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about, and Mandy had said it was just too wicked, and that’s where she first heard that word. In an effort to join in their whispering, Latha had whispered, loud enough for them to hear, the only secret she knew at that time: she had a kitten hidden in the barn, named Cutie-Pie Face. The next day Mandy had told their father, and their father had cut a switch from an elm sapling and had switched Latha’s legs with it until she cried, and he had searched the hayloft until he found Cutie-Pie Face, and had taken the kitten away somewhere so that Latha never saw it again. Latha hated Mandy so much for that that she almost didn’t put any candy for her in that paper poke when she was loading up on candy at Ingledew’s the day Ike Whitter was lynched, but it didn’t matter because she went off and forgot the poke of candy anyhow. One night in bed she was so jealous of their whispering that she couldn’t keep her mouth shut and went ahead and told Barb and Mandy about the candy, and about the gunfight and about the old giant who had lifted her off the floor. But her sisters told her she was just making it up, and they wouldn’t believe her. From then on, she just let them do their whispering, and when they were so busy doing their whispering they didn’t hold on to their doll, whose name was Sally, so Latha would take Sally and whisper things to it.
    Then after Rindy Whitter became her friend she didn’t need to whisper to Sally any more. She and Rindy told each other everything they knew to tell, they told each other so much that they ran out of things to tell and could only sit together in silence or try to teach Rindy’s doll, whose name was Florrie, how to talk. Florrie never learned to talk, so it was pretty quiet whenever the girls got together, unless one of them had heard or seen something new to tell the other. The girls had observed that whenever their fathers, Saultus Bourne and Simon Whitter, were sitting together on the porch, the men usually talked about the weather, at least for a while until the weather was completely covered. So Rindy and Latha sometimes did that. But the weather lately wasn’t changing at all; day after day it didn’t rain or even cloud up and Rindy said she had forgotten what thunder sounded like, so Latha had to pretend to be the thunder and speak a big boom to remind her, but Latha’s voice was too girlish to sound like the thunder. She got a dishpan from the kitchen and beat on it with a wooden spoon, until her mother told her to cut out that racket.
    Latha would take Rindy out to the milk lot and boost her up onto the back of the calf so she could ride the calf around, and then they’d swap places, and Latha would ride while Rindy would lead the calf around and around, even out to the garden and around it. The Whitters had a mule, which the Bournes didn’t have, because, as Saultus Bourne sometimes said, they was too pore to buy one. The Whitter’s mule’s back was too high for the girls to boost one another up there, so they couldn’t ride the mule, but they could pet it, and Latha liked to reach up and run her hand down the mule’s long face. But one time the mule bit her hand, and it bled so much blood that they had to take her to the doctor to have stitches put in. It was her third visit to the village, and she saw how all the shot-out windows had been replaced. The doctor, whose name was Plowright, scared her and hurt her more than the mule had. And Latha’s father raised a big ruckus because he didn’t have the dollar that the doctor wanted for doing the job and hardly anything to offer in place of it except a piglet, which the doctor accepted, but Latha’s father complained that the piglet was supposed to be their meat for the next year, so it was going to be a sorry Christmas.
    Little by little Latha was becoming aware of just how poor they were. The reason for it, according to her father, was that “I aint got no boys to help out around the place, and you gals