City Kid

by Mary MacCracken

  “It’ss for you,” he said.

  Harry. Who would have guessed?

  “Thank you.” We were both embarrassed, but that was okay. I wasn’t going to rush it this time. “Can I open it?”

  Harry nodded and I carefully slit the pieces of Scotch tape and lifted off the paper. A bright pink box labeled Geranium Dusting Powder. Inside was a fat snowy puff on top of paper sealing in the powder. I poked in one corner of the paper and dipped my finger in the powder and rubbed it on the back of my hand.

  Self-consciousness vanished in the scent of geraniums and I grabbed Harry and kissed him quick before either of us ran away.

  “Hey,” he objected, but he was grinning from ear to ear. “Do you really like it? I bought it for you with my own money.”

  “I love it,” I told him. “It’s absolutely perfect. You couldn’t have picked anything nicer.” I gave him one more kiss.

  The door opened and Harry dove for his book bag.

  It was the school secretary. “Mrs. Karras wants to see you before you leave.”

  “Okay. Be there in a minute.”

  Harry was already halfway down the hall. “Hey, Harry,” I called. “Good-bye. Thanks for everything.” He turned and waved, then scurried on, dragging the heavy book bag, empty now of its secret.

  Mrs. Karras looked up from her desk. “What’s this I hear about kissing in the music room?”

  No wonder Harry buried his present under seven books. News traveled fast in School 23. “Couldn’t help it,” I admitted. I showed her the box of Geranium Dusting Powder.

  Mrs. Karras smiled. “We’ve loved having you here, Mary. I wish we could keep you. Well – who knows? Maybe something will happen.”

  “You taught me something important,” I said. “It’s the principal who makes the school. You’re the one who sets the mood, gives the encouragement, provides the material, becomes the model. No teacher can do it alone.” I hugged her one last time. “Please stay in touch.”

  I ran down the grimy stone steps, waved at the yowling white dog, and drove to Luke’s house.

  I rang the doorbell and counted while I waited. One, two, three, four, five. I was about to ring again when the door opened slightly.

  A stocky, black-haired man stood behind the half-open door. “Yeah. What is it?”

  “I’m one of Luke’s teachers over at the school. Is he all right?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” The door was starting to close.

  “Chuck?” I asked. The door opened again.

  “Where’d ya get my name?”

  “Luke and his mother, too, mentioned you. I’m Mary MacCracken. This is my last day over at School Twenty-three and I just wanted to leave a good-bye present for Luke.”

  Chuck opened the door wider. “Listen. Sorry. I thought maybe you were one of those truant officers. See, I let the kids take the day off so they could go on up to Canada with their mother and my brother’s family. We got a camp up there and I’m going up myself at the end of the week. But the kids have done so good, I thought I’d give ’em a break, and let ’em all go up in my brother’s van. Come on in.”

  “No. No, thank you. I’m late already, but would you give this to Luke for me?”

  “Sure. Sure I will. What was the name again?”

  “Mary.”

  “Mary? Oh, sure. Now I know. Luke went up to the country with you. Right?”

  I nodded.

  “You know what Gloria, Luke’s mother, that is, says? She says you worked a miracle on that boy.”

  “No. Don’t say that. Luke did most of it himself.”

  “Well. Maybe. But I tell you, I’d never have believed that kid could do it. I mean get so smart and all.” Chuck turned Luke’s present awkwardly in his hands. “Could I ask you, I mean, would you tell me what you did to stop him from being some kind of stealing, cheating, bratty dumbbell?”

  It was my turn to stand without speaking, shifting my weight from foot to foot in the Falls City sunlight.

  What had I done? How could I put it into words for Chuck? I’d had my plan for helping Luke grow, teaching him academics, but I knew that what Chuck was really asking was how could he do whatever it was to keep on helping Luke.

  It was a question I had longed to hear, and now I wasn’t sure how to answer.

  I did the best I could. “I’m not sure. I guess my part was showing Luke that he was smart, that the reading and math weren’t that hard – and listening to him. Luke needs someone to listen, so he can believe that words can make a difference.” I hesitated, searching for words myself. “I guess we got involved with each other; anyway, I know I cared a lot about him.

  “The rest Mrs. Brauer did here at home. She heard him read out loud and do his homework. She showed him she was proud of what he was doing, and when she really began to believe he could do it, then Luke believed it too.”

  Chuck put out his hand. “Well, I – uh – we thank you. And I’ll tell you something. This summer up at the cabin, I’m gonna teach the kid to fish. I mean really fish. Wade the streams, cast, go after trout. A year ago I wouldn’t have believed he could learn, but I’m pretty sure I can teach him how to do it now.”

  “I’m sure you can. Luke will love that. And remember, please call if I can ever help.”

  Chuck nodded and I shook his hand. Silence grew around us in the hot sunshine on the project stoop. I knew that I should go, but Luke had been such a large part of my life that it was hard to let him go for all time.

  But he would be all right. I knew it. My part was done. It was foolish to stand there waiting for the right way to say good-bye. No words would ever be adequate.

  I wrapped my heart in a cliché. “Give Luke my love,” I called, as I ran down the project steps for the last time.

  Afterword

  When I began writing this book, I reviewed many old records and files that I had kept during my college years, One of the documents that I came across was “The Experimental Elementary School Mental Health Model.” This was the model that was actually used for our initial training at the Mental Health Clinic. I was very excited to rediscover this program even though some parts were never implemented. The plan had seemed good to me in 1970, and in 1980 it seemed even better. My excitement resulted in ninety hand-written pages describing each section of this model in detail, and the few training sessions we actually did have at the clinic in even greater detail.

  Two drafts later I realized that the first ninety pages of my book were, in fact, very dull stuff. So I cut the ninety pages and began with Luke, who, of course, is the heart of the book. I hope through his story the messages of the report are brought to life.

  Coming soon …

  Joey is the class clown, but proves to be a dark seven-year old.

  Eric is a kindergartener, withdrawn by what he’s witnessed.

  Alice appears the model child, but secretly scores zero on every math test.

  Charlie struggles to understand his place in the world, leaving him confused and alone.

  Ben has had a comfortable home life, but has been called stupid so often he now believes it.

  The inspiring story of five troubled children who foster carer Mary MacCracken fought to bring back from the brink.

  Tap here to pre-order Turnabout Children now.

  Inspired by Mary MacCracken?

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  Read an exclusive excerpt now.

  Chapter 1

  The article in the newspaper was tiny, considering the crime. It told of a six-year-old girl who had lured a local toddler from his yard, taken him to a nearby woodland, tied him to a tree and set fire to him. The boy, badly burned, was in hospital. All that was said in what amounted to no more than a space filler below the comic strips on page six. I read it and, repulsed, I turned the page and went on.

  Six weeks later, Ed, the special education director, phoned me. It was early January, the day we were returning from our Christmas break. “There’s going to be a new girl in your class. R
emember that little girl who set fire to the kid in November …?”

  I taught what was affectionately referred to in our district as the “garbage class.” It was the last year before congressional law would introduce “mainstreaming,” the requirement that all special needs children be educated in the least restrictive environment; and thus, our district still had the myriad of small special education classrooms, each catering to a different disability. There were classes for physically handicapped, for mentally handicapped, for behaviorally disordered, for visually impaired … you name it, we had it. My eight were the kids left over, the ones who defied classification. All of them suffered emotional disorders, but most also had mental or physical disabilities as well. Out of the three girls and five boys in the group, three could not talk, one could but refused and another spoke only in echoes of other people’s words. Three of them were still in diapers and two more had regular accidents. As I had the full number of children allowed by state law for a class of severely handicapped children, I was given an aide at the start of the year; but mine hadn’t turned out to be one of the bright, hardworking aides already employed by the school, as I had expected. Mine was a Mexican-American migrant worker named Anton, who had been trawled from the local welfare list. He’d never graduated from high school, never even stayed north all winter before, and certainly had never changed diapers on a seven-year-old. My only other help came from Whitney, a fourteen-year-old junior high student, who gave up her study halls to volunteer in our class.

  By all accounts we didn’t appear a very promising group, and in the beginning, chaos was the byword; however, as the months passed, we metamorphosed. Anton proved to be sensitive and hardworking, his dedication to the children becoming apparent within the first weeks. The kids, in return, responded well to having a man in the classroom and they built on one another’s strengths. Whitney’s youth occasionally made her more like one of the children than one of the staff, but her enthusiasm was contagious, making it easier for all of us to view events as adventures rather than the disasters they often were. The kids grew and changed, and by Christmas we had become a cohesive little group. Now Ed was sending me a six-year-old stick of dynamite.

  Her name was Sheila. The next Monday she arrived, being dragged into my classroom by Ed, as my principal worriedly brought up the rear, his hands flapping behind her as if to fan her into the classroom. She was absolutely tiny, with fierce eyes, long, matted blond hair and a very bad smell. I was shocked to find she was so small. Given her notoriety, I had expected something considerably more Herculean. As it was, she couldn’t have been much bigger than the three-year-old she had abducted.

  Abducted? I regarded her carefully.

  Bureaucracy being what it is in school districts, Sheila’s school files didn’t arrive before she did; so when she went off to lunch on that first day, Anton and I took the opportunity to go down to the office for a quick look. The file made bleak reading, even by the standards of my class.

  Our town, Marysville, was in proximity to a large mental hospital and a state penitentiary, and this, in addition to the migrants, had created a disproportionate underclass, many of whom lived in appalling poverty. The buildings in the migrant camp had been built as temporary summer housing and many were literally nothing but wood and tar paper that lacked even the most basic amenities, but they became crowded in the winter by those who could afford nothing better. It was here that Sheila lived with her father.

  A drug addict with alcohol problems, her father had spent most of Sheila’s early years in and out of prison. He had no job. Currently on parole, he was attending an alcohol abuse program, but doing little else.

  Sheila’s mother had been only fourteen when, as a runaway, she took up with Sheila’s father and became pregnant. Sheila was born two days before her mother’s fifteenth birthday. A second child, a son, was born nineteen months later. There wasn’t much else relating to the mother in the file, although it was not hard to read drugs, alcohol and domestic violence between the lines. Whatever, she must have finally had enough, because when Sheila was four, she left the family. From the brief notes, it appeared that she had intended to take both children with her, but Sheila was later found abandoned on an open stretch of freeway about thirty miles south of town. Sheila’s mother and her brother, Jimmie, were never heard from again.

  The bulk of the file detailed Sheila’s behavior. At home the father appeared to have no control over her at all. She had been repeatedly found wandering around the migrant camp late at night. She had a history of fire setting and had been cited for criminal damage three times by the local police, quite an accomplishment for a six-year-old. At school, Sheila often refused to speak, and as a consequence, virtually nothing was contained in the file to tell me what or how much she might have learned. She had been in kindergarten and then first grade in an elementary school near the migrant camp until the incident with the little boy had occurred, but there were no assessment notes. In place of the usual test results and learning summaries was a catalog of horror stories detailing Sheila’s destructive, often violent, behavior.

  At the end of the file was a brief summary of the incident with the toddler. The judge concluded that Sheila was out of parental control and would be best placed in a secure unit, where her needs could be better met. In this instance, he meant the children’s unit at the state mental hospital. Unfortunately, the unit was at capacity at the time of the hearing, and thus, Sheila would need to await an opening. A recently dated memo was appended detailing the need to provide some form of education, given her age and the law, but no one bothered to mince words. Her placement was custodial. This meant she had to be kept in school for the time being, because of the specifics of the law, but I need not feel under any obligation to teach her. With Sheila’s arrival, my room had become a holding pen.

  Youth was my greatest asset at that point in my career. Still fired with idealism, I felt strongly that there were no problem kids, only a problem society. Although initially reluctant to take Sheila, it had been because my room was crowded and my resources overstretched already, not because of the child herself. Thus, once I had her, I regarded her as mine and my class was no holding pen! My belief in human integrity and the inalienable right of each and every one of my children to possess it was trenchant.

  Well, almost. Before she was done, Sheila had given all my beliefs a good shaking and she started that very first day. As Anton and I were sitting in the front office that lunch hour, reading Sheila’s file, Sheila was in our classroom scooping the goldfish out of the aquarium and, one by one, poking their eyes out.

  Sheila proved to be chaos dressed in outgrown overalls and a faded T-shirt. Everything she said was shrieked. Everything she touched was broken, hit, squashed or mangled. And everyone, myself included, was The Enemy. She operated in what Anton christened her “animal mode.” There was not much “child mode” present in the early days. The slightest unexpected movement she always interpreted as attack. Her eyes would go dark, her face would flush, her body would take on alert rigidity, and from that point it was a finely balanced matter as to whether she would fight, or panic and run away. When she was in her animal mode, our methods were a whole lot more akin to taming than teaching.

  Yet …

  Sheila was different. There was something electric about her, about her eyes, about the sharpness of her movements that superimposed itself over even her most feral moments. I couldn’t articulate what it was, but I could sense it.

  I loved my children dearly, but the truth was, they were not a very bright lot. Most children with emotional difficulties use so much mental energy coping that there simply isn’t much left for learning. Additionally, other syndromes often occur in conjunction with psychological problems, either contributing to them or resulting from them. For example, two of my children suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and another had a neurological condition that was causing a slow deterioration of his central nervous system. As a consequence, none of the c
hildren was functioning at an average level for his or her age, although undoubtedly several were of normal intelligence. Thus, it came as a surprise to me to discover during Sheila’s early days with us that she could add and subtract well, because she had managed only three months of first grade.

  A bigger surprise came days later, when I discovered she could give the meanings of unusual words. One such word was “chattel.”

  “Wherever did you learn a word like this?” I asked when my curiosity finally overwhelmed me.

  Sheila, little and dirty and very smelly, sat hunched up on her chair across the table from me. She peered up through matted hair to regard me. “Chattel of Love,” she replied and added in her peculiar dialect, “it be the name of a book I find.”

  “Book? Where? What book?”

  “I don’t steal it,” she retorted defensively. “It be in the garbage can. I find it.”

  “Where?”

  “I do find it,” she repeated, obviously believing this was the issue I was trying to explore.

  “Yes, okay,” I replied, “but where?”

  “In the ladies’ toilets at the bus station. But I don’t steal it.”

  I smiled. “No, I’m sure you didn’t. I’m just interested in hearing about it.”

  She regarded me suspiciously.

  “What did you do with the book?” I asked.

  Sheila clearly couldn’t puzzle out why I wanted to know these things. “Well, I read it,” she said, her voice full of disbelief, as if I’d asked a very silly question. There was a worried edge to it, however. She still sensed it was an accusation.

  “You read it? It sounds like a rather grown-up book.”

  “Well, I don’t read all of it. But on the cover it say Chattel of Love and so I do be curious about it, ’cause of the picture,’ cause of what the man be doing to the lady on the cover.”