Crunching Gravel Read Online Free Page B

worked, Dad joshed with the squaws. He preferred delivering welfare to these people than to needy whites.
    By mid-afternoon, back in town, we unloaded the truck. At home, I scrubbed myself trying to efface the odor. We hung our clothes outside in the icy air, but the smell persisted.
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School
    The Sundsteen School was a white clapboard single-room affair, without basement, situated on bare land at a juncture of roads. Sundsteen Road veered west here and wound on, meeting Highway 17, which led eventually to Rhinelander, the largest town. The road past the school was little more than a two-mile service road ending near swamps leading to Columbus Lake. Several of the poorest families lived along this road, far from town.
    At the front of the schoolroom were the teacher’s desk, a blackboard, and a large wood stove enclosed in corrugated tin ineptly stamped with metal flowers and grapes. Twenty movable desks were arrayed before the teacher, the first-graders to the front, the eighth-graders to the rear. On cold days, we pulled chairs as close to the stove as possible. The “library” was a bookcase roughly six feet high and six feet wide holding a scattering of much-abused books and a set of Compton’s Encyclopedia. Beside the bookcase sat what we called a “sandbox,” a long mahogany-stained pine case standing on what appeared to be piano legs and filled with sand. Here we built relief maps of the area, complete with glass for lakes and twigs for trees. Occasionally, some enterprising student drew an approximation of Wisconsin. In spring the box held quarts of frogs’ eggs, which we observed hatching. If the tadpoles did not die, we returned them to the swamps where we had found the eggs.
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Igloo
    I would do anything for Osmo Makinnen, the school bully, although, since I was nearly three years behind my class in age, I was often the butt of his teasing. Provoking my tears was easy, and when I complained, the others called me “sissy” and “teacher’s pet.” Miss Crocker could do little but comfort me. She was seldom with us on the playground, particularly in winter, when we donned our wool coats, hats, mufflers, and rubber boots and swirled around the school like insane starlings.
    One winter, after the heaviest snowfall of the year had hardened into drifts, Osmo and his cohorts excavated an enormous tunnel in the snow the county plow had pushed back from the road—massive deposits of hard snow covered with an icy crust. The tunnel led to an igloo large enough for three persons.
    Osmo began the excavations by explaining his plans for the room, which we would use as a clubroom. He delegated most of the digging but ignored my anxious wish to contribute. I should have known better. Showing his disregard, even contempt, for me, he passed the shovel over my head to my cousin Grace, who stuck out her tongue. I hung about, pathetically trying to catch his eye.
    For the next week, until the digging was over, I stayed by myself, made snowmen, and followed fox-and-geese patterns, pretending that others were also playing the game.
    I was surprised when Osmo said he wanted me to be the first to-enter. He insisted on an early start, to leave time for the others to visit before classes started again. I didn’t even bother to eat my lunch.
    He first removed the end of an old barrel blocking the entrance. “You’ll have to crawl all the way back,” he said. “I’ll be right behind.”
    The passageway was barely wide enough for my shoulders. I negotiated a turn by squirming along on my belly. Osmo had warned me not to kick the tunnel sides. The roof of the igloo was built of snow blocks, each dovetailed and rounding to form a domed roof. Sunlight shimmered through the roof, a lovely iridescent green.
    Osmo asked my opinion of the place. I said it was great. I imagined Eskimos safe inside from an arctic blizzard. Osmo took a handful of wood shavings and some