Staggerford

by Jon Hassler

“It’s only a page,” said Beverly. “Maybe I could just leave it with you and pick it up after school.”

  “When all is said and done, I’m more progressive than you are, Pruitt. That may strike you as ironic, but it’s true. Every day that Staggerford High School operates smoothly is a day of progress, and every day that somebody like you comes along and throws a wrench in the ointment is a day of backsliding. I’m perfectly willing to listen to any suggestions anybody might have concerning the betterment of Staggerford High School, but I keep in mind all the while that any changes have to be made within the framework of policy.”

  Beverly said, “What I wanted to ask you about was the first paragraph. I must have written the letter ten times, and the first paragraph is still awkward.”

  “So actually what it amounts to is that you are an obstacle in the road to progress. Anyone who disregards the Handbook—”

  “I’m not optimistic about the future of the Handbook, Wayne.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m just not optimistic about it, that’s all.”

  “And do I start the letter by saying ‘Dear Sirs,’ or ‘Gentlemen,’ or what?”

  Miles took the letter from Beverly.

  “You’re never optimistic about anything, Pruitt. That’s your trouble. You’re an obstacle in the road to progress around here.”

  The bell rang. Beverly hurried away. Miles locked his classroom and started up the stairway. “I’m late for study hall, Wayne.”

  “You’re an obstacle in the road to progress,” Wayne called after him.

  At the landing, Miles turned and saw Wayne standing at the bottom of the steps in his most earnest pose, his hands outstretched, palms up, like a beggar. He was painful to look at.

  * * *

  After school Miles went into the basement lunchroom and burned his tongue on a quick cup of the coffee that had been simmering on the stove all day. It tasted like tinfoil. Then he went to the faculty meeting in Ray Smith’s history classroom.

  As Miles entered, Wayne Workman was at the lectern saying, “I would like your input on how we should handle Parents’ Night, and on this new-style report card I am passing around for your inspection. And I would like your input on what can be done about the smoking and the writing on the walls in the rest rooms. The meeting is now open.”

  The faculty offered this input:

  “What’s wrong with the report card we’ve got?”

  “When is Parents’ Night?”

  “Why is Parents’ Night?”

  “I thought we should have beat Owl Brook by two touchdowns. We were that much better.”

  “Aw, that goddamn Fremling.”

  “I’m wondering if there’s anyone besides myself who would like to see the Faculty Handbook burned.”

  “Huzzah.”

  “This report card would be a lot more work to fill out. Look, it asks for an attitude rating and a behavior rating.”

  “Behavior is attitude.”

  “Does it ask for a grade?”

  “I say let them smoke. What’s the harm?”

  “It’s only the parents of good students who show up on Parents’ Night anyhow. We never see the parents of the problem students.”

  “What would you say to them if they did come?”

  “If you were the parent of a problem student, would you come?”

  “They could be doing worse things in there than smoking and writing on the walls.”

  “Have you ever considered throwing out the traditional grading system and going to something else?”

  “If only we could have scored in the third quarter when we were on their twenty-five.”

  “Aw, that goddamn Fremling.”

  “We had a hundred and five kids at the door for tricks and treats. My wife counts them.”

  “Somebody dumped garbage on my steps.”

  “The front of my house is covered with eggs and tomatoes.”

  “I got off easy this year—a few soaped windows.”

  “You know what I read in the boys’ can downstairs? It’s over the sink. I’ll tell you after the meeting.”

  “I’d like to see two grades—pass and fail—instead of five.”

  “I must confess that when I’m figuring grades, I always give the benefit of the doubt to the kids of the parents who show up at Parents’ Night. I wish I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Do we get to vote on which report card we want?”

  “Do you realize how long it would take to make out each card—to mark each student on attitude and behavior? Besides times absent and times tardy and the scholastic grade and signing our names?”

  “Behavior is attitude.”

  “Last year we had more. We had a hundred and thirty and we ran out of candy.”

  “Well, I for one am going to see the Faculty Handbook abolished.”

  “Miles, what’s the matter with you today? You don’t look so hot.”

  “I’ve got a bad tooth.”

  “Let’s vote. I make a motion that behavior is attitude.”

  When Wayne Workman had all the input he wanted, he said, “Next Monday night is Parents’ Night. The Public Relations Committee will handle the arrangements. We’ll need publicity and ushers and coffee and cookies. Who is chairman of Public Relations?”

  “Right here,” said Coach Gibbon.

  “We want a good turnout of parents, Coach.”

  “Right. Now can I go? I’ve got my wrestlers waiting for me in the gym.”

  “Well, we’ve got the report card and the rest room walls yet. And I want to tell you about my new Indian attendance plan.”

  “But this is the first night of practice. I’ve got to get down there and get things organized.”

  “All right, Coach.”

  “Now wait a minute,” said Thanatopsis. “The Faculty Handbook is very specific about who is excused from faculty meetings and who isn’t.”

  Coach Gibbon stole out of the room.

  “Next I would like to appoint a committee to oversee the smoking and writing on the walls in the rest rooms,” said Wayne.

  His wife said, “I’m not through, if you don’t mind. On page six of the Faculty Handbook it says, ‘Absences from faculty meetings will only be allowed persons who have sought and obtained, at least two hours prior to the meeting, the principal’s or superintendent’s permission to be absent.’ ”

  “Please, Anna Thea. We’ll take that up in good time.”

  She continued, “And I want to point out that this morning you denied a certain member of this faculty the right to attend a funeral because according to the Handbook it was the wrong kind of funeral, and now, in defiance of the Handbook, you allow another member of this faculty to leave so that he can show his wrestlers how to put on their jockstraps.”

  Wayne was cornered. He chewed his mustache and frowned. His eyes seemed to be crossing. His tie seemed to be unstraightening itself.

  Thanatopsis said, “Now it isn’t your inconsistency that I wish to point out, although I guess I already have pointed it out. What I wish to point out is that this Faculty Handbook is stupid, and any enlightened faculty should be able to get along with fewer rules and more common sense.”

  “We don’t have the power to abolish the Handbook,” said Wayne. “It’s been handed down to us by the superintendent and the board.”

  “The superintendent and the board are all reasonable men. I’m am sure they will listen to our analysis of its shortcomings.”

  “Our analysis?”

  “A committee’s analysis. Appoint a committee, Wayne. I volunteer to chair it.”

  “Very well, I will appoint a Handbook Committee.”

  “When?”

  “Before our next meeting.”

  “Very well,” said Thanatopsis.

  On the matter of report cards, opinion was equally divided between the new card and the old. Wayne appointed a Report Card Committee.

  No one knew what to do about misbehavior in the
rest rooms, so he appointed a Rest Room Committee, or what Coach Gibbon (when he discovered himself a member) chose to call the Can Committee.

  Now it was time for Wayne to unveil his new idea for Indians. He stepped out into the hall for a drink of water and re-entered the room wiping his mustache with the back of his hand.

  “May I have your attention. I would like to tell you about my new plan to improve Indian attendance.”

  Miles wondered how many times these futile words had been spoken in Staggerford. There arose from the faculty a barely audible sound—not a groan, not a hiss, but a kind of suppressed sigh.

  “I call my plan ‘Befriend an Indian.’ ” Wayne held up a sheet of paper with a list of names down the lefthand side and the words BEFRIEND AN INDIAN printed in red across the top. “An Indian, like everybody else in Minnesota, can legally quit school when he is sixteen. And most of them do. Every dropout at sixteen decreases our state-aid monies. I have prepared this list of all the Indian students in Staggerford High School who will turn sixteen between now and the end of the current school year. You will see that here at the top I have printed, ‘Befriend an Indian.’ That’s exactly what I’m asking you to do, befriend an Indian. I will pass this paper among you and you will please write your name next to a name on the list. And then proceed to befriend the Indian with that name.”

  The paper went from hand to hand.

  “To give you an idea of how serious our problem is, I give you these statistics. In grades nine and ten the proportion of Indians to whites is approximately eighteen percent. In grades eleven and twelve the proportion is three percent. That’s because as soon as Indians turn sixteen they drop out. Last year we graduated only two Indians, both of them girls, and I don’t think it’s any secret that both of those girls stayed in school till they graduated because they were befriended by my wife. If it hadn’t been for Anna Thea, those two girls wouldn’t have graduated. Now I grant you that my wife has an inside track where girls are concerned, because the home ec department is a place where a lot of girls naturally feel at home. But there is no reason that you, Mr. Jennings for example, could not seek out an Indian student with a talent for science and bring him along to the point of graduation, is there?”

  Ross Jennings, biologist, shrugged.

  “And you, Mr. Pruitt. Is there any reason why you couldn’t discover an Indian boy or girl with a talent for English—poetry or adverbs or some such thing—and bring him along to the point of graduation?”

  “No reason whatever,” said Miles.

  “Do your utmost to find the right Indian then, and encourage that Indian to make good. Encourage him to keep his nose to the ground and earn his diploma. Tell him to be like everybody else. Tell him about Nancy Bigmeadow. The last I heard Nancy Bigmeadow was still in Washington.”

  “Who is Nancy Bigmeadow?” asked Ross Jennings, new on the staff.

  “Nancy Bigmeadow is a girl from the reservation who graduated a few years back and now she is in Washington.”

  “Washington, D.C.?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s she doing in Washington, D.C.?”

  “I can’t tell you exactly what her job at this time might be, but I know that when she went to Washington it was on some kind of program that trained Indians for jobs in some aspect or other of the federal government, and Nancy Bigmeadow was the only Indian chosen from Minnesota. It was quite a feather in our cap.”

  Ross Jennings said, “But if we don’t know what Nancy Bigmeadow is doing in Washington, how can we use her as an example? Are we supposed to say to Indians, ‘Look here, before you quit school consider Nancy Bigmeadow—she went to Washington, D.C.’? Mr. Workman, let’s be realistic. That isn’t much to go on. Where I taught last year I had a student who quit school and went to Wyoming, but it was to take a job servicing prophylactic dispensers in rest rooms. How do we know Nancy Bigmeadow is doing any better than that?”

  The faculty laughed.

  Wayne was wounded. “If you can ask a question like that, Mr. Jennings, then you don’t know Nancy Bigmeadow.”

  “That’s precisely my point. She is unknown to me. This is my first year in Staggerford.”

  By the time the Befriend-an-Indian list was handed to Miles, all the Indians were befriended but one—a boy he didn’t know named Sam LaGrange. Miles wrote his name next to Sam’s.

  “Nancy Bigmeadow is maybe not my best example,” said Wayne. “But all of us who have been here a while can point to others.”

  Ray Smith, historian, said he knew an Indian who went to North Dakota to hoe sugar beets.

  The faculty laughed.

  “No, seriously—” said Wayne.

  Everett Tillington, mathematician, said he once knew an Indian who went to Iowa to work in a banjo factory.

  The faculty laughed. The meeting was falling apart.

  “Before we adjourn,” called Wayne, trying to look stern through his misery, “I would like to call on my wife to tell us how she befriends Indian girls in her field of home economics.”

  At the word “adjourn” half the teachers stood up to leave.

  “To befriend an Indian,” said Thanatopsis, “feed him pie.”

  Over the laughter Wayne asked if there was a motion to adjourn. There wasn’t. The faculty was rushing, like sophomores, to the door.

  Miles went to his classroom for his briefcase and his coat and the sack containing Lyle Kite’s ranger pants. He crossed the hall to the home ec room and asked Thanatopsis what could be done about the pants.

  “You must have got acid on them,” she said. “Look what it’s done to the fabric. What kind of acid was it?”

  “It was Mrs. Oppegaard’s vomit.”

  Thanatopsis shrieked. “Take them to the dry cleaners,” she said, laughing. “But I doubt if they’ll ever be the same again.”

  He took them to Bud’s Cleaners, where Bud said, “It looks like you got acid on them. I can try to clean them but I can’t promise what they’ll look like. What kind of acid was it?”

  “Stomach acid.”

  On the way home, Miles stopped at the Kite house to tell Lillian he was having the uniform cleaned and would return it in a few days. He also mentioned, in Imogene’s presence, that he was going to the dentist in Duluth the next day.

  “Oh, super,” said Imogene. “Tomorrow’s my day off. I can go along and look for a new winter coat.”

  “I thought I’d leave before seven,” he said, hoping to discourage her. “I thought I’d visit my father on the way into the city.”

  “I’ll be ready. Just honk in the alley.”

  TUESDAY

  NOVEMBER 3

  WHEN MILES HONKED HIS horn at sunrise, Imogene was ready. Smelling of perfume and shoe polish, she settled herself into the front seat of the Plymouth and said, “This is going to be fun. We will go to dinner and take in a movie. They’ve brought back Virginia Woolf at the Strand. I love Burton and Taylor together.”

  Duluth was two hours away—a hundred miles through forests of jackpine and leafless aspen. Miles was so distracted by the beauty of the morning that twice he nearly left the road. Every twig on every tree was hung with a silver drop of melting frost. Three deer stood in a clearing near the highway, a buck, a doe, and a fawn. Formations of ducks and geese crossed the sky. Imogene slept all the way.

  In Duluth’s West End, the old End, Miles parked on a narrow street and pointed to a four-story building of sooty brick.

  “That’s where my father lives. I’ll just be a minute.”

  “I’ll tag along,” said Imogene. “I’d like to see the old boy.”

  Inside the front door a decrepit nun behind a desk asked them what they wanted.

  “I’m Leonard Pruitt’s son.”

  “Oh, dear, old Mr. Pruitt,” said the nun. “His feet are so big. You’ll find him on the third floor.”

  They took the elevator to the third floor, where all the old folks who could move under their own power had come out into the hall for a stro
ll and those who couldn’t had come out for a ride. Miles spotted his father in a tangle of wheelchairs. Since Miles had last seen him, Leonard Pruitt’s teeth had come out and his face had fallen in. As always, the old man wore the white shirt and pants of a buttermaker.

  “Hello, Dad, it’s me, Miles.”

  Seeing Miles and Imogene, all the walkers and riders came to a stop.

  “It’s me, Miles. And this is Imogene Kite.”

  Leonard Pruitt put his hand to his ear. Webbed in the spokes of his wheelchair was a gummy mixture of dust and gravy.

  “Your son!” Miles shouted, scattering most of the onlookers.

  Leonard Pruitt nodded. “Do you want to see my room? I have a picture of my boys in my room.” It was what he always said to visitors, anybody’s visitors.

  Miles pushed the wheelchair into Room 30, and Imogene followed. Leonard Pruitt showed them a photograph of his sons, Dale and Miles, at the ages of thirteen and twelve. It had been taken by a sidewalk photographer on Seventh Street in Minneapolis, and in the background Miles saw the old Century Theater and a streetcar. The Century had been torn down and replaced by a nightclub about the time streetcars were replaced by buses.

  “They’re grown up now,” said Leonard Pruitt. “One’s in California and one’s a schoolteacher. One of them is married and has two daughters. I don’t know which one. We had ice cream last night.” He was wearing sandals, his feet and ankles swollen too large for shoes.

  An old man wearing suspenders over his pajama tops wandered into the room, lay down on Leonard Pruitt’s bed, and snapped his eyes shut, pretending to sleep. Leonard Pruitt maneuvered his chair over to the bed and hit the old man on the leg. The old man smiled but did not open his eyes. Leonard Pruitt hailed a nurse, who came in and pulled the old man from the room.

  A tiny lady, attracted by the commotion, came into the room and gave Miles a stern look and said she didn’t see why he had so much trouble driving through the snow. She had just traveled that road barely an hour before, coming in from teaching country school, and she had no trouble. Her voice was high-pitched, like the whine of a little girl. She said the only snowdrifts were along the open stretches of road near Hartle’s Corner, but if you had a Ford coupe with chains on the tires as she had there was no excuse for getting stuck.