His mouth twitched as he squinted at my fingers sticky with turpentine. “Mrs. Gladney wants to see you at the school,” he said, stuffing his hands into his pocket.
My hand stuck out between us as I blinked a few times. “When does she want me to be there?”
Joe Don flinched as the buzz saw in the nearby building sheared off bark from a gigantic log. “Half-past five today. She said she’s expecting you.”
“Tell her I’ll be there.”
“She knows you will. She said so.” He looked me over, head to toe, and walked toward the front gate.
I knew she planned to make the case for me to finish school. I wouldn’t explain why I quit; I’d lie if she pressed me. Though the trip would be a waste of her time and mine, I looked forward to saying a proper goodbye.
The school floors smelled of wax and ammonia and gleamed beneath the silver dome-lights mounted in the ceiling. My soles squeaked as I walked the empty hallways, doors closed and rooms dark on either side of me. In my stained clothes, with my hands still a little sticky from turpentine and my back throbbing like a regular working man’s, I could imagine that I hadn’t set foot in a school for years. Those days were long behind me.
Mrs. Gladney’s door stood open at the end of the hall. Sunshine and electric light spilled out onto the clean linoleum. I softened my footsteps and eased up the corridor, wanting to hear her at work.
Her scratching pencil made a flourish, perhaps underlining a term-paper grade. She said, “Roger, I hope you’re not planning to scare me.”
“No, ma’am.” I stepped around the corner and used my best classroom English. “Joe Don said that you wanted to see me.”
Mrs. Gladney pushed away from her desk and faced me. She wore a demure jade-green skirt with matching shoes and a long-sleeved white blouse topped with a gold necklace. Since I’d seen her in October, a new tightness creased the corners of her eyes and pinched her mouth. She looked older than her thirty years. For the first time, I noticed not a beautiful woman, but a person—someone with troubles—and I merely wanted to help. I still admired my favorite teacher, but no longer did I covet her. It felt like a little death inside me.
I murmured, “Is everything all right, ma’am?”
“I planned to ask you the same thing.” She gestured to the chair beside her desk, the top of which was covered in stacks of paper and theme books. I sat and adjusted my posture to ease the now-constant ache in my back. She said, “You’re hurting. I can see it in your eyes.” Before I could protest or tell her the same, she continued, “Schoolboys shouldn’t look so pained.”
“I’m not in school anymore, ma’am.”
She pointed at me with the blunted tip of her Ticonderoga pencil. “And you dropped out before you wrote a composition for me. I want it now.”
“You sent Joe Don to fetch me, ma’am…so I could write a paper for you?”
“In part.” She passed over a few blank pages and the pencil she’d used. Small teeth marks marred the orange-painted wood that was still warm from her grip. She said, “Give me one hundred words on whether it is ever acceptable to lie.”
As I tried to form a question, the lines deepened around her mouth; she barely contained whatever was gnawing on her. She said, “That’s right, Roger. Is it ever acceptable to lie? Write that at the top of the first page. You have a half-hour to complete the assignment.” She took out another pencil from a collection that rattled in her drawer and opened a student’s composition book. I stared at her while she flipped through pages to the most recent essay. Without looking up, she said, “You better get busy.”
Eraser tapping my lower lip, I considered past reasons for lying and the falsehoods I’d planned to tell her today. There was no doubt in my mind that some lies were good: if we always told the truth about what we did and thought and felt, there’d be no living with each other.
Scratching out as much as I wrote, I ended up with the following: “It is acceptable to tell a lie when you might do much more harm with the truth than with a story that will spare a person’s feelings or protect someone’s secrets. Revealing some secrets can be so cruel that it is better to keep them safe than to tell people what they do not really need to know. A lie is all right when it can do some good without hurting anyone.” I counted the words and had about thirty to go. Rereading the piece, I nibbled Mrs. Gladney’s pencil, enjoying the compression of the soft wood against my teeth until I thought about her mouth doing the same thing. My bite marks overlapped hers.
She wrote a B at the top of a page and closed the last of the theme books. With a smile, she said, “I’ve watched my students chew their pencils in nervousness or boredom for years and never thought I’d do it. Like smoking—you consider it repulsive and then one day you’re puffing away like everyone else.” She looked at the pencils in her desk drawer. “All of these have my teeth marks on them and I’ve only been addicted since…well, right after you dropped out.”
“I have thirty more words to go.”
“The number you use isn’t nearly as important as your ideas.” She took the paper and read my work, holding the page in both hands. A faint tremor in her fingers made my essay quiver. Her glance slid back to me a few times before she set the paper down. “Say you’ve stolen a loaf of bread. The baker asks you if you did it. What do you tell him?”
“I say no. But as soon as I can, I leave money to pay for what I stole.”
“You may have heard about the German prisoner who escaped. Say you liked him and helped him to steal away. This is a person, not something you can pay for later. Would you lie to the police? The United States Army? President Truman?”
After a moment of hesitation, I said, “If I helped him, it would be because I liked him, because he wasn’t a Nazi, just born in the wrong country at the wrong time—I’m just supposing now—and deserved a chance to become an American and live free. So, yes, I’d probably lie to protect him.”
“And yourself, don’t forget. In both cases, you’d lie to keep from being punished. So is it always OK to lie?” I shrugged, and she said, “What do you think of liars?”
“It depends on why they lied, ma’am.”
“Would you like them if they lied to protect a friend?”
“Maybe.”
“To do some good without hurting anyone? To right an old wrong?”
“I reckon so, ma’am.” I began to squirm until a jabbing back spasm stilled me.
Her voice rose as she leaned closer. “Would you lie to keep a secret from a friend?”
“So I can protect another friend, ma’am?” I flinched when I saw her eyes, small and glassy, like Papa’s when he’d beaten me.
I drew back, but she grabbed my wrists in a grip tighter than Rienzi’s and said, “So you can protect someone you hate!”
Turning my face away from her, I cried, “No, ma’am.”
“But what about sparing your friend’s feelings, like you wrote?” She held on while I tried to pull away. “Tell me! Would you rather hurt me with the truth or with a lie?”
“I’d never hurt you. Please let me go.”
“What do you know about Mr. Gladney?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me what he’s been up to.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Liar! When did you last see my husband?”
“I-I-I…” Tears tumbled out of my eyes. She released me, crying as well.
“I’m sorry, Roger. It’s all right.” She offered a wrinkled kerchief from her purse. Rosy patches of blush and dark streaks that matched her eye makeup already marred the white linen.
I declined it, pulling a faded rag from my back pocket. Red ovals on my wrists outlined the impressions left by her fingers. With a sniff, I said, “It’s harder to be sure in real life than on paper. I reckon I deserve a failing grade.”
“No, you don’t deserve to fail.” She dabbed at her tears and sighed. “I checked your records. You only needed two more credits to get a certificate of
completion. Not as good as a high school diploma, but handy to get into college. You could teach next door to me someday.”
“I can’t come back to finish up, ma’am. Just like I can’t live at home again. I think you know why.”
She dropped her gaze and sat still a moment. Hopefully I’d given her what she needed to know. Her fingers plucked at another stack of papers—out of nervousness, I thought—until she withdrew a folder with “MacLeod, Roger” typed on it.
When she looked at me again, the old gentleness had returned to her eyes. She said, “You had very high marks in all your coursework. I was looking forward to teaching you more of Bookkeeping and Senior Composition too.” With her bite-marked pencil, she swirled a C at the top of my paper. “It’s not your best work, but you did write something that I hope you won’t recant: ‘A lie is all right when it can do some good without hurting anyone.’”
“I meant what I said, ma’am, about never hurting you.”
“And I’ll always remember you for that.” She touched my hand, soft this time instead of insistent. “I gave you that particular theme for a reason. I hope that you’ll understand and forgive me for something I’ve done.”
“You’d never do anything to hurt me, either.”
“I pray that I haven’t. Now, look at this.” She opened my folder. On top of a few dozen sheets of paper lay a typed letter stating that Mrs. Valerie Gladney had tutored me in Senior Composition and Bookkeeping and administered the appropriate tests, all of which I had passed. She recommended me for a high school certificate. Beneath her flowing signature and the words “Approved By,” her husband Walton Gladney had scrawled his name and the current date.
I swiped away more stinging tears and said, “Why would you risk your job by lying for me, ma’am?”
“I feel somehow responsible for what happened. A wife always blames herself, I suppose.”
“How did you get Mr. Gladney to sign it?”
The tightness returned and set her mouth into a hard line. “Even a wife who blames herself can be very persuasive—it also helps to have long, sharp knives in the house.” When I blinked at her, she blushed and said, “At our wedding, my mother advised us to ‘never let the sun go down on an argument.’ Mr. Gladney should listen to his mother-in-law. My additional advice to you, as you’re out in the world and planning someday to take a wife, is to never close your eyes at night when you’ve made your lover mad enough to hurt you.”
I rubbed the bruises on my wrists as I pictured what Rienzi was capable of doing to me. “It’s not my place to ask, ma’am, but will you stay with…will everything stay the same for you?”
Her shoulders slumped. She said, “Remember first grade? Early in the term I wrote on the board: ‘I OBEY THE RULES.’ I was raised to honor marriage, Roger. My family doesn’t believe in divorce.”
I gestured to the letter she and the principal had signed. “You don’t obey all the rules, ma’am.”
“I know. Once I had the idea, I convinced myself that it wouldn’t hurt anyone. Mr. Gladney’s belief that I would—that I will—harm him proved sufficient to…motivate him.” She twisted the band of white gold on her finger, moving it up past one knuckle and then the other. Before the ring cleared her fingertip, she slid it back in place and said, “Knowing that I could do no harm and a lot of good allowed me to see it through. A divorce, though…a divorce would hurt everyone but me.”
“It’s none of my business. I’m sorry for—”
“I’d love to have you teaching in the next classroom. At least come back and see me some day. Please?”
I stood and thanked her, my eyes wet again. “I won’t ever forget you.”
“Do better than I did. Be smarter.” She pushed out of her chair and hugged me. “As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been stumbling along after the grownups. I did this because you deserve a chance to catch up. I did this because I couldn’t give you what you deserve most of all.”
“What’s that, ma’am?”
She touched my damp cheek and said, “A decent childhood.”
*
The next day, Mr. Clayton passed along word that Ramsey Lumber had a new owner. Before week’s end, a number of trucks surrounded an area at the edge of the lumber yard, the farthest point from the noise of the mills. I climbed high atop a tower of lumber and watched crews of workmen frame and roof a large office. They eventually carried in paneling and furniture and painted the exterior a blinding white. As a final step, they hung a lacquered oak door that had frosted glass in the top third of it.
On Monday morning, I returned to the top of one of the fifteen-foot stacks to see why Mr. Clayton had sprinted past. By the time I’d reached the top, the office door had closed. A half-dozen other mill hands stood on the lumber piles, all watching, waiting for some sign about what the new owner was like and what plans he might have for our livelihoods.
Mr. Clayton emerged first, backing out the door. He laughed and chatted with the man, who stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind him. The owner followed the foreman’s pointing finger, perhaps getting an overview of the operation that could make him even richer or that he would now run into the ground. Despite the extra weight around his middle and an expensive suit, I recognized the white Stetson on his head and the shadowed face.
I muttered, “Papa’s back.”
CHAPTER 28
The widow Mrs. Bonny Ramsey had married and signed over the sawmill to her new husband, Mance MacLeod.
I couldn’t avoid him forever. I didn’t know if Papa had read a roster of his workers or merely stumbled upon me, but a day after he’d taken a tour around the sawmill, he caught me in the lumber yard taking a short break. I’d lain on the ground to rest my back. To ease the spasms, I imagined spreading across the dirt like a puddle. My contours took on the shape of the earth.
Calvin rapped hard at his form, joining the edges together with too many hammer blows. I sat up. Papa marched so close that his shadow covered me.
The new white Stetson shaded his eyes and pressed down the tops of his ears. He wore a cream-colored linen suit that should’ve wrinkled like the devil, but stayed smooth over his heavy frame. Instead of a revolver, he now wore a massive ring of keys at his waist. His mouth twisted downward into a familiar scowl as he said, “What the blue blazes are you doing?”
“Stretching out my back, sir.” Upon standing, I realized that I was now taller than him. Still, I moved out of striking distance.
“I was afraid you fell sleep. Now don’t be setting a bad example to the others. Being my son don’t mean you can loaf.” Papa leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You and me, together, gotta learn these folks how to put in a good day’s work.”
Maybe I didn’t hear him right over Calvin’s hammering. When I imagined our reunion, I thought he’d acknowledge me but nothing more. I didn’t expect much, and I certainly didn’t think he’d couple us together like boxcars. For some reason he’d put Mr. Hyde away and presented himself as good Dr. Jekyll. He softened his gaze, but I expected him to lash out any minute. I said, “I’ll set a good example, sir.”
“Thank you.” Papa turned his back and walked to the planing mill where the machine squared-up another board with a prolonged scream.
Calvin wiped his face on a sleeve and said, “Your daddy’s a hard one to figure out.”
“I’m glad you heard him. I thought I was dreaming.”
“You told lots of bad stories on him, and then he shows up with smiles and thank yous.”
“I didn’t think he knew how. Be honest now: he did give me a scolding.”
“As rough as a pinch on the arm. And you only got it because you two—together—need to set a good example for the rest of us.” He whacked the edges of a new form together, a big grin on his face.
When I next saw Papa, I still expected Mr. Hyde to emerge, snarling. Wrong again. He stopped a group of us outside O’Neil Gowdy’s store before we began to eat dinner. “Gentlemen,” he said, removing
his hat. His chin dropped into a roll of fat at his neck, and he intoned, “Let’s bow our heads and thank the Lord for His nourishment of our bodies and our everlasting souls.”
*
A month later, Papa sent an assistant to summon me to the office. On the frosted glass of the door, a painter had printed, “Mance MacLeod, Owner.” I reminded myself that he didn’t own me, that I wasn’t even kin to him. I rapped on the lacquered oak and said, “It’s Roger, sir.”
He reclined in a red leather chair behind his mahogany desk, which was lit by a brass lamp with a green glass shade. Oak paneling walled his office, and fresh-cut heart-pine—maybe the last in South Georgia—spanned the floor. A leather desk blotter as big as a heifer, with maple triangles at its corners, sprawled across the table.
“Look how well your papa’s done,” he said. “All thanks to my salvation.” Beside his fat black telephone sat a clothbound Bible with a purple satin ribbon marking a page halfway through it. I’d never seen him read any book before, let alone Scripture.
His high-speed ceiling fan chilled the room; the constant rush of cold air on my sweaty head almost hurt. There were no chairs on my side of the desk, so I continued to stand. Harsh sunlight blazed through the frosted glass; on the floor, oblong letters spelled out, “Mance MacLeod, Owner.” The shadows almost touched me.
He steepled his fingers and said, “I’m glad you’re using the proper name I gave you. It’s about time you got shed of that pet name from Reva. Maybe you can get totally free of that sinful woman’s influence.”
“I don’t live at home anymore, sir.”
“Praised be. You’re coming to supper at my house tonight. You haven’t met your stepmother and her son yet.”
“Did Mama ever divorce you, sir?”
“Reva don’t know it, but Judge McCrory took care of it for me.” His smile displayed many capped teeth. “C’mon, let’s go. It’s the biggest house in the county, so we have lots of space for you. Imagine that, Roger, a room of your own.”
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