by Jon Hassler
“It’s no mystery why I failed,” said Stevenson. “It turned out that these Indians around Staggerford are a different breed from the Indians we had up there at North Siding. An altogether different breed. Ask George Butler. He took my place up there. He’ll tell you that to this day those Pinelake Indians are going to school like whites. They’re a more ambitious breed than these Sandhill Indians. Less clannish. Maybe they’ve got more French blood in them. Or less French blood, who knows? All I know is that I came down here and fell flat on my face.”
There was a pause. Miles opened his eyes and told Stevenson that he was underrating himself. Mrs. Stevenson said so too. So did Imogene. But Miles knew (did Imogene know? did Mrs. Stevenson know?) that Stevenson couldn’t possibly underrate himself. As a superintendent he was a dud. When you considered what he had contributed to the Staggerford school system in twenty years—a mediocre teaching staff, a Faculty Handbook full of platitudes, an average of three Indian graduates per year, compared to perhaps two when he came to town—then you knew the man was a failure. But Miles loved to hear him talk. His voice was a low hum. His life was a lullaby.
Next, the rubber of bridge. Imogene and Stevenson enjoyed bridge and they enjoyed each other as partners. When Stevenson chuckled, Imogene chuckled. When Imogene chuckled, Stevenson chuckled. Nowhere else but at the card table, and then only as partners, was either of them known to chuckle. Tonight they won, which was no more than right; Mrs. Stevenson and Miles were stupid at cards, and Miles was bored besides.
After cards Mrs. Stevenson served raspberry sundaes and butter cookies (the ice cream brought a keen pain to the left side of Miles’s jaw) and after that she took Imogene into the next room for a tour of her china closet. Stevenson and Miles returned to the fire.
“My contract called for me to be in Staggerford on the first of August,” said Stevenson. “That’s twenty years ago last August. Viola and I were scheduled for coffee at Bartholomew Druppers’ house that afternoon. Bartholomew Druppers was chairman of the school board then. He’s still on the board, you know, and he’s mayor now besides. Quite a public servant, Bartholomew Druppers. The coffee party was going to be an exclusive affair with the school board and their wives and some of the older faculty and their wives and a few selected old-time businessmen and their wives. It was set to start at three o’clock at the Drupperses’ house.
“So on the first of August Viola and I arrived in town at ten in the morning. The moving van was to follow the next day. I went straight to Bartholomew Droppers’ law office and I said, ‘Mr. Druppers, I don’t know how this is going to set with your wife, but my wife and I will have to take a raincheck on that coffee party this afternoon. This is a working day and I have to be about my business. School begins in one month and it’s none too soon for me to set off on my reservation visits, and my wife has elected to come along with me.’
“Blazes, what a hot-shot I must have been, Miles. I remember the look on Bartholomew’s face.
“ ‘Come with me,’ he said, and he led me across the street to Sy Larson’s grocery store. Sy Larson was also on the board in those days. Bartholomew told Sy that the coffee party was off because I wanted to get started with my work. I remember Sy was behind the meat counter tying a package with a string when he heard the news. He stared at me for a moment, then he went to the phone and got in touch with two more board members and they rushed right over to the store and stood with Bartholomew and Sy in front of the meat counter. I stood a little apart from them as they held a conference. Miles, do you know how I interpreted the serious expressions on their faces? It shows you how innocent I was at the age of forty. I thought their expressions were the expressions of four men who had found themselves a determined leader who would see them through whatever troubles lay ahead—four men who were at last coming to grips with their old, old attendance problem. I imagined the expressions I saw in Larson’s Grocery that day were the same ones you might have seen at the Continental Congress when Jefferson walked in and said, ‘All right, boys, I’ve got a little document here I’d like you to sign; we’ll call it the Declaration of Independence.’ But, Miles my friend, I have since figured out what those expressions really meant. They were not the expressions of courage and determination. Hell, those were the expressions of men who were afraid to tell their wives the coffee party was off. But what did I know? I spoke up and said once more that I had to be about my business, and I left the store and drove with Viola out to the Sandhill Reservation. It was our first look at Sandhill.”
Stevenson shook his head. Miles searched with his tongue for the source of pain on the left side of his jaw.
“Bleak. Blazes, Miles, it’s bleak out there. You know what I mean. You’ve been out there.”
Miles nodded.
“We drove to the village of Sandhill and stopped at the Sandhill General Store. Viola and I went inside and introduced ourselves to Bennie Bird, who’s been running the store since the year one. It was dark in there, and Bennie was sitting behind the bar at the back of the store where he serves beer. That was twenty years ago last August, and to this day, I’m told, he’s still sitting there. I told Bennie I was Staggerford’s new superintendent of schools and I was learning my way around the Sandhill Reservation because the school was there to serve all youngsters in the district, never mind race or creed. I told him I was eager to get acquainted with all the Indian families, and his store looked like the logical place to start. This seemed to puzzle Bennie. He looked over his shoulder, and I was surprised to see a woman sitting behind him in the shadows. She was sitting on a stool smoking a cigarette. I assumed it was Mrs. Bird. I leaned over the bar and introduced Viola to her, but she didn’t respond. She just smoked and stared at us. There was a long silence, which I found very awkward. I repeated to Bennie that I was exploring the reservation. He said nothing. He looked over his shoulder again at the woman. We decided to leave.
“Miles, on the inside of the door there was a sign saying, ‘Did you forget shoelaces?’ I can see it yet. As we were going out the door, we heard Bennie Bird and the woman making a noise. It sounded like they were laughing. We got into the car and drove another mile or so deeper into the reservation. I could see that Viola’s eyes were wet. You know, Miles, how dismal the Sandhill Reservation looks to a white man. Nothing but brush and jackpines, and here and there a yard full of stumps and weeds. Narrow driveways winding between the trees. Never a straight driveway. All of them narrow and crooked. I don’t know of a more depressing landscape. Dusty roads. No-good land. Brush. Blazes, it’s bleak. I looked at Viola. She did her best to smile, but her eyes were wet. Her instincts were telling her that we had no business on the reservation, and we had no business missing the coffee party. And my instincts were telling me I was no Indian expert, and we had no business leaving North Siding in the first place.
“I turned the car around and we headed back to Staggerford. We drove several miles in silence. Finally I said, ‘Viola, did you forget shoelaces?’ I was trying to be funny. I thought it would cheer her up, you know. But when I said it, she burst into tears and cried like a baby all the way back to Staggerford.”
Imogene and Mrs. Stevenson returned from the dining room and sat down, and Miles tried to imagine Mrs. Stevenson crying like a baby.
The superintendent said, “We should have stayed in North Siding.”
A faint reverberation touched Miles’s ears. It coincided with another twinge of pain in his jaw, and he assumed that it was a rush of blood to his head; but when he heard it again he called it to the attention of the Stevensons.
“Someone at the door, do you suppose?” said Mrs. Stevenson, rising from her chair. “At this hour?”
“The wind,” said the superintendent.
“No, I think it was a knock at the door,” said Imogene.
Mrs. Stevenson went first to the front door, where she found no one, and then noiselessly through the carpeted rooms to the kitchen, where Miles heard her unlock doors, speak, and lock them ag
ain. She returned to the fire and sat down.
“The Bone woman,” she said.
“The Bonewoman!” said the superintendent with surprising emotion, picking his feet off the floor, then letting them down again. “The Bonewoman? At this hour? I tell you, something should be done about that woman. Coming around at night. It’s a scandal. Viola, don’t open the door to that woman again.”
Mrs. Stevenson patted his arm. “I gave her a bone, Ansel. The beef bone, from supper. What harm could there possibly be in that?”
“Never again, Viola! She comes like a scavenger. A thief in the night. She’s a crow, picking over carrion. Never again open the door to that woman, Viola.”
Miles saw fear in the superintendent’s eyes. He understood its cause. A few hours before, Miles himself had leaned out the back door of Miss McGee’s house and sensed that the Bonewoman had somehow brought to the neighborhood the shadows and frost of the end of October—that by walking through the garden she was somehow hastening its decay, its freezing, its cover of snow. And now for Superintendent Stevenson, whose passionate clinging to life had fixed his attention squarely on death, the Bonewoman called up the same emotions, but more strongly—a sense of the end of things. Shadows and frost and the end of things.
“What possible harm?” his wife was saying gently. “The roast we had for supper. A good roast.” She turned to Imogene. “It was a delicious roast—tender, and the bone was not large. A very small bone, actually, for so large a roast. What possible harm?”
Imogene stood up and said it was time to go home. Miles agreed, but he was reluctant to follow. For one thing, he was carrying on an experiment in his mouth, finding that if he ran his tongue a certain way along the inside of his lower left wisdom tooth, the pain subsided; and for another thing Stevenson showed signs of dropping back to his normal, relaxed state and appeared ready to begin another installment of his soothing, meaningless biography.
Imogene said, “Come on, Pruitt.”
They put on their coats and the Stevensons let them out the front door into a flood of moonlight. The late-rising moon was blossoming over the bare trees, four times its normal size.
“Gracious, look at the moon,” said Mrs. Stevenson. “It’s a real harvest moon.”
“The moon!” said the superintendent, and he retreated to the fire.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Imogene. “The harvest moon was last month. This one’s called the hunter’s moon.”
On the way home, Imogene told Miles that the superintendent’s problem was definitely heart trouble. Mrs. Stevenson had confided in her. It was a bad valve.
“In a case like that,” said Imogene, “he can submit to surgery and the chances are sixty-five percent that it will be successful, or he can learn to live with it and maybe survive another twenty-five years, or maybe expire tomorrow. He has decided to learn to live with it. For a younger man the chances of a successful operation would be eighty percent, but he’s sixty this year—did you know that?—and he’s not particularly robust, so the odds drop to sixty-five percent. I don’t know. It would be a hard decision to make. Bad-valve people who are faced with that decision are split almost down the middle. Fifty percent submit to surgery and fifty percent learn to live with it. Now of the fifty percent who learn to live with it, fifty-eight percent live to the age of sixty-five and forty-two percent don’t, although those percentages vary if you break it down into the various ages the people are when they are faced with the decision. I mean obviously, Pruitt, one hundred percent of those who are sixty-five when they are faced with the decision are going to live to be sixty-five because they already are sixty-five.”
The moon was the color of a peach.
“Pruitt, what is your problem? You keep moving your jaw all the time.”
“I’m afraid it’s my wisdom tooth going bad.”
“Your wisdom tooth! My God, Pruitt, you’re thirty-five. What are you doing with a wisdom tooth? I had my first two wisdom teeth extracted when I was nineteen and the other two when I was twenty-one. People seldom carry their wisdom teeth into their thirties. I think you’ll find the average age for getting rid of your last wisdom tooth is twenty-three.”
They came to the house that Imogene shared with her mother. The peach moon stood at the edge of the sloping roof and seemed about to roll off.
“The wisdom tooth is an unnecessary tooth,” said Imogene. “It’s a carry-over from our more primitive ancestors in the evolutionary chain.”
Miles grasped Imogene roughly by the shoulders and kissed her hard on the mouth and left her standing at her door. Her surprise was great, but not so great as to leave her speechless. She said to Miles as he walked away, “Goodness, Pruitt, what are you thinking of?”
What he was thinking of as he crossed the alley in the moonlight was Thanatopsis Hayworth from St. Paul, whose hair was dark with a tinge of sable, and how he had waited, alas, too long.
When he got home, Miss McGee called to him from her downstairs bedroom: “Is that you, Miles?” She knew that it was, but whenever he came in late she said, “Is that you, Miles?” to indicate that she was awake to receive whatever he might care to tell her about his evening. Tonight he stood at her bedroom door and looked into the darkness and told her that he had kissed Imogene Kite. He told her this because he had never known a woman, whatever her age, who was not delighted by news of a stolen kiss. But he underestimated Miss McGee’s delight. She broke into an uncontrollable laugh. “How dreadful,” she said when she caught her breath. He could still hear her laughing as he climbed the stairs and shut his door.
SATURDAY
OCTOBER 31
IN THE BACKYARD NEAR the garden stood a basswood tree that held on to its leaves until late autumn and then released them all between the dusk and the dawn of one frosty night. During the night Miss McGee—her bedroom window open an inch—was wakened by the shower of large, leathery leaves and by the wind that sprang up and shuffled them like parchment.
In the morning Miles raked the basswood leaves into a pile as Miss McGee hung the week’s wash on the clothesline. It was another sunny day, unseasonably warm. They heard geese calling and they looked up to see a flock of three dozen Canadas in the western sky. The geese flew over town and disappeared in the east, then returned much higher, heading west. In a few minutes they appeared a third time, flying undecidedly south in a wavering V. They were joined by a dozen more Canadas flying slightly below them and keeping to a V of their own, as if they wished not to merge and lose their identity. The call of the geese was a high-pitched bark, and for some time after they were out of sight Miles heard them on the southeast wind, yapping like a pack of airborne terriers.
When Miss McGee finished hanging out the wash, she held open a large plastic bag and Miles filled it with basswood leaves. She said it was going to rain.
Miles looked at the sky. A flock of blackbirds was now crossing overhead.
“It’s a clear day, Agatha. Not a cloud.”
“But the wind is swinging to the east, and that means moisture. Goodness, Miles, look at the perspiration on your face. You really must try to get more exercise and reduce your weight. Are you between six two and six three? I would judge six three. Our health text says that a man of six three should weigh two hundred and five pounds. I daresay you’re much heavier than that, Miles. Wayne Workman is your height, and I’m sure he’s at least twenty pounds lighter than you.”
“Wayne Workman is light of brain.”
“Oh shush. You never have a good word to say about Wayne Workman. The Workmans are fine people.”
“I like Thanatopsis.”
Miss McGee giggled. “You and your nicknames. Do you call her Thanatopsis to her face?”
“I’ve called her nothing but Thanatopsis since she moved to town. The first few times I met her I kept forgetting what her real name was, and all I could remember was that it had a lot of vowels and t-h’s in it, and the word Thanatopsis always came to mind.”
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��Her name is Anna Thea.”
“I know that now. But I like Thanatopsis better. It fits her.”
“It does not fit her. Thanatopsis is Greek for ‘view of death.’ ”
“I know what it’s Greek for.”
“Well, there’s nothing fitting about it. Anna Thea Workman is young, and she has a lot of vitality. It’s a dreadful name to call anyone. Sometimes I think, Miles, that you are careless where other people’s feelings are concerned.”
Lillian Kite came across the alley, carrying in one hand her bag of yarn and in the other a man’s suit on a hanger. Lillian Kite, Imogene’s mother, was a tall woman in her late sixties. She had a red face and white hair. She was the widow of Lyle Kite, who had been a ranger in the National Park Service, and the suit she carried was one of Lyle’s uniforms. She handed it to Miles, who had asked to borrow it for tonight’s Halloween party at the Workmans’.
“Isn’t there a hat that goes with it?” he asked.
“Yes, there’s a hat, but I had my hands full. You can pick up the hat tonight when you come to pick up Imogene.”
“She goes with the uniform?”
“Well, aren’t you planning to pick her up for the party? She has an invitation, too, you know. Don’t tell me you’re going with somebody else—not after what happened last night. She told me what happened, what you did. You romanced her. Agatha, did you know that Miles romanced Imogene last night?”
“Yes, I did. Here, sit down. I’m going in and put on the coffeepot.”
Lillian Kite pulled a lawn chair out from the shade of the house and sat in the sunshine. Miles pulled another chair into the sun for Miss McGee and the chaise longue for himself. It was a flimsy chaise longue and it squeaked and teetered as he carefully lowered his weight onto it.
Lillian Kite began to knit. She was a constant knitter. She never sat down without taking up her needles. She had begun knitting seriously when her husband died—not after the funeral when time hung heavy on her hands, but immediately upon finding him dead. She had gotten up to make breakfast that morning several years ago and when she went back to the bedroom she found her husband tangled up in the bedclothes with a horrible expression on his face—his lower lip protruding and his eyes open. She called the doctor and the minister and the undertaker, and she picked up her needles and a ball of yarn and she went to work at high speed. When one by one the doctor and the minister and the undertaker came to the front door, she did not rise from her chair but said merely, “He’s in there,” pointing at the bedroom with her right-hand needle. She had been knitting ever since.