Milkweed Ladies by Louise McNeill Page B

hill.
    The schoolhouse stood on posts, and the sheep that pastured in the schoolyard sheltered under the floor. Sometimes, in the middle of a class, we could hear them bumping around under us, bawling. We had a flagpole and flag, a stove, desks, a bench, a water cooler, one shelf of worn-out books,and hooks on the wall to hang our overcoats; but in the winter of 1930, we didn't hang our coats much, for the board of education had no money to fix the broken window sash. I tried to fix it with rags, and I kept the fire boomed up, but the blizzard winds came howling in. I taught most of that winter in my warm leather jacket with a red tam-o'-shanter on my head.
    I had twenty-six pupils in all eight grades, and though I had studied “educational methods” in college, I had learned nothing about teaching school. So I remembered Miss Anne Correll and called the kids, one class at a time, up to the Recitation Bench. At noon we gathered around the stove, and the kids ate their white beans and jelly-bread sandwiches. Everybody had apples, and there were still a few wild American chestnuts and plenty of fall blackberries and wild goose plums. Often at night we would go from house to house, eating homegrown popcorn and apples and playing our mountain music: “The Little Mowhee,” “Wildwood Flower,” and “Red Wing.”
    The door peg and Granny's broom handle had held the world, but by 1932 Granny lay bed-sick over at Aunt Mat's and everybody was talking about the hard times. The Great Depression was reaching its low point.There were stores going out of business and a lot of men walking the road. Then the government started giving away “commodities,” and Miss Moss Miller brought Mama a whole poke full of stuff: big grapefruit and lard and canned beef. There were foreclosures: Uncle Hunter's drug store failed, and he had to go to work on the county roads with a pick and shovel. Then the bank took Uncle Dan'l's farm; and one winter morning, Uncle Dan'l died of pneumonia, from walking his line fences in the snow.
    Sometime during the Depression, Wint's store burned down, and nobody knew why. The store went up like a box of tinder, and all over the neighborhood the eerie light shivered in the sky. When the fire got to the shelf of shotgun shells, the shells exploded and shot off, whizzing into the night like Roman candles. All the store goods, and all the men's tall tales, and our village center went up that night in a great display of fireworks, a kind of blazing last gesture of defiance against the coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his alphabet soup.
    The very night of the day we moved over to the road, Granny Fanny died. She had been in bed over at Aunt Mat's for nearly a year, sometimes sitting up against the pillow knitting socks. I had been over to seeher a few weeks before and had told her about the new calves and how the garden was planted, and on my way back across the pasture that evening I had felt the strange hovering in the air of death's gray wing.
    The undertaker put Granny Fanny into a fine black dress with white ruffles at her wrists and throat. Everybody said how she looked so “natural,” but she didn't look natural to me. She looked more like some fine, proud mountain queen who had ruled over all her people and had never bruted or slaved. I was a grown girl by then and had gone off to college, and I had made my vow to be a poet and learned all hundred verses of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat by heart. When they took Granny Fanny up to our grave-hill in the black hearse, I went to her in my new white silk dress, carrying an armful of red poppies, for I had read in the decadent fin de siècle poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne that poppies are for sleep:
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    Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;
    For these give joy and sorrow; But thou, Proserpina, sleep.
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    During the years of my brush country schoolteaching, I would go out