The Teacher's Funeral (8 page)

I loaded the wagon and talked Siren back along the Hog Scald Road, me and J.W. up on the board. We met Lloyd coming home, swinging his dinner pail. He was chewing mint and free as a bird and grinning because he wasn't me.

M
e and Tansy rode better than a mile in silence.

She was Teacher Tansy in her new hat, so I felt like I ought to put up my hand to be called on. Her chin was set, and she gripped the reins herself, so she hadn't brought me along to drive. Her skirts took up most of the board. I clung to one side. Past the covered bridge over Sand Branch we turned into Stony Lonesome Road and hit the first hole hard.

It jolted me into speech. “Tansy, where in the Sam Hill are we headed?”

“I need another pupil to make eight.”

“But nobody lives up Stony Lonesome Road,” I pointed out. Nobody but the Tarboxes.

Dread swept me.

“Tansy, you don't mean—”

“They're a big tribe,” she said, “with a bunch of kids.”

“But they don't send them to school, Tansy.” My heart was in my mouth. Nobody messed with Tarboxes. Tarboxes had two heads apiece. Was I along to protect Tansy? Could I look after myself?

It was slow going, veering along in dry ruts. J.W. was all over the wagon bed behind us. “Tansy, let's find us a place to turn around.”

We were coming past Tarbox territory, weedy hay-land and rough cropland, seen through fallen fences. Lines of old corn stubble planted in some earlier year rode the eroding rises. We smelled their home place before it came into view: the never-shoveled-out barn, the never-shifted pigpen.

Siren balked and showed unwilling. But Tansy turned her up the lane. The smell now would water your eyes. Chickens wilder than hawks flew at us. Gaunt, hopeless cows stood unmilked in the field. At least two corners of the barn needed jacking up. The well was downhill from the barn lot.

Busted implements littered the landscape. Whose implements they were was anybody's guess. The Tarboxes never knew the difference between Thine and Mine. Whatever went missing in Parke County, from a handsaw to a heifer, people said the Tarboxes got it.

“Here, there's room to turn around,” I said because we hadn't been spotted yet. A couple of people were in the privy. You could tell because it had no door on it. But they weren't looking our way.

The house was in worse shape than the barn. Tansy drew up and climbed down, and I had to follow. J.W. was on his hind legs, peering over the wagon side. The gate to the yard was off its hinges. You wanted to be real careful where you stepped. Tansy made for the house.

A rusted-out cream separator stood on the porch. It was said the Tarboxes strained their milk through an old shirt. There it was, wadded up on the peeling porch floor. A washtub webbed to the wall stood on a rickety table. In place of an oilcloth, the table was covered by a map of the world. A woman gaunt as her cattle appeared in the door. She shook off the kids clinging to her apron and stepped out.

“Well, skin me for a polecat,” she said in the Hoosierest accent I ever heard. “Company! We don't get many people up this way if you don't count the sheriff.”

In her hand was a length of pigtail chewing tobacco. She bit off about an ounce and returned the plug to her apron pocket.

“What can I do you for?” From behind her, eyes peered out of the gloom of the house.

“I'm the new teacher,” Tansy said.

“We heard the old one kicked the bucket.” Mrs. Tarbox spoke muffled. She had no teeth, and it took her some time to take control of her chaw. “But you look a good deal like Tansy Culver to me,” she said. “Didn't you turn out to be a great big girl!”

Mrs. Tarbox gave Tansy the once-over. Her gaze lingered over Tansy's new hat with its bunch of artificial grapes spilling off the brim. It put several years on her. I don't suppose Mrs. Tarbox ever had a hat.

“Who's the squirt?” She meant me.

“He's one of my brothers,” Tansy said. “Russell. He's along to—I like to keep an eye on him.”

“I see what you mean. He looks shifty,” Mrs. Tarbox said. “What's on your mind?”

“I want you to send your children to school.”

“You do, do you?” Mrs. Tarbox placed a hand on her bony hip. “The ones that isn't in jail is either too young or too old.”

“You're never too old to learn,” Tansy said.

“Tell them that.”

“If any of them are between six and sixteen,” Tansy said, “the law says they go to school.”

“When did they put that law through?”

“1901,” Tansy said.

Mrs. Tarbox's lip curled. “Indianapolis.” She shot a stream of brown tobacco juice onto the porch floor just off Tansy's left flank.

Tansy held our ground.

Mrs. Tarbox squinted aside. “Tell you what. I've got a couple inside you can have.” A sound of scrambling came from inside the house. “But I'll tell you right now, they ain't housebroke.”

“Are they six?”

“Not that I recollect. By the time my kids is six, they've got chores at home.” She looked out over the ruined territory. “A farm don't run itself, in case you ain't heard.”

Now I personally felt eyes on us from every side. Tarbox eyes from the house, the barn, up in trees. This looked like a lost cause, and I was real ready to go.

But there was still some fight in Tansy. “Don't you want them to be able to read and cypher?” She searched all the seams in Mrs. Tarbox's face.

Mrs. Tarbox clenched her jaw. “And be better than me?”

They had a staring contest then that nobody won. Finally Tansy said, “Yes.”

And Mrs. Tarbox said, “Get off my land.” She sounded more tired than mad.

Tansy turned, and we went. I helped her up on the board to show all the watching eyes I wasn't entirely useless.

Tansy was just turning Siren in the lot when I looked back. J.W. wasn't in the wagon bed. There was some terrier in him. That meant he dearly loved rolling in manure and decay, so Tarbox territory was the happy hunting ground for him.

I was beginning to worry when he rocketed out from under a fence ahead of us and down the lane, barking his head off. Something moved in the ruts between here and the road. Some critter was creeping across the lane. J.W. was closing in on it with his tail high.

Tansy saw and slapped the reins on Siren's rump. J.W. snapped at the thing in the road, then jumped an easy five foot in the air. His bark turned into a terrible yowling scream.

It was a porcupine. Of all the vermin on this place, J.W. had to take out after a porcupine. Waddling at speed, it disappeared into the weeds. Still, Siren knew what it was and pulled up short. I jumped down and made a dead run for J.W. He was stretched in a rut. His screaming was already weaker, and he was pawing the air.

Before I could get to him, somebody else did. He'd vaulted the fence. Now he was bent over J.W. He was older than me, by the look of him, and with a whole lot more muscles. A Tarbox, naturally.

He glanced up. “Git a stick, three, four inches long.”

“Wha—”

“Git it.”

I darted off and found one and came back. He'd pulled some binder twine out of his overalls and commenced wrapping J.W.'s front and hind paws, quick and easy. He could tie a knot one-handed. He wedged the stick in J.W.'s mouth to keep it wide. A porcupine quill had lodged in the roof of J.W.'s mouth. Another quill was in his tongue, and one through an eyelid. He rolled J.W. on his back to straddle him, pulling a pair of pliers out of the loop on his overalls. They were the kind you use to fix wire fencing, though none of their fences looked fixed.

“Git a hold on his head,” he told me.

He began to draw the quill out of the roof of J.W.'s mouth with the pliers. His upper arm bulged with the effort. “Them quills is barbed at the business end,” he said over the sound of J.W.'s squealing. He pulled out the quill and held it up. It was the size of a darning needle. He went back for the one in J.W.'s tongue. After that, the quill through the eyelid, which was delicate work and the hardest to watch.

“Lucky,” Tarbox said. “Jist three.”

He untied J.W.'s legs and pulled the stick out of his mouth. When he cradled him in both hands, J.W. keened and moaned but didn't thrash.

“You got to git the quill out right now,” he said, “or sometimes they'll jist stop their breathing.”

We were both bent over and close. Like Charlie Parr, he could beat me to a jelly if he took a notion to. His greasy hair hung in his face, he smelled like swill, and he'd just saved my dog.

By then I felt eyes on us from closer to. Tarboxes as big as this one were standing on the far side of the fence, watching. Some had pitchforks in their hands. All their jaws worked with chaw. A fence line of tough customers.

“I'll heft him up to you,” he said.

I was climbing on the board when he noticed Tansy. From up here she'd watched through Siren's ears as he'd drawn out the quills.

Handing me J.W., he said, “Tansy?” When he scooped the hair back from his eyes, I saw he must be nineteen or twenty. He wasn't as gaunt-faced as his maw, but his cheekbones stood out above the stubble.

Tansy blinked.

“Glenn Tarbox,” he said. “What brings you up thisaway?”

“I wanted to talk your mother into sending some kids to school.”

“Have any luck?” he said.

“No.”

“Nobody has much luck with Maw,” he remarked, stepping back.

“Thanks,” I said, “for—”

“Git him to drink and keep him quiet,” Glenn Tarbox said. “He'll swell up like a poisoned pup, but he'll be up and makin' his rounds tomorrow. He's mostly jist skeered now.”

Siren jerked us through the ruts toward home. She was anxious to be out of there and back to the barn. I held J.W. like a baby. His eye was beginning to puff up, and blood gummed the corners of his mouth. He scratched at my arm so I'd hold him tighter.

“They both knew your name,” I said to Tansy. “How do they know us?”

“They've got eyes and ears,” she said. “They're neighbors. They're not on another planet.”

“Almost, though,” I said, and Tansy didn't disagree.

In a way, I felt a little bit sorry for her, working this hard to get enough pupils and still not making it. I don't think I'd ever felt sorry for her before.

“Dadrat that Tarbox woman,” she said. “
And
she's having another baby.”

“She is? How can you tell?”

“I'm a woman. Women know these things.”

“Tansy, how come the female sex think they know more than the male sex?”

“Because we do. What's the capital of Delaware?”

“I don't know.”

“Know by tomorrow,” Tansy warned. “I'm the teacher, and I won't have dumb brothers.”

And we jigged and jogged on home.

When we got there, she said, “Find that old quilt in the wash house and make up a bed for J.W. in your room.”

“J.W. in the house?” I marveled. There was a rule against that.

“You'd just sleep in the barn with him otherwise, wouldn't you?”

“Yes,” I said, and went for the quilt.

I meant to stay awake all night for J.W. But he woke me and Lloyd early the next morning, clawing at my hand dangling out of the bed. He had a big grin on his face and sported a shiner, like he'd been off on a drunk and got into a fistfight.

Me and Lloyd drilled each other out of the Monkey Ward map on the way to school. Just as well because Tansy drove us all like cattle across the United States, state by state, capital by capital, river by river. She had us studying those maps like we were Lewis looking for Clark—her and Little Britches, who was become as regular in her attendance as J.W. Pearl tapped her map and said, “I myself have no intention of visiting any of these places.” But by the end of the morning, Little Britches could spell Utah, and Flopears found Indiana.

Me and Charlie spent noontime behind the boys' privy, pulling charred wood off the back of it. We sawed pine planks while the big blue horseflies a privy draws plagued us bad.

“Up in the Dakotas they don't have this insect life,” I told Charlie. “They don't know what a chinch bug or a Hessian fly is up there.”

“That right?” Charlie said.

We were just finding out neither one of us had brought nails when somebody stepped out of the sugarbush grove.

It was Glenn Tarbox. I liked to jump out of my skin. Seeing a Tarbox on their own turf was one thing. But leave it to him to stroll through Aunt Fanny Hamline's grove like it was a public right-of-way.

“Hey, Charlie,” he said. He wore no shirt under his overalls, and he was muscled like a bull, tight as a tree. We had on our straw hats. You didn't go to school without a hat. Glenn was bareheaded, of course.

“Glenn,” Charlie said.

“Russell,” Glenn said, which surprised me. Most things came as a surprise to me in those days.