Esther's Pillow

by Marlin Fitzwater

  “Here, boys,” Aaron said, as he tossed it to the ground, and gave it the first kick. Thrilled with their new soccer ball, the children kicked the kidney around the yard and down by the granary, as Jack finished the butcher. Several days later, the kidney was still down by the corn field, dry as dirt and covered by flies.

  Butchering contained the kinds of lessons that every child had to learn, and they did so with some enthusiasm. School, on the other hand, was a necessary evil to most families and viewed in practical terms. Of course, there was a growing demand for a mathematical expertise—at least if anyone wanted to know the changing prices for corn, hogs, and wheat—but seven or eight years of school seemed more than enough to master the most important lessons: to memorize the Ten Commandments and learn to make moral decisions. Aaron and Ed both assumed that the new schoolteacher understood these principles of education; it was her family history that concerned them.

  “We’ll see how she does,” Ed said. “Wait till the first Literary, then we’ll see what happens.”

  Chapter Four

  Margaret Chambers knew it was Ileen because the screen door didn’t slam. It was allowed to close gently, as if slowed by the body of a cat slipping and twisting through the opening. Ileen Chambers walked softly in the world and doors closed gently behind her.

  Ileen maneuvered through the mud room, sidestepping the milk bucket and her father’s rubber overboots with the tin clasps. She noticed that her parents’ coats were gone from their nail hooks and realized she must have plenty of time before the Literary. Wherever her parents were, they would not miss Margaret’s first Literary as a teacher. Ileen was seventeen and had not gone to Literary since she was in high school, providing her mother with another explanation for Ileen’s lack of a husband: lack of exposure. But why did she need exposure in a community where she already knew everyone?

  “Is that you?” Margaret called out from her room.

  Ileen did not answer until she was in the bedroom. They had shared it all their lives, and the evidence surrounded them: a vase from Aunt Jane, a faded sampler blessing the home, and a Sunday school watercolor that Margaret had done twelve years ago. The watercolor was pretty, a daisy with bright colors. Margaret’s mother remarked on it every time she came in the room, so the girls kept it on the wall even after they became tired of it. A birdhouse with a red roof sat beside the china lamp. Margaret always said the painted blue jay on the lamp shade was the only admirer that birdhouse ever had, and probably so since Margaret took the house out of the tree just a week after her father had hung it on a low limb. She saw the neighbor’s cat creeping down the limb; the house had been in their room ever since. Margaret had once read a French saying that marriage was like a birdhouse, those without want in and those within want out. She wasn’t sure if she remembered the saying right, or exactly what it meant, but she thought about it a lot, especially when she became dissatisfied with her surroundings. It always seemed to her that she wanted an escape, but then she wanted a return to safety as well, like coming home to teach, even though she didn’t seem to have the patience for all the rituals of the job, like Literaries.

  “Ileen,” she said, “I’ve been going to Literaries all my life. I remember sitting on the front steps of Mt. Pleasant School when I was in about fourth grade, while all the adults were inside eating, and three boys about my age, maybe a little older, asked me if I wanted to go on a snipe hunt. I was so excited.”

  “You didn’t fall for the old snipe hunt, did you?” Ileen asked, laughing. “I thought you were too smart.”

  “I bought it for the same reason every kid buys it,” she said. “I wanted those boys to like me. Ed Garvey was one of them. I don’t remember the other two. But I remember sitting out in that grass, holding that stupid paper bag, and waiting for the boys to drive those snipes into my bag. And I remember waiting in the dark, just able to see the school past the mulberry bushes, and I remember being scared to death that some snake was going to get me before the snipes got there. And then I saw the door of the school open and a shaft of light came out that hit those boys full in the face, while they were laughing and sitting on the same steps where I had been, and I knew I had been tricked. I hated those boys. I ran inside to mother and they laughed at me all the way. I have never liked Literaries since.”

  “Oh, Margaret, you’re so dramatic,” Ileen said. “Those boys were harmless. And now Ed is one of our most important citizens. Practically runs the mill.”

  “It’s not that,” Margaret said. “It’s like the birdhouse. I feel trapped. Do you know that Jerry and Berry Quick are going to play their marimbas again? They’re grown men. They’ve been playing those twin marimbas for twenty years. We used to think they were going to be great musicians, giving concerts around the world. Now they’re just old bachelor farmers playing in barns.”

  “Oh, Margaret,” Ileen said with a kind of shushing sound, “you’re the only one who thought they would be traveling around the world. The rest of us knew they were just farm boys in overalls who liked playing the marimbas.”

  She let the moment slide, then added, “You probably thought that old man who played the harmonica and the accordion was going to the Kansas City symphony.”

  “Hush, Ileen,” Margaret said. “When did you get so sarcastic? And where did you get the Kansas City symphony?”

  “I don’t know,” Ileen said. “I’ve always liked the music, even the spoons player. You know I saw Dad trying that down in the barn once. I walked in and he had three spoons between the fingers of each hand and he was beating them against his knee, and I think he was even singing. Daddy can’t sing. But they had just been to a Literary, and he thought he could do it.”

  “At tonight’s Literary,” Margaret proclaimed, “I am the main attraction, and I don’t even want to go.”

  “You’re not my main attraction,” Ileen said, grinning. “I want to see those new Swedish boys you were telling me about, the blonde ones who just moved onto the Bonebreak place.”

  “Ileen, they’re still in school. Too young for you.”

  “I’m only seventeen, and I’m going to get married. One year doesn’t matter much.”

  “Just remember,” Margaret said, “there are four schools coming together tonight. I’m the only new teacher in years, and the only one who’s been to college. These people never change. Everybody sits around in the desks. Then we have Mrs. Darden introduce the teachers, then we have the Quick brothers, and the spoon players, and old Ab Grogger playing the bones, and then little Jenny Arnstead gives her reading. Then we set the date for the next Literary, adjourn, and then we have the covered dish dinner . . . a lot of baked beans and potato salad.”

  “Margaret, why are you teaching anyway?” Ileen said.

  “I love teaching. The kids are wonderful. It’s just these meetings with parents I can’t stand. Literaries are the only entertainment in this community. I understand that. They’re fun for the children and their families. They’re just not fun for the teachers.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t like the whistling Solomon family, with all those grandkids lined up, just a whistling and yodeling their hearts out,” Ileen said with a giggle.

  “We’ve been watching that family so long the oldest boy is seventy-three,” Margaret said, joining in the humor. “But that’s what makes it so hard to have fun around here. Everyone but the Solomon family is repressed. We don’t sing anything but hymns. Don’t dance. And the Reverend Aaron makes it sound like joy in any form except work is bad.”

  “Margaret,” Ileen countered, “you’ve got to work your way into heaven. That’s what the Bible says.”

  “Well, I want to dance . . . to have fun like we used to in college,” Margaret said. “I’m not just working to get into heaven. I want to meet a grown man as handsome as those Swenson boys and live in the city, and go to plays and dances and parties. Maybe I’ll just take that Swenson boy with me.”

  “Margaret, you don’t mean that. That Swenson b
oy is your pupil.”

  “I know that,” Margaret said, “but he does have an eye for me. You know what I mean, Ileen. I’m going to teach for five years and then move to Kansas City. You can come with me if you want.”

  There were 133 one-room schools in Nickerly County. Ostensibly, the reason for this was so that the children could walk to school, especially in winter when roads were difficult and hooking up the buggy for a short ride to school simply seemed extravagant. But a more compelling reason was parental control, over the teacher and over the curriculum.

  Mt. Pleasant was a larger school than Sunnyside, principally because it was closer to Nickerly and served a larger population. Mt. Pleasant was named for the picture of a mountain printed inside the textbooks selected for 1903. The mountain’s snow-crested peak was so pristine and sparkling that it reminded the school mothers of God’s beauty. Even though the closest mountain was in the Rockies, some 500 miles away, and no one in the Mt. Pleasant School had ever seen a real mountain, it seemed the perfect name for a new school. Several of the mothers looked at the Mt. Pleasant picture and proclaimed that they would one day visit that place.

  The school had twenty bench desks that ran the full width of the school, and twenty bench seats of the same length, meaning all the children sat in rows, side by side, an arrangement conducive to foolishness such as pencil poking and ankle kicking. Although hand holding had never been allowed, children would group together in the yard to laugh and tease about the latest school romance. Teachers watched this sort of thing carefully, and the admonitions against touching by the Reverend Aaron were a fearful reminder that such behavior was not allowed. For most children, of course, it was not desired anyway, and some of the boys placed their rulers on the bench as a reminder to any girl to keep her distance.

  On Literary night, the parents squeezed onto the benches, but the “ruler” division erected invisible barriers between families. It was crowded, and the farmers folded their arms over their stomachs so that their shoulders and hands wouldn’t accidentally touch. For several of the heavier farmers and their wives, maintaining the margin of decency could be quite taxing, to the point where farmers would turn in their seats, crossing their legs away from their neighbors and putting their arms around their wives’ shoulders, thus eliminating the possibility that anyone, even for an instant, could imagine any untoward touching.

  The easiest way to avoid this contortionist purity was simply for the men to sit together in the back of the room and the women to sit together in the front. As many of the Nickerly families came from Quaker ancestry, they were quite familiar with the separation of men and women in public places. Indeed, although it was now a source of liberal pride that most churches had moved away from the practice of forcing men and women to segregate, it was still a voluntary chastity that was widely practiced. Also, men and women had different things to talk about in terms of their farm duties. Some families liked the Literaries, however, because children were among the few subjects that men and women could talk about, and in many cases it was the only time a farmer even found himself in the company of a woman, or at least a woman other than his wife.

  So it was not unusual to see the first three rows filled with the women of the Civic Improvement Association, although there did seem to be a special intensity about their introductions, as each lined up to meet Margaret Chambers, the new teacher at Sunny-side. Margaret was wearing a dark blue wool dress that protected her against the cool air of the autumn prairie evening. The dress had bright white trim about the neck and sleeves. On her right shoulder, like a star against a blue bird’s wing, she wore a golden brooch, as large as a silver dollar and curved like a seashell. The brooch glittered like a piece of broken glass that catches the sun. Every introduction brought the patrons of the community face-to-face with this undefined challenge, this bit of rebellion.

  In fact, all the women were a little frightened of Margaret, for reasons that few understood. Ileen had noticed it years before. Even when Margaret was in high school, other women shied away from her on the street. When she walked into a group of adult women, they drew back like a clutch of hens, as though sensing danger in their midst. Even now, as the ladies drew closer to Margaret to welcome her to the school, some of them got a spooked look, like a horse’s eye when it catches the flicker of a passing shadow, skittish and fearful of a rock in the field. Ileen could never understand this reaction. Perhaps it came from Margaret’s reputation in school for perfect papers or from her physical maturity that had always seemed on the verge of being out of control. As a child Margaret’s long legs were hard to keep hidden. But there was also an innocence about Margaret that kept the women from gossip, from assigning any malicious motive to these lapses in decorum. It was as if Margaret could not be blamed for an uncontrollable gene her ancestors had bred beneath her bonnet.

  “What a beautiful brooch,” Mrs. Garvey said to Margaret, knowing that the ladies were already looking askance at the bright piece of jewelry and hoping to relieve the stigma by openly and specifically addressing the matter.

  “Thank you; I won it at school,” Margaret said. Margaret had won the brooch her first year at Emporia, as the only female member of the debate team that argued the merits of Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to bust the railroad trusts. The team sponsor had given writing pens to his team for years, but in honor of this break in the gender barrier, he had selected a simple brooch from the local jeweler. Margaret had worn it tonight as a symbol of intellectual achievement and because she liked the sparkle it gave to her dress.

  Mrs. Garvey could see that the womenfolk had a somewhat different interpretation, and was determined to help Margaret with a clear statement of her approval. But her chivalry didn’t prevent Mrs. Tucker from staring straight at the brooch as she said hello to Margaret. A look of condemnation was spread across her face like the pain of tight shoes. The brooch was brazen. It boasted of a superiority to Mrs. Tucker and most of the other ladies there, from a woman judged to have no right to superiority by all the normal standards of social ascendancy. Margaret’s claim to superiority could only come after she had taught for thirty years in the community, or if she married a farmer and raised a dozen children, or if long days of backbreaking work in the fields had yielded honest wealth, or if she demonstrated piety through faithful service to the church. These were the normal pathways to social acclaim and community praise. Anything less than a lifetime of commitment was a superficial attempt at recognition, a temporary and sometimes scornful presence, like the patent medicine salesman who stepped down from his square rig and prancing horse to offer cures for every ailment, then moved on down the road and out of mind.

  Margaret caught the look in Mrs. Tucker’s eye and instinctively stepped back. Then, recovering herself, she leaned into the introduction with the confidence she had learned in college and she did a remarkable thing: she stretched her arm forward to its full reach, opened her palm and there for all the room to see, she offered to shake Mrs. Tucker’s hand.

  Jay Langston, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Margaret since he first caught sight of the auburn curls that flowed over her shoulders, noticed the exchange with Mrs. Tucker and exclaimed to the men huddled near him, “The new teacher shakes hands.”

  “She thinks she’s a man,” said Ed Garvey. “My mother has treated that girl like a daughter, helped send her off to college, and now she comes back thinking she owns the place.”

  Margaret realized there was a flutter in the room, but she held steady, her gaze fixed and her smile as broad as Tiny Tucker’s bosom. Mrs. Tucker was not prepared to be on the defensive and had no idea how to respond. She was a private person in a world where people did not draw attention to themselves in public, certainly not by shaking hands, which women just did not do, and not by sharp words or wild gestures either. She turned and walked to her seat, head down, realizing her humiliation and vowing to exact an appropriate vengeance, just as soon as God made his wishes known. Margaret Chambers had committed the sin
of pride, and Tiny Tucker had no doubt that she would soon feel the wrath of the Lord.

  The handshake attempt brought the room to order as quickly as if someone had tapped a spoon on a glass, and the evening’s formal festivities began. The teacher at Mt. Pleasant School, Mr. Talmage Grimes, welcomed the parents and friends to the first Literary of the year.

  Mr. Talmage Grimes was only twenty-three. He had completed just one year of high school, the minimum requirement for getting a teaching certificate from the State of Kansas, and he had spent nearly four years helping his father in the local grocery store before leaving in a family dispute and deciding on a career in education. He found himself well suited to education, patient with the children, studious in his preparations, and serious in his ambition. As a man, he enjoyed the preferential benefits of a higher salary and community recognition. He was in his third year of teaching, and he was earning thirty-six dollars a month, well above Margaret’s starting salary of thirty-one dollars and fifty cents. He introduced Margaret briefly as the new teacher at Sunnyside, whose family had resided in Nickerly for many years.

  Margaret had thought about her introduction to the community carefully. Although this was an evening of socializing, she wanted to express her seriousness of purpose and to educate the parents as to their children’s curriculum. This first Literary might be the only one of the year for the men folk, especially if the remaining ones occurred during a snowstorm or at harvest time.

  “Good evening,” she began, “I’m delighted to meet you all, even though I know most of you from living here, and I thank you for coming. I want to take this moment to tell you about our new eighth-grade graduation test. It will be given to all proposed graduates, and since we don’t have any eighth-grade students this year, I thought you would like to take the test, just to see how smart our children have to be to graduate.”