And she always got her homework and got it right. She had, what seemed to her mother, an unscholarly way of doing it, though. She would take her books or her printed assignments. She would walk singing through the shop, through the parts room, through the other parts rooms behind that, and down into the passages in the toes of the hills.
Oread would sing so. Then she would pick the iron answers out of the answer pots. She’d put them together by subjects. She would stamp them onto her papers, and they would mark all the answers correct in her handwriting. So she would have the Catechism, the Composition, the questions on the Reading, the Arithmetic all perfect. Then she’d drop all the iron answers back into the answer pots where they would melt themselves down to iron slag again.
“Don’t you think that’s cheating?” her mother would ask her. “What if all the other children got their homework that way?”
“They couldn’t unless they were funnyfingers,” Oread said. “The hot iron answers would burn their hands clear off unless they were funnyfingers. No, it isn’t cheating. It’s just knowing your subject.”
“I guess so then,” mother Frances said. There were so many things she didn’t understand about her husband Henry (“He’s boyish, like a boy, like an iron boy,” she’d say), and about her daughter (“She’s like an owl, like a little owl, a little iron owl”). Neither Henry nor Oread liked the daylight very much, but they always faced it as bravely as they could.
One day Oread found her mother in tears, yet there was happy salt in them. “Look,” the mother Frances said. She had a valentine, an iron valentine that Henry had given her. There was an iron heart on it and an iron verse:
“Oh, it’s nice, Mama,” Oread said.
“But of iron?” Frances asked.
“Oh yes, the very first rimes were made out of iron, you know.”
“And what of the five hundred years?”
“I think it’s considerate that he would wait five hundred years after you die to take another wife.”
“Yes, I suppose so, Oread.” But Frances wasn’t completely at ease with her family.
Henry always made a good living from his typewriter repair shop, or rather he made a good living from his parts stocks in the rooms behind. Other dealers and repairmen, not just of typewriters but of everything, came to him for parts. His prices were reasonable, and there was never a part that he didn’t have. A dealer would rattle off the catalog number of something for a tractor or a hay-baler or a dishwasher. “Just a minute,” Henry Funnyfingers would say, and he would plunge into his mysterious back rooms. He had a comical little song he would croon to himself as he went:
And in a second, with the last word of the song just out of his mouth, he’d be back with the required part still hot in his hand. He never missed. Parts of combines, parts of electric motors, parts for Fords, he could come up with all of them instantly with only a catalog number or the broken piece itself or even a vague description to go on. And he did repair typewriters quicker and better than anyone in town. He wasn’t rich, he was fearful of becoming rich; but he did well, and nobody in the Funnyfinger family wanted for anything.
When they were in the sixth grade, Oread had a boyfriend. He was a Syrian boy named Selim Elia. He was dark and he was handsome. He looked the veriest little bit as though he were made of iron; that was the main reason that Oread liked him. And he seemed to suspect entirely too much about the funnyfingers; she thought that was a reason that she’d better like him.
“When you grow up (Oh, Oread, will you ever grow up?) I’m going to marry you,” Selim said boldly.
“Of course I’ll grow up. Doesn’t everyone?” Oread said. “But you won’t be able to marry me.”
“Why not, little horned owl?”
“I don’t know. I just feel that we won’t be grown up at the same time.”
“Hurry up then, little iron-eyes, little basilisk-eyes,” Selim said. “I will marry you.”
They got along well. Selim was very protective of little Oread. They liked each other. What is wrong with people liking each other?
When in the eighth grade, Oread made a discovery about Sister Mary Dactyl, the art teacher for all the grades. Sister Mary D seemed to be very young. “But she can’t be that young,” Oread told Selim. “Some of the mythological things she draws, they’ve been gone a long time. She has to be old to have seen them.”
“Oh, she draws them from old stories and old descriptions,” Selim said, “or she just draws them out of her imagination.”
“A couple of them she didn’t draw out of her imagination,” Oread insisted. “She had to have seen them.” That, however, wasn’t the discovery.
Sister was drawing something very rapidly one day, and she forgot that someone with very rapid eyes might be watching her hands. Oread saw, and she waited around after class.
“You are a funnyfingers,” she said to Sister. “All your fingers are triple-jointed like mine. They can move fast as light like mine. I bet you can pick up iron parts out of the hot pots without getting burned.”
“Sure I can,” said Sister M.D.
“But are you a funnyfingers all the way?” Oread asked. “Papa says that, in the old language, our name Funnyfingers meant both funny-fingers and funny-toes. Are you?”
“Sure I am,” said the very young-looking Sister Mary Dactyl. She took off her shoes and stockings. Sisters didn’t do that very often in the classroom then. Now, of course they go everywhere barefooted and in nothing but a transparent short shift, but that wasn’t so when Oread Funnyfingers was still in the eighth grade.
Yes, Sister was a funny-toes also. She had the triple-jointed fast-as-vision toes. She could do more things with her toes than other people could do with their fingers.
“Did you have a little hill or mountain when you were young, I mean when you were a girl?” Oread asked her.
“Oh, yes, yes, I have it still, an interior mountain.”
“How old are you, sister who always looks so young and pretty?”
“Very old, Oread, very old.”
“How old?”
“Ask me again in eight years, Oread, if you still want to know.”
“In eight years? Oh, all right, I will.”