<\/p>\n
The Informer<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ll never forget Chip\u2019s enormous right thumb, directed toward me, as he turned in response to Mrs. Laird\u2019s question about my desk mate, Robert: \u201cWho told him the answers?\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019ll never forget the jerk of my own torso, the pop of her hand against my virgin first-grade butt, as I learned the hard way the lesson of all tellers.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll never forget Parents\u2019 Night, 1962, as I stood over my first six weeks\u2019 test work and saw the full-page \u201cU\u201d scrawled by Mrs. Laird across my arithmetic problems. I hadn\u2019t realized that you couldn\u2019t add moons and suns. So very unsatisfactory.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll never forget the news, over a decade later, that Mrs. Laird had been crushed to death in her own garage. By her son, only a \u201clearning permit\u201d driver, who thought he had shifted the car into reverse before he accelerated.<\/p>\n I know one act doesn\u2019t lead to another. I know that no one, mother or son, deserves such a fate. But remember: I\u2019m the one who, at age six, added four moons and three suns and got a sum of seven.<\/p>\n And I\u2019m the one left, here and now, to tell their story.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2028Terry Barr<\/strong> is the author of the essay collection, Don’t Date Baptists and Other Warnings From My Alabama Mother<\/em>. He lives in Greenville, SC, with his family and has had essays published in Full Grown People, Vol. 1, Brooklyn, <\/em>and The Bitter Southerner.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Informer I\u2019ll never forget Chip\u2019s enormous right thumb, directed toward me, as he turned in response to Mrs. Laird\u2019s question about my desk mate, Robert: \u201cWho told him the answers?\u201d I\u2019ll never forget the jerk of my own torso, the pop of her hand against my virgin first-grade butt, as I learned the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13408"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13409,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13408\/revisions\/13409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}