One Mississippi Read Online Free Page A

are, definitely.” He cast a disparaging eye at the kids getting on the bus. “We gotta tell Dad. We can’t go to this school. We’ll be as dumb as these people in a month.”
    “Are you crazy, Bud? Don’t you dare say a word. Think about it — guaranteed straight A’s from now on, and we never have to crack a book. I mean, I’m a junior, and they’re just now reading ‘Julius Seizure.’ We read it in ninth.”
    “I swear our history teacher was drunk,” Bud said.
    I told him everything I’d learned about the school from Tim Cousins. Mrs. Passworth, the algebra teacher, was rumored to have spent time in a mental institution. Miss Williford’s French I and II classes were legendary; she spent two-thirds of every class period showing slides of her three trips to Paris. Mr. Mapes, in social studies, would write the answers on the board the day before a test, and he never gave below a C. Every day in fifth-period chemistry, Mrs. Deavers put her head on her desk and took a nap. You were welcome to nap too, do whatever you liked, as long as you didn’t disturb Mrs. Deavers.
    Janie got on the bus with this smirky grin.
    “You okay, Idjit? How’d you make out?”
    “Daniel, this school is so easy!”
    “Shhh . . . that’s gonna be our little secret.”
    Mom and Dad never asked how we became straight-A students overnight. At school I quickly learned to modify my Yankee ways. I rolled up my sleeves and let my shirttail hang out at the back, in keeping with the fashion down here. After enduring dozens of sarcastic remarks about my Indiana accent I began saying “y’all” for “you guys,” “Co-Cola” instead of “pop,” and “seb’m” for the number after six. I learned to say “ain’t” and “cain’t” and “hale, yeah,” and of course, “Mis’sippi.”
    Bud did not try to adapt. He lived in his room with his portable TV, except for the daylight hours, when we were mostly outside cutting grass. Our new house was a brick rancher, with four dinky white columns holding up the front porch roof, but it was set on a rolling lawn so huge that Mom said it made her feel like Scarlett O’Hara. I pointed out that Scarlett had slaves to take care of her yard. “And I have you boys,” she said with a smile.
    Three acres of grass in Mississippi was a job that never ended. By the time you mowed down the last patch of V-headed stalks, new V’s had sprung up where you started. If you missed a couple of days, the lawn turned into a jungle of high green uncuttable Mississippi piano wire, teeming with biting flies, no-see-ums, yellow jackets, and fire ants.
    Dad bought us a huge Yazoo mower with a thirty-inch blade and bike-sized rear wheels for leverage — a real Rottweiler of a mower that made our old Indiana Lawn Boy look like a poodle by comparison. It took strength just to push the Yazoo across the flat part of the yard. Great gouts of grass spewed up from the chute, bathing me in a swirl of green dust.
    Bud and I took turns at the helm of this monster. This was our welcome to Mississippi: incredible heat that started early and cranked hot all day and stayed sweltering long after dark, August all the way through September and straight on into October without any letup, muggy heat and mosquitoes and the roaring Yazoo and the tang of cut grass and Dad coming out to point out the spots we had missed. I grew to hate every inch of that yard, every fire-ant hill and rock poking up, every patch of gravel spitting back at me like shrapnel. I prayed for a hard freeze to come sweeping down from the north.
    On his birthday, November 11, Bud stood up at the supper table to announce that he had joined the Marines.
    Mom and Dad were appalled — Vietnam was on Cronkite every night — but there was nothing they could do to stop him. Bud was eighteen. He had signed the papers.
    “Basic’s hard, but then it gets better,” he told me that night. We were up late eating big bowls of vanilla ice milk drowned in