by Richard Peck
But Letty hollered out, “You there, Blossom Culp! I want a word with you.” At that her whole club turned my way.
Ione Williams was there, and Harriet Hochhuth and the Beasley twins, Tess and Bess, who are identical, and Maisie Markham, who stands out a mile.
Letty has the sweetest little face you ever saw until you come to her mouth, which is mean. She bustled up and began to speak. Then her eyes popped when she saw the spelling medal I wore depending from my front.
“Well, if that doesn’t about take the cake!” she exclaimed. “Wearing that old grade school spelling medal to high school!”
“Did you ever?” said several of her club.
“They are not going to be interested in your so-called past achievements here at the high school,” Letty continued. “Take my advice and throw that thing away.”
I made a silent vow right then to wear that spelling medal on my chest until it fell off.
“But never mind about that,” Letty said. “What I want to say to you is this, Blossom. You will find here at the high school they have such a thing as school spirit. The freshman class must pull together, and as Miss Spaulding used to say, ‘A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.’”
Letty left no doubt as to who the weakest link was, and all her club looked right at me.
“We don’t have any intention in this world of being dragged down or embarrassed to death by you, Blossom. Let this be a warning.” Her eyes narrowed to slits.
“Is that a fact,” I remarked.
She patted her hair bow. “You cannot help your background, Blossom, or do much about your looks. But I hope in my heart you won’t make a jackass of us all by telling tall tales and poking your nose into other people’s business and claiming you are some kind of a witch or whatever, which are three of your bad habits.”
There are times in life when it’s better to remain silent and let your fists do the talking. I was winding up to knock the socks off Letty Shambaugh when I caught a glimpse of Alexander Armsworth in the distance, which distracted me.
He was wandering into the schoolyard in a new belted knicker suit with his eyes peeled for two high school cronies of his, Bub Timmons and Champ Ferguson.
Then from within the schoolhouse a bell rang, the first of many. Everybody ganged toward the entrance. Alexander was claimed by Bub and Champ, and Letty singed ahead with all her club. I was left to face high school alone, keeping Alexander Armsworth in the corner of my eye.
I suppose high school is educational, though very little of it is to my taste. The teachers can teach only one subject, so you spend half the day traipsing from one classroom to the next, herded along like hogs in a chute.
To keep us freshmen in our place, we all had to wear what they call beanies, which are little orange and black skullcaps with the number 18 on them, as we are to be the graduating class of 1918. I had to anchor my beanie on my unruly hair with a hatpin.
As headgear they are not flattering, though Letty wore hers like a crown of jewels. On Maisie Markham’s big head, the beanie looked like a covered button. But if you turned up without one, some sophomore had the privilege of wiping the floor with you.
Our days began with a thing they call homeroom. Here attendance is taken and announcements are made. All the freshmen are stuck in the same homeroom, so it was no better than being in Horace Mann School. In the first week we had class elections. Letty was made president of the class, and Alexander was made vice-president. My name didn’t come up.
Our homeroom teacher was an ancient person, name of Miss Blankenship. We returned to her later each day for English literature, where she was driving us with a whip through a play called Hamlet. Every day she put a new quotation from this play on the blackboard, such as:
SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF DENMARK
Act I
which was written out in her quavering hand. Until Miss Blankenship, I hadn’t known that a woman can go bald, too. But she wasn’t blind. One false step and she nailed you.
Though I could put up with most of high school, I nearly drew the line at what they call Girls’ Gym. I get all the exercise I need, and I’m not in the habit of taking off my clothes in public. Still, we all had to take it except for Maisie Markham, who was excused on the grounds of weight.
I’d expected the gym teacher to be a big, beefy woman, like a heavyweight wrestler in bloomers. But here I was proved wrong.
Her name was Miss Fuller, and she was more willowy than muscular. She wore a bandeau of flowered silk tight across her forehead and artistic drapings in several colors hanging down over her bloomers. Satin ribbons that attached to her gym shoes crisscrossed to the knee over her cotton stockings. She had a wan face and sad spaniel eyes with a suspicion of rouge dotting both her prominent cheekbones.
Under her direction, we ran relays and swung Indian clubs, but she favored what she called Artistic Expression. She’d crank up an Edison Victrola and play a song called “Pale Hands I Love Beside the Shalimar.” To this accompaniment we were to turn ourselves into fields of waving wheat or sometimes flowers sprouting and putting out foliage.
She was a great one for graceful movement, and I’d often fall down, as I found it hard to maneuver in bloomers and rubber shoes. I wouldn’t have minded it much except for the locker room. Here we had to strip down and shower together in a big galvanized metal enclosure.
Every now and then me and Mama drag a wash-tub in from the porch at home and have a bath before the fire. But we take turns.
In Girls’ Gym we all had to splash around under the spigots together. This was not natural to me, particularly as Letty Shambaugh took it for an opportunity to make remarks about my person.
Her person, which I glimpsed through the steam and soapsuds, was pink and dimpled all over. I could only hope this bathing business wouldn’t continue on into cold weather, which is not good for your health.
From Girls’ Gym we went daily to the study of history. It was taught by a new teacher, name of Mr. Ambrose Lacy. Many of the sillier girls had crushes on him. Because Letty Shambaugh sat across the aisle from me, I happened to notice she’d written Mr. Lacy’s name on her notebook cover, encircled it with a heart, and lettered in the following poem:
If you love me as I love you,
No knife can cut our love in two.
Sickening though this was, Mr. Lacy took it in his stride, seeming to have a long history of being admired. He was a handsome man and knew it, with regular features and a cleft in his chin. His hair was yellow and wavy, and all his neckties and pocket handkerchiefs matched. As high school teachers go, he was about average, but he struck so many vain poses that I personally thought he’d have done better on the stage.
He was fond of the sound of his own voice. One time early in the semester he clasped his hands in the small of his back and proclaimed: “Rome is dead, and the once-great British Empire is on its knees. But Bluff City is in her prime! Where else on earth do the tracks of the Wabash Railroad and the Illinois Central cross, creating prosperity and a top-notch daily wage for those willing to work?
“Boys and girls, we had better search the history of Bluff City to learn why we’re sitting so pretty. What is history but mankind’s record where we look for guidance? We search the past for wisdom because the future is the Great Unknown!”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I said, speaking out before I thought.
Mr. Lacy looked down at me, startled. He’d been as cranked up as Miss Fuller’s Victrola before my interruption. “You aren’t?”
“Well, no,” I said. “An aunt of mine foresaw the future, so it wasn’t the Great Unknown to her. Here awhile back she had a vision of the San Francisco earthquake a week ahead of the actual event.”
Across the aisle Letty Shambaugh threw herself onto her desktop and began drumming it with her little fists. “Oh, no. Blossom’s going to tell more lies about her trashy family. I could just die. Somebody stop her.” Et cetera.
But Mr. Lacy paid
her no heed. He hadn’t noticed me before, but now he did. “Did your aunt make this—ah—prophecy known?”
“Shoot, yes,” I explained. “She was living right there in San Francisco at the time, in a rooming house on Mission Street. She preached the earthquake’s coming from the street corners and notified all the newspapers.”
“I see,” said Mr. Lacy, staring at me like a cat had spoken.
“It didn’t do her any good, though, as it turned out.”
Letty moaned. “Oh, don’t let Blossom finish the story. Her endings are always simply awful. Somebody stuff something in her mouth.” Et cetera.
“Nobody likes hearing bad news,” I said, “so my aunt was widely ignored. She began to lose faith and to disbelieve her Powers, and that led to a regular tragedy.”
“It did?” said Mr. Lacy. The whole classroom had gone quiet except for Letty moaning.
I nodded. “My aunt failed to save herself. Her vision foretold that the entire south end of the city would collapse into its own cellars. But on the night before the great quake she just went to bed like anybody else. Of course, when it struck at dawn and she was throwed across her room and felt the floor give under her, she was proved right.
“But it was too late to get out. Down she crashed and ended up pinned under half a house. Alive though she was, she’d have been left to rot except that one of her arms was poked through the wreckage and stretched exposed on the sidewalk.”
Mr. Lacy shuddered, but all the boys were attentive. Ahead of me, Alexander was listening. He wouldn’t turn around, but I saw how red his ears were getting.
“There my aunt was,” I said, “like a rat in a trap all day with only her hand and arm free out there on the public pavement.”
I dropped my voice as I came to the terrible part of this true story. “On that hand my aunt wore a diamond ring. Imagine her horror and dismay when some looter came along on the sidewalk outside and all but trod on her helpless hand. Then he looked down and saw it.
“This looter fellow hunkered down and took hold of her hand, which my aunt tried to jerk away. Then he saw it wasn’t a dismembered limb or lifeless. By then he’d noticed the diamond sparkling on one of her fingers.
“He took her hand in his rough grasp and commenced to twist at her ring, determined to take it from her. But it was a tight fit and wouldn’t work loose.
“Well, sir, the looter rubbed my aunt’s finger raw, but he couldn’t pull that doggoned diamond ring over her knuckle. All this time she was screaming from under the house, unheeded.”
I fell silent then to give everybody time to picture this awful scene and to figure out what was coming next if they had any imagination.
“Then my ill-fated aunt knew the worst when her hand was raised to the looter’s stubbled face. She felt the hot wetness and sharp teeth when his mouth closed over her ring finger.”
The classroom was tomb-silent. Mr. Lacy, who is naturally pale, went paler. “You don’t mean,” he began, “that—”
“You bet your boots,” I said. “The damnable looter chewed my aunt’s finger off and bit the bone in two. Then he made away with her ring. The fire department didn’t dig her out till nightfall. They never located her diamond ring, though her finger was found in a gutter nearby just where die looter had spat it out.”
The room remained hushed except for the pounding sound of Maisie Markham’s feet as she galloped to the door with both her hands clamped over her mouth. Maisie doesn’t have the stomach for a good story.
3
I SAT BACK PRETTY WELL SATISFIED at this true story of my nine-fingered aunt.
Besides, it was history, being about the San Francisco earthquake, and this was history class. But across the aisle Letty was clutching her forehead. Up ahead Alexander sat slouched in his seat, his ears burning with embarrassment. A person knows when her efforts to contribute aren’t appreciated. I got no better from Mr. Lacy.
He swallowed heavily and said, “Blossom, since you’re responsible for this upset, you’d better skin on down to Miss Fuller’s locker room and see that Maisie is all right. The child may need to stretch out on the cot down there until she’s better.”
“I’ll need a pass,” I said, reminding him of one of the many rules around this place.
“Just go, Blossom,” he barked, so I went, making a dignified exit.
Any moment of freedom in a school day is worth its weight in gold, so I took my sweet time getting down to the locker room on my errand of mercy. Since high school teachers don’t work a full day, they have such a thing as a free period. Miss Fuller was having hers when I finally sauntered into her office at one end of the lockers.
She was at her desk busy with paper work. But Maisie was nowhere in sight, and she’s hard to miss. When I explained that I’d been sent down on her behalf, Miss Fuller recounted how Maisie had lost her lunch on the way here but had recovered enough to be sent home.
“She has a weak stomach,” I remarked. “She stuffs her face with candy the livelong day—licorice and suchlike.”
“A very unhealthy habit,” Miss Fuller noted.
“And nasty,” I added.
As I had no place to be, I lingered at Miss Fuller’s desk, noticing that she was extra wan-looking today. Behind the horn-rimmed reading spectacles, her magnified eyes were more soulful than usual. Though she’d seemed intent upon her paper work, her mind was drifting. This is the sort of thing I can often tell about people, don’t ask me how.
I expected to be sent on my way, but Miss Fuller’s thoughts were off gathering wool. I thought of taking a peek at her gradebook, but who cares about a gym grade? Then my eyes fell upon a fatal document.
It was a note on the desk. There was a page of writing that ended with numerous X’s, representing kisses. I knew that handwriting even upside down. My eyes popped, but I kept a poker face. It was a letter from Mr. Lacy.
Miss Fuller seemed to notice me again. “What class did Maisie get sick in?” When I told her, she only said, “Ah.” But her hand fluttered up to the back of her neck. “Ambrose—Mr. Lacy is quite a good teacher, I believe?”
So-so, I nearly said, but I was on my guard now. “He is right good,” I remarked, “and many of the girls are sweet on him.”
“Indeed?” she said.
Naming no names, I quoted to her the poem Letty Shambaugh had written to Mr. Lacy on her notebook cover. I hoped to share a good laugh with Miss Fuller, but I was in for another surprise.
“‘No knife can cut our love in two,’” she echoed. “That is a real beautiful sentiment.”
It was about the worst corn-fed sentiment I’d ever run up against. But something was dawning on me fast. Love had come to Miss Fuller. She had it bad for Mr. Lacy, and being a gym teacher, she didn’t know a good poem from drivel.
She sighed and returned to her work, but she was watching me on the sly. Since I often do the same, I can tell when it’s being done to me. Miss Fuller’s hand skated over the papers on her desk, concealing Mr. Lacy’s note and picking up another page.
She stroked the artistic knot of hair that rode high above her bandeau. “Speaking of poetry,” she remarked, “how does this strike you?”
She read aloud in a mournful voice like the coo of a mating dove:
“Thoughts are bluebirds high above,
Winging toward you with my love;
Soaring over oak and pine,
They bring the news that I am thine.”
I like to have gagged. This poem was more sickening than Letty’s. Miss Fuller had no doubt cribbed it off a two-cent valentine.
“What do you think?” she asked, and waited for a reply.
My head whirled. Not only was Miss Fuller stuck on Mr. Lacy, but she was writing slop to him like a young girl. It shook my faith in grown-ups.
“I have heard worse,” I said cautiously, though I never had.
Miss Fuller sighed again and plucked at the tails of her bandeau. “Don’t be kind,” she sighed. “My poor words are
unworthy. For me, Artistic Expression is limited to the dance. With poetry, I seem to strike out.”
She’d get no argument from me on that score.
“I don’t suppose you know any . . . suitable poetry, Blossom?”
I could see the woman was desperate, so I racked my brain. Then suitable poetry came to me. It was Miss Blankenship’s daily words from Hamlet, which had seeped into my head.
“How about this?” I said.
“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
Miss Fuller blinked at me from behind her horn-rims. Her hand stole up to her long cheek. “That has a nice ring to it,” she said. “Did you write it?”
“No, but Shakespeare did,” I explained, “in Hamlet, Act Two.”
“Nevertheless,” she said, “it seems to hit the nail right on the head.” She pushed paper and an ink pen across the desk at me. “I’ll be much obliged if you’d just copy out those words. I would like them for . . . my scrapbook of Beautiful Thoughts.”
She grew shifty-eyed then as people will when they’re lying.
The bell rang just as I finished my copy work. I was ready to scoot, but Miss Fuller looked up in a dreamy way, saying, “You are a strange child, Blossom, and not a promising physical specimen. Still, you are somehow sympathetic.”
“Many thanks,” I told her, as these were the first halfway civil words I’d heard in high school. Then I cut out.
The schoolyard was emptying when I stepped out into the afternoon sunshine. There, at the foot of the steps, stubbing his toe in the earth, was Alexander Armsworth. Reminding myself how Miss Fuller could make a fool of herself over the male sex, I meant to breeze past him in case he had no greeting for me. But he did.
“Well, Blossom, you’ve put your foot in it again with that tall tale about your so-called aunt getting her ring finger gnawed off.”