Free The Teacher's Funeral by Richard Peck Page A

to do in the days ahead.
    I believe Little Britches would have settled in for the day if things had turned out better. We’d made it to M when she looked up from Webster and said, “I smells smoke.”
    An autumn haze drifted across the stifling late-August schoolroom. From out on the front step, J.W. began barking his head off. It was a regular cacophony out there. Cacophony was one of our C words. Now we all smelled smoke.
    Beside me, Charlie stroked his smooth chin and suddenly jerked. He kicked his way out of the desk and sprang through the front door on his storky legs. We all followed.
    As we rounded the schoolhouse, J.W. took the lead. Tansy was coming up hard from behind. The fire had a head start, and flames shot up from the back of the boys’ privy. It was burning merrily in a nest of unscythed dry grass. Few things in this world smell worse than a privy on fire.
    Thinking quicker than he ever did in school, Flopears was at the pump, pumping water into his hat for all he was worth. Tansy was pounding up with the pail. Everybody was running into everybody else, except for Pearl, who didn’t think anything to do with the boys’ privy had anything to do with her. J.W. was generally underfoot.
    Me and Charlie Parr? We were pointing to the cloudless sky and ducking, saying it must have been a lightning bolt, and were we the only ones to hear that clap of thunder?

Chapter Nine
One Lucky Boy
    S chool didn’t keep the full day. Still, I was worn down to a nub by bedtime, too tuckered to sleep. As always, Lloyd was taking his half out of the middle.
    â€œShift over,” I said. “I’m not telling you again.”
    â€œQuit your twitchin’,” he said.
    A sour smell of privy smoke rose off his hair, and probably mine. Apart from everything else, we were in Aunt Maud’s bad books. She’d made us new feedsack shirts for the first day of school. She was handy with a needle. Lloyd had burned a hole in his shirt the size of a silver dollar. I’d burned a cuff off mine. It was all in a good cause, of course—putting out the fire before the privy could burn down to the seat.
    I was just about to drift off, catching that first glimpse of the Dakota wheat fields in the Red River valley, when Lloyd said directly into my ear, “Russell, you figure anybody found the buggy whip?”
    That brought me back to life. “What buggy whip?”
    â€œThe buggy whip you and Charlie were smoking behind the privy this morning, and one of you dropped it in the weeds where it smoldered till it caught—”
    â€œWho says we were smoking buggy whip?” I mumbled like a man talking in his sleep.
    â€œPearl and Flopears and Lester and—”
    â€œAll right,” I mumbled. “All right.”
    â€œIn fact, everybody but Little Britches, who was in the other privy. People who weren’t even at school know by now. They probably know in Montezuma and Rock—”
    â€œThere’s no evidence,” I said. “It was a hot fire while it lasted. It burned all the undergrowth just about back to the grove.”
    â€œRussell,” said Lloyd, “do you need evidence when that big a crowd catches you in the act?”
    I snored then, the soft snore of first sleep.
    But I was wide awake, so I noticed a random moonbeam strike the doorknob as it began to turn. Lloyd may have seen too. The door banged back. We bounced in the bed.
    Tansy filled the doorway with a coal oil lamp and her hair down. In her nightdress she looked like an avenging angel. In fact, two avenging angels. She advanced on the bed, and we scrambled to the headboard, clutching our feather pillows before us.
    She stood at the foot. Her lamp made fearful shadows in all the hills and hollers of the bed. It was Tansy-our-sister now, not Teacher Tansy. And there were no witnesses.
    She waited while we cowered, another of our C words. The terrible silence undid me, and I began to babble