She’s broke the heart of many a poor fellow,
But she’s never broke this-un of mine.”
Brown feet tapped softly, fingers drummed on desks, heads wagged to the rhythm. Some of the boys and girls even sang parts. I could see that these mountain children had music in them. They sang more unself-consciously than they talked, and with more emotion, charm and skill than I had ever heard in impromptu singing:
“I’ve got a gal in the Buffalo Hollow,
Hey-tank-toddle all the day,
Oh, she won’t come and I won’t follow,
And a hey-tank-toddle all the day.”
The children smiled at me, first shyly and then broadly, and I found myself smiling back at them and getting caught up in the fun of the mountain song.
After all the songs had been sung, innumerable verses of each one, I was thinking reluctantly that my next task was to get an attendance roll on paper, the children’s names and some information about how much schooling they had had. Last year some of the children had gone to the Low Gap School (the one from which Mr. Grantland had gotten the desks) but there the school year had been only four months, and no attendance roll or grade books had been kept to hand over to the new school. Apparently this was because the teacher had been almost as ignorant as the pupils. There were many stories about teachers in these mountains, like some of whom Miss Alice had told me: one man who had stubbornly refused to believe or to teach that the earth was round; another who had used just one sentence written on the blackboard—“Where will you spend eternity?”—to teach both reading and spelling; a woman who had taught that the stars and the stripes on the American flag were God’s pledge that the earth would never be destroyed by another flood.
I beckoned to Ruby Mae and she came obediently up to the desk. “Could you and two other girls help me take a roll?”
“Well’m, guess so. What’s ‘take a roll’?”
“Write down the pupils’ names, ages, addresses—so on. I’ll tell you what to do. Ruby Mae, who’s that tall brunette girl there? In the second row, third from the front? Brown eyes?”
“Oh, you mean with the dark hair? That thar’s Lizette Holcombe.”
“She’ll do fine. Now one more. The blonde girl? Red bow in her hair?”
“That’s my best friend, Bessie Coburn.”
“Well, would you get them up here? This is a special job, an important one.”
Ruby Mae was puffed with pride already as she went back to enlist the two girls. “We want to write down the full name of each pupil,” I explained, handing each of them a ruled tablet and a pencil. “Age . . . beneath that, parents’ names . . . grade the child attended at the Low Gap School . . . home address.”
The one named Bessie shook her head. “I vow and declare, Teacher—that home address now—much obleeged if you’ll tell us what ye’re a-meanin’ by that ‘home address’?”
“Where they live. For reports and notices and so on,” I explained patiently. “We have to know that.”
“Jest can’t mortally—” Ruby Mae looked as puzzled as the others.
“Tell you what. Let’s each take a row. You watch me with the first name and then you’ll understand perfectly.”
All of the pupils in my row were boys. The first one looked to be about a second-grader, flaxen-haired, with eyes that looked at me directly as he spoke and the firmest mouth I had ever seen on a youngster. My notebook was ready. “Now—your name?”
“Front name or back name?”
“Well—er—both.”
“Front name be Sam Houston.”
Long pause.
“A fine name,” I prodded. “A Tennessee hero. He picked up where Davy Crockett left off, didn’t he? Was Sam Houston an ancestor of yours?”
“No’m, no blood kin.”
“Well now, your—what did you call it—back name?”
“Holcombe.”
“Oh, yes. Of course, now I remember. That was your father who helped us this morning. Now, what’s his full name?”
“He be John Swanson Holcombe.”
“And your mother’s name?”
“She’s just Mama.”
“But she has a name. What’s her name?”
“Wimmin folks call her ‘Lizzie.’ ”
“But her real name?” I persisted.
The small brow wrinkled. “Let me study on hit now. Oh, shorely. Now I know. Elizabeth Teague Holcombe,” he intoned triumphantly.
I glanced over at my helpers standing at the head of their rows watching me. Their faces wore a quizzical expression that seemed to say, “Uh-huh, you see, not quite as easy as you thought.”
But Sam Houston Holcombe and I pushed resolutely on into the wilderness of facts. He was nine years old. He had never before been to school. There were five other children in the family. His “Paw and Mama were all-fired tickled pink ’bout this scholl a-startin’.”
“Last question, Sam—”
“Generally go by Sam Houston, Teacher.”
“Of course. I beg your pardon—And now your address? Tell me where you live.”
“Wal—” That puzzled look on the small face again. “First ye cross Cutter Branch. Then ye cut acrost Lonesome Pine Ridge and down. Through the Gap’s the best way. At the third fork in the trail, ye scoot under the fence and head for Pigeonroost Hollow. Then ye spy our cabin and pull into our place, ’bout two mile or so from the Spencers.”
Acutely conscious of the three girls watching me, I scribbled something that made no sense even to me except that the Spencers seemed to be the nearest neighbors to the Holcombes. Obviously I was going to have to devise some new system in a hurry for addresses in Cutter Gap.
I nodded to my three helpers and they started down their rows as I went on with mine. My second boy had pathetically crossed eyes. “Your name?”
“Orter.”
“Full name, Orter?”
“Name’s Orter Ball O’Teale.”
“Age?”
“Eleven year old a-goin’ on twelve.”
His address turned out to be easier because his family lived just down the road from the mission house.
Although this was turning out to be a somewhat unconventional roll, it was valuable to me because the children volunteered all sorts of information on the side. John Spencer, fifteen, had a battered plane geometry book on his desk.
“Teacher, I worked these figgers—”
“You mean you’ve done the problems?”
“Yes’m.”
“All of them? All the way through the book?”
“Yes’m, mighty near. Could you get me a harder book?”
“I’ll surely try. May have to send to Asheville for it.”
“I’ll thank you kindly for that.”
“John, have you always been so good at math?”
“Yes’m. Plumb crazy about workin’ figgers. Not a solitary thing I like better.”
“Well, that’s great,” I said looking at him with new interest.
“Don’t aim to take no big-head ’bout it with the other young’uns though,” he added quickly.
That brought me to a boy who said that his name was Zacharias Jehoshaphat Holt—to snickers all around him. The boy immediately behind him said softly, “Plumb crazy. Ain’t yer name a-tall.”
“This isn’t the time for fooling,” I said. “We’re trying to get the roll down. Now tell me your real name.”
“Zacharias Jehoshaphat—” With that his right ear jerked violently.
Now the children laughed uproariously, some of them doubled over—all but the boy who had spoken up. He kept a straight face as he volunteered, “Teacher, that’s not his name. He be a-packin’ lies. You can tell. Jest look at his ear.”
Sure enough, Zacharias’ ear jerked again. “Certainly, I see his ear,” I said. “But what’s that got to do with not telling the truth?”
“Oh ma’am! All them Holts when they tell a whopper, their ears twitch—”
I ignored this an
d turned again to the boy in front. “Tell me your name,” I tried again.
“Zacharias—” He snickered—and swallowed. “Jehoshaphat—”
Once again, the ear wiggled. But now I saw it—a string over the ear. Slightly unnerved, I reached over to remove the cord. But the boy in back jerked it away from me and stuffed the string in his desk. Incensed, I marched to the desk and reached in, only to have my fingers meet a mass of wriggling fur. As I squealed and stepped backwards, a small animal as frightened as I clambered onto the desk screeching in protest. A ring-tailed raccoon sat there looking at me from behind his funny mask of a face, one end of the cord held fast in his mouth. Then he took one paw (so like a small hand) and delicately extracted the string from his teeth and began trilling and scolding at me, as if he were the teacher and I the naughty pupil.
Naturally my schoolroom was by this time a bedlam, the girls giggling, the boys holding their middles and laughing so hard that one of them got the hiccoughs. But the boy on whose desk the coon sat held a straight face. He seemed a reincarnation of what Tom Sawyer should have looked like: overalls . . . bare feet . . . tousled hair . . . lots of freckles . . . two front teeth missing. It was his too-straight face that tipped me off. He had masterminded the whole thing, I suspected.
“Now—let’s begin all over,” I said to the boy in front. I was trying hard to be patient, but who ever heard of this much trouble just getting a few names on paper!
“Creed thar put me up to it,” the small thumb jerked toward the Tom Sawyer character behind him. “Said if’n I’d do hit, he’d let me sleep his coon for one night.” Meanwhile the boy in back was whistling softly.
“I see.” I could wait no longer for identification of the whistler. “What’s your name? Creed what?”
“Creed Josiah Allen,” he smirked.
“This is your raccoon, Creed?”
“Yes’m. Pet coon, ‘Scalawag.’ ”
“Might be a good name for you too. You’re a scalawag. Now stop whistling and—”
“Jest whistlin’ a catch—”
“Never mind that. Cut it out,” I said severely, “and we’ll talk about you and the matter of a pet in school in a minute.” Then I returned to the boy in front.
“Name?” I asked for the fourth time.
“Front name be Zacharias. Fer a fact, Teacher. Ye can jest call me Zach. That ‘Jehoshaphat’ now. That was made up. Back name be Holt. Six of us Holts in school.”
I learned that Rebecca and Ozias Holt had eight children, four of them boys. The oldest, Wraight, was seventeen. He had been one of the pupils Mr. Grantland had been watching, the one with the cunning look. The Holt cabin was somewhere southeast of the mission on the slopes of Runyon Rowe Mountain. The directions for getting there took an entire paragraph.
That brought me back to Creed whose eyes glittered with—was it intelligence or mischief? Perhaps both. Quickly I decided that I’d better try to make friends this first morning. “How old is Scalawag, Creed?”
“Got him from a kit last summer.”
“What’s a kit?”
“Like a nest. Where other young’uns are. He’s most grown now. Sleeps with me.” Then seeing the expression on my face, he added defensively, “Oh, he be clean. Coons wash every natural blessed thing afore they eat hit.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“Coons are the main best pets in the world,” he confided. “If ye’d like one fer yerself, Teacher, come spring, maybe we’uns could spy out a kit and git one for ye.”
“Uh—thanks, Creed. Thanks so much. It’s very nice of you. Well, tell you what, let me think about that offer. Now—about Scalawag and school—”
“Oh, Scalawag won’t cause no trouble. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
What could I say without caving in this friendship before it got started? Suddenly I had an inspiration. “It’s like this, Creed,” I lowered my voice. “This is just between you and me. Promise you won’t tell.”
“Cross my heart.” His face was rapt.
“Scalawag is such a ’specially fine coon—I can see that already—you know, so good-looking and such a little comic actor, that the children will want to watch him instead of doing their lessons.”
“Land, no, Teacher.” Creed’s look said that this conversation was not going the way he had hoped and that he was ready to do battle for his pet. “We’ll study on, study on, better’n ever.”
I leaned even closer. “Let’s make a pact. You leave Scalawag home after this, then I’ll let you bring him to the last social, the big recitation just before school closes. We’ll fix it so that Scalawag will be part of the entertainment.”
“Honest, Teacher!” His face was shining. “That be a sealed bargain, fair and square. Land o’ livin’! Why then pretty nigh everybody in the Cove’ll see Scalawag. Put it thar, Teacher!” He stuck out a grubby hand.
So, feeling rather proud of the way I’d handled that little crisis, I went on down the row: Joshua Ben Beck . . . and one more O’Teale: Smith, age fifteen, and then two empty seats. The last note I had made for each boy was what school supplies and books he had. Only there was pathetically little to put down, no notebooks, little paper of any kind.
Obviously the matter of books and supplies was urgent, yet the parents of these pupils could contribute almost nothing. I was going to have to make an immediate survey of the schoolbooks available. The day before, David Grantland had carried over to the school all textbooks that the mission owned. There were so few it was scarcely believable! And these were tattered, with pages missing and torn, most with no covers.
Among the boys in my row, I had seen on desks one worn copy of Red Riding Hood, one Fowler’s Arithmetic, a Jack and the Beanstalk, and a Smith’s Primary Grammar. I thought of my father’s library at home—books floor-to-ceiling on three sides of the room, many of them bound in calf, embossed and tooled in gold. How odd life is, I could not help thinking. Why are things so disproportionate? Why do some people have so much and others so little?
As the morning went on, I had a growing uneasiness about the big swarthy boy in the back row. Ruby Mae had put his name down as Lundy Taylor and his father as Bird’s-Eye Taylor. Perhaps Mr. Grantland’s covert watching of several of these boys had alarmed me unnecessarily, but I noticed that the Taylor boy was uncooperative, never joined in the singing, never took part in anything. Resentment of some sort smoldered in him. Already, he seemed to dislike me. I forced myself not to keep looking at him.
On the other hand, there were those children who were particularly bright and appealing—like Vella, the little sister of Zacharias (ear-twitching) Holt. The tiny girl with auburn pigtails was only five, straight brows over mahogany-colored eyes looked at me with a direct level gaze. Her nose was shaped into a little bump at the tip; below that, a pale rosebud of a mouth with almost no lower lip. All morning long she stared at me with those so-brown eyes; ever so often she would yawn, the eyes big and round and never wavering during the yawn.
Then there was Little Burl. Twice during the morning he slipped up to my desk to reach out admiring grimy fingers and touch the embroidery on my shirtwaist. “Teacher, hit’s a wondery sight to behold.” On his second trip he entreated, “Teacher, when will ye set up and sup with us? Our house is over furrenist the crik, over the ridge and down. Ye can cut through the nigh way.”
“Of course I’ll come. Little Burl, how is your father?”
“Oh, Paw’s head be mendin’ fine now. Doc MacNeill shore fixed it good. If’n ye’ll come and sup, I’ll ask my Mama to make ye a Scripture cake.” The blue, blue eyes were pleading.
“I’m so glad about your father. And I will come soon. That’s a promise.”
All morning I was conscious of the constant roar of the fire in the stove. Much too hot close to it, with the rest of the room always uncomfortably cold. There were the dripping noses, no handkerchiefs at all; the shining eager faces during the spelling bee; the lilt of the voices. What was it, I wondered, that ga
ve the voices that musical quality, that rhythm? “Teacher, ever-who seen such pretty wearin’-clothes as yours!” . . . “If happen you pass” . . . “I wonder me if” . . . “Tuesday, ’twas a week ago” . . . “Teacher, be ye sorry at our meanness?” . . . Where, I asked myself, do I begin to correct English? How can I unravel bad grammar from picturesque traditional idiom that it would be a shame to change . . . “I hope, Teacher, it won’t discomfit you bad” . . . “Teacher, the day long you’re makin’ this a thronged day.”
Next in that “thronged day” came noon recess, which the children called “the dinner spell.” Even before they opened their dinner pails, some of the children organized a singing game. Their voices were high and sweet in the crisp cold air:
“Here come five dukes, a-rovin’, a-rovin’, a-rovin’
Here come five dukes a-rovin’, with a heigh a-ransomtee . . .
We’re quite as good as you sires, one of us, sires, one of us sires,
Pray will you have one of us sires, with a heigh a-ransomtee . . .”
The song sounded so British. “Dukes” and “sires” in these isolated mountains!
After I had eaten the basket dinner that Miss Ida had prepared for me, I stood in the doorway watching the children. I was aware of a kaleidoscope of impressions: the oak-split baskets or lard buckets with large soda biscuits, sometimes with a slice of pork between, more often with sugar heavily sprinkled on the bread; cold roasted sweet potatoes which the children peeled and ate like bananas; corn bread, big hunks of it; an occasional apple. Very few children had milk. Those who did not, went back and forth to the cedar water bucket in the back of the room, everyone drinking from the same gourd. I made a mental note that I was going to have to put a stop to that. The communal gourd would be a good way to start epidemics. What we needed was a supply of those new paper cups just on the market called “Health Kups.” I had seen some of them in Asheville. But if they were too expensive, perhaps I could teach the children to make folding cups out of glossy paper.
I left my post at the door and began a list on a scrap of paper on my desk:
Solve matter of communal bucket. Health Kups?
Christy Page 9