Read Losing Battles for Free Online

and Jack’s little dog Sid that’s there waiting for the end of school, he frolics in too, with a kiss for that ugly hound! ‘Sic ’em, Frosty!’ Curly hollers, and if you’d been there, you’d had to stand well out of the way, or hid behind the pickle barrel. Curly even calls for his sister! Calls for Miss Ora to come out of the dwelling house back of the store and swat Jack with her broom.”
    “She’s a pretty good artist with that broom, but she don’t always make an appearance when she’s called,” giggled Aunt Birdie. “That’s her reputation.”
    “A good thing for ’em both they didn’t call for Lexie,” said Miss Lexie. “I’d killed both of ’em right on the spot, before they went an inch further.”
    “If you’d got close enough to the store, you might’ve caught a flying rattrap, sure enough.” Uncle Curtis told her. “But you couldn’t expect to put a stop to Jack and Curly. Your broom ain’t any longer than Miss Ora’s.”
    “ ‘Hand over the ring! Where you got it hid?’ Jack keeps hollering. ‘What’d you do, swallow it?’ he says.
    “ ‘Let go my windpipe,’ says Curly. ‘And quit turning my store upside down—I put it in my safe.’
    “ ‘Bust it open!’ says Jack.
    “ ‘I ain’t a-gonna!’
    “ ‘Don’t make so much racket,’ says Jack. ‘The new teacher’s over there trying to get a good start. Speak more quiet.’
    “ ‘Make me!’ says Curly.
    “So Jack he brought down on Curly’s crown with a sack of cottonseed meal—”
    “Without warning?” Aunt Cleo cried.
    “—of cottonseed meal that Curly had standing right there. Busted the sack wide open and covered that booger from head to foot with enough fertilize to last him the rest of his life. Then didn’t old Curly whirl!
    “Jack says, ‘Hold it, Curly! Vaughn, go back to your desk!’ Yes, that little feller’s slipped out and followed his big brother into battle.”
    “Couldn’t the new teacher hold onto her pupils any better’nthat?” teased Uncle Noah Webster. “In my day, the teacher wielded a switch as long as my arm!”
    “You can’t keep children of mine shut up in school, if they can figure there’s something going on somewhere!” Miss Beulah called above the sudden spitting of the skillets in her kitchen. “They’re not exactly idiots!”
    “ ‘Vaughn, get out of men’s range,’ says Jack. And Vaughn’s still little enough to back off like his brother tells him, but big enough not to back no further than the best place to see. He squats him on the roof of the pump box and could see and hear.”
    “Here it comes!” sang the aunts.
    “Jack dives right over the counter into Curly and butts him out of reach of that old piece-of-mischief that Curly was whirling for, and it was loaded, you bet, and steers him out from behind that counter to the one clear spot in the middle of the floor—and the whole store busts wide open. All in a golden cloud of pure cotton-seed meal.”
    “That’s when I wish I could’ve waded in on top of ’em!” hollered Aunt Nanny. “Wielding the battle-stick I stir my clothes-pot with!”
    “The whole schoolhouse must’ve been equally ready to pop!” cried Aunt Birdie. “And the teacher, of course, she couldn’t do any good.”
    “Maybe not a teacher . But what was Gloria doing all this time? Where was she? “ asked Aunt Cleo. “She must come into this somewheres.”
    “If you teach, you’re expected to go on teaching whatever happens,” said the voice of Gloria. She spoke from her seat on the log.
    “Until you die or get married, one,” Aunt Birdie agreed.
    “You mean Gloria was the teacher?” shrieked Aunt Cleo.
    “That was only my first day.” Gloria turned her head only the least bit to tell them. “I wasn’t blind to what went on. I was taking full stock of that commotion from my windowsill, abreast the pencil sharpener. All the while careful to keep the brunt of the children behind me instead of where they