Who Do You Think You Are

in the entrance to the Boys’ Toilet. She did not deliberately repeat the toilet locale, and was a bit surprised at the way it kept cropping up. She knew that those little dark or painted shacks were supposed to be comical—always were, in country humor—but she saw them instead as scenes of marvelous shame and outrage.
    The Girls’ Toilet and the Boys’ Toilet each had a protected entry-way, which saved having a door. Snow blew in anyway through the cracks between the boards and the knotholes that were for spying. Snow piled up on the seat and on the floor. Many people, it seemed, declined to use the hole. In the heaped snow under a glaze of ice, where the snow had melted and frozen again, were turds copious or lonesome, preserved as if under glass, bright as mustard or grimy as charcoal, with every shading in between. Rose’s stomach turned at the sight; despair got hold of her. She halted in the doorway, could not force herself, decided she could wait. Two or three times she wet on the way home, running from the school to the store, which was not very far. Flo was disgusted.
    “Wee-pee, wee-pee,” she sang out loud, mocking Rose. “Walking home and she had a wee pee!”
    Flo was also fairly pleased, because she liked to see people brought down to earth, Nature asserting itself; she was the sort of woman who will make public what she finds in the laundry bag. Rose was mortified, but didn’t reveal the problem. Why not? She was probably afraid that Flo would show up at the school with a pail and shovel, cleaning up, and lambasting everybody into the bargain.
    She believed the order of things at school to be unchangeable, the rules there different from any that Flo could understand, the savagery incalculable. Justice and cleanliness she saw now as innocent notions out of a primitive period of her life. She was building up the first store of things she could never tell.
    She could never tell about Mr. Burns. Right after she started to school, and before she had any idea what she was going to see—or, indeed, of what there was to see—Rose was running along the school fence with some other girls, through the red dock and goldenrod, and crouching behind Mr. Burns’s toilet, which backed on the schoolyard. Someone had reached through the fence and yanked the bottom boards off, so you could see in. Old Mr. Burns, half-blind, paunchy, dirty, spirited, came down the backyard talking to himself, singing, swiping at the tall weeds with his cane. In the toilet, too, after some moments of strain and silence, his voice was heard.
There is a green hill far away
Outside a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.
    Mr. Burns’s singing was not pious but hectoring, as if he longed, even now, for a fight. Religion, around here, came out mostly in fights. People were Catholics or fundamentalist Protestants, honor-bound to molest each other. Many of the Protestants had been—or their families had been—Anglicans, Presbyterians. But they had got too poor to show up at those churches, so had veered off to the Salvation Army, the Pentecostals. Others had been total heathens until they were saved. Some were heathens yet, but Protestant in fights. Flo said the Anglicans and the Presbyterians were snobs and the rest were Holy Rollers, while the Catholics would put up with any two-facedness or debauching, as long as they got your money for the Pope. So Rose did not have to go to any church at all.
    All the little girls squatted to see, peered in at that part of Mr.
    Burns that sagged through the hole. For years Rose thought she had seen testicles but on reflection she believed it was only bum. Something like a cow’s udder, which looked to have a prickly surface, like the piece of tongue before Flo boiled it. She wouldn’t eat that tongue, and after she told him what it was Brian wouldn’t eat it either, so Flo went into a temper and said they could live on boiled baloney.
    Older girls didn’t get down to look, but stood by, some making puking noises. Other little girls jumped up and joined them, eager to imitate, but Rose remained squatting, amazed and thoughtful. She would have liked longer to contemplate, but Mr. Burns removed himself, came out buttoning and singing. Girls sneaked along the fence, to call to him.
    “Mr. Burns! Good morning Mr. Burns! Mr. Burns-your-balls!” He came roaring at the fence, chopping with his cane, as if they were chickens.
    Younger and older, boys and girls and