The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Please, sir, I need to go something terrible,” she said.

  “AINT NOBODY GOIN NOWHERES!” he yelled, “Until I find out who hollered them words at me. Now you gals stick yore noses back in them circles!” Mr. McWhorter began to pace up and down the aisle. With her nose again in the circle Latha couldn’t see what he was doing but she could hear him yelling, “Was it you?” and “Was it you?” and then she heard him yell, “All righty, I’ll just whup ever one of y’uns, until somebody confesses.” And she heard the hickory hiss through the air and land on somebody’s hide, and somebody yelped, and then somebody else hollered, and somebody else, and it seemed he was beating up all fifty of them (she hadn’t learned to count but she knew that “fifty” was a whole lot, and in fact there actually were forty-nine students in that room). She tried to think of other things, she thought of a ballit her grandmother had taught her to sing, called “Lady Margarite,” about this English lady in a castle who killed herself when her lover who was King William married someone else. There were many verses to the ballit and she got to the seventh or eighth (it might have been the ninth but she hadn’t been taught how to count yet) before she felt the water running down her leg.

  Before long the screaming and hollering of the beaten pupils was replaced by laughter—giggling and guffawing and sniggling and gut-busting. Some girl began to sing:

  Riddledy raddledy, my old fiddle,

  Latha Bourne began to piddle.

  Quicker’n she knew how to count,

  Everbody was dreckly drownt.

  Latha was not able to stop, and soon began to cry, and between her tears and her pee it was a wonder that nobody did actually drown. She was not able to keep her nose in that circle and she turned away from the blackboard, and so did Rindy, just in time to see Every Dill leap atop the teacher’s desk, unbutton his fly, take out his private thing, and begin to pee in an arc upon the floor. Latha stopped crying, she stopped peeing too, and began to laugh. So did Rindy. Latha was both amused and fascinated, because she had never seen a human male’s private thing before. She didn’t have time to get a good look at it before Mr. McWhorter lashed it with his hickory stick and Every yelped and fell off the desk, where Mr. McWhorter continued to thrash him as he lay on the floor.

  Between the two of them they had made two considerable puddles, which, however, soon drained off into the cracks between the floorboards.

  Mr. McWhorter stopped beating Every and said to Latha, pointing at the door, “Git on out to the outhouse!”

  “It’s too late now,” she said, and remembered to add, “sir.”

  During the afternoon recess, Mr. McWhorter made Every stay inside. Latha went into the woods behind the outhouse and removed her underpants and hung them on a tree limb to dry. While the girls were playing house, Rindy pointed at one of them and told Latha, “That’s Selma Alan, she’s the one who sang the piddle song.” Rindy suggested, “Let’s tear her hair out.”

  “She’s lots bigger’n us,” Latha pointed out.

  “But there’s two of us,” Rindy said, who knew how to count that far.

  Latha changed the subject. “I wonder what Mr. McWhorter is doing to Every.”

  “I reckon he drew another circle on the blackboard and is making Every stick his pecker in it.” Rindy was convulsed with laughter at her own wit.

  “Pecker?” said Latha. She hadn’t heard the word before, and wondered if it was just another word for nose.

  “His dood,” Rindy said, and pointed at her own crotch, where there wasn’t one. “Prick. Goober. Horn. Jemmison. Ducey. Root. Peter.”

  “That’s a lot of words,” Latha observed.

  “There’s a lot of peckers around my house,” Rindy said. “And I don’t mean the livestock.”

  After recess, Mr. McWhorter announced that the remainder of the school day, assuming everbody was settled down and there wasn’t no more foolishness, would be devoted to Joggerfee. Instead of teaching the primers separately, he would just teach Joggerfee to all of them at once, and he started with a question, “What’s the capital of Arkansas?” There were various guesses—Jasper, Harrison, and Fort Smith—before someone correctly answered Little Rock. “What’s the capital of the United States?” likewise produced several answers before the correct one. “How many states in the Union?” “What’s the biggest state?” Nobody knew what the smallest state was, after several guesses, so the teacher moved on to Europe, and somebody guessed correctly that London was the capital of England but nobody knew the capitals of France, Spain, or Italy. The students were getting bored with European Joggerfee, and some boy who had captured a blue-bellied lizard during recess threw it across the aisle at the girl’s side, where it landed on a girl’s bosom and clung there for dear life and there was much screaming and hollering and Mr. McWhorter got out his hickory and commenced thrashing around with it.

  Latha nudged Rindy and whispered, “Hold up your hand and ask him when he’s gonna teach us Rithmetic.”

  “What’s that?” Rindy asked.

  “How to count,” Latha said.

  “Heck,” Rindy said, “I’m having enough trouble with reading, I don’t need nothing harder.”

  Finally, Mr. McWhorter said, “Okay, it’s time for girls’ dismissal. Boys will wait fifteen minutes until their dismissal, and there will be no fighting nowhere on the way home.”

  But there was fighting on the way home. Even though the girls were dismissed early to get them away from the boys or give them a head start on the boys, most of the girls dawdled. The various dogs who had spent the day sleeping under the school’s porch came out and began fights of their own, with ole Rouser right in the midst of them. Latha had to be proud that her dog would not take any sass from ary other dog. Rouser chased a hound twice his size down the creek a ways, then came back to walk Latha home. This time she wasn’t so afraid of the swinging bridge and got across it all by herself, but was careful not to look down.

  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 o
n 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 up 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 wi
th 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.