Hunter's Horn by Harriette Simpson Arnow

Author:Harriette Simpson Arnow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michigan State University Press

CHAPTER TWENTY

Suse hated the haymaking; it made her miss two more days of school, and already, because of Milly's condition, she had had to miss more than usual to help with the washing and the floor scrubbing; and Miss Burdine complained and scolded each time a scholar was even late. And now when Suse came back after the haymaking, Miss Burdine was even more sharp, because Andy had gone on in his studies and Suse had missed a lot. They had got into one of the hardest places in the eighth-grade arithmetic, where a body had to build a whole round silo with a round floor and a bottom thicker than the top, reinforced with four-inch pipe, and all of concrete at so much a cubic yard, and figure out how much the whole thing cost, even to the paint.

Suse read the problem three times, and then whispered to Andy, sweating over half a tablet full of figures, “I reckon she explained it all th first day I missed.”

“Kind of,” Andy answered, “but I somehow couldn't much understand—we worked some a th same kind in water tanks last year, recollect, but not so long. I recken I'm a worken this right, but I keep missen th answer. It allus costs a little too much.”

Suse studied the explanations in the book for a time, then worked the problem; her answer was within a few cents of Andy's but was several dollars more than that in the book. Arithmetic class was not far away. “Let's ask her are we on the right road,” Suse whispered.

Andy shook his head. “She don't much like to be asked about arithmetic.”

“You're bashful,” Suse said, and as soon as Miss Burdine had finished third-grade reading class—John Robison Tiller—she raised her hand and asked if Miss Burdine would please look at their silo problems a minute: she and Andy had worked and worked; their answers were almost exactly alike but different from that in the book, and they couldn't find any mistakes they'd made; could the answer in the book be wrong, she asked—once they'd used an arithmetic book and Andrew had found three wrong answers.

Miss Burdine smiled the distant, half pitying, half ridiculing—or so it sometimes seemed to Suse—smile she often gave the children. “Now, Suse, you know the answers in our textbooks are always right. You missed the day I explained the problems and I can t interrupt my work to explain again…. Maybe you're copying from Andy and that's the reason you get the wrong answer.”

She called fifth-grade reading, Lee Roy and Ruby, and turned away.

Andy gaped at her in surprise, but Suse bent her head and stared at her figure-covered tablet page through embarrassed, angry tears. Arithmetic between her and Andy had always been a kind of game—they'd worked much together and copying would have destroyed the game.

Andy was patting her on the back and whispering, “Don't feel bad, Suse. Anyway she didn't explain the silos to me—she read out loud what th book said an told me to start worken.

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