Emily Rankin: ... chest. "Children, this is Betty Glengarry," which sounded to me like a name from a song. We were expected to say, "Good morning," so we did. Betty looked at us without a word. "We're a little crowded, Betty. But, we'll find a seat for you. Hang up your coat and lunch pail."

We all watched in silence to see where Mrs. Taylor would put Betty, but before she had a chance to assign a seat, a thin girl named Laura, apparently reading the writing on the wall, gathered up her books and wedged in next to her friend Emily, leaving a desk free. This became Betty's desk. It was in front of the one I shared with Ruth, close enough so that within a couple of days, I had spit balls clinging to my hair, and tiny red sores on my legs where Betty had reached back and poked me with her pencil. I wasn't happy about the situation, but I was glad that Betty had chosen to devil me instead of Ruth, who was smaller than I was, and dainty. And I had brothers who had inflicted far worse upon me, while Ruth had none. For the first week after Betty arrived, I decided to weather her minor attacks, expecting them to wane over time. In a different kind of school, the teacher might have noticed such things, but Mrs. Taylor had to trust that what was going on behind her back wasn't worth her attention.

Since she taught us all, the chairs clustered at the front of the room by the chalkboard were always occupied by whatever grade level was having a lesson, while the rest of us sat at our desks and did our work until it was our turn at the front. Some of the older boys slept through a good part of the day. When they woke up for their lessons at the chalkboard, they were so openly contemptuous of Mrs. Taylor that I believed the lessons she taught them were shorter than they might have been. They were all big boys who were useful on their farms, and didn't see the point of going to a school that wouldn't teach them to sow, or reap, or herd anything. And they knew full well that if the war was still going on when they were old enough, school wouldn't help them fight the Germans. Being the farmers and ranchers who fed the soldiers might save them from the war, or make them strong enough to fight. But school never would.

Still, in the coldest months, the work they might be asked to do at home was tedious and difficult; mending fences and barn roofs and wagon wheels. Given the choice to spend a day snoozing and, at recess, roughhousing with the other boys instead of working in the freezing wind, the boys generally chose school if their fathers let them. But when Betty arrived that October, the days were still warm, and so those awful boys were not regularly attending school. If not for her, the schoolhouse would have been a peaceful place. At least, until everything fell to pieces that terrible November, and I was called upon to tell my catalog of lies.

Back then, I didn't know a word that described Betty properly, or what to call the thing that set her apart from the other children in that school. Before she'd been there a week, she'd taught us a dozen words we had no business knowing, poured a well of ink on Emily's sweater, and told the little kids where babies came from, something I'd only just learned from my grandmother the spring before when the calves were born. For me, learning about babies was a gentle thing that my grandmother handled with the grace and humor of someone who had borne several of her own, every one of them on the bed where she still slept with my grandfather. But for the youngest of the children at my school, it was not gentle. Betty was cruel about it. She scared them to bits. Worst of all, she told them that if they tattled to their parents, she would follow them through the woods after school and beat them, as she later did me, maybe kill them. And they believed her, just as I did.

I could threaten my brothers with death and dismemberment a dozen times a day, and they would laugh at me and stick out their tongues. But when Betty merely looked at them, they settled right down. So, they might not have been much help had they been with me that day in Wolf Hollow, when Betty stepped out from behind a tree and stood in the path ahead of me.

When I was smaller, I asked my grandfather how Wolf Hollow got its name. "They used to dig deep pits there for catching wolves," he said. He was one of the eight of us who lived together in the farmhouse that had been in our family for 100 years. Three generations.