by Wingshooters
EIGHT
That Saturday night, we got our first snow of the year. And it was a good one, a full-fledged storm that began in the evening and dropped a foot of fresh powder by morning. Just looking out the window and seeing the world covered in white lifted my spirits a bit—despite my disappointment that my father wasn’t coming, despite the scene at Earl’s house. When I went outside and let the snow fall on my face and my hands, I couldn’t help but feel better.
We had to go to Mass in the morning, but as soon as we were back, I took the dog and headed out to the nearest woods. A few people had already been out for a walk, so there was a path I could follow without sinking in up to my knees. Brett ran along the trail for a while and then went bounding off into the powder. I tossed snowballs for him to catch, and then threw some at a tree, where they left white spots ten feet up along the trunk. Brett barked and jumped futilely, trying to reach them, all four legs off the ground. I felt guilty for mis-leading him and pulled him away, encouraging him to run out ahead of me.
He refocused quickly. He picked up a long branch and carried it down the trail, holding it in the middle like a tightrope walker’s stick, just an inch above the surface of the snow. Farther up there were trees on either side of the trail, and Brett ran smack into them, each end of the branch catching one of the trunks. He bounced back from the force of the impact and looked confused for a moment. Then, taking a few more steps back to rev himself up, he ran forward and tried again. And again the thunk of the branch against the trees. He tried three or four times with increasing force, until finally the branch broke and he was left with only half of it, which he held by the far right end. Past the obstacle of the trees now, he ran along gaily, with his head tilting left from the weight of the branch. Then the loose end caught on something and planted in the ground, and he flew rump over head like a pole vaulter. He landed upside down in the powder off the trail, which was so deep he vanished completely. All was still for a moment. Then he sprang directly from his back to his feet, his entire body covered with snow. He was so obscured by white I couldn’t see his black fur—but I saw the happy pink tongue sticking out of his mouth; and the joy in his body as he started to buck, like a bronco, shaking the snow from his body. Once free, he let off an exclamatory bark and bolted down the trail.
It snowed more on Sunday night, and as I walked to school the next morning, I again felt the exhilaration that a snowfall always brought me. It even carried me safely past the house of Jeannie Allen, the girl who often harassed me. Her father was shoveling, clearing a path from their door to the sidewalk, but Jeannie was nowhere in sight. As I walked by, she pushed her curtain aside and stared at me, but she didn’t come out of the house. I took a deep breath of relief as I walked by Mr. Allen, who nodded hello, and continued down the street.
At school, it felt almost like a holiday. All of the kids were talking about building snowmen and having snowball fights, and Miss Anderson had a hard time calming everyone down. It seemed especially cruel that we were stuck inside that day—but finally, it became clear that Miss Anderson was moving ahead with her lessons. No one answered questions, not even Missy Calloway; we were all staring out the window at the snow. No one fell for our teacher’s attempts at discussion. And it was this unusual, depressed silence that made it quiet enough for us to hear a strange sound in the hallway.
First the clomping of heavy boots, moving steadily down the hallway. Then the whoosh of thick winter coats. This was no group of students walking late to class, or even teachers, who always seemed to move lightly. It sounded like an army, and as I turned toward the open doorway, I saw that in some sense it was. A group of four men was walking by, stone-faced and with clear purpose. Earl Watson was one of them, and Uncle Pete too; the others were Bob Grimson and John Berger. When I saw Earl and Uncle Pete I expected Charlie to be with them, but to my relief, he was not. I say relief because it was clear to me exactly where they were going. My classmates all murmured nervously, except Brady Grimson, who stood straight up and said, “Dad?” Bob Grimson might have paused for a moment, but then he kept on walking. “Dad!” Brady called out again, more urgently this time, and then he ran out to the hallway. Several of our classmates shot out of their seats and scrambled to the door, ignoring Miss Anderson’s command to stay seated. I got up too and fell in behind them.
“Dad, what are you doing?” Brady asked. He’d run toward his father and then stopped abruptly as the whole group of men turned to face him. In their dark, bulky jackets and red plaid hats; in their thick-fingered gloves and heavy boots, they looked as big and unassail-able as a mountain range.
“Go back to class, son,” Bob Grimson said. He was generally an easy-going man, who worked long hours at the diner he ran with his wife and never took vacations, but he looked tired today, gray-faced and grim.
“But what are you doing here?” asked Brady again. Mr. Grimson was quiet for a moment. The other men watched him, adjusting hats and gloves and tugging on their jackets. Uncle Pete avoided my eyes and I wanted to hit him, I wanted to hold him—I knew he wouldn’t have come here on his own. “We’re going to watch him teach,” Mr. Grimson said finally.
“What?”
Now Earl stepped forward, looking bigger than ever in his thick green winter jacket. “We’re going to watch the nigger teach,” he said roughly to Brady. “Law says we’re allowed to sit in the classroom and watch our children’s teachers teach.”
“But Dad,” Brady said, turning back to his father, “he’s not my teacher.”
The men were silent for a moment while we all absorbed that fact. Miss Anderson came and stood behind the children in the doorway.
“He’s here with me and Earl,” said John Berger, pulling off his big gloves. “I’m here because of Harriet, and he’s here for Kevin. They’re supposed to be in Mrs. Hebig’s class next year, so we want to see what’s going on. And you’ll get to the fifth grade too, all of you, in a couple of years.”
I pondered this. I knew that parents could sit in and observe a class; Missy Calloway’s mother had done so the previous year. But I also knew—we all did—that none of these men had ever, not even when they’d been invited for a student conference or open house, stepped foot inside the school before.
“Come back to class, children,” Miss Anderson said, and I was surprised by her tone. She sounded scared. She herded us out of the hallway and back into the classroom as if away from the scene of an accident.
If we’d been having a hard time paying attention before, now it was impossible. I wanted desperately to sneak out and run down the hallway, watch what happened in Mr. Garrett’s class. I wanted desperately to tell the men to leave him alone, especially Uncle Pete. Everyone in the class had forgotten the snow; we were all listening, for what we didn’t know. But when an hour passed and no sound had come from the end of the hallway, we settled back into the rhythms of Miss Anderson’s voice—not listening exactly but no longer straining to hear something else.
I didn’t see the men leave—they must have gone out the back—but I heard later that they hadn’t stayed for long. “He was shaking,” Charlie told my grandmother, repeating what he’d heard from Uncle Pete. “John opened the door and they all walked in, and the nigger’s eyes popped out of his head. They sat down in the chairs and just stared at him.”
I tried to imagine those big, full-grown men sitting in those child-sized chairs, a scene that might have been comical under different circumstances.
“He asked what they were doing, and John, he says, ‘I want to see what kind of learning my daughter’s going to get. Far as I can tell, I’ve got no reason to keep her in this school.’”
“Did he ask them to leave?” my grandmother asked.
“Yep, and they quoted the law at him, said they were exercising their legal rights. Pete said the fella was so scared he kept dropping his chalk, and none of the letters he did get up on the board was straight. They stayed about half an hour, they said, and then they figured they had got
their point across. Pete waited outside, and five minutes don’t pass before the nigger comes out front while the kids are still in class and stands there and shakes his head.” My grandfather seemed satisfied with this result. “We’re getting to him,” he said. “I think they’re gonna break.”
But he didn’t—they didn’t—at least not yet. The whispers at school the next day were at first about Mr. Garrett—about how his hand had shaken as he wrote on the board, and how tight and nervous he’d sounded as he tried to give his lesson. Everyone knew that he’d left the classroom soon after the men were gone, to get himself back together. Mrs. Hood’s first graders had seen him out the window, shaking his head, just as Uncle Pete had related.
The next day, Miss Anderson came to class looking grim. It wasn’t until years later, when I was an adult, that I wondered what Mr. Garrett’s presence was like for the rest of the teachers—whether they were just as uncomfortable with him as everyone else; whether they looked at him or spoke to him in the teachers’ lounge at lunch; whether they called each other in the evenings at home to discuss the day’s events. For them, the Garretts’ presence must have been troubling and surreal. The conflict in Boston, and earlier, the events in the South and in Washington, must have seemed totally foreign to them, the struggles of a different world. The civil rights movement had never reached Deerhorn, and now, because of the clinic, some of the changes it had made possible were happening right there in town, very much against their will. The Garretts were alone now, the first black couple. But would there be others, coming after them? And this was happening on top of all the other shifts and changes of the time—the war, women’s rights, Watergate, drugs, and now the fall of the president that people had hoped would somehow restore the order. Did any of the teachers threaten to resign from their jobs? Whether or not they did, nobody actually quit—in that town, good jobs were not easy to come by, and teachers made more money than most everyone else.
I did wonder even then, though, what it was like for Mr. Garrett. When I saw him in the hallway or out on the playground, he seemed different, more guarded and watchful, his sense of ease gone. Did other teachers say hello when he passed them in the hallway? Did they stop their conversations when he was near, or keep talking like he didn’t exist? Did he go home at night and share stories with his wife about how people whom he’d never hurt in any way still treated him like he carried the plague? And of course I wondered these things, if he experienced these things, because I had gone through them myself.
But that morning, I see in retrospect, Miss Anderson was troubled not only because of what was happening, but because she knew it would continue to happen. And it did. At about ten-fifteen, before recess, I heard heavy boots in the hallway. And we saw two unfamiliar men walk by down the hall in the direction of the fifth grade classrooms. Everyone saw them, although no one rushed to the door this time. We all knew where they were going.
At recess, some of the more adventurous boys in class ventured down the hallway. When they came back they reported that they saw the two men—fathers of children in the first and second grades—sitting in the child-sized chairs. The class was empty otherwise; Mr. Garrett and the children were outside. But the men were seated there, unmoving, rooted like trees, and I knew when I heard this description that they’d be staying there all day.
The next morning, a little earlier, another two fathers walked by. Again, they stayed in the room all day, not leaving the school until we were released at two-forty. The next morning it was a set of parents—Casey and Sally Borham—and the morning after that, two more fathers. We heard afterward that Mr. Garrett no longer seemed so nervous; he just went on with his lessons as if the adults weren’t there.
But the students were rattled. They were caught off-guard when Mr. Garrett called on them, stuttering out inadequate replies; and even the usual chit-chat between subjects or after recess had dwindled down to nothing. This discomfort, the adults insisted, was because of the teacher’s presence, not theirs. According to my grandfather, people were putting off housework, taking time from their jobs, rearranging their schedules to show up at the school and sit in on Mr. Garrett’s fifth grade class.
I still don’t know why Charlie wasn’t among them. Maybe he was too old, but that didn’t seem right; his age didn’t stop him from doing anything else. Maybe as much as he talked about the Garretts, he wanted to keep a distance from the actions against them. Or maybe, on some level, my presence at the school prevented him from going. Maybe he realized there were parallels between their troubles and mine. I hope so; I hope this could be true. I just don’t really know. What I do know is that he took a vicarious pleasure in people’s efforts to unsettle the Garretts. And they were going to keep on doing it; they were going to keep sitting in on Mr. Garrett’s class until all available parents had taken a turn. Then, they would simply start over.
It wasn’t until the Saturday after the second week of visits that I discovered that not everyone approved of them. I went uptown with my grandmother in the early afternoon to do the weekly shopping, helping her fill the basket with seven days’ worth of vegetables and meat, beans and flour and coffee, all the staples she used for her simple, hearty meals. We didn’t talk much, my grandmother speaking only to tell me to fetch a box of cereal or to stop squeaking my shoes against the slick linoleum. But our silence was companionable; there just wasn’t a lot to say. We didn’t have as much in common as Charlie and me.
After my grandmother paid and the bagger boy had packed up all the groceries, she pushed the cart out to the parking lot. And there we ran into Darius Gordon, who was walking toward the entrance of the market. He was wrapped up tight in his long tan coat, a green wool cap pulled down over his ears. He had a look on his face that suggested that his thoughts were far away, and wherever they were, it wasn’t pleasing to him. He didn’t see us until he’d almost walked into our cart, and even then it was not until he mumbled his apology that he realized who we were.
“Oh hello, Helen, Michelle,” he said, his breath visible in the cold winter air. “I’m sorry, I’m getting slow on the uptake in my old age.”
My grandmother smiled. I knew how much she liked Mr. Gordon; she always said that he was a gentleman. “That hardly describes you, Darius. You’re one of the sharpest men I know.”
“Well, not so sharp that I didn’t let myself run out of coffee. And it’s hard for me to get started in the morning without it.”
“Where’s your Lucy?” my grandmother asked.
“Oh, at home in her dog bed. She didn’t appreciate the thought of coming out in this cold weather. She’s not much for the outdoors at all, actually, which is strange for an English setter. She doesn’t run headlong into the world the way your Brett does.”
At this, he looked at me, and I felt a double rush of pleasure—because he spoke to me, and because he praised my dog. Then he turned back to my grandmother. “Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?”
My grandmother hesitated. How could she answer that? My father’s absence had defined the whole day, and all the food and beer and talking, all the football and television, couldn’t cover the silence of the telephone, the emptiness of the mailbox, the extra seat at the dining room table. As soon as the meal was over I had gone out with Brett and walked until I couldn’t feel my feet.
“Yes,” she said. “Pete and Bertha came over, and between us we ate the whole turkey. Michelle here helped mash the potatoes.” She paused, and I knew she was keeping herself from looking at me, trying as hard as she could to sound normal. “And how about you?”
“Spent it with Del and his wife,” Mr. Gordon replied. “It was nice enough, but holidays are for children. A bunch of adults sitting around and staring at each other gets tiresome after a while.” He looked at me again, warmly. “You’re lucky to have a grandchild, Helen. Especially lucky that she’s staying with you. Del and Karen, I think they got too caught up in his career to think about having a family.”
They were silent for
a moment, as the subject of his son’s job lay between them. And that made me stop feeling sad about the holiday and start thinking about the clinic, which of course made me think about the Garretts.
Mr. Gordon’s mind must have turned in this direction too, for now he raised his eyes again and carefully asked, “Have you heard about what’s been happening at the school?”
This was not a real question, I knew. Of course she had heard. What he was really asking was, what do you think of it?
My grandmother wouldn’t meet his eyes now; she looked down at the cart. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard all about it.”
Mr. Gordon paused, and when he spoke, his voice was gentle. “They’re crucifying that man, and he did nothing wrong. In fact, he did exactly what he was supposed to do.”
My grandmother shivered slightly, and I wasn’t sure it was from the weather. Her warmth toward Mr. Gordon was gone; she had retreated back into herself. “I think people are upset about them not minding their own business.”
“And the wife, she followed the letter of the law. There was nothing she could do but make a report.”
My grandmother said nothing to this, so Mr. Gordon continued, a little more strongly now. “And it’s not just the showing up at school anymore. The wife told my son that a strange car’s been driving by their house, a gray Buick. A couple of nights ago someone fired a shot over their roof.” He leaned uncomfortably close now, his wrinkled hand gripping the cart. “Earl drives a gray Buick,” he said, and his cheeks had turned red. “He’s gone too far, Helen. He’s losing control. You’ve got to get Charlie to stop him.”
My grandmother stepped back and flinched as if he’d reached out to strike her. “They had no business coming here, Darius. They had no right. They’ve brought on all this trouble themselves.” But even as she said this, I heard the uncertainty in her voice, as if she were speaking someone else’s words and not her own. And in her face I saw a fissure, an opening, and I wasn’t sure what it meant.