The Teacher's Funeral Read Online Free Page A

was at school where he learned to turn the other cheek. Charlie still walked with a slight limp.
    As I say, it was like a miracle, if you could believe it. Miss Myrt dying practically on the eve of school starting up. In August.
    â€œShe’ll be a restless spirit,” Charlie observed. “She’ll be a soul in torment, carried off just when she was fixing to lock us up in that schoolhouse for another year.”
    I hadn’t thought of it like that. And I didn’t have time to wonder how Charlie did. Somehow, it didn’t sound much like Charlie.
    Lloyd sat studying the fire, wanting with his whole heart to believe. Him and Charlie sat with their backs to the grove, so I was the one to see Siren. She slept on her feet, and she’d dozed through everything so far. Now she nickered and pulled back on her rope. Her tail whipped around. The firelight caught one of her eyes rolling back with fear.
    That was all the warning in the world I got. Siren nickered again, and I seemed to hear the answering nicker of another horse, far off. The mist in the grove was blue now, and a patch of the darkness changed. The underbrush crackled, as if from a footfall. Something was moving in the timber.
    A hand pushed back a low-hanging limb. I saw her then, just a darkness against deeper dark. I saw the shawl over her head. Now the firelight found her. She stopped, keeping this distance from the living. More shadows puddled at her feet.
    I could see nothing but her eyes, and I knew them from somewhere. Beneath the shadowing shawl her head was tied up with a rag—to keep her dead jaw from dropping in one final gape.
    She stood there until her glinting eyes found mine. My heart had stopped by then, so I could have heard every word she spoke. She was silent as eternity, quieter than snow. One of her draped arms began to come up, slow because she had arthritis in that elbow. She seemed about to point at me, which would naturally have finished me off right there. Instead, she held up something: an untidy bundle of switches. She’d gathered them in the grove, for the grave.
    My heart gave a single thump, and I was ready to travel, faster than Charlie at his top speed. I was on my feet, grunting like a bullbat. What Lloyd and Charlie were doing I didn’t know. I meant to save myself. At that very moment, a live coal rolled out of the fire. In my first fleeing step, I trod my bare foot right on that red-hot coal. The soles of our feet were tough as whang-leather by this time of year, but that was a sizable coal.
    â€œEyeow!” I screamed in fear and pain. This was happening directly in front of Charlie. When I kicked up my foot, he saw that the live coal was still stuck to the sole of it. With unusual presence of mind, Charlie leaped to his feet and grabbed me up like a sack of flour. The next thing I knew, I was in the crick. Charlie’d thrown me right in the middle of it. I was sucking water on the slimy bottom. My foot was still burning but not alight. I couldn’t think. I was burning up and drowning, and I’d just seen a ghost. Took me forever to distinguish up from down and break the surface of the water.
    The first thing I saw was my sister, Tansy, with a shawl thrown back over her shoulders. She stood in the dancing firelight, unwinding the rag that had held her jaw closed. Charlie and Lloyd were rolling in the weeds, busting their guts laughing. Tansy shook her bundle of switches at me.

Chapter Four
Flowers for Miss Myrt
    W e stuck it out till daylight, me and Lloyd. When we could finally settle down, we slept in the bed of the spring wagon, plastered all over with oats. J.W. joined us and chased rabbits all night in his sleep, jerking continually.
    We’d planned to sleep like cowboys around the fire but forgot to bring a length of rope to circle the campsite. A snake won’t crawl over a rope. We slept in the wagon and left our trotlines behind where they were. What Charlie’d found