Staggerford

by Jon Hassler

  Vera Collins and Harry the lumberjack exchanged vows and exchanged rings, and the Simpleton said, “By the power invested in me by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, I now pronounce you man and wife. I hope you’ll be very happy. I have to go now and fix the slot machine in the teen room.”

  The lumberjack, with a wrinkled pucker, brushed the bride’s wrinkled cheek, and Miss McGee was the only witness not transported by the sight. Everyone else was smiling tenderly, and there were tears in the eyes of Lillian Kite. The senior citizens lined up to kiss the bride, and the first woman in line, the one in bedroom slippers, said, “Where are you and Harry going to be living?”

  Miss McGee was horrified. She hurried out the door after the Simpleton and said, “Do you realize there are certain people in that room who believe they have just seen a real wedding?”

  “I know it, that’s half the fun.” Ozzie Lutz was behind schedule. He walked very fast along the corridor and spoke over his shoulder to Miss McGee, who fell behind. “That’s why the oldsters are more fun than teens. Teens are almost impossible to entertain, but oldsters will believe anything. Last week we had a mock funeral in that room, and one of the oldsters asked me why the newspaper didn’t print an obituary. I tell you, once an oldster gets into the swing of this program, nothing can keep him home. Oldsters think the world of this program. They’re here in the morning waiting for me to unlock the building. Just give the program a chance and you’ll see. We have fun. Right now we’re in the middle of a contest to see who can make the most tulips out of egg cartons. On your way out, sign the book. My office is the one by the front door. Tell the girl at the desk that I told you to sign the book.” Ozzie Lutz spoke these last words while disappearing up a dark curving stairway.

  So this was what awaited one who retired, thought Miss McGee: putting on sham weddings and making tulips out of egg cartons. She recalled Patty Hawk’s wedding, which to Miss McGee’s way of thinking was as great a hoax as this one, and she felt trapped between the moral wasteland of the younger generation and the stale slough of senior citizenship. Which was worse? She had to face one or the other, and by retiring she had chosen the latter.

  She did not sign the Simpleton’s book. She went straight home and called Father Finn.

  Now Father Finn was a prayerful man. Every day he was conscientious in his reading of the Divine Office—not the new, abbreviated version, but the old edition, tedious and beautiful. He read his Office because he believed in its efficacy before God and because the hour he spent in his favorite vinyl chair was more soothing than milk to his ulcer. In a drawer of his desk, Father Finn kept a list of favors that had been granted him through prayer. Some of them, such as finding a box of lost cigars, he had to admit were small potatoes; but others, such as his sister’s recovery from cancer and the fantastic mileage he was getting out of his Montgomery Ward tires, bordered on the miraculous. Such was Father Finn’s faith that he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that one of his prayers had moved a mountain. He was astonished, however, at the speed with which today’s prayer moved Miss McGee. He had just begun offering up one of the penitential psalms for the intention of her return to the classroom when the phone rang.

  “If you have not yet found my replacement, I will come back in the fall and teach,” she told him. “I am not ready to become a senior citizen.”

  “My prayers have been answered,” he said. “The Spirit is at work.”

  “I am not ready to attend mock weddings,” she said. “I am not ready to attend mock funerals, I am not ready to spend the rest of my days making tulips out of egg cartons.”

  “God bless you,” said Father Finn.

  WEDNESDAY

  NOVEMBER 4

  AFTER A NIGHT OF fitful sleep, Miles looked into the mirror and barely recognized himself. His left cheek was swollen and his left eye appeared higher than his right. He was pale and shaky and his mouth was crooked. He looked like a portrait in chalk, smudged.

  He called school and left word with Wayne Workman’s secretary that he was taking another day of sick leave.

  He called Doc Oppegaard and described his trouble.

  “You’ll be fine by noon,” said Doc. “The inside of the mouth heals fast.”

  It was another clear, golden morning. Miles dressed and took his coffee and his briefcase out the back door to the lawn chairs under the bass wood tree. He opened his briefcase and felt in his pocket for his red pen. He had left it upstairs, luckily. He closed the briefcase and drank his coffee. He said good-by to Miss McGee, who walked down the alley toward St. Isidore’s. When he finished his coffee he moved to the flat chaise longue and fell asleep.

  In a few minutes the ringing phone drew him out of a dream, and he went into the house to answer it.

  “I can’t have you missing another day, Pruitt.” It was Wayne Workman.

  “But I have no choice, Wayne. I’m in bad shape. I had this tooth pulled yesterday and—”

  “I don’t care what your excuse is. If you are alive you’ve got to come to school. Mrs. Horky took your classes yesterday and she had a devil of a time with your second hour and with your study hall. She came back again this morning, and she’s in your classroom right now with first hour, but she says she will not under any circumstances be in that room when it comes time for second hour, nor will she go upstairs at two o’clock and take over your study hall. She says at two o’clock she’s going home.”

  “Now wait a minute, Wayne. When people sign up to be substitute teachers, don’t they agree to take the bad with the good? They’re paid to take the bad with the good. I’m in no shape to be teaching today.”

  There was a long pause. Perhaps Wayne was paging through the Faculty Handbook for the solution to this problem. When he spoke it was at a higher pitch. “Pruitt, are you refusing to do what I say?”

  “Yes.”

  Another long pause. Perhaps he was chewing his mustache. “Pruitt, second hour begins in ten minutes. If you can’t be here for second hour I will understand. Ten minutes wouldn’t be enough time for you to primp for the young ladies in your classes—”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “… but if you aren’t here to take your study hall at two o’clock—that’s almost five hours’ warning I’m giving you then we shall see what we shall see.” Wayne hung up.

  Miles understood why Wayne loved to use the telephone. On the telephone it was so easy to have the last word.

  Under the leafless basswood, Miles lay so that the sun fell on the swollen side of his face. It felt good. He dozed again. The phone rang again.

  “Pruitt, your Indian is missing!” It was Wayne.

  “My Indian?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, my Indian?”

  “Sam LaGrange. Your Indian. At the faculty meeting Monday you signed up to befriend Sam LaGrange, and now this morning he’s absent.”

  “He doesn’t want to be friends.”

  “For godsakes, Pruitt, quit trying to be clever. Today is LaGrange’s birthday. He’s sixteen and he has quit school. Your job is to bring him back. You could do it right now, before study hall. You could bring him back.”

  “Do you mean by force, or what?”

  “I mean find him and talk to him. Think of the example you would set for the rest of the faculty if you followed one out to the reservation and brought him back.”

  “Wayne, to tell the truth, I’m not optimistic about your plan for befriending Indians.”

  “I’m not surprised, Pruitt. When were you ever optimistic about anything? Remember what I told you about being an obstacle in the road to progress? Well, you are. You’re keeping the world from advancing.”

  “Now that’s saying quite a lot, Wayne. I don’t think—”

  “You’re an obstacle, Pruitt. You’re holding back the advance of the world.”

  Miles expected him to hang up, but apparently these were not Wayne’s last words. He waited to hear more.

>   “Pruitt, you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pruitt, do you know what it looks to me is wrong with you?”

  “What?”

  “It looks to me like you’re prejudiced against Indians.” He hung up.

  This time Miles took a pillow and one of Miss McGee’s afghans out to the chaise longue and he went back to sleep.

  “My, if we aren’t the picture of comfort this morning,” said Imogene Kite, striding across the alley. She was on her way to work.

  Miles opened and shut his eyes. Imogene stood slightly to one side of the sun and she was blinding to look at. “I’m recuperating from yesterday’s ordeal, Imogene.”

  “You’re certainly playing that tooth for all it’s worth.”

  “Imogene, would you care to look in my mouth and see the destruction?”

  “Don’t be gross, Pruitt. You’re making a big case out of a swollen cheek which will be down to its normal size by nightfall. Mark my words. Mucous membrane heals fast.”

  “That’s what Doc Oppegaard said.”

  “Don’t you know that the mild chemical components of mucous act as a soothing balm to mucous membrane?”

  “Imogene, before I forget it, I‘m sorry for yesterday. But you realize I had no alternative but to come straight home.”

  “Well, I did want a winter coat, and goodness knows when I’ll get back to Duluth again. As I said yesterday, Pruitt, I am tall for a woman.” She turned to go.

  “Have a good day in the stacks,” said Miles.

  Later, Miles put on a tie and walked to Doc Oppegaard’s office. Stella Gibbon and the dentist had finished their wine and cheese and were reading jokes to each other from two issues of the Soybean Monthly.

  “My tooth,” Miles pleaded. “Karstenburg did me wrong.”

  In the inner office Doc looked at the damage Karstenburg had left. “Boyoboy,” he said, “what a mess. Look here, Stella, he’s developing a dry socket.”

  Stella peered into Miles’s mouth, then reeled back. “How absolutely ugly!” she said.

  Doc packed the hole with cotton dipped in something sour. “Hold that in there and come back tomorrow. Boyoboy, Karstenburg really butchered you. I could have done better than that.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” said Miles.

  “I don’t pull the tough ones. No small-town dentist pulls the tough ones because the tough ones are always painful no matter who pulls them, and a small-town practice depends on a painless reputation. That’s why I sent you to Karstenburg. It’s better for Karstenburg to take the blame than me. But I swear to God I could have done better than that.”

  “I have one more wisdom tooth,” said Miles, getting out of the chair, “and when that goes bad, I’ll let it rot before I’ll go back to Karstenburg.”

  “Go to Hoover in Fargo. He has his office right in downtown Fargo, and he’s a crackerjack.”

  “Oh, Dr. Hoover,” said Stella. “He’s out of this world.”

  Once again the two of them saw Miles to the door, and on the front step Doc said, “How much did Karstenburg soak you?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “It will be high. You’ve got to pay a guy plenty to take the blame for a mess like that.”

  Toward the end of fifth hour when Mrs. Horky saw Miles standing with his briefcase in the hall, she left her class and seemed to be on the verge of falling into his arms. “Miles, thank God! You can’t imagine what I’ve been through. Jeff Norquist is a brutal, incorrigible, hellish criminal. He insulted me and disobeyed me. And Roxie Booth is absolutely irredeemable. She told two stories this morning about incest. How in the world do you get up in the morning when you know second hour is waiting for you? If I had to teach second hour every day, why I simply wouldn’t teach. I would take my pension and go clerking at the five-and-dime. This fifth-hour class is a charming class and I got along all right with first and third hour, though there’s not a bit of sparkle in either one of them, but I absolute refuse ever again to take your second hour, Miles, even if it means striking my name from the substitute list. And the same goes for study hall. I told Wayne Workman that never again in my life would I step foot into the same room with Jeff Norquist, and I find that he’s not only in your second hour, he’s in your study hall as well. That boy needs help, Miles. There’s something bad cooking in that boy and I don’t want to be around when it boils over. And between classes he hangs all over that little Indian girl, Annie Bird. I mean he’s all over her body right out here in the hall. I’m going home and dust. I’ve been here two days and all the while there’s been dust settling on my furniture.” Mrs. Horky streaked out the front door. The bell rang and students came spilling out of classrooms.

  Beverly Bingham had not seen Miles for forty-eight hours. Now, using the crowded hallway as an excuse, she pressed herself against him. She said, “You don’t look so hot.”

  “Hello, Beverly.” He tried to back away from the touch of her body, but there was no place to go.

  “Do you have my letter?”

  “Yes, it’s here in my briefcase, but I didn’t get a chance to look at it yet.”

  “Maybe you could read it this hour and I’ll pick it up after school.”

  “Yes, I’ll do that. I’ll meet you back here in an hour.”

  She smiled and brushed her attractive front across his arm and was swept away down the hall.

  Across the hall Wayne Workman had been standing on tiptoe in order to see over the stream of students. He had been watching Miles and Beverly.

  In study hall, little Hank Bird pulled a knife on Jeff Norquist and said, “You better lay off my sister.”

  Later in thinking it over, Miles couldn’t believe that Hank had been serious. Hank had an IQ of 99, which was enough sense to know what was bound to happen if he threatened somebody two years older and considerably larger. Maybe it was Hank’s way of showing off the knife he had stolen during the noon hour from Olafson’s Hardware. Maybe Hank secretly admired Jeff Norquist (Jeff had once stolen a new LTD from the Ford dealer) and was awkwardly trying to strike up a friendship between thieves.

  But Jeff Norquist didn’t see it that way. In the time it took Miles to get from his desk at the front of the room to the fight halfway down the middle aisle, Jeff put little Hank out of commission. He closed one of Hank’s eyes, knocked out one of his front teeth, and broke one of his fingers.

  Miles separated them and picked up the knife, which still had Olafson’s price sticker on it. It was a large jackknife with two blades, a bottle opener, and a screwdriver. Three ninety-five, plus tax.

  The screaming of the girls in study hall carried all over the school, and as Miles rushed Hank down to the nurse’s office, he met Wayne Workman on the stairs.

  “What’s happening?” asked Wayne.

  “I’ll tell you later. Watch my study hall for me.”

  The nurse was not in her office. Miles found a bottle of aspirin and handed it to Hank, whose eyes were filling with tears of pain. Miles put him in a chair and told him not to move. He ran to Delia Fritz’s office for the keys to the school car. He returned to the nurse’s office and led Hank outdoors and across the street to the shed behind the football bleachers where the school car—a green station wagon—was kept. He drove to the emergency room of the hospital, where Hank was drugged and his finger was put in a splint. Then he put him back in the car and headed west out of town. He passed the road leading to Evergreen Cemetery, he passed the Bingham driveway, and he crossed the Badbattle near the entrance to Pike Park. He came to the weathered wooden sign marking the border of the Sandhill Reservation, and as he approached the village of Sandhill he saw short, crooked trails leading from the highway to clearings in the forest. In each clearing an old car was parked next to the only door of a small house. The Indians had not built their houses in clusters; they were scattered like this throughout the forest of the reservation. Each car had on its roof a wooden structure like a rickety pulpit, a platform from which at night a
n Indian with a spotlight was allowed to shoot deer along the reservation roads.

  Miles turned off the highway and onto the single street running through Sandhill. The street was sand. He parked in the shadow of the Sandhill General Store.

  “You belong to Bennie Bird, don’t you?” Miles asked the boy, making sure.

  Little Hank nodded slowly. He was groggy from the shot he had been given at the hospital.

  Miles helped him out of the car and through the doorway of the dark store. Mrs. Bird was inside, alone. She was sitting in the shadows behind the bar at the back of the store, probably on the same stool where Superintendent Stevenson saw her twenty years before. When she saw her son being half-carried, half-pushed toward her, she stood up and came around from behind the bar and took him in her arms. She was tall. Her skin was very dark, and her gray, coarse hair was tied together at the back of her neck by a piece of bright red yarn. Her face was expressionless but she drew herself up so erect that her height became a reprimand, and Miles felt, for no good reason, quite guilty.

  Little Hank struggled feebly against his mother’s embrace, and Miles began to explain what had happened. “What started the fight was that Hank drew a knife—”

  Mrs. Bird spoke to him over Hank’s head. “Get away from here before his father sees him.”

  Leaving the store, Miles saw this sign tacked on the inside of the door: DID YOU FORGET SHOELACES?

  He got into the school car and drove ahead, thinking that he would circle the block, but he found that Sandhill was not laid out in blocks. Sandhill was a dozen buildings strung out along this one bumpy street. He drove past the Sandhill Public School, which had been closed when the Sandhill and Staggerford school districts consolidated. The building, according to a small sign above the door, was now the “Chippewa Folk-Arts-And-Crafts Center, Open June 1—September 1.” He passed St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, a small replica of the white, wooden churches of New England, but falling into ruin. The spire above the empty belfry was bent; it leaned, like the leaning jackpines all around it, with the prevailing northwest wind. The white paint had flaked off the walls and the windows were covered with boards. He passed the Sandhill Post Office, a square brick building (the only bricks on the reservation) no bigger than his classroom. Over the door a brand new American flag moved limply in the breeze; it was illuminated by the late-afternoon sun, and it shone like a jewel against the gray November landscape. He passed a gas station with one pump. He came to a narrow, two-story house and slowed down to read the lettering on one of the windows: