Page 70 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

Mr. Corley had about half his nose cut off in a saloon fight when he was a young man. He looked much worse that the artist Van Gogh with his ear cut off.
Our biggest problem at the Corleys’ was with bedbugs. I had never had any experience with them at all, but Imogene had come across them somewhere. I didn’t have much trouble with them so long as Imogene was there, but if she went away for the weekend, they began to attack me. I guess she was more palatable than I was.
We tried everything we’d ever heard of to get rid of them. We put the mattress out to sun all day, we sprayed it, we set the bed legs in cans of water, and later in kerosene, and absolutely nothing seemed to phase them. We finally decided they were dropping down from the ceiling. One thing we didn’t try was burning the mattress.
This was in the days of the WPA, and they were going to build a new school house for Claunch. The ones in charge said they needed a room for an office and for storing some of their materials. Why they couldn’t have found an empty room in some building in town, I’ll never know, but we gave them one of ours. Since we had only four rooms in the school - and they were all in use - that meant that two rooms had to double up. Dora Elsie moved her room of teenagers and preteens into my room of teenagers. The room was divided by a curtain but that did not curtail the noises of two classes going on simultaneously. That was really one hectic time for all of us, especially with the added noises coming from the construction site while we were trying to teach school.
The most sorrowful part of it was that after all that inconvenience and difficulty, and our own patience and forbearance, I never even got to see the building completed, much less teach in it awhile. You know what they used to say about the WPA men leaning on their shovels.
A most terrible odor permeated the room at one time. We decided it came from under the floor, but had no way of getting to it. The high school boys and I took up the floor and found a long-dead skunk. After it was removed, we were all right again in about a week.
The county was having some kind of school fair, and we had all the pupils doing art work of every kind to put in it. Dora Elsie had found a place where there was a deposit of crystalline material that proved to be just right for making castles and things.
It was strong enough to hold its shape but soft enough to form anything we wanted by pinching off a bit here and another bit there.
We ran out of material on Friday, so because the time was growing short for delivering the finished product to Socorro, that afternoon after school Dora Elsie, Imogene and I went after more. We were in a big hole in the ground about twelve or fifteen feet across, and taking the crystal out of the sides of the hole. We were digging it out in large chunks and we pulled out a piece about the size of a laundry basket. It was very light weight as you can see.
Just behind this piece was a huge hollow space - filled to overflowing with about a hundred hibernating rattlesnakes, all coiled up together like tangled string. In the