Free Enduring by Donald Harington Page A

Mr. McWhorter come to her, and he demanded, “Young lady, is that meant for me?” Without taking her nose from the circle, she said, “I need to use the outhouse for Number One real bad and that’s all my finger means.”
    “That aint all it means by a long shot,” he said. She shrugged her shoulders, the only sign language she knew to mean, I don’t know what you’re talking about. He seemed to get it. “Don’t you understand what that means, child?” She shook her head but had to smudge the chalk circle to do so. “Wal, I reckon you’re too young to know. But it aint nice. It’s downright brash and blackguardy.”
    Some boy in the class yelled, “Up yours too!” and Mr. McWhorter wheeled around and tried to identify the culprit but everyone was either giggling or guffawing and he couldn’t tell who had yelled. Both Latha and Rindy had taken their noses out of their blackboard circles and were watching Mr. McWhorter get red as a beet and start lashing the air with his hickory stick, and then he started beating his desk with the stick until the stick broke. Latha almost felt sorry for him but she desperately needed to go to the outhouse and that was all she could think of.
    “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.