The Teacher's Funeral (13 page)

After all, Eugene Hammond wasn't near as ignorant as your typical city person. From his butchering, he'd been a country boy. He gave good presents too. You couldn't fault him there. Thanks to him, we marched into school these mornings to John Philip Sousa strains. We no longer had to start the day with that dumb “We hail our pleasant school” song from Miss Myrt's time.

But handing Tansy off to Eugene Hammond didn't sit right with me. My thoughts were deep but confounded.

After noon dinner in a landscape of steaming innards, coiling sausage, and long pans of scrapple, Eugene Hammond was suddenly before us, drawing on his driving gloves, lowering his goggles.

“How would you fellows like a ride in an automobile, just a spin down as far as the schoolhouse and back?”

“Would I!” Lloyd sang out before I could put a lid on him.

Charlie held out a little longer. But when Eugene Hammond offered to let him crank the automobile with his good hand, Charlie caved in.

Since he'd gone over to the enemy, so to speak, what choice did I have but to follow?

T
he days grew shorter, along with Tansy's temper.

By now, we knew way more than we wanted to. We could tell you the capitals of countries nobody had ever heard of, and their principal exports. Even those of us whose mouths moved when we were reading our own names knew the multiplication table up through times twelve. Seemed like Tansy was looking high and low for any little leftover opening in our heads she could cram knowledge into. And with a heavy hand growing heavier.

Finally, I had a word with Dad. We were down with the pigs one time when I told him Tansy was getting intolerable, one of our Spelling School words. “Dad,” I said, “I wish to heaven your plan hadn't blown up in our faces.”

“What plan?” Dad was clipping needle teeth on the pigs, so I didn't have his full attention.

“Your plan to show up Eugene Hammond as a tenderfoot at the butchering,” I said to refresh his memory.

“Was that my plan?”

“Wasn't it?”

“In fact, it wasn't.” Dad gripped a snout. “I invited that young fellow to meet our neighbors in case Tansy was taking to him. It didn't surprise me he was a crack shot. And he mentioned to me himself that he'd come from a rural district over by Gas City, so I supposed he knew his way around a hog.”

“Dad,” I said, discouraged. “Were you playing fair again?”

“I was trying to,” he said. “Son, I've seen you confused before, many a time, but never more than now. If your sister's getting intolerable, why wouldn't you want Eugene Hammond to have her?”

Dad had found the flaw in my argument. I kicked a small hill of pig manure, saying, “Well, why can't she pick Charlie Parr? A fellow would like his sister to marry his best friend, and Charlie's good-hearted. I know he's not broke out with brains. If brains was dynamite, he couldn't blow his nose. But I personally don't think he puts himself forward enough.”

Dad pondered. At last he looked up from his task, saying, “I've just thought of a plan, and I think it'll work.”

I was all ears.

“Let's let nature take its course.”

Glenn Tarbox had helped me put up the school stove. He was still faithful in coming through Aunt Fanny's sugarbush grove every morning, though she'd threatened us all with sudden death if we trespassed. The stove, a front-loader, stayed in the woodshed through warm weather. It weighed about half a ton, but Glenn needed very little help from me to heft it all the way into the schoolhouse.

We set it up by the rostrum on a square of asbestos. We had to hang the stovepipe from the ceiling with strap iron. The pipe rambled across past the mud dauber wasps' nest to a hole in the chimney. Took us two mornings to get it up and fired. Glenn was bringing his noon dinner and his breakfast too in a Karo syrup pail now. I remember one morning he had a right good-looking slab of sour cream apple pie. Though on the quiet side, he was easier company before Charlie got to school.

As for learning and knowledge, I myself thought we were all making pretty fair strides. But did that satisfy Tansy? My head rang around the clock from that cowbell clanging at my spelling.

Then on Thursday morning Mr. George Keating came into the schoolhouse and made right for Tansy with a letter. She went pale and gripped her pointer. Her knees set her skirts atremble. Silence fell, though somebody whispered, “It's come.”

It took its sweet time, because we were into November. The letter was from the County Superintendent of Schools. Now we'd know when Tansy was to be examined and her so-called teaching methods observed. Now we'd learn if Tansy could go on being teacher or if she'd be turned out.

We'd been on the lookout for that letter these many weeks, and waiting hadn't improved Tansy's disposition. It was bound to get here before Thanksgiving. You couldn't count on the roads for a visit from outside after that. The roads around here were nearly impassable.

Mr. Keating hung on to hear the news so he could repeat it. Tansy was all thumbs with the envelope. Finally, Little Britches had to drop down from teacher's chair and come over to help her with it.

Tansy scanned the page while we waited. An icy wind seemed to sweep her, though the stove glowed and you couldn't see your breath even here on the back row.

She looked up and stared sightless across us.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

An icy wind swept us all. “Go on,” Charlie called from back here, “read out the letter, Tansy.”

“Miss Tansy,” she said in a broken voice.

Her eyes hurried down the page to the worst paragraph:

Horrified silence followed. Then we all squealed once more like pigs under a gate—louder. “Unfair!” we called out. “How come we have to be tested too? We didn't do nothing!”

“This sort of thing never happened under Miss Myrt,” Pearl proclaimed. “I personally don't mean to take part and may well be absent. The idea.”

She wasn't the only one thinking about being too sick for school tomorrow, though me and Lloyd would never get away with it. If we didn't peel out of bed pretty early, Tansy would touch a match to the mattress.

We were all fixing to riot when she concluded with,

She was already beginning to recover. In fact, she was laying her plans for tomorrow before Mr. Keating could get on his route with the news.

“This schoolroom needs a thorough cleaning before our…company comes. Just look at those windows. And that kindling needs to be in a neat stack. And, Pearl, you'll sweep the floor.”

Pearl bridled. “I'll do no such—”

“Pearl, I said you'd sweep the floor,” Tansy said, “or I'll sweep it with you.” She advanced on Pearl with the pointer and Pearl went for the broom. We all went for something.

On the fatal Friday of Tansy's trial, I was at school with the ladder before sunup. We'd had the stove going for two weeks now, so it was high time to clean out the stovepipe. It was beginning to smoke and seep soot.

I lit a lamp and turned it up. The spit-polished windows shivered in the graying dawn. Not a dead fly decorated the sills. The place was spotless. The Superintendent of Schools could see his face in any surface. The assistant superintendent could eat his dinner off the floor.

Glenn Tarbox stepped up behind me. I jumped a foot.

“Dagnab it, Glenn!” I cried. “You like to scare me out of my skin. What are you doing here so early?”

He was always early. He was trying to keep ahead of Charlie Parr, if you asked me. But this was practically the middle of the night. He had on a starched shirt, blued and ironed flat. His hair had a neat parting, and he'd shaved.

“I don't have that far to come,” he said.

“But Stony Lonesome—”

“I don't live out home no more.” Glenn looked away. “I live over through the sugarbush at Aunt Fanny Hamline's. She don't keep horses, so I sleep in the tackroom of her barn.”

Ha, I thought. What did he take me for? “Glenn, you lying—”

“No, it's the truth. Aunt Fanny put me up when I told her I'd kill my own food, do all her repairs, and run off whoever was stealin' from her.”

“But you were the only one stealing from her, Glenn.”

“I know it,” he said, “but her eyesight ain't up to much.”

I stared at him, wondering. “You're not killing all your food, Glenn. You had a nice slab of sour cream apple pie here a while back. Did Aunt Fanny bake it?”

Glenn nodded. “I found her soft spot. Everybody's got one except my maw. I offered Aunt Fanny to work for free.”

My head pounded with these disclosures. “And you get along all right with her?”

“Sure,” Glenn said, “after I found out where she stockpiled her ammunition and hid it from her.”

Still, I couldn't get my mind around it. Glenn Tarbox rooming and boarding with Aunt Fanny Hamline?

“How come, Glenn? Just to be closer to school so you can get ahead of Char—”

“I won't live out home no more,” Glenn said. “My brothers were on me day and night about quittin' school. They don't want me gittin' ahead of them. They'd do anything to keep me down.”

“Why?”

“That's the way people is who ain't goin' anyplace in life theirselves. They don't want you goin' anyplace either. It was my brothers stuck the puff adder in teacher's desk, and sawed through the board over the ditch. They wanted them crimes pinned on me.”

My jaw dropped. This was by far the longest speech anybody'd ever had out of Glenn. I was bewildered. The silence of frosty dawn fell around us. Light began to find the eastern windows.

“We better get them pipes down before Tansy gets here,” Glenn said. “How's she doin' this morning?”

“She couldn't keep her breakfast down,” I betrayed.

Glenn held the ladder while I went up it. The pipe rose out of the cold stove and angled at the mud daubers' nest. Seemed like the lengths had fitted together easy, but now I couldn't work them loose. Glenn tried, and he couldn't either. The pipes had expanded with the heat, or something.

“Even if we got 'em apart,” Glenn said, “the whole business would take the morning.”

I could hear Tansy in my head, telling me how I'd left everything to the last minute as usual.

“But they's another way,” Glenn said, “quicker.” He reached into an overall pocket, behind a belt loop, and drew out a twist of paper. He opened it and showed me a few pinches of gray powder.

“Gunpowder,” he said, “about an ounce.” Trust Glenn to have an ounce of gunpowder on his person, just in case. “It'll only take that much to clear the stove, pipes, and chimney, all in one puff. Nothin' to it.”

With these words, Glenn unlatched the stove door, struck a match to the kindling inside, and threw in the gunpowder.

Then quite a lot happened all at the same time. With an explosion that left my ears ringing well into the new year, the whole stove stood up on its hind legs. The door that Glenn was closing hung loose in his blackened hand. The stovepipe came clattering down from the ceiling, belching a bushel of black soot all over us and the room, including the head of Abraham Lincoln.

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.”