Free The Bones of Plenty by Lois Phillips Hudson

building. With not more than a minute of quick footwork on the part of the man and half-hearted dodging on the part of the bull, the capture was done. The man had his lead stick hooked in the ring and the bull followed, rocking his massive shoulders and haunches in a gait calculated to crowd the man. But the man had a great stride to match the bull’s, and he kept the leather nostrils stretched into such painful ovals that the bull could not side-step to dislodge the hook. The man never looked behind him. He marched away over the flattened fence, with his straight back no more than four feet in front of the glittering eyes and the cruel secret brain.
    The more logical it was to stop trembling, the more difficult it seemed to stop. The big boys took up the siege where the bull had left off. Even after she finally got them to sit down and ostensibly to work, the atmosphere in the one big room, grown stuffy and confining with the warm day, was that of a becalmed ship alive with the vibrations of mutiny. If she asked a question, she was more likely to get an uncontrolled burst of laughter than an answer. She knew they couldn’t be blamed for thinking it was funny to see a teacher run away from a bull—even if it was for her life. What she blamed them for was starting the whole thing—wandering far into a pasture where they had no business and getting an animal worked up like that.
    When the man came back to fix the fence, she was grateful and yet angry. Why did he keep such an animal in such a flimsy fence? She could not stop being aware of him out there, digging, pounding, nailing, with the sun glinting on his red-gold arms. Once when she looked out the window, her heart beating with the remnant of her fright and with her exasperation over the laughing savagery of the disobedient males ranged in front of her, she saw the man resting, leaning his arm across the new post, gazing at the schoolhouse, and then laughing until he finally had to blow his nose. He must be crazy, she thought.
    After school he came in. She saw his inches of crinkly red hair rub the top of the door. He introduced himself politely enough, but then he said in a severe deep voice, “Now then, Miss Shepard, that was our prize bull out yonder in the breeding pasture.” He did not apologize by his tone or his expression for speaking the words “bull” and “breeding” to a young woman. “In the future we’ll have to ask you to enjoin your pupils from trespassing on our property. After all, it is a schoolteacher’s duty to be responsible …” A belly laugh that rolled from him as though he were a Barnum and Bailey bass drum put an end to the speech he had been working on all afternoon.
    He saw me run, she thought, and hated him.
    He was often near the school when it let out, and particularly, it seemed, when she needed him. Once her little Ford got snowed in during the day and he pushed her out of the bank. But just as she could feel the wheels getting traction again, the car started to make a dreadful, sharp, rapid thumping. She stopped and let the engine idle. The trouble didn’t seem to be there. Cautiously she let the car move and again the thumping resounded. It was in the back and she got out to see if it was the bumper. But nothing seemed amiss, and she thanked George again for his help, while he stood inclining his head to her with a respectful hand on the bill of his cap. She climbed back into the car and started it once more. This time the banging shook the whole automobile.
    She leaned out and called, “Do you suppose it’s the transmission?”
    “Could be. Sounds like she’s all froze up somewheres, don’t she?” he said. (She had noticed that he talked much less grammatically when he wasn’t making a speech he had prepared just for her. She found the contrast amusing and foolishly flattering.)
    She couldn’t remember any more how many times she started the car and stopped it again in annoyed confusion before his wild laughter