The Teacher's Funeral (3 page)

It was dead of night now with a ring around the moon. J.W. came back from his patrol, limping with a bur between his toes, and crept into Lloyd's damp lap.

You could hear any distance now, even above the whine of the katydids. Way off somewhere a dog howled at the moon, and other dogs picked up his wolfish cry. Even J.W.'s ears pricked, though he never moved.

“That howling only means but one thing,” Charlie remarked, “and you know what.”

“What?” Lloyd said.

“Dogs always know when somebody's died.”

“No, sir, you're not getting me again, Charlie. You either, Russell,” Lloyd piped in a thin and wobbling voice, “you dirty—”

“I ain't talking about gettin' anybody,” Charlie said. “Somebody did die tonight. That's why we—I was late. Everybody's telling everybody else. You're the only two who don't know nothin' about it.”

He had me about half interested. It wasn't like Charlie to pull something on his own. He didn't have that much imagination. “How'd you find out?” I asked, to see what he'd say. Charlie didn't think quick enough to lie.

“Party line,” he said.

It was true that the Parrs subscribed to the telephone. We Culvers did too. “Who died?” I inquired.

“Take a guess,” Charlie said. “Go ahead.”

“Somebody we know?”

“You can believe that.”

“Somebody old or young?”

“Old,” Charlie said, “as the hills.”

Lloyd was looking back and forth between us, clutching J.W. He was on the hook again, and I was getting there.

“Old as Old Man Lichtenberger?”

“Nobody's that old,” Charlie said.

“Man or woman?”

“That'd be tellin' too much.”

“Somebody we like?”

“Not hardly,” Charlie said.

“Somebody who's been feeling poorly late?” I was wracking my brains.

Charlie shrugged his big shoulders. “She must of felt pretty poorly tonight. She died.”

“So it's a woman!”

“More or less,” Charlie said.

The truth burst over me. “You don't mean Miss Myrt Arbuckle!”

“You got her,” Charlie said. “She's dead as mutton.”

“Charlie, you lying—”

“No, Russell, believe me or believe me not. Miss Myrt kicked the bucket right about supper time.”

“Prove how you know.” I narrowed my eyes.

“Well, she rooms and boards with Miz Cooper, and when Miz Cooper rung the doctor, everybody picked up. My ma did. You can bet your aunt Maud did.”

That was the beauty of the old party line telephone. A call for one was a call for all. When somebody rang for the doctor—two long rings and a short one—everybody picked up.

“When Miss Myrt didn't come to supper, Miz Cooper went to her room. The old hen was stretched out on the bed, deader than a doornail. Doc Wilkinson told Miz Cooper to put pennies on Miss Myrt's eyes to keep them closed till he could get there. And he said to tie up her jaw with a rag to keep it from sagging. So she's shut up at last.”

Lloyd's eyes were wide and staring. His jaw hung open.

I was almost speechless with amazement, but not quite. “What killed her?”

“You got me,” Charlie said. “All I know for sure is she's cut her last switch.”

Many's the time she'd striped Charlie Parr's other end, back before the arthritis got in her elbow. Though he was a preacher's son, it was at school where he learned to turn the other cheek. Charlie still walked with a slight limp.

As I say, it was like a miracle, if you could believe it. Miss Myrt dying practically on the eve of school starting up. In August.

“She'll be a restless spirit,” Charlie observed. “She'll be a soul in torment, carried off just when she was fixing to lock us up in that schoolhouse for another year.”

I hadn't thought of it like that. And I didn't have time to wonder how Charlie did. Somehow, it didn't sound much like Charlie.

Lloyd sat studying the fire, wanting with his whole heart to believe. Him and Charlie sat with their backs to the grove, so I was the one to see Siren. She slept on her feet, and she'd dozed through everything so far. Now she nickered and pulled back on her rope. Her tail whipped around. The firelight caught one of her eyes rolling back with fear.

That was all the warning in the world I got. Siren nickered again, and I seemed to hear the answering nicker of another horse, far off. The mist in the grove was blue now, and a patch of the darkness changed. The underbrush crackled, as if from a footfall. Something was moving in the timber.

A hand pushed back a low-hanging limb. I saw her then, just a darkness against deeper dark. I saw the shawl over her head. Now the firelight found her. She stopped, keeping this distance from the living. More shadows puddled at her feet.

I could see nothing but her eyes, and I knew them from somewhere. Beneath the shadowing shawl her head was tied up with a rag—to keep her dead jaw from dropping in one final gape.

She stood there until her glinting eyes found mine. My heart had stopped by then, so I could have heard every word she spoke. She was silent as eternity, quieter than snow. One of her draped arms began to come up, slow because she had arthritis in that elbow. She seemed about to point at me, which would naturally have finished me off right there. Instead, she held up something: an untidy bundle of switches. She'd gathered them in the grove, for the grave.

My heart gave a single thump, and I was ready to travel, faster than Charlie at his top speed. I was on my feet, grunting like a bullbat. What Lloyd and Charlie were doing I didn't know. I meant to save myself. At that very moment, a live coal rolled out of the fire. In my first fleeing step, I trod my bare foot right on that red-hot coal. The soles of our feet were tough as whang-leather by this time of year, but that was a sizable coal.

“Eyeow!” I screamed in fear and pain. This was happening directly in front of Charlie. When I kicked up my foot, he saw that the live coal was still stuck to the sole of it. With unusual presence of mind, Charlie leaped to his feet and grabbed me up like a sack of flour. The next thing I knew, I was in the crick. Charlie'd thrown me right in the middle of it. I was sucking water on the slimy bottom. My foot was still burning but not alight. I couldn't think. I was burning up and drowning, and I'd just seen a ghost. Took me forever to distinguish up from down and break the surface of the water.

The first thing I saw was my sister, Tansy, with a shawl thrown back over her shoulders. She stood in the dancing firelight, unwinding the rag that had held her jaw closed. Charlie and Lloyd were rolling in the weeds, busting their guts laughing. Tansy shook her bundle of switches at me.

W
e stuck it out till daylight, me and Lloyd. When we could finally settle down, we slept in the bed of the spring wagon, plastered all over with oats. J.W. joined us and chased rabbits all night in his sleep, jerking continually.

We'd planned to sleep like cowboys around the fire but forgot to bring a length of rope to circle the campsite. A snake won't crawl over a rope. We slept in the wagon and left our trotlines behind where they were. What Charlie'd found on the hook discouraged us somewhat.

Charlie had seen Tansy home in the middle of the night. I suppose they'd come out to the crick together, and they went back together. They'd tied up Stentor down the road, out of sight.

It beat me how those two had come up with a plan to spook me so quick. For Pete's sake, Miss Myrt hadn't cooled before they'd cooked up a scheme. And she wasn't stiff before they scared the p-waddin' out of me. I blamed Tansy. She'd be the brains of the outfit.

But Charlie and Tansy? The two of them with their heads together was a new one on me.

By dawn's early light, Lloyd rode Siren into the crick to give her a drink. We hitched her to the wagon, poured water on the embers, and set off for home on the crown of the road.

“Hoo-boy,” Lloyd said. Him and J.W. were up on the board, crowding me. “You shoulda had a look at your face. When you seen Tansy being the ghost of Miss Myrt, you went whiter than any sheet.”

“You went bright green when you thought Charlie was Old Man Lichtenberger's ghost.”

“I was just surprised,” Lloyd said. “Then I tripped. I was cool as a cucumber.”

“Same color as one too,” I said. We rattled on behind Siren's switching tail.

Presently, Lloyd said, “It was worse for you.”

“How come?” I said.

“Because Charlie's your pal.”

That was pretty wise for a ten-year-old. Too wise, and it made me think. When a girl mixes into things, even Tansy, you don't know who your pals are, and that's the truth. I changed the subject, and then me and Lloyd voiced our hopes that they'd shut down Hominy Ridge School.

When we got home, Tansy was at the stove, looking way too solid to ever be a ghost. She was frying up a pan of eggs. “Go on down to the henhouse and see what you see,” she said over her shoulder. She'd already gathered the eggs. They were there in two pails. “Go on,” she said, and we went.

The Rhode Island Reds were in the yard, all down at one end standing on each other's heads. They were way too quiet and watchful. For two cents I wouldn't have approached the henhouse at all.

It was dim inside, and slick underfoot. We were just in the door when I skidded to a stop. There was a big, long bullsnake right there on the henhouse floor. Part of him. He'd crawled in through a knothole in the wall and tried to crawl out the same way.

But he'd swallowed an egg whole, and it made a lump in him that wouldn't let him fit through the knothole. He didn't have the sense to try another way out. You could see where he'd thrashed around, but now he was quiet, playing possum. Lloyd gaped around me at him. I guess we both gaped.

We went outside to see the rest of him. Seemed like we'd had about enough snakes for the time being. But ten or twelve inches of this one hung down the side of the henhouse with his mean-looking head in the dust.

We went for the ax and chopped him through at the wall. “You want to cut the egg out of him?” Lloyd asked.

“You want to eat it?” I said, so we left it. We divvied up the snake with the ax for the hens to feed on and buried the head. I didn't see this as a bad sign at the time. Later I wondered.

There was a day between before Miss Myrt's funeral. That was about as long as you could wait on a funeral in this weather. But she had a brother coming from French Lick. The idea that a teacher would have a brother at all stumped Lloyd.

Baz Ellenbogen, who hadn't made it through the first reader under Miss Myrt some years back, was the grave digger. As Baz himself said, he never dug a grave he enjoyed more. But the day wasn't to be pure pleasure. Far from it. And I still think the snake in the henhouse was an evil omen of trouble coming.

On the morning of Miss Myrt's funeral, we hoed weeds in the field like troopers. But as quick as we knocked off for noon dinner, Tansy was all over us. We could not do anything right.

And we had to wear shoes and clean underdrawers to the funeral. Shoes on a weekday. Underdrawers in August. We fumed. I was too busy dodging Tansy's thumps to wonder why she couldn't just enjoy the day like everybody else. I'd be real glad to see her back in town for high school. She was getting awful hard to live with.

Then after dinner she sent us down to the garden to pick a big bunch of glads. “Flowers?” I said, dancing out of her range. “We're boys. We don't pick flowers.”

“You'll be picking up your teeth if you don't.” She made a fist.

Eyeing it, I said, “What for?”

“For Miss Myrt,” Tansy snapped. “Show some respect for once. And make sure the colors don't clash. Don't take all day. I'd go myself, but I have a hat to trim, and I'm going to take a bath in the trough.”

“A bath?” Lloyd's eyes bugged out. “It's
Thursday
.”

The next thing I knew, me and him were down in the garden, picking glads. “Do these clash?” Lloyd kept asking, waving every color at me.

“How would I know?” I said, squatting and grunting. I'd sooner hoe weeds. There's some dignity to that.

We labored on under the midday sun. Then Lloyd said, “We could pick all one color. Then they wouldn't clash.”

“Yes,” I sulked, “but nothing we ever do is right.”

I
t was close and airless in the church before the female mourners got their cardboard fans going. Wasps droned in the window wells as people shuffled in, filling the pews. Us Culvers were down front, one pew back from the mourners' bench where Miss Myrt's brother from French Lick sat.

Dad wore his coat and his Sunday shirt with the detachable cuffs. His derby hat rested on his knee, turned up to show the puckered-silk lining. In his Sunday best and shaved, Dad was a fine-looking man. He could have passed for a judge.

Beneath a spray of entirely white glads, the lid on the pine coffin stood open before us. It was without question Miss Myrt Arbuckle laid out within. She had the longest nose in North America. It stood up against the yawning lid, shiny and sharp with a flaring nostril. She had a snout on her long enough to drink water down a crawdad hole.

Lloyd was all eyes, shifting around to see better until Dad laid a calming hand on him. I was about as near a corpse as I cared to be. Tansy loomed next to me. She'd trimmed her straw hat with a ribbon of funeral purple. Her feet were as big as mine, and I knew her shoes were crowding them painfully. Served her right for making me and Lloyd wear ours. Aunt Maud on her far side had a black veil pulled over her hat, and it made her look like a spider in its web.

This was the whole family. Our mother had died having Lloyd. Aunt Maud was Mother's sister. When he was a widower, Dad asked Aunt Maud to be his wife, to give us kids a mother. Or as Aunt Maud put it, “My number come up.”

But she said she was nothing but a nervous spinster, and she didn't think marriage would calm her. Besides, she said her health wouldn't stand up to matrimony, that in fact she was not long for this world. Dad would be a widower again before he turned around.

Aunt Maud lived just down the road in the old Singleterry home place where her and Mother had grown up.

Charlie Parr was across the aisle with his ma. From the pain in his face, he had on shoes too. As I'd predicted to Lloyd, everybody turned out. The murmuring behind us was drowning out the wasps. People stood outside in the Balm of Gilead cemetery, to hear the service through the windows.

Doc Wilkinson was one of the pallbearers. As the saying goes, doctors bury their mistakes, and he may have been here to see it done. Doc rolled pills and busted boils and cut fishhooks out of us if we couldn't dig them out ourselves. If your bowels weren't regular, he'd dose you with his own Peristaltic Persuader. He signed death certificates and birthed all the babies except for the Tarbox family, who had an annual baby and no way to pay.

The fanning was at fever pitch now, and here came Imogene Lustbader down the aisle, clutching her music. She was Tansy's age, but didn't go to high school. Switching her skirts around the coffin and trying not to look in it, she settled on the bench and opened the piano. Us Methodists were saving for an organ.

Imogene, who was moon-faced and not good-looking, worked her hands and opened her sheet music. Then she crashed down on the keys with “Goodnight Down Here, Good Morning Up There.” After that she played “Someday We'll Understand,” then the popular “Who'll Be Next? Be Ready,” and finally “The Old Rugged Cross,” played with a cake-walk tempo because we'd started late. It was the same songs as a real funeral, though without the usual sobbing after “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Preacher Parr had sat in his high-back chair at the front, stroking his cheek and drawing inspiration from Imogene's music. Now he climbed into the pulpit and looked us over. There was tragedy in his eyes, but he liked funerals better than weddings. As he often said, “Better tears now than tears later.”

He seemed old to me, even for somebody's dad, and he had chin whiskers. He glanced out the bright windows, then boomed, “Even the sunshine is somber today, brothers and sisters, when we see Miss Myrt Arbuckle on her final journey, as she swaps semesters for eternity.”

He had a preacher's voice, hollow and joyless. “Miss Myrt was not one of us,” Preacher Parr recalled. “She served here only twenty-two years, a foreigner in our midst, as she came from up around Crawfordsville. She was an old maid and a teacher, so you couldn't call her a full member of our community. But we done the best by her we could.”

The congregation shifted, hoping for some credit.

“Oh yes, we built the Hominy Ridge School, a modern weatherboarded structure for her comfort and convenience, all with volunteer labor we gladly give.”

Tansy twitched.

“How many in this particular House of the Lord recollect the old schoolhouse that Hominy Ridge School replaced?”

Dad stirred.

“Yes, sisters and brothers, the old schoolhouse, the first schoolhouse—the log schoolhouse, with its stick chimbley daubed with clay.”

That brought forth the first amen, in a cracked voice from the back. “Who remembers the winds of January whistling in through the chinks in them pine logs?”

“Yo!” said Dad suddenly, his hand aloft.

“Who remembers how we young chilrun brought moss and branches to school every blessed morning in vain attempts to stuff the cracks in them everlasting logs against the frigid fury of winters like we don't have anymore?”

An elderly chorus of amens followed.

“Who remembers the cold comfort of that open hearth before we built a new school with its patented front-loader chunk stove with isinglass winders?”

“We do!” chorused the oldsters. “We do!” Aunt Maud shook her cardboard fan in the air.

“And who remembers the time the skunk got down the chimbley, and we thought we could smoke him out, and we learned different?”

The church rocked with happy laughter.

“Yes, and who remembers the schoolmaster of them early years, him whose final resting place is right outside in the Balm of Gilead graveyard? Who remembers the terrible Increase Whittlesey of blessed memory?”

Dad winced.

“Increase Whittlesey, ten foot tall in his clawhammer coat with the three-foot, inch-thick birchwood paddle in his mighty hand, and the braided rawhide whip just for the boys?”

Dad flinched.

The congregation was about ready to witness now. They were on the edge of their pews.

“And who remembers a time when chilrun
wanted
to learn?” Preacher Parr's mighty fist exploded on the pulpit. Charlie had inherited his dad's big fists.

“Who remembers when chilrun were
happy
to learn?” (Wham)

“Who remembers when chilrun were
eager
to learn?” (Wham)

Mrs. Darrell Embree jumped to her feet a pew behind us and called out, “Tell it like it was!”

“Sister, that's what I'm doin',” Preacher Parr retorted, leather-lunged. Dimly, I began to see how he operated. Nobody would miss Miss Myrt, so Preacher Parr got them to miss the good old days when the winters were worse and the kids were better. At a funeral you want to miss something.

He seemed to drift away and leave Miss Myrt's corpse in the dust, so to speak. But then he doubled back on her.

“It was twenty-two long school years ago when Miss Myrt Arbuckle first come among us. It was in that year she was set up in the new Hominy Ridge schoolhouse with its fresh-dug well, its pony shed, and its other necessary outbuildings. It was twenty-two years ago that the school board issued her first annual teaching supplies, a fresh box of chalk and a new broom.

“Who remembers the young woman come among us at that time? I don't know if you can say she was in the full bloom of her youth. I'm not sure the bloom was ever on Miss Myrt. And she was plain. That's the only word for her. As the saying goes, she was ‘all wool and no embroidery.' But she was a great big robust woman. Why, it would have taken a wagon scale to weigh her and two trips to the grain elevator to get her there.”

Preacher Parr fell suddenly silent. The afternoon sun sparked off the square specs riding down his nose. You could have heard a bee belch.

Then he pointed directly down into the coffin and its contents. “And look now at the wretched husk of that woman today!” he roared. “Look upon all that remains of her remains!”

The church creaked as people stood at the back for a better view.

“What brought her to this?” the preacher inquired. “She was a teacher of the old school, no doubt about it. Her motto was, ‘No lickin', no larnin'.'”

“Amen to that!” several grown-ups echoed.

“She taught to the thwack of the hickory sprout,” Preacher Parr remembered. “She done the best she could, so what cut her off in her prime, more or less?

“I ask you, sisters and brothers, what brought her low? Doc Wilkinson tells me her poor heart just give out, and that's the scientific diagnosis. But who's to blame?

“We are a people of piety. We need somebody to blame.” (Wham)

“Without blame, there is no shame.” (Wham)

“Without shame, there is no humility!” (Double wham)

Preacher Parr shook a fist at heaven. “I'll ask you one more time. Who put this woman in her coffin before her span was up? Who sent her from the Here to the Hereafter on the milk train? Who punched her ticket untimely?”

The congregation pondered, and I had a bad feeling I knew who. So did Lloyd. He was still as a statue between me and Dad, trying to make himself smaller.

“That's right, mothers and fathers. Hear your hearts. It's the degraded chilrun of this modern age who put Miss Myrt down like a lame horse. Chilrun ruined by ease. Chilrun who think they have every right to sit by the stove and hog the heat while their ears are deaf to learning. Young gals with bright bows in their hussy hair. Young boys with impure thoughts gnawing at their vitals!”

It was amazing how small Lloyd could make himself. It was almost like there was nobody between me and Dad. I wished I could do that.

“The ungrateful!” (Wham)

“The unruly!” (Wham)

“The uncalled for!” (Wham)

“They are the authors of this woe! This generation of the young is one mess of bad puppies. Oh ye parents, take it out of their hides tonight! Rein them in before they strike again!”

Preacher Parr faltered and fell back. The amens liked to raise the roof. He put out a trembling hand to stem them. “I cain't go on in the face of this injustice,” he said, husky-voiced, “the old at the mercy of the young. I turn to a finer spirit than I am, a greater talent than I possess.”

We waited spellbound to hear who Preacher Parr thought better of than himself. “I refer to the Spirit of Poetry, who dwells anonymous among us. Dwelleth.”

We murmured among ourselves.

“Yes, I'm talking to you about the Sweet Singer of Sycamore Township.”

The murmurs mounted. There was for a fact a poet among us, somebody nobody knew. Every once in a while a poem would appear from the Sweet Singer. It might be topical. It might be seasonal. It might be a warning outright. You'd find it nailed to a tree or posted on the church door or sent to the Rockville newspaper. Nobody knew who the poet was. Everybody wondered, but nobody knew.

“And so as we see Miss Myrt off, I can do no better than to conclude with this poem from the Sweet Singer, come mysteriously to my attention.” Clearing his throat, Preacher Parr intoned:

A reverential silence lingered. Then Mrs. Darrell Embree called out, “The Sweet Singer has hit the nail on the head with that one! It is the finest piece of literature written in our lifetime!”

Cries rose from around the church:

“Beautiful!”

“Touching!”

“Shakespeare, move over!”

I stole a look at Tansy. She didn't seem to think much of the poem. So I guessed she wasn't the Sweet Singer. Now we knew Miss Myrt wasn't either, though nobody would have accused her of having any poetry in her soul.

The Sweet Singer's poem took the place of the concluding prayer. We were on the home stretch now. Down the aisle came Albertine Winchell, another girl about Tansy's age. She swept around the coffin and Imogene, and mounted the steps to the altar. Turning on us, she cupped her hands and burst into song: “Not Lost But Gone Before,” with piano accompaniment.