Kind One by Laird Hunt

thought I might be quick with a piece of chalk and one day asked me was I interested in tending the school he had it in mind to set up. He had people in his employ, and those people had children and he had his own, and the only school nearby was farther away than he liked to send them. He had seen me gobbling at the books on his shelves and had watched me help his children make their numbers and letters and had a feeling it would work out right. He had hired a teacher from Marion to come out by autumntime and had a shed at the edge of one of the fields that would make a fine school by then, but if I was willing to work in rough conditions I could get it going now. He would see to the slates and primers and make sure I had what I needed.
    He put this to me while I was scraping spilled oatmeal off the wall in his front hall. He had his hands kind of slipped into the pockets of his purple vest as he spoke. This was still in my early days in his employ. They hadn’t started in to call me Scary. He had seen the fresh blood on my ankle but hadn’t blinked. I was still what you could call young then and had been some time away by then from Charlotte County, and some of the freshness of strong young arms and strong young legs had likely bubbled up into my head and made me think some of the furniture had floated back into its right place, and I set down my scraper and looked up at Lucious Wilson and told him, yes.
    “Good,” he said and went away with a whistle, and I picked my scraper back up and went to work on the oatmeal, but a week later I found myself wearing a snug black dress and neat black shoes and standing at the front of the room. There were six or eight of them, depending on the day and the farming weather, that Lucious Wilson had directed into my charge. They sat on benches with a slate each in their laps, and I had a chair in the corner I could move to if I needed it and there were windows to look out of and fine black fields all around. I had asked Lucious Wilson for a map of the country and some paper to draw big letters and numbers on and with them had decorated my abode. The pride of the whole thing was the chalkboard. It had been brought up by wagon from Indianapolis. Lucious Wilson said the shed might still be rough, but it would have a chalkboard. I wrote my name on that board the first day. I wrote, “Miss Sue.”
    She’s dreaming, you will have said to yourself by now. She’s old and life-kicked and set to dreaming about things that never happened. Ginny Lancaster of Charlotte County, Kentucky, or Scary Sue the oatmeal scrubber, a schoolteacher. And yet there I stood those mornings in my black dress. There I was.
    There wasn’t much to the first day or two. I had Lucious Wilson’s little ones and another little one and then a fistful that were all but grown. Not a body in the room knew its letters to speak of, so we started there. My trick about it was to pretend I was in that old schoolroom of mine, that room where I had written my story and been called to the front of the class. I could even bring up the pine smell of that place, and it wasn’t a thing to imagine that my old teacher was standing just behind me with a little smile, whispering at me about what to say. We did letters and took a peek at numbers and sang songs, and another few of those days mooed and grazed their way by. Lucious Wilson liked to come in at the end of a morning and stand in the doorway. Once he came a nob early, and I had him step up to the front of the room and give us a song. He couldn’t sing worth shooting, but there was fun in it and we all clapped.
    “This is fine, Sue,” he said afterward. “Just fine.”
    The trouble came up on the second week. It sat in the lap of one of the bigger ones, who one morning looked me up and looked me down, then said, “You ain’t our teacher. You ain’t any teacher at all.”
    I came over to see if she was having trouble with the letters I had set them to practice. It was when I