The Teacher's Funeral

The Case Agitator represents Russell’s dream of freedom and independence. The 1904 models of the Case Agitator threshing machines are steel, not wooden-sided, and they rock Russell’s world. Looking at the new threshers, Russell feels that the “twentieth century had found us at last” (11). He thinks the thresher is the prettiest thing he ever saw (55). He envisions himself in the Dakotas, working on one of the steel threshers. There, Russell imagines people would finally treat him as a man, doing “a man’s work on a crew of men” (12). In this scenario, Russell is free of all the things he believes are holding him back: school and his family. He thinks he is already above farm work and is tired of his family treating him like a child. Working on a threshing crew in the Dakotas is modern, exotic, and adult, the opposite of what Russell experiences in his staid life on the farm. Russell thinks the Case Agitator is his future.

Immediately after Miss Myrt’s funeral, Tansy’s old hat gets ruined in the near collision with Eugene’s automobile. The brim breaks, and as Tansy watches the “fine figure of Eugene Hammond,” it falls off completely (52). The broken hat signifies a change from childhood to womanhood. Both the old hat and the child Tansy are gone. Eugene sends Tansy a new hat on her first day as teacher, acknowledging her new status as an adult woman. The hat arrives in a “fancy box” wrapped in fine ribbon and tissue paper (73). Tansy is now a woman and appreciates Eugene’s attention; “tears formed in her eyes” (73) when she opens the box.

Russell sees that the new hat is “quite a good hat, with grapes on it, better than the one that got busted up in the accident” (74). The hat represents Tansy’s coming of age, reflecting Tansy’s maturation and her new appeal to the opposite sex. Russell comments, “She was Teacher Tansy in her new hat” (99). The new hat confers adulthood, “it put several years on her” (102). It also enables Tansy to interact on an equal level with other adult women in the community. The hat reflects Tansy’s responsibility and professional role: It makes her more than Tansy Culver, as Mrs. Tarbox realizes. Russell thinks that Mrs. Tarbox never had a hat, which suggests that Tansy’s hat also elevates her socially.

“It was like a knife you could cut through time, a hole you could punch in the universe” (55), is how Russell describes Eugene’s Bullet No. 2 racing car. The car represents the advances of the 20th century and their inexorable infiltration into rural America: Eugene and his auto symbolize modernity and ambition. Eugene’s company switched from being a premier wagon-making company to producing automobiles. Eugene knows that Russell’s dad “can see its possibilities” (50). The automobile and other mechanized farm machines will revolutionize farming practices. Eugene sees these changes as positive improvements, near miracles; “we live in miraculous times, its wonders to behold” (94).

Aunt Maud, in contrast, thinks such changes are negative and will irrevocably ruin people’s way of life and connection to the land. As the Sweet Singer, she writes, “But the car’s a living nightmare / For an unsuspecting earth” (113). The Culver men, however, are impressed with the car. It is the “prettiest thing” Lloyd, and maybe Russell, ever saw (55). To Tansy, Eugene is the most attractive thing she’s seen. Both Eugene and his car, however, fail to win over the Culver family. Russell remains on the farm to pursue his education—the true avenue to success—and Tansy prefers Glenn to Eugene, despite Eugene’s presents, and his serious pursuit.