Christy

by Catherine Marshall

Books: Write father. Are there books from our library which the children could use? Give him list of possibilities such as:

  Treasure Island

  The Scottish Chiefs

  Little Women

  Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates

  Huckleberry Finn

  A Tale of Two Cities

  Write our minister’s wife in Asheville. Perhaps ladies’ societies would help us buy textbooks.

  Write report to Dr. Ferrand of first day’s school and desperate need of books.

  Think through need of warm clothes, especially shoes for the children. Would church at home help there too?

  Handkerchiefs? Perhaps a pile of clean rags each morning on my desk.

  Saw suggestion of tobacco juice stains on outside of new building. Could any of the boys be chewing? Track this one down.

  Problem: How to go about grading the school?

  Problem: Is gender segregation good or bad?

  Think through. And that other matter—the constant tittering and the giggling. I had not been able to stop it all day and it bothered me. Was it that the children were so excited over this first day of school and the new building with its shining windows of real glass and their new teacher who had been “brought on” and Creed’s pet raccoon? Perhaps. Even so, the laughter in the wrong places at moments which were meant to be serious was making me increasingly self-conscious. What was I doing wrong?

  The background hum of the high-pitched voices outside was shattered by a screech of pain and then violent crying. I ran out to find tiny Vella Holt crumpled up on the ground, sobbing, with the other children gathering in a circle around her.

  “Has a pump knot on her head,” a voice volunteered as I took the child in my arms.

  The little girl did have a large bump. It was going to be a nasty bruise. What was worse, the blow had been dangerously close to the side of her temple.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  No one answered. I looked up. The circle of faces looked too grave for children’s faces, too noncommittal. “Someone has to tell me,” I persisted. “Did Vella fall down?”

  “No’m,” a girl’s voice said softly. “She got hit.”

  “How? With what?”

  Someone thrust a homemade ball into my hands. It was so much heavier than I expected that I almost dropped it. The ball appeared to be made of strips of old cloth wound round and round and then bound with thread. But when I pushed a thumb through the cloth, I found a rock at the center. “Vella got hit with this? No wonder she has a bump on her head! Who threw this?”

  Again, the silence. Then out of the corner of my eye I caught a movement. I turned my head to see Lundy Taylor and Smith O’Teale slinking into the empty schoolhouse.

  “Did Lundy or Smith throw this?” The children answered not a word but their eyes told me the truth. I felt chilled and frightened. Could either boy have done such a thing on purpose? As we comforted Vella and put cloths wrung out of fresh snow on her “pump knot,” my mind struggled with the problem. I decided that it might be better to make the boys stay after school and ask Mr. Grantland to help me get to the bottom of the mischief, rather than talk to them before all the other pupils.

  From then on, the day did not go too well. For one thing, already I had used up all my lesson plans for the day and I was running out of ideas. Surely one of the chief differences between the veteran teacher and the recruit must be that the experienced can never find enough time, whereas the ingénue struggles to fill the hours, looks forward to dismissal time as a reprieve. I told myself that the real problem was no books; textbooks would make all the difference. Of course they would. How could anyone teach without books? Only twelve-thirty. It had to be later than that. Perhaps I was not cut out to be a teacher after all. I was grateful that Mr. Grantland would be helping me in the afternoon.

  What subjects had we not touched on today? Penmanship. Happy thought! I was proud of my handwriting. It was a nice script, I had always flattered myself. I would enjoy putting some sentences on the blackboard to be copied for penmanship.

  About halfway across the floor, I almost stepped on several marbles. Automatically, I stopped to pick them up. But at that moment a child hurled himself toward me almost in a flying tackle. “Teacher, don’t touch them.” It was Little Burl hanging onto my arm, shrieking at me.

  I was startled at his ferocity. “Why not? I can’t leave them on the floor, someone will step on them and go scooting.”

  The little boy looked at me, his face flushed and contorted, his cowlick jerking. “Teacher, them thar marbles are hot, they’ll burn ye.”

  “Hot?” I still didn’t understand.

  Some of the pupils looked embarrassed. Obviously there was something Little Burl did not know how to explain. In the back of the room the laughter started again. It seemed to be led by Wraight Holt and a boy named Rorex Beck, but I also heard Lundy babbling in idiotic fashion, “He! He! Hot marbles!”

  Finally it was John Spencer who spoke up. “Teacher, I’d thank ye to let me pick up the marbles for you. Little Burl was afeared you’d burn your fingers. He’s right, them marbles are red hot.”

  “How did they get so hot?”

  “They was put in the stove, ma’am.”

  “You—did you—?”

  “No ma’am, not me. Guess it was just foolery.”

  Calmly John took a rag from his pocket, gingerly picked up the marbles one by one and then left them on the rag on my desk.

  This whole episode struck me as a low-down prank, ingenious—but mean, almost as bad as the one on the playground. “Look, a prank’s a prank,” I heard myself saying to the roomful of children. “But this wasn’t funny. There are tiny children in this room. What if some of them stepped on red hot marbles with bare feet? They’d have gotten badly burned. You see, glass holds heat—”

  “It sure does!” a self-assured masculine voice said from the doorway. “And your Teacher’s right,” Mr. Grantland was speaking as he strode toward my desk. For me, his presence filled the room. Suddenly I realized how drained I was; the marble trick had been one too many.

  “And this isn’t the kind of prank we’re going to put up with here.” He was by my side protectingly. “Recess time for you, Teacher,” he said quietly and I looked at him gratefully.

  As I turned to go, I heard him say, “Girls and boys, I have here a letter from Dr. Ferrand for the opening of school. I thought you’d like to hear it.”

  I had been teaching school for almost a month. It seemed so much longer. Was it only four weeks ago that I had followed Mr. Pentland up that mountain trail into this new life? Why, my life in Asheville seemed so far away that it could have been months or years. After the first couple of weeks in Cutter Gap when I knew my way around some, I had thought that everything would get easier. How wrong I was! Instead, my troubles were multiplying faster than the freckles on Ruby Mae’s face.

  For one thing, neither Lundy Taylor nor Smith O’Teale had admitted throwing the ball-rock at little Vella. Not even David Grantland had been able to penetrate Lundy’s wall of surliness, and Smith—frightened of something—would not talk at all.

  Nor was I making any progress with what I had supposed would be acomplished by the first or second week: dividing the school into proper grades. In order to handle so many children, I needed to seat the pupils of each grade together—regardless of sex. Yet over and over I was told, “No’m, I can’t sit by no boy. This ain’t a courtin’ school. My Paw’ll take me out if’n ye make it a courtin’ school.” None of the children would budge from this attitude.

  They were equally immovable on their insistence on Latin, Latin, and more Latin when what they really needed were the most elementary of subjects. It seemed that from the Old Country had come the conviction that any boy or girl without Latin “didn’t have no l’arnin’ a-tall.”

  “Don’t hanker for fancy doings and foolishness in the school,” parents told me, “but don’t you let my young’uns go till they can read L
atin real good.” Or “Don’t mean to be onery, but my mind’s sot and I’m that long-headed ’bout Latin.”

  They were too—long-headed stubborn Scots with a sprinkling of equally flinty Irish and German. In taking this job I had supposed that a year and a half of Junior College on top of High School would enable me to teach ordinary subjects in a one-room country schoolhouse. But I had not counted on having to teach Latin and I was terrified at the prospect.

  Then there were various behavior problems—like the tobacco chewer who was depositing amber spittle on the freshly painted outside walls of the schoolhouse. And some crude obscene drawings had appeared on the walls of the privies. Increasingly, evidence pointed to three boys as our chief trouble­makers: Lundy Taylor, Wraight Holt and Smith O’Teale, with Rorex Beck sometimes joining in the mischief.

  Then there were children who were not alert because they were not eating properly, were actually hungry, I suspected. And there were several with eye problems. I would see them shielding their bloodshot eyes from the light; on sunshiny days they would sometimes slip beneath their desks to get into a shadow.

  Nor could I ever have anticipated the pigs—what the children called “hawgs.” In the Cove most hogs were not penned, so they wandered at will, fattening themselves on “mast”—beechnuts, acorns, and chestnuts. Some of them had taken to sleeping under the schoolhouse floor, grunting with what must surely be the most repulsive sound in the world, scratching their backs on the foundation posts. The pig noises did not help a bit with the effort to teach seventy-two classes in six hours: that was, for three days of the week, six subjects in all twelve grades; for the other two days when Bible was added, eighty-four classes. Of course it was impossible!

  After any such day I desperately needed some time to myself to take my mind off pigs and Latin and get back some perspective. But in the mission house privacy was as hard to come by as four-leaf clovers in a patch of dandelions—chiefly because Ruby Mae Morrison was always appearing at my bedroom door. In Ruby Mae I had an unsought protégée. She stared at me, questioned me, talked ceaselessly while she wonderingly fingered my possessions. Or if I fled from my room to escape her, she would trail me around the house and grounds like a devoted collie dog.

  Since Ruby Mae wanted to be with me that much, I tried enlisting her help in running errands, like spying out for me when Miss Ida would be out of the kitchen. Then I would rush down to wash my clothes. Otherwise, Miss Ida would stand there as I worked, gazing at me steadily with pursed lips, rubbing her thumbs against her fingers, disapproval shrieking from her cold silence. I could never seem to do anything to please her.

  Of course Miss Ida was just Miss Ida, often irascible, as I knew now, a stickler of a housekeeper and always clutching of her brother David. Mr. Grantland did not take his sister too seriously, and neither should I, he told me. In fact, David Grantland was a support to me in all of these troublesome matters—in school and out—because his light approach helped me ward off self-pity and hang onto my sense of humor.

  It was he who had explained to me that first day of school when I had been so bothered by the children’s giggling every time I opened my mouth, “Don’t worry. It’s nothing. Your way of speaking, the way you use the English language sounds just as strange and funny, that is, to the pupils as their way of speaking sounds odd to you. You’ll get used to one another.” He had been right. Within the week the snickering was tapering off.

  And he was soon telling me, “Look Christy, enough of this ‘Mr. Grantland.’ Makes me feel like your father.”

  I blushed ridiculously. “You don’t seem a bit like my father—”

  “Then make it ‘David.’ ”

  “But not before the children.”

  “No, not before them, but everywhere else—”

  So it was agreed.

  As I got to know David better, I found that he was a tease with a tongueful of banter on any subject—even those I took most seriously. Like that Tuesday night at the supper table when, having added the last name to the school roll that day, I admitted my discouragement. “Just imagine it! A grand total of sixty-seven pupils in one room! That’s just too many, especially when they’re in all twelve grades.”

  “Well, my offer still stands,” David told me as he helped himself to more corn pudding and reached for another hot biscuit.

  “Which was—?”

  “Which was to take over the Bible classes on top of all the mathematics classes.”

  “Does that include Bible memory work?”

  “Yes—and I’ll even go you one better,” he added impulsively. “If you like, I’ll take one or more of your advanced Latin classes. And there you have a magnificent offer.”

  Before I could answer, Miss Alice put in, “It really is a good offer, Christy, with all David has to do.”

  “That’s right!” David continued. “And if you think you have it bad, look at me! I must call on a minimum of sixty families each month. Dr. Ferrand’s orders. Build schoolhouse-churches, barns, springhouses, roads. Write sermons and preach, organize Sunday schools. Set up parties and hay rides and stir-offs and get good wholesome fun going for the young folks. Shall I go on?”

  “No need. I’m impressed,” I told him. And I really was. He and Miss Alice were each doing the work of several people. But then I asked, “Where’s the barn you built?”

  “Afraid you’d ask about that.” He leaned close to me, a wide smile lighting his features. “No barn. Just thought I’d try tossing that in for effect. Now—do you want my help—or don’t you?”

  “As my students would say, ‘I do! And thank you kindly.’ ”

  But even with David’s help and his jocular attitude, whenever I could be by myself of a night after Ruby Mae had gone to bed, I felt that I had to face the sober facts: the school was too much for as inexperienced a teacher as I was. All the doubts I had had that day of Bob Allen’s accident, and again when Miss Alice had questioned me about my motives in coming to Cutter Gap, returned in full force. It was not that I was superstitious about Mr. Allen’s accident. He was recovering nicely. But perhaps, I reasoned, the accident had nonetheless been one of many signposts trying to tell me that I had made a mistake, pointing me back to my world where I belonged.

  One afternoon after an especially exhausting day in school, I thought that a walk would clear my head. So I slipped out the side door of the mission house, for once evading Ruby Mae. The air was cold, still with the tangy crispness of winter. Gratefully I drew deep draughts of it into my lungs. The snow which had covered all of East Tennessee on January 2nd had still not melted here in the mountains.

  Snow never lasted so long in Asheville, and by the second day it was always dirty from soot and traffic. I never knew that snow could be so beautiful until I saw it miles away from a city. Such sparkling pristine pure white!

  But just ahead of me down the road there were some dark blobs scattered over several yards, marring the whiteness. As I got closer, I saw that the blobs were torn fur—some black, some reddish-brown with—Oh, no! Some poor little rabbit had been caught by another animal and literally torn to bits. On the crust of the snow there were blood stains and bits of torn fur clinging to bloody viscera. I did not want to see any more, so I skirted the spot and walked on rapidly down the road.

  I wished that my mind were a slate so that with one swipe I could wipe off what I had just seen. Instead, a train of kindred memories came rushing in. Like that time when I had seen a tomcat streaking across our lawn in Asheville with a baby squirrel in his mouth, the squirrel crying in pathetic, high-pitched squeals of animal terror. I had dashed after the tomcat but he had been too quick for me. Sadly, I had turned back towards the house, the baby animal’s protest at death reverberating in my ears. Why did nature have such a vicious, tooth-and-claw aspect? Or that time when I had been playing hide-and-seek with playmates and had stepped on the body of a dead bird in the boxwood serpentine of the yard next door. Right now, so many years later, the nerves up my bac
k crawled at the thought. I remember that I had refused to look while mother had slipped off my shoe and cleaned it. And after that, I had never wanted to wear that pair of shoes again.

  I jerked my mind back. I’ll think of other things. I was passing the O’Teale’s tobacco barn, so their cabin must be somewhere near. There were four of the O’Teale children in my school and since I was in no mood to pay a call, I knew I’d better turn around and start back. But it was too late. Suddenly, I was at the edge of their yard and Mrs. O’Teale had seen me. She put her hand to her mouth and hallooed. There was no escaping now.

  The O’Teale cabin was like all the others I had seen, except more unkempt. In the yard, the trampled-down snow was littered with trash—rags and papers and junk, with pigs and chickens wandering at will. There was the usual big black pot turned on its side, rusting. No effort had been made to stack the firewood; the logs lay in wild disarray where they had been tossed. But in the midst of the squalor were the usual clumps of old English boxwood, snow-capped, incongruous in this setting.

  I paused at the edge of the yard as I saw that the debris was worse than it had looked from a distance. There was filth, human filth along with the animal. The chickens were pecking at it; the pigs were walking through it, rolling in it, grunting. I lifted my skirts, and with my eyes on the ground for each step ahead, picked my way across the yard. Isn’t there an outhouse in the back yard? Aren’t they teaching the children anything? I found myself wishing fervently that I had started my walk from the mission house in the opposite direction.

  Mrs. O’Teale (whose first name, Swannie, did not seem to suit her at all) was delighted to see me, obviously flattered by what she thought a deliberate visit from the new teacher. She was a tall slender woman with stringy, dirty-looking blonde hair. She was wearing a faded calico shirtwaist and an ill-fitting skirt with an apron on top of it. Her shoulders sagged, as if for a long time they had been carrying too heavy a load. Her eyes were dull and tired and sad, beaten by life. In the next few moments I saw why.