It was a shock to the board to see the names of the team's fullback, right-end, and left-half on the list Mama produced at the next meeting. The right-end and the left-half promised to try better, and not again answer all questions by saying, “You bettin' on us this Saturday?” But the fullback couldn't promise because he never talked to the teachers, In fact, although he had heard there were teachers at the school, he spent his spare time resting from curtain-pulling in the woodworking department, where he was making his mother some shoe trees.
Anyway, the time came when Ogellmuggell appeared before the school board to report on his progress.
Ogell-muggell came to the board meeting. I still remember him—I was there, as Papa was off on a land deal and I was to take Mama home late at night. Ho stood there smiling as if asleep and having a dream of food and touchdowns….
“Well, Ogell,” said the Major, “that was a nice run you made Saturday.”
“It was nothin' … ninety yards.”
“What are you planning against Milltown High?” asked Silver Dollar.
“Your usual attack?” asked the Major, sniffing the end of his good cigar. They were trying to show Ogell-muggell was human.
“Who was the great blind poet of the Greeks?” asked Mama.
Ogell-muggell smiled at Mama. “I don't follow them western teams, Miss.”
“Young man,” said Mama, “unless you answer my questions you will be dropped from all your classes.”
“Thank you,” said Ogell-muggell. “I was wonderin' why I had to go suddenlike to all that writin' and readin'….”
The Major coughed. “Now, my boy … a little education is a remarkable thing. I myself am a Yale man.”
“Lousy team this year,” said the football player.
The Major coughed into his cigar tray and looked at Mama, fear in his eyes for the first time.
“Football is an evil, brutal thing,”
said Mama. “You are engaged in battering and crippling other young men.”
Ogell-muggell nodded. “Did you see me clip that punk last Saturday?”
Mama said, “I am going to do away with football in the High School, and you will thank me in time….”
Ogell-muggell looked at Mama as if she had said there was no God or chocolate ice cream. “No football?”
Mama rattled some papers. “I want to ask you about your studies. It costs six hundred dollars to send a man through High School….” Mama looked at the rest of the board like a Roman lion daring one of the Christians to bite him first. “It costs two thousand to train and fatten a football player for four years….”
The Major said, “May I ask where these figures come from?”
Mama smiled. “From your report on the needs for a new field, and twenty tons of cement every twenty feet.”
Silver Dollar nodded. “We could sell four thousand tickets to a section, sixteen thousand customers a game, I figure, if we get State Champ honors….”
“That so?” said Ogell-muggell. “I didn't know there was that many people alive at one time in the world.”
Mama got up with dignity. “There is a lot you don't know. One week from tonight you will be given an oral examination on your year's work, by this board. If you pass, you will have set back education in America fifty years, and you will have built a field we don't need for anything but cows…. But if you fail,” said Mama, “I will try and get you your job back at the icehouse.”
The news spread at once. Three days before the State Champ game that would give our town the first State Champ title in twenty years! And Ogell-muggell dreaming of ice again, the way a Southerner in exile dreams of juleps.
At first there was talk of burning our house down, or lynching our cherry tree, or kidnapping our privy and holding it for ransom. But womanhood was sacred in those days, and no real action was taken against Mama. Poor Ogellmuggell was the sufferer; but like a gallows, he was built to take it.
He was walking a hired girl home from a mushroom hunt they had organized in a near-by forest, when suddenly sixteen fellow students from the High School appeared.
Pinterest
