The Rebel (1959–1961): Season 1, Episode 7 - School Days - full transcript

Realizing Yuma is literate and in admiration of his ability to stand up to illiterate Armbruster family, Liam O'Shea offers Yuma a temporary schoolmaster job and he gains the affection of Peggy of which Troy Armbruster is jealous.

Neat as I can make it,

it will cost you $2.25 to mail the package.

Can you weigh up about $1.10 worth?

'Tis a peculiar sort of letter I'm after thinking

when what's mailed and what's not has not apparent

bearing on the total sense of it all.

To tell the truth, it's not really letters

just a bunch of notes.

Notes?

Things I've seen.

Places I've been.



Thoughts that crawl into my head.

Ah, like a diary, you mean.

Yeah, I send them along to a newspaper editor back home.

Is that a fact now?

If ever you feel the urge to do a paragraph

on Grizzly Hill,

you'll not neglect to mention the postmaster

that goes by the name of Liam O'Shea?

It's a promise.

Thanks.

Hey, Gaskins!

C'mere and read this.

♪ Johnny Yuma was a rebel ♪

♪ He roamed through the West ♪



♪ Did Johnny Yuma, the Rebel ♪

♪ He wandered alone ♪

Go on, read some more.

Next to death, loneliness is the worst thing

that can happen to man.

I've seen it spread like a plague epidemic

over an entire army encampment touched off

by something as ordinary as a soldier's from home.

I'll have my property.

Now, hold on a minute, sonny.

Am I gonna have to climb over you to get it, mister?

Now, don't get your back up, sonny.

We was just having a little fun.

Mister, if I thought you had the brains to understand

my writing I'd be flattered,

but by the looks of you there's more desert

wasteland between those ears than there is in all of Texas.

Dumb am I?

Well, you mangy little coyote, I can put my X

to a check big enough to buy this whole county

with enough left over to box it up and ship it east.

That's how dumb I am.

I couldn't care less what you do with this county,

all I want is my papers back.

Of course, if you'd prefer to eat them.

Go on, give him his papers back.

Now, c'mon Gaskins I'm not paying you to hang

around this store all day.

Lad.

I want a word with ya.

It appears you might be shopping for employment.

Yeah.

You can read and write that much I know,

and I'm assuming you can count

to 10 without losing your way.

What's left you can get from the textbooks.

Sure lad, 'tis the post of schoolmaster

I'm offering you.

Schoolmaster?

Aye.

Me?

Aye.

For a few weeks only.

Till our replacement gets here from St. Louis.

Are you serious?

Aye, that I am.

Consider the salary, lad.

More than you'd make in three months punching cows.

Short hours.

Everybody looking up to you with respect.

But I've had no experience.

Think of the children.

The little darlings.

Their precious education's interrupted

by the scholastic hiatus.

I'm appealing to your social conscious, lad.

You mustn't refuse.

Doesn't the school board have to put it to a vote first?

You're looking at the school board.

Well, how about that big noise I just rubbed

up against?

Cal Armbruster?

What about him?

Well, I don't think he's gonna like this.

You know, lad, the very same thought has occurred to me.

Talking to me like that.

Like as if I was nothing.

Just a piece of dirt that he got caught under his boot.

Well, I never heard of nobody being talked

to death yet, Pa.

Doing, like you always said, doing that's what counts.

As if books and brains was the same thing.

I never got nothing out of a book except

a mail order pump.

Never stepped no foot in a school room neither.

Neither will one of my kin.

Self-made, that's me.

I look at you, Troy, you ain't even 21

you know more about the land and the cattle on it,

and work harder than anybody in this county.

Well, tomorrow, Pa, I may be a little

unmindful of my chores.

I hear that O'Shea sent word for the kids to go

over to the schoolhouse and help that

new teacher tidy up.

But you know, I got a hunch that they ain't gonna make it.

Now, maybe now you get the idea!

Ain't you, or you, or nobody to come around

that schoolhouse, you understand?!

Now, get on!

Get on!

Get outta here!

Go on, scat!

Beat it!

'Tis a bold, brave warrior you are, Troy Armbruster,

and no mistake.

Good morning, Peggy.

'Tis proud you must be of this day's work?

Oh, do you think they care?

Did you ever see a bunch of kids that wanted

to go to school, did ya?

Well, 'tis certain sure such an ambition

never occurred to you.

Well, do you let me pass.

You know enough.

You read and write.

Now, what's a girl wanna go to school for anyway?

Well, you'd be surprise what a girl

can learn from the right teacher.

You taking up with that outsider?

And if I have?

Oh, well I couldn't expect you to understand

a man of his caliber.

He's sensitive, intelligent, and mannerly.

How come you know so much about him?

A man's past is in his face.

A man?!

Well, he ain't no older than I am, Peggy!

But he's lived!

Why he's traveled everywhere, and seen everything!

Ah, that's bum's travel!

People who ain't got nothing travel around like that!

Everything I need's right here!

I'm foreman of my dad's spread,

and I'm foreman of my dad's spread because

I can do the job better than anybody else can.

There's room for improvement.

Yeah, like what?!

Like taking your hat off while you're addressing a lady.

Hi.

Hi.

I'm Peggy O'Shea.

I was expecting a larger turn out.

Oh, they'd be here if they could,

but it's himself that's stopping them.

Troy Armbruster.

Well, I guess I'd better have a talk with him.

Plan to keep this up?

You planning on stopping me?

I might give it a try.

All right, I'll tell you what I'll do.

I'll let you have the first swing.

You mean it?

Sure I mean it.

You go right ahead.

Yeah, that was a pretty good one.

All right, kids, enough time's been wasted.

That's enough for today, kids.

Thanks for helping to clean up.

See you in the morning.

Makes a big difference, doesn't it?

Lord Byron, my favorite poet.

You know, you're like him in so many ways.

Oh?

Lord Byron doesn't have to face a school room

of kids in the morning.

It must be a grand thing to have traveled as you have.

To have met adventure in so many forms.

Not secondhand from books, as most of us do.

Well, you've traveled.

It's a long ways from Dublin to Grizzly Hill.

Eight years old, I was, when my father brought me.

The trip meant little to me then.

This is all I know.

You know, 'tis a terrible thing to have to settle

for so little,

when you know you're born for something better.

It's getting late.

Where will you sleep?

In here.

Well, you'll take dinner with us?

Now, you can't say no to roast venison and huckleberry pie.

Sure, now would Lord Byron decline such an invitation?

Listen, there's three of us.

Well, I do hope you make this a habit.

Well, it's possible.

A fella could get real addicted to your pie.

Well, goodnight.

Goodnight.

You sure you didn't recognize them, lad?

It was just some ornery drunks.

It was too dark to see their faces.

I can pin a name on one of them.

Now, Peg, you don't know.

'Tis precisely the sort low shenanigans he'd be up to.

And needing a nose full of whiskey to give him courage.

Troy Armbruster may be a lot of things,

but I don't think he's a coward.

Whatever's eating him goes a lot deeper than our scrap.

'Tis certain sure you don't know

the Armbruster character.

Thick-skinned, uneducated louts, both of them.

What any woman could see in either one is beyond me.

'Tis me own fault.

'Twas no bed of roses I ushered you into.

If you wish to resign.

Resign?

You couldn't bust me loose from this jail with scatter gun.

Now, can anyone tell me where

and when Cornwallis surrendered?

All right, Peggy.

Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Pennsylvania,

1781, October 19th.

That's correct.

Write this down.

Now, I'd like to talk to you about a man

who was many things.

Humanitarian,

inventor,

president of the United States.

He was the author of the Declaration of Independence.

His name was Thomas Jefferson.

Psst!

If you're starting school, Armbruster,

take a seat in the back.

I'll stand, I may not be staying.

We were talking about the Declaration of Independence

and Thomas Jefferson.

It was signed July 4, 1776.

You said I was uneducated,

got no ambition to go to school.

So, here I am.

And this is what he said.

"We hold these truths to be self evident

"that all men are created equal."

"That they are endowed by their creator"

"with certain unalienable rights."

Leaving already, Armbruster?

Yeah, I learn fast.

Who is it?

Do you know what time it is?

It's all right.

Father's asleep.

Well, that's not the point.

A girl doesn't visit a man late at night

unless she's chaperoned.

'Tis only a schoolgirl visiting her teacher.

What could be more innocent?

If you're just a schoolgirl.

But I'm a woman, is that it?

I was afraid you hadn't noticed.

I noticed.

Well?

Peggy.

Wait.

I know what's in your mind.

She's only a country lass, you're thinking.

Like hundreds you've known.

Common as flies they are,

and nothing to give a man save a dog's devotion.

Not like some of the sophisticated women you've known.

Peggy sometimes you see things that don't exist.

Ah, you cannot down yourself in my eyes, Johnny Yuma.

The first time I saw you,

'twas as if I received a picture postcard

from some far off place.

The Taj Mahal maybe.

No, you're outsider our Johnny,

the world I belong to.

Believe me there's nothing romantic about the life I lead.

I hate this place.

I don't belong here.

No more than you do.

We're special.

Can't you see that?

Look, I left some poems in desk today.

Stanzas I've composed.

Maybe you didn't find them?

I found them.

Well, that's the real Peggy O'Shea.

My heart went into those rhymes.

Everything I think and feel.

Are they the expressions of some provincial drudge?

Of some drab housewife?

I don't know much about poetry.

Oh, it isn't expert criticism I'm asking,

but simply from the scanning of them, surely,

you can tell.

Oh, I see.

I certainly do see.

'Tis a fool I've been.

Troy!

You and him that's all I see.

I close my eyes and I can't even shut it out.

He doesn't want me, Troy.

He doesn't want me.

You think I'm proud of what I did

jumping him three to one?

You're hurting me...

Hurting you?!

Not like you been hurting me.

Today, I went to school.

Me, Troy Armbruster.

My old man's gonna skin me alive when he finds this out,

do you know that?!

But I did it to please you!

But nothing pleases you doesn't it?!

I'm gonna make you forget him.

I'm gonna make you.

Lass, where have you been?

You had me worried something terrible.

I went for a walk, father.

Let me have a look at ya.

Who was he?

Don't ask me, father.

Don't ask me.

Speak, lass, who was he?!

I'll have a name from ya.

Who was he?!

Will somebody tell me what this is all about?!

We'll show you what it's all about.

How could you do me this way?

Do?

Do what?

Messing around with our womenfolk,

that's what stranger.

Did she say that?

Well, it's not true!

Do you expect us to believe she did that to herself?!

I never laid a hand on you, Peggy, and you know it.

Father, you wouldn't listen to me.

You wouldn't let me explain.

Lass, we know you were here.

There's no explaining to do.

Take that shirt off of him.

Shoot him if he moves.

Now wait a minute, Pa, you can't bullwhip him

you'll kill him.

I can't, huh?

Now, wait a minute, Pa, you didn't give Peggy

a chance to explain.

He only tried.

Maybe you think we oughta let him off

with a talking to, huh?

Now, Pa you now that's not what I mean at all.

Not so fast, maybe I got something to say about this!

Some more of your fancy words, teacher?

She didn't tell you all of it.

You could be real sorry afterwards.

Instead of a whip, you oughta be measuring me

for a wedding outfit.

If you want, I'll spell it out for ya!

You don't have to spell it out for me!

You take that back, or I'll kill you!

You dirty her name to save your stinking hide.

It was me, you understand!

It was me!

Oh, Troy.

Oh, Peggy I love you.

You pushed him into, lad.

You knew you could get him to admit to it.

You knew that much, lad.

He needed a nudge.

If he was half the man I figured,

there wasn't anything else he could do.

We heard you won't be here for the ceremony.

New school teacher arrives Monday.

I left a wedding present with your pa.

Oh, now you shouldn't have.

What we've learned from you is present enough.

I keep learning too.

Congratulations, Troy.

Thank you.

I won't be able to go back to school,

but I'll have a teacher at home now.

So, I'm gonna learn to read and write.

Well, so long.

Maybe I'll see you around.

But ain't going to learn to read no Lord Byron.

♪ Johnny Yuma was a rebel ♪

♪ He roamed through the West ♪

♪ Did Johnny Yuma, the Rebel ♪

♪ He wandered alone ♪

♪ He got fightin' mad ♪

♪ This rebel lad ♪

♪ He packed no star ♪

♪ As he wandered far ♪

♪ Where the only law ♪

♪ Was a hook and a draw ♪

♪ The Rebel, Johnny Yuma ♪

♪ Johnny Yuma was a rebel ♪

♪ He roamed through the West ♪

♪ Did Johnny Yuma, the Rebel ♪

♪ He wandered alone ♪

♪ He searched the land ♪

♪ This restless lad ♪

♪ He was panther quick ♪

♪ And leather tough ♪

♪ If he figured that ♪

♪ He'd been pushed enough ♪

♪ The Rebel, Johnny Yuma ♪

♪ Johnny Yuma ♪