The Teacher's Funeral (11 page)

T
hat Friday morning Mr. George Keating, the mailman, had another parcel for school, a big one. He delivered it straight into the classroom and stayed on to see what was in it.

We were doing numbers, so everybody was ready to stop, including Tansy. We unwrapped it and saved the string. Then we looked down into the box at the top of a human head. When we got it out, it was a plaster bust of The Great Emancipator, President Abraham Lincoln, finished like bronze. We oh-ed and ah-ed and read out the inscription on the pedestal:

IF THERE'D BEEN MOTORCARS,
HE'D HAVE DRIVEN ONE OF OURS

C
OMPLIMENTS OF

THE
O
VERLAND
A
UTOMOBILE
C
OMPANY

T
ERRE
H
AUTE
—I
NDIANAPOLIS

I glanced at Tansy standing back. She was a shade pinker.

The bust of President Lincoln would bring great dignity to our library shelf. But when we got it out of the box, something else was wedged in the bottom. Pearl grabbed for it. She unwrapped it and shrugged. It was just a baseball, which had nothing to do with her.

Glenn had it then, and held it up. It was snow white with red stitching. Regulation.

Our hearts turned over. We'd never been this close to a real baseball. Our only baseballs were the ones we made, ourselves, pig leather stuffed with horsehair and stitched at home. They were never round. They neither bounced nor rolled. And they never lasted.

The ball, the only really perfect thing in the world, rested in Glenn's cupped palm. Lester gazed up at it in awe. Flopears came close to comprehending. There was a lump in Lloyd's throat. I saw through a blur of tears. The ball was naturally stamped: “Compliments of the Overland Automobile Company.”

“I suppose this means immediate recess,” Tansy said.

Mr. George Keating stayed on to play a round of catch with us. Pearl sat up on the hitching rail, retying her hair bow. But the rest of us took part. Tansy too, to see that we'd roll the ball to Little Britches for her turn. Playing catch was enough for now. We couldn't play a real ball game, and we hadn't gotten to Four-Cornered Cat yet. For now it was enough to feel that baseball, still white and perfect, slide into your hand like it was coming home, to see the arc of it against the dark blue sky. To feel the throw in your shoulder.

These were perfect moments, and they passed.

Though on in years, Mr. Keating had a stylish windup and follow-through. But he remembered he had mail to deliver and went on his way. We'd pushed recess to its limits. As quick as Tansy got the ball, she'd call time and lead us back to learning.

So Charlie and Glenn set up a back-and-forth between themselves. We didn't have ball gloves, so you heard the smack of the ball in the heel of the hand. It got louder. The ball was a blur between them now. Charlie was redder in the face. Glenn's upper arm strained and glistened.

Then it all went wrong, which is the way it was heading all along. Glenn threw a little wild and caught Charlie's guard down. The ball glanced off his right temple, popped up, and bounced off the schoolhouse wall behind him.

Charlie swayed, stunned. Then he took out after Glenn, springing like a panther across the yard. Dust rose behind him. Glenn had just time to make that come-and-get-me gesture with both hands. Then they were squaring off, but not throwing punches yet. You fought fairer in those days. You not only had to keep your chin down, you had your good name to think about.

Tansy grabbed up Little Britches to enfold her, but that seemed all she could think to do.

Charlie swung. He was longer in the arm, and his fist connected with Glenn's stubbled jaw.

“That's for the puff adder,” Charlie yelled out. They were nose to nose now.

“You crazy fool,” Glenn growled. “What are you talkin' about?”

“And that's for the plank—”

But Glenn brought a left hook out of nowhere. It laid Charlie's nose sideways, though he was still standing.

“Why would I do them things?” Glenn hollered at him.

“Why?” Charlie worked around to swing again. “To make yourself the big hero.”

“Whose big hero?” Glenn ducked and danced.

“Tansy's hero.”

The world stopped dead to listen. Even Pearl. Tansy turned Little Britches's face to her skirts.

Glenn had stuck the puff adder in the drawer and sawed the plank to be Tansy's hero? Why did he want to—

“You didn't figure the plank would hold till Aunt Fanny got on it.” The blood gushed from Charlie's nose. “You lurked around, hopin' to lift Tansy out of the ditch just like you grabbed the snake out of the drawer,
where you put it
. Big hero!” They'd both forgotten to fight. Charlie was up in Glenn's face. “Tarbox trash.”

That did it. Glenn sprang. He was shorter in the arm, but pure gristle. Down they went, rolling in the dirt, throwing punches like a piston engine gone haywire. Dust whipped into a fog. Charlie and Glenn were a frenzy of flailing elbows and kicking heels and the sounds of smacking.

The rest of us stood there, up on our hind trotters, watching. Though it was none of my put-in, I edged around to Tansy. “They can't keep this up,” I said, but they did, seemed like forever. At last they both fell back, not a punch left in either one of them.

Little Britches was scared and crying. Tansy set her aside and walked over to the two sprawling figures and gave them both good, swift kicks.

“Get over to the pump, the pair of you,” she said, “and put your heads under it.”

But they couldn't move for the moment.

“Either that,” Tansy's voice spiraled up, “or I'll…turn you in to Aunt Fanny and tell her you're both stealing from her.”

Still they stayed put, though when one sat up, the other one did too.

“You're neither one heroes to me,” Tansy said while we all listened. “Far from it, you lummoxes. You're nothing in this world but…half-witted…half-wild…Hoosier…hicks.”

Tragedy struck then. Tears spilled and streamed down Tansy's face, though she threw back her head to stem their flow. The sobs came then, faster than she could swallow. A teacher dares not cry, not a real teacher. Tansy looked in her hands for the cowbell, but it wasn't there. “Go on,” she said in a broken voice. “Clean yourselves up.”

Charlie limped to his feet, but said, “I ain't goin' nowhere.” His shirtfront was red with blood. He held up a hand swelling already. You could tell from here that he'd broken it. He'd broken his hand on a rock-hard Tarbox jaw.

He looked up at me through a closing eye and repeated himself. “I ain't goin' nowhere.”

And there was but one thing I understood. Me and Charlie weren't lighting out for the Dakotas after all. All my dreams were dust, and maybe Tansy's too.

We cut hay all that Saturday, me and Dad. I'd meant to give him a good day's work anyway, when I thought it would be my last. So that part was the same.

I couldn't handle the Dakotas on my own, and I cursed a fate that knocked out Charlie at just the wrong moment. Was this the kind of luck I had ahead of me from here on? I was low in my mind and supposed Dad didn't notice.

Lloyd spent the day down at the barn. He was raising a calf by hand on skim milk. It was the kind of foolish, farmerish enterprise that appealed to him. I wouldn't have had the patience.

He was coaching the calf to drink from a pail. And a calf is dumber than a pig. The calf would get the pail wallering around on the ground and spill half the milk out. Then it'd get its nose in too far and start drowning. Then it'd throw its head and snort milk in every direction and all over Lloyd.

Why anybody would want a day like that, I couldn't tell you. But Dad let Lloyd off to have it.

The hay we were cutting was to feed the cattle through the winter when they couldn't get out to pasture. Dad thought we might get three cuttings out of the first bottomlands. He always knew when to cut the hay when it had the most milk in it, as we put it in those days.

Little was said at supper. Tansy and Aunt Maud had been canning preserves out of the last of the green zebra tomatoes. That smell hung heavy in the kitchen air. Tansy looked drawn and grim, brought close to hopeless about her teaching. I was trapped for life and never would get off the place. For once, Lloyd didn't have anything to say. If he was glad he wouldn't lose me to the Dakotas, he didn't mention it. I never had thought he looked up to me like he should.

Afterward, Dad told me to get the ladder, and we'd ride down to school to run the rope back up the bell tower. He'd cut and planed a new plank for over the ditch too.

There was only one minor mystery about the evening, as far as I could see. When they were clearing the table, Aunt Maud sent Tansy upstairs to “change.” Though whether Tansy was to change her mind or her dress, Aunt Maud didn't say.

Lloyd stayed down at the barn to have a talk with his calf. Me and Dad and J.W. headed off along the road to school behind Stentor, into the sunset. We took the buggy since it was only the three of us, and tied the ladder on the side.

We weren't long about our schoolhouse business. Dad never wasted time with extra talk. When we climbed back up in the buggy, we headed on down the Hog Scald Road, away from home. The light was fading. “Dad, are we going to look at a cow?”

He'd buy half-starved cattle off patch farmers, feed them out, and sell them on. But this was a peculiar time of day for it.

Dad said he thought we'd give Stentor a stretch and run on into Montezuma.

Montezuma? An hour each way, in the dark? But I didn't say anything. J.W. hunkered in my lap and snapped at lightning bugs. The thick dust of the road cushioned the buggy wheels. I fell into a daze. This is the road I'd meant to walk, later tonight, meeting up with Charlie. We'd have worn our winter suits under our overalls, with eats in our pockets. We'd have lit out.

I might have dozed off, because now you could see the lights of Montezuma as we came down the hill into it, and the black Wabash River beyond. I couldn't figure why we were here. Nothing would be open, and we didn't know anybody.

Stentor shied at the city lights and threw his tail. We thundered across a section of wood-block paving in front of the depot. Dad turned down a darker street that crossed the Monon tracks. A line of boxcars on a siding cast a long shadow. Down that way, campfires flickered, putting me in mind of going to the crick with Lloyd, and Charlie.

You could begin to see the shapes of human heads between here and the flames. We pulled up a little short of them. They were tramps, waiting for the freight that went through north in the middle of the night. Their bundles were piled around. They were cooking their mulligan over the fires. They may have been Dakota-bound.

One of them broke from the others and started for us. He was drunk, weaving in half circles, swinging a bottle. His other hand was out, wanting something from us. A growl rumbled low in J.W.'s throat. Dad reached for the whip socket, and the tramp turned back to the fire.

Figures, rough customers, slouched in the boxcar doors, smoking. Pinpoints of orange light glowed in their cupped hands. We sat on a while longer, just out of the firelight. It began to come to me why we were here. Dad knew, somehow. He knew this was the night I'd meant to light out, and he was showing me where I'd have gone. It wasn't like I'd pictured it, nor anywhere I wanted to be. But I'd have had Charlie along to—

“Charlie wasn't ever coming,” said Dad, who could evidently read minds.

“But, Dad, we had us a plan from way back, to—”

“Son, I think it was all your plan. Charlie had him a different one. I believe he's pursuing it right now back at our house. He's busier than a one-armed corn-shucker, trying to get back into Tansy's good graces after that dustup in the school yard. And who do you think it was gave her the cowbell, the first day of school?”

“You? Playing fair?”

“Charlie. Playing for himself,” Dad said. “And broken hand or no broken hand, he's not about to leave a clear field for Glenn Tarbox.”

“Glenn Tarbox? What—”

“Those boys are butting heads over Tansy.”

Tansy? My head swam. “But, Dad, why?”

Dad seemed to smile. “Son, if I have to explain that to you, we'll be here till morning.”

Dad turned Stentor away from the worrisome scene in the railroad yard. We headed on back the way we'd come, shoulder to shoulder in the crickety night. The schoolhouse bell tower was a shape against the starry sky before I knew where we were. As we stopped to get the ladder, I said, “Dad, I wouldn't have lived up all my wages, in the Dakotas. I'd have sent money back.”

And after a little while, he said, “I'd sooner have you home.”