He had been principal of Bowerstown Junior High School for thirty years, having spent his entire career in the school that had hired him two months after his graduation from the University of North Carolina. His marriage to Arlene Weathers had caused controversy because Arlene had been a ninth-grade student during his first year of teaching. It had to be suspicious, the gossip declared. A teacher marrying one of his students, and it did not matter that the marriage had occurred during Arlene’s senior year at the University of Georgia, or that she was she was only eight years younger than Lamar.

It didn’t seem right, the talkers had whispered busily among themselves, their faces coated in irritation so visible it had the look of a rash. It simply didn’t seem right.

The talk had been stopped by a woman named Elsie Wade at a school board meeting held to discuss the issue. She had said simply, “How many people here remember George Gurley?” The answer to the question was the answer to the foolish quarreling about Lamar Gathers marrying Arlene Weathers.

George Gurley, a widower in a childless marriage, had married Pretty Bowers when he was forty-one and she was fourteen.

Pretty had mothered six children from the union.

The land for the school had been donated to the community by George. He had been the school’s superintendent for twenty years.

And Elsie Wade, whose maiden name had been Elsie Gurley, had been the first child born to George and Pretty.

The troubling gossip over Lamar and Arlene had ended as quickly as it had started.

In the years following their marriage, Lamar and Arlene Gathers had gained a reputation as fine, unorthodox teachers and even better citizens. In the Valley of Light, they were thought of as givers and leaders. They were high class, as Whitlow Mayfield had once described them. Yet there was nothing uppity about them, nothing at all. People respected them and behaved with civility in their presence, the way they would behave around a preacher.

It had been Lamar who thought of sponsoring a fishing contest as a fund-raiser for the school, the idea coming to him from a truant student named Kenny Overmeyer, a boy so stocky he had the look of someone who had grown tall, but had been hammered short. Kenny loved fishing. Next to fishing, school was as bothersome as a hornet, and he had no sense of guilt in playing hooky. Hooky, to Kenny, had more meaning than missing school. Hooky had the word hook in it, and that was cause enough to find the river on any day that cried to him to avoid the closed-in quarters of a classroom. There had been many such days for Kenny.

Lamar’s resolution of the problem was still a story traded for idle talk at Taylor’s store. Lamar had said, “Well, Kenny, if you won’t come to us, I guess we’ll just have to come to you,” and one day the entire class had shown up at the river, catching Kenny by surprise. A spelling bee was conducted as Kenny pulled in catfish. Kenny, who was smart enough by nature to eventually own a car dealership in Knoxville, had won third place. Lamar had said, “This looks like so much fun, we ought to get everybody in on it.”