The Teacher's Funeral (7 page)

“Wrong!” Tansy grabbed up the cowbell on her desk and rang it over her head, introducing a new tradition to orthography.

“What's wrong with it?” I whined.

“Find out!” Tansy barked.

Little Britches pointed out another word.

“Lester Kriegbaum,
ascend
.”

“Ascend,” Lester said, “A-S-C-E-N-D. Ascend.” So that put their side one ahead.

Little Britches pointed at the page. She was beginning to feel her power now.

“Pearl Nearing,” Tansy said,
“asphyxiate.”
Tansy smiled slightly.

“Tell her to pick shorter words,” Pearl snapped.

“Asphyxiate.”

“Oh, all right. Asphyxiate. A-S-F—”

The cowbell clanged.

Little Britches pushed back her bonnet, and bounced in teacher's chair. She scanned the page for another word, the longer the better.

“They don't all have to start with
A
,” Tansy remarked.

“What's
A
?” Little Britches asked.

Tansy looked out at us. “Flop—Floyd Lumley, ascend the rostrum and write the letter
A
on the blackboard.”

The blackboard wasn't anything as grand as slate. It was just a part of the wooden wall painted black. Flopears shambled forth. He picked up the chalk, pointed at the blackboard, and wrote a large, crooked
A
. Turning in her big chair, Little Britches gave him all her attention.

“Write, ‘A is for apple,' Floyd,” Tansy said, and Flopears printed:

A IS FOR APPEL

And so it went. The morning melted away as we spelled each other down and taught Little Britches her ABC's. Tansy said we had to look up the meanings of the words too, though we'd always thought just spelling them was plenty.

“Miss Myrt didn't have us do it that-a-way!” we bleated, as we were so often to do in the days ahead.

I believe Little Britches would have settled in for the day if things had turned out better. We'd made it to
M
when she looked up from Webster and said, “I smells smoke.”

An autumn haze drifted across the stifling late-August schoolroom. From out on the front step, J.W. began barking his head off. It was a regular cacophony out there.
Cacophony
was one of our
C
words. Now we all smelled smoke.

Beside me, Charlie stroked his smooth chin and suddenly jerked. He kicked his way out of the desk and sprang through the front door on his storky legs. We all followed.

As we rounded the schoolhouse, J.W. took the lead. Tansy was coming up hard from behind. The fire had a head start, and flames shot up from the back of the boys' privy. It was burning merrily in a nest of unscythed dry grass. Few things in this world smell worse than a privy on fire.

Thinking quicker than he ever did in school, Flopears was at the pump, pumping water into his hat for all he was worth. Tansy was pounding up with the pail. Everybody was running into everybody else, except for Pearl, who didn't think anything to do with the boys' privy had anything to do with her. J.W. was generally underfoot.

Me and Charlie Parr? We were pointing to the cloudless sky and ducking, saying it must have been a lightning bolt, and were we the only ones to hear that clap of thunder?

S
chool didn't keep the full day. Still, I was worn down to a nub by bedtime, too tuckered to sleep. As always, Lloyd was taking his half out of the middle.

“Shift over,” I said. “I'm not telling you again.”

“Quit your twitchin',” he said.

A sour smell of privy smoke rose off his hair, and probably mine. Apart from everything else, we were in Aunt Maud's bad books. She'd made us new feedsack shirts for the first day of school. She was handy with a needle. Lloyd had burned a hole in his shirt the size of a silver dollar. I'd burned a cuff off mine. It was all in a good cause, of course—putting out the fire before the privy could burn down to the seat.

I was just about to drift off, catching that first glimpse of the Dakota wheat fields in the Red River valley, when Lloyd said directly into my ear, “Russell, you figure anybody found the buggy whip?”

That brought me back to life. “What buggy whip?”

“The buggy whip you and Charlie were smoking behind the privy this morning, and one of you dropped it in the weeds where it smoldered till it caught—”

“Who says we were smoking buggy whip?” I mumbled like a man talking in his sleep.

“Pearl and Flopears and Lester and—”

“All right,” I mumbled. “All right.”

“In fact, everybody but Little Britches, who was in the other privy. People who weren't even at school know by now. They probably know in Montezuma and Rock—”

“There's no evidence,” I said. “It was a hot fire while it lasted. It burned all the undergrowth just about back to the grove.”

“Russell,” said Lloyd, “do you need evidence when that big a crowd catches you in the act?”

I snored then, the soft snore of first sleep.

But I was wide awake, so I noticed a random moonbeam strike the doorknob as it began to turn. Lloyd may have seen too. The door banged back. We bounced in the bed.

Tansy filled the doorway with a coal oil lamp and her hair down. In her nightdress she looked like an avenging angel. In fact, two avenging angels. She advanced on the bed, and we scrambled to the headboard, clutching our feather pillows before us.

She stood at the foot. Her lamp made fearful shadows in all the hills and hollers of the bed. It was Tansy-our-sister now, not Teacher Tansy. And there were no witnesses.

She waited while we cowered, another of our
C
words. The terrible silence undid me, and I began to babble in the night.

“We done pretty good in tamping out the fire, then raking up. Me and Char—the other boys will build up the back wall of the privy as quick as we can filch—find the lumber. I will myself personally shave enough new shingles to patch the roof…”

I ran out of things I was going to do as quick as I could get to them. Still, Tansy stood there. The lamplight flickered on her face.

Next to me, Lloyd was half his natural size, almost completely concealed by his pillow.

I wracked my brain for what else I better do. “And I'll get the wad out of the bell,” I said. “…whoever done that…”

After a time, Tansy broke her silence. “Oh yes, you'll do all that,” she said. “And more. You've had a narrow escape. You're one lucky boy. What if the fire had spread into that sugarbush grove? Do you happen to recall whose particular grove that is?”

Helpful Lloyd spoke from behind his pillow. “Aunt Fanny Hamline.”

“That's right,” said Tansy. “Aunt Fanny Hamline.”

Tansy gave me time to picture Aunt Fanny Hamline in my mind. She was maybe the meanest living woman in Indiana now that Miss Myrt was no more.

It wasn't fair. “What about Char—”

“Did Charlie wad the bell?” Tansy spoke like lightning striking. “So if we'd had to ring it for help to fight the fire, we'd have been up a gum stump?”

“But—”

“Was it Charlie's chore to scythe the weeds around the privy in this dry weather?” Tansy pondered. “I begin to see the pattern. You muffle the bell. You leave the weeds standing. Then you set the fire.”

“No, no, it wasn't nothing like—”

“But that's not your worst offense.” The lamp burned lower now as my time ran out. “No. Your worst crime was to hold me up to derision.”

Derision
was one of our
D
words that nobody could spell. Some said it wasn't even a word, until we looked it up.

“You burned down the privy to hold me up to public derision on my first day of teaching. That is a capital offense. Men have hung for less.”

I whined, “There's no evi—”

“There'll be evidence across your back end and Charlie's too. Big red welts. The smoking alone will win Charlie his stripes from Preacher Parr when I tell him and Dad about—”

“Tansy, don't,” I beseeched. “We're going to make…”

“Restitution?” she said, though we weren't to the
R
's yet. “You bet your sweet life you are. You'll split a winter's worth of kindling as soon as you put up the school stove. You'll be splitting kindling in your sleep. And you'll get to school every morning before me to lay the fire. You'll take down the stovepipe every two weeks like clockwork to empty the soot. You'll stack and you'll stoke and you'll take out the ashes.”

“Miss Myrt always had us take them chores in turns. She—”

“And you'll have plenty of reason to miss her,” Tansy said.

A whimper rose from behind Lloyd's pillow, and maybe mine.

Tansy turned at last to go. Seeming to remember something, she looked back. “And tomorrow directly school's out, you'll hitch Siren to the wagon because we're going on a little errand.”

“What kind of—”

“You'll find out.”

“Not me too?” Lloyd said, muffled, scared.

“No, not you, just Russell,” Tansy said. “Though, Lloyd, why you can't spell
expectorate
when it's spelled just like it sounds, I cannot fathom.” The lamp in her hand hissed and spat. Then Tansy was swallowed by the night. The smell of coal oil hung in the room.

I made a note in my mind to talk over our Dakota plans with Charlie. It was high time to head out. Around here things were getting too hot for us, so to speak.

In a voice small and forlorn Lloyd said, “I miss Miss Myrt. She only threatened you in daylight.”

Then we must have slept.

I awoke in dread. Tansy hadn't told Dad about the privy fire because she was holding it over my head. He was bound to hear, though. And Aunt Maud too. What with the telephone and the Rural Free Delivery, there wasn't much place to hide anymore.

But when we slunk in from milking, Dad was at his place at the kitchen table with the weekly newspaper,
The Parke County Courier,
open before him.

I'd have given a lot to see a headline in it reading,

LIGHTNING STRIKES
RURAL SCHOOL PRIVY

But it wasn't to be.

“Hark at this,” Dad said, and began to read:

FARM FAMILY IN NOVEL ACCIDENT

M
ODERN
M
ISHAP AT
C
OUNTY
C
ROSSROADS

Aunt Maud had just turned out a pan of her buckshot muffins. Tansy was making our dinner. “Oh my stars, that sounds like us!” Aunt Maud said. “Who's telling our business?” She and Tansy hung over Dad as he read out the article:

When Tansy saw herself called handsome in print, her hand stole up to her back hair.

Outrage etched Aunt Maud's face at anybody blaring our personal business to the listening world. “How'd they know we were coming from a funeral anyhow?”

“The way we were dressed on a Thursday,” Tansy said in a far-off voice, dreamlike. “Your veil. My hat.”

“Well, they got that right about me being flung a considerable distance,” Aunt Maud maintained. “I was in the air long enough to see my whole life pass before me.”

Dad grinned. “That young go-getter Eugene Hammond is behind this story,” he said. “You can see him on every line. He hand-fed each word to the
Courier
. He'll go far, that fellow. This is better advertising for his company and himself than you can pay out money for.”

Aunt Maud couldn't pull her eyes off the page. Still, her chin wagged. “I didn't expect to see my name in the paper till my obituary on the day they put me in the ground!”

“And you might not see it then,” Dad remarked mildly.

Anyway, our sudden fame kept everybody's mind off my crime. I didn't feel much like one lucky boy, but at least I wasn't looking at an arson charge. Me and Lloyd attended school in our next-best shirts, sent off with a warning from Aunt Maud. This second day of Tansy's teaching went along better, and ran the full time.

Little Britches was back, on her own terms. She'd sit nowhere but at teacher's desk, and she thought she owned the Webster speller. The day unfolded as we taught her the alphabet and refreshed it for Flopears. We spelled each other down to the continual clang of the cowbell and wore the dictionary out, looking up meanings.

Our dinner pails were Karo syrup cans because of their wire handles. We sprawled in the noonday yard and hung on the hitching rail. Pearl sat apart. Flopears had only a measly little square of hard salt-and-water corn bread in his pail that wouldn't fill a wood tick. We shared out with him, and he got a pickled peach off me. You could use the boys' privy, though the back of it was entirely gone and daylight showed through the roof.

We played our noontime games: Bug in the Gully and Old Sow Out. Tansy pinned up her skirts and played along with us to make sure nobody kicked Little Britches in the head by mistake. Charlie remarked that in a bigger school with at least nineteen pupils, you'd have two teams for real baseball, and an umpire. We looked ahead to winter and snow on the ground. Then we'd bring our rifles and hunt rabbits at noontime. But I nudged Charlie to mention privately about being up in the Dakotas by then.

At the end of the day, Tansy asked how many of us had the Monkey Ward catalog at home. Hands went up. Everybody ordered out of the catalog, and without its pages you'd have to carry corncobs to the privy.

“Look in the back of it,” Tansy told us. “There's a map of the United States for giving the shipping rates. Tear out that map and bring it to school. We start geography tomorrow.”

We squealed like pigs under a gate. Since somebody had filched the school map, we'd hoped to be free of that subject. “I see no reason to study geography,” Pearl said firmly, “no reason in the world.”

As school days went, I'd known worse. But the threat of Tansy's errand after school hung heavy on me, whatever it was. Lloyd stayed after to shoot some marbles in the school yard with Flopears and Lester. Deciding there was a wagon ride in it for him, J.W. followed me home.

When we got there, Siren acted like she didn't want to be caught. Horses know what we don't. I had to chase her all over the lot. When I was at last backing her into the shafts, Dad called me over to the barn door. A new pile of lumber was heaped inside, five or six lengths of good, seasoned white pine planking, appearing out of nowhere.

Dad fingered his chin. “Have you any use for this?” he wondered, offhand.

“Dad,” I said, “I believe I do.” I'd learned some carpentry from watching him. And I had a privy that needed extensive repair. As well he seemed to know.

“You can take the lumber when you go back to pick up your sister at school,” he remarked. “And you may want the ladder.” So he seemed to know I'd be unwadding the bell too, whoever done that. There was no end to what Dad knew. He may have known what Tansy's errand was. But pride kept me from asking.