by Richard Peck
We waited spellbound to hear who Preacher Parr thought better of than himself. “I refer to the Spirit of Poetry, who dwells anonymous among us. Dwelleth.”
We murmured among ourselves.
“Yes, I’m talking to you about the Sweet Singer of Sycamore Township.”
The murmurs mounted. There was for a fact a poet among us, somebody nobody knew. Every once in a while a poem would appear from the Sweet Singer. It might be topical. It might be seasonal. It might be a warning outright. You’d find it nailed to a tree or posted on the church door or sent to the Rockville newspaper. Nobody knew who the poet was. Everybody wondered, but nobody knew.
“And so as we see Miss Myrt off, I can do no better than to conclude with this poem from the Sweet Singer, come mysteriously to my attention.” Clearing his throat, Preacher Parr intoned:
Alas, Miss Myrt has shuffled
off this sad and mortal coil,
Free at last from a spinster’s lot
And a teacher’s toil.
In her day she was never meek
And rarely if ever mild;
How well she knew that to spare the rod
Was to spoil the ignorant child.
We trusted her with our young’uns,
And for goodness sake
Some of the kids around here
Are meaner than a snake.
She was plainer than a pikestaff
And rougher than a cob,
But at her sad departure
We all fetch up a sob.
Though we take a solemn solace
That in the sweet by and by
Miss Myrt’s a-cuttin’ switches
For that Schoolhouse in the Sky.
Sincerely yours,
The Sweet Singer of Sycamore Township
A reverential silence lingered. Then Mrs. Darrell Embree called out, “The Sweet Singer has hit the nail on the head with that one! It is the finest piece of literature written in our lifetime!”
Cries rose from around the church:
“Beautiful!”
“Touching!”
“Shakespeare, move over!”
I stole a look at Tansy. She didn’t seem to think much of the poem. So I guessed she wasn’t the Sweet Singer. Now we knew Miss Myrt wasn’t either, though nobody would have accused her of having any poetry in her soul.
The Sweet Singer’s poem took the place of the concluding prayer. We were on the home stretch now. Down the aisle came Albertine Winchell, another girl about Tansy’s age. She swept around the coffin and Imogene, and mounted the steps to the altar. Turning on us, she cupped her hands and burst into song: “Not Lost But Gone Before,” with piano accompaniment.
To these strains us mourners began to troop down for a final farewell to Miss Myrt, starting from the rear. Everybody we knew jostled down the aisle, except of course for the Tarbox clan and Aunt Fanny Hamline, who were naturally not there.
At last our pew stood over the coffin. Aunt Maud’s black-gloved hand clutched the coffin rim and she shook her veils at the corpse. “Mine will be the next face they shovel the dirt on,” she said in prophecy.
They hadn’t been able to brush all the chalk dust out of Miss Myrt’s dress, so she looked natural. Somebody had tucked her gradebook into a breast pocket.
“Oh for pity’s sake!” Tansy said pretty loud. “Who put that pointer in her hand? Honest-to-Pete!”
Clutched in both Miss Myrt’s waxen hands was the pointer she slapped the map with or pointed to things with on the blackboard. She never whupped us with it because it was too valuable: a fine polished maple shaft with a brass bullet tip.
To the great astonishment of me and Lloyd and probably Dad, Tansy barked, “They aren’t going to put that pointer in the ground. It’s worth good money, and there’s plenty of use left in it!”
With that, Tansy turned back her cuffs and reached into the coffin to work the pointer loose from Miss Myrt’s clenched hands. It slid right out, but one of her knuckles seemed to jerk, and my knees buckled. If Miss Myrt had grabbed for that pointer and hung on to take it with her to the Schoolhouse in the Sky, I’d have passed right out on the spot. And Lloyd too, though he was so small now, he could barely see into the coffin.
The pointer was in Tansy’s fist. She was stalking out the side door of the church. Her big straw hat quivered with purpose. You talk about an evil omen.
That moment had trouble written all over it.
Chapter Six
The First Such Mishap of the Twentieth Century
Bad omens abounded, and we didn’t get home from Miss Myrt’s funeral without another one. Quite a big one.
Dad owned a good buggy, made by the Durant-Dort Carriage Company with a collapsible leather roof. It carried only two people, though, especially if one of you was Tansy. So it didn’t get much use.
We’d gone to the funeral in the spring wagon drawn by Siren and Stentor. Coming home, Lloyd and Dad were up on the board. Clinging to the sides, Tansy and Aunt Maud stood in the wagon bed with me and J.W. He naturally went too. You couldn’t leave home without him. The roads were graveled and pretty good between the church and our place, and it was getting past the heat of the day.
We were coming up to the crossing of Quagmire Road and the Hog Scald Road, where there’s a high screen of hedge apple. I for one heard something like summer thunder.
Stentor and Siren were just about to make the turn onto Hog Scald Road when there came a terrible banshee scream. Both horses reared and liked to fall back on Lloyd and Dad. Polished metal flashed. I thought of the all-steel Case Agitator. Then we had one rear wheel down in the ditch, and the wagon hung at a steep angle.
There were oats in my mouth as I slid down the bed. J.W. skidded and scrabbled beside me. Dad seemed to be on the board still, clinging to the reins. Lloyd did a backflip and lit on Tansy. The two of them, loosely bunched, slid down too.
Above us, Dad fought to keep the horses from breaking out and bolting. I hit the backboard with a thump, and J.W. was all over me. Tansy and Lloyd hit with a bigger thump. Me and J.W. piled out of one side of the wagon, Tansy and Lloyd the other. Tansy’s hat with the funeral ribbon was still on her head because of the hatpins, but askew, and ruined. A moment of stunned silence fell.
Then Tansy hollered, “Where’s Aunt Maud?”
A second before, Aunt Maud had been clinging to the wagon side, jigging home with the rest of us. Now she seemed to have taken flight. I looked up in the hedge apple trees to see if she’d flown up there. But Tansy was skittering down the slick weeds toward the ditch. It was deep, and there was standing water in it.
Then we saw Aunt Maud’s black veil draped over a sticker bush. Beyond it, between weeds and water, Aunt Maud herself was stretched out in a bed of cress.
Her skirts were over her head. The elastic of her summer drawers gripped her thighs. Then came blue-white knees. Then black stockings, rolled over garters, down to her high-topped, year-round Sunday-and-funeral shoes. It was more of Aunt Maud than I had ever seen. Lloyd too. J.W. pulled back at the sight of her and drew up one paw.
“Aunty, Aunty, can you hear me?” Tansy cried, tangling her skirts in the sticker bush.
“I’m a dead woman.” Aunt Maud’s voice was muffled by her skirts. “Didn’t I say I’d be next? Lay me out.” She sat up, sweeping down her skirts, and she too still had on her hat.
I marveled at how far she’d lit from the wagon. She must have done a double somersault off the backboard.
“Is everybody all right?” Dad called from above us. “Had I better come down?” But he had his hands full with the panicky horses.
I scrambled up the bank to tell him we were all fine and Aunt Maud had won for distance.
When I reached him, Dad was beside Siren, soothing her. She and Stentor were starting to settle. Dad was standing almost at his ease, talking to a stranger. He was a young man, suddenly appeared, who seemed to be off some other planet. He wore a helmet with goggles pushed up and leather leggings.
Behind him, half in the far ditch on Hog Scald Road, was a sight I couldn’t get my eyes around. It was an automobile. Not our first. We’d seen a couple in town, a curved-dash Oldsmobile, for one. But nothing like this. This one was long and lean, like a dream of a driving machine. It was a racing car. Now Lloyd and J.W. were beside me, drinking it all in.
The young man who’d nearly run us down was named Eugene Hammond. Him and Dad had already exchanged names and decided it had been a near miss with no real harm done on either side.
“Go ahead,” Eugene Hammond said to me and Lloyd. “You can have a look at it.” He knew we itched to get closer. We crept across the road. I was still spitting oats. J.W. wasn’t sure, but didn’t want to be left out.
The car was warm to the touch like a living thing. I’d heard its roar and thought it was thunder. I’d heard its screaming brakes and thought of banshees. Its balloon tires were so thick, you couldn’t span them with your hand, and the machine steered with another wheel. A double seat, but no roof to catch the wind. Nothing between the driver and any distance, nowhere to go but ahead.
It was the “Bullet No. 2” racing car, the first with an eight-cylinder, in-line engine, according to Eugene Hammond. Him and Dad had drifted across the road too, as Dad was drawn to the machine. The famous Barney Oldfield had driven this car last winter at Daytona Beach, Florida. He’d traveled a mile in forty-three seconds. It made me dizzy to hear, and Lloyd caught his breath. Dad looked a little skeptical. He pulled on his chin. Dad’s where Lloyd gets that gesture.
“I see your wagon was made by the Standard Wheel Company of Terre Haute, Mr. Culver.”
“It’s a pretty good wagon when it’s not in the ditch,” Dad said.
“It was the top of our wagon line,” Eugene Hammond said.
“You’re associated with the Standard Wheel Company?” Dad asked.
“I am, though we’re switching our operations over to motor carriage manufacture. We’ll be the Overland Automobile Company. I’m showing the Bullet No. 2 at fairs throughout Indiana to advertise our company. It’s the coming thing, Mr. Culver. As a farmer, you see its possibilities. You’ll have heard that the P. H. Studebaker Company at South Bend is moving over to autos, and they’re a bigger operation than we are.”
Things were moving too fast for Dad. His mind was still back in Terre Haute. “You don’t mean to tell me you come from Terre Haute in that thing today.” Dad touched a tire. A pneumatic tire.
“Mr. Culver,” Eugene Hammond said, “I could have come from Evansville today in that thing.”
Dad went ashen.
“I could have come from Louisville, Kentucky.”
It was a moment of near-religious wonder.
And it was soon over. Aunt Maud showed up in the road, leaning on Tansy. “Well, if that ain’t men all over! Talking machinery when I could be dead in that ditch!” Aunt Maud vibrated through her veil. “If it hadn’t been for this girl here who had to about carry me up the bank on her back, I’d still be in the cress down there, wilting like a salad with one foot in the cattails and the other in the grave!”
Tansy caught her first sight of Eugene Hammond. Her hand stole up to the broken brim of her hat. Eugene Hammond noticed her too, saying to Dad, “I hope the young lady suffered no injury.” He’d pulled off his driving gloves to shake hands with Dad. The gloves hung loose in his grip, yellow wash-leather gloves with buckles.
“Mercy, no.” Tansy spoke in a voice unfamiliar to us. “I was but momentarily discommoded.” We all stared at her new vocabulary. Lloyd gaped. The broken brim on her hat hung down over one of her ears, and stickers had snagged her skirts. She wasn’t looking her best.
It was time to be on our way. Eugene Hammond joined us behind the wagon to help the horses drag it back on the road. Aunt Maud supervised. She claimed she might be too nervous ever to get back in any wagon. But when Eugene Hammond offered to deliver her home in his racing car, she bellered like a calf and vaulted into the wagon bed unaided.
We found Dad’s derby hat undented. It was on his head now. He was up on the board again with the reins in his hand. We were about to part company with Eugene Hammond, who said, “Mr. Culver, I hope the next time our paths cross, the circumstances will not be so sudden. But we may have made history today.”
Dad wondered how.
“I daresay this is the first mishap between horse-drawn vehicle and automobile in rural Parke County in the twentieth century, or in fact human history.”
Dad allowed that it was entirely possible.
Tansy stood backward in the wagon as we went off down the Hog Scald Road. She watched the fine figure of Eugene Hammond cranking his Bullet No. 2 until he was lost in the distance. She adjusted her hat, but the brim came off in her hand.
The whole experience recalled to Dad the first time an automobile had turned up in this district. Four, five years ago nobody around here had ever seen one. Then one day a car came down the road past the Ogilvy place.
Harve and Orv Ogilvy, father and son, were out in their field. They were both dumber than stumps. When they saw that automobile coming in the distance, they didn’t know what it was. Harve ran for his gun. When he got back, the car was closer, so Harve fired both barrels at it. The car swerved out of the ruts and came to a halt. The driver jumped down and vanished into a stand of broom-corn.
“Did you kill that thing, Paw?” Orv asked Harve.
“No,” Harve said, “but I got him to turn loose of the man he had hold of.”
Anyway it’s how the story went, and we told it again, jigging on home past ditches bright with daylilies. J.W. barked us by all our neighbors and their livestock. It seemed to me that about everything that could ever happen in an August already had.
That night after an early supper, the school board met in an emergency meeting. They had to decide what to do about Hominy Ridge School now that Miss Myrt was in the ground. They were meeting down in our parlor.
It wasn’t quite dark outside, after a long day. Me and Lloyd were already upstairs in our room. We’d shoved the big brass bed we shared into the bay window, hoping a breath of cool night air would make a wrong turn and stumble across us.
Lloyd was already in bed, in one of Dad’s old Sunday shirts he wore for a nightshirt in this weather. He had a tin button pinned on it with the J. I. Case threshing-machine eagle. I was stretched out with an ear applied to the floor, trying to listen in on the school board meeting below. All I heard was a mumbling buzz.
From the bed Lloyd said, “Russell, you think Dad’s going to take it out of our hide for killing Miss Myrt?”
“Shut up, I’m trying to hear the school board,” I pointed out. “Don’t you want to know if they’re closing down the school?”
“You can’t hear anything,” Lloyd said. “You think Dad’s going to take it out of our—”
“No, it was just a funeral oration, which is no different than a sermon,” I said. “Dad knows we didn’t kill Miss Myrt. She died of her own meanness. The bile backed up in her, and she foundered on it.”
I knew Lloyd was up there in the middle of the mattress, pulling on his chin, being skeptical.
“Besides, when did Dad ever take anything out of your hide?” I said. “When did he ever once whup you?”
“That time you got me to steal his .22 rifle to kill rats in the barn, and I shot Siren instead, and she kicked the door off her stall.”
“Well,” I said, “other than that.”
“The time you got me to plug every watermelon in the patch to find the ripest one, and we ruined a whole wagonload of—”
“Well,” I said, “if you don’t count—”
“The time you—”
“All right,” I said, “all right. But Dad’s not going to do anything, so forget all about it. Put it out of your mind. We’re innocent.”
“That’s what you said the time we—”
“Lloyd, don’t make me come up there and hide you myself.”
I straine
d in vain to hear the direction the meeting was taking. Still, it was cooler here on the floor. Time passed.
“Russell,” came a small voice from the bed, “what’s the prettiest thing you ever seen?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. It sure wasn’t Aunt Maud with her skirts over her head.”
“But what was?”
“I guess the new steel Case Agitator threshing machine.”
Silence from the bed. After a couple minutes I said, “What’s the prettiest thing you ever seen?”
“That Bullet No. 2 racing car,” Lloyd said, just waiting to be asked.
I saw what he meant. That thing seemed to be moving and on the prowl even when it was tipped into the ditch. It was like a knife you could cut through time, a hole you could punch in the universe. It was like fast in a shape. It might have been prettier than the Case Agitator.
My ear was taking root to the floor. I couldn’t hear anything informative, but I was getting tired enough to sleep right here where I’d dropped.
Finally Lloyd said, “You know the prettiest thing Tansy ever seen?”
“No. Do you?”
“I bet I know.”
“What?” I said.
“Eugene Hammond,” Lloyd said. Then he dropped right off. His breathing rose and fell, regular. Probably when I was a kid, I dropped off that quick too.
The voices rumbled below me. It was night now with moonlight on the floor. Then I heard another voice, higher-pitched, mingling with the low. A voice of the female sex, and it wasn’t Aunt Maud. We’d taken her home.
That left Tansy. Tansy and the school board.
It took me a minute. Then I had goose bumps all over like somebody had trod on my grave. Suddenly I pictured Tansy with Miss Myrt’s pointer in her grip. Somewhere in my head Tansy slapped a map. I had the evidence of my ear. The terrible truth dawned on me by moonlight. All those evil omens had led to this. I shook like a wet dog.