Jonce saw Hodge Mauldraugh first. He came into the churchhouse with Bee, standing there darkening the door, saying no word. We looked back, stretching from our seats. The grass crickets were suddenly loud above the hush. Jonce came down from the pulpit, walking toward the door with the floor boards squeaking under his odd shuffle. He stood in front of Maul-draugh, his hands slightly lifted, open. Mauldraugh spoke, and his words were filled with cold anger. They poured out of him like sluice water.

“I’m not agin you reaching my boy back a grade,” he said. “What he larns, I want hit got proper. But I’m agin my boy being whipped. I do all the scourging for my house. Nobody’s going to beat my chap and keep drawing breath.”

“I’m running this place,” Jonce said. “Drawing pay to school keep and whip as I see fitten. When a scholar goes against the rule, I’ll not spare the rod.”

Mauldraugh spoke as though he had not heard, pushing Bee a little way toward Jonce. “I’m bringing him back to school,” he said, “but I’d better never hear of him being touched. I’d better never hear . . .” He went out of the door, and Bee took a seat beside John Winns, glancing about, hard-eyed and proud.

The classes were doubled so all would be over by noon, and the afternoon free for the bat-fly. I learned to read the first page in the primer. “Henny Penny found a grain of wheat. ...” I sat on my legs, for they ached from hanging over the bench without reaching the floor.

“Little man,” Jonce said, “I’m going to hammer together a box for you to rest your feet on.”

We ate hurriedly at noon. I had a lunch bucket of my own now, and sat with the boys upon the beech roots laid bare by creek flood. There was a baked horse apple in my bucket, oozing sugar from the top, and cushaw blooms, fried in meal batter, tasting like fish. We scattered the crumbs to the minnows working the shallows; we lit up our lamps.

Jonce dragged a ladder from under the churchhouse floor, setting it against the wall inside, beneath the trap-board. Eli Phipps went up first to slide the board away. We climbed after, grasping the creaking ladder slats, holding our lamps aloft. The floor gave under a step, nails prying loose from rotten wood. “Walk the joists, boys,” Jonce said. “Likely to fall square through the ceiling.” Below, the girls laughed, and the boys who had no lamps shouted from the ladder’s end. Bee Mauldraugh’s voice rose above them all.