Free Enduring by Donald Harington Page B

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