City Kid

by Mary MacCracken

  Lisa Eckhardt was mixing paint when I walked into her second grade.

  “Hi,” she said cheerfully. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon. Come on in.”

  “I know,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be here so soon. I think we’re only supposed to come twice a week in the beginning.”

  “Well, feel free. Come whenever you like. You know, Luke actually said something to me yesterday. Didn’t do any work, of course, but he did say good-bye when he left. And that’s something. I wasn’t sure he even knew I existed.”

  The door burst open and the kids poured in. Lisa yelled, “Put your boots in the closets or else wipe off your feet. The floor’s getting too wet to paint on.”

  “Okay, Miss Eckhardt.”

  “We gonna paint. All right!”

  In between pokes and yells and boots tossed across the classroom, the children managed to find a pile of men’s shirts and help one another button them up.

  I watched, liking what I saw. Obviously they had all done this before and knew what to do. It was noisy and chaotic, but there was a sense of unity, almost of a family. The bickering was part of their communication.

  Remembering Luke’s pictures, I knew this was not the time to take him out of class. During art, at least, he could be doing the same thing as the rest of the class.

  Luke came in last. No boots. No gloves. His hands rough and red, nails black with dirt. I stood beside him as he hung his jacket on a hook in the closet.

  “I’m going to come back for you in about a half hour,” I said. “I have to go down to the office right now. Okay?”

  Luke nodded without expression. He stood by the coat closet, alone and silent. I wanted to get him a shirt, help him button it, find a paintbrush. Instead, I walked to the door. It would not help to treat Luke like a baby in front of the other children.

  Mrs. Karras was nowhere in sight when I walked into the office, but the secretary willingly gave me the key to the file and in a minute I had lifted out Brauer, Lucas. The file was thick and the folder smudged and bent. It had obviously been in and out of the drawer many times. I took the file to the music room and sorted the contents on the long metal table.

  There were four piles of pink absence slips signed by the truant officer. Twenty-five slips in three piles, twenty-eight in the fourth. One hundred and three altogether. Luke had been enrolled in school for two years. One hundred and eighty days to a school year. Two years and half of this one. Four hundred and fifty days altogether and Luke had missed over a hundred of them – over half a year. Had he been out more days this year than last? I tried to read the dates, but the carbon print was smudged and illegible. I sighed and put the pink slips back in the folder.

  There was another large pile of white typewritten pages. I began to leaf through these and realized they were descriptions of Luke’s arrests. Twenty-four pages, a separate sheet for each arrest. Last November he had stolen over ten dollars’ worth of toy guns and army men from the five-and-ten. The previous April, a woman’s purse and gold earrings from the local department store, and before that, a cigarette lighter and aspirin and cough medicine from the drugstore.

  The accounts of fires were more numerous. Luke had set both small and large street fires, and there was one major episode on the hills on the edge of the city during a dry spell. The fire had gotten out of control and it had taken the entire Fire Department two days to put it out.

  My stomach felt queasy. The reality of the folder hit me harder than the report Mrs. Karras had given us the day before. But the mismatch between this file and Luke of yesterday was the hardest to understand. How had all this started? Why? I searched the folder for a social history or background information, but there was none. Only a signed permission slip from Luke’s mother, agreeing to his being part of the program, and the intelligence test Mrs. Karras had mentioned.

  I studied the test form closely, trying to decipher the psychologist’s handwriting and remember what Jerry had explained about the WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). He had felt that there was some bias against culturally deprived children on all verbal sections of intelligence tests, but that the performance sections, made up of puzzles, pictures, and mazes, were more accurate. I could see that there was a great deal of difference in Luke’s subtest scores. He had given mainly one-word answers or no answer at all to verbal questions, but on the performance part of the test, where he had to arrange pictures sequentially or build block designs from patterns, his score was far above the mean of ten. I made a mental note to discuss all this with Jerry at our next meeting.

  I glanced at my watch. I’d spent over twenty minutes going through Luke’s file. No more time to think about the past. Now I needed to think about today.

  I took the file back to the office and hung my jacket and scarf in the closet in the music room and then stood looking around the room. We were not going to have much in the way of books, or any kind of equipment; at least I wanted to keep my coat in our room. It was going to be difficult to work in a room that wasn’t mine. For the past six years I had tried to build a room for children where they could feel physically and emotionally safe. I was convinced that all children needed a safe place somewhere in their lives in order to grow. A place where they knew they were listened to, accepted, and cared for.

  I had filled my room at school with books, records, pictures, and plants, with scraps of bright carpet sewn together for mats, old pillows covered with soft prints, fish tanks, and homemade games. There would be none of this in the bare, drab music room of School 23, only cold metal furniture and an old piano.

  Yet somehow I was sure Luke could grow. The pink truant slips and typed arrest sheets faded from my mind. That was last week, last month, last year. Now the image of yesterday’s Luke hunched over his lion picture filled my mind. Suddenly I knew what to do. I took Luke’s lion picture from the file cabinet where we were to keep our records, data sheets, and tests on the children and wrote down his story as nearly as I could remember it; then I went back to the office and typed it on a white unlined piece of paper. I wrote the title in capitals.

  THE LIONS

  There were four lions. A mother lion with fur around her face and three baby lions. They lived in Africa. A zoo keeper caught them and put them in a big field with a big, BIG fence around them. They lived happily ever after.

  by Luke Brauer

  As I typed, I thought of Luke’s picture. Was there any relationship between the baby lions and Luke and the large space between the lions and their mother?

  Careful, I warned myself, don’t read in too much.

  In the music room, I cut a file folder in half to make front and back covers, punched the picture, the story, and the covers with a three-hole punch, I put Luke’s story and lion picture between the two halves of the folder and laced them all together with some red yarn from the materials drawer. With Magic Markers, red, yellow, and blue, I wrote LUKE’S BOOK on the front cover.

  Painting was over by the time I got back to Lisa’s room. They were cleaning up, to use the word euphemistically, accompanied by Lisa’s shouts. “… Dump the water in the sink, for Pete’s sake. Not on the floor. Pick up the papers!”

  Lisa looked up at me. “I swear I don’t know why I do it. It’s not worth the mess.” Then she smiled. “Well, maybe it is. Look at this.” She pointed to what was obviously a picture of School 23, grimy red bricks outlined in black, gray stone steps, even a lady with a whistle in the yard beside the school.

  We smiled together. “It’s worth it,” I said. “How about Luke? What did he do?”

  “God! You know, I don’t know. He’s so quiet. The other twenty-nine are so noisy, it’s like he’s not there. But I know he did something – I would have noticed that at least.”

  Lisa wiped her hands with paper towels at the sink.

  “Luke,” she called. “Come here.”

  Luke’s body crouched lower over his desk.

  “Luke Brauer. Do you hear me? Come over here.”


  Lisa’s voice was not mean. Just loud.

  Reluctantly, Luke stood up as the class watched with interest.

  “Come on over here. Now what did you paint?”

  Oh, Lord, I thought. Why had I asked? I never wanted him to be singled out like this.

  Luke stood in front of Lisa. Paint was smeared on his shirt, his face, his hair.

  “Well,” she said, “what did you paint?”

  Luke shrugged.

  “See,” Lisa said. “That’s all he ever does.” She hunched her own shoulders in imitation.

  “I’ll ask you once more, Luke. What did you paint?”

  Luke kept his eyes on the floor.

  “All right. All right. I give up. Go on with Mary.” She shook her head at me. “Maybe you can get something out of him.”

  Lisa turned to the class as Luke and I headed for the door.

  “Get out your phonic workbooks.” The class groaned and then shouted its objections as Luke and I left.

  I walked down the hall toward the music room with Luke beside me, not talking, wanting only to give him some space to let the humiliation dissolve a little.

  When we got to the music room, Luke crawled up onto the same metal chair of the day before. I sat beside him, turning a box of crayons in my fingers.

  After a while I said, “I thought maybe you might be tired of drawing or painting. I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe we could read a little.”

  Luke’s expression never changed, his eyes stared straight ahead. He had yet to speak to me today. Still, I might as well try; there certainly was nothing to lose.

  I pulled the file folder toward us and turned it over.

  “I made this while you were painting. The cover isn’t too good, because I made it very quickly. You can make another one sometime, if you want.”

  “Luke’s Book,” Luke said.

  You are wonderful, Lucas Brauer, I wanted to say, remembering my other children and how it often took months to get a single spoken word. You talk. You read. But I’m sure you startle easily. I kept myself silent, my body still, not even turning the cover.

  Luke looked at me and reached for the book at the same time.

  “Luke’s Book?” This time it was a question and there was surprise in his voice.

  “Mm-hm. Remember how you drew the lions yesterday?”

  Good! He can’t resist. Luke opened the cover, then turned the book sideways to study the lions. Then he looked at me. “I can make better lions,” he said. “Do you want me to make better ones?”

  “I like these,” I said. “But you can make more if you want.” Will he look at the story? Can he read more than his name?

  Luke turned the book back and easily, as easily as anything, he read, “‘The lions. There were four lions …’” When he’d finished he said, “You forgot to say they were lying down.” He said it softly, without accusation.

  “Yes,” I answered. “I thought that was all right because anybody who looked at the picture could see they were lying down.”

  Luke turned the book around again and studied the picture.

  “I guess,” he said. “But next time put in about how they’re lying down.”

  Next time! There was going to be a next time. Luke might set fires and lie and cheat and steal, but there was no doubt that he could be reached.

  Now I was the one who leaned back and stared out across the room, wanting the moment to last a little longer. Where was the arsonist and thief of the file folder? Where was the rebellious truant? It didn’t make sense.

  Luke squirmed beside me and rubbed his nose, leaving new smears of red paint across his face.

  There was a sink in the back of the room and I nodded toward it and smiled at Luke.

  “How about washing up? You’ve got red paint from here to here.” I touched my own face to show him.

  I turned the faucets back and forth – hot, cold, a little more hot. Making it the right warmth, as I had for my own children.

  “Okay,” I said. “Here’s a piece of soap.” I wanted to mix the soap between his hands, wash his face, but I knew better. I moved back and sat on the table, watching him from across the room.

  Luke rewarded me with a question.

  “Know how I got so much paint?”

  “Unh-unh. How?”

  “From the kangaroo. I made him all red.”

  “The kangaroo you made during art?”

  “Yup. I could tell a story about it, but you write it down so you don’t forget stuff this time. It’s called ‘The Kangaroo.’”

  There was a long pause. Then Luke said, “How’ll I start?”

  “Lots of good stories begin ‘once upon a time.’” If pretending made it easier for him to talk, it was okay with me.

  “Okay. Once upon a time there was a kangaroo, and he hopped very high. He was funny and he was a boxing kangaroo. One day he hopped into a bucket of red paint. That was bad. The kangaroo was sad. A zoo keeper put a fence around him. But then he remembered how high he could hop and he hopped right over the fence.”

  Luke stopped. “Do you think a kangaroo could hop that high?”

  I nodded, still writing. “A good young boxing kangaroo could definitely hop that high,” I said.

  Luke nodded. “Write ‘The End by Luke Brauer.’”

  Friday night Cal and I drove up to the country. The snow was gone, but there had evidently been a heavy windstorm and broken branches lay across the road and path into the house.

  Before breakfast the next morning, Cal was out prowling around, inspecting the damage.

  “There’ll be a lot of clean-up work to do in the spring. A couple of big trees are down in the meadow. Must have had a wet snow before the wind.”

  I poured our coffee and Cal talked to me as I cooked the eggs.

  “You know, my father used to tell a story about President Roosevelt. After he had finished his first term in office, he went to register to vote. In those days you had to write down your occupation. You know what he wrote? ‘Tree Grower.’ I was thinking about that this morning. When I’m here in this place, I think if I couldn’t describe myself as engineer or inventor, I’d say ‘grower of trees.’ Not very good trees, maybe, but certainly lots of them.”

  I put our eggs on the table and climbed in on the bench next to the stone wall. “Yes,” I said. “I can see that. You are a grower.”

  “And you,” Cal asked. “If you couldn’t say teacher or writer, what would you say?”

  I watched the sun glimmering through the small window panes, highlighting a pale brown spider who was beginning to spin a web in the far corner of the room. Cal was one of the few people who knew about the journals I kept and the occasional poems and articles I’d published. He teased me sometimes about my diaries, but it was an old habit. From the time I was a little girl, things stayed brighter, clearer for me if I wrote them down. After I began to teach, I kept a small black and white notebook for each child I taught. My version of a lesson plan, I suppose.

  A montage of the children I’d known imposed itself upon the spiderweb and I smiled at Cal.

  “I know what I would think, but I’m not sure I could tell other people.”

  “What?”

  “A lover of children.”

  This time Cal smiled at me as he got up to pour us more coffee. “That sounds very nice. You should get used to saying it.”

  Chapter 6

  We no longer had our meetings at the clinic on Mondays. Now that we were with the children at School 23, it didn’t seem natural to meet in any other environment. We had unanimously agreed that our meetings would be at the school.

  Each week we discussed one child in depth and shared opinions, ideas, and suggestions about things we should eliminate, continue, or increase. We altered discussions of children and this time it was Luke’s turn.

  I was eager to talk about Luke with Shirley and Hud. Luke was so different from the seriously emotionally disturbed children I had known. I thought perhaps at
the day care center or camp they might have had other children similar to Luke.

  Most of all, I wanted to talk to Jerry. He had promised to check the records at the clinic for background information about Luke. He had also asked me to copy Luke’s subtest scores from the WISC test and to give Luke two other tests: the Bender Gestalt, in which a child copied designs to test visual perception, motor and memory abilities; and the House-Tree-Person, in which drawings often revealed to a trained examiner how a child felt about himself and his world. Luke had enjoyed copying the nine design cards of the Bender and doing the drawings. I also had asked Luke to draw a picture of his family, and now I spread his tests and stories and my notes on the table for Shirley and Hud to inspect and Jerry to score and interpret.

  “Well, he’s not dumb, that’s for sure,” Jerry commented as he examined the WISC. “His scores in information and vocabulary are low, but look at this sixteen in Block Design and a fourteen in Picture Arrangement. This kid knows how to plan, organize, and then carry out his thoughts, and he’s socially aware and alert to detail. Whatever the reason for his acting-out behavior and poor school performance, it is not because of lack of intelligence.”

  Shirley commented in her soft voice as she leafed through Luke’s book, “His stories seem to be mainly about animals. Does he talk about other things?”

  I shook my head. “No, not much, although he didn’t object when I asked him to draw the House-Tree-Person – or even to drawing his family. I really feel he’s trusting me an awful lot when he talks at all. Do you think I should ask him more?”

  “Not yet,” Jerry answered. “The records at the clinic show he didn’t talk at all while he was there. Just poured the sand back and forth from bucket to bucket. I’d go slow for now. Besides, he’s telling us a lot with his drawings.

  “See how tiny the door is on this picture of a house?

  “Now I don’t feel you should try to read an entire psychoanalysis into children’s drawings, but if you treat their pictures as one more piece in the puzzle, they can be helpful.”