Losing Battles (39 page)

“You copy who you love,” Aunt Beck said.

“Unless you can get them to copy you,” said Gloria. “But when I was young, Miss Julia filled me so full of inspiration, I even dreamed I’d pass her. I looked into the future and saw myself holding a State Normal diploma, taking the rostrum and teaching civics in high school,” she told Judge Moody. “I’d keep on making the most of my summers, and finish as the principal. I always thought I’d wind up in Ludlow.”

“Well, Jack wound up in Ludlow, and I can’t say much for it,” said Miss Beulah.

“Miss Julia undertook it, and she wanted me to undertake it after her—a teacher’s life,” said Gloria. She sat up as tall as she could in the middle of them, her face solemn as a tear drop, her head well aflame in the western light. “Her dearest wish was to pass on the torch to me.”

“The torch?” asked Etoyle, dancing closer.

“What she taught me, I’d teach you, and on it would go. It’s what teachers at the Spring Teachers’ Meeting call passing the torch. She didn’t ever doubt but that all worth preserving is going to be preserved, and all we had to do was keep it going, right from where we are, one teacher on down to the next.”

“And the poor little children, they had to pay,” said Aunt Nanny.

“Anybody at all that would come to her wanting to learn, she’d welcome a chance at them,” said Gloria. “They didn’t have to be a child.”

“Who’re you starting to take up for, girl?” Aunt Nanny cried, to tease her.

Uncle Noah Webster laughed. “Didn’t there use to be a story that she even tried to teach Captain Billy Bangs? He come up like Granny in the bad years after the war, and in his case never got any schooling from his mother.”

Gloria said, “She liked to say, ‘If it’s going to be a case of Saint George and the Dragon, I might as well battle it left, right, front, back, center and sideways.’ ”

“I’m glad Banner School didn’t hear about that,” said Miss Beulah. “Or me either, while I was one of her scholars. I’d had to run from a dragon, though that’s about the only thing.”

“She was Saint George,” Gloria corrected her. “And Ignorance was the dragon.”

“Well, if she sent you to high school and coached you in the meanwhiles, and was fighting your way to a diploma from Normal for you, she must have come mighty near to thinking you was worth it, Gloria,” Aunt Beck said in comforting tones as she searched the young girl’s face. “A heap of times, people sacrifice to the limit they can for nothing. But now and then there’ll be a good excuse behind it.”

“But the time came and I didn’t want her sacrifice,” Gloria said. “I’d rather have gone without it. And when the torch was about to be handed on to me for good, I didn’t want to take it after all.”

“For how long did you keep fooling yourself?” asked Aunt Cleo. “I don’t see many lines across your brow.”

“I finished Alliance High and crammed at Normal and studied in summer and took an exam and got my two-year certificate. Then I took Banner School to gain the experience to help earn the money to get back to Normal and win my diploma to keep on teaching—”

“And run bang into Jack Renfro,” said Aunt Nanny, with a strong pinch at her from behind.

“Wait, wait, wait!” little Elvie cried. “What’s Normal? Don’t skip it! Tell it!”

“It’s true, Gloria, you’re the only one in sight that’s been or is ever likely to go there,” said Aunt Birdie. “Put it in a nutshell for us.”

“Not enough of anything to go round, not enough room, not enough teachers, not enough money, not enough beds, not enough electric light bulbs, not enough books,” said Gloria. “It wasn’t too different from the orphanage.”

“Was it pretty?” begged Elvie.

“Two towers round as rolling pins made out of brick. On top of the right-hand one was an iron bell. And right under that bell in the tip-top room was where they put me. Six iron beds all pointing to
the middle, dividing it like a pie. When the bell rang, it shook us all like a poker in the grate,” said Gloria. “I can hardly remember anything about Normal now, except the fire drills.”

“Tell the fire drill!” cried Elvie.

“A black iron round thing four stories tall, like a tunnel standing on end, and a tin chute going round and round down through it,” said Gloria. “You have to jump in, stick your legs around the one in front and sit on her skirt and the next one jumps in on yours, and you all go whirling like marbles on a string, spinning on your drawers—they grease it with soap—round and round and round—it’s everybody holding on for dear life.”

“Do you come out in a somersault?” asked Elvie.

“You pray all the way down somebody will catch you. Then you stand up and answer to roll call.”

“I’m a-going,” said Elvie.

“It’s already too crowded,” said Gloria. “Just us giving the history teacher the kings of England was liable to bring the roof down, and we practiced gym outdoors. When it rained, the piano had to be rolled like a big skate right into the post office, that was the basement. While you were trying to dance the Three Graces for the gym teacher, everybody else stood in your path reading out loud from their mother’s letters and opening their food from home. We just had to dance around them.”

“Do it now!” said Elvie.

“I said I hoped never to be asked to do that dance again.”

“Didn’t you appreciate a good education being handed to you on a silver platter?” asked Miss Lexie Renfro with a sharp laugh.

“There was too much racket,” said Gloria. “Too big a crowd.”

“Oh, but didn’t you love it?” Mrs. Moody broke in. “A bunch of us in Ludlow still get in the car and go back there every spring to see ’em graduate.”

“Come and see me!” Elvie invited her. “That’s where I’m going. I’m going to come out a teacher like Sister Gloria.”

“You’ve got a mile to go,” Miss Lexie told her.

“Everybody was homesick, homesick, homesick,” Gloria said.

“Who was
your
letters from?” asked Ella Fay.

“Miss Julia Mortimer, telling me to make the most of it, because it comes your way only once,” said Gloria.

“That’s a fact,” said Mrs. Moody. “I majored in gym,” she
went on. “Led the school-wide wand drill. I still have my Zouave cap.” Judge Moody bent a surprised look on her. “
Ta-ta ta da!
” She gave him back a bar of the
Hungarian Rhapsody
. “Then I had to go forth and teach Beginning Physics. That’s what they were all starved for.”

“I can’t hardly wait,” said Elvie.

“For right now, you start getting busy with the fly swatter,” Miss Beulah told her.

“So here came Gloria to take her turn at Banner School, and she run bang into Jack, only to have Miss Julia herself to face. I declare, Gloria!” Aunt Birdie exclaimed. “I wish you had the power of the Beechams to draw us a picture. I’d dearly loved to have been hiding behind the door the day you broke it to Miss Julia Mortimer you was leaving the schoolhouse and becoming a married woman.”

Gloria rose to her feet from the baby-rocker. Aunt Nanny reached out and caught the baby.

“It’s a sweet little story, I know,” said Aunt Beck.

“Nobody’s listening but we women,” Aunt Nanny said. “The men are all about ready to fall asleep anyway, Curtis is nodding, and Percy is already whittling to his heart’s content.”

“Tell it. Maybe we can help you,” said Aunt Birdie.

Uncle Noah Webster reached his hand up the neck of the banjo, as the other hand stole to the strings and began to pluck out softly “I Had a Little Donkey and Jacob Was His Name,” without giving the tune its words.

“It was the last time I went across to see Miss Julia,” said Gloria. “It was Sunday before my reports were due, the first reports after spring planting. Her bank going up the road to her house was a sheet of white, all irises and pheasant-eye. We had tender greens and spring onions with our chicken. The Silver Moon rose was already out, there at the windows—”

“It’s about to pull the house down now,” said Miss Lexie.

“The red rose too, that’s trained up at the end of the porch—”

“That big west rose? It’s taken over,” nodded Miss Lexie.

“She’d filled the cut-glass bowl on the table,” said Gloria. “With red and white.”

“She didn’t cut ’em any longer,” Miss Lexie said, as if she were bragging on her. “The reds hung on the vine all over everything, and turned blue as bird-dog tongues.”

“Leave the child alone, Lexie. Nobody asked you to help tell,” said Aunt Birdie.

“I was sitting with her at the dining room table after dinner, under those frowning bookcases, and I had my report cards spread out all over the table, making them out.”

“Skip those!” cried Aunt Nanny.

“And I spilled her ink,” said Gloria. “And after we rescued the reports and mopped the table, I said, ‘Miss Julia, listen. Before I go back to Banner, I’ve got something to tell you that’ll bring you pain, and here it is. I may not ever be the wonderful teacher and lasting influence you are. There’s a boy pretty well keeping after me.’ And she said, ‘A Banner boy? Well, give me his name and age and the year I taught him, and I’ll see if I can point out an answer for you.’ ”

“Gloria, you’ve got her down perfect!” cried Aunt Birdie. “Go on!”

“So I handed her his report. ‘Still a schoolboy?’ she says. I told her he’d had to stay out of school and that’s why he was coming so late, and she’d never got to teach him. I said
I
taught him and that was half my trouble, because I couldn’t run from him. She said, ‘I’m looking right now at who he is, and I see exactly your trouble. I’ll go over a few questions with you.’ ”

“Poor Gloria!” breathed Aunt Beck.

“She said, ‘In the first place, how did you get him to start back to school, once he was loose?’ I told her, ‘I let him be the one to drive the school bus.’ She said, ‘What way did you find to get him to study his lessons? Though it seems to have done little good.’ I told her by asking him to run up my flag, cut and saw my wood, and keep up my stove so the whole school wouldn’t either freeze us or burn us down, and watch my leaks and my windows and doors so we wouldn’t have a chance to float out of sight or all get blown away. And he’s studying between times before he knows it.’ She said how did I keep him with open book on pretty days? I said, ‘On pretty days, I might be driven to keeping him in after school.’ I said, ‘After he carries the children home to their mothers, he turns the bus around and sails back. He washes my boards and beats my erasers and sweeps my floor and cuts my switches and burns my trash and grinds my pencils and pours my ink, and takes down my flag—and all the time I’m right behind him, teaching him.’ She says, ‘After that, how do you make sure he doesn’t forget it the minute you
finish?’ I said, ‘He carries me home. And I live at their house. We have all the evening,’ I said.”

“Go on,” said Aunt Nanny. “Don’t stop and dream on us.”

“Miss Julia said, ‘And what about now, after the seed’s in the ground and before the crops are laid by? How far away from school is he now?’ And I told her how even now he was still coming to run up my flag and salute it with me and coming back to help me home in the evenings. And on the days he missed all the recitations, I had that much more to catch him up on. When I saw the very most of Jack, I told her, it seemed like those were the same days when I had to take off from his attendance and mark him an absence from school. I told her the family was still trying to scrape a living from this old farm, the circle still unbroken, nine mouths to feed, and he’s the oldest boy.”

“Well, and just who is that, now, that you’re making sound so pitiful?” cried Miss Beulah, still being everywhere at once, as if she’d be too busy to sit down to listen to foolish chatter.

“Did she say she’d love to meet him?” asked Aunt Beck.

“She didn’t think that was necessary,” Gloria said. “I tried telling her she’d never laid eyes on Jack. ‘Scholastic average 72, attendance 60, and deportment 95 is a pretty clear picture to me of the two of you,’ she said. ‘You’ve awarded him a general average of 75 and two-thirds.’ I said, ‘And 75 is passing.’ ‘Passing so far,’ she says. ‘Is he going to be present on examination day and sit down and take those seventh-grade examinations? Remember, I’m the one who made those examinations out.’ ‘He’ll take ’em if I have anything to do with it!’ I told her. ‘And win his diploma?’ And I tell her I’ve already got his diploma filled out—all but for the Superintendent’s signature and the gold seal. ‘Miss Julia, I’m going to hang onto Jack and pull him through. And as soon as he gets his feet on solid ground, I’m going to marry him.’ ‘Marry him?’ she said.”

“Did she appear satisfied?” Aunt Birdie asked, nodding Gloria ahead. “And tell you to go on, keep a-courting?”

“Exactly the opposite,” said Gloria. “ ‘Marry him! And leave Banner School without its teacher?’ she says. And she jumped right up and it shook the china closet behind her, and said, ‘Oh, you can’t do that!’ ”

Aunt Nanny slapped her lap, on either side of the baby, and Aunt Birdie’s high giggle led the laughing.

“She said, ‘It’s a thoroughly unteacherlike thing to do,’ ” Gloria
went on. “She said, ‘Instead of marrying your pupil, why can’t you stick to your guns and turn yourself into a better teacher and do him and the world some good?’ ”

There was a fresh burst of womanly laughter, and along with that and the tickling notes of the banjo, one low groan from a man joined in—it could only have come from Judge Moody.

“I wonder what Miss Gloria
won’t
decide to tell us,” remarked Miss Beulah. “Something’s happened somewhere to loosen her tongue.”

“Keep on, Gloria! Gloria, I declare! After all the good excuse you’d put up!” cried Aunt Birdie. “Could you still go her one better?”

“I told her I wanted to give all my teaching to one,” Gloria said. And as they sat silenced, she added, “That’s when she laughed at me.”

“You can’t stand that,” said Miss Beulah. “No, not from anybody, not you.”

“Did you wilt?” asked Aunt Nanny.

Gloria’s eyelids dropped shut and trembled. Then she went on. “Miss Julia said my story was one that had been heard of before now. She said I wasn’t the first teacher in Creation to be struck down by tender feelings the first day I threw school open and saw one face above all the rest out in front of me. She said teachers falling in love with their first pupils was old at the Flood. But it didn’t give them any certificate to stop teaching.”