by Jon Hassler
Miss McGee sipped her hot chocolate, and when she looked up again Beverly was weeping. In a split second the girl had been jolted by the force of her sorrow. Shaken by sobs, she was spilling her chocolate on her lap and on the arm of the wing chair. Like the time a week ago when she had wept in the corridor of the school, and like this morning in the pickup when the tire blew out, despair overcame her in the wink of an eye. There were never, it seemed, any preliminary stages to Beverly’s sorrow—no languid dampening of her spirits, no gradual sinking of her heart. Sorrow came to Beverly like a disfiguring blow to the face. Like a baby, she cried with her chin.
Miss McGee leaned forward and took Beverly’s cup, then offered her hand. Beverly took the hand and studied it through her tears. A homely hand—spotted and wrinkled and bumpy. Blunt fingers. She put the hand to her face and wiped her eyes with it.
Beverly, Beverly (Miles wrote in his journal that evening), what were you on the verge of telling me as I changed the tire on your truck this afternoon? A family secret you call it. You say it is the reason nothing in your life will work out, and the reason you were crying all over Miss McGee when I got home from school.
Getting you home was an altogether miserable experience: trying to extract you from Miss McGee’s living room, then trying in the car to convince you that your future held hope, then trying to loosen the rusted lug nuts on that ancient GMC with the wind blowing so cold across the prairie that it made my hands and ears ache, and trying to make out what you were saying as you stood there with your back to the wind and your hair flying out in front of your face, and trying to keep my own heart from growing heavy as I watched you drive off down the highway and then turn down into the dark woods of that gloomy gulch you live in.
Something has to be done about you, Beverly. As soon as this Indian squabble is over, you and I and Agatha will get together and talk things out. I would also like Thanatopsis to be in on it. Thanatopsis will know what’s best for you. Throughout high school you have avoided her homemaking courses, and though you haven’t admitted it to me, I know why: Coming from the kind of home you do, you are afraid of making a fool of yourself among all those new stoves and sewing machines. But Thanatopsis has more to offer than homemaking courses. She knows what’s good for people. She makes people glad.
Thanatopsis, come to think of it, is just the person we need to go to Pike Park on Saturday and meet with the Indians. She would make them all glad. Poor Thanatopsis is going to have her hands full with Wayne for the next two days. As the meeting approaches, he will become edgy and harder than usual to live with. Today at the base of the flagpole, Wayne lost his voice. How embarrassing it must have been for him to open his mouth and speak to Alexander Bigmeadow in that tiny squeak. I felt sorry for him, yet I was as amused by it as that green-hatted Indian was, and I too wanted to laugh. I was hoping, in fact, that Wayne would make a few more remarks in that ridiculous little voice. The wildest laughter often springs from tension, and—who knows?—if Wayne had kept speaking, the whole tribe might have called off the confrontation and gone home in stitches. But Wayne’s chagrin was so great that he, like Bigmeadow, scowled at the men who were snickering, and when the last signs of lightheartedness drained from their faces and they glared again with vengeance, Wayne nodded curtly as if to say, “That’s better,” and turned and marched back to school. How easily our pride destroys our good sense.
What’s it like to go through life astonishing people by your mere existence? I am thinking of the governor’s Giant. When the Giant stepped out the front door of the school this noon, it wasn’t only Bennie Bird who recoiled in amazement. I saw a thousand people take a step backward, Indians and students alike. The Giant is over seven feet tall, perhaps seven two, and even for all that height he is overweight. He must weigh close to four hundred pounds.
But Annie Bird wasn’t impressed. Annie Bird, who could fit with room to spare into one of the Giant’s pant legs, accepted him for exactly what he is: a public servant. She used him as her bodyguard. She went out and sized up the invasion and turned it back with a well-calculated lack to her father’s crotch. She humiliated her father in the eyes of the tribe (he is the constable of Sandhill) and thereby transformed a mob into groups of picnickers. There was nothing for the Giant to do but to stand rather uselessly at her side. Heaven help Jeff Norquist if he marries Annie Bird.
Since I last saw Jeff Norquist’s mother, she has gone into a speedy decline. She looks haggard and slightly dirty. I remember when she was classy. When I had Jeff’s sister Maureen in class, Mrs. Norquist was a frequent visitor at school, and she didn’t look much older than Maureen. That was five years ago. Now she’s old. The change is primarily in her wrinkled and milky complexion. It was apparent today that her delay in opening the door was due to a desperate attempt to fix her face. She wore two smears of crimson rouge, and the smear on the right side was not on the cheekbone where it belonged, but back by her ear.
I remember Mr. Norquist—I forget his first name-as the Berrington County Attorney. He divided his time between Staggerford (where he was a law partner with Bartholomew Druppers) and the courthouse in Berrington. He drowned in the Badbattle. But it couldn’t have been his drowning that caused Mrs. Norquist to lose heart. He was already dead when I had Maureen as a student. What caused her decline has been something more recent. Jeffs vicious behavior? Or did her losing heart precede, and perhaps cause, his viciousness? Jeff was not vicious today. He will not be vicious in Pike Park on Saturday. He will be scared.
I cannot believe that Saturday’s meeting will be all that grim. I cannot believe that vengeance runs very deep in the Sandhill Indians. I cannot believe that Alexander Bigmeadow can hold his stern pose for more than a day at a time. Of the 507 Indians who came to town today, at least 500 seemed to be having fun.
Miles dropped these thoughts, typewritten, into the plastic briefcase, closed it, and put it in the closet. He then opened his old leather briefcase and fished out Jeff Norquist’s paper:
What I Wish
When my father was living we used to go down to the river on picnics. One Sunday when I was ten my father tied a long rope to the branch of a tree that grew out over the water and we put on our bathing suits and swung out on the rope and fell into the water. It was great fun until I swung out too far and fell into a dropoff we didn’t know was there. When my father, who couldn’t swim, saw me go under he panicked and ran out to save me. I guess he forgot that I knew how to swim and that he couldn’t. He went in over his head and never came up.
I wish I’d had a father for more than ten years. My mother is probably doing the best she can, but we don’t have anything to say to each other anymore. All she ever talks about is my sister Maureen. A mother isn’t a father.
No wonder the briefcase was so heavy, thought Miles. He should have known better than to collect all 114 papers at one time. The wrongs and losses and near misses of 114 people, when packed together in one briefcase, took on the heaviness and solidity of rock. So it wasn’t the poor penmanship after all that made reading these papers so difficult. Nor was it the futility of trying to teach English grammar. It was the way these papers teased him off the road of hope into the gulch of despair.
Miles stuffed Jeffs paper into the briefcase and snapped it shut. If Coach Gibbon were to read these papers, he thought, then Coach Gibbon would understand why a tie was as good as a win.
FRIDAY
NOVEMBER 6
IT WAS BOOK REPORT day.
The boys in first hour (about four years after the rest of the senior boys) had discovered John R. Tunis, and Lee Fremling was one of six who reported on All-American, though he was one of only two who had actually read the book. For seven weeks Miles had watched Lee reading the book in study hall, forming his heavy lips around each word. Today, after hearing the story from Lee, five other boys stood up in the front of the room and told the plot to the class, but a question or two from Miles revealed that four of them had never read it, and he gave them F
’s. None of the four contested the F. They all shrugged as if to say, “Well, anyhow I tried,” and returned to their desks and yawned.
Love was big with second hour. Miles sat at Jeff Norquist’s empty desk and listened to Roxie Booth, who had never read a book in her life, review Love Story, which had been last night’s late show on TV. She concluded her review by saying, “It would be almost worth it to die young so you could see how hard your boyfriend would take it. Boys make me cry all the time. Just once I’d like to see them cry.”
Miles asked her if she saw the movie on TV. “No, I never did.”
“You read the book?”
“Yeah, I read the book,” she adjusted the ropes and chains and spangles that hung around her neck.
“Then why do you refer to one of the characters as Ali MacGraw?”
“Because that’s who took the part in the book.”
Miles gave her an F.
Miles expected weighty matters from third hour, but nothing so dull as William Mulholland’s review of The Computer Programmer’s Handbook. His stoical classmates gave all thirty minutes of it their grave attention. Miles covered his eyes and slept.
During his free hour, Miles was the guest of Thanatopsis Workman’s home ec class. Once or twice a year Thanatopsis liked to give her girls a guest to practice on. He sat at a square table with three sophomores and ate a grapefruit, a pile of underdone macaroni, and a tasty apple turnover. The girl on his left, a large blonde named Tina, was in charge of serving; and the girl on his right, a small blonde named Dee Ann, took credit for the cooking. The third girl, a skinny bundle of nerves named Virginia, had been assigned to keep the conversation alive, but as she took her place at the table something struck her funny and she spent the entire meal giggling behind her hand.
“What’s so funny, Virginia?” asked Tina with a scowl.
“Stop laughing, Virginia, we have a guest,” said Dee Ann.
“You’ve got an A going in this class, Virginia, now don’t blow it on one of your silly spells.”
“Virginia, you aren’t touching a bit of your food.”
“Mrs. Workman, can’t you do something about Virginia?”
Virginia, behind her hand, turned purple and began to strangle on her laughter, and Tina, to save her life, carried her away to the nurse’s office.
As Miles expected, fifth hour got off to a superb start with Nadine Oppegaard’s review of John Brown’s Body. Nadine was hooked on the Civil War, and she reviewed Benet’s book without notes. She was eloquent, and she ran her fingers over her face as she spoke, exploring for pimples. She recited from memory the sad section about Stonewall Jackson’s death, concluding with his dying words, “ ‘Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.’ ” The class was a hushed audience. Miles gave her an A.
Nadine did not return to her desk, but remained at the lectern and said, “Stonewall Jackson died at thirty-nine, Mr. Pruitt. Are you thirty-nine yet?”
“No, why do you ask?”
“I’m trying to picture thirty-nine. Wouldn’t it be nice to have your place in life and in history established by the time you were thirty-nine, like Stonewall Jackson?”
“Or like Alexander the Great,” said Peter Gibbon, place kicker and reader of ancient history.
“Or like Mozart,” said Nadine, violinist.
“Or like Keats,” said Peter, who wrote sonnets in secret.
“Or like Toulouse-Lautrec,” said Nadine, painter of cancer of the mouth.
“Or like Mr. Pruitt,” said Beverly Bingham.
The discussion stalled. The class turned to look at Beverly, who was gazing at her teacher with such bald-faced admiration that Miles blushed. The class saw the blush. They looked back at Beverly and saw in her blue eyes that she loved him. Even those who had not heard the rumor began to wonder what this was all about.
Nadine said, “What I mean is that here was Stonewall Jackson in his thirties with the respect of all his troops and the respect of his commanding general, Robert E. Lee. How many of us will be able to claim that much respect for ourselves by the time we’re thirty-nine?”
“Mr. Pruitt has the respect of his troops,” said Peter Gibbon. “We’re his troops.”
Several students nodded and warmed Miles’s heart.
“All right, if we’re his troops, who is his Lee?” asked Nadine, who was enjoying her position at the lectern.
Somebody said, “Mr. Workman is his Lee,” and the class groaned.
Somebody said, “Mr. Stevenson,” and the superintendent must have wondered why at that moment the entire class turned to look at him across the courtyard.
Nadine said, “A man’s Lee has to be the person he lives for and is ready to the for.”
The class thought further, and so did Miles.
“Who are you close to, Mr. Pruitt?” asked a girl from the back row—someone afraid that this investigation into her teacher’s private life would the on the vine. Nothing interested a class more than the details of a teacher’s private life.
“Don’t you have any family?” prompted Nadine. “I mean, we know you’re not married, but don’t you even have parents?”
“I have a father and a brother.”
“Are they your Lees?”
“To be honest, the closeness we once felt doesn’t really exist any longer. In the seventeen years since my brother moved to California, we haven’t exchanged one letter, and in the five years since my father became senile we haven’t exchanged one thought.”
“Miss McGee is his Lee,” said Beverly Bingham.
“How can that old maid be his Lee?” said Nadine. “They don’t have a thing in common.”
“They have a great respect for each other,” said Beverly, “and that counts for a lot.”
Again the class turned to study the message in Beverly’s blue eyes.
Miles called on Peter Gibbon, who took Nadine’s place at the lectern and reviewed The Last Days of Pompeii. He said that now the football season was over he intended to begin The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which he claimed (with a grin) was written by his Uncle Edward. In college he would major in ancient history and his ambition was to become a professor at a Big Ten university. Miles wondered what had made Peter the scholar he was. The only reading materials in the Gibbon house were his father’s coaching journals and Stella’s magazines, featuring the same subjects month after month: diet, movie stars, and breast cancer. He gave Peter an A.
Beverly Bingham, dressed in the blouse Miss McGee had bleached and laundered, reviewed Gone With the Wind. She said it was a combination of love and disaster, and it made her weep and hope at the same time.
“I’ve heard that’s a book only a female can love,” said Peter Gibbon. “Is that true?”
Beverly said she didn’t know. “Ask a man.”
“Is it a book only a female can love, Mr. Pruitt?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t read it.”
The class reacted with mock amazement.
Nadine Oppegaard asked Beverly what she thought of the ending.
“The ending is beautiful,” said Beverly.
Nadine said, “I think Gone With the Wind has the stupidest ending I’ve ever read.”
“Oh, no. It’s inspiring. ‘Tomorrow is another day,’ says Scarlett. That’s inspiring.”
“I say it’s melodramatic. Scarlett’s plantation is a ruin and her daughter is dead and her husband has run away, and we’re supposed to believe she’s hopeful about her future? She must be out of her mind.”
“No, she’s doing the only thing a person can do when everything goes wrong. She’s putting her faith in tomorrow and hoping that things will be better.”
“It’s melodramatic.”
“No, it’s not, damn it. It’s very true to life. It’s the only thing a person can do when everything goes wrong. You probably haven’t had anything go wrong in your life, Nadine. Well, I have, and that’s how I get through it. I say tomorrow’s got to be better.
”
“And that’s melodramatic—for you to say that. What’s so much worse about your life than mine? I think we all have the same degree of troubles. I’m living with something I’d trade for just about any other kind of trouble I can think of, and so is Peter, and I still say the ending of Gone With the Wind is stupid.” She was clearly referring with her customary frankness to her father’s affair with Peter’s mother.