In the Fall They Come Back

by Robert Bausch

  “But you did confront him. You told me …”

  “It was a mistake. I lost him by doing that. You may now lose him too.”

  “He wasn’t angry.”

  “He didn’t show any anger with me, either. But I lost him.”

  “The abuse has stopped, pretty much,” I said. “Now his father forces him to work out with him—that’s not very nice, but it isn’t abuse. And it’s good for him.”

  It got quiet for a while. I finished my coffee and tried not to let him know it was gone. I kept sipping at an empty cup, feeling as though I’d been forced to defend myself. I could see that he pretty much agreed with Annie, and I was beginning to realize that coming here was a big mistake. But then I remembered what kind of teacher he was; I remembered why I admired him so much. I said, “But you never just came to work, taught your classes and went home, did you?”

  He smiled.

  “I can’t believe you ever did that. How’d you lose George if you weren’t getting in there and trying to help outside of the class?”

  “There’s that too. One must find a balance. It is very very hard.”

  “Seems easy to me. If you care about it. If you care about a student—about really teaching something that …”

  “But you see, son. It’s a service job. It’s work we value ourselves, yes. But to everybody else, it’s a service job. No different than that of a cook, or waiter, or dishwasher, or butler.”

  “I get it. I understand that. But isn’t it also a kind of profession like being a lawyer, or …”

  “No,” he said, and then he leaned forward and spoke loudly, angrily. “You don’t get it. We are not like lawyers, or judges, or even accountants or business managers. We don’t count as much as a telephone repairman, or a plumber. A teacher is part of the service industry: short order cooks, waiters, butlers, maids, and so on. It’s always been that way. Aristotle was a servant in Prince Phillip’s household. All through the ages teachers were always among the servants in the great households; paid little, and given the responsibility of educating the upper classes. All the great kings and queens of England, France, and Spain, were educated by mere servants, people who lived and died without mention anywhere, in any book. What they passed on, what they prepared their students for, was the whole world—the whole bloody world—and not one of them was any more important than a common scullery maid!” His voice quavered a little at the end there, and it may have surprised him. He was deeply sad, but he didn’t want me to see it. The tone of his voice at the end almost broke my heart. He got up and took his cup to the sink. It was as if he had announced to me, at the very moment he himself discovered it, that he had wasted his life.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He rinsed his cup and set it in the sink; then he stood there, looking out the bright window toward the climbing sun.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  He turned back to me a puzzled look on his face. “Sorry?” he said. “What in heaven’s name are you sorry for?”

  “I guess I’m sorry I brought it up about … I mean …”

  He waved his hand, almost laughed. “Ah, forget it. You got nothing to be sorry for. I’m sorry I went at you like that.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “You’re a good teacher, Benjamin,” he said. “A fine teacher.”

  I said nothing.

  “Just don’t ever take it too seriously.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And remember that each person you have to deal with is a separate entity—a completely separate and whole entity.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He pointed to his head. “A universe, young man. A universe. Every student you see will be different from every other student you see every day of your teaching life. If you remember that—if you never forget to see people and not types of people—you will be fine.”

  “I will remember,” I said, but I would have said anything. I was so ashamed for bringing this tender and benevolent man to such an extremity—to the realization of what his life finally meant—and to be honest I was already thinking about how to make an exit from his kitchen as soon as possible. My sense of triumph was in flames. In a way, I was glad of our conversation though, because it made me see, with absolute clarity, that maybe I should only teach a few more years, and then get on to law school. It seemed to me that I should eventually get very tired of being among the servants.

  38

  The Second Coming

  Suzanne’s next poem opened with this:

  Here comes to the earth a

  being—incredibly powerful

  Then it went on:

  Not Superman nor savior,

  though he benefits from good press

  The papers say He is all loving, all powerful, all good.

  He waves a finger and miracles happen

  sunsets, dawns, millions of blossoms

  white blooming clouds in columns of light

  cathedrals of light

  cells divide, multiply, life

  mushrooms from the dark miracles of life and

  miracles of death (life, birth, immortal cancer

  cells that cannot die).

  But children can. By the thousands.

  Countless others burn in fire

  under walls of hunger or in floods or landslides

  earthquakes and fires and fires and fires

  The babies die, we all die

  But oh the miracle of those sunsets in fall

  those black towers of green leaves and white

  roofed mountains shimmering in ice blue lakes

  and oh that love, thrashing in human hearts

  He maims in traffic of blood and cells

  in genes, in mitochondria

  in skyscrapers and machines and rooms and

  cellars everywhere

  He ordains, He wills, He waves that finger

  every day He does these things

  every second He does these things

  and will not stop

  He will only keep choosing, electing

  Here will be orange sunrise, white swirls of cloud

  in blue and here will be death and disease and horror

  and here will be love and here will be hate

  here will be motherhood, and here will be murder

  no one gets out

  Yet does He love us. He loves us so

  Yet is He the one the true the only

  and here He comes to the earth this being

  There He is! Look, He is right there rising over the earth

  like the sun in morning

  like a spirit growing from the ground

  He moves toward us

  He loves us

  He might do anything! He might do anything!

  Fear not.

  The poem was called “The Stampede.”

  Now, what would you do with that? It was clearly some sort of development of the ideas I had put in her head with my God assignment. It was not a good poem—it wasn’t even close to her earlier work. I didn’t know what I should do about it though. It wasn’t school work; this was not a creative writing class and I was not a creative writing teacher, so I didn’t think it would be a good idea to give it back to her with comments and suggestions for revision. What would I say to her about it anyway? That the idea of the poem isn’t new? Who expects new ideas from a high school student? Could I tell her the poem wasn’t really all that poetic? That her imagery—except for the bit about the trees and the mountains—was prosaic and a little confusing? That poets rely on connotation and nuance, the true souls of words, and using the word miracle while describing suffering children was perhaps a bit of a violation of some basic poetic principle of which I was completely unaware? I had to admit, I couldn’t really tell her what was wrong with the damn thing. I just knew it was bad.

  But how could I criticize it? I didn’t think she wrote poems and left them on my desk for that reason anyway. I could have responded to the
idea of the poem, I guess, but I was working with the fear that if I did anything differently she might stop writing them; might stop leaving them on my desk. I liked finding her poems in the morning because she was communicating with me, having another sort of conversation with me, even if I had never looked her in the face and didn’t even know the color of her eyes.

  I wanted only to encourage her, but I guess I thought it might also be a bad idea not to respond to her ideas. I didn’t want her to think I was simply ignoring her sincerity, her sensibility. I’m not stupid. I could see she was attempting to touch a nerve with me; that she was writing that poem to me directly. I considered asking Leslie to read it but then thought better of it. She had taken to sitting next to Suzanne, and speaking to her gently at the beginning of every class, but nothing developed from that. (Leslie wrote in one of her journal entries that she thought Suzanne was very sad, and I replied that it was probably best to leave her alone.)

  I read the “Stampede” poem over and over. But I didn’t talk to Annie or anybody at the school about it. Frankly, I’d grown tired of Annie and her attitude toward my students and their problems. But I did have somebody I could go to.

  When I was in graduate school I knew a guy named Wally Drummond who claimed to be a poet. Everybody called him Drum. He and I worked for a while on the school literary magazine, and in my last year of graduate school, we used to have a cup of coffee each morning before a class we both hated, called “Myth and Symbol in the Literature of Ireland.” He always joked that the class should have been called, “No Thing Simple in the Literature of Ireland.” (Reading too much James Joyce could do that to a person.) At any rate, I always thought Drum wasn’t such a bad guy, and I figured he might be willing to read the poems and talk about them. (I know. It should have been clear to me then what sort of movement I was making away from Annie; if I couldn’t talk to her about Suzanne then what could I talk to her about?)

  I hadn’t seen Drum in quite a while, but when I told him what I wanted he agreed to see me. He was working at the public library just up the road from Glenn Acres, so we arranged to have a quick lunch one cold, wintry Wednesday near the end of January. I took all of the poems Suzanne had written. I hoped he might know what I could say to her that would be useful—especially about the last poem.

  The first thing Drum did was read all of them. He sat across from me in a bagel bakery and read each poem as if he were trying to decipher one of the Dead Sea scrolls. When I asked him if he wanted some cream cheese for his bagel he held up his hand and shushed me, frowning in concentration. I slathered my bagel and sipped my coffee and watched him. He was a tall, thin, sharp-pointed kind of man—his face filled with corners and crags. He wore a thin mustache, and let the beard on his chin grow just enough to show. His brow hung over his eyes, making them look sinister and threatening, like something hiding in the shadows, under the lee of two curved stones. In spite of his dark countenance, he was almost meek and it always stunned him when anyone took him seriously.

  I was nearly finished with my bagel when he finally put her poems down and picked up his own bagel. “You say she’s a high school student? I gotta talk to her.”

  “You can’t do that.” I told him all about her while he prepared his bagel and sipped his coffee. “She’s as shy as a wild animal, for reasons we can scarcely guess at,” I said once I’d finished.

  “So she reads a lot.”

  “She sure does.”

  “It shows.”

  I took a sip of coffee and waited for him to continue, but he added more cream cheese to his bagel, stared at it for a bit, and then started eating again. He looked down at the poems.

  “What can I say to her about that last one?” I said.

  “Why do you have to say anything?”

  “Well, I feel as though I’ve put those ideas in her head.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know if I want that responsibility.”

  “Really.”

  “Not for that,” I said. “Not for a vision of the world so bleak that she might …”

  “Oh,” he said, understanding me before I did. I realized as I was telling him about it that I was more concerned about Suzanne than her poem.

  “Her life has been miserable up to this point,” I said. “I think I can believe that absolutely. What if my suggesting these things to her leads her to try something awful?”

  He nodded, chewing his food. Then he pointed to the poems and said, “Can I have these?”

  “No. They’re mine.”

  “How about copies?”

  “What do you want them for?”

  “I’m still poetry editor of Hounds-Tooth.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Maybe we’ll publish one or two of them.”

  “Really.”

  “That would be my response to her. Do her a big favor. Get a few of them published, then hand her the book and see what she says. I bet that would be a terrific way of motivating her—if that’s what she needs.”

  “You’re a poet. You think her poems are good?”

  “Nobody really knows what a good poem is. Some poets can recognize a bad one when they see it. But poems are like wines. People take what they like. Most people in this country think a good poem is anything that rhymes.”

  “Most people like bad poetry.”

  “That’s because good poetry makes demands on them.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Poetry has always had a very small, very select, very special audience.”

  “James Dickey said a poet in America is ludicrous.”

  “That was a criticism of America, not poets.”

  “I know that.”

  “Anyway, I think some of these show promise.”

  “What about that last one, about God the brute?”

  “Didn’t you ever read W. B. Yeats? ‘The Second Coming’?”

  I shrugged.

  “How’s it go? Something like, ‘What rough beast with lion body and the head of a man, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?’ ”

  “I remember it,” I said. “Maybe I can get her to change her title to ‘The Second Coming Revisited.’ That is better, don’t you think?”

  “Her poem isn’t just about God, it’s about us. Why don’t we run from such a God, eh?”

  I shook my head, more in amazement than anything else, but he took it to mean that I disagreed with him.

  “See?” he said. “You don’t like it. I do. It’s not perfect, but nobody ever wrote a faultless piece. It’s the best poem I’ve ever seen by a high school senior I can tell you.”

  “But what do I do now?” I said. “What about how I respond now?”

  “I’ll publish these, or most of them, in Hounds-Tooth.”

  “You can do that.”

  “I’m the poetry editor.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t you think I should get her permission?”

  “The magazine is copyrighted. Her name will be on the poems. What could she object to?”

  “I don’t know. It feels wrong.”

  “Shit, Anne Bradstreet’s uncle or some sort of family friend took a bunch of her poems to London and published them in a book without telling her.”

  “Really.”

  “It might help you break through the shyness if you could show her a magazine with her poems in it.”

  I thought about what that would be like. Placing a new copy of Hound’s-Tooth on Suzanne’s desk one morning, watching her pick it up and begin to leaf through it. “When does the magazine come out?” I asked.

  “The first week in April.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Take them. Go ahead and do it. But I want them back when you’re done.”

  “Sure.”

  “What do I do in the meantime? Shouldn’t I have some sort of response to this last poem?”

  He smiled, and with those dark eyes he looked almost evil. “Give her Blake’s poem about the tiger.”


  I realized he was exactly right. That poem would be perfect. So here is what I put on her desk the next morning:

  The Tyger

  Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,

  In the forests of the night;

  What immortal hand or eye,

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  In what distant deeps or skies.

  Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

  On what wings dare he aspire?

  What the hand, dare seize the fire?

  And what shoulder, & what art,

  Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

  And when thy heart began to beat,

  What dread hand? & what dread feet?

  What the hammer? what the chain,

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? what dread grasp,

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

  When the stars threw down their spears

  And water’d heaven with their tears:

  Did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  Tyger, Tyger burning bright,

  In the forests of the night:

  What immortal hand or eye,

  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

  Suzanne came in as she always did, before anyone else. I watched her from outside. I was in the smoking area with Doreen, who stood with her back to the door so I could see over her shoulder through the top window on the door. We were both freezing, but she agreed to stand there with me until Suzanne got there. The cold air made Doreen’s eyes glitter and she let me know she didn’t want to stand there too long. Suzanne went right to her desk; she did not have a new poem for me. When she sat down and put her books under her chair, she picked up the piece of paper and began reading.

  I couldn’t see her face. I never had seen her face, but she did something that got me worrying a little bit: when she was finished reading, she held the paper against her breast and started rocking a little, back and forth, like in prayer or something. I looked away, but Doreen noticed something was bothering me.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing.”