"If your teacher has to die, August isn't a bad time of year for it. You know August. The corn is earring. The tomatoes are ripening on the vine. The clover's in full bloom. There's a little less evening now, and that's a warning. You want to live every day twice over because you'll be back in the jailhouse of school before the end of the month."
This is the opening paragraph of the novel. It immediately situates the central premise of the narrative. The protagonist, Russell Culver, does not like school and will take any opportunity that comes his way to avoid it. That list of opportunities even extends to viewing the death of a teacher as a golden ticket to get out of going to school for as long as it takes to find a replacement. The references in this paragraph also make it immediately obvious that this is not an inner-city school story. Corn, tomatoes, and clover all indicate a distinctly rural setting and strongly suggest a farming community. If Russell almost giving prayerful thanks for his teacher dying isn't enough of a hint about the full extent of his disdain for school, surely the comparison to a prison removes any remaining doubt. At the very same time, however, that opening line also indicates that Russell has a sense of humor.
"In their wisdom, the school board had hired on Tansy to take Miss Myrt's place at Hominy Ridge School. They wouldn't pay for a real teacher trained at the Terre Haute normal school. Probably Miss Myrt herself had never darkened the door of the normal school, or even been to Terre Haute. They could get Tansy for thirty-six dollars a month because she still had a year of high school to go. She'd no doubt talked them into it. But it wouldn't have taken much. The school board dearly loved a bargain."
Russell's teacher, Miss Myrt, is very much dead. Her passing is that golden opportunity he has been waiting for. It is not just that he is expecting to get temporarily excused from attending school until a new teacher can be hired. It is that Russell realizes the process of finding a new teacher will push the temporary freedom from school into one lasting long enough to pursue his dream. Russell has some vague plans to head to the Dakotas with his best friend. The expectation of a long delay in finding a replacement for the departed Miss Myrt is what drives Russell's hopes. Those hopes are dashed by the unexpected rapidity with which the school has found a replacement. The new teacher is a young woman named Tansy of clearly dubious qualifications. Her willingness to accept wages even below the level of her limited qualifications is also quite clearly her strongest attribute. Simply having found a replacement for Miss Myrt would have complicated Russell's Dakota dreams, but there is one other element about the new hire that really complicates things. Her name is Tansy Culver. She is Russell's older sister.
"Then quite a lot happened all at the same time. With an explosion that left my ears ringing well into the new year, the whole stove stood up on its hind legs. The door that Glenn was closing hung loose in his blackened hand. The stovepipe came clattering down from the ceiling, belching a bushel of black soot all over us and the room, including the head of Abraham Lincoln."
The question becomes one of just how far Russell is willing to go to ensure his sister's dreams of being a teacher remains as unfulfilled as his own dreams of getting away from school forever and carving out a life dream of independence and freedom in the Dakotas. Things begin on the first day of school when he muffles the sound of the bell Tansy uses to announce the commencement of the school day. As the year goes on, separate incidents involve a fire and the furtive placement of a puff adder. Tansy will not be deterred from realizing her dream, however. The explosion threatens to bring all that to an end, however. It is not a small firecracker affair. The explosion is caused by the igniting of gunpowder and is both physically destructive to the school and emotionally devastating to Tansy because she is convinced her brother has finally crossed a line in his pranksterism. The above quote describes an aftermath of the explosion which seems to all but confirm this accusation. When Russell pins the blame entirely on Glenn, Tansy reminds him of his history of always blaming others amid her certainty that her brother has just effectively destroyed any chance she had of becoming a certified teacher.
