Rain was something we were always afraid of at the hill house. After we moved there, we heard that the other people left years before because the house was too dangerous when it rained. Of course the roof gave trouble, not having been taken care of in so long, but the real trouble was with the foundations. The hills were nothing but clay, and when the rain came down them, the foundations would sink in the soft mud. That's why the cinders were in the yard, so that you could walk around there after a rain. If you went back into the hills after a rain, though, you had to wear boots.

When I first looked at the house, I could tell it was leaning and not straight, but it wasn't until after the first spring we were there and the first real rain came that we knew why. All night that night the house rumbled, and we thought it was just the thunder. In the morning the kitchen had dropped down on one side and there was wet clay under the stove. We had plenty of empty rooms downstairs, so we made another room the kitchen and left the old one just dropping there at the back of the house in a crazy way. When the hurricanes came in off the Atlantic that fall, we lost that old room and half of the front porch too.

I set up my train in one of the empty rooms upstairs, and I made all kinds of scenery for it to pass through. I made a tunnel and a hill out of some old boxes, and made a bridge with some of the trellis that was nailed to the front porch for climbing roses. Everyone could tell that climbing roses would never grow in that clay and cinders. It made Aunt Mae mad, though, because she liked the trellis and said that she could sit and imagine there were roses on it, even if there weren't.

My train was a beautiful thing, though. It ran all through the room. First it went under the tunnel, then over an old shoe box which I covered with crepe paper to make it look like a green hill, then it came down off the shoe box over the trellis bridge, which looked just like the steel bridge they had over the river at the county seat. From there it had a clear stretch over the floor in a circle and stopped back at the tunnel.

The same fall that we had the hurricane off the Atlantic was the fall I entered County Elementary. That was the name of the grade school down in town. It was far from our place. In the morning I had to go down the hill and across town to get to it, because it was at the foot of the range of hills opposite from ours. When it rained, I wore my boots to get off the hill. Then I had to carry them with me through town, and they were always wet and covered with clay, and they'd get me dirty and ruin my homework papers.

The school was a wooden building in the middle of a big yard that didn't have any grass on it. It had four rooms. I went into the first, second, and third room, but they had a fourth, fifth, and sixth room and also a seventh and eighth. I don't know what the last room was used for, but a big boy told me what happened there sometimes at night when he and his friends used it, and I didn't understand what he was talking about.

There were three teachers, two women and a man. The man had the seventh and eighth room. He was from out of state, but the two women were from town. One was our neighbor when we lived in town, and she didn't like Aunt Mae. I got her for my first teacher.

She recognized me right away and asked if the hussy was still living with us. I asked her what she meant, and she said that I should stop trying to pull her leg, that she knew my smart-aleck kind, that I was a perfect nephew for Aunt Mae, sly and tricky. When she said "sly and tricky," it sounded like the kind of words the preacher at church used, and I didn't like him. Her name was Mrs. Watkins. I knew her husband too, because he was a deacon at the church. I don't know what he did for a living, but his name was always in the paper trying to make the county dry, trying to keep the colored people from voting, trying to take Gone with the Wind out of the county library because so many people were reading it and he just knew it was "licentious." Someone wrote a letter to the paper asking if Mr. Watkins had ever read the book, and Mr. Watkins answered it saying that no, he would never lower himself to such a degree, that he "just knew" it was dirty because they were going to make a movie of it and therefore it had to be dirty, and that the man who had questioned his activities was an "agent of the devil." All this made the people of the county respect him, and a group met in front of the library in black masks and went in and took Gone with the Wind off the shelf and burned it on the sidewalk. The sheriff didn't want to do anything about it because he'd get into too much trouble with the people in town, and anyway, the election was next month.

Mrs. Watkins knew how the people felt about her husband after he did this to protect county morals, and whenever someone played around in the room, she'd say that she was going to talk to Mr. Watkins and see what he would do to punish such a person. This made all the playing in the room stop, because we were afraid Mr. Watkins would do to us what he did to the book. Anyway, at lunch one day the little boy who sat next to me told me that he was positive Mr. Watkins would burn anyone who was bad in his wife's room. After this really got around, Mrs. Watkins had the quietest room you've ever heard, and it was the wonder of the other two teachers, because when someone finished three years so quiet in Mrs. Watkins', he just naturally got a lot noisier in the next room.

Because she said I was a bad influence, Mrs. Watkins made me sit in the front row "right under her eye," as she said. This made me mad at Aunt Mae, but then I realized I was happy that she hadn't been friendly with Mrs. Watkins. I knew no one could be unless he was a deacon or a member of the Ladies' Aid, and Aunt Mae didn't like that kind either.

After a few days I began to notice that Mrs. Watkins was cross-eyed. That was something I had never noticed before, and when I told Aunt Mae, she laughed and laughed and said she hadn't noticed it either.

I memorized Mrs. Watkins' whole body the first week, along with a few pages out of the primer reader. Where I sat, my head came just a little above her knee, and I never felt a bonier knee in my life. I was just looking at her legs and wondering why she never shaved them the way Mother and Aunt Mae did when she hit me on the chin with her knee and told me to pay attention. My front tooth had been loose for a week, but I had been too afraid to let Mother or Poppa pull it out. When Mrs. Watkins' knee hit, I felt it pop loose and I let out a little "ouch," which I think pleased her. She didn't know she had done me a favor, and I never told her. I kept the tooth in my mouth until after class, then I spat it out and kept it, and I looked in the mirror at home and saw the new one coming through.

I wondered why a woman had such a straight body, because both Mother and Aunt Mae were round, and you could lay against them and be comfortable. Mrs. Watkins was straight all the way, with two big bones sticking out near her neck. You never knew where her waist was. Some days her dress would make it look like it was at her hips, but then it would be up across her chest or else near to where a waist should be. She must have had a big navel, because thin dresses sank way in near her stomach.

One day she was bending down over my desk to correct a paper, and I smelled her breath for the first time. I didn't know where I'd smelled that smell before, but I knew I had. I turned my head away and tried to cover my nose with my reader. That didn't do any good, though, and I could still smell it on the way home. It was a kind of odor you can't forget, the kind that reminds you of something or someone, like the smell of flowers always reminds me of funerals.

I don't know what I learned that year with Mrs. Watkins, but whatever it was there wasn't much of it, and I didn't like what there was. With three classes in the same room, she could only spend a little time with each one. I do know that I learned to read a little, because the next summer when I went to the movies with Aunt Mae I could read the name of the movie and people in it pretty well. I could add, too, and knew how to print. Poppa said that was all I had to know and I didn't have to go back the next fall. That was alright by me, but Mother wouldn't let me listen to him. Poppa was trying to grow some crops back in the hills above the house, and he needed someone to help him plow the clay, and Mother said that was why he didn't want me to go back to school.