A Distant Music

by BJ Hoff

  Billy grinned and dropped a pencil to the floor. “That pencil, Weaselface.”

  Jonathan rapped his pointer on the corner of his desk, but neither youth seemed aware of his presence. He waited, deciding to see how the Tallman boy would handle the situation.

  Kenny stared at the pencil on the floor for a long time. Finally, he bent over and picked it up, handing it to Billy without looking at him.

  Jonathan wasn’t surprised. Most of the younger children gave in to Billy Macken’s bullying. The boy was the biggest student in the room and had an air of meanness about him that, combined with his size and rough behavior, was nothing less than intimidating.

  He’d been held back more than once, and so he was one of the older students in the room. At fourteen he could have gone into the mines—it wasn’t unusual for much younger boys to leave school and join their fathers in the coal mines. But Jonathan suspected that sheer laziness had kept Billy aboveground so far. Laziness and an overly indulgent mother, who had apparently talked her husband into letting their son stay in school for a while longer.

  Jonathan tried not to warm to the idea of the Macken boy leaving school, even though it would make his days considerably easier. Billy had routinely rebuffed every attempt to interest him in learning. The boy was a daily discipline problem and a continual aggravation to the other children. Even so, Jonathan was loath to see Billy or any other boy go into the mines at such a young age. But if something didn’t change, and change drastically, he was going to have to fail the boy again this year, and no doubt that would be the end of Billy’s education. He couldn’t see Buck Macken holding still for his son to stay out of the mines much longer.

  He went to the boy’s desk, waiting until he had his attention. “Billy, I want you to go outside and come in again, this time with a different attitude.”

  The boy met Jonathan’s eyes with a defiant sneer, but finally he stood and sauntered down the aisle to the door.

  Jonathan sighed and, ignoring the urge to give Kenny Tallman a reassuring pat on the shoulder, turned and went back to sit down at his desk.

  When he glanced up again, he saw Lester Monk trudging up the aisle, brushing snow from his hair. The boy stumbled—a common occurrence with Lester—and shot Jonathan a self-conscious grin as he righted himself and squeezed in behind his desk.

  Jonathan smiled back, studying the boy. Certainly Lester’s family could use the money that an underhanded sale of the flute might bring. But somehow Jonathan couldn’t envision the plodding, awkward Lester as the culprit. The youth simply didn’t have the imagination to concoct such a scheme, much less the mental acuity to carry it off. Lester was clumsy, often inept—but he was no thief. Of that Jonathan was confident.

  Behind Lester came Maggie MacAuley and little Summer Rankin, great friends who, admittedly, were two of Jonathan’s favorite students. Both of them looked his way and smiled. Even though he had always tried to discipline himself against the folly of having favorites in the classroom, it was hard not to be partial to these two, different though they were in age and temperament.

  Maggie MacAuley, with her riot of fiery copper hair and sharp little chin, was probably the brightest child in the one-room schoolhouse. The girl was unfailingly cheerful; her quick, eager smile would have melted the ice under Dunbar’s mill in mid-January. Moreover, she had a keen wit, an insatiable curiosity, and a hunger to learn that challenged even Jonathan’s love of teaching.

  Maggie’s parents were Irish immigrants, the family as poor as any other in town. Even so, Maggie and her two older sisters were invariably dressed in clean feed-sack pinafores, and the parts in their neatly combed hair appeared to have been cut with a straightedge.

  Jonathan knew the MacAuleys to be good, principled people who did the best they could with the little they had. Maggie’s father, Matthew MacAuley, was a leader of sorts among the miners—a man others respected and heeded, a man from whom his coworkers were likely to seek counsel.

  It seemed to Jonathan that Maggie was very much her father’s daughter. Possessed of a generous heart and a fiercely loyal nature, she could be counted on to help look after the younger children in the classroom and come to their aid whenever needed. She also exhibited a measure of common sense rarely encountered in one so young, a trait that more than once had led Jonathan to entrust her with considerable responsibility.

  Yes, he was fairly certain that Matthew MacAuley’s daughter was, like her father, a natural leader.

  But not for a minute did he believe she was a thief.

  As for poor little Summer Rankin, Jonathan’s heart ached for the child, whose frailty seemed even more stark when reflected in the glow of Maggie’s vitality. He found it absurd, and somehow obscene, to consider this small girl even remotely capable of wrongdoing.

  Summer was a mere wisp of a child—a tiny, fragile creature whose white-blond hair and pale skin would have given her an almost spectral appearance had it not been for the angry flush of fever that more often than not blotched her hollowed cheeks. Jonathan had it from Dr. Woodbridge that the girl had a rheumatic heart and failing lungs. Of late, she was out of school more than she was in, and even on the days she was present, a distracted, distant stare glazed her eyes, causing Jonathan to wonder just how aware she really was of her surroundings.

  Nine years old, Summer lived midway up the Hill in a rough-hewn cabin crammed with people, both children and adults. Jonathan almost always came away from his visits to the Rankin home feeling somewhat dazed by the number of family members who seemed to inhabit that cramped, raucous dwelling. Aging grandparents, aunts and uncles, and three of Summer’s siblings—all under the age of six—lived there. It struck him as truly remarkable that a delicate, dreamy child like Summer could exist in such shabby bedlam, albeit an apparently happy bedlam.

  For a time, until he had come to know both children better, Jonathan had puzzled over the bond between Summer Rankin and Maggie MacAuley. The twelve-year-old Maggie was as strong and self-assured as Summer was frail and shy.

  While Maggie preferred rousing stories of adventure and sensible, precise lesson assignments, Summer responded mostly to art and music. In fact, this fey child was the only one of Jonathan’s students he had ever allowed to touch his silver flute. A shyly whispered plea in the fall of the year had moved Jonathan to comply, even to demonstrate the basic rudiments of technique. To his amazement, within minutes Summer had managed to evoke a simple but plaintive folk melody he’d played for the class upon occasion.

  But that had been months ago. These days, the girl had neither the breath nor the energy to play. Indeed, Jonathan suspected that most of Summer’s strength now had to be conserved for the mere effort of existence.

  A condition which he was beginning to understand all too well…

  He watched the child take her seat, his throat tightening as she smiled up at Maggie MacAuley, who bent over the desk to button the top of Summer’s sweater before scooting in behind her own desk. Maggie was fiercely protective of her ailing little friend. Even those inclined to bully the younger children were reluctant to incur Maggie’s wrath by teasing or otherwise harassing Summer.

  The weight pressing on his heart squeezed even harder as Jonathan questioned just how much longer Maggie’s young friend would need her protection. He could almost see the girl failing. He wondered if Maggie saw it too, and he rather hoped she did. Otherwise, it would only go harder for her when she had to face the truth.

  One after another the children slipped into their seats, Jonathan dismissing each as a potential thief with little more than a glance. These children were better than that. Other than Billy Macken and Orrin Gaffney, he couldn’t believe any one of them was capable of deliberate treachery—or cruelty. For surely it might have been cruelty that motivated the theft. As much as he tried to avoid the thought, there was always the possibility that the flute hadn’t been stolen for its monetary value at all, but rather to deliver a personal wound to him.

  In that event,
the offender would be someone with a grudge against him or, at the very least, someone who disliked him intensely. Was it possible that one of the children—his children—could actually bear such animosity toward him without his knowing?

  Billy Macken now walked back into the schoolroom, and Jonathan’s eyes went from him to Orrin Gaffney. Was it possible?

  While the very idea appalled him, Jonathan wasn’t in the least ignorant of human nature’s capacity for meanness or duplicity. His years of association with children and their families had introduced him to a dismaying range of cruelties, of which both the young and their elders were capable. He had lost his youthful naïveté and much of his earlier belief in the innate goodness of man some time ago.

  Yet with all their faults, these children were like family to him. Indeed, he loved them almost as much as if they were his family, in no small part because he had recognized their need for love and attention.

  Much of the time, even the two troublemakers, Billy and his chum, Orrin, could evoke an aching compassion in him. He made a determined effort to dismiss his suspicion of the two. He mustn’t judge them without evidence. Who could say what motivated their rebellious behavior, aggression, and spitefulness? Certainly, they shared the same needs and the same deprivations as any of the other students in his schoolroom.

  It hadn’t taken Jonathan long to realize that the children of Skingle Creek had known little in the way of affection or gentleness in their young lives. Nor had they been exposed to much in the way of beauty or the arts. This dark cavern of a town, carved from the bottom side of a mountain, seemed to exist in the shadows. If the coal dust from the mines hadn’t smudged the face of the entire community, the lowering gloom from the surrounding hills would have. It was a gray, hopeless place in which to live, and sooner or later, many of those within its confines became a gray, hopeless people.

  Survival seemed the only real ambition of the town’s residents, their only visible achievement. Many were uneducated, even illiterate. The men—and most of their sons—broke their backs and punished their lungs by hammering and picking away in the bowels of the earth. They seldom saw daylight except on Sunday, going below-ground before dawn and emerging, half-blind and hunched, well after sundown.

  Although they created small joys wherever and whenever they could, for the most part mining families seemed to live grim, even bitter lives, from which escape was virtually impossible. The mining company had structured a brilliantly ruthless system that worked entirely to the company’s advantage.

  It was a system that bordered on enslavement. Not only did the company own the store that represented the miners’ only source of food and clothing, but they also provided the only clinic where medical treatment could be obtained. They even owned the building that presently housed the school.

  The truth was that the company owned the town.

  And, for all intents and purposes, the miners themselves.

  Two

  The Collection

  I set my face to the road here before me…

  Padraic Pearse

  A month after the silver flute turned up missing, Maggie MacAuley decided that something had to be done about Mr. Stuart.

  He looked as thin as one of the racing dogs Garth Miller kept down in his barn. Only the day before, Lily Woodbridge had said he looked “faded,” and though Maggie disliked agreeing with anything Lily said, she would have been hard-pressed to argue.

  Indeed, Mr. Stuart was beginning to remind her of her mother’s good Sunday tablecloth, which at one time had been bright and colorful, with mouthwatering pictures of loaves of bread and blue milk jugs on it. Now it was faded from so many launderings that it had hardly any color left to it. Ever since Lily’s remark, Maggie would sometimes find herself gripped by the fanciful thought that when she looked up from her books she might find Mr. Stuart gone, faded away like the designs on that tablecloth.

  He was terrible quiet these days—so quiet that sometimes they almost forgot he was even in the schoolroom. He was still strict with the lessons, still gave them proper instructions, but more and more often now he allowed them to work by themselves instead of holding what he called “class discussions.”

  Of late he was so…distant…that he didn’t even seem to notice when the pesky Crawford twins or Billy Macken and Orrin Gaffney acted up. If they became too rambunctious, he would just look at them with his sad, tired eyes, and pretty soon Dinah and Duril would cease their mischief, as if they knew their teacher didn’t have the strength to settle them down. Billy and Orrin, of course, only pretended to behave. As soon as Mr. Stuart turned his back, they started up with their mischief again.

  He was like a man who was drifting away from himself, leaving only a shadow behind to keep order in the schoolroom.

  Maggie was determined to find a way to help the teacher be himself again, to make things in their school the way they used to be. But an unsettled feeling in the pit of her stomach told her she’d better be doing something soon or it would be too late.

  It snowed most of the morning, so Maggie and the other children had to stay inside for lunch. But early in the afternoon the sky cleared, and Mr. Stuart sent them outside to take some fresh air. Now everyone was standing around the school yard, their breath spiraling up like the smoke from the coal chimneys that fogged the town.

  “We have to do something about Mr. Stuart,” Maggie said, tugging her knitted gloves up over her wrists as far as they would go.

  Summer Rankin bobbed her head up and down, puffing her fair hair into a halo around her cap. “Mr. Stuart is bad sick.” She started to add something more, but instead broke into a fit of coughing. These days it seemed that Summer was nearly always coughing.

  “It’s his heart,” said Lily, her face pinched in a wise-old-owl expression. “My daddy said he could tell from just looking at him that his heart is bad.”

  As the daughter of Skingle Creek’s only doctor, Lily offered every comment as though the entire town had been holding its breath, just waiting to hear from her. Maggie had heard her da say that Lebreen Woodbridge was “little more than a quack” and probably ought not to be doctoring even hogs or chickens, but Lily took on as though the man made house calls on the governor himself.

  Never one to tolerate Lily’s airs, Maggie offered her own observation on Mr. Stuart’s state of health. “His heart is broken,” she said, ignoring Lily’s sour look. “He’s that sad because he doesn’t have his flute anymore. The music has gone out of him.”

  Junior Tyree, whose daddy was the town junkman and garbage hauler, dug the toe of his shoe at a rock embedded in the ground. Junior’s people were the only black folks in Skingle Creek, and as a rule he didn’t have much to say about anything that went on—which was just as well, since some folks probably wouldn’t have paid him any mind. To Maggie’s way of thinking, however, Junior showed more sense than lots of the white people in town. She for one had learned to pay attention on those rare occasions when Junior volunteered an opinion, which he looked about to do.

  “He’s gonna leave,” said Junior, studying his foot as he went on raking the toe of his already scuffed shoe on the rock. “Teacher won’t be staying around here much longer. He prob’ly thinks one of us took his flute.”

  That remark just about made Maggie take back her opinion of Junior’s good sense. “Don’t talk crazy, Junior Tyree! Mr. Stuart would not think any such thing. He knows we wouldn’t steal his flute.”

  Junior looked up, his dark brown eyes squinting at Maggie. Junior always squinted, for though he could scarcely see the tip of his own nose, he was either too poor or too proud to wear spectacles. Maggie figured him to be too poor. Indeed, of them all, it seemed that Kenny Tallman was the only one who could afford eyeglasses.

  “How you figure?” said Junior. “Who else is he gonna think done it ’sides one of us?”

  His statement brought on an angry buzz from the others. “You better just hush, Junior Tyree!” Lily Woodbridge pushed up to Junior, hand
s on her hips, blond sausage curls wagging. “You don’t know anything!”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Or maybe you do. Maybe it was you who stole Mr. Stuart’s flute, and that’s why you’re so sure he suspects one of us.”

  “Oh, be quiet, Lily,” Maggie muttered.

  Junior might have said a dumb thing, but he wouldn’t have stolen Mr. Stuart’s flute, and Lily knew that just as well as anyone. Junior was just like his daddy, Ezra, and didn’t Da always say you could trade Ezra Tyree’s word for gold, he was that honest?

  “It seems to me that we need to be working out a plan to help Mr. Stuart instead of standing here quarreling at one another,” she said pointedly.

  She looked at the others—first Summer and then Lily, Lester, and Kenny. The problem was too big for the lot of them, she knew. But her mother always maintained that you had to start where you were or you’d never get anywhere at all.

  That being the case, Maggie took a deep breath and proceeded to speak her mind.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said, waiting until the others quieted before going on. “We can all of us see that Mr. Stuart is ailing bad. He’s always been peaked, but he’s even more sickly since his flute went missing. If we could just have found that flute, he might be feeling better by now, or at least not any worse.”

  “But we didn’t find it,” Kenny Tallman pointed out.

  Maggie shot him an impatient look. “Like we don’t know that?”

  Kenny pushed up his eyeglasses a little higher on the bridge of his nose. “Well, I just mean it’s not as if we didn’t try. We looked everywhere we could think of.”

  “So then,” Maggie said, “it occurs to me we might want to replace the flute.”

  She might as well have announced that they were going to blow up Dredd’s Mountain with a firecracker, the way they were all staring at her.

  “Listen now,” she said in a rush, “Mr. Stuart’s birthday is coming up. December 22, remember? That’s almost Christmas. I was thinking that somehow we might give him a birthday present and a Christmas gift.” She paused and then added, drawing out the words to emphasize them: “A…brand…new…flute.”