In the Fall They Come Back

by Robert Bausch

  At the end of the last period, after everyone had filtered out, I sat at my desk and stared at Leslie’s chair. I would have had to say good-bye to her on this day anyway. She was a senior and she would have graduated. She had earned an A in my class.

  The room was brightly lit. Outside the air was balmy and sweet with the smell of wisteria and honeysuckle. Through the picture window of my classroom I saw the new leaves stirred slightly by mild, summer breezes. Broad white clouds blossomed and grew silently in the blue cathedral above the dark green trees. It was a beautiful day. A memorable day. I made up my mind I would not feel badly about anything but what happened to Leslie. I sat there a long time as the building emptied. I watched those clouds reforming themselves, changing from great churning puffs to thin, wispy hints of what they once were, and I knew I would go home, and prepare myself for law school and Annie. I was going to work on my relationship with her. I was bent on repairing it. She said on that last morning that we should “take the summer to reconsider things,” so that is what I planned on doing. I was just too numb to apprehend what she really meant by that.

  Finally, when I was fairly certain the building was empty, I got up and started putting papers in folders and arranging things in my briefcase. I cleaned out my desk, and put one piece of chalk—my only souvenir—in one of the inside pockets.

  As I was closing the strap on the briefcase and buckling it, concentrating on it, I realized someone else was in the room. I looked up, and there—fully erect and sort of heaving with it, her red hair draped on both sides of her face—stood Suzanne Rule. She wore a blue sweat-suit kind of jacket, and blue sweat pants with white tennis shoes. When she knew I saw her, she took a deep breath, and then as if it was her first attempt at it, she walked slowly across the space in the middle of the room. She did not look down. It was as though she were walking a tightrope, but I will never forget her bright, green eyes, the small red freckles across her nose and cheeks, the look of pride and determination on her face as she approached me.

  When she got to my desk, she paused. I wanted to say something—anything—to congratulate her for walking upright that long, for letting me see her face. I looked at her hands, expecting her to pass me a note of some kind, but her hands were empty. They grasped the sides of her sweatpants. When I looked up again I realized she was fighting tears. Her eyes did not meet mine; they seemed to study something on the wall just above and behind me as she said, “Thank you, Mr. Jameson. Thank you … for all this year.” Her voice was delicate and sweet, like birdsong. I had tears in my own eyes. Before I could say anything, she nodded, and now she did look in my eyes. “Thank you,” she said again, in a slight whisper. Then she turned around and walked out of the room.

  I would not want to surrender how I felt at that moment for all the money on earth.

  49

  Commencement

  Graduation took place in the bright, sunlit yard above the basketball court. It should have been a small celebration—we only had twenty-nine graduates, each of them dressed in a light blue cap and gown—but with family members and friends, it turned out to be a fairly crowded afternoon. Mrs. Creighton gave the graduating address. In her high, trembling voice, she talked of the future. She did not mention Leslie Warren, although when some of the seniors got up to speak that’s all they talked about. It saddened me to realize that Leslie was an inspiration to all of them.

  George graduated with honors. I watched him at the ceremony. In the cap and gown he looked taller and carried himself with a kind of strength, in a way that showed he was distinguished, proud, and ready. He would take what he wanted from the world. I saw him hugging his father and mother and a host of relatives and admirers. His father actually came up to me and shook my hand. He had tears in his eyes. “I sure am proud of that boy,” he said.

  “Well, he’s a young man,” I said. “Not a boy at all.”

  He looked at me without the slightest sign of recognition or awareness that I might remember what a prick he was. All I could do was let go of his hand and turn away from him.

  I had one very proud moment.

  Mrs. Creighton stood at the top of the small rise in the ground and called out the names of the graduates and asked each to come to the front and receive a diploma. When she called out Suzanne Rule’s name, she stood straight up and walked across the open space between the graduates and Mrs. Creighton, who handed her the diploma with tears in her eyes. Suzanne looked out at the small crowd. It was so quiet suddenly, it seemed that the whole world noticed her posture and waited to see what she would do. Mrs. Creighton whispered to her, and then Suzanne gave a small, unpracticed smile and started to walk back down the hill.

  The crowd let go a soft, scattered bit of laughter, which stopped her. She was in the middle of the open space of ground, holding her diploma in her small white hands, still standing upright. Mrs. Creighton had tears streaming down her face. Then people began clapping tentatively and Mrs. Creighton walked down and put her arms around Suzanne and held her for a quiet moment. Then everybody started clapping loudly and cheering. It was a small, beautiful thing to see.

  Once all the names had been called and the graduates had thrown their caps in the air, I found my way to the parking lot and got in my car. I didn’t want to stick around for the party. I already felt as though I had inadvertently stumbled into somebody else’s revelry and I didn’t want to suffer a lot of farewells. As I was pulling out of the place, though, I saw Doreen standing at the edge of the basketball court by herself. I stopped, rolled down my window, and waved to her. She came over to me, smiling.

  “Where’s Annie?”

  “I’m going to get her now. We’re going out to dinner.”

  She nodded. It was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Don’t be a stranger.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’m awful sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Really. It’s just how things turned out.”

  She touched my arm. “Weren’t you proud of our Suzanne?”

  “Yes I was.”

  “You should be proud of yourself, too.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “You should be.”

  I patted her hand, then put the car in gear. “See you,” I said.

  She waved and I drove away from Glenn Acres for the last time.

  I have not seen Suzanne Rule since that last day at Glenn Acres. I’ll probably never know what happened to her. Shortly after I left the school I heard from Doreen that Suzanne and her mother moved to Florida. I don’t know if she ever learned to face the world or speak to people the way I hoped she would. I would have loved to have given her that, too. But I am pretty sure I gave her poetry, and poetry is a terrific gift to give a person.

  And maybe that is what a really good teacher is, finally: a man or woman with only the best intentions, bearing gifts. Imagine how you’d feel if you could hand somebody music, or movies, or books, or art, or history, or anything in the world worth knowing; if you could give somebody that kind of treasure in a few moments of time, every day, for just a little while. I still think of Suzanne Rule every time I read a poem. Every time I open a poetry journal I look for her name.

  And I think of Leslie. I remember her smile, the tempting way she would turn my way when she thought she was going to destroy me, and how much that look seemed to mirror the other one—the look she gave me when I knew she was helpless and grateful, and how much it seemed to ask for a simple embrace. When I took Leslie in my arms I loved something totally other than glamour, or attractiveness, or sex. I loved her for herself, with no calculation whatsoever about my rights in the matter. As the poet said, I had no rights, since I was neither father nor lover.

  A few weeks after I left Glenn Acres, Annie and I broke up. It turned out that what she wanted to work out over the summer was how to do that. She and Steven realized they were made for each other, which was not really a big surprise. I think Annie and I discovered over those two years I was a teacher
that we were not made for each other. Anyway, I was so brokenhearted over Leslie I didn’t really seem to notice what was happening around me until Annie was gone. I have to admit, I missed her for a long time.

  50

  A Long Time Ago

  It’s been more than twenty years. Twenty-four new summers have come and gone, and now it’s fall again, and I am working still for the U.S. government in the Antitrust Division. I have spent my life examining business contracts and corporation agreements; studying mergers and acquisitions; policing hedge funds and banking practices in the federal financial system. It is interesting work sometimes, but not at all what I believed I’d end up doing with my life. Sometimes I think of ways to change, to get away from it all and go back to teaching somewhere. I spend most of my time reading documents that were not written to be understood; I have to truly study every phrase to make sure very clever people are obeying the law, which is to say I am in the law library more than I am anywhere else.

  I will probably think of my days at Glenn Acres for the rest of my life. Even after all this time, it is all so fresh in my memory, I don’t know if I’ll ever get to a point that it doesn’t occupy my mind whenever I have a chance to think about things.

  I often wonder what might have happened if I had refused to help Leslie, or if I had insisted that she take care of the problem herself. I think it’s possible she might have ended up doing the same thing. On my worst days, I wonder what would have happened if she had gone to her parents and discovered love in their response. I also wonder how long I might have stayed at Glenn Acres if Leslie had been alive to attend graduation. Lately I’ve been trying to get up the nerve to take a weekend away from my work and drive out to see if the school is still there; I know Mrs. Creighton died not too long ago—I think it was 1999. I never saw Bible again but I’m sure he must have gone to feed the roses not long after I left Glenn Acres. For a long time after I left there, I kept in touch with Doreen. We saw each other occasionally over the years. She and I’d go have a drink and laugh over our brief time together. I was never really attracted to her the way I was attracted to Annie, and of course she didn’t move me at all the way Leslie did, but I liked Doreen. In spite of our age difference, I trusted her then more than I ever dreamed possible. This truly surprised both of us since she knew that deep down she was so completely untrustworthy. I still have coffee with her every now and then. She told me about Mrs. Creighton’s passing. Something about Doreen always made me feel as though I could say almost anything and I always felt comfortable around her. And now she’s become the principal of a new school in Fairfax and she has asked me to consider coming back to teach for her.

  I don’t know if I ever truly missed teaching. I spent a lot of time in the classroom as a student when I was in law school, and I noticed things other teachers did. I watched the classroom manner of teachers who simply read from their notes and stood behind the lectern as though it was some kind of protection from a firing squad. While they read, the students tried desperately to write it all down, and the only one in the room who used his mind was the guy who fell asleep and had a dream. Why didn’t “teachers” like that simply hand over their notes and be done with it? Why not save everybody a whole hell of a lot of time?

  I’m not saying I knew any better. Or I shouldn’t be saying that. I was such a failure at it myself. But I wonder about what my life would have been like if I had remained a teacher. I always thought I might get another chance at it someday, but I never really pursued it. After all that happened I didn’t think it was actually possible. Could I leave something like Glenn Acres off a résumé? And how could I include, in any record of my professional life, what happened with Suzanne Rule? At times I believe that my one real success with her is the only memory from my short life as a teacher that cannot wane or darken with time. I think of it as something I possess that no one can take away.

  I’ve gone on with my life, of course, and I am the best lawyer I can be. I’ve married twice, and failed at it both times, but I am not unhappy. Sometimes I think about those two years at Glenn Acres as though it were something in the recent past. I’ll be sitting in the library, reading some case history in a law book, and suddenly I’ll look up and stare at the yellow sunlight filtering into the high windows above me, or I’ll hear a siren outside, or maybe I’ll notice a cold rain dripping down the drains and trickling in the gray, watery light of those same windows—and I’ll think of seasons gathering and passing and then I can’t concentrate on much of anything. I remember all those faces, a few bright days, and Leslie’s radiant smile the last time I saw her. It will always make me sad. But I also remember the look on Suzanne Rule’s face when she first saw her poems in that magazine and she lifted her head and looked at me with those green, dazzling, secret eyes. I remember the harmonics in her trembling voice when she said, “Thank you, Mr. Jameson. Thank you for all this year,” and before long I’m daydreaming about working with young kids again, about bearing gifts. At times like that I actually believe it might be possible that perhaps I will become a teacher once more.

  Who knows?

  Maybe I could do some good.

  Robert Bausch

  Stafford, Virginia

  April 2014

  A Note on the Author

  Robert Bausch is the author of many works of fiction, most recently the novels Far as the Eye Can See and The Legend of Jesse Smoke. He was born in Georgia and raised around Washington, D.C., and received a BA, MA, and MFA from George Mason University. He’s been awarded the Fellowship of Southern Writers Hillsdale Award and the John Dos Passos Prize, both for sustained achievement in literature. He lives in Virginia.

  Also Available from Robert Bausch

  The Legend of Jesse Smoke

  A provocative and timely new novel about the unlikely star of the Washington Redskins, female quarterback Jesse Smoke.

  When Skip Granger, the assistant coach for the Washington Redskins, first sees Jesse Smoke, she is on the beach in Belize. And she has just thrown a regulation football a mile.

  Granger knows that Smoke’s talent is unprecedented for a woman, and nearly unparalleled among men. As Granger observes her throughout a season as quarterback for the Washington Divas of the Independent Women’s Football League, he decides to sign her to the Redskins, even as he faces losing his job and credibility. As the first woman on a major NFL team, Jesse Smoke’s astounding success places her in the tradition of athletes like Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis. Yet Smoke is quickly faced with her own battles, including the clamors of the press, the violence of her teammates, and the institutional resistance that seeks to keep football in the hands of men.

  While a female quarterback in the NFL is a fantasy at the moment, Robert Bausch’s genius as a writer makes it a highly engaging reality on the page. Fans of football—and readers who were just waiting for a player worth getting excited about—will relish Jesse Smoke’s journey to the big leagues.

  “Sheds light on some of football’s prickliest issues: gender inequality and the culture of violence. Robert Bausch’s energetic new fantasy novel imagines an expanded NFL in the not-so-distant future, a time when Super Bowls are no longer numbered and fan engagement is stronger than ever … an elegant, sometimes brilliant, case that football is a ‘beautiful game’ that ‘allows us to act like heroes, even when what we are engaged in isn’t really heroic.’” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Entertaining and courageous … The Legend of Jesse Smoke is a football book readers and sports fans will both love, and one that will change the way you see the game.” —Bustle

  Far as the Eye Can See

  An American odyssey—a Civil War vet heads west into a landscape of political and moral upheaval, journeying toward the bloody reckoning of Custer’s Last Stand.

  Bobby Hale is a Union veteran several times over. After the war, he sets his sights on California, but only makes it to Montana. As he stumbles around the West, from the Wyoming Territory to the Black Hills
of the Dakotas, he finds meaning in the people he meets—settlers and native people—and the violent history he both participates in and witnesses. Far as the Eye Can See is the story of life in a place where every minute is an engagement in a kind of war of survival, and how two people—a white man and a mixed-race woman—in the midst of such majesty and violence can manage to find a pathway to their own humanity.

  Robert Bausch is the distinguished author of a body of work that is lively and varied, but linked by a thoughtfully complicated masculinity and an uncommon empathy. The unique voice of Bobby Hale manages to evoke both Cormac McCarthy and Mark Twain, guiding readers into Indian country and the Plains Wars in a manner both historically true and contemporarily relevant, as thoughts of race and war occupy the national psyche.

  “An entertaining old-school western [in] the reluctant-hero tradition of Charles Portis (True Grit).” —The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice

  “With a setting gleaming with historical accuracy and a protagonist whose voice is right out of Twain, Bausch’s novel is a worthy addition to America’s Western literary canon, there to share shelf space with The Big Sky, Little Big Man and Lonesome Dove.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  Bloomsbury USA

  An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  1385 Broadway

  50 Bedford Square

  New York

  London

  NY 10018

  WC1B 3DP

  USA

  UK

  www.bloomsbury.com

  BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  First published 2017

  © Robert Bausch, 2017