On Agate Hill (37 page)

Oh Dan Tucker was a fine old man,
Washed his face in a frying pan.
Combed his hair with a wagon wheel,
And died of a toothache in his heel.

We always began the afternoon session by reading them a story, for there is nothing like a story to calm even the most fractious child. Even little Shadrack Sturgill, who twitched all the time and had fits, did not move a muscle during story time. Being Mariah’s disciple, I often took this opportunity to impart a little lesson, for you could not imagine the living situations of some of our children, how impoverished their lives in terms of moral guidance and even conversation.

I remember we had quite a discussion about “The Young Frog” from the Holmes’ Reader, for instance. This is a fable wherein a vain frog complains about her “dull, out of the way life”; against all advice, she leaves home and moves to town to make her fortune. But once in the city, she is soon devoured by a hungry duck. “Boys and girls, we should be satisfied,” decreed the Holmes’ Readers, for “it is a bad thing to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think.” I closed the book. “Now, how do you like this story?” I asked them. It seemed like good advice to me, for these little lives proscribed by poverty and place.

But instantly a hand was waving — Jesse Badger, of course, old Memorable Jones’s grandson, the smartest child in school. “Why, if a feller was to foller that, Miss Rutherford, he wouldn’t get noplace atall in the world, now would he?”

I was taken aback. “Jesse is entirely right,” I said, changing my mind in an instant, for I hope I never grow too old to learn from a child. The next story I read to them was “The Emperor’s Clothes.”

And so it went, grammar, geography, and history, then, at last, everybody’s favorite, spelling! And every Friday the beloved spelling bee, attended by many a parent, standing at the back. At the end of each school day, the children helped us clean the slates, put away the books, sweep the floor, and gather up the dippers. Then row by row they retrieved their jackets and lunch pails and stood by their desks until dismissed. I was very strict about all this, for I have found that children love order, and that it is good for them. It is good for us all — alas, poor Molly!

But let us return to the days, the lovely ordered days, the hot sweet breeze
in summer, bringing in the scent of the wild roses at the edge of the woods; or the smell of wet wool clothing in winter, when it was so hard to control the heat from our potbellied stove. Sometimes the classroom got so stuffy that we had to throw open the windows — ah, but then the icy wind came in. We either froze or roasted. Our woodstove was kept well supplied by Cicero Todd, glum and scowling as ever, his arrival every few days occasioning great excitement among the children, who were allowed to ride his huge dog Roy, fearful looking but endlessly patient with them. In fact, Roy seemed to enjoy this game as much as they did. Cicero Todd lived nearby in a little cabin he had built when he was practically a child, according to Chattie Badger. “Nobody knows where he came from, nor who his people was, nor how come him to fetch up here.” He was a skilled carpenter, though, making chairs and tables and beds, poplar dough boards, rolling pins, barrels, and buckets, as well as more desks for us. “There’s no harm in him,” Chattie decreed, so eventually I paid no attention as Cicero came and went, part of the endless weave of our days, like the coverlets Chattie wove rain or shine on her loom by the fire.

That first year, only two incidents made a break in this pattern.

The first happened early on, when Molly had gone up to the blackboard to write out the day’s Bible verse for copying. Unbeknown to us, several of the boys had caught a blacksnake in a slip noose and put it in my desk drawer, coiled to look like it was still alive. There it lay when Molly opened the drawer to get the chalk. She did not cry out nor even mention it, just calmly picked up the end of the noose and dangled the snake in front of the class, causing several girls to scream and the children in the front to scramble backward, overturning one of the desks. Then she let the snake down on top of the desk in its loose coil, turned her back, and said, “Ready, boys and girls?” and turned to write the Bible verse on the board. Her color was high, her eyes practically gave off blue sparks, and I was so proud of her at that moment. Molly thrived at the Bobcat School, she really did. I have to believe this now.

“For God so loved the world, that whosoever believeth in him shall not
perish, but have Eternal Life,” she wrote in her lovely slanted hand, a credit to Gatewood Academy. The children had all begun to copy when suddenly the “dead” snake, being only stunned, slithered to life. It slid off the desk and went straight for Molly. The children screamed — myself, I am ashamed to say, among them. Molly turned around, calmly put down the chalk and grabbed up the end of the slip noose again, lifting the snake high above her head where it twisted gleaming in the sunlight until it went limp again. Then she walked straight down the middle of the aisle with it. You could have heard a pin drop until she came back inside and resumed the lesson, never once mentioning the snake.

The second incident was more serious. Christmas had come and gone; it was the winter term. Many of the smaller children had been kept at home due to the severity of the weather, others because they did not have shoes or adequate clothing, and the “big boys” showed up, as promised. We had quite a time with three of them — Ira Lineback, Arthur Church, and Jemmy Vestal, who chewed tobacco in the schoolyard and spit it at the younger children’s feet, terrorizing them. Then they took a fat boy’s shoes and coat away — this was poor little Red Layless — and forced him to lie in the mushy snow and “make angels” all recess until he was freezing and sobbing. When he tried to get up, Ira kicked him in the nose, making it bleed, and he went back to making angels. The rest of the children were too afraid to tell us, so we knew nothing of it until they all came trooping in without him.

Molly looked up. “Why, where is Red?”

Busily taking off their coats, they did not answer.

“Where is he?” Molly darted to the door and soon returned with poor Red, sobbing and shaking, his nose bleeding copiously, his feet blue. Molly took him over to the stove where she wrapped him in her own coat.

I have seldom felt such anger. “All right,” I said, standing before them. “Who is responsible for this outrage?”

The silent children looked down, studying their desks. At the back of the room, Arthur stared out the window at the darkening day, while Jemmy Vestal pretended to fall asleep.

“Who did this cruel thing to Red?” I asked them again, my voice shaking.

Now Jemmy began to snore loudly, which caught the fancy of the other two. When they put their heads down on their desks and began snoring loudly too, all three, the whole room erupted in laughter. It was like an epidemic — even my “good girls,” such as Betsy Ray and Virginia Kershaw, caught it. I’m afraid I began screaming at them, but I could not even make myself heard above the uproar.

At that moment a blast of freezing air came into the schoolroom along with Cicero Todd, wearing his huge black overcoat and hat, followed by Roy. Cicero’s dark hair lay on his shoulders unkempt, his coat had leaves and twigs and snow on it. Up the aisle he came, walking hard, leaving a trail of snow and dirt behind him. The laughter subsided into only a few titters, then silence, as he got to the front of the schoolroom. Automatically I stepped aside. I was hysterical, anyway. He crossed with heavy steps to my desk, where he took his time seating himself, scraping my chair across the floor loudly, then grunting as he sat down on it, facing the class. Roy lay down beside him, panting, ears up and hair on end, as if waiting for a command. Cicero stared at the students, his black eyes narrowed beneath his bristling brow, a formidable figure. Then reaching deep into his coat, he produced an enormous black pistol with a gleaming wooden handle, and laid it on the desk.

A general intake of breath was audible in the room. Nobody moved.

“All right then,” Cicero Todd said after a while. “Let’s let these ladies get on with school.”

The next day, our three “big boys” were absent. They never returned, and we never had any more trouble with discipline at the Bobcat School.

Winter turned to spring, then summer again, then fall. There was no question that Molly had come into her own, fully self-possessed and capable, though the second part of Martha Fickling’s prediction came true as well: everybody tried to court her, including poor Augustus Worth himself when
his wife left him. Molly wouldn’t have it for a minute, though she spared his feelings as best she could, poor thing, laughing away his intentions as if it were all a capital joke.

Likewise she sent away Eliza Valiant’s brother Ben who would not take “no” for an answer to his letters, but insisted upon a visit to Jefferson to see for himself and press his suit in person. He stayed at Martha Fickling’s for three full weeks, once arriving up at the Bobcat School with an armful of roadside flowers, to everyone’s delight and consternation, for she wouldn’t have him either, or encourage him at all, though our “big girls” were all swooning over him. The entire community took a shine to it: such a fine young man, so handsome, so interested in everything about Jefferson and Ashe County.

What was wrong with Miss Petree?

I wondered myself, finally determining to ask her on a misty May morning as we walked the familiar old Indian trail, a shortcut around the mountain from the Badgers’ farm to the Bobcat School. On that particular day, Felix Boykin was taking Ben on a botanical tour up to the bog on the top of Bluff Mountain.

“Oh, Agnes, I don’t know!” Molly said. “It’s just . . . not . . . right.” She kicked a rock along the trail ahead of her, like a boy.

“What’s not right? He seems like a fine young man to me.”

“He is a fine young man.” Here Molly gave a great sigh. “But I don’t love him, and I never have, and I don’t know why I don’t, but I don’t, and so I just — can’t — marry him! He’s too nice.” She hauled back to give the stone a big kick into the trees.

I had to smile at her childishness. “But Molly, what is all this folderol about love? You
like
Ben, don’t you?”

She nodded, red-faced.

“And as far as you know, he is a perfectly fine and upstanding and morally unobjectionable young man, even an admirable young man, is that not so?”

“Yes, Agnes.”

“Well, then, let me suggest to you that love will grow between you naturally in marriage, that commitment fosters love, as does intimacy; this is what
marriage is all about. True love is not necessarily cataclysmic, or whatever it is that you imagine. Marriage provides a safe place, a garden, for true love to grow and flourish.” There now. I was proud of myself.

“No.” She shook her head vehemently.

“But Molly, when I think of what Ben could offer you . . .” I had to say this, though I’d hate to see her go, for we had truly become like sisters. “A life in Charleston, a fine house and a position in society, why you could see Eliza and her children every day — your future would be
made
, dear. You would have the kind of security you have never had.”
(And probably never will have the chance to have again, you little nitwit!
I did not say.) “You should do it, Molly, you should say yes, you should go. I would be so happy for you.”

“Would you? And what about
you
, Agnes?” Molly stopped walking and looked at me curiously.

“Why, I will be here, I suppose,” I said lightly.

“Well, I will be here too.” Molly stuck out her lip in a way that reminded me of how stubborn she had been when she first arrived at Gatewood Academy, and I knew I could not budge her.

Sure enough, she had convinced Ben of the futility of his suit by the end of the month, and it was with a sad heart that I told him goodbye on the platform in Jefferson. Molly had stayed at the farm, pleading headache. “Promise me, Agnes, that you will let me know if you and Molly ever need anything, if I can help you in any way,” Ben said, his eyes huge and earnest behind his glasses. I promised. He leaped on board and the hack pulled away.

“Too bad,” Felix Boykin said.

“Oh, hell, I don’t know!” Martha Fickling snorted. “If it ain’t there, it ain’t there, ain’t that right?”

“What’s that?” Felix turned back to ask her.

“Chemistry,” Martha Fickling said. “Dynamite. Ain’t that right, Professor? You put two things together and the whole damn thing blows up, blows you clean out of the water. Just like they dynamite a mine.”

Felix Boykin shook his head. “Sounds like a dangerous theory, Martha,” he said, winking at me.

I agreed, waving as the hack drove away.

But Ben Valiant proved to be as generous as he was disappointed, for not a month had passed when in came a box from South Carolina containing a beautiful globe of the world, the latest thing, and a stand to put it on, as well as eight pairs of little eyeglasses and a note which read, “For the children of the Bobcat School, with gratitude and very best wishes from your good friend, Benjamin Valiant.”

This romance concluded, our lives fast became fuller than ever, as that summer we began our “moonlight school” for grown men and women who wanted to learn to read and write, and it was surprising how many of these there were, and how badly they wanted to learn, walking the long roads home at all hours, often sleeping on the schoolhouse floor. We also dealt with outbreaks of both ringworm and head lice — I came to depend upon trusty old kerosene as a primary medication for “doctoring” — and, in late fall, we mourned the tragic death of little Eunice Ward who fell into a vat of boiling molasses at a stir-off.

The winter proved long and hard. Molly and I were separated by necessity, as the Badgers needed a place for their old granny, finally forced by a stroke to leave her lonely cabin on the top of Misty Mountain. Paralyzed and furious, she took over the girls’ bed closest to the fire, sending two of them in to me, as Molly volunteered for a cot in the lean-to, a space which she professed to find quite suitable, though there were many mornings when she awoke to find her bed covered by a fine layer of snow that had sifted down through the cracks. She wore long linsey underwear and woolen socks to bed, keeping her school clothes under the covers at the end of her bed tick so that they would be warm in the mornings.