by Eudora Welty
“There was too much racket,” said Gloria. “Too big a crowd.”
“Oh, but didn’t you love it?” Mrs. Moody broke in. “A bunch of us in Ludlow still get in the car and go back there every spring to see ’em graduate.”
“Come and see me!” Elvie invited her. “That’s where I’m going. I’m going to come out a teacher like Sister Gloria.”
“You’ve got a mile to go,” Miss Lexie told her.
“Everybody was homesick, homesick, homesick,” Gloria said.
“Who was your letters from?” asked Ella Fay.
“Miss Julia Mortimer, telling me to make the most of it, because it comes your way only once,” said Gloria.
“That’s a fact,” said Mrs. Moody. “I majored in gym,” she went on. “Led the school-wide wand drill. I still have my Zouave cap.” Judge Moody bent a surprised look on her. “Ta-ta ta da!” She gave him back a bar of the Hungarian Rhapsody. “Then I had to go forth and teach Beginning Physics. That’s what they were all starved for.”
“I can’t hardly wait,” said Elvie.
“For right now, you start getting busy with the fly swatter,” Miss Beulah told her.
“So here came Gloria to take her turn at Banner School, and she run bang into Jack, only to have Miss Julia herself to face. I declare, Gloria!” Aunt Birdie exclaimed. “I wish you had the power of the Beechams to draw us a picture. I’d dearly loved to have been hiding behind the door the day you broke it to Miss Julia Mortimer you was leaving the schoolhouse and becoming a married woman.”
Gloria rose to her feet from the baby-rocker. Aunt Nanny reached out and caught the baby.
“It’s a sweet little story, I know,” said Aunt Beck.
“Nobody’s listening but we women,” Aunt Nanny said. “The men are all about ready to fall asleep anyway, Curtis is nodding, and Percy is already whittling to his heart’s content.”
“Tell it. Maybe we can help you,” said Aunt Birdie.
Uncle Noah Webster reached his hand up the neck of the banjo, as the other hand stole to the strings and began to pluck out softly “I Had a Little Donkey and Jacob Was His Name,” without giving the tune its words.
“It was the last time I went across to see Miss Julia,” said Gloria. “It was Sunday before my reports were due, the first reports after spring planting. Her bank going up the road to her house was a sheet of white, all irises and pheasant-eye. We had tender greens and spring onions with our chicken. The Silver Moon rose was already out, there at the windows—”
“It’s about to pull the house down now,” said Miss Lexie.
“The red rose too, that’s trained up at the end of the porch—”
“That big west rose? It’s taken over,” nodded Miss Lexie.
“She’d filled the cut-glass bowl on the table,” said Gloria. “With red and white.”
“She didn’t cut ’em any longer,” Miss Lexie said, as if she were bragging on her. “The reds hung on the vine all over everything, and turned blue as bird-dog tongues.”
“Leave the child alone, Lexie. Nobody asked you to help tell,” said Aunt Birdie.
“I was sitting with her at the dining room table after dinner, under those frowning bookcases, and I had my report cards spread out all over the table, making them out.”
“Skip those!” cried Aunt Nanny.
“And I spilled her ink,” said Gloria. “And after we rescued the reports and mopped the table, I said, ‘Miss Julia, listen. Before I go back to Banner, I’ve got something to tell you that’ll bring you pain, and here it is. I may not ever be the wonderful teacher and lasting influence you are. There’s a boy pretty well keeping after me.’ And she said, ‘A Banner boy? Well, give me his name and age and the year I taught him, and I’ll see if I can point out an answer for you.’ ”
“Gloria, you’ve got her down perfect!” cried Aunt Birdie. “Go on!”
“So I handed her his report. ‘Still a schoolboy?’ she says. I told her he’d had to stay out of school and that’s why he was coming so late, and she’d never got to teach him. I said I taught him and that was half my trouble, because I couldn’t run from him. She said, ‘I’m looking right now at who he is, and I see exactly your trouble. I’ll go over a few questions with you.’ ”
“Poor Gloria!” breathed Aunt Beck.
“She said, ‘In the first place, how did you get him to start back to school, once he was loose?’ I told her, ‘I let him be the one to drive the school bus.’ She said, ‘What way did you find to get him to study his lessons? Though it seems to have done little good.’ I told her by asking him to run up my flag, cut and saw my wood, and keep up my stove so the whole school wouldn’t either freeze us or burn us down, and watch my leaks and my windows and doors so we wouldn’t have a chance to float out of sight or all get blown away. And he’s studying between times before he knows it.’ She said how did I keep him with open book on pretty days? I said, ‘On pretty days, I might be driven to keeping him in after school.’ I said, ‘After he carries the children home to their mothers, he turns the bus around and sails back. He washes my boards and beats my erasers and sweeps my floor and cuts my switches and burns my trash and grinds my pencils and pours my ink, and takes down my flag—and all the time I’m right behind him, teaching him.’ She says, ‘After that, how do you make sure he doesn’t forget it the minute you finish?’ I said, ‘He carries me home. And I live at their house. We have all the evening,’ I said.”
“Go on,” said Aunt Nanny. “Don’t stop and dream on us.”
“Miss Julia said, ‘And what about now, after the seed’s in the ground and before the crops are laid by? How far away from school is he now?’ And I told her how even now he was still coming to run up my flag and salute it with me and coming back to help me home in the evenings. And on the days he missed all the recitations, I had that much more to catch him up on. When I saw the very most of Jack, I told her, it seemed like those were the same days when I had to take off from his attendance and mark him an absence from school. I told her the family was still trying to scrape a living from this old farm, the circle still unbroken, nine mouths to feed, and he’s the oldest boy.”
“Well, and just who is that, now, that you’re making sound so pitiful?” cried Miss Beulah, still being everywhere at once, as if she’d be too busy to sit down to listen to foolish chatter.
“Did she say she’d love to meet him?” asked Aunt Beck.
“She didn’t think that was necessary,” Gloria said. “I tried telling her she’d never laid eyes on Jack. ‘Scholastic average 72, attendance 60, and deportment 95 is a pretty clear picture to me of the two of you,’ she said. ‘You’ve awarded him a general average of 75 and two-thirds.’ I said, ‘And 75 is passing.’ ‘Passing so far,’ she says. ‘Is he going to be present on examination day and sit down and take those seventh-grade examinations? Remember, I’m the one who made those examinations out.’ ‘He’ll take ’em if I have anything to do with it!’ I told her. ‘And win his diploma?’ And I tell her I’ve already got his diploma filled out—all but for the Superintendent’s signature and the gold seal. ‘Miss Julia, I’m going to hang onto Jack and pull him through. And as soon as he gets his feet on solid ground, I’m going to marry him.’ ‘Marry him?’ she said.”
“Did she appear satisfied?” Aunt Birdie asked, nodding Gloria ahead. “And tell you to go on, keep a-courting?”
“Exactly the opposite,” said Gloria. “ ‘Marry him! And leave Banner School without its teacher?’ she says. And she jumped right up and it shook the china closet behind her, and said, ‘Oh, you can’t do that!’ ”
Aunt Nanny slapped her lap, on either side of the baby, and Aunt Birdie’s high giggle led the laughing.
“She said, ‘It’s a thoroughly unteacherlike thing to do,’ ” Gloria went on. “She said, ‘Instead of marrying your pupil, why can’t you stick to your guns and turn yourself into a better teacher and do him and the world some good?’ ”
There was a fresh bu
rst of womanly laughter, and along with that and the tickling notes of the banjo, one low groan from a man joined in—it could only have come from Judge Moody.
“I wonder what Miss Gloria won’t decide to tell us,” remarked Miss Beulah. “Something’s happened somewhere to loosen her tongue.”
“Keep on, Gloria! Gloria, I declare! After all the good excuse you’d put up!” cried Aunt Birdie. “Could you still go her one better?”
“I told her I wanted to give all my teaching to one,” Gloria said. And as they sat silenced, she added, “That’s when she laughed at me.”
“You can’t stand that,” said Miss Beulah. “No, not from anybody, not you.”
“Did you wilt?” asked Aunt Nanny.
Gloria’s eyelids dropped shut and trembled. Then she went on. “Miss Julia said my story was one that had been heard of before now. She said I wasn’t the first teacher in Creation to be struck down by tender feelings the first day I threw school open and saw one face above all the rest out in front of me. She said teachers falling in love with their first pupils was old at the Flood. But it didn’t give them any certificate to stop teaching.”
“Those words must still be in letters of fire on your poor brain,” said Aunt Beck.
“What did you do? Laugh or cry?” said Aunt Nanny. “Tell you what I’d done—I’d run.” As she hollered it, Lady May scampered down and ran from her.
“I argued as good as she did,” Gloria said. “I asked her if she could give me just three good reasons right quick why I couldn’t give up my teaching and marry that minute if I wanted to.”
“Was she stumped?” asked Aunt Birdie eagerly.
“She thought she had them,” said Gloria. “She told me, ‘All right, Gloria. One: you’re young and ignorant—each one of you as much as the other.’ That wasn’t so. ‘Two: sitting and hanging your heels over Banner Top in the moonlight, you don’t dream yet where strong feelings can lead you.’ That wasn’t so. ‘And three: you need to give a little mind to the family you’re getting tangled up with.’ ”
“For mercy’s sakes! Only one of the biggest families there is!” cried Miss Beulah. “And one of the closest!”
“And it’s exactly where they put me down with my valise,” said Gloria.
“Well! Stacey Broadwee, Ora Stovall, and Mis’ Comfort and me, we all drew straws for the teacher,” said Miss Beulah to the company. “And who do you reckon got the little one?”
“Miss Julia didn’t let up,” said Gloria. “ ‘Here’s reason four, for good measure: do you know who you are? Just who are you? You don’t know,’ she says. ‘Before you jump headlong, ask yourself a few questions.’ ”
“And as if that wasn’t our business more than hers!” said Miss Beulah. She added to Gloria with a show of sarcasm, “And I suppose she was ready with an answer for that too?”
While Uncle Noah Webster leaned toward her and picked at another chorus, Gloria was shaking her radiant head. “She said if only Mississippians had birth certificates and would be like other people! ‘It wouldn’t kill them,’ she said. ‘It’s no insult to be asked to prove who you are. It wouldn’t hurt a soul to be ready to furnish some proof of his existence at the right time. And nothing would be lost but a little fraction of the confusion.’ ”
In the disapproving quiet that came after her words, Judge Moody could be heard clearing his throat.
“There’s a good long page, ain’t there now, in everybody’s family Bible for writing ’em down?” asked Uncle Curtis.
“For writing down ours. But Gloria’s lacking in the ones to do the writing,” Aunt Beck sadly reminded him.
“You’re here, aren’t you?” Aunt Birdie said with a scandalized laugh at Gloria.
“Miss Julia told me there was a dark thread, a dark thread running through my story somewhere,” Gloria went on. “Or my mother wouldn’t have made a mystery out of me. And I owed it to myself to find out the worst, and the quicker the better.”
“The worst! And how did you like that?” grinned Aunt Nanny.
“I said it suited me all right kept dark the way it was. I didn’t mind being a mystery—I was used to it. And if I was born a mystery, I’d be married a mystery.”
“And die one?” prompted Aunt Beck.
“Miss Julia still wasn’t satisfied?” asked Aunt Birdie, looking into Gloria’s face. “I’d have been.”
“She said it was a piece of unwisdom.”
“Was that all?” asked several.
“No. ‘Use your head,’ she said. ‘Find out who you are. And don’t get married first,’ she said. ‘That’s putting the cart before the horse.’ ”
“But you did that very thing, didn’t you?” said Aunt Birdie sympathetically. “Don’t blame you a solitary bit.”
“She said, ‘Go back to Banner School. Give out your reports tomorrow—and make those children work harder. Then teach out your year as you promised. And meantime, get your own eyes open. You’re in the very best place to get a little light on yourself. Banner’s the side of the river you surely were born on. You were found in Medley—that’s in walking distance of Banner School. Get to work on yourself. And I’ll work on you, too.’ ”
“Ouch!” cried Aunt Nanny.
“She said where there was a dark thread running, she hated to think of it being unravelled by unknowing hands, and after it’s too late—when she couldn’t be standing there to see it done right. She said every mystery had its right answer—we just had to find it. That’s what mysteries were given to us for. And she didn’t think mine would be too hard for a good brain.”
“Poor Gloria!” murmured Aunt Beck. “I bet you wished mighty hard you hadn’t got her started on you.”
“You’re lucky it didn’t do her any good,” said Aunt Birdie. “You’re the same little question-mark as ever, ain’t you?”
“How did you discourage her, Gloria?” asked Aunt Nanny.
“I snapped the elastic band around my reports, and took the roses she gave me with ’em, and went out of her house and into the spring, and took my road,” said Gloria. “And Jack was there at the other end of the bridge, waiting for me. Whistling.”
“Oh, I bet you skipped!” said Aunt Nanny.
“And never went back,” said Miss Lexie, looking at her.
“And never give another thought to who you were,” said Aunt Birdie stoutly. “And how would you have had the time, anyway, after that?”
“I didn’t see how she could be right about the best place to look—about my beginnings being anywhere around here. I’d already seen all there was to Banner, the first day.”
“Not grand enough for Miss Gloria?” Miss Lexie rocked back on her heels, giving her silent laugh.
“In my heart of hearts, I thought higher of myself than that.” Gloria lifted her chin and opened her eyes wide upon them. “I still do.”
Granny’s tiny voice spoke.
Uncle Noah Webster stopped his tune at once, everybody hushed talking and laughing, and Miss Beulah said, “What is it, what’s that, Granny?”
She said, “Sojourner.”
Miss Beulah went hurrying toward her chair. “Are you telling us something, Granny?”
“Prick up your ears. Once is all I’m going to tell it,” Granny said. “Sojourner. That’s your mother.” She flicked her fan at Gloria. “Fox-headed Rachel.”
All eyes travelled back to Gloria. She stood staring.
“Granny, Granny, wait a minute—I can’t put my finger right quick on who Rachel Sojourner is!” cried Miss Beulah. “There’s no Sojourners I know of!”
“Sure you know! Sure you remember!” said Aunt Nanny. “I do.”
“Where’d they live?” asked Aunt Cleo. “In Banner, sure-enough?”
“Yes’m, clear to the bottom of the hill,” Aunt Nanny said. “Lower than Aycock. They did! Nobody with the name left now.” She slapped herself on her lap. “And Rachel is the one Miss Julia Mortimer taught sewing to—the little girl on the end of the recitation ben
ch. Yes’m. Rachel couldn’t learn to do mental arithmetic, so while the rest of us was firing off to beat the band, she sat like Puss—just pointing the tip of her little tongue out, and putting in a seam.”
“Taught her to sew right here.” Granny’s voice came again. “Saw she’s starving. Called her into my own house. ‘You can help me with this brood, mending their stockings. At least you’ll get fed.’ ”
“You’re bringing her back to me,” said Miss Beulah, in wary tones. “I don’t see her face yet, but I’m beginning to hear just a little—hear the laughing. Yes, in this house, I’d hear the boys tease her, circling around her at the quilting frame, or the loom, maybe, tease her while she treadled. I can hear her laugh floating through the breezeway—and I can see her weak eyes now. She worked—or she laughed—till the coming tears would put her eyes right out. I’ll remember two or three other failings about her too, in a minute,” she added, her eyes moving to Gloria. “Yes, I’m about to see her pretty well.”
“Tossing her mane,” said Granny. “Fiery mane.”
As Gloria let out a gasp of protest, Miss Beulah kept on. “And it was Nathan knew best how to make her cry.”
“But was as still about her as that hunk of firewood going to waste down there in the yard,” Granny said, looking around her and then up into Nathan’s face.
“Couldn’t help teasing Miss Rachel, Granny!” said Uncle Noah Webster. “I remember her for the very reason.”
“But we had one she could count on. Sam Dale would never tease her,” said Uncle Curtis, and instantly the tears stood in Miss Beulah’s eyes.
Granny’s head drove back against her chair as if it had started on its rockers to run off with her, like a buggy. “Mr. Vaughn put a stop to her foolishness, sent her on,” she said. “Well, that’s who you are. You’re Rachel’s.”
“It’s just because Granny is so old that you believe her,” Gloria said in a rush to the company. “If she wasn’t your granny, celebrating her birthday, you’d think she could be as wrong as anybody else.”
“All I hope is Granny didn’t hear that,” Miss Beulah whispered.