by Richard Peck
Chapter Seventeen
Grown and Flown
Of course these events took place years ago, long before your time. It was that year of 1904, when automobiles began to burn up the rural byways. The year airships like boxkites began to darken the skies, though they hadn’t found our patch of sky yet. The year my sister, Tansy, got her provisional teaching certificate.
“Well, I hope you’re satisfied now,” I dared tell her, with the kitchen table between us.
“Far from it,” she snapped back. She could snap with very little provocation, as you know. “Has it ever dawned on you that I undertook this entire enterprise to see you through to eighth-grade graduation, Russell Culver? Do you think I didn’t know you wanted to wander off to the Dakotas or some outlandish place? If I didn’t turn you around, who would? You have no more direction than a newborn calf, and less judgment. You’ll need that eighth-grade graduation certificate to get into Rockville High School.”
Had I heard her right? This was at Thanksgiving, so my head still rang like a belfry from the exploding stove.
“High school! Me? How many years would that take?”
“It takes the average pupil four years for a diploma,” Tansy calculated. “I’d think you could do it in six.”
“And what am I supposed to do with a high school diploma? It is nothing but a durned piece of paper.” I oozed outrage.
“You’ll need it to get into college,” Tansy said. She was very Teacher Tansy now, though we were at home, saved from school by Thanksgiving. “Purdue University, if they’ll have you.”
“College? And how long would that take? Another four years, I suppose.”
“At least,” Tansy murmured.
“What? You know I’m half deaf.”
“I said at least.”
“I’ll be an old man by then,” I said. “And why, Tansy? I ask you why?”
She leaned across the kitchen table at me. Somebody was coming up the back porch steps, maybe Aunt Maud, so Tansy spoke low and fast. She nearly had me by the throat. “I’ll tell you why, Russell Culver. Because it’s time you set some kind of example for Lloyd. It’s high time you stopped being little brother to me and started being big brother to him. He’d look up to you if there was anything to look up to. And remember this, mister: Everything you can get away with will be Lloyd’s burden. Every mistake you make will be his excuse.”
And that was it. She turned away, and my fate was sealed. I had to succeed now and do something with my life. What choice did I have?
Tansy was a teacher, make no mistake about it. Down to her toes. She was good and grew better. I’ll tell you how good. She not only got me through the eighth-grade graduation exam, she got Charlie Parr through too.
The Board of Education set great store by her. They were even willing to hire a substitute teacher and send her for a winter’s course at the normal school in Terre Haute. They forgot she hadn’t graduated from high school.
But somehow she never had the time to take off. One winter she was coaching Little Britches for the statewide spelling bee. Another winter she was helping Lester revise his “What Indiana Means to Me” essay for the county contest. It was always something, right up till she married and had to turn in her pointer. By then I was nearly through Rockville High School and looking at the catalog of courses from Purdue.
The twentieth century held some surprises for us all: the flicker of the motion pictures, the yammer of the radio, the mounting rumble of foreign wars, the jangle of change. Aunt Fanny Hamline held out against everything, unto the end. She died at a hundred and three, still hoping to take it all with her.
Dad and Aunt Maud lived long lives too, and felt the setting sun upon their faces. Though Aunt Maud had always maintained she was not long for this world, she outlived all her generation.
At her funeral, the mysterious poet who dwelt among us, the Sweet Singer of Sycamore Township, sang one last song.
When it was time for Aunt Maud’s funeral, we of the Methodist church had us a different Reverend Parr, Charlie. You never know who’s going to see the light. A pretty fair preacher Charlie turned out to be too, if you ask me. Better than his dad. The poem by the Sweet Singer that Charlie read out at Aunt Maud’s funeral went this way:
I seen but little of this world,
Except my corner of it;
The city never drew me,
For I knew I could not love it.
What I loved best was watching
The garden getting ripe
And a pouch of sweet tobacco
And my old cob pipe.
What I loved best was a harvest moon
Before a frosty morn
And lamplight in the barn lot
And them long, straight rows of corn.
I was plain and country;
That’s where it starts and ends,
But nobody loved her family more,
Nor treasured more her friends.
I loved the changing seasons,
And looking for life’s reasons,
And honey in the comb,
and home.
And so the Sweet Singer sang one final time to us, from the hereafter. For the Sweet Singer had been Aunt Maud herself.
With the educations Tansy made me and Lloyd get, we went out into the world—back east to the great boom of the big city, the topless towers of Indianapolis. There we went to seek our fortunes and find our futures.
Floyd Lumley found his way to Indianapolis too, as you know from the cartoons he drew for the Indianapolis Star newspaper in his famous career. And you’ll recall how in the fullness of time Lester Kriegbaum became President of Indiana University and married the Dean of Women.
Both Floyd and Lloyd married Indianapolis wives: strictly city girls who’d gone to Butler University and bobbed their hair.
After we were all married, we went back home to Sycamore Township a good deal, especially in the fall of the year, when that particular world turns gold. We’d get together to laugh and live over the old days when we and the twentieth century were young: Floyd and Lloyd and Lester and their wives, Charlie and Pearl Parr, me and Beulah, Tansy and Glenn.
This book is dedicated to my mother, who entered first grade in a one-room country schoolhouse in the fall of 1912.
And to the memory of my dad, a former country boy dressed in town clothes, when my mother took him home to introduce him to the Leadills and all the country neighbors of my future grandfather, on butchering day.
My dad was a more successful suitor than Eugene Hammond, who vanishes, unchosen, from this story into the urbanity of Terre Haute and the technology of the internal combustion engine.
