by Richard Peck
Little Britches needed another hug. But then she slid down Tansy’s skirts and bobbed back to the recitation bench. Tansy had swapped one snake for another in Little Britches’s mind. It must have worked, because she looked to be recovered. Now she was pulling Glenn and Charlie down on the bench, to say, “Repeat after me,
“A is for the animals who keep us alive,
B is for the busy bee, buzzing round the hive.”
“Russell Culver,” Tansy commanded, “see me outside.” She always called me Russell Culver at school, like we weren’t kin. Out on the front step, she whispered, “Get that thing off me, quick, and fling it in the ditch.” She was flushed, but underneath that, paler than death. “I can’t stand a snake.” I unwound it, and it slithered off.
“Tansy, does Alice Roosevelt really carry a pet snake around in her purse?” I asked.
“Of course she does,” Tansy snapped, “as you’d know if you ever read anything. Sometimes you act like you haven’t been born.” She was still real jumpy about having that snake around her wrist.
To calm her down, I said, “You done some pretty quick thinking in there. I’ll give you credit.”
“Never mind about that,” she said. “Not one word of this snake business to Dad, you hear me? I have only myself to blame. When I got to school this morning, the front door lock was broken. I should have seen trouble on the way.”
Sure enough, the front door was jimmied and splintered. What I wanted to know was, who broke in with a sack full of puff adder? Whose hands shook out that sack into the desk drawer? How many hands?
“Remember, not a peep to Dad and certainly not to Aunt Maud,” Tansy said, “or else. I can handle this. I have to. I’m the teacher. And put a lid on Lloyd. He babbles like a brook. Now, back inside. You and Lester are reciting next.”
And that was that. From out of the schoolroom warbled Little Britches’s piping voice:
“C is for the cattle, lowing in the sheds,
D is for the daffodils, nodding in their beds.”
Then Charlie’s baritone and Glenn’s bass, working the same territory.
No power on earth would keep a lid on Lloyd. At supper that night, he announced, “Tansy’s got a secret.”
She shot him a deeply dangerous look.
“Are we going to have to hear what it is?” Dad inquired.
“She’s got her an S-W-double E-T-H-E-A-R-T, as we say in Spelling School.”
Tansy eased off, a little.
“And his initials are E.H., for Eugene Hammond,” Lloyd informed us. “He’s sending us stuff at school to get on her good side.”
It dawned on me that’s where Tansy’s new hat with the grapes came from. But me and Dad had the sense to keep quiet.
Not Aunt Maud. “Well, why wouldn’t she have a whole bunch of swains and sweethearts lined up for her all the way back to the windpump?” Aunt Maud demanded. “Good-lookin’ girl like that!”
Tansy preened slightly, a sight in itself.
Me and Lloyd blinked. That was a new one on us. Could it be that Tansy was a good-looking girl and we hadn’t noticed because she was our sister? We gaped. And our teacher? We wondered.
That night in bed, Lloyd said, straight in my ear, “Russell, you asleep?”
“Yes,” I said, “but if I wasn’t I’d ask you a question.”
“What?”
“If you sass Tansy at the supper table, aren’t you worried she’ll take it out of you at school?”
Silence from the middle of the bed. It had never crossed his mind. Then he said, “Russell, I think she’s turning out to be not too bad a teacher.”
“Well, learn plenty,” I told him, “and tell me all about it when and if I get back.” Then I slipped into sleep to the distant sound of steam engines threshing Dakota wheat.
Chapter Twelve
Another Old Gal in the Ditch
Seemed like Tansy was never satisfied. If it wasn’t orthography, it was looking up meanings. If it wasn’t looking up meanings, it was geography. Then history, then I don’t know what. Now it was numbers.
“Six is to eight as twelve is to…” That kind of thing, which was irritating to me. Tansy had an arithmetic book, The Western Calculator, from the high school. She pored over it at home in the evenings, keeping a day ahead of us. At this rate we’d be looking at multiplication tables before the month was out.
The weather was still hotter than hinges, with only a glint of goldenrod. Me and Lloyd slumped to school through clouds of midges. But already Aunt Maud was introducing winterish hot oatmeal into our breakfasts. And her hot oatmeal tasted like pullet mash.
Attendance at school was good, here before harvest. I thought every day would be Glenn’s last, but he was still Johnny-on-the-spot. And Tansy kept coming up with new ideas never heard of in schoolteaching. Seemed to me, if she’d been trained right as a teacher, she’d stick to the rules more. But she combined Spelling School with geography and split us into teams to name all forty-five state capitals and the territorial capitals and spell them. So we started off Thursday morning spelling each other down. And you couldn’t look at your map. You had to know, which we said wasn’t fair. I dreaded what she was saving up for me. And what about Glenn, who couldn’t spell his own name, let alone a capital city? As things turned out, it never came to that.
“Pearl Nearing,” Tansy rang out. “Iowa.”
Pearl got an easy one and sneered. “The capital of Iowa,” she said, “happens to be Des Moines. Capital D-E, capital M—”
Clang went the cowbell. Down went Pearl.
“Russell Culver.” Tansy smiled slightly. “Florida.”
I sighed. “The capital of Florida is Tampa. Capital T-A—”
“No, it ain’t!” said several. Suddenly everybody was an expert.
“It’s Tallahassee,” piped Little Britches.
“I know it,” I whined, “but I can spell Tampa.”
Tansy reached for the cowbell to give me a double clang when we all heard a sudden sound from outside: a splintering of wood and a screech, then a howl from J.W. All louder than the crack of doom.
What now? Tansy spoke under her breath. We all crowded outside. J.W. was cowering against the school with one paw up. Looked like he’d had a nasty shock.
The plank across the ditch had split under the weight of a real big, real old lady. Her bonnet was askew, and she was flat on her back, waving a cane. My land, she was enormous. She’d make Tansy look like Little Britches. She was down at the bottom of the ditch, but her bosom was level with the road.
And mad? As a hornet. You couldn’t hardly follow her. But it seemed to be, “Somebody’ll pay for this and pay through the nose,” and “If I ever get out of this ditch, there are some who’ll wish to heaven I hadn’t.” Things like that. She was spitting like a bobcat on a chain.
Tansy pushed through us and looked in the ditch. “Oh no,” she said. “Aunt Fanny Hamline.”
I thought we’d need a block and tackle to lift her. But getting Aunt Fanny Hamline out of the ditch became one of Tansy’s most famous days of teaching. It was a lesson in engineering too. It should have been studied at Purdue University.
We needed rope and sent Lester as the smallest boy up the bell rope in the tower. Being puny paid off, and up he swarmed in his Buster Brown collar with a knife in his teeth. He whittled away at the rope above him. And when it snapped, we were in a bunch below to catch him and the rope.
Getting it under Aunt Fanny took longer. Squaring off in the same teams as state capital Spelling School, we started above her bonnet and slipped the rope under, sawing back and forth to get it down to the middle of her. Not to her waist. She didn’t have a waist. It was heavy work even with all hands at it. The hardest part was staying out of range of her cane.
And noisy? “You brats is rubbing all the skin off my backbone,” and “I’ll have the law on ever’ one of you, individually,” and “You can run, but you cain’t hide,” and “I know where you live.” Things like th
at.
Once her cane swung too near Glenn. He grabbed it out of the air and flung it in the road, and that slowed her down some.
When we got the rope centered, our problems began. She wouldn’t sit up, and we couldn’t budge her flat. We heaved and we hoed and we got nowhere. If one team heaved while the other was hoing, she’d begin to revolve. If somehow we happened to flip her over on her front, she could drown in the ditch. There was always some standing water in the ditch, even in dry weather. This would quiet her, but then she’d come back to haunt us. We were getting right down to the end of our rope, so to speak.
Just then the mailman, Mr. George Keating, making his regular rounds, drew up. We seemed to come as a surprise to him. Aunt Fanny stretched out full-length and hollering from the ditch. All eight of us pulling at her with the bell rope, like tug-of-war. The cowbell still in Tansy’s fist.
Mr. Keating ran a hand around the back of his neck, saying, “And I thought I’d seen everything.” If it hadn’t been for the mailman, Aunt Fanny would still be in the ditch. We decided to tie both ends of the bell rope to the back of his mail wagon. Though Aunt Fanny Hamline outweighed his horse, with all eight of us and Tansy pushing the wagon and pulling on the rope and the horse straining and pawing the road, we showed some progress.
Aunt Fanny began to skid on wet reeds. Her bosom moved like hedgehogs just even with the road. Then she was skidding sitting up, her bonnet still askew. Then she was on her feet, tramping the ditch at a brisk pace and trying to work out of the rope around her before the horse broke into a trot.
Even on her feet, it was no Sunday-school picnic lifting her out of the ditch. But four of us behind and four of us before, and finally Aunt Fanny staggered up onto solid ground. There wasn’t a whole lot left to the back of her skirts, and she was drenched with ditch water all up that side. We retrieved the rope, and Mr. George Keating went on his way, no doubt to spread the word. Somebody found her cane. J.W. slunk off in search of quiet.
Aunt Fanny herself was nearly winded. It had been a workout for a woman of her years and size. Her breath came in wheezes. But she returned to life pretty quick. Without invitation, she stomped into the schoolhouse, filling it up. We followed.
Some of us had never set eyes on her. She’d lived in her house in the grove since right after the ark came ashore. And she was but seldom seen.
It was said that she never left her place for fear somebody would charge her money for something. She was so tight, they said, that she’d sit out under a tree on a hot day to save the shade on her porch. Cheap? She’d skin a louse for its hide and tallow.
“What’s this place supposed to be?” Aunt Fanny pointed her cane in various directions.
“This is a public schoolhouse,” said Tansy, “as you know.”
“Well, it don’t look anything like one to me. Where’s the American flag?”
“The taxpayers haven’t seen fit to provide one,” Tansy said. “I take it you’re a taxpayer.”
Aunt Fanny jumped on that. “Girl, I’m the biggest taxpayer in Sycamore Township and maybe Parke County, and I get the least for my money. Who are you supposed to be?”
“I’m the teacher here,” Tansy said.
“Piffle,” said Aunt Fanny. “Myrt Arbuckle was the little end of nothin’ whittled down to a fine point, but you ain’t even—”
“Don’t talk me down in front of my pupils,” Tansy warned.
“Who’s to stop me?”
“I am.” Tansy held her ground, and Aunt Fanny faltered. We gaped. It was hard to see Tansy around her. There were ferns plastered to Aunt Fanny’s whole backside. And a tuft of dark fur. Minks like wet ditches. We wondered if she’d flattened one.
“State your business,” Tansy said, pretty pert. “I have teaching to do and knowledge to impart.”
“Well, impart this to your so-called pupils. Tell ’em to keep off my property. One or more is trespassin’ and stealin’ from me.” Aunt Fanny seemed to address the bracket that used to hold the map. Her eyesight wasn’t up to snuff, and she naturally wouldn’t pay for spectacles. “I don’t see like I did, but they’s bound to be your bunch. And they’s giggin’ my frogs.”
Tansy looked around her at us. “Anybody here gigging Aunt Fanny’s frogs? Pearl, have you been gigging Aunt Fanny’s frogs?”
Since a gig is a pole five foot long with a metal frog-sticker on the end of it, you couldn’t really picture Pearl with one in her hand. Neither could Pearl. “Certainly not! I have never laid a finger on a frog. The idea! None of this has anything to do with me.” She patted the enormous bow on the back of her head.
Aunt Fanny looked thunder-struck. “Who’s that stuck-up little—”
“Fl—Floyd Lumley,” Tansy called out around her, “have you been gigging Aunt Fanny’s frogs?”
“No, Miss Myrt!” Flopears sang out.
Aunt Fanny’s old pink-rimmed eyes popped. “Well, he ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed, is he?” she observed.
We saw what Tansy was up to. She was wearing down Aunt Fanny one so-called pupil at a time. Lucky there was no string of frogs hanging out by the hats this particular morning. Though of course they wouldn’t have been gigged. They’d have been brained by a slingshot.
Aunt Fanny’s half-blind gaze swept teacher’s desk where Little Britches and a Baldwin apple were. She didn’t see either. Glenn had brought apples for all this morning, we didn’t know where from.
“I’ve got apples comin’ on from the trees up by my house,” Aunt Fanny imparted to us, “and I have ever’ one of them apples counted. Believe it.”
We did.
“And I’ll tell you all something else for free.” She rapped her cane on the floor. “I may be blinder than any bat, but I got me a government-issue rifle. It was the one my husband, Mr. Hamline, carried when he fought with Captain Lilly’s Eighteenth Indiana Light Artillery at Chicamauga.”
Her husband? Aunt Fanny had been married? Lloyd went pale as this page.
“And I can lock and load while you’re lookin’ for your feet. If you can outrun a bullet, come see me. Otherwise, keep off my place!”
She turned to go, and her skirts made a rusty sound. We fell back, and Charlie came in the door. We’d been too occupied to miss him. In his big hands were the two halves of the plank across the ditch.
“Somebody’s sawed this plank half through,” he announced.
We blinked, and some of us remembered the snake in the drawer. Charlie remembered. Except for Glenn, who came through the grove, we’d all crossed the plank this morning. Tansy too, and she’s no wood nymph, as I’ve mentioned. But Aunt Fanny must have been the last straw, so to speak.
“And now you’re tryin’ to kill me,” she said, “or cripple me up for life.” Out she went, but turned back at the door. She pointed an old bent finger, sighted down it, and cocked a thumb. “Jist try me,” she said. Then she was gone, more or less in a puff of smoke.
That was also the day I finally talked Charlie into heading off for the Dakotas no later than Saturday night. I pulled out all my arguments in favor of this enterprise.
At last Charlie seemed to stir at the salary of seventeen dollars a week for the threshing season, and keep. We’d get there for free, as long as the freight trains ran. I liked the sound of riding the rods, however you did that. But it was the seventeen dollars that seemed to win Charlie.
Still, it was harder than usual to get him to concentrate. The sawed plank and the puff adder preyed on his mind. I told him to put the whole business behind him, and school too.
“All right,” he said at long last. “I’m tired of hearin’ about it. Saturday night.”
A thrill shot through me with some fear in it. Now that Charlie had caved in made it real. We’d have to sneak off without good-byes. Charlie was of legal age to quit school, but I wasn’t, quite. Anyway, sneaking off was part of the deal. We’d slip out of our houses after everybody was in bed, meet up, and make for Montezuma for the Monon freight train that we
nt through late. Up in the Chicago yards, we’d find us a train of the Great Northern Line. I knew it by heart. Boys from these parts went up every year.
“Remember, wear your winter suit under your overalls,” I told Charlie. I spelled it out for him. You had to. “You don’t want to carry anything in your hands. Bring eats in your pockets. You got all this?”
He claimed he did, so finally we were on our way to the big skies of the Dakotas and to the Red River valley, the American Nile. What could stop us now?
Chapter Thirteen
The Only Really Perfect Thing in the World
That Friday morning Mr. George Keating, the mailman, had another parcel for school, a big one. He delivered it straight into the classroom and stayed on to see what was in it.
We were doing numbers, so everybody was ready to stop, including Tansy. We unwrapped it and saved the string. Then we looked down into the box at the top of a human head. When we got it out, it was a plaster bust of The Great Emancipator, President Abraham Lincoln, finished like bronze. We oh-ed and ah-ed and read out the inscription on the pedestal:
IF THERE’D BEEN MOTORCARS,
HE’D HAVE DRIVEN ONE OF OURS
COMPLIMENTS OF
THE OVERLAND AUTOMOBILE COMPANY
TERRE HAUTE—INDIANAPOLIS
I glanced at Tansy standing back. She was a shade pinker.
The bust of President Lincoln would bring great dignity to our library shelf. But when we got it out of the box, something else was wedged in the bottom. Pearl grabbed for it. She unwrapped it and shrugged. It was just a baseball, which had nothing to do with her.
Glenn had it then, and held it up. It was snow white with red stitching. Regulation.
Our hearts turned over. We’d never been this close to a real baseball. Our only baseballs were the ones we made, ourselves, pig leather stuffed with horsehair and stitched at home. They were never round. They neither bounced nor rolled. And they never lasted.