At supper, her father asked, “Well, little lady, how was yore first day of school?”
“Tolerable,” she said, pronouncing it “tobble” the way everybody did. Which means “nothing special.”
Her grandmother prompted, “Which was yore favorite part?”
“Recess,” she answered.
Her mother said, “You went off and forgot yore dinner bucket.”
Latha hung her head. “I never forgot it. It fell in the creek when I was trying to cross that swinging bridge.”
Mandy said, “Some boys was making the bridge rock and roll and that’s how come her to drop the bucket.”
“Why!” her mother exclaimed. “That there was the last lard pail we’ve got. Tomorrow you’ll just have to take yore dinner tied up in a rag.”
Rouser’s barking alerted them to a visitor and then the knock came at the door. It was Every. He was holding the dinner bucket. “Howdy, folks,” he said. “Found this down the creek a ways, warshed up on the gravel.”
Latha’s mother snatched it out of his hand as if he had stolen it. She pried the lid open and looked inside. “Why!” she exclaimed. “It’s all still here and never got a bit of wet. You could just take it to school tomorrow.”
Grandmother Bourne invited Every, “Stay more and have supper with us.”
“I’ve done et,” Every said, but his eyes lighted on the egg custard pie. “We never had no dessert, though.”
They fixed a plate with pie on it and gave it to Every. Since all the seats at the table were taken, he ate it standing up.
Mandy said, “Every is sweet on Latha, aint you, Ev?”
Every blushed. “I just wanted to find her dinner bucket for her.”
Mandy said to Latha, “Tell ’em what Every done when you wet yore pants.”
“I won’t,” Latha declared.
“I will, then,” said Mandy. “They was making fun of Latha because she piddled a puddle when Mr. McWhorter wouldn’t let her go out, and everbody was making fun of her and carrying on, so Every, he just jumped up on Teacher’s desk and yanked out his thing and piddled right there in front of the whole world.” Mandy and Barb were overcome with laughter, and Latha’s father thought it was pretty funny too, but Every and Latha just went on blushing.
Grandmother Bourne asked Every, “What did ole McWhorter do to ye?”
“Aw, he just took the hickory to me and thrashed me good.” He lifted the corner of his shirt so they could see his backside, all covered with welts.
Latha suddenly realized that she had forgotten to retrieve her panties, which she had hung on a tree limb behind the schoolhouse. She felt almost naked to realize she wasn’t wearing them.
There was still plenty of daylight. After she had thanked Every for rescuing her dinner bucket, and he thanked them for the pie and went home, she whistled up ole Rouser (remembering who had taught her how to whistle) and returned to the schoolhouse, fearlessly crossing the swinging bridge. She was tempted to enter the schoolhouse, whose door, she had been told, was never locked, so she went on in, and found her seat, and sat in it for a while. A copy of the McGuffey First Reader was inside the desk, so she took it and decided to just borrow it overnight, to get ahead of the others. What others? she interrupted herself, realizing that Rindy was the only other first grader.
She carried the book with her when she went out and around the schoolhouse to the woods behind, and found the tree where her panties were still hanging on a limb in the evening breeze.
Sitting under the tree, grinning like a fool, was Every Dill.
“’Pon my word,” Latha exclaimed, “you sure do turn up everywhere all the time.” She reflected that his name, Every, might even refer to that fact.
“I had me a hunch,” he said, “that you might be a-coming back over here to fetch yore undies.” He pointed up at the garment, hanging directly over his head. “There ye go.”
She did not immediately take the panties. She sat down beside Every and asked, “What makes ye think they’re mine?”
“I seen ye come back out here and hang ’em up,” he said.
“You must spy on me a lot,” she observed.
“Aint nobody else worth looking at,” he said.
“It kind of makes me sort of nervous,” she admitted.
He did not say anything to that, and a minute passed in silence before he asked, “Well, do ye aim to put ’em back on? They’re dry as can be.”
“Not with you watching,” she said.
“Why not?” he said. “You seen mine when I stood on McWhorter’s desk. Time to see your’n.”
“Remember I was at the blackboard,” she said. “I didn’t get a very good look.”
“Let me watch ye put yore bloomers back on,” he said, “and you can have all the look you can stand.”
Latha stood and removed her panties from the limb. She stepped into them, then lifted her dress to pull them up her legs. He must’ve got a pretty fair but quick look at the place where the panties would cover.
“You aint got nothing there,” he observed.
She bristled. “Aint no gals and womenfolk who do,” she told him.
“Is that a fact?” he said, with wonder. Latha realized he had no sisters and probably never saw his mother undressed. And then he asked, “What do you pee with?”
“My elbow,” she said and poked it in his face. It took him a moment to realize she was kidding. “Aw, naw,” he said. “You’re just a-funning me.”
You aint got nothing there. The words kept echoing in her head, and wouldn’t let her go.
Chapter seven
Somehow things weren’t the same with Every Dill after that. She was grateful to him for all his attention and help, for stopping those boys who were rocking the bridge, for diverting the class’s attention from her own mishap, for finding her dinner bucket, and for countless other favors and courtesies. But other girls teased her because of Every’s attentions, and even her best friend Rindy made no secret of her envy and lost no chance to low-rate him. She stopped referring to him by his actual name and called him only “Dill Pickle.”
Rindy and Latha constructed for themselves a playhouse, high up on the ridge which separated the Bournes’ forty acres from the Whitter’s forty, under a giant oak tree, using scrap lumber from Murrison’s sawmill and whatever else they could find. Every offered to help, but they didn’t want him or anyone else to know the location of their secret playhouse, although they accepted his donation of a window sash with real glass in it, as well as odds and ends of furnishings: a ladderback chair, a braided rug, some pieces of tableware he’d taken from the pantry, and, best of all, a pallet: not really a bed, but some bed-ticking stuffed with straw. “Too bad you caint never use it yoreself,” Rindy told him, thanking him for it.
They installed their dolls as permanent residents of the pallet. There was no way to keep Rouser from knowing about the playhouse, so they allowed him to become the guard dog.
All through their first years of school, except some weeks in January when the snow was too deep, the girls went up to their playhouse nearly every day after school, and all day on Saturday. Rindy got ahold of some rope and climbed that oak tree and rigged up a swing for them, with a stuffed towsack for a seat. That swing didn’t just go back and forth like school swings; it went way out and up and around, practically around the world, especially when one of the girls gave a big push to the other.
Although the teacher Mr. McWhorter never gave anyone any “homework” to do (all of them had plenty of homework to do but nothing connected with school), sometimes Latha attempted to tutor Rindy with the McGuffey readers, but it was like trying to teach Rouser how to fly. In their playhouse Latha would take the McGuffey and try to drill Rindy on a certain page. When Latha was promoted to the third grade and Rindy stayed behind in the first, Latha gave up trying to tutor her with the McGuffey.
By then, McWhorter had been replaced by a woman teacher named Agnes Ricebird, who was smart as a whip and made u
p for most of McWhorter’s glaring deficiencies, for instance, she not only taught them how to count but taught them how to do sums. The older students claimed that McWhorter had never done this because he didn’t know how to do sums himself, which was probably true. Miss Ricebird, who boarded with Doc Plowright and his family (he was one of the two physicians in Stay More), had some radical ideas: she decided to seat the students by grade regardless of gender, so there were cases in which boys and girls sat together. Some of the parents thought this was wicked, a word that Latha now understood pretty well. She didn’t think it was wicked for a boy and a girl to sit together, although, since Rindy was still in the first grade and the only other third grader was Every Dill, she wasn’t too awfully certain that she wanted to sit with him. But he minded his manners, and was very smart, and he knew the McGuffey Third Reader backwards and forwards even before they started using it. Miss Ricebird put a lot of emphasis on articulation and emphasis, and whenever Latha mispronounced something Every would correct her. If she weren’t so determined to be excellent, she would have resented that, but as it was she was grateful to him. One more of his favors.
Emphasis was a problem for the whole school because many of them had learned, possibly from Mr. McWhorter or perhaps from their parents, that the last word in a sentence should get all the emphasis, thus they would read “The boy wore a hat on his HEAD,” or “She put the vase of flowers on the TABLE,” or “The little dog liked to play with his BALLS.” Miss Ricebird needed most of the fall to teach the students how to emphasize CORRECTLY.
That winter there was an outbreak of several illnesses: measles, mumps, diphtheria, and whooping cough. Rindy got a bad case of the mumps and had to stop attending school and stop visiting the playhouse after school. Latha got the measles, which kept her out of school for a week. When she came back and took her seat, she noticed a very bad smell as if somebody had eaten something terrible and then farted. It took her a while to identify the source of the stinky odor: a small bag that Every was wearing on a string around his neck. She held her nose with one hand and pointed at the bag with the other hand and asked him, “What in creation is that?”
“Aint it terrible?” he said. “Maw made me wear this. It’s called ass fit duh.
“Whose ass did it come out of? The Devil’s?”
Every laughed. “Now that there is a good guess, because what most folks call it is Devil’s Dung.”
“What did you do wrong that she’s punishing you for?”
He laughed again. “Aw, it’s not a punishment. It’s supposed to keep off the germs that have been making everbody sick.”
“Well,” she observed, still holding her nose, “I’m not a germ but it’s sure keeping me off.” She got up from her seat, walked up to Miss Ricebird’s desk and said, “Teacher, Every stinks so bad I can’t stand to sit with him.”
Miss Ricebird looked at her with sympathy and said, “Every’s not the only one who’s wearing asafœtida. Look around. There’s at least half a dozen pupils wearing it. The whole room has become intolerable, but we can’t open the windows in this cold.” Latha scanned the room and saw several other kids wearing the bags around their necks. She wanted to ask what in dickens the stuff was, but she couldn’t ask questions even of nice Miss Ricebird. “Maybe it would help you,” the teacher went on, “if you were wearing it yourself. Then you wouldn’t notice it on others.”
So when Latha went home that afternoon, she told her mother she wanted some asafœtida to wear. She couldn’t remember how it was pronounced, only that the first part was ass, which was easy to remember. Her mother couldn’t tell what she was trying to say, but her Grandma Bourne got it and said, “Yessir, the girl is asking for some asafœtida, which everbody used to wear whenever there was anything catching going around.” Of course they didn’t have any in the house. The plant grew on the mountainside high up, but not in the wintertime. Probably the drugstore in Jasper carried it, but Saultus Bourne wasn’t about to walk plumb to Jasper for any such, even if he had the money to pay for it.
The problem was solved when the next day at school, Every brought from home another one of the tiny bags, with a string attached. He made a little ceremony out of tying string around her neck and Miss Ricebird complimented him for his thoughtfulness. For years afterward, however, Latha couldn’t even think of Every without remembering the stink of asafœtida. And that night her sisters refused to sleep with her as long as she was wearing the thing, so she had to take it off. Rouser was also very repelled by it, and he refused to follow her to school each day for as long as she was wearing it.
The only thing good to come of the whole asafœtida business was that she made a point to learn how to spell the stuff, and it so happened that during the regular Friday afternoon spelling bees, the word came up and no one else knew how to spell it except Latha.
Even after the sicknesses had cleared up and no one wore asafœtida any more, Latha had made up her mind that she didn’t want to share a desk with Every. She tried to decide which would be better: to study and work real hard so that she could get promoted to a grade ahead of him, or to pretend to be dumb so that she would fall a grade behind him. The former might have been more natural for her, but the latter seemed easier, so one day in their playhouse she told Rindy of her plan and wondered how Rindy had managed to stay in the first grade. Rindy was smart. She wasn’t a genius like Every but she had a good head between her shoulders. “It’s simple,” Rindy declared. “I just don’t give a damn.”
For an entire week, Latha tried not to give a damn, but she just couldn’t do it. Miss Ricebird didn’t have a dunce’s stool in the corner the way Mr. McWhorter had (or rather she converted that piece of furniture to a pedestal for the water bucket) but she had a bench down front that she called The Laggard’s Bench, where stupid students were required to sit and read McGuffey under her supervision. Latha tried each day to do something, or to fail to do something, that would earn her a seat on The Laggard’s Bench, but she never could.
So finally she just gave in and decided the only way to escape Every would be to be promoted ahead of him. She took a copy of McGuffey home with her and practically memorized it. She spent so much of the playhouse time doing arithmetic and practicing her script writing skills that Rindy complained of being lonely and neglected.
But it worked, and Latha skipped the fourth grade entirely and found herself in the fifth, no longer a deskmate of Every’s but reassigned to sit with a much better-looking boy named Raymond Ingledew, who was the son of John Ingledew, Stay More’s banker and most prominent citizen. Raymond was not only much better-looking (“cuter” was the word they used) than Every but also he was a good bit older. Latha never did find out exactly how old he was but she learned he had been held back in the fifth grade for five years, so it wasn’t too hard to guess that he might already be a teenager. When Latha told her mother who her new deskmate was, her mother nearly swooned. “Why!” her mother exclaimed and then amplified that. “Why, as I live and breathe! You lucky gal. Just to think, that a Bourne gal would ever get that close to a Ingledew. I’m so proud of ye!”
Latha wanted to protest that she hadn’t done anything to accomplish anything prideworthy, other than to get herself promoted to the fifth grade. “He’s a good bit older’n me,” she observed.
“That’s the least of yore problems,” Grandma Bourne said. “Aint you never heard about the Ingledew woman-shyness? It’s in their blood. Since time out of mind, every Ingledew man has been unable to speak to a female.”
Latha wanted to ask how they had managed to court and marry and procreate, if that were true, but she never asked questions of anyone any more, not even her dear Granny. “He spoke to me,” Latha declared.
“HE DID?” her mother and grandmother said in unison. “What did he say?”
“He told me a riddle,” she said, “but I didn’t get it. ‘Do you know why they cut down that big walnut tree beside the creek?’ I said no I didn’t. ‘Because it was showing its n
uts to the womenfolk.’ Then he laughed so hard that Miss Blankinship—that’s our teacher this year—made him write on the blackboard three hundred times, ‘I will not laugh.’ But I don’t see what was so funny.”
“It aint very nice,” her mother said. “In fact, it’s nasty.”
Each day Raymond Ingledew had a new riddle or a joke to tell her, but he was careful to cover his mouth with his hand after telling it so that Miss Blankinship wouldn’t hear his laughter. He used a lot of words she had not heard before, and she wrote these down in her notebook so that she could later show them to Rindy to see if she knew what they meant. All of the words, like “nuts,” which she learned meant the testicles, had something to do with a boy’s or a girl’s sexual parts, or with the many ways that these parts could be brought together.
One day instead of a new joke Raymond simply gave her a piece of a page from his Indian-head notebook, on which he had written, “Have you ever done it?”
She honestly didn’t know what he meant, but being unable to ask questions, she simply drew a circle around “it” and wrote a question mark beside it. Writing question marks wasn’t the same as asking questions, was it?
He looked at her as if she didn’t know nothing, then he formed the thumb and forefinger of one hand into a circle, into which he poked the forefinger of his other hand and moved it in and out. His blushing gave away the possible meaning of the gesture, but she shrugged her shoulders and looked at him as if he didn’t know nothing. So he whispered in her ear, “Diddling,” and when she did not respond to that, he tried, “Lallygaggin,” which she had heard but didn’t know the meaning of. He tried “Pussywhippin.” She had heard Rindy say that “pussy” was one of the words for one’s private parts, so she could honestly shake her head; no one had ever whipped her pussy. “No?” he said. “You aint never done the dirty deed?”
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