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scrubbed, dusted, mended all our clothes; yet when I came home from school, she was always eager to keep me company—to play a card game named Rook or rush off on a mushroom hunt or have a pillow fight or, as we sat in the kitchen’s waning afternoon light, help me with homework.
    She loved to pore over my textbooks, the geography atlas especially (“Oh, Buddy,” she would say, because she called me Buddy, “just think of it—a lake named Titicaca. That really exists somewhere in the world”). My education was her education, as well. Due to her childhood illness, she had had almost no schooling; her handwriting was a series of jagged eruptions, the spelling a highly personal and phonetic affair. I could already write and read with a smoother assurance than she was capable of (though she managed to “study” oneBible chapter every day, and never missed “Little Orphan Annie” or “The Katzenjammer Kids,” comics carried by the Mobile paper). She took a bristling pride in “our” report cards (“Gosh, Buddy! Five A’s. Even arithmetic. I didn’t dare to hope we’d get an A in arithmetic”). It was a mystery to her why I hated school, why some mornings I wept and pleaded with Uncle B., the deciding voice in the house, to let me stay home.
    Of course it wasn’t that I hated school; what I hated was Odd Henderson. The torments he contrived! For instance, he used to wait for me in the shadows under a water oak that darkened an edge of the school grounds; in his hand he held a paper sack stuffed with prickly cockleburs collected on his way to school. There was no sense in trying to outrun him, for he was quick as a coiled snake; like a rattler, he struck, slammed me to the ground and, his slitty eyes gleeful, rubbed the burrs into my scalp. Usually a circle of kids ganged around to titter, or pretend to; they didn’t really think it funny; but Odd made them nervous and ready to please. Later, hiding in a toilet in the boys’ room, Iwould untangle the burrs knotting my hair; this took forever and always meant missing the first bell.
    Our second-grade teacher, Miss Armstrong, was sympathetic, for she suspected what was happening; but eventually, exasperated by my continual tardiness, she raged at me in front of the whole class: “Little mister big britches. What a big head he has! Waltzing in here twenty minutes after the bell. A half hour.” Whereupon I lost control; I pointed at Odd Henderson and shouted: “Yell at him. He’s the one to blame. The sonafabitch.”
    I knew a lot of curse words, yet even I was shocked when I heard what I’d said resounding in an awful silence, and Miss Armstrong, advancing toward me clutching a heavy ruler, said, “Hold out your hands, sir. Palms up, sir.” Then, while Odd Henderson watched with a small citric smile, she blistered the palms of my hands with her brass-edged ruler until the room blurred.
    It would take a page in small print to list the imaginative punishments Odd inflicted, but what I resentedand suffered from most was the sense of dour expectations he induced. Once, when he had me pinned against a wall, I asked him straight out what had I done to make him dislike me so much; suddenly he relaxed, let me loose and said, “You’re a sissy. I’m just straightening you out.” He was right, I was a sissy of sorts, and the moment he said it, I realized there was nothing I could do to alter his judgment, other than toughen myself to accept and defend the fact.
    As soon as I regained the peace of the warm kitchen, where Queenie might be gnawing an old dug-up bone and my friend puttering with a piecrust, the weight of Odd Henderson would blessedly slide from my shoulders. But too often at night, the narrow lion eyes loomed in my dreams while his high, harsh voice, pronouncing cruel promises, hissed in my ears.
    My friend’s bedroom was next to mine; occasionally cries arising from my nightmare upheavals wakened her; then she would come and shake me out of an Odd