The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  That year of the walnuts for dinner was also a year it snowed more than usual, up to Latha’s knees in many places. Even Swains Creek froze over. If you had a good coat and shoes, you could just walk across the ice of the creek to get to school without bothering with the swinging bridge. But Latha did not have a good coat or shoes. Her father told his three daughters they might as well stay home from school because he didn’t have the money to buy them some shoes. As soon as he stopped ranting and apologizing and cursing, Latha sneaked away, and walked barefoot through the snow to school. It wasn’t so bad, although she didn’t like the spots where the snow was so deep it came up to her knees, which were much more sensitive to the cold than her feet were. Rouser tried to follow her for a while, but gave it up when he nearly drowned in the snow. She reflected that all animals are barefoot in the snow—cows and pigs and horses and deer. Why should she mind? As long as she kept going as fast as she could, the cold didn’t bother her feet. Her coat, which was a hand-me-down from both Barbara and Mandy, was kind of raggedy and thin, but it kept most of the heat in her body. The thought of warming her feet at the school’s stove kept her plodding onward.

  But the stove, she was to discover when she reached the school, had not been lit. There was nobody there. Miss Blankinship must have decided to stay home too. Apparently no other students had tried to make the trip. The schoolroom was cold and empty. Latha knew she would not be able to walk all the way back home without getting frostbite in her feet.

  There was a stack of firewood for the stove, but Latha knew she had nothing to light a fire with. She began to cry, not from self-pity but from fear. She sat down at her desk and sobbed and shivered. If she froze to death, would anybody think to come looking for her?

  By and by, of course, her guardian angel showed up. “Seen ye a-trompin through the snow,” he said. “You must’ve been behind the door when brains was passed out. Gal, what on earth got into ye, comin out in this weather?”

  “What got into you, Every?” she returned.

  “I was jist a-follerin you,” he said. “I never aimed to come to school on a day like this.” He knelt before her and took one of her bare feet and began to rub it vigorously. Then he did the other foot. He himself was wearing boots.

  “I don’t reckon you’d have any matches to light a fire with,” she said.

  He patted his pockets and said “I guess not.” He suggested, “You stand up and stomp on those feet for a while, to keep your circulation going.”

  “My what?” she asked. It wasn’t exactly a question.

  “Your circulation. The blood has got to flow through your feet or you’ll have frostbite, sure enough, if you aint already got it.”

  Then Every began to go around the room, lifting each of the desk tops and rummaging around in the pupils’ belongings inside the desk. Finally he exclaimed “Yessiree bob!” and showed her what he had found: several stick matches. He stuffed the stove with some chips and slivers of wood from the woodpile, ripped a page out of McGuffey and put that in with them, struck a match, got a little blaze going, and then began to put in firewood. Before long, he had a roaring fire going in that stove. He grabbed the former dunce’s stool off the podium and placed it beside the stove and patted the seat. “Here now,” he said to her. “You sit on this and get warm.”

  Of all the days of her schooling, that was the day that stuck longest and clearest in Latha’s memory. As soon as the room was reasonably warm and her feet no longer felt frozen, Latha said, “Don’t look like nobody else is a-coming. So who’s going to be the teacher, me or you?”

  “You was here first,” he observed.

  Latha surprised herself at the good imitation of Miss Blankinship she was able to perform, pretending there were first and second graders present who needed her attention, and finally getting around to Every and drilling him on the McGuffey Fourth and commending him for his good work. “You even sound like her,” he observed. “You even walk like her!”

  They both laughed and had a great time. When recess came—and whenever there was rain or snow or high wind during recess, the kids always stayed inside—they decided to play “Hide the Chalk,” a popular game which consisted of one of them hiding a piece of the blackboard chalk while the other waited in the vestibule, and then the other trying to find it while the first one was obliged to call out “Cold!” if the seeker wasn’t in the vicinity of the chalk’s hiding place, and “Hot!” if the seeker was near it. They played this game for the whole recess, and Latha was much better at both hiding and finding.

  “Now you be the teacher,” Latha said when “time o’ books” resumed after recess. Every clearly remembered what a dunce Mr. McWhorter had been, and gave a reasonable impersonation of his fumbling manner, much to Latha’s amusement. She couldn’t even answer his stupid questions for laughing so hard. At one point she held up her hand and said, “Teacher, sir, I need to use the outhouse.”

  “Number one or number two?”

  “Just number one.”

  “No sense in going out in the snow. Just use the vestibule and try to pee through one of the cracks in the floor.”

  They both thought this was hilarious, and although Latha had just been pretending and didn’t really need to go, she was tempted to visit the vestibule and see if there was a crack in the floor that might be sufficient. So she did. Every tagged along. “I don’t aim to watch ye,” he declared, “I jist want to see if there’s any cracks wide enough. I may need to use one myself directly.”

  And sure enough, the floorboards of the vestibule weren’t nearly as neatly joined as those in the schoolroom, and there was one place where, if one squatted carefully over it, one could probably pee through it. “Close the door,” she told him. He pushed the door shut. “With you on the other side of it!” she corrected him. Then while he was out of sight, she decided to go ahead and try the vestibule’s inside-outhouse, and squatted over the crack with her panties down. It took her a bit of shuffling to get in exactly the right spot, and she wetted the edges of the crack and part of the floor. But it worked, and she reflected it was too bad they couldn’t do that when school was actually in session.

  When she finished and went back into the schoolroom, Every said, “Well, I reckon I’ll give it a try too,” and he went out and peed through the same crack, his missing mingling with hers. There was something awfully passionate about that. She found herself remembering the time back in the first grade when Every had wanted to watch her when she put her panties back on after she’d hung them out to dry, and the remark he’d made, You aint got nothing there. She still had nothing there, but if Every wanted to see it, she didn’t mind.

  Was he reading her mind? He suggested, “Why don’t we stop playing teacher and pupil and start playing something else? We could even try playing husband and wife.”

  Now, although Latha was nearly eleven, nobody (not even Rindy) had ever told her that husbands and wives “do it.” She would have been genuinely shocked to learn that her own mother had ever done it with her own father. She knew that it was something boys and girls did, sometimes, but only when they were young and naughty. When they grew up and got married, they didn’t do it. So when she said to Every, “I don’t want to be your wife,” she was only referring to that misconception of hers. If he had said, “Let’s play like we’re sweethearts and do some fooling around,” she might have nodded her head.

  “That’s a shame,” Every said, crestfallen. “As long as I’ve known ye, I’ve meant to make ye my bride.”

  “That’s real sweet,” she said, and kissed him on his cheek.

  He looked terribly pleased. “My first kiss,” he said, and turning the other cheek, “Do this here side too.” When she did, he asked, “Have you never been kissed before?” She shook her head, and he kissed her on the cheek, then on the other cheek. She smiled in pleasure and stared deep into his eyes, so he kissed her on the mouth. That was the most fun.

  “I never dreamt school would be like this,” she obser
ved. She returned his mouth-kiss, trying hard not to remember the odor of asafœtida.

  He put one of his hands on her chest and felt her breast, which was just beginning to swell, although the nipple was already firm. His finger touched it, and she trembled all over.

  She knew that if he kept that up, and they kept kissing, she would really want to lie down with him beside the stove and see if his thing could possibly get inside of her thing. They were completely alone. Nobody else had come to school. They moved nearer to the stove and he mashed himself up against her; she could feel the hardness of his thing through his overalls pressing against the spot where only the playhouse pillow had pressed. This was much better than the playhouse pillow, and she felt herself rising against gravity as if she had no weight, and she wondered would he be offended if she bawled like a calf? Together the two of them began to sink toward the floor.

  The schoolhouse door opened, and there was Every’s father. “What in Sam Hill?” said Mr. Dill. “If this don’t beat all. Are you’uns trying to dance or to wrassle or what?” They had separated the instant they heard the door open, but they were both still flushed and flustered. “Don’t look to me like Miss Blankinship is anywheres near-abouts,” Mr. Dill observed. “Nor nobody else for that matter. So what are you’uns doing here?”

  “We’re just a-playing school, Paw,” Every said.

  “I don’t rightly know about nowadays,” his father said, “but when I went to school, boys and girls never hugged each other.” He moved to the stove and closed its damper, then opened the grate and peered inside. “Got a good fire going there. We’ll have to put it out afore we can leave.” He fetched the water bucket, which was empty, and took it outside to the water pump but returned with a bucket full of snow and reported that the pump was frozen and they’d just have to try to melt some snow to make water. He set the bucket of snow on top of the stove. Then he just sat down at one of the desks, so Latha and Every sat too, but separately. “This ole place aint changed a bit since I was a pupil,” Mr. Dill observed. “I hated it back then, and I don’t much care for it now. So I don’t see why you’uns wanted to spend the time here by yourselfs. Unless you really are stuck on one another, but you didn’t need to come all the way over here through the snow just to cuddle.”

  While the snow in the bucket melted—and it took three buckets of snow to make enough water to put the stove’s fire out—Mr. Dill ran on and on about their motives for being there, and the fact that one of them was a female and the other one was a male, and the peril involved in being alone together, although he personally didn’t believe that they were old enough to make babies or even to know how to do whatever had to be done to make babies, but in any case it was a good thing he’d come along right at the moment he did, because there was just no telling what they might have tried to do if he hadn’t shown up.

  Latha, who couldn’t say a word, wished he would just hush up. But at last the fire was out, and Mr. Dill took them out into the yard, where he had left his horse and sleigh. He was probably the only man in Stay More who had a sleigh, but after all he was a wagon-maker by trade, and making a one-horse open sleigh for very occasional use wasn’t any problem for him. It had no bells, and the horse didn’t have a bobtail, but oh what fun it was to ride in it. Mr. Dill sat up front in the driver’s seat, and Every and Latha sat in back beneath some kind of fur blankets (Every said they were bear), so Latha’s going home from school was a lot better than her coming to school, although Mr. Dill decided not to take her straight home but for a ride up the main street of Stay More and a good ways toward Parthenon. At one point Mr. Dill turned his head and winked at her.

  She spent a good bit of time trying to figure out what a wink means.

  Chapter nine

  Latha’s mother had never lost an opportunity to belittle the Dills. “Thank the Lord for them,” she often said. “Iffen it weren’t for them, we’d be the porest family hereabouts.” Her disfavor toward them was despite the fact that she and Every’s mother were second or third cousins. Every’s grandmother on his mother’s side was a Swain, and Latha’s grandfather on her mother’s side was also a Swain, so they were kinfolks, and Latha had learned at an early age that kinfolks are the most important thing in the world, that family is foremost, and that we should always think a lot of those who have blood similar to our own. The only time Latha had ever gone outside of Stay More was once when her Grandma Bourne wanted to go to Parthenon to attend the wedding of a girl named Belle Bellah. Grandma Bourne was a Bellah. The bride’s brother, Jim Bellah, had brought a wagon from Parthenon to transport the Bournes, all six of them, on one beautiful day in June. Latha and her sisters had taken baths in the washtub (Latha always was last and had to bathe in water that had been used by both her sisters) and put on their best dresses, such as they were. Jim Bellah told Latha she was the prettiest little lady he’d ever seen or imagined. They had a fine ride up to Parthenon, about six miles from Stay More, and the wedding was in a church. There were no churches in Stay More. Parthenon wasn’t much bigger, but it had two churches. Grandma Bourne and Latha’s mother both cried during the wedding ceremony, and Latha didn’t understand why.

  The summer that Latha was eleven years old her mother opened her mail one morning and announced that she had received word that her father, Ezra Swain, who was Latha’s grandfather she had never met, was gravely ill at his home in Swain, which had not been named after him but after his grandfather. Swain, Arkansas is down in the southwestern part of Newton County, a considerable distance from Stay More. Latha’s mother wanted very much to go there and be with her father in his last hours and, if he passed on, to attend his funeral. But how to get there?

  As it turned out, Every’s mother, whose mother was very close to Ezra Swain and also lived near Swain, wanted to visit with her mother and to attend Ezra Swain’s funeral if it should come to pass, so she, Mrs. Dill, persuaded her husband the wagon-maker to hitch up his largest wagon and make the trip to Swain. He had to borrow an extra horse to pull the covered double tree wagon, but there was room for all the Bournes if they wanted to go. But by the time the wagon was loaded, with provisions for the trip and changes of clothes, etc. it was discovered there wouldn’t be room for the youngest, Latha, so she would have to stay home. Every, unbeknownst to her, volunteered to give up his seat to her, and he stayed home. But when they were getting ready to depart, Latha saw that she still couldn’t be comfortably squeezed in aboard the wagon. She could sit on her father’s lap, but she was too big for that, and it was a bumpy ride over the mountains all the way to Swain. So Latha declared that she had just as lief stay home. She had a spirit of adventure that looked forward to such a long trip, but like Every she had no interest in a funeral.

  Her father allowed as how that was just as well, because Latha could milk the cow and feed the pigs and chickens and keep an eye on the place. She was old enough at eleven to be by herself.

  Latha did not watch the wagon leave (one of the first things her grandmother had taught her is that it is very bad luck to watch someone leaving; you may never see them again), and thus she did not know that Every was not on the wagon. And Every did not know that Latha was staying behind. The grown-ups decided it was best to keep it that way, so that the two of them might not be tempted into any sort of wicked mischief.

  For a good part of the day that the wagon had departed, Latha went up to the playhouse and spent some time with Rindy. They were almost too old to play with their dolls, but they could play like they were having a tea party and entertaining friends. Latha wished she had asked her mother for permission to sleep over at Rindy’s house, but her mother probably wouldn’t have granted it because there were so many boys at the Whitter place. All of her previous requests to sleep over at Rindy’s had been denied. Rindy had never slept over at Latha’s, but only because there wasn’t a spare bed. Now, however, Latha’s whole family was gone, so Latha asked Rindy to sleep over. Rindy said she’d have to go ask her mother, and an hour later ret
urned to report that her mother needed a lot of help in the kitchen, and since Rindy was the only girl left in that big family of boys, she’d have to stay.

  So Latha was alone. She went home and did her chores, milking the cow, etc., then made herself a small supper, mostly leftovers, and then sat on the porch for a while and whistled a few tunes, and hummed some others. There was still lots of daylight, and she had a notion she’d like to see what Every’s house looked like. She had walked past it a few times and seen it from the outside, but she’d never been inside, and she wanted to see where Every slept and what belongings he had. So with Rouser tagging along, she strolled on over to Every’s, taking the shortcut, the cowpath that went through the woods.

  Now it just so happened that Every at almost the same time had taken into his head a notion to visit Latha’s house and spy on her bed and her belongings, and he took his dog Fancher along with him, but he stayed on the road and didn’t take the cowpath shortcut, and thus they missed each other.

  As she approached the house, Latha wondered why their dog Fancher wasn’t barking at her. She couldn’t see the dog anywhere abouts. Had they taken the dog in the wagon? The Dill’s house was made of logs, a common two-pen dogtrot, so-called because dogs (or cats, or people) can trot (or walk, or sit) in the breezeway separating the two sides. It didn’t have as much total space as the Bourne’s house did, if you didn’t count that breezeway. Latha had no problem getting in, because nobody in the Ozarks ever had locks on their doors, not even when they went away on trips. In the “house” on the right, Latha saw, was the kitchen and the living room, while the left “house” contained the two bedrooms, one for Every and one for his parents. His was pretty small, just big enough to contain a bed too large for him, covered with a pretty homemade crazy quilt, and a small table and a chest which, she discovered, contained his shirts and socks and underclothes. One of the drawers contained odds and ends and play-pretties: a spy glass, a harmonica, a rabbit’s foot, a compass, one small book, True Manhood: The Secret of Power, a spinning top, a corncob pipe, a small pair of scissors, and, taped to a board with a drawn heart surrounding it, a lock of dark hair. Latha fingered the lock of hair and placed it alongside her own hair and saw that they were identical. But when and how had Every managed to cut off a lock of her hair?