IN THE FIRST WEEK or two after the Halloween Costume Ball, Miss Spivey couldn’t turn around without hearing about the Threestep Fall Fair, last held in 1931 when I was only four years old. Her predecessor Miss Chandler had founded the original Fall Fair as a fund-(and fun!) raising kick-off for the school year back in 1904. Miss Spivey listened politely to numerous hints but remained noncommittal in regard to the Threestep Fall Fair (which used to put Toomsboro Days to shame every September). She had other things on her mind. After all the work Theo Boykin had done for Halloween, Miss Spivey felt we owed him more than just the chance to look like a Bedouin for a day. One morning she said to Ralphord and me, “What can we do for your friend Theo?”
That was the first time I ever heard anyone call Theo Boykin our friend. I could tell that it struck my brother Ralphord, too, and was amazed he had the sense not to say a word about it.
There was no denying that we Cailiffs spent a lot of time with our neighbors, the Boykins. Eugene could almost always be persuaded to thrill and entertain us with feats of strength like lifting Ralphord up off the ground with one hand, and Daddy liked to say that Momma and Mrs. Boykin were thick as thieves. But it was Theo and Force and Ildred who really had a bond. If they weren’t inventing labor-saving devices, a few of which—like the chicken feeder that didn’t have to be filled but once a week—actually saved folks some labor, they were conducting experiments or repairing automobiles, sometimes both at once. Last spring, for example, when the circus was in Oconee and our T-Model Ford was sitting half on and half off the lane with a hole in its fuel tank, Theo Boykin had an idea how they could “fix” it with a piece of copper tubing and a No. 21/2 tin can. Force and Theo and Ildred worked all day long on that car. (Daddy was gone to Macon at the time.) We had just sat down for supper, Force and Ildred still smelling like gasoline, when we heard a popping sound from the yard out front, and here came our T-Model Ford, chugging up the lane with Theo Boykin at the wheel, his eyes fixed in deepest concentration on the tin can they’d set in front of the windshield with a tail of copper tubing that snaked on down to disappear under the hood. Force had to drive almost as slow as walking, but that tin-can fuel tank got us to Oconee in time for half the circus that night, including the part where the littlest Flying Marengo twirled three times in midair, sparkling in her spangly outfit like a flame.
All I could think of to tell Miss Spivey in response to her question about our friend Theo was that the teacher at the colored school, which was located in the country outside Threestep, was bound and determined to get him to college. “Miss Templeton says there’s a college he can go to where they can teach him to be a lawyer or a doctor,” I said.
In case Miss Spivey had any trouble believing that, Ralphord added, “They got colored doctors at the Negro hospital in Macon.” Momma had told us.
“Have y’all ever heard of a college like that, Miss Spivey,” I asked her, “where Theo could go?”
“Of course Theo can go to college!” Miss Spivey said. “He could go to Morehouse in Atlanta, for example.” She paused. “Or Howard University, back East.” Those were two she could think of offhand, she said.
I told her Ballard Normal School in Macon was the one Miss Templeton had in mind for him, at least to start. (His momma said Atlanta was too far.) One hitch was that he had to go to high school first. Now, Ballard had a high school, too, but there was another hitch. Theo’s father was dead and gone, passed away some years earlier in the middle of chopping wood to stoke the kilns over at the pottery during a week of record heat. The way Mrs. Boykin told it, “My man just laid down and he was so hot and so tired that he never did get up. Boss came and shook him, said, ‘Get up, now. There’s work to do,’ but he was dead.” That meant Theo was the man of the house and had been for a while. When he turned sixteen last year, Mr. Veal over at the pottery offered him a job doing the same work his daddy had done, and Theo took it. It tore Miss Templeton up, but as Mrs. Boykin said, “A boy’s got to eat, no matter how smart he is.” You’d see him walking along the road on his way to work, his nose in a book, leaning forward into the pages like a person walking into a stiff wind.
That’s when Miss Templeton came up with the idea of teaching Theo his high school subjects by tutoring him herself. They had been meeting early in the morning for over a year now. Theo was always coming along telling us something he learned about the properties of electricity or the Peloponnesian Wars, or quoting his favorite lines from Shakespeare, such as, “Prick us and do we not bleed?” or “To thine own self be true.” (“That sounds pretty,” he told us one time, “but the man who said it was a jackass.” He meant Polonius, not Shakespeare.) Theo had to set off walking at about five to get to the country schoolhouse before Miss Templeton’s regular day began. They’d tried meeting in the evening, but he couldn’t stay awake once he sat down after work. (His momma found him sound asleep at the table one time, his head on his plate.) Miss Templeton rode almost five miles to the little country school herself, on horseback, from the opposite direction. She lived with a minister and his family near Brennan. “They’re the ones loan her the horse,” I told Miss Spivey.
She looked thoughtful. “I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes,” she said, whereupon Ralphord glanced at her hiking boots, “but doesn’t it make more sense for Theo to get his lessons here, in Threestep? He could study an extra hour in the time he would save walking.”
I was this close to pointing out that there was no colored teacher in Threestep to give him his lessons when I realized that Miss Spivey meant that she was fixing to do it. I must have had a look on my face, because she asked me did I think Miss Templeton would object to the idea. Would Theo? I didn’t know what to say. I told her I reckoned he would save time, just like she said.
She had a chance to put her questions to Theo himself after school that day when he came with my brother Force to pick up the deer skull we’d used for our skeleton. Force was still in his school uniform. Theo had on overalls that were dusty with dried clay from the pottery. Miss Spivey told Theo that she had been thinking of ways she could help Miss Templeton help him with his high school studies.
Theo glanced at Ralphord and me. Then he shrugged. “Fact is, I haven’t been going out there since school started again, ma’am.”
“Why not?” said Miss Spivey.
“We ran out of books.”
“How’s that?” said Force.
“I studied all she had.”
Force whistled.
“We’re saving up to buy the rest from a fellow in Milledgeville that Miss Templeton knows. She’s teaching somebody else meanwhile,” Theo said. “A girl,” he admitted.
“Goodness,” said Miss Spivey. “Can’t Miss Templeton get a set of books from the high school in Claytonville?”
That’s where the colored high school for Piedmont County was.
Theo looked wary now, as if this might be a test, as if there might be some particular thing Miss Spivey did or did not want to hear. He took his wire cutters out of his pocket, turned them over in his hand, and put them back. Then, having come to a decision, he said, “Ma’am, we don’t want their schoolbooks.”
Miss Spivey said, “I beg your pardon?”
Miss Templeton wanted him to study from white high school books, Theo told Miss Spivey. “Miss Templeton says they’re better. More up-to-date.”
“I got high school books,” said Force.
“You have high school books,” Miss Spivey said.
“Sure do,” Force agreed. “I reckon they’re the white kind. I get to bring ’em home if I care to.”
Miss Spivey gave him a thoughtful look. Then she folded her arms and said, “I believe it’s high time I met my colleague down the road.”
Miss Leona Templeton was a sweet-faced, soft-spoken woman who might have been about the same age as Miss Spivey, or even a year or two younger, I couldn’t tell. Her salary was also paid by the WPA, but Miss Templeton started teaching in Piedmont County before Miss Spivey came to Threestep, back when we still had old Miss Chandler at our school. I had met Miss Templeton once and I’d seen her several times more, when she came to visit the Boykins. She had marcelled hair that might have looked old-fashioned on somebody else. It had the opposite effect on Miss Templeton, adding, like her Chicago accent, to her romantically mysterious air. Some of the mystery I assigned to Miss Templeton may have been due to her resemblance (at least in terms of her pale skin color and overall good looks) to an oval-framed portrait that Mrs. Faith Boykin had hanging on the wall in her parlor. The portrait was a photograph of Mrs. Boykin’s sister, I’d been told, the one who decided that she could go up North and pass for a Greek or an Italian, for what that was worth. I had the impression that the sister’s story was not a happy one, but Mrs. Boykin never did give me any tragic details. All I knew was that the sister lived on an island now, off the coast of Georgia. I might have thought the island part was a story Theo and Eugene made up, except the Boykins used to visit her sometimes when Mr. Boykin was still alive. They would take a train to the coast below Savannah and someone would pick them up in a boat. I used to be crazy with jealousy over Theo and Eugene getting a boat ride, which I hadn’t ever had in my life.
My brother Force offered to carry Miss Spivey to Miss Templeton’s school on Saturday. Momma sent me along to sit in the backseat of the Ford and look out the window, so that anyone could see it wasn’t just Force and Miss Spivey going for a ride in the country.
I had never seen Miss Templeton’s school before. As the crow flies—and as Theo walked—it was only three miles from Threestep, but to drive there, you had to go five miles straight on through Claytonville and take an old logging road that switched back to the right in a south-westerly direction. This about tripled the distance. Even when you got there, it was set back far enough from the road that you were likely to miss it if you didn’t know where to look. The building was made out of unpainted pine, the kind that turns dark brown with time and weather. There were no windows, properly speaking, just some openings covered in oil paper. Most of the light came from the doors at either end and from a pair of kerosene lamps on the teacher’s desk, which was set in the middle of the room for maximum illumination. Coming in from broad daylight, we never even saw the skinny girl sitting on a bench in the back of the schoolroom until Miss Templeton told her to stand up. It was that dark inside.
The girl was Etta George, the other student in the high school course. Etta George did not look big enough to be in high school. She had smoldering eyes and not a word to say while she shook hands with “Miss Spivey, Mr. Force, and Miss Cailiff,” which was how Miss Templeton introduced us to her. I think Etta George would have preferred to skip the handshake, but Miss Spivey never gave anybody a choice in such matters. She stuck her arm out like a pump handle and left it there until you got the idea. Etta’s hand was cool but damp, I noticed in the second or two that our palms touched. She appeared greatly relieved when Miss Templeton called her over to the teacher’s desk to look at the box full of high school books that we had brought along to show we meant business.
Force had brought these books home from school in Milledgeville during the past week, a few each day so as not to arouse suspicion, since he was not a boy known for his studiousness. Etta George pulled a small book bound in black from the box and used her sleeve to dust the spine. I could say her face lit up, but that would understate the case considerably. “Look at this, Miss Templeton!” she said. “It’s Virgil!” After that, the two of them tore through that box like it was Christmas. They kept exclaiming to each other over what they found. Did we really have Millikan-Gale’s Practical Physics? Miss Templeton said there weren’t five high schools in the state of Georgia so advanced as to be using that book. And look here! Seymour’s Solid Geometry. The whole fourth year of high school was in that box. Miss Templeton straightened up and asked, “When can we begin?”
On the way home, Force and Miss Spivey were silent. This was unnatural, especially for Force. He could not abide a long silence between people. In the passenger’s seat, Miss Spivey gripped the door with one hand and her hat—a teal-blue tam that matched her short wool jacket—with the other. We were bouncing along some of the worst roadbed in the county, and Force could hardly afford to turn his head, but he was working up to something, I could tell. Finally, he said, “So they’ll be three of them coming.”
Earlier, in the schoolhouse, when they were talking over the details—which days they’d meet, what time they’d start, where Miss Templeton could tie the horse, how it would be better to approach the schoolhouse from the woods behind it than from the road out front—during all that talk, I could tell that Miss Spivey was hiding her surprise that Miss Templeton intended to ride all the way to Threestep twice a week instead of getting a little extra sleep while Miss Spivey took over Theo’s lessons.
“Three of whom?” she said, almost shouting over the road noise and the engine.
“Theo and Miss Templeton and this Etta. Etta George.”
“Oh,” Miss Spivey said. “Three of them.” She sounded almost cheerful when she said it, or maybe the bumps in the road put the lilt in her voice.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Force said.
“Of course not.”
“Just, some folks won’t like it, that’s all.”
Miss Spivey looked over at my brother. It was hard for me to read her expression from the backseat, where I was hanging on to the box of books to keep myself in place. He tried again, more directly this time, to make his point.
“Like that Superintendent,” Force yelled. “He won’t take kindly to you teaching them at Threestep School, Miss Spivey, no matter how early in the morning. It ain’t done.”
“It is now,” she yelled back, sounding too pleased even to correct his grammar.
Miss Templeton showed up at Threestep School on horseback the following Tuesday, as agreed, wearing a black velvet riding jacket and hat and those very funny riding pants that look like you’re carrying two loads sideways. The horse had a bit, halter and reins but no saddle. Miss Templeton had been selling things to buy books and supplies. Behind her on the horse, hanging on to her for dear life and probably for warmth, too, sat Etta George. She had on a yellow dress with the skirt hiked up for riding and brown shoes that looked big as footballs at the ends of her long skinny legs. Theo came outside with a lantern and held the horse for them while they dismounted, politely averting his eyes when Etta George’s skirt hitched up even higher as she slid down to the ground, and then he tied the horse up behind the schoolhouse, away from the road.
Since Ralphord and I were there, too—Force having decided grimly that a little extra studying wouldn’t hurt him, either—Miss Spivey gave each of us a secret mission. My mission was to make sure that anything written on the blackboard in the early morning session was erased “to the point of utter invisibility.” I fetched an extra bucket of water for cleaning the blackboard to Miss Spivey’s satisfaction. Ralphord was assigned to be the official lookout. He could have performed his duties by watching the road from the schoolhouse door or even through a window, but where was the glory in that?
On the very top of Threestep School, where the four triangles of roof over the schoolhouse came together, there was a little wooden belfry. It had a weather-vane lightning rod on top and louvered openings on the four sides that were probably meant to let the school bell clang out in every direction, except that there was no bell, and never had been. A narrow ladder led up from a door in the half-room ceiling to a tiny room just big enough for a theoretical bell to swing back and forth in it. The belfry was murderous in the summer and freezing in the dead of winter, but in November, with the walnut trees out front being mostly leafless, Ralphord prevailed upon Miss Spivey to let him keep watch from up there. “I can see the road a mile in both directions, Miss Spivey. Won’t nobody get past me.” She made Ralphord repeat ten times “Nobody will get past me,” and then she used a skeleton key to open the door in the ceiling. Force did a quick sweep with a straw broom for bats and cobwebs before he boosted Ralphord up through the door. We heard a little scrambling overhead, and then Miss Spivey called, “Are you all right up there? Ralphord?”
“I can see Bibbens’ store from here, Miss Spivey,” he replied.
If anybody came down the road, Ralphord was supposed to do his magpie call to sound the alarm so that Theo and Etta George and Miss Templeton could slip out the door and into the woods behind the schoolhouse, where the horse was tied up and waiting. After the first half hour’s worth of magpie calls—including some from a real magpie, for Ralphord was good enough to fool the birds themselves—Miss Spivey amended her instructions, calling for an alarm if somebody suspicious approached the schoolhouse. Ralphord complained later, “I won’t never get to make a peep if I got to wait for somebody suspicious to come along.” I asked him if he knew what “suspicious” meant, and he said, “Leave me alone, Gladys.”
The tutoring—which I know Ralphord pictured as “tootering” in his mind—worked out better than my brother Force thought it would. Miss Templeton’s horse came and went, swift and relatively silent, in the early morning darkness, and Theo looked a lot less tired than he used to in the old days of walking back and forth to the colored school. About three weeks out, in response to a request from Daddy for a demonstration of something he’d learned thus far, Force conjugated two and a half Latin verbs right at the supper table. With the third one, he only got as far as amat, which meant, he said, “you love,” at which point he switched to telling us about Etta George being almost as smart as Theo. “That girl don’t say much in English, but in Latin she’s quick!” The fact is Etta George wasn’t as good as Theo in solid geometry, but she definitely had the edge in third-year Latin, and she kept him on his toes in everything. Although Force trailed behind the both of them, his grades at school began to improve almost instantly—“I passed a Latin test!” he reported—and he was good for everyone’s morale. Ralphord kept himself entertained by learning to do catbirds and cardinals and jays—he’d get them making such a racket in the woods behind the schoolhouse that folks began to wonder what had gotten into the birds lately—but he was saving the magpie for when a suspicious character appeared, assuming (correctly) that one day, one would.