by Jon Hassler
He put his hand into the briefcase and drew out Roxie Booth’s paper. He shook his head. Before he met Roxie Booth, Miles had come to believe that there was no scribble he could not read and no tangle of clauses he could not untie, but Roxie Booth this year was challenging his reading skill as it had never been challenged before. Her writing was a riddle, which, when he solved it, said this:
What I Wish
Living free with nature in my mind of how it is like dad says no mother always agrees. But if my mind is the one I know no matter whatever rules or whatever. Then why not. Or I’ll lose my mind. Isn’t it me to say just to get away from this hassle in a cabin? Before I lose my mind.
Losing. That was the melancholy strain running through dozens of papers every year. Parents lost in death and divorce, fingers lost in corn pickers, innocence lost behind barns and in back seats, brothers and uncles lost in Vietnam, friends lost in drug-induced hallucinations, and football games lost to Owl Brook and Berrington.
He turned Roxie’s paper over and spent twenty minutes writing in understandable English what he believed she was trying to say. Then he climbed down from the bleachers, and he walked down the sloping bank to the Badbattle River. He crossed the river on stones without getting his shoes wet, for the Badbattle wasn’t much more than a trickle in late October, and he walked along the far bank, under oak and birch. He saw four ducks and a flock of red-winged blackbirds. He saw a garter snake, a goldfinch, and a crow. He saw a bittersweet vine strangling a small maple tree. When the bell rang, calling him back to the classroom, he was ditching a channel in the mud and freeing a swarm of minnows that the receding water had left in a landlocked pool.
Fifth hour, Miles rejoiced.
In terms of quick minds and motivation, this was the best class he had ever had. It had been created by the haphazard process of computer scheduling, and he expected that another twelve years would pass before he was assigned another one like it. In this class if Miles paused midsentence in search of a word, one of the students, probably Nadine Oppegaard, was sure to supply the word, and if he wasn’t quick she would finish the sentence for him as well. Nadine Oppegaard had a wide, dark face with the patient, heavy-lidded look of Buddha, and her speech was deliberate, wise, and sometimes cutting. She was the genius child of the dentist, Doc Oppegaard, who seemed not at all surprised at having fathered a genius, and of Mrs. Oppegaard, who was astonished. Since the eighth grade Nadine and her violin had appeared in the all-state orchestra, which performed at the annual teachers’ convention in St. Paul. One year she was concertmistress and had her hand kissed, onstage, by the governor. At the convention this year she was to be featured in the slow movement of a Mozart concerto. Nadine’s science-club project last spring was an exhibit of two dozen gigantic oil paintings of cancer of the mouth. She had painted them from a series of photos in her father’s journal of dentistry. The exhibit hung for most of the summer in the public library, where it took up all the room between the ceiling and the top row of books. The day after the exhibit went on display, Miles had gone to the library to browse through the magazines. As he sat at a table reading Harper’s, he caught himself unconsciously hunching his shoulders against the purple, pink, and ochre blossoms that appeared to be growing malignantly out from the walls. The air seemed contaminated. He began breathing shallow. Such was Nadine’s impasto technique that he was unable to think of the paintings as abstractions, or as flowers in the style of Georgia O’Keeffe. He could only think of them as cancer, and although he had always been among Nadine’s well-wishers he stayed out of the public library until they were gone.
Beverly Bingham, too, was in this class. It was a wonder to Miles how a girl as pretty and quick and cleareyed as Beverly could have emerged from the Bingham farm in the gulch—a hopeless, rocky farm on the riverbank west of town where little grew but weeds and chickens because the topsoil had long ago been washed into the river, and because Mr. Bingham had been sent to prison, and because Mrs. Bingham (it was said) was crazy. Mrs. Bingham was better known as the Bone-woman, the ghostly figure that came to town in the evening and carried a gunnysack from door to door asking for bones—chicken bones, beef bones, pig bones—which (it was said) she ground into meal for her chickens. Mrs. Bingham raised chickens for sale, and if she sold you a fryer or a roasting hen for Sunday dinner she would call at your house on Monday (it was said) to retrieve the skeleton and feed it to the chicken she would sell you next week.
Nearly every day, Beverly Bingham stayed after class to talk to Miles. Until today, the talk had been about schoolwork, particularly Gone With the Wind. Miles had recommended it to her, having discovered that girls with wistful blue eyes like Beverly’s always fell in love with Gone With the Wind. But today Beverly lingered after class to weep. During the three minutes between classes Miles was expected to stand outside his classroom door on hall duty, and it was there in the crowded corridor that Beverly broke down. At first Miles wished she had waited until after school, when he would have had more time to console her, but in retrospect he was glad she hadn’t. He was at his worst when confronted with other people’s grief, and Beverly’s sorrow seemed to spill out far beyond the borders of consolation. Her helplessness rendered him helpless. No, it was better that she spoke to him when she did, thus restricting her tears and his mumbling to the three minutes between bells. She said, “Almost six years ago my sister married a bum named Harlan Prentiss, and nobody knows where Harlan Prentiss disappeared to, but he ran away from my sister right away after they were married and my sister has been living in Minneapolis ever since and she never comes home. She only sends a card at Christmastime and the card has no return address.” Up to this point Beverly had been speaking in a matter-of-fact voice, but now Miles saw her anguish suddenly take charge and twist her face into an expression of despair. Tears brimmed in her eyes.
“Goddamn it,” she said. “I told myself I wasn’t going to cry today.” She stepped back into the classroom and put her books on Miles’s desk and sobbed silently into the short sleeve of her soiled blouse.
Miles couldn’t think of anything to say. His words of solace were blurted out in choppy phrases that he himself did not entirely understand, but which—the wonder of it!—Beverly seemed to find valuable. She wiped her face and smiled at him through her tears. Miles mumbled something more. Sixth-hour bell rang. She picked up her books and went to the door, then turned and said, “I’m sorry, but you’re the one I had to tell because you always seem to have your shit together.”
As Miles closed the windows of his classroom he saw Superintendent Stevenson looking at him from his office across the courtyard. Miles waved at him. Stevenson carefully nodded, or rather wobbled, his head. Miles turned out the lights and locked the door and climbed the stairs to last-hour study hall.
Last hour, Miles wilted.
Last-hour study hall was large and dismal and entrusted only to veterans. There were five teachers on the Staggerford staff who took charge of it, a year at a time, and this was Miles’s year. He entered the long, ill-lighted room containing a hundred stationary desks that had been carved on by three generations of students. Some of the names on the desks matched the names on the World War Two memorial in front of the public library. The study-hall teacher’s duty was simply to see that everybody kept his mouth shut. Miles took his place on the platform at the front of the room, scowled at a couple of potential whisperers, and tried to ignore the age-old smells of study hall, which were three in number.
Sweat, at low intensity, smelled much like a salty bowl of chicken soup. Is anyone’s nose so well trained (Miles wondered) that he can differentiate between the smell in a gym that tells you where the locker room is and the smell in a dimestore that tells you the lunch counter is in the next aisle?
The second study-hall smell arose from the mixture of manure and Berrington County topsoil, which by this time in the afternoon had dried and was flaking off the boots of the farm boys. The smell, to Miles, was not entirely bad, for it brou
ght to his mind, when he tried for them, images of red barns and rolling pastures. Corn fields and windmills. Lowing herds at sundown.
It was the third smell that bothered him most, for it was without a redeeming feature. It was the inevitable midafternoon smell of hot lunch being converted into air.
This hour, between two and three, Miles wilted. Because he had been stern from the beginning, study hall gave him no sass, but it gave him the blues. The lighting, as mentioned, was dim, and the afternoon sun, when it shone, did not shine on this side of the building. The students’ minds were not fresh. They made a weak attempt at homework, then pushed it aside, tomorrow’s classes being too distant to imagine. They watched the clock. They dreamed daydreams so dull that they fell asleep. Miles sat on his platform wondering if he would be able to rise from his chair when the bell rang, wondering if he would have the strength to walk home, wondering if life was worth living.
There was a moment today, at 2:25, when study hall came suddenly to life. Heads were lifted and cocked as the siren in the belfry of the city hall announced trouble, probably a fire, somewhere in Staggerford. Students stood up at their desks and strained to see outside. Miles found this sign of vitality so reassuring that he allowed everyone to go to the windows and watch the volunteer firemen run into the fire hall across the street and come out wearing yellow rubber coats and clinging to the handholds of two shiny ladder trucks. When the trucks were out of sight there was a little chatter, which Miles quickly scotched, and then everyone returned to his desk and to his dim and vapid daydreams.
At the final bell of the day, Miles dismissed study hall and went downstairs to take up his hall-duty post outside his classroom. He said goodnight twenty-five or thirty times. When the halls emptied, he put in the required quarter hour at his desk; then he picked up his briefcase, put his coat over his arm, and stepped outside into the perfume of dying leaves.
He crossed the street and walked past the fire station. The firemen, sweating in their yellow rubber coats, had returned from the fire and were backing the trucks into their stalls. He passed the city hall and he passed the spacious lawn of the Staggerford Public Library. At the corner of Main Street he turned and walked past the Weekly office, where Albert Fremling was licking address labels and Mrs. Fremling was talking on the phone and Lee Fremling was cleaning the drum of the press with a rag dipped in denatured alcohol and Grandma Fremling was sweeping the floor. He walked past the Hub Cafe, the Morgan Hotel, the hardware store, the bakery, and the bank. He turned right at the next corner and walked down River Street past the houses of Oppegaard the dentist, Hoover the retired farmer, Droppers the mayor, Handyside the baker, and Kelly the auto mechanic. The last house at the end of the second block was Miss McGee’s. He climbed the three steps to the wide front porch. The front door with its thick pane of oval glass stood ajar. He went inside and hung his coat in the closet at the foot of the stairs.
“How was your day?” Miss McGee called from the kitchen.
“A good enough day. It seemed long though. How was yours?”
“The Dark Ages are beginning all over again, Miles.”
“What makes you say that?” She often told him this, but her reason for saying it differed from day to day. He walked through the living room (deep soft chairs with worn upholstery, dark woodwork, a bookcase with glass doors) and through the dining room (a round oak table, six chairs, a mirror over the sideboard, linen curtains) and stood in the kitchen doorway.
Miss McGee was gathering together bottles and vegetables from the refrigerator—the makings of a salad—and listening to news on the radio. Miss McGee was a spinster. This was her forty-first year teaching sixth grade at St. Isidore’s Catholic Elementary, and this was the house she had been born in.
“How is the world going wrong, Agatha?”
“Oh, I don’t know. One thing and another.”
It was not like her to be vague, and Miles waited for her to tell him what had happened, but she said no more. She stood at the counter, chopping celery stalks to pieces. She was wearing one of the neck-to-knee aprons that she tied on herself every afternoon when she got home from school.
Miles loosened his tie and said, “I wonder where the fire was.”
Miss McGee shot him a quick glance, then went out the back door to her garden, where she lopped a head of cabbage off its stalk.
Miles went upstairs to the room he had been living in for twelve years, the first room on the right at the head of the stairs.
Few could remember a time when Miss McGee—slight and splay-footed and quick as a bird—was not teaching at St. Isidore’s. This was her forty-first year in the same classroom, her forty-first year of flitting and hovering up and down the aisles in the morning when she felt fresh, and perching behind her walnut desk in the afternoon when fatigue set in. In the minds of her former students, many of whom were now grandparents, she occupied a place somewhere between Moses and Emily Post, and when they met her on the street they guarded not only their speech but also their thoughts.
They knew of course—for she had been telling the story for over half a century—that when she was a girl she had met Joyce Kilmer, but who would have guessed the connection between that meeting many years ago and the fire alarm this afternoon? Standing at the garden among her cabbages, she decided that she would never tell a soul—not even Miles—about the cause of the fire alarm. She could not lie, but she could keep a secret.
Agatha McGee met Joyce Kilmer when she was six. She was a first grader st St. Isidore’s. The year was 1916 and her teacher, Sister Rose of Lima, primed the first grade for months, leading them in a recitation of “Trees” every morning between the Apostles’ Creed and the Pledge of Allegiance; and then on the last day of school before Christmas break, Joyce Kilmer stepped through the classroom door at the appointed hour, casting Sister Rose of Lima into a state of stuttering foolishness and her students into ecstasy. Miss McGee remembered it like yesterday. Mr. Kilmer was handsome, cheery, and a bit plump. He wore a black suit and a red tie. With a playful sparkle in his eye he bowed to Sister Rose of Lima, saying he was delighted to meet her, and then he walked among her students, asking their names. The children’s voices were suddenly undependable, and they told their names in tense whispers and unexpected shouts. Jesse Farnham momentarily forgot who he was, and the silence was thick while he thought. When he finally said, “Jesse,” Mr. Kilmer told him that he had known a girl by that name, and the first grade exploded with more laughter than Sister Rose of Lima permitted on ordinary days. (Priests and poets melted her severity.) The laughter, ending as suddenly as it began, was followed by a comfortable chat, the poet telling stories, some without lessons. Before Mr. Kilmer left, his admirers recited “Trees” for him. For Agatha McGee his visit was, like Christmas in those years, a joy undiminished by anticipation.
But that was long ago. Nowadays poetry, among other things, wasn’t what it used to be. Yesterday at St. Isidore’s as Miss McGee sat at the faculty lunch table she overheard Sister Rosie tell Sister Judy in an excited whisper that Herschel Mancrief was coming to town. He was touring the Midwest on a federal grant, and would arrive at St. Isidore’s at ten the next morning. The two sisters were huddled low over the Spanish rice, trying to keep the news from Miss McGee. She wasn’t surprised. She was well aware that the new nuns, although pranked out in permanents and skirts up to their knees, were still a clandestine sorority. How like them to plan an interruption in the schoolday and not let her know.
“About whom are you speaking?” she asked.
“Oh, Miss McGee,” said Sister Rosie, the lighthearted (and in Miss McGee’s opinion, light-headed) principal of St. Isidore’s. “We were discussing Herschel Mancrief, and we were not at all sure you would be interested.” Sister Rosie was twenty-six and she had pierced earlobes.
“I will be the judge of my interests, if you please. Who is Herschel Mancrief?”
“He’s a poet the younger generation is reading,” said Sister Judy, blushing behin
d her acne. “We studied him in the novitiate.”
“His credentials are super,” said Sister Rosie.
“And he’s coming to St. Isidore’s? I might have been told. Will he visit classes or speak to an assembly?”
“He will visit classes. But of course no one is obliged to have him in. I know what a nuisance interruptions can be.”
“Poets are important to children. I was visited by Mr. Joyce Kilmer when I was a girl, and I treasure the memory. Please show Mr. What’s-his-name to my classroom when the time comes. What’s his name?”
“Herschel Mancrief. He can give you twenty minutes at quarter to twelve.”
So this morning Miss McGee announced to her sixth graders that they were about to meet Herschel Mancrief. They looked up from their reading assignment, a page headed “Goths and Visigoths,” and as a sign of their undivided attention they closed their books. Divided attention was among the things Miss McGee did not permit. Slang and eye shadow were others.