He held his so both of us could see. “We’re reading Henny Penny” he said. “Look at that old dommer hen planting three grains of wheat. Ain’t that a peck of foolishness? Fellow who writ this book is a witty.”

“I can’t read writing,” I said, “but I know my letters.”

“What’s the biggest river ever was?” Jonce stood before the older boys, holding a book square as a dough board.

“Biggest river I ever saw was the Kentucky, running off to the blue-grass, and somewhere beyond.”

“It’s a river in South America, far off south, many thousands of miles.”

“There’s a place called South Americkee, over in Bell County. Now hit’s the truth.”

“This river is the Amazon. It’s one hundred and sixty-seven miles wide at the mouth.”

“I looked that word up in the dictionary and it said Amazon was a fighting woman. River or woman, I don’t know which.”

Cricket throb, dry and ripe, came through the window, dull against Jonce’s words leaping over the room. He leaned from the pulpit, swinging his arms. Scholars stretched to draw numbers on the blackboard. Three classes in arithmetic were going at one time, three threads of voices intent as crickets. My feet hung from the bench, heavy as lead plumbs. “My tongue is dried to a string,” I told Leth.

“Hold up one finger and crack the others,” he said. Jonce saw me at last and nodded, and I went into the yard, being no longer thirsty where the air was free of bat smell and wood rot. I sat on a mossy rock under the scalybark, and the bushtail squirrel came halfway down, head foremost, unafraid. A titmouse whistled overhead, lonesome and questioning.

As I sat on the rock a boy ran out of the church-house, jumping the five doorsteps. His books were caught under his arm as he hurried down the creek road, leaving hat and dinner bucket behind. The squirrel fled up the scalybark; the titmouse hushed. Jonce came into the yard to look down the road after the boy. I slipped back into the schoolroom before he returned, wondering at the quietness there.

“Jonce put Bee Mauldraugh back in the fifth reader,” Leth said, his voice husky with anger. “He reared up and Jonce cracked him with a figger book. Reckon Bee ought to be put back a grade, but I don’t like to see nobody strike my kin. Uncle Hodge’ll give Jonce trouble sure. He thinks the sun riz in that Bee.”

Euly and I ate out of a shoe box at noon. We laughed when it was opened, amazed at what was there. Fried guinea thighs and wings, covered with a brown-meal crust. Two yellow tomatoes. A corn pone, and a thumb-sized lump of salt.

“Mommy must o’ killed the guinea before daylight,” I said. “I never heard a peep.”