The Teacher's Funeral (15 page)

“See these here cells like a comb of honey?” Glenn pointed them out. “The mother mud dauber lays an egg or two in ever' one of them cells. Then she goes to work and stings a spider with her pizen. She don't kill that spider, but she stuns it. Then she sticks that spider in the cell with the egg and shuts it up tight. As the eggs hatch, they've got plenty of spider meat to feed them on. And that's how the mud dauber wasp starts out life.”

We were all silenced by this knowledge. It wasn't school-learning from Tansy, of course. All she knew about the life of the mud dauber, she'd just now learned. But Glenn was a country boy. Few of nature's ways were mysteries to him. On the other hand, the superintendent and the assistant were town men. Rockville.

“You learned that at school?” the superintendent inquired.

Glenn shrugged. “Where else?”

“Well, I am glad to see that the study of natural science is not neglected,” Mr. Whipple admitted. “But, son, tell me this. Why do you look so surprised? Didn't you know we were coming?”

“I ain't surprised, mister,” Glenn replied. “I just don't have no eyebrows.” He turned back to his seat, and we all heaved with relief.

That was just before T. Bernard Whipple's gaze fell on Flopears.

I was myself pretty near the end of my rope now. It didn't seem fair. If there was anybody worse to call on than Glenn, it was—

“Boy,” Superintendent Whipple barked, “what's your long suit?”

“Who, me?” Flopears pointed to himself. “My what?”

“Come down here and show us what you have mastered. I take it you're not another scholar of the mud dauber.”

“Of the what?” Flopears was stumped. He took up his complimentary notepad and wandered down to the rostrum.

Now Flopears, head hung, was there between the superintendent and the assistant. Tansy stood back, pity in her eyes, and dread.

“Well, son, tell us. What are you best at, numbers or letters?”

Flopears tried to think. “Is them my only choices?” He flipped open his notepad on teacher's desk. “I reckon I like pictures best.”

The superintendent and the assistant bent over Flopears's notebook. Little Britches too. Mr. Whipple turned to a new page. They all looked closer. Tansy drew nigh.

Then, somehow, we were all on our feet, drifting down to see what was on Flopears's notebook pages.

They were pictures he'd drawn with his complimentary pencil. Pictures like we'd never seen. They ought to have been in frames. There was one of Aunt Fanny in the ditch and all of us trying to heave her out with the bell rope. And you could see it was Aunt Fanny, bigger than a church debt, and all of us. There was the big bow on the back of Pearl's head. And Lester's Buster Brown collar. And me back when I had eyebrows.

Mr. Owen turned a page, and there was a portrait of Tansy, and in one arm Little Britches with her face turned to Tansy's bosom. And in Tansy's other hand the garter snake, coiled with its tail hanging down.

“That's me.” Little Britches poked a small finger at the page. “It was the time—”

“That we were studying natural history,” Tansy said. “Herpetology.”

Flopears had even done a scene of the first day of school, way back in August. We were all racing out of the schoolhouse, J.W. too, barking his fool head off. In the distance the boy's privy blazed like a torch. You could just about smell it.

“Lightning,” me and Charlie said together.

You could have knocked us over with feathers. Flopears had captured us all in his notebook. And we were so real, we almost strolled off the page. We'd gotten him wrong. He wasn't a dunce. He was an artist. According to these pages, he saw us all a good deal clearer than we'd ever seen him.

T. Bernard Whipple cleared his throat. “I am glad to know,” he said, “that the study of art has not been neglected.”

With that, the superintendent and his assistant folded up their forms and reached for their overcoats. It was done with, and there was no doubt in our minds but that Tansy had passed her trial. Another miracle, and a mercy too, since me and Lloyd never had to be called on. So there is some justice in this world, though not a lot.

O
f course these events took place years ago, long before your time. It was that year of 1904, when automobiles began to burn up the rural byways. The year airships like boxkites began to darken the skies, though they hadn't found our patch of sky yet. The year my sister, Tansy, got her provisional teaching certificate.

“Well, I hope you're satisfied now,” I dared tell her, with the kitchen table between us.

“Far from it,” she snapped back. She could snap with very little provocation, as you know. “Has it ever dawned on you that I undertook this entire enterprise to see you through to eighth-grade graduation, Russell Culver? Do you think I didn't know you wanted to wander off to the Dakotas or some outlandish place? If I didn't turn you around, who would? You have no more direction than a newborn calf, and less judgment. You'll need that eighth-grade graduation certificate to get into Rockville High School.”

Had I heard her right? This was at Thanksgiving, so my head still rang like a belfry from the exploding stove.

“High school! Me? How many years would that take?”

“It takes the average pupil four years for a diploma,” Tansy calculated. “I'd think you could do it in six.”

“And what am I supposed to do with a high school diploma? It is nothing but a durned piece of paper.” I oozed outrage.

“You'll need it to get into college,” Tansy said. She was very Teacher Tansy now, though we were at home, saved from school by Thanksgiving. “Purdue University, if they'll have you.”

“College? And how long would
that
take? Another four years, I suppose.”

“At least,” Tansy murmured.

“What? You know I'm half deaf.”

“I said
at least
.”

“I'll be an old man by then,” I said. “And
why,
Tansy? I ask you
why?
”

She leaned across the kitchen table at me. Somebody was coming up the back porch steps, maybe Aunt Maud, so Tansy spoke low and fast. She nearly had me by the throat. “I'll tell you why, Russell Culver. Because it's time you set some kind of example for Lloyd. It's high time you stopped being little brother to me and started being big brother to him. He'd look up to you if there was anything to look up to. And remember this, mister: Everything you can get away with will be Lloyd's burden. Every mistake you make will be his excuse.”

And that was it. She turned away, and my fate was sealed. I had to succeed now and do something with my life. What choice did I have?

Tansy was a teacher, make no mistake about it. Down to her toes. She was good and grew better. I'll tell you how good. She not only got me through the eighth-grade graduation exam, she got Charlie Parr through too.

The Board of Education set great store by her. They were even willing to hire a substitute teacher and send her for a winter's course at the normal school in Terre Haute. They forgot she hadn't graduated from high school.

But somehow she never had the time to take off. One winter she was coaching Little Britches for the statewide spelling bee. Another winter she was helping Lester revise his “What Indiana Means to Me” essay for the county contest. It was always something, right up till she married and had to turn in her pointer. By then I was nearly through Rockville High School and looking at the catalog of courses from Purdue.

The twentieth century held some surprises for us all: the flicker of the motion pictures, the yammer of the radio, the mounting rumble of foreign wars, the jangle of change. Aunt Fanny Hamline held out against everything, unto the end. She died at a hundred and three, still hoping to take it all with her.

Dad and Aunt Maud lived long lives too, and felt the setting sun upon their faces. Though Aunt Maud had always maintained she was not long for this world, she outlived all her generation.

At her funeral, the mysterious poet who dwelt among us, the Sweet Singer of Sycamore Township, sang one last song.

When it was time for Aunt Maud's funeral, we of the Methodist church had us a different Reverend Parr, Charlie. You never know who's going to see the light. A pretty fair preacher Charlie turned out to be too, if you ask me. Better than his dad. The poem by the Sweet Singer that Charlie read out at Aunt Maud's funeral went this way:

And so the Sweet Singer sang one final time to us, from the hereafter. For the Sweet Singer had been Aunt Maud herself.

With the educations Tansy made me and Lloyd get, we went out into the world—back east to the great boom of the big city, the topless towers of Indianapolis. There we went to seek our fortunes and find our futures.

Floyd Lumley found his way to Indianapolis too, as you know from the cartoons he drew for the Indianapolis
Star
newspaper in his famous career. And you'll recall how in the fullness of time Lester Kriegbaum became President of Indiana University and married the Dean of Women.

Both Floyd and Lloyd married Indianapolis wives: strictly city girls who'd gone to Butler University and bobbed their hair.

After we were all married, we went back home to Sycamore Township a good deal, especially in the fall of the year, when that particular world turns gold. We'd get together to laugh and live over the old days when we and the twentieth century were young: Floyd and Lloyd and Lester and their wives, Charlie and Pearl Parr, me and Beulah, Tansy and Glenn.

 

This book is dedicated to my mother, who entered first grade in a one-room country schoolhouse in the fall of 1912.

And to the memory of my dad, a former country boy dressed in town clothes, when my mother took him home to introduce him to the Leadills and all the country neighbors of my future grandfather, on butchering day.

My dad was a more successful suitor than Eugene Hammond, who vanishes, unchosen, from this story into the urbanity of Terre Haute and the technology of the internal combustion engine.