The audience was not prepared for levity, and missed the attempt entirely.
“These questions were developed by the State of Kansas,” Margaret continued, “and will give you a clear idea of what your children are learning. Now, here’s the first question on the exam: Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.”
Margaret paused for emphasis, and to let the parents think about the question. But most of the fathers in the room, still having nightmares about questions they couldn’t answer in grade school, thought she might be waiting for one of them to stand up and answer. They started slumping on their benches, pressing closer together, and looking at the floor. All the repressed fears of being called upon as a boy suddenly resurfaced, striking a resentful anger.
“She isn’t going to make us answer, is she?” Ed Garvey whispered to Jay Langston.
“Who does she think she is?”Jay responded, suddenly thinking this teacher was not someone he wanted to tangle with, in spite of her curls.
“Let’s turn to geography,” Margaret said. “Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Manitoba, Hecia, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall, and Orinoco.”
Jay swore under his breath. “I know Denver and the Yukon,” he whispered. “The rest I never heard of.”
“Those will give you a hint as to how tough the test is,” Margaret concluded. “I think it will be a useful measure for achieving graduation.”
There was silence. The men breathed a sigh of relief that the possibility of questioning was over, and the women clasped their hands in their laps, a stern show of sympathy for the discomfort of their husbands. Only Mrs. Garvey offered support, smiling at Margaret and mouthing the word “good.”
“Thank you,” Margaret said, and took her seat beside Mr. Grimes.
Chapter Five
Easy Tucker pulled his wheat wagon, led by two dappled mares, onto the scales at the Garvey Mill, tied the reins to the front of the buckboard seat, and jumped to the ground. The horses were sweating from the pull, and Easy swatted aimlessly at the large flies circling their haunches. He patted the left horse’s front shoulder to let him know the trip was over, then waved to Ed Garvey’s shadow in the window of the elevator.
The August morning sun cast a glare in the window, so Easy couldn’t be sure whether it was Garvey senior or junior behind the scales. He opened the door with a rush, befitting his celebratory mood, and hardly noticed the handful of men seated on benches around the room or leaning against the back wall.
“Hello, Ed,” Easy said. “This is the last of it. Got my boy out there plowing today.”
“Good to see you, Easy,” young Ed Garvey said. “The boys here were wondering if you’d be in this morning.”
Ed Tucker had farmed near Nickerly all his life. And as sure as weevils like the wheat, Ed liked the feel of cold hard cash for his crops.
The threshing machine was hardly out of the field before Easy had every scoop of wheat in the elevator and every dollar in the bank, not that he left it there long. His philosophy was that every year’s work earned him at least one extravagance, and this year he was planning on a new car.
Ed Garvey studied the scale before him, moved the weights to the far right, then jotted a figure on the back of a letter from the Kansas Grange.
“Easy,” Garvey said, “I suppose that horse and wagon outfit weighs the same as yesterday, or do we need to weigh it again?” In order to weigh the wheat, Garvey normally weighed the wagon fully loaded, emptied the wheat, then weighed the wagon empty, and subtracted the difference. It would save time just to use the weight of yesterday’s wagon, since presumably it hadn’t changed overnight, although Ed Garvey Jr. knew his father wouldn’t approve of this practice.
In addition to his love of cash, Easy Tucker had a number of eccentric qualities, including the fact that he could never remember anybody’s name. He had no trouble with numbers or places, and he had done pretty well through the seventh grade, which was as far as his family let him go, but he couldn’t always tell you Ed Garvey’s name, even though he sat beside Ed all seven of those educational years. It was very embarrassing, and more than a little frustrating, and so he got to calling everybody by an all-purpose nickname of one kind or another. This was a perfect solution because every man in Nickerly had a nickname, from Cavity Ben Johnson who had no teeth and was called Cav, to Red Romberger who had bright red hair and freckles. Easy Tucker hit on a solution to his problem when one day he accidentally called his best friend Lucky, and it worked—Ed Garvey responded. From then on, Easy Tucker simply called everyone either Easy, Lucky, or Speedy. When his friends realized what he was doing, they mockingly started to call him Easy. The name stuck.
Ed Garvey calculated the weight of the wheat, opened the dark green accounts book, and made an entry for Easy Tucker. His right hand followed a strip of leather from his belt to his pocket, where it dislodged a key that opened the wooden cash drawer beneath the table. Ed counted out the cash into Easy’s right hand and said, “Thanks for your business, Mr. Tucker.”
Jay Langston, leaning against the iron stove in the middle of the room, watched and waited for the transaction to take place. Business was business. Then he piped up, “Easy, you gonna buy a car with that money?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “No matter. That money will be gone by Christmas anyway.”
“No, it won’t,” Easy said. “No, it won’t.” But Easy knew it might. He was usually broke and begging for a loan by Easter. Most families, like the Reverend Aaron and Ivy, sold a little of their wheat in August for cash to buy school clothes or a new roof for the house, but kept the lion’s share in a granary to be traded for flour during the winter. Every month Aaron would take a load of wheat to the mill and trade it for two 48-pound bags of flour. Ivy would bake all of her breads, pies, cakes, pancakes, and biscuits for the month out of these two bags. Most farmers husbanded their resources this way so that no matter what else happened, the family always had food. Not Easy. He said he wanted his money to grow, at 1percent in the bank. Unfortunately, he seldom left it there long enough to benefit from his financial strategy.
“I bet you take that money right down to the dance hall, take a fling around the floor when Mrs. Tucker isn’t looking, and lose the whole pile,” Jay shouted so all could hear. The other farmers chuckled, until they noticed that Easy wasn’t smiling.
Easy had a quick temper, or at least that was his reputation; few of the men at Garvey’s had actually seen him angry. Easy was built like a block of cedar, with a square face and large forehead and one peculiar feature: he had no nose, at least not that you could see. His nose looked like a bite of pancake from the front. It was so flat against his face that sometimes people would work their way around to his profile just so they could see if he really had a nose. The story went that one year at the county fair, Easy was stopped near the sheep pens by a complete stranger who asked if he really had a nose. Startled, Easy stepped back from the stranger as if stung by a bee. Then he realized that several folks had heard the question and had stopped to look. Easy felt the blood rushing up through his shoulders and past his collar. Then he turned slightly away from the stranger, lifted his right fist, and sent it with slingshot velocity right onto the man’s nose. The nose flattened with a crunch, sending blood flying in all directions. People ran, screaming and shouting that Easy Tucker had gone mad. Satisfied that now there were at least two people in the world with a pancake nose, Easy found Mrs. Tucker over by the baked goods exhibits and took her home without saying a word. The joke around the community was: If you make fun of Easy Tucker, you soon look like Easy Tucker. So the men at Garvey’s Mill let the matter of money drop.
Hank Simpson, who ran a bakery on Nickerly’s Main Street, had dropped by to join the boys for a bottle of pop. Usually, a small group of farmers gathered at his shop in the afternoon, especially on rainy days when they couldn’t work in the fields. Rainy days were set aside for stocking up at the hardware and dry goods store
s. On nice days, when business was slow, Hank left the store to Mrs. Simpson and wandered on down to the mill.
“Easy,” Hank said, “you better keep that boy plowing noon and night ’cause it’s almost time for school. Another two weeks and you lost him to that Chambers girl.”
“Not if my wife has her way,” Easy said. “She says the new teacher has been showing more than ankle to that oldest Swenson boy.”
Club Wilson spoke up from the end of the bench, “I think that Chambers girl is a bird. You touch her and she’ll fly away so fast.”
Club Wilson’s family owned more land in Nickerly County than anyone, thousands of acres by some accounts, with teams of draft horses that could plow twenty acres a day, and barbed wire fences running along stone posts for uninterrupted miles. They also owned the quarry that produced the limestone for all the buildings in town and the fence posts around the farms. Hundreds of men were employed by the Wilson Quarry. They set the dynamite charges and drilled the holes for spacers that would crack the stone open like peanut brittle, not always perfectly straight but close enough for construction purposes. The Wilsons probably had more money than the Garveys, but it hardly showed, mostly because the Wilsons kept to themselves. Club broke his leg in high school, playing football in a pick-up game one evening after class, and hobbled around in a leg cast for nearly six weeks. After the cast was removed, his friends started calling him Club because he tended to drag one foot. The name stuck long after all evidence of the broken leg had disappeared. In fact, most folks no longer remembered how Club got his name in the first place.
“I don’t think she’s so much,” Club said rather sheepishly. “Too tall for me.”
“Not too tall for Talmage Grimes,” Jay broke in. “I hear she slips over to Mt. Pleasant ever so often for a little lesson sharing.”
Joe Tanner hadn’t said anything because the conversation seemed so meaningless. But he could feel the group stirring with uneasiness as the subject turned to women. He had been involved with a girl once, nearly ten years ago when he was nineteen, and she had told him she loved him, just before she ran off with one of the boys from the quarry.
“I’m leaving,” Joe said, standing up. “I got no use for women of any kind. Trust in the Lord, I say, ’cause He’s the only one that won’t leave you when you need Him.” Joe walked through the group and out the door. His departure quieted them for only a moment.
“This is a serious matter,” Easy said. “It’s our kids going to that school. No telling what that Chambers girl is teaching them. She don’t go to church. Her folks don’t go to church. And you can ask Johnny Hargrove what her mother is like.”
A general silence fell over the room as the men considered this new accusation. If this was a call to action, it was slow to be recognized. But Easy had put a question before the group that required a response, and Club was the first to offer a rational solution: “If you boys want to get rid of her, why not just have the school board fire her?” he said. “You guys run the school.”
“No, we don’t,” Ed Garvey interrupted. “My mother does and she loves that Chambers girl. I’m not sure she’s so bad anyway. I don’t believe half that stuff they say about her.”
“Maybe you don’t believe it ’cause you don’t want to,” Joe said.
“That’s crazy,” Ed said. “I don’t like it any better than you if she’s corrupting the morals of our kids.”
“Hell,” Club added, “she’s been to college. You know she’s trying to talk those kids into leaving Nickerly County. First thing you know, we won’t have anybody to work the fields or the quarry. We won’t be good enough for our own kids.”
“Boys, I’ve known her family all my life,” Piney Woods offered. “The Chambers live just up the road. They may not be God-fearing people, but they aren’t evil. We can’t get her fired.”
“Piney,” Club said, “I heard your wife just the other day tell you to stay away from that Chambers girl. Just as you went into the hardware store.”
Piney was embarrassed. He was as tall as a pine tree, with a long face and coal-black hair that lay across his head like wet seaweed. Because he didn’t seem to have any hips, his pants were hitched high, and cinched tight. He wore wire-rim glasses that his grandfather had left him. The glasses had helped Piney, his father, and his father before him through at least three grades of school. They should have been replaced long ago, but since the diagnosis was the same for all three generations of men—they couldn’t see the windmill in the cow pasture—they were passed down from one generation of Woods to the next. The remarkable thing was that the glasses survived three generations, unbroken and with only a few deep scratches, even though Piney’s face was so narrow and his ears so small that the glasses kept slipping off his nose.
Despite his homely appearance, Mrs. Woods loved Piney with a passion, and she suspected most other women of secretly sharing her sentiment. Ever since the first Literary, when she caught Piney staring at Margaret Chambers during the introductions, she had imagined a spark of interest between them. Of course, there was no such illicit romance between her husband and the schoolteacher. But jealousy is a passion of its own making. The more Mrs. Woods thought about the possibility of someone else sharing her Piney, the more certain she became that something had to be done to stop Margaret Chambers.
Piney dismissed his wife’s concerns as so much women’s talk, but he did notice a new attentiveness in Mrs. Woods, and when she had touched his leg three nights in a row, it occurred to him that her preoccupation with Margaret Chambers might not be such a bad thing.
“Oh, Mrs. Woods is always saying that,” Piney said. “She says there’s something going on with that Swenson boy. Now that ain’t right. God’s hand will fall hard on any teacher that takes a boy. I find it hard to believe.”
John Buckhorn sat quietly through the discussion, mainly because he had never heard any of these accusations before. He was single, lived alone in his family’s home on the edge of Nickerly, and had known Margaret Chambers all his life. Indeed, he probably knew Margaret better than anyone at the mill, and he did not recognize the picture they were painting.
“John,” Ed said, “do you think we could run her out of town, get her to leave on her own?”
“What?” John asked. “What are you talking about? Why would she leave?”
“What if we told her to leave?” Ed said. “Just told her we don’t approve of her carrying on, told her to get out.”
“You mean scare her?” John asked.
“Sure,” Ed said. “Let’s tar and feather her.”
The theme for this month’s meeting of the women’s Civic Improvement Association was blueberry pie and family history. Each member would bring a pie recipe and an old family photo. The recipes would be shared and written down, while the pictures would lead the family history discussions. Tiny Tucker, Easy’s wife, opened the meeting with a prayer.
“Dear Heavenly Father,” she began, “thank you for another month of blessings in which our community has prospered. We have reaped the rewards of your attention to our needs, and we pray that we may be worthy of your goodness.”
Tiny was making an effort to keep her prayer short. She had been accused in the past of rambling in her pleas to the Lord, and while no one wanted to be critical of this most sacred conversation with God, Tiny had opened her eyes once during her prayer at the meeting two months ago and saw that Heneretta Woods, Piney’s wife, was fast asleep, a fact Tiny took as personal criticism. Tiny was angry with Heneretta for weeks, but at the next meeting she did shorten her opening prayer, and today she would try to be particularly succinct.
“Lord,” she began, “as we bless you for this bountiful harvest, we also beseech you to deliver our community from the demons among us, raise our hearts above the mundane affairs of the world, and allow our eyes to shine on the goodness of the Lord. Lead us, Heavenly Father, onto the paths of righteousness, for there are those among us who threaten our families and our children. Hold
us close to your heart, oh Lord, as we struggle against the devil and his disciples.”
Tiny could hear some shuffling among the seven members of the club present, but she kept her eyes firmly closed. “Dear Father, our children today are threatened by dark and sinister forces,” she continued. “Soon they will begin school again and every day face the dangers of worldly sin. Help them, oh Lord, to resist temptation, and help us, oh Lord, to rise up and throw off the sinners, to lift the demon from our midst, to support those who would rid our community of the infestation that plagues our youth, and give us the strength to stand and be counted for the Lord. I ask in Jesus’ name, Amen.”
The women of the association opened their eyes and said nothing. They stared at Tiny as if she had lost her senses. Tiny looked around the room, feeling that some explanation was necessary, but not wanting to acknowledge that she might be alone in her antipathy for Margaret Chambers.
“All right,” Tiny said, “who wants to read her recipe first?”
Tiny was intimidating. Her dress was long and gray, reaching to the floor, and tied with a drawstring about the neck. Her body was completely protected from intrusion by the most heavily starched costume in Nickerly. Her face was a landmark, as strong as stone, vaguely like a bronze bust that seemed too big for its pedestal. She had a long and slightly hooked nose that implied Roman ancestry, large brown eyes covered by dark hoods of eyebrows that suggested a manliness of character. She ran the Tucker family with an iron hand, making sure that Easy was involved in every farmers’ organization in the county. She understood the power of information and organization, and even supported the women’s suffrage movement, although this was not a subject for public discussion in Nickerly. Tiny had sent a check for three dollars to the Topeka organizers of a protest march for women’s right to vote, although she never told Easy she did it.
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