The Teacher's Funeral by Richard Peck

out. Around here things were getting too hot for us, so to speak.
    In a voice small and forlorn Lloyd said, “I miss Miss Myrt. She only threatened you in daylight.”
    Then we must have slept.

    I awoke in dread. Tansy hadn’t told Dad about the privy fire because she was holding it over my head. He was bound to hear, though. And Aunt Maud too. What with the telephone and the Rural Free Delivery, there wasn’t much place to hide anymore.
    But when we slunk in from milking, Dad was at his place at the kitchen table with the weekly newspaper, The Parke County Courier, open before him.
    I’d have given a lot to see a headline in it reading,
    LIGHTNING STRIKES
RURAL SCHOOL PRIVY
    But it wasn’t to be.
    â€œHark at this,” Dad said, and began to read:
    FARM FAMILY IN NOVEL ACCIDENT
    M ODERN M ISHAP AT C OUNTY C ROSSROADS
    Aunt Maud had just turned out a pan of her buckshot muffins. Tansy was making our dinner. “Oh my stars, that sounds like us!” Aunt Maud said. “Who’s telling our business?” She and Tansy hung over Dad as he read out the article:
    The O. C. Culver family of rural Sycamore Township was involved in an accident with an automobile last Thursday. The party was returning from a funeral when their horses drawing a Standard Wheel Company wagon shied at a near collision with a Bullet No. 2 eight-cylinder racing car driven this past winter at Daytona Beach, Florida, by Barney Oldfield.
    At the time of the crossroad contretemps, Eugene Hammond of the newly organized Overland Automobile Company of Terre Haute was the motorneer at the wheel of the car.
    The Culver family includes O. C. Culver, a prominent local citizen and practitioner of diversified farming, his handsome daughter, Miss Tansy Culver, two young sons, and Mr. Culver’s sister-in-law, Miss Singleterry, who was flung some distance off the tailgate.
    Fortuitously, no injury was sustained by either the four-footed or two-footed victims of the misadventure. Eugene Hammond was able to drive the auto on to the Vigo County fairgrounds, where he demonstrated it in a time trial, finishing first. It is believed that this accident is the first such between horse-drawn vehicle and internal combustion engine in the twentieth century here in the Hoosier heartland. What lies ahead in this advanced new era? An airship colliding with a church spire? We live in miraculous times, its wonders to behold.
    When Tansy saw herself called handsome in print, her hand stole up to her back hair.
    Outrage etched Aunt Maud’s face at anybody blaring our personal business to the listening world. “How’d they know we were coming from a funeral anyhow?”
    â€œThe way we were dressed on a Thursday,” Tansy said in a far-off voice, dreamlike. “Your veil. My hat.”
    â€œWell, they got that right about me being flung a considerable distance,” Aunt Maud maintained. “I was in the air long enough to see my whole life pass before me.”
    Dad grinned. “That young go-getter Eugene Hammond is behind this story,” he said. “You can see him on every line. He hand-fed each word to the Courier . He’ll go far, that fellow. This is better advertising for his company and himself than you can pay out money for.”
    Aunt Maud couldn’t pull her eyes off the page. Still, her chin wagged. “I didn’t expect to see my name in the paper till my obituary on the day they put me in the ground!”
    â€œAnd you might not see it then,” Dad remarked mildly.

    Anyway, our sudden fame kept everybody’s mind off my crime. I didn’t feel much like one lucky boy, but at least I wasn’t looking at an arson charge. Me and Lloyd attended school in our next-best shirts, sent off with a warning from Aunt Maud. This second day of Tansy’s teaching went along better, and ran the full time.
    Little Britches was back, on her own terms. She’d sit nowhere but at