by Leah Weiss
When she closes the door with the wild dog, the letters, and her inside, we take our leave, a bunch of wet hens to tramp down the mountain with the fluff gone out of our feathers. Birdie don’t help the mood when she throws her head back and cackles like the witchy woman she is. Nobody talks on the walk down cause we got nothing to say to change things.
I think bout them seventy words and how good they was for Mama, and how bad for Miss Shaw. I never heard a sister write that way. Course, I don’t have a sister.
It could have been a simpleminded sister, all flowery.
Maybe.
Today don’t turn out the way I planned.
Brother don’t need to know what we done.
Kate Shaw
I sit in Mr. Poore’s Asheville office while he completes my final paperwork. It is a dismal room that strains my enthusiasm to teach at my next post. Everything is coated with nicotine yellow. Even the philodendron with sickly leaves curling in resignation, trailing over the windowsill. Even Mr. Poore, hunched over my paperwork, registering my teaching certificate, transcript, and credentials to my new school district. I pull from my pocket a handkerchief monogrammed RH and hold it to my nose for relief against cigarette smoke. The skinny man scribbles and pushes glasses up the sharp bridge of his nose. His worn jacket hangs from gaunt shoulders. Ichabod Crane comes to mind.
He doesn’t look up when he says, “Last teacher called it godforsaken where you’re going.” Mr. Poore’s raspy voice is ruined from a million puffs. “Couldn’t understand a word they said. Like being in Russia or Africa, she said.”
A hairline crack appears in my shell. I’ve only taught the classics in private schools and have no experience teaching young children. Will I fail miserably? Scare them away? Or will I instinctively know what to do? Outwardly, I stay composed, knowing this appointment is the final step before I climb the mountain before me.
Mr. Poore is one of a dozen worker bees in the Asheville education building, plodding through piles of endless paperwork. Every surface in this office, except the chairs in which we sit, is stacked with papers and folders. A transistor radio is slightly off the dial and plays “Stand by Your Man.” The scratch of Mr. Poore’s pencil nub on my forms is like mice in the walls. My skin itches. My head hurts. I need a bath. Petty annoyances, truly, when compared to the catastrophic poverty in Appalachia where I am going.
In the last decade, two presidents turned the spotlight on the plight of these forgotten people. Phrases such as retarded frontier and hillbillies stymie understanding. Disturbing photos of emaciated people, dismal data on teen pregnancies, incest, and genetic deficiencies point to desperate needs in Appalachia. Humanitarians want to save these scraps of Scotch Irish. I am in line as well, turning my back on privileged school life, looking for a place to matter.
My journey toward Appalachia started with an index card. Wanted: Experienced teacher. It was tacked to a bulletin board in a church I rushed into for shelter from a sudden storm. Some would call it serendipitous, others fate. Whatever the case, the church gave me more than shelter that day; it gave me direction when I was rudderless.
According to the letter from Preacher Eli Perkins sent in response to my inquiry, his mountain settlement called Baines Creek is barely a crossroads, a dot on a map. It’s remote, embraced by natural beauty, and riddled with hardships. He writes that the census, which no one can vouch for, records forty-one children between the ages of six and seventeen in his school district. The preacher’s tiny community has had a string of teachers for the one-room schoolhouse. They came but didn’t stay. He believes youth and inexperience were to blame, and he asks for someone more seasoned. There is purity in his plea. A tenacity to care for his people. If there is a war to be won in Appalachia, Eli Perkins has lived at the front lines all his life and still fights. He seeks an ally.
I’ve fought inequities all my life on a different front but have gained little purchase among those who have too much. I want it all to mean more. I need it to mean more. My hope is that I am able to make those I’m leaving behind understand.
“Yep, the locals scared off the other teachers is what I’m told.” Mr. Poore giggles like a girl. “Said they got no use for book learning.” He mutters, “Dumb suckers,” under his breath, then breaks into a coughing fit.
He looks up. “Why in blue blazes do you think you can do any good in that backward place? They don’t want to do better.”
“Preacher Perkins would disagree.” I clutch the letter I’ve read a dozen times. “He thinks the children on his mountain deserve an education like everyone else.” My controlled voice rises a notch. “And just because injustices never end doesn’t mean they’re not worth fighting against. Women and children have rights. Education is the key.” My cheeks flush with familiar heat.
Mr. Poore plops back in his chair and, for the first time, really looks at me.
“You one of them gall-dang liberals, aren’t you? Trying to bend the laws. Change the natural order of things.” He tap-tap-taps hard with his finger on one of the papers in my stack. “Says right here you were fired. Now I know why.”
I didn’t realize my dismissal was a matter of public record. I lean forward to see the paper, concerned. “Can just anyone access that information?”
He ignores me. “Maybe you and that godforsaken place of losers deserve each other.”
I want to shout You’re rude and wrong! but he’s close to the truth. He strikes another nerve when he adds, “Well, you being”—he squints at a form—“fifty-one and on the hefty side may be more to their liking there. They’ll have to work extra hard to run you off.”
Mr. Poore crossed the line.
I say softly, “You’re not paid much, are you, Mr. Poore?”
“What you say?” His face cocks crooked, and he pinches his thin lips.
I speak louder. “You’re not paid much, are you?”
I could easily strangle Mr. Poore with his skinny tie. Instead I use words. “Apparently, the pay can’t attract a professional who knows proper protocol.”
His eyebrows arch high just as Tammy Wynette belts out, “Keep giving all the love you caaaan,” and Mr. Poore and I stare at each other. I hold strong, and after a half-dozen heartbeats, he looks down and says “Well!” and stamps the required state seal on my paperwork. “May you be happy in Baines Creek hell, Miss Shaw.”
“Proper protocol, Mr. Poore. You really could do with lessons.”
I escape with the smelly documents completed and a modicum of respect, grateful for fresh air. Mr. Poore was unnerving, but he can’t dim the deeper purpose Eli Perkins promised in his letter.
I need an ally to instill hope and possibility in my good people.
We all deserve hope and possibility.
Even me.
• • •
The calendar reads Friday, August 28, 1970, when I start my climb to the end of the world. I head to a place where only one person may want me, leaving a place where only one person will miss me. I’m surprised the warmth of summer fades quickly this high in clouds that spill over mountaintops, so my car windows are rolled up and the heater works overtime. Wind whips through treetops, and I creep around blind curves with rock walls on one side and drop-offs tumbling into loose air on the other. Gone is this morning’s sense of anticipation as my headache tightens. I reach for the bottle of aspirin and swallow two.
On the first patch of level ground, I find the schoolhouse with its rusting roof and unpainted wood. A woman stands in the doorway with her hand raised in flat greeting. I thought Preacher Eli Perkins was to meet me. Just then, the storm unleashes and blots out everything behind a wall of water and I wait, grateful for a reprieve.
I sit in stillness for the first time in a long time, surrounded by boxes of my life. Another hand was raised to me last May, not in greeting, but to put me in my place. I lean my head against the window. Rain pound
s around me and obliterates here and takes me back to there.
• • •
“You are dismissed, Miss Shaw.”
That verdict had hung in the air of Dr. Virginia Collingwood’s ordered office before I even entered. She added, “There’s no need for debate. No one stands in your corner on this matter.”
I hadn’t said a word, yet she raised a small hand in protest. “I’m not interested in your side of the story…how you have been wronged or your actions misunderstood. Damage has been done, which I must spend precious time undoing, thanks to you.”
Dr. Collingwood held out an envelope. “Here is a recommendation of sorts for your years here.” She didn’t pass it halfway across her expansive desk. She made me reach.
“My words may help you land another post somewhere. In return, you must leave today without further incident. And please, please do not damage our reputation any further or the consequences will be more severe than dismissal.”
Ravenscroft, a century-old boarding school for girls in eastern North Carolina, is conservative and traditional. I am neither. Yet for the ill-fitting years I stayed, a rebel with a friend on the board as buffer, I’d skirted dismissal so often over issues of feminism, liberalism, and our First Amendment rights that I believed I was bulletproof.
I was not.
I stood, interrupting Dr. Collingwood, and walked to the door.
“Miss Shaw! We’re not done.” She raised her cultured voice in surprise.
The fight had gone out of me. “Yes, we are.”
It was easy to put my life in boxes and load them in the deep trunk of my Edsel. I needed to break from this place for many reasons, mostly because I didn’t fit. I never fit. I’m always crossing the line; rhetoric is a tedious adversary. My last rebellion was written across the painted wall of my living room in permanent marker. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. (Thank you, Ms. Sanger.) How many saw it before it was painted over?
I shut the door to this place I had only borrowed, and the catch of the latch was final. The campus was deserted that Saturday evening, my colleagues off at dinners and movies, so I was spared good-byes. I drove away, numb, windows down, magnolias pungent, the only sound the crunching of tires on gravel. I passed brick buildings and empty sports fields and grazing horses. Then the heady pine woods enveloped me.
I saw lights ahead, like a landing strip. I coasted closer and saw students, my girls, standing on each side of the road, holding lit candles illuminating young faces. Folded notes fluttered through my open car windows. They held the wisdom of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, which we shared in secret, sitting barefoot on the floor of my tiny living room, drinking strong coffee by candlelight until the early hours of day.
Last in line is Jen Carter, a senior on my dorm. She held the bonsai tree that had sat on her windowsill for four years. Her grandfather planted its seed a half century before. Jen loved the tree. It was her peace offering tonight, and a farewell gift I had to accept.
I cried.
• • •
The storm abates. I pull a canvas field coat from the backseat and slip it on. The woman is again at the door, waiting. She looks like a woman used to waiting, poor dear. Her age is hard to guess. Like these mountains she calls home, her shoulders are worn down.
I open the door and step over a puddle. “Hello. I’m Kate Shaw.”
She screws up her forehead. “You that teacher from down below,” she states.
“Kate. Please call me Kate. And, yes, I am she,” I say automatically, and then bite my tongue. Judgment slides over the woman’s hooded eyes, doubting already my fit for the task. I walk forward with extended hand and she shakes mine limply. She looks up at my height of six feet, two inches and likely questions my inclinations in such a manly frame. I blush when I’m winded or embarrassed. Otherwise, I’m plain as a pikestaff.
When she doesn’t answer, I say, “I thought Preacher Eli Perkins was to meet me.”
“Had him a funeral.”
She doesn’t introduce herself, so I ask, “What’s your name?”
She stares at me, so I repeat, “Your name, please?” and smile, trying to soften her attitude toward me. She looks off to the side and mumbles. I think I hear “Prudence P…” but don’t catch her last name, and don’t ask again. She’s put me in my place with her insolence.
I make small talk as we step inside the schoolroom. “What nasty weather! I feared the wind would blow me off the road and I’d never be found.”
“We’d a looked.”
I count eleven scarred desks sitting apart like lonely islands. A woodstove is in the corner, and a blackboard with a diagonal crack is bolted to the wall. A table for the teacher is center front with an oil lamp. A second lamp is on a window ledge. The glass shades are dirty. There’s not a book. Not a piece of paper. Not a poster.
When it became clear I was taking this job, Rachel had asked hopefully, “Won’t you miss teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf?” I was cavalier, shaking my head. Now, my soul is chilled in this stark space that smells of kerosene and wood ash, with no electric lights or creature comforts against the cold.
“I’m sorry, so sorry you had to wait.” My voice sounds out of place in this odd quiet. “I underestimated the time needed. The road was so steep…”
I stop talking and look at the woman. Her face is blank. I’ve never looked into such a face. The charcoal lids of her eyes are sunken. Her neck is creased with grime, her nails caked to the quick with dirt, her shapeless dress little more than a rag. One shoe is tied with a strip of cloth to keep the sole from flapping. This is poverty the likes of which I’ve never imagined except in the books of Dickens and the Brontë sisters.
“Do you know how many students will come?”
“Nope.” She folds her arms, and I see the face of the enemy, hollow and hard. In the same instant, I realize I am the enemy, a threat in this hard and hollow place where she survives and I have yet to prove myself.
I fumble for the right words and sigh. “I come in peace. I simply hope to help.”
I think her folded arms relax. Or maybe not.
It’s only midafternoon yet night feels close. I’m tired. Tired from the drive. Tired of upheaval, judgment, adjustments.
“I’ll get the rest of my supplies from the car tomorrow. Right now, I’d like to go to my quarters. I understand they’re close by.”
Prudence P drops her arms to her side, turns, and walks toward the door. I follow, thinking we’re going to my house. Instead, she says over her shoulder, “Teacher’s cottage got burnt down. Your place is up the creek.”
“Will you ride with me?”
“No road where you go. Gotta walk the creek. Pass a trailer. You’re next.”
I dampen the panic in my voice. “I know I made you wait,” I say, “but will you walk with me or give me better instructions?”
She won’t turn around. She simply jerks her thumb toward the woods behind the schoolhouse. “Thataway. Mile or so. Thirty, forty minutes. All depends,” she says and walks across the clearing.
“Depends on what?” I bark to her back in fear.
Prudence P adds, “Watch out for them dogs,” then steps down the bank into the mist.
My feet don’t move. My mouth is dry. What an awful introduction to my new life. Fear lines my stomach like sour milk and vinegar. It squeezes my lungs. I struggle to breathe. I close my eyes to center myself. My headache is a steel vise.
You can do this, Kate Shaw. No one said teachers got killed up here. Mr. Poore would have happily told you if it was true.
I have no choice but to move. I go to the trunk of the car and fill my backpack and satchel with items I’ll need tonight: a change of clothes, raincoat, tea, crackers and cheese, and a flashlight. Last, I grab my walking stick, which feels inadequate for the mountain
I’m to climb.
I feel the urge to rush to safety, to a cabin I hope will have a door to bolt against dangers that slither in the underbrush. Or a place to ward off wild dogs that wait to tear me to pieces.
Stop! I order my imagination, and hold tight to the trunk lid for support.
I lock the car, sad to leave its safety, and walk across the clearing, past a store with the name The Rusty Nickel painted crudely over the front door. It’s a lopsided building with sooty windows. I peer inside and see cans lined up neatly on a shelf, bags of corn or rice stacked on the floor, glass jars of beans, and tools hanging on the walls. Taped to the inside of the window, a scrap of cardboard reads Open Somtime.
On one hillside I see the charred remains of a cottage. This must be where the other teachers stayed who came before me, living no more than two hundred paces from school. The sight of its remains chills me even more than Prudence’s reception. A scrap of a red curtain flutters in one window like a bloodied flag.
Further up the opposite hillside, a whitewashed church sits with a wooden cross nailed above the door. Likely Eli Perkins’s church. Two small homes on each side of the school are dark, with feed-sack curtains closed. I haven’t seen anyone except Prudence P, but that doesn’t mean I’m alone.
For the first time in my life, I wish I had a loaded gun. Not the wimpy, pearl-handled pistol my mother kept in her bedside table, but something intimidating. Knowing how to use it would be a plus as well.
I chuckle weakly. Would Rachel even recognize me if she saw me now, cowering?
She’d expect more.
I follow the sound of rushing water that takes me beyond the schoolhouse to a worn path that heads up into the hills. I trust this is where Prudence P wants me to go. I note the time on my watch and start my trek, not sure how far a mile is. The bottoms of my trousers brush wet foliage. When the wind stirs, rain drips from leaves. I whistle weakly. Papa taught me to whistle when I’m nervous. He said relaxed lips help stress dissipate. Today it only helps marginally.