This will make more sense (not a lot more) if you read this first)
My Papa was mostly self educated. His grandma taught him to read from the labels on ketchup and whiskey bottles and liniment jars. Papa always felt it held him back to have started his intellectual journey in the pantry instead of the classroom. He wanted better for his kids so when I was a strapping lad of seven he told Mama to sew me up some town clothes because he was taking me to enroll in school.
Our pimento ranch was two creeks away from the town of Nooutlet (rhymes with bootlet) which sat at the end of a 17 mile mostly gravel road that sort of petered out on a bluff bank 15’ above the Upper Fresca River. It wasn't much of a town ; nobody ever got around to naming it until the state put up a sign where the gravel road met the state highway that read ‘No Outlet’. The town council met, had a few drinks, decided had been insulted, voted, and then went down to the highway; there they sawed the space out, changed the second ‘O’ to lower case and added a sign that read ‘17 Miles’ . For a couple of years the highway department replaced the sign with their version every few months but insults are not forgotten in East Texas and the midnight alterations continued until the goverment finally gave up and put up an official state sign that read “Nooutlet 15 miles”. Though they got the distance wrong nobody felt like arguing with them anymore and it wasn't worth moving the town over.
Not counting outhouses, there were only three buildings in Nooutlet when Papa and I arrived there in our town clothes. The largest was Lum Keefer’s two story Golden Heifer Hotel, Restaurant, Lounge and Investment Bank. Mr. Keefer had built it mostly with lumber from the discredited Full Gospel Tabernacle of Faith. The congregation there had been snake handlers and the church was abandoned after the funerals following their last revival. The pastor, Brother Batson, was blamed for the tragedy. It was assumed he must have been backsliden himself for so many of his flock to have been bitten. He, of course, denied this but his reputation as a spiritual leader was ruined and he never took up a serpent again. He left Nooutlet in disgrace but returned years later to betray us all; but that's a story for another time.
Across the road from the Golden Heifer stood Mister Mit’s Mercantile. It wasn't really one building but a sprawling assembly of interconnected barns, buildings, tin sheds, a couple of gutted school buses and a silo. An old boxcar near the center of the complex served as Mit Guidry’s office and the nerve center of his empire. Mister Mit’s enterprises included a feed store, a bait shop, a beauty parlor operated by his wife, Cosmoline, and a grocery store where you could buy bread by the slice, snuff by the dip and put luxury items like canned chili on lay-away.
The most popular of Mister Mit’s businesses was his bar and grill which was located in the silo. Mister Mit had always said Nooutlet sounded like it should be in Alaska so he traded Mr. Keefer a broken pimento bailer for a wooden indian, dressed it in a surplus Air Force parka, and it put outside a doorway he had cut in the silo beneath a sign that read -
Eskimo Bar & Grill
Coolest Beer in Town
Tasty Grilled Goods Available
Your Job Is Your Credit
(we sell single swallows)
He got my sister, Acetylena, to paint a mural around the silo depicting polar bears and penguins at work and play in the Arctic. She got a free beauty treatment from Miss Cosmoline for doing it. Mister Mit was so impressed that at the unveiling he presented Acetylena with a book on taxidermy bound in what was probably real leather. He said it wasn't payment but rather an award for artistic achievement. Acetylena’s thirst for knowledge was as fierce as Papa’s and she devoured that book; unfortunately our dog, Argon, did too. (When Mister Mit heard about it he gave her a cloth bound copy of “The Bluejacket’s Manuals” which Acetylena loved just as much but Argon had no taste for). Everbody agreed it was the best art in Nooutlet; there wasn't any electrical fans in town back then so looking at the mural was the only relief folks had in the Summer.
At the bitter end of the road stood what Papa and me had come for — The Nooutlet Academy, where I was to have formal education inflicted upon me for the first time. It sat perched on a bluff bank overlooking the bubbling, fizzing stream of the Upper Fresca River (the Fresca is unusual in being the only carbonated river in East Texas). The building itself was plain as could be. Many folks lay claim to having been educated in a one room school house but the Nooutlet Academy was only ¾ of a room — the rear wall had been sold to Mr. Keefer who needed it to complete The Golden Heifer. The money was used to buy glass for the windows on the front of the building which faced North and a store bought toilet seat for the outhouse after Miss Gibbs, the teacher, said she would quit if they didn't. The school board had Mister Mit order a nice padded one from Monkey Wards since Miss Gibbs was sorta boney. They gave it to her at that year's graduation. She cried when she opened the package and thought so highly it that when school let out in the evenings she would assign one of the older boys to unbolt it so she could take home at night. In the summer they replaced the wall with chicken wire because of ...well chickens ; in the winter they stacked up pimento bales. It's a little know fact outside of the pimento community but pimentos are an effective head lice repellent. Unlike many more exalted schools, with their real glass windows and store bought chalk, there was never a single case of head lice reported at the Nooutlet Academy.
Miss Gibbs believed the purpose of education was take knowledge out of books and store it in your brain by memorizing it so that you didn't need the book any more and could sell it or use it for something else. This made sense to me after what happened to Acetylena’s taxidermy book. We memorized a little bit of everything : state capitals - agricultural products of Burma - books of the Bible - Avagadro’s number — William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speach - the poem “Gunga Din” - all the odd and even numbers up to 1000 - the oath taken by Future Farmers of America (we didn have a chapter of the FFA but Miss Gibbs thought it might come in hand if any of us ever had to pass ourselves off as farmers) -Maxwell’s equations - the date of the Great Pimento Blight - the names of all the Presidents except Republicans (Miss Gibbs was a hardshell Democrat as well as Hardshell Baptist) — the greek alphabet - Hamlet’s soliloquy and much much more. Miss Gibbs believed that her job was get the stuff into our heads and let teachers farther down the line explain it.
A lot of bubbles have flowed down the Fresca since I sat in that little ¾ room and, while cooling myself with puffs of compressed air from one of my Papa’s basketballs, recited for Miss Gibbs the stages of the mosquito’s life cycle and the names of all the ships sunk at Pearl Harbor. I've forgotten a lot of what I learned at the Nooutlet Academy but sometimes I dream of it and when I wake up some weird thing that I didn't know I knew, like FDR’s birthday pops into my head. Then I remember where it must have come from and I smile.
Thank you Miss Gibbs.
btw - to this day I have never had head lice