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.
