“She isn’t going to make us answer, is she?” Ed Garvey whispered to Jay Langston.
“Who does she think she is?”Jay responded, suddenly thinking this teacher was not someone he wanted to tangle with, in spite of her curls.
“Let’s turn to geography,” Margaret said. “Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Manitoba, Hecia, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall, and Orinoco.”
Jay swore under his breath. “I know Denver and the Yukon,” he whispered. “The rest I never heard of.”
“Those will give you a hint as to how tough the test is,” Margaret concluded. “I think it will be a useful measure for achieving graduation.”
There was silence. The men breathed a sigh of relief that the possibility of questioning was over, and the women clasped their hands in their laps, a stern show of sympathy for the discomfort of their husbands. Only Mrs. Garvey offered support, smiling at Margaret and mouthing the word “good.”
“Thank you,” Margaret said, and took her seat beside Mr. Grimes.
Easy Tucker pulled his wheat wagon, led by two dappled mares, onto the scales at the Garvey Mill, tied the reins to the front of the buckboard seat, and jumped to the ground. The horses were sweating from the pull, and Easy swatted aimlessly at the large flies circling their haunches. He patted the left horse’s front shoulder to let him know the trip was over, then waved to Ed Garvey’s shadow in the window of the elevator.
The August morning sun cast a glare in the window, so Easy couldn’t be sure whether it was Garvey senior or junior behind the scales. He opened the door with a rush, befitting his celebratory mood, and hardly noticed the handful of men seated on benches around the room or leaning against the back wall.
“Hello, Ed,” Easy said. “This is the last of it. Got my boy out there plowing today.”
“Good to see you, Easy,” young Ed Garvey said. “The boys here were wondering if you’d be in this morning.”
Ed Tucker had farmed near Nickerly all his life. And as sure as weevils like the wheat, Ed liked the feel of cold hard cash for his crops.
The threshing machine was hardly out of the field before Easy had every scoop of wheat in the elevator and every dollar in the bank, not that he left it there long. His philosophy was that every year’s work earned him at least one extravagance, and this year he was planning on a new car.
Ed Garvey studied the scale before him, moved the weights to the far right, then jotted a figure on the back of a letter from the Kansas Grange.
“Easy,” Garvey said, “I suppose that horse and wagon outfit weighs the same as yesterday, or do we need to weigh it again?” In order to weigh the wheat, Garvey normally weighed the wagon fully loaded, emptied the wheat, then weighed the wagon empty, and subtracted the difference. It would save time just to use the weight of yesterday’s wagon, since presumably it hadn’t changed overnight, although Ed Garvey Jr. knew his father wouldn’t approve of this practice.
In addition to his love of cash, Easy Tucker had a number of eccentric qualities, including the fact that he could never remember anybody’s name. He had no trouble with numbers or places, and he had done pretty well through the seventh grade, which was as far as his family let him go, but he couldn’t always tell you Ed Garvey’s name, even though he sat beside Ed all seven of those educational years. It was very embarrassing, and more than a little frustrating, and so he got to calling everybody by an all-purpose nickname of one kind or another. This was a perfect solution because every man in Nickerly had a nickname, from Cavity Ben Johnson who had no teeth and was called Cav, to Red Romberger who had bright red hair and freckles. Easy Tucker hit on a solution to his problem when one day he accidentally called his best friend Lucky, and it worked—Ed Garvey responded. From then on, Easy Tucker simply called everyone either Easy, Lucky, or Speedy. When his friends realized what he was doing, they mockingly started to call him Easy. The name stuck.
Ed Garvey calculated the weight of the wheat, opened the dark green accounts book, and made an entry for Easy Tucker. His right hand followed a strip of leather from his belt to his pocket, where it dislodged a key that opened the wooden cash drawer beneath the table. Ed counted out the cash into Easy’s right hand and said, “Thanks for your business, Mr. Tucker.”
Jay Langston, leaning against the iron stove in the middle of the room, watched and waited for the transaction to take place. Business was business. Then he piped up, “Easy, you gonna buy a car with that money?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “No matter. That money will be gone by Christmas anyway.”
“No, it won’t,” Easy said. “No, it won’t.” But Easy knew it might. He was usually broke and begging for a loan by Easter. Most families, like the Reverend Aaron and Ivy, sold a little of their wheat in August for cash to buy school clothes or a new roof for the house, but kept the lion’s share in a granary to be traded for flour during the winter. Every month Aaron would take a load of wheat to the mill and trade it for two 48-pound bags of flour. Ivy would bake all of her breads, pies, cakes, pancakes, and biscuits for the month out of these two bags. Most farmers husbanded their resources this way so that no matter what else happened, the family always had food. Not Easy. He said he wanted his money to grow, at 1percent in the bank. Unfortunately, he seldom left it there long enough to benefit from his financial strategy.
“I bet you take that money right down to the dance hall, take a fling around the floor when Mrs. Tucker isn’t looking, and lose the whole pile,” Jay shouted so all could hear. The other farmers chuckled, until they noticed that Easy wasn’t smiling.
Easy had a quick temper, or at least that was his reputation; few of the men at Garvey’s had actually seen him angry. Easy was built like a block of cedar, with a square face and large forehead and one peculiar feature: he had no nose, at least not that you could see. His nose looked like a bite of pancake from the front. It was so flat against his face that sometimes people would work their way around to his profile just so they could see if he really had a nose. The story went that one year at the county fair, Easy was stopped near the sheep pens by a complete stranger who asked if he really had a nose. Startled, Easy stepped back from the stranger as if stung by a bee. Then he realized that several folks had heard the question and had stopped to look. Easy felt the blood rushing up through his shoulders and past his collar. Then he turned slightly away from the stranger, lifted his right fist, and sent it with slingshot velocity right onto the man’s nose. The nose flattened with a crunch, sending blood flying in all directions. People ran, screaming and shouting that Easy Tucker had gone mad. Satisfied that now there were at least two people in the world with a pancake nose, Easy found Mrs. Tucker over by the baked goods exhibits and took her home without saying a word. The joke around the community was: If you make fun of Easy Tucker, you soon look like Easy Tucker. So the men at Garvey’s Mill let the matter of money drop.
Hank Simpson, who ran a bakery on Nickerly’s Main Street, had dropped by to join the boys for a bottle of pop. Usually, a small group of farmers gathered at his shop in the afternoon, especially on rainy days when they couldn’t work in the fields. Rainy days were set aside for stocking up at the hardware and dry goods stores. On nice days, when business was slow, Hank left the store to Mrs. Simpson and wandered on down to the mill.
“Easy,” Hank said, “you better keep that boy plowing noon and night ’cause it’s almost time for school. Another two weeks and you lost him to that Chambers girl.”
“Not if my wife has her way,” Easy said. “She says the new teacher has been showing more than ankle to that oldest Swenson boy.”
Club Wilson spoke up from the end of the bench, “I think that Chambers girl is a bird. You touch her and she’ll fly away so fast.”
Club Wilson’s family owned more land in Nickerly County than anyone, thousands of acres by some accounts, with teams