On some summer afternoons, when the children longed to be killing rats against time down at the barn or baiting hogs back in the river swamp, Miss Wigglesworth would make them accompany her on a slow stroll through the garden, where they would suddenly come up on a complete tea service hidden behind a clump of aspidistra—cups and saucers, lace napkins, little silver spoons, and iced cakes with ants crawling on them.

“Oh, look!” Miss Wigglesworth would exclaim, striking a carefully rehearsed pose denoting surprise and delight, her eyes stretched wide, one hand pressed to her bosom. “The dear little fairies have set out this tea party just for us!”

But the children knew this was a lie. They had seen Miss Wigglesworth with their own eyes earnestly staggering out to the end of the garden over and over with the tea tray, the fringes of her shawl snagging on branches, her upper lip straining gently to cover her teeth in her excitement. They did not want to sit on these uncomfortable garden seats on a sweltering summer afternoon swallowing scalding-hot tea out of rose-painted cups and listening to Miss Wigglesworth remind them, “Pinkie, pinkie!”

That night the fairy tea party would be matched with a little act of cruelly imaginative revenge, and the next morning Miss Wigglesworth would be sitting in the hall on her strapped-up trunk, dressed in her traveling cloak, her hat on her head. “I cannot allow myself to be…,” she would say in a quavering voice, and then the mother of the children would sweetly say, “Oh, Miss Wigglesworth” and “Dear Miss Wigglesworth.” And the father, stern and tall and somber, would say, “Miss Wigglesworth, will you step into my office please.” And there in that dark and serious room a little, red-eyed child would stand in front of the gun cabinet facing Miss Wigglesworth and, with her fists clenched behind her back, recite, “Miss Wigglesworth, I am sorry I put that very small alligator in your bathtub, and I will not do it again, ma’am.”

Later that day the mother would find a time to be alone with Miss Wigglesworth and, tweaking a drooping shawl back into position on Miss Wigglesworth’s bony shoulder, would say, “Miss Wigglesworth, you know we love you and appreciate you very much, but sometimes I wonder…for someone in your position…if you fully realize how fortunate…living as you do in the bosom of our family, why I know girls who would…Now we are very happy to have you here of course, and…Oh, Miss Wigglesworth, dear Miss Wigglesworth, don’t start that.”

And the next day things would go on just as before, because the fact was, Miss Wigglesworth, for all her strapped-up trunk and her traveling cloak and her statements about not allowing herself to be…, had nowhere to go.