoolhouse and made right for Tansy with a letter. She went pale and gripped her pointer. Her knees set her skirts atremble. Silence fell, though somebody whispered, “It’s come.”

  It took its sweet time, because we were into November. The letter was from the County Superintendent of Schools. Now we’d know when Tansy was to be examined and her so-called teaching methods observed. Now we’d learn if Tansy could go on being teacher or if she’d be turned out.

  We’d been on the lookout for that letter these many weeks, and waiting hadn’t improved Tansy’s disposition. It was bound to get here before Thanksgiving. You couldn’t count on the roads for a visit from outside after that. The roads around here were nearly impassable.

  Mr. Keating hung on to hear the news so he could repeat it. Tansy was all thumbs with the envelope. Finally, Little Britches had to drop down from teacher’s chair and come over to help her with it.

  Tansy scanned the page while we waited. An icy wind seemed to sweep her, though the stove glowed and you couldn’t see your breath even here on the back row.

  She looked up and stared sightless across us.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  An icy wind swept us all. “Go on,” Charlie called from back here, “read out the letter, Tansy.”

  “Miss Tansy,” she said in a broken voice.

  Her eyes hurried down the page to the worst paragraph:

  I will myself, accompanied by the assistant superintendent, undertake to examine your qualifications as a teacher in an eight-grade rural school with an eye to granting you a provisional teaching certificate.

  You will be subjected in the place of your teaching to an oral examination of general knowledge. Your students will demonstrate their acumen and progress during the usual Friday Elocution class.

  Horrified silence followed. Then we all squealed once more like pigs under a gate—louder. “Unfair!” we called out. “How come we have to be tested too? We didn’t do nothing!”

  “This sort of thing never happened under Miss Myrt,” Pearl proclaimed. “I personally don’t mean to take part and may well be absent. The idea.”

  She wasn’t the only one thinking about being too sick for school tomorrow, though me and Lloyd would never get away with it. If we didn’t peel out of bed pretty early, Tansy would touch a match to the mattress.

  We were all fixing to riot when she concluded with,

  Yours very sincerely for Quality Education,

  T. Bernard Whipple,

  Parke County Superintendent of Schools.

  She was already beginning to recover. In fact, she was laying her plans for tomorrow before Mr. Keating could get on his route with the news.

  “This schoolroom needs a thorough cleaning before our…company comes. Just look at those windows. And that kindling needs to be in a neat stack. And, Pearl, you’ll sweep the floor.”

  Pearl bridled. “I’ll do no such—”

  “Pearl, I said you’d sweep the floor,” Tansy said, “or I’ll sweep it with you.” She advanced on Pearl with the pointer and Pearl went for the broom. We all went for something.

  On the fatal Friday of Tansy’s trial, I was at school with the ladder before sunup. We’d had the stove going for two weeks now, so it was high time to clean out the stovepipe. It was beginning to smoke and seep soot.

  I lit a lamp and turned it up. The spit-polished windows shivered in the graying dawn. Not a dead fly decorated the sills. The place was spotless. The Superintendent of Schools could see his face in any surface. The assistant superintendent could eat his dinner off the floor.

  Glenn Tarbox stepped up behind me. I jumped a foot.

  “Dagnab it, Glenn!” I cried. “You like to scare me out of my skin. What are you doing here so early?”

  He was always early. He was trying to keep ahead of Charlie Parr, if you asked me. But this was practically the middle of the night. He had on a starched shirt, blued and ironed flat. His hair had a neat parting, and he’d shaved.

  “I don’t have that far to come,” he said.

  “But Stony Lonesome—”

  “I don’t live out home no more.” Glenn looked away. “I live over through the sugarbush at Aunt Fanny Hamline’s. She don’t keep horses, so I sleep in the tackroom of her barn.”

  Ha, I thought. What did he take me for? “Glenn, you lying—”

  “No, it’s the truth. Aunt Fanny put me up when I told her I’d kill my own food, do all her repairs, and run off whoever was stealin’ from her.”

  “But you were the only one stealing from her, Glenn.”

  “I know it,” he said, “but her eyesight ain’t up to much.”

  I stared at him, wondering. “You’re not killing all your food, Glenn. You had a nice slab of sour cream apple pie here a while back. Did Aunt Fanny bake it?”

  Glenn nodded. “I found her soft spot. Everybody’s got one except my maw. I offered Aunt Fanny to work for free.”

  My head pounded with these disclosures. “And you get along all right with her?”

  “Sure,” Glenn said, “after I found out where she stockpiled her ammunition and hid it from her.”

  Still, I couldn’t get my mind around it. Glenn Tarbox rooming and boarding with Aunt Fanny Hamline?

  “How come, Glenn? Just to be closer to school so you can get ahead of Char—”

  “I won’t live out home no more,” Glenn said. “My brothers were on me day and night about quitt
in’ school. They don’t want me gittin’ ahead of them. They’d do anything to keep me down.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s the way people is who ain’t goin’ anyplace in life theirselves. They don’t want you goin’ anyplace either. It was my brothers stuck the puff adder in teacher’s desk, and sawed through the board over the ditch. They wanted them crimes pinned on me.”

  My jaw dropped. This was by far the longest speech anybody’d ever had out of Glenn. I was bewildered. The silence of frosty dawn fell around us. Light began to find the eastern windows.

  “We better get them pipes down before Tansy gets here,” Glenn said. “How’s she doin’ this morning?”

  “She couldn’t keep her breakfast down,” I betrayed.

  Glenn held the ladder while I went up it. The pipe rose out of the cold stove and angled at the mud daubers’ nest. Seemed like the lengths had fitted together easy, but now I couldn’t work them loose. Glenn tried, and he couldn’t either. The pipes had expanded with the heat, or something.

  “Even if we got ’em apart,” Glenn said, “the whole business would take the morning.”

  I could hear Tansy in my head, telling me how I’d left everything to the last minute as usual.

  “But they’s another way,” Glenn said, “quicker.” He reached into an overall pocket, behind a belt loop, and drew out a twist of paper. He opened it and showed me a few pinches of gray powder.

  “Gunpowder,” he said, “about an ounce.” Trust Glenn to have an ounce of gunpowder on his person, just in case. “It’ll only take that much to clear the stove, pipes, and chimney, all in one puff. Nothin’ to it.”

  With these words, Glenn unlatched the stove door, struck a match to the kindling inside, and threw in the gunpowder.

  Then quite a lot happened all at the same time. With an explosion that left my ears ringing well into the new year, the whole stove stood up on its hind legs. The door that Glenn was closing hung loose in his blackened hand. The stovepipe came clattering down from the ceiling, belching a bushel of black soot all over us and the room, including the head of Abraham Lincoln.