The churchhouse door was chained and padlocked. We waited, looking across the foot-packed ground to the graveyard hidden behind a stickweed patch. A bushtail squirrel crept down a scalybark to wonder at us with bright eyes. “I bet he’s tame as a house cat,” I said. “I bet he is.” Two bats flew around the eaves, disappearing with dull squeaks, and then we heard the dinner buckets of the scholars cracking together up-creek and down.

The children came into the yard and set their buckets by the steps. The boys crouched on their knees to play fatty hole, the bright marbles spinning from rusty fists into the dirt pockets. Euly went into the graveyard with the girls. I watched the boys, standing a littie way apart. The losers held their knuckles to be thumped, clenching them against the pain.

A boy named Leth came up to me and said: “Let’s me and you play big ring,” and he loaned me two marbles: one to put in the ring, and the other to shoot with. I held them in the cup of my hand, and they were fine to look at—green as a moss pool, with specks like water fleas in the glass. He drew a great circle with the toe of his brogan. We squatted on our heels. I clenched a marble between thumb and forefinger, feeling its perfect roundness, smoother than any acorn.

“Yonder comes the teacher,” Leth said, “but there’s a spell yet before books. Jonce Weathers has got to clean after the bats. The floor gets ruint every night.”

“Where, now, do them bat-birds stay of a day?” I asked.

“Yon side the ceiling, hanging amongst the rafters,” Leth said.

We played two games of big ring, then we stood at the churchhouse door watching Jonce sweep with a brushy broom.

“Ain’t Jonce the littlest teacher you ever saw?” Leth asked. “He’s got scholars nigh big as he is. Be a wonder if he don’t get run off. Two teachers they got rid of last year, and they’d a-made two of Jonce.”

“I bet he’s sharp as a shoe sprig,” I said. “Size don’t count for sense.”

“I saw his arm muscle once,” Leth said. “It wasn’t much larger than a goose bump.”

When the bell rang we went inside. I kept close to Leth, finding a place beside him on the bench where the primer children sat. Leth’s feet touched the floor, but I could only reach it with my toes. The older boys came in late, the warped floor creaking under their steps. Jonce glared angrily at them. Books were opened, thumbs licked to turn the pages, and bright pictures spun under their hands.

“I’ve got no book,” I said to Leth.