THE YEAR 1939 BEGAN with a cold snap. On the Monday we returned to school, Ralphord and I scraped frost off the schoolhouse windows while Force hauled in more wood. Miss Spivey was worried about attendance, she said, but children started to arrive before long, puffing like dragons in the doorway, the smoke pouring out of the schoolhouse chimney drawing them in. I couldn’t remember Arnie Lumpkin ever returning to school after the holidays, but here he was, wrapped in a blanket like a cigar-store Indian. Other children were similarly swaddled in blankets and oil cloth, some with jackets and coats underneath, some without. I recognized a pair of velvet drapes from their daddy’s funeral parlor on the Brookins twins.
The cold kept Miss Templeton and Etta George home on Tuesday morning, which proved to be a lucky thing. Momma had declared that it was too cold to walk a mile, so Daddy carried us to school—Force and me and Ralphord and Theo Boykin—under a layer of hay in his wagon. Neither his Model A truck nor the T-Model Ford would start. Ralphord looked grateful when Miss Spivey said it was too cold to climb up to his lookout post. He was dozing in a cocoon of blankets later when we heard a loud grunt and a scraping sound, followed by the sudden rattle of one of the shutters, as if someone had fallen against it. Force leaped up and ran outside, just in time to see someone plunge into the laurel bushes behind the outhouse and take off crashing through the woods, so bundled up Force couldn’t tell who or what it was. Miss Spivey called him back. She said we’d find out soon enough who it was and added, to my delight, that we might as well light the stove. Smoke hadn’t been curling up out of the chimney five minutes—Force and Theo both having vacated the premises—before children started showing up at the door. The velvet-clad Brookins twins were the first to arrive. Mavis Davis was the second or third, depending on how you counted the twins.
On Wednesday, Mavis couldn’t say just how the Superintendent of Schools in Piedmont County had found out that Miss Spivey was teaching lessons to a colored boy and a white boy together at Threestep School. “Why can’t she just say Theo Boykin and Force Cailiff, for heaven’s sake?” my sister Ildred exclaimed. “Everybody knows what boys she’s talking about!” Mavis was able to report, however, thanks to her mother’s habit of keeping her ear to the ground in her capacity as secretary to the Superintendent, that this information did not sit well with him. Miss Spivey had to close school at noon on Thursday and hitch herself a ride to Claytonville for a scolding.
The Superintendent started by taking the reasonable approach, Miss Spivey said later. He pointed out that there was a high school for Theo to attend in Claytonville, and that the Piedmont County Board of Education, at whose pleasure he himself served, was responsible for determining the curriculum best suited to the needs of students in that school and every other school in the county. Could she imagine what it would be like if every teacher was at liberty to choose whatever she saw fit to teach to each individual student? (She could imagine that, but she didn’t say so.) He even allowed that Miss Spivey’s impulse to assist the colored boy was no doubt a selfless and commendable one.
However.
In the country schools, of which Threestep was one, teachers were required to focus their energies on the elementary grades, where basic skills were learned and where the great majority of the population was likely to be served. Regrettably, Miss Spivey had shown an unfortunate disregard for her youngest students, as she preferred to lavish her attention—she knew he was getting warmed up when he said lavish, Miss Spivey said—on two adolescent boys. When it came to that, he was not even going to mention the impropriety of meeting, in secrecy, with two boys who were nearly old enough to be considered young men. One of them colored. And the other—well, the Superintendent was not at liberty to reveal details, but he did not mind telling her that Force Cailiff had a history.
“Everyone has a history,” Miss Spivey had said, even though she must have known a smart mouth wouldn’t get her anywhere.
There would be no more tutoring, the Superintendent declared, pausing, Miss Spivey said, after each word. For. Emphasis.
“I thought he was finished then,” Miss Spivey reported. “But he was not.”
The Superintendent had many more things to object to, now that he’d gotten started. Field trips, for example. When Miss Spivey called them an “indispensable pedagogical tool,” the Superintendent informed her that Miss Chandler, who taught school in Threestep for more than forty years, had never taken anybody anywhere. He was getting so many complaints—mostly from the parents of the smaller children Miss Spivey often sent home on field trip days—that he felt obliged to inform her that parents expected their children to spend the school day in school (especially children who were too small to be useful at home, although he didn’t put it that way). He said it went without saying, although he was taking great pains to say it at considerable length, that the children were supposed to be learning their lessons, and not gallivanting all over the county.
There would be no. More. Field trips.
For that matter, there could be a lot less of these “Arabian Nights” in the schoolroom, from what he’d heard. Children, especially the younger ones, were highly impressionable and some of them had a hard time distinguishing fairy tales from reality, a fact of which he would have expected her to be aware, given her advanced training in the field of education and her fancy degree. (He didn’t say “fancy degree,” but he was thinking it, Miss Spivey said.) Children were coming home and spilling kerosene out of lamps to look for genies. They were digging up front yards and pastures in search of secret trapdoors into the earth.
“I had no idea,” Miss Spivey said, sounding pleased.
The Superintendent informed her that she had given him no choice but to write a report to the county Board of Education (really, to have Mrs. Mavis Davis write a report which he would then edit heavily, lest the board think that scandalous and hussy were his favorite words). If it weren’t for the reluctance of the board to jeopardize future WPA appointments in Piedmont County, the Superintendent said, he would feel compelled to take more serious disciplinary action at this time.
We were waiting for her at Bibbens’ store when Deputy Sheriff Linwood Perkins brought her back from Claytonville that afternoon—me and Ildred and Momma, and Force and Ralphord and Mrs. Bibben, who was minding the store. The deputy sheriff didn’t say howdy or even wave at the crowd who came out on the porch when he dropped her off, which we immediately took as a bad sign. In fact, from what I could see of him through the windshield while Miss Spivey got out of the car, he looked mad. Miss Spivey had a scarf pulled up over her face against the cloud of dust the deputy sheriff’s tires raised as he pulled away faster than he needed to, but when she let the scarf fall, she looked as cheerful as ever. Her foot had not yet landed on the first porch step—she wore the hiking boots to go see the Superintendent! we saw with dismay—before I burst out, “Are y’all fired?”
Miss Spivey laughed. “Gladys,” she said, hustling us back inside the store, “that is the very same question Mr. Perkins asked me after my little chat with the Superintendent.”
Linwood Perkins had, in fact, waited for her on a bench in the hall outside the Superintendent’s office with his hat in his hands.
Miss Spivey sat down on an overturned barrel next to the Bibbens’ woodstove. She plucked her felt tam off her head and dropped it in her lap. “No, I am not fired,” she said at last.
I let out the breath I’d been holding.
“I’m on probation.”
“What’s that mean?” Force asked her.
“He’d like to send me packing, is what it means,” Miss Spivey said. “But he can’t afford to do it.”
She untied the white scarf around her neck and gave us her report. “I don’t know what makes him think we limited our gallivanting to the county,” she said when she came to the field trip part.
“I hope you didn’t say that to him, Miss Spivey!” Momma said.
“No, Mrs. Cailiff, I did not say a word. I bowed my head and beat my breast and vowed to amend my ways. No more field trips, no more tutoring adolescent boys of any kind or color, and no more Arabian Nights.” Miss Spivey looked around Bibbens’ store at our long faces and added, “I lied, of course!” We brightened up immediately. Then she turned thoughtful. “We’ll have to find some other place to meet, however. For the tutoring, I mean. We can go to Miss Templeton’s school, if we have to. How far is that from here—Force?”
“Five miles to Claytonville and another, say, four on the switchback. Nine miles driving, Miss Spivey.” Force knew how far it was to everywhere. He got around.
“That’s a long piece to drive before daybreak.” Momma sounded doubtful. “In the dark. On that old road.”
“And you’d have to go through Claytonville to get there,” Ildred pointed out. She was sitting on the inside ledge of the storefront window display, leaning against some bags of chicken feed. Ildred hadn’t said much to me about the high school lessons, or tutoring, or “whatever they call it.” I think she found it worrisome, just like Force did, but she could see how important it was to Theo, and she didn’t want to be the one to talk it down. “I reckon you’d have to hide folks”—she meant Theo, Miss Templeton, and Etta George—“when you were driving through town.”
“That doesn’t sound very convenient,” Miss Spivey said.
“Or y’all could go to May’s in McIntyre.”
Everybody looked at me. Momma frowned. “That’s just as far, Gladys. Farther, I expect.”
“But going the opposite way,” I said. Nowhere near Claytonville.
“It would be just as dark.”
“Not if we went on Saturday!” That was Force, proving that there was a brain inside that handsome head of his. “On Saturday, we wouldn’t have to go so early. We could wait till it was light.”
“But Theo works on Saturdays, don’t he?” asked Mrs. Bibben, who had learned of the tutoring only recently and didn’t outright disapprove. Also, to her credit, she did not mention that Miss Spivey was in the habit of minding the store on Saturday morning, so the Bibbens could go fishing.
Ildred said, after a tiny pause, “Theo only works at the pottery till noon on Saturday.”
“Then y’all could do your schooling business on Saturday afternoon,” Mrs. Bibben pointed out happily.
Miss Spivey, meanwhile, was giving me just the kind of thoughtful look I was hoping for. She said, “Your sister May might not appreciate having us underfoot.”
“I expect she’d enjoy the company,” I said. “Don’t you think so, Momma?”
Momma frowned. “Might be too much company for Ed.”
“He’ll go along with it,” Force said. “Ed always goes along.”
Momma looked like she was not so sure that Ed would go along, but she did allow that McIntyre was in the next county. Wilkinson.
“And this here’s Piedmont County,” Force said, just in case anybody had forgotten. “Piedmont County Superintendent don’t hold no sway in Wilkinson, does he?’
“No, he does not,” Miss Spivey said.
Force carried us to McIntyre the very next Saturday in Daddy’s truck. Ralphord and I both went along as usual. Ralphord got out near O’Quinn’s mill to go fishing, at which point Theo Boykin climbed into the back of the truck and ducked under the tarp to stay out of sight. Luckily, the weather had warmed up considerably. We picked Miss Templeton up behind the second little white church east of Threestep. Miss Spivey said it was a real crime, to make a grown lady hide out in the back of the truck like that, but Miss Templeton said there was no sense asking for trouble. “Any more than we already have,” she added, tying a scarf around her head, hat and all, in preparation for the ride. She punched up the cushion she’d brought to sit on and let Force and Theo each take a hand to help her up into the truck.
I am sorry to say that Etta George did not go with us out to May and Ed’s place. She was afraid to get any more mixed up in it, Miss Templeton admitted. Etta continued to study Latin with Miss Templeton in the early mornings at their country school, using my brother’s third-year Latin book, which he had to pay for out of his own pocket when he told his teacher it was lost.
May was waiting for us on the porch that ran across the front of their tin-roofed house, little Ed in her arms. She was wearing the same calico dress she wore on most special occasions, with a man’s canvas jacket over it. Her hands were lost in the sleeves. She had her Sunday shoes on and her hair pulled back with the mother-of-pearl combs she got for a wedding present years ago. Little May was leaning up against her momma, one arm hooked around May’s knee, and the three bigger girls stood in a clump next to her, all in calico dresses and sweaters, looking like smaller versions of May.
As soon as Force cut off the engine, May handed little Ed to the girls and hurried down the two wooden steps and across the yard to open the car door for Miss Spivey.
“Y’all mind if I join in?” she said before Miss Spivey’s foot touched ground. “Ed says it’s all right.”
I followed May’s glance back over her shoulder and saw Ed in his overalls, standing in the doorway to the barn. He waved and yelled, “Howdy,” before he retreated into the darkness behind him. Ed was a quiet man overall, compared to his business partner Ebenezer, but it wasn’t like him to miss a chance to talk to folks. I expect he wanted us in the house and out of sight, in case somebody else happened by the place while Theo and Miss Templeton were on the premises. Ed spent the three hours out in the barn, banging and clanging things—he didn’t have any livestock inside, just old hay and stove parts and an automobile carcass—so we wouldn’t forget he was there. After a while, May sent me out to make sure the girls weren’t climbing up in the hayloft, their daddy not being accustomed to keeping an eye out for danger the way May was.
Out in the barn, Ed asked me, “What’re they doin’ in there?”
I said, “Algerbra.” May wasn’t ready for solid geometry, Miss Spivey said. I asked Ed if he happened to know that algebra was named after an Arab called Al-Jabr. I also pointed out that the Arabs invented numbers as we know them.
He shook his head. “What’s she wanna learn algerbra? What’s it good for?”
I had no idea, but thinking of Theo, I said, “For going to college, I reckon.”
While Ed and I were talking, the girls were busy pulling out handfuls of hay and throwing it all over the place under the hayloft, squealing and sneezing. Little May got to her feet on top of a bale and when Ed snatched her up with one arm around her middle, she said, “Daddy, I’m hungry! I want some pie.” They knew there was pecan pie in the house. They’d seen Theo carry it in. That set them all off.
“Kin we have pie?”
“Daddy! I want me some pie!”
“I’m hungry, Daddy!”
Ed blew out a breath and swung little May to the barn floor while they kept up pouncing on him. “I sure don’t see no college ’round here.”
“I know,” I said, but I was thinking that I wished he’d go inside and see for himself how May bowed her head over the algebra book and marked the place with her finger while she copied numbers and letters into the notebook Miss Spivey had given her. I’d never seen numbers and letters put such a blissful expression on anyone’s face before. “I reckon she’s just—interested—in it, Ed.”
“Beats me why.” Ed looked mournful, like he couldn’t see how his wife’s interest in algebra was going to bring any good in his direction or hers.
“Beats me, too,” I said, mostly to be agreeable, and I thought Ed looked like he felt a little better.
The Superintendent of Schools may not have been at liberty to reveal the details of Force Cailiff’s “history” to Miss Spivey, but either he went ahead and revealed them anyway, or somebody else must have told her about my brother and the college girl from Ohio who started asking him for rides in the country back when Force first learned to drive the T-Model Ford. He was studying how to park in Milledgeville one day and pulled right up to where that girl was standing on the curb waiting to cross Columbia Street. That was how it got started. It ended with her having to leave school, and Force crying and carrying on because she was gone back up to Ohio, which was where she was from, and how was he ever going to see her again? He was set to marry her, he said, no matter if she was four years older than he was, but Momma said he wasn’t marrying nobody at the age of fifteen. He even climbed out a window one night and walked all the way to Claytonville, intending to hop a Southern Railway freight when it slowed down at the siding. He was fixing to follow her all the way to Toledo. The deputy sheriff, who went with our daddy to bring him home, asked Force if he wanted to get that girl in more trouble than she was already in by forcing the law to go after her for corrupting a minor. “A who?” Force said. “You mean me? She didn’t corrupt me none. She just—”
“Stop right there, son,” the deputy sheriff warned, “before you say something incriminatin’.”
We were two years past that particular disaster, and Force had long since stopped sending letters that the girl’s parents probably tore up before she ever got a chance to see them, but it had been news to Miss Spivey, whatever her sources, and it had a certain effect on her. We all noticed it at school. For days after her chat with the Superintendent, Miss Spivey kept talking about Ohio. Geography lessons, history lessons—they were all about Ohio. “What fortification important in the French and Indian War was located where the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers come together to form the mighty Ohio?” Miss Spivey would ask, her skirt flaring when she said Ohio.
The answer, in case you’re wondering, is Fort Ticonderoga.
At about that same time, all my agitation over how to ask Miss Spivey about her Toomsboro connections without her taking offense proved to be for naught. When I finally asked her after school one day if what I’d heard about her being from around these parts was true, Miss Spivey freely admitted that her daddy’s people came from Toomsboro.
I was standing beside her teacher’s desk. Through the window I could see Ralphord in the schoolyard, moving toward the outhouse. He was hopping on one foot. I said, “You don’t talk like you’re from ’round here.”
“I never lived in Toomsboro,” said Miss Spivey. She straightened up the notebooks she’d been correcting. “But I did spend one summer with my grandmother there. I thought we were going to a place she had on the sea islands, but it was Toomsboro for the duration. I didn’t take it well, as I recall. It was too bad, really. A chance to get to know Grandmother Spivey—they kept me away from her most of the time, she was a do-gooder, you see—and all I did was sulk. I was about your age, Gladys, but obviously not as mature.” Miss Spivey looked regretful, and then she told me the amazing fact that she had attended the one-room school in Toomsboro for three days while she waited for her mother to come get her at the end of that summer. “My grandmother thought I might enjoy the experience, and she knew my mother wouldn’t like it, so off I went.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I asked, “Did you enjoy it?”
“It was very different from what I was used to,” Miss Spivey said, and she added, in that slightly sad voice people use when they can’t believe how long ago something that seems like yesterday really was, “That was back in 1921.”
She looked out the window then, as if the past might be spread out there for her to view. Instead, there was my brother Force, loping up into the schoolyard from the road. He saw us through the glass when he got closer and waved, handsome as usual in his uniform jacket and gray pants, and then he kept on going around the back of the school, out of view. I said, “My brother Force was born in 1921.”
Miss Spivey sat up a little straighter behind that big desk of hers. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I know.”
Her eyes had gotten bright, watching Force cross the schoolyard. I could tell she wasn’t thinking about her grandmother in Toomsboro anymore when she peered around the room, as if to make sure there was no one else in earshot. The only thing resembling a person other than the two of us was the skeleton we made for Halloween, which was still hanging in the corner as if he’d misbehaved, sporting a big old gourd for a head in place of the deer skull. Miss Spivey leaned toward me. Both of her lightly penciled eyebrows, which were high and round like little crescent moons most of the time, went straight and dark. I was sorely afraid she was about to tell me that she did get thrown out of that one-room school, just like Mavis said, but Miss Spivey hunkered down over her desk and divulged to me instead that my brother Force, the only one of us to be born in a hospital as you’ll recall, had been switched at birth with the son of an Arabian princess who was in exile at the time, having fled certain death back home in Baghdad. (It seemed the usual way to remove a person from office there was to remove his head and the heads of all his relations.) Switching the babies was an extra precaution, Miss Spivey said, in case the new Caliph’s henchmen ever caught up with the princess and her entourage, which, sad to say, they eventually did. In Ohio, as a matter of fact. My real brother, Miss Spivey said, had perished with the rest in Ohio.
I said, “Are you sure about that, ma’am?”
She was sure.
“Y’all’re saying that Force is no kin to us at all?”
“You must never tell a soul,” Miss Spivey said.
“Force never said nothing about it.”
“He wouldn’t know, would he?” Miss Spivey said.
“But what about Momma?”
“She doesn’t know, either.” Miss Spivey’s eyebrows were one dark line now. She said, lowering her voice further, “I shouldn’t have told you this.”
But seeing as she had, she also told me where to look for proof. Inside the crook of my brother’s right arm was a scar about the size of a quarter. I’d always heard that it was from some hot wax that dripped on him when he was little, but Miss Spivey said no. She said that’s where his birthmark shaped like an eagle used to be. She even showed me, in a book she had, where it said that the caliphs of Baghdad were descended from the kings of Georgia, and how heirs to the throne were born with the mark of an eagle on their right arm. “I never heard of them having kings in Georgia,” I said, but Miss Spivey explained that there was another Georgia someplace way over on the other side of the world. I didn’t believe that at first, but it was true! She showed me on the map.
“And this here other Georgia is where Force’s people come from?”
“That’s right,” she said. “In the distant mists of time, before they moved south to Baghdad.”
Miss Spivey and I turned as one to look (south) out the window. We saw Force and Ralphord, the both of them side by side, swinging on the outhouse door.
“We were testing it,” Force explained when they came in to get me. “To see how it was holdin’ up.”
On the way home, I kept stealing glances at Force. He was wearing his jacket, so I couldn’t see the pale skin on the inside of his arm, right in the crook of his elbow, where a patch that was pinker and shinier than the rest of him had always put me in mind of a pink butterfly. When Force caught me looking, I knew before he said a word that she had told him, too. He stopped in the road, letting Ralphord go on without us, and said, “That’s just a story she told you, Gladys.”
I was so surprised that I forgot to pretend not to know what he was talking about. I said, “You don’t believe Miss Spivey? You reckon she lied?”
“I reckon she made up a story. There’s a difference, Gladys, between lying and making up a story.”
I waited, but he didn’t say what the difference was.