by Richard Peck
Outside, J.W. howled. The backflare from the doorless opening on the stove had singed Glenn and me with a sudden searing. Glenn was solid soot from horns to hoof, though even in his coal-blasted face, you could see his eyebrows were missing. And if his were gone, mine could not be far behind.
“It must of been two ounces,” Glenn calculated. The stove door still hung hingeless in his hand. The scene was one of ruin and desolation. Darkness had once more fallen at the soot-blackened windows.
I thought I might have been killed outright by the explosion, but seemed to be standing. Then all of a sudden I’d have been willing to swap this world for a better one because of the voice from behind me. Tansy’s.
“Russell Culver, you have ruined my chances as a public school teacher. You meant to and you did. It was your plan from the start.”
“No!” I wailed, tasting cinders.
“Gee, Russell,” came Lloyd’s voice, also from the door, “what did you want to blow the place up for?”
“It wasn’t me!” I cried out to heaven. “It was Glenn! He—”
“That’s right,” Tansy said. “Blame others.”
Chapter Sixteen
Two Miracles and a Mercy
By nine o’clock a miracle had taken place. As the pupils got here to find Tansy in what looked like a coal mine, a broken woman, they fell to. Even Pearl scooped a little soot. Little Britches turned back her small sleeves to dust teacher’s desk. Charlie wasn’t entirely broke up to see Glenn’s sorry state, and he put the stove back together. Of course me and Glenn naturally did the work of ten, sweeping, polishing, fitting up the stovepipe: busy as bees, good as gold.
Still, for years after, Tansy swore I’d tried to blow Hominy Ridge School off the face of the earth just to ruin her chances. She was deaf to reason, even when Glenn explained time and again we were only rushing to clean out the stovepipe.
Once the schoolroom looked like its old self, me and Glenn went out to stick our heads under the pump. Big, scorched shreds of our shirts came away with the soot. Only the bibs on our overalls preserved our modesty.
“I got any eyebrows?” asked Glenn, coming up agasp from the freezing water.
“Not a whisker,” I said. “Me?”
“Nothin’,” Glenn said. “Over your eyes you’re smooth as lard.”
Still, we’d all made a miracle. At nine o’clock sharp, Tansy sent Flopears Lumley out to ring the tower bell to begin school, though we were all there. Nobody was out sick. It was way too big a day to miss. When he got as far as the coat room, Flopears yelped with fear and surprise.
“What now?” Tansy murmured. We all turned to see Aunt Fanny Hamline filling up the door frame. She advanced on us in her coal-scuttle bonnet. In one hand her cane, in the other a furled flag.
We shrank.
“State your business,” said Tansy, near the end of her rope already.
“Is this a public schoolroom,” Aunt Fanny snapped, “or ain’t it?”
“It is,” we all sighed.
“Is this the day the Superintendent of Schools is coming, or not?”
“It is,” we all mumbled.
“Then you need an American flag.” Aunt Fanny brandished her flag, and the Stars and Stripes unfurled above us. “This is the same flag my husband, Mr. Hamline, carried into battle at Chicamauga,” Aunt Fanny proclaimed. “Three rebel minié balls went through it, but it has stood up right well.” She held it high and gave it a shake.
A shaft of sunlight struck through the repolished windows to catch the tattered flag’s colors.
Tansy’s eyes filled, but she drew herself up and reached for her pointer. “Thank you, Aunt Fanny. It’s just what we needed, and it’s better than a new one.”
Aunt Fanny waved away thanks and turned on her heel. She stumped out, taking a swing with her cane at J.W. as she turned into the morning light.
Charlie put Lester on his shoulder to plant the flag up in its holder. It hung proudly over President Roosevelt and Alton B. Parker.
We were looking good now, like an actual schoolroom. And I knew at last where I stood. She could believe me or believe me not, but what I most wanted in the world was to see Tansy succeed. Why she hankered to be a teacher, I couldn’t tell you. But she had chalk dust in her veins, and she deserved to get that certificate. It was only fair.
We heard the jingle of harness outside, and voices.
“On your feet for the Pledge of Allegiance,” Tansy said with a catch in her voice, “quick.” Two figures loomed into the schoolroom.
We scrambled up and turned our innocent faces to the flag. Behind us, our visitors had to stand stock-still with their doffed derby hats over their hearts. This slowed them down, but we soon came to “with liberty and justice for all.”
“Amen,” Flopears said, confusing this with church.
Two men, duded up in town clothes, marched down through us to the rostrum. The one in the lead was a stout party, balder than any egg. He put out a soft pink hand to Tansy, saying, “T. Bernard Whipple, Parke County Superintendent of Schools. This here is my assistant, Mr. Owen.”
Mr. Owen had a good head of hair on him and wasn’t half as big around as T. Bernard Whipple. He was a young man and altogether a more modern figure, in low shoes. He offered his hand, and Tansy’s lingered in it.
We watched.
Mr. Whipple and his assistant superintendent set aside their overcoats and unfolded forms they meant to fill out. Tansy held her ground, a step above them on the rostrum. Her chin was firm, but her eyes were far from certain.
“Without further ado, we will begin,” the superintendent boomed, “if you have no objections, Miss Culver.”
“None whatever,” Tansy said in a faded voice.
“Your age?”
“A lady never gives it,” Tansy remarked.
“But a teacher must. How, for example, would we know when you were old enough to draw your pension?”
“Not that it need come to that,” Mr. Owen blurted, meaning Tansy might marry and be saved before she was pensioned off. I’ll tell you right now, Mr. Owen couldn’t take his eyes off her. I wondered if this worked for her or against her.
“Seventeen,” Tansy said.
“You are a native-born American citizen?” the superintendent inquired.
“Better than that,” Tansy replied with spirit. “I am Hoosier-born and in Parke County.” The brooch she inherited from our mother was at her throat to close her collar. It winked in the morning.
The superintendent and his assistant nodded. So far so good.
“And now to your general knowledge.”
Us pupils held our breath. How general was her knowledge?
“On the subject of geography, what is the highest elevation in the state of Indiana?”
Search us. Did she know?
Tansy stroked her brooch, recalled, and spoke in a clear voice. “Weed Patch Hill at one thousand one hundred and eighty-six feet above sea level, in Brown County. Known as the Everest of Indiana.”
“Excellent!” Mr. Owen said. “Right on the money!”
But the superintendent wasn’t so easily pleased. “And now to not waste time, we move right along to the subject of grammar.”
We all paled, but Tansy never blinked.
“What is a participle? Does it ever part with its verbal significance? Does it assert action?”
Us pupils hadn’t gotten to participles, whatever they might be. Had Tansy?
Yes. She told them all about the participle, though I myself followed little of her reasoning. It was some kind of verb that didn’t act like one. Tansy even explained how you better never let your participle dangle.
“Beautifully explained!” Mr. Owen said.
Superintendent Whipple shot him a look of irritation. “Miss Culver,” he said, “you will agree that the greatest living poet is—”
“James Whitcomb Riley, now of Indianapolis, the Athens of America,” Tansy interjected.
“Quite so. But the fir
st truly Indiana poetic masterpiece is universally considered to be—”
“‘The Hoosier’s Nest,’” Tansy rapped out, “by John Finley, 1830.”
“Miss Culver,” Mr. Owen said, “you wouldn’t know a line or two of it, would you, by chance?”
Tansy was directing all her answers straight at him now. She cupped her hands and burst into verse:
One side was lined with divers garments,
The other spread with skins of varmints;
Dried pumpkins overhead were strung,
Where venison hams in plenty hung;
Two rifles placed above the door;
Three dogs lay stretched upon the floor—
In short, the domicile was rife
With specimens of Hoosier life.
Mr. Owen caught his breath. “A truly professional rendering, Miss Culver. I have not heard better elocution on the professional stage. Not in Muncie. Miss Culver, not in Fort Wayne.”
Tansy blushed slightly and cast down her eyes. I personally thought things were going better than expected. If she could just keep them busy with her answers, maybe they’d never get around to us pupils.
We were all quiet as mice. Ahead of me, Lloyd grew smaller and smaller there between Lester and Flopears.
But after a question or two about arithmetic that went over my head, Mr. Whipple drew a big handkerchief from under his coattails and said, “I think we have heard sufficient from the teacher. But what has she taught?” He gave his nose a big honk, and we all shrank further. Lloyd was practically a dot in the distance.
“It is high time we trained our sights on a few of the pupils.” T. Bernard Whipple turned on us. Mr. Owen dragged his eyes off Tansy.
Suddenly, she swept her skirts around him and stepped down from the rostrum, making for Pearl. She reached out and grabbed Pearl’s nose between two of her knuckles. Pearl’s eyes bugged, and she went an ugly beet-red. But by and by she had to open her mouth to breathe. Then quicker than the eye, Tansy stuck a finger in her mouth and hooked out the chewing gum. She flung the gum in the stove and resumed her stance, straightened her skirts, and folded her hands before her. So they could see she was on top of things, or at least Pearl.
Little Britches cleared her throat noisily. When the superintendent and the assistant had turned on us, they’d turned their backs on her. She didn’t like it. They looked back and noticed her for the first time, small in the big chair. Her nose just cleared teacher’s desk. Her hair was in sausage curls because this wasn’t just any day. She looked up beady-eyed at them.
“Well then, little lady,” Mr. Whipple boomed, “what might you be doing sitting in the teacher’s place?”
“Heppin’ her.”
“And I take it this is your first year of school.”
“Yep.”
“And what is your name?”
“Beulah Bradley,” Little Britches said.
“And how old are you?”
“A lady don’t—”
“Tell them,” Tansy said.
“Six.”
“And do you know your letters yet?” T. Bernard Whipple hung over her, big as a house.
“G is for the gopher, digging in its burrow,” Little Britches remarked. “H is for the patient horse, plowing in its furrow.”
Beside me, Glenn nodded in agreement. “Ah,” said the superintendent. “Can you put the letters together into words?”
Little Britches took up her complimentary writing pad from The Overland Automobile Company and began making big letters with her complimentary pencil. Her tongue escaped the side of her mouth as she labored. At last she held up the pad. It read:
SEE THE FAT MAN
We stirred, but nobody dared break silence. Tansy looked aside. Mr. Owen’s jaw trembled. He spoke suddenly. “You are a regular scholar, Beulah. In two or three years you’ll be learning your multiplication tables.”
“Six eights are forty-eight,” Little Britches mentioned.
Mr. Owen stared down at her. “You know your multiplication tables already?”
“Twelve twelves are a hundred and forty-four,” Little Britches pointed out.
Mr. Whipple simmered. His ears burned red against his pink head. “Miss Culver, the child is only in first grade. The multiplication tables don’t come until—”
“I am here to help her learn,” Tansy said, “not to keep her from it. She is the brightest button in the box, and what the others learn, she picks up.”
The superintendent jabbed a note on his form with his pencil. He looked out upon us for another victim. We rode low in our desks. The capital of Missouri is Jefferson City, I drilled in my head in case I’d get geography. I was wracking my brain for Oregon when the hard Whipple eye fell on me. But it bounced back and forth between me and Charlie and then jumped to Glenn.
Glenn. The superintendent had gone from the youngest of us to the oldest, from the smartest to the—
“Young man, you look of an age to have profited by a good deal of schooling.”
Glenn just sat there.
“Come down here and demonstrate what you know.”
We all stared at the floor. Tansy too. What schooling Glenn had mastered wasn’t going to detain us long. He came out of the desk, long-legged, fully grown. The black rags of his ruined shirt clung to his heavy shoulders. He started down to the superintendent.
But on his way, Glenn swung past the wall and grabbed up teacher’s broom. Was he going to sweep out the place? My head swam.
Down front, Glenn swiped at the ceiling with the broom, and the mud daubers’ nest broke loose from the rafter and fell into his hands. Stray bits of nest hung in the air and settled on the superintendent’s bald dome.
“This here’s science,” Glenn said, and broke open the nest with his big hands. It fell apart on teacher’s desk, and Little Britches peered into it. The mud daubers’ nest was untenanted. The wasps had long ago grown and flown. But here was where they’d started out life.
“See these here cells like a comb of honey?” Glenn pointed them out. “The mother mud dauber lays an egg or two in ever’ one of them cells. Then she goes to work and stings a spider with her pizen. She don’t kill that spider, but she stuns it. Then she sticks that spider in the cell with the egg and shuts it up tight. As the eggs hatch, they’ve got plenty of spider meat to feed them on. And that’s how the mud dauber wasp starts out life.”
We were all silenced by this knowledge. It wasn’t school-learning from Tansy, of course. All she knew about the life of the mud dauber, she’d just now learned. But Glenn was a country boy. Few of nature’s ways were mysteries to him. On the other hand, the superintendent and the assistant were town men. Rockville.
“You learned that at school?” the superintendent inquired.
Glenn shrugged. “Where else?”
“Well, I am glad to see that the study of natural science is not neglected,” Mr. Whipple admitted. “But, son, tell me this. Why do you look so surprised? Didn’t you know we were coming?”
“I ain’t surprised, mister,” Glenn replied. “I just don’t have no eyebrows.” He turned back to his seat, and we all heaved with relief.
That was just before T. Bernard Whipple’s gaze fell on Flopears.
I was myself pretty near the end of my rope now. It didn’t seem fair. If there was anybody worse to call on than Glenn, it was—
“Boy,” Superintendent Whipple barked, “what’s your long suit?”
“Who, me?” Flopears pointed to himself. “My what?”
“Come down here and show us what you have mastered. I take it you’re not another scholar of the mud dauber.”
“Of the what?” Flopears was stumped. He took up his complimentary notepad and wandered down to the rostrum.
Now Flopears, head hung, was there between the superintendent and the assistant. Tansy stood back, pity in her eyes, and dread.
“Well, son, tell us. What are you best at, numbers or letters?”
Flopears tried to think. “I
s them my only choices?” He flipped open his notepad on teacher’s desk. “I reckon I like pictures best.”
The superintendent and the assistant bent over Flopears’s notebook. Little Britches too. Mr. Whipple turned to a new page. They all looked closer. Tansy drew nigh.
Then, somehow, we were all on our feet, drifting down to see what was on Flopears’s notebook pages.
They were pictures he’d drawn with his complimentary pencil. Pictures like we’d never seen. They ought to have been in frames. There was one of Aunt Fanny in the ditch and all of us trying to heave her out with the bell rope. And you could see it was Aunt Fanny, bigger than a church debt, and all of us. There was the big bow on the back of Pearl’s head. And Lester’s Buster Brown collar. And me back when I had eyebrows.
Mr. Owen turned a page, and there was a portrait of Tansy, and in one arm Little Britches with her face turned to Tansy’s bosom. And in Tansy’s other hand the garter snake, coiled with its tail hanging down.
“That’s me.” Little Britches poked a small finger at the page. “It was the time—”
“That we were studying natural history,” Tansy said. “Herpetology.”
Flopears had even done a scene of the first day of school, way back in August. We were all racing out of the schoolhouse, J.W. too, barking his fool head off. In the distance the boy’s privy blazed like a torch. You could just about smell it.
“Lightning,” me and Charlie said together.
You could have knocked us over with feathers. Flopears had captured us all in his notebook. And we were so real, we almost strolled off the page. We’d gotten him wrong. He wasn’t a dunce. He was an artist. According to these pages, he saw us all a good deal clearer than we’d ever seen him.
T. Bernard Whipple cleared his throat. “I am glad to know,” he said, “that the study of art has not been neglected.”
With that, the superintendent and his assistant folded up their forms and reached for their overcoats. It was done with, and there was no doubt in our minds but that Tansy had passed her trial. Another miracle, and a mercy too, since me and Lloyd never had to be called on. So there is some justice in this world, though not a lot.
