by Louise Hawes
“You mean like this?” Fry let the book drop and leaned close, crossing his eyes and breathing in stereo like a nearsighted Darth Vader.
“Yeah,” I told him, pushing him backward, onto the arm of the couch. Couldn’t he be serious even once in his life? “Just like that.”
Bearings
You are my dear compass,
who knows no way but true,
so when I’m lost and drifting,
I find myself in you.
Yet when I ask you, fearful,
if I should set you free,
imagine my surprise to hear
you take your north from me.
The First Class
After the rich kids’ parents hired lawyers and all the special-ed students got excused, there were seventeen of us mainstreamers who couldn’t buy or talk our way out of the poetry course. It was held after school, so we all had to drive down to the community college the second Thursday in June. It didn’t seem like a whole lot of planning had gone into our reform; the college was already on break and there was no air-conditioning. But really, how could we complain? Our instructor was going to be one of the most famous people in the world. (Which late-breaking development inspired five of the rich kids’ families to suggest, oops, they didn’t mean it and they were willing take their punishment after all. But the judge told their lawyers that if their reasons for not taking the course were good, then their reasons for taking it had to be bad. Score one for the huddled masses.)
We still couldn’t figure out why the Great One had decided to teach us. We all knew why we were there—too young to serve time, too old not to be punished for $50,000 worth of property damage. But why would a legend leave the security of the nursing home where he was comfortably decaying, to teach a bunch of incorrigibles who had set his house on fire about iambic pentameter?
“He’s got it all,” H acknowledged. “Fame, money, a zillion books.” He looked around the small cinder-block room. “There’s not a single person here who hasn’t heard of Rufus H. Baylor.” Despite the fact that he’d complained about being here, and moaned every time Fry did, my prince’s second-in-command sounded just the tiniest bit starstruck.
And what he’d said about people knowing who Baylor was? It was true. Not only for the kids in that room. But for their parents, their friends, and just about everyone on the planet. “You’re right,” I told him, surprised to be agreeing with the guy I usually went out of my way to pick fights with. “Baylor sure doesn’t need to come all the way out here to teach a roomful of . . .”
I paused, trying to think of a way to describe the unbrilliance that filled that classroom. I took a quick survey: three people openly on cell phones, two undercover; four guys talking in the corner; two girls reading the same magazine; and one doing her nails. (Throw in the three of us holding a conversation about all this, and that left only two—count them, two—kids who sat up straight and looked expectantly at the classroom door. As if they couldn’t wait to get started.)
“Think about it,” I said. “If you were a celebrity, would you want to hang out with kids like us?”
Fry, who was not inclined to speculation about anything except microbrews, shrugged. “Maybe he just wants to see how the other half lives.”
He had a point. Sure, Baylor’s work was required reading (in the case of a few really famous poems, required memorizing). And he got wheeled out in front of reporters once a year to read a sonnet, to smile for the cameras, to say something dripping with metaphors. But then he was supposed to go back to sleep and let the world go on without him. Maybe he was just plain curious about that world?
At first, when a thin, nervous man walked into class and looked at us like we might bite, I thought he could be our famous teacher. But he was much too young, and after he took roll, he pointed to his name tag, as if he were teaching us to read. “Dr. Fenshaw, English Literature,” he said. Me Dick, you Jane. If we weren’t all so hot and sweaty, it would have been funny.
After that, our fearless leader, who was probably the prof who’d been scheduled to teach us before Baylor decided to do it himself, launched into what sounded like a speech he had practiced over and over. In fact, Fenshaw was so busy talking to himself, he never even heard the old man come in. The visitor had to listen to the speech right along with the rest of us. Together, we learned everything we never wanted to know about “Southern pastoral.” Rufus H. Baylor wasn’t just the People’s Poet, Fenshaw told us, he was the place’s, too. His poems had made Carolina wrens, fence lizards, redbuds, wisteria—all of it—famous, even poison ivy. He’d turned pieces of our state into household words, scattering them across the country from his office at the Library of Congress or wherever Poets Laureate worked.
Meanwhile, Baylor (who else could it be?!) stood quietly beside the door, hands folded over the handle of a walking stick. He smiled and sized us up while we did the same. The Great One, it turned out, was much taller than I’d imagined. He didn’t seem to fit the dainty rolltop desk I’d seen at the House That Was No More, and he made Fenshaw look like a skinny miniature. But it wasn’t just his size that was a surprise; Baylor seemed brighter, more alive than I’d expected.
Maybe it was all the black-and-white news photos I’d seen, or the fact that he was older than anyone I knew. I’d pictured him in a wheelchair, with white hair, pale skin, and a tweed jacket he probably couldn’t put on by himself. The only thing I’d gotten right was the white hair.
Under that famous, snowy mop, Baylor’s cheeks were flushed and his eyes were sharp blue, deep and twisty like the middle of a cat’s-eye marble. He didn’t wear glasses, so when he looked at you, there was nothing between you and those marble eyes. He wore comfort clothes, a bright orange tee, the writing on it nearly illegible, and jeans—an octogenarian in jeans.
Finally, either because he realized we were looking past him, or because he got that tingly feeling you sometimes do when a person’s watching you from behind, Professor Hot Air turned around and spotted our guest of honor. That’s when the poet left his stick in a corner and walked to the center of the room with both hands open, holding them out for the prof’s. Flustered, the smaller man stuck his out, too, and let Baylor grab him in a double handshake.
Then, while Fenshaw was pulling file cards out of his pocket, looking for the introduction he finally located and began to read, the Great One took off down the aisles between our seats. He came over to each one of us in turn, waiting beside our desks, holding out those open hands. One by one, we stood up, and did the double-handshake thing. It was the oddest feeling, having your hands trapped in that old man’s. Up close, the peeled letters on his tee announced, I THINK, THEREFORE I RHYME. He didn’t say anything, just beamed a smile on you, a huge, open grin no one could possibly fake.
When the prof had finished his introduction and Baylor had shaken the last hands and ambled back up to the front of the room, our celebrity teacher started class. He didn’t introduce himself; he didn’t say, “Hi, how are you?” Or even, “How could you have done this dastardly deed?” Instead, he talked a poem—right out of the gate, just like that. He hadn’t written it down because he knew it by heart. His voice wasn’t exactly old, but it was comfortable like his clothes, with just enough Southern in it, to make him sound like home. He didn’t stop at the ends of the lines and breathe heavy, the way Miss Kinney always did when she read poetry. It was like he was having a conversation with us, only we weren’t talking back. Not even Coral Ann Levin, whose father was the soccer coach, and who had the biggest mouth in the entire school. And not Hector Losada, who had the second biggest. Even the mule-size kid who’d answered roll as Thatcher, and whom I recognized as the bully who’d wanted H to break down the cottage door, had stopped talking to his friends. He just smiled patiently, as if Baylor were telling a joke and he were waiting for the punch line.
The poem wasn’t very long; in fact, it stopped just when I’d gotten used to the song it was making. It rhymed, but not in a “rose” / �
��nose” kind of way. It could have been a love poem, but I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that it was about trying to make good things last. Almost as if Baylor had heard me wish it every time Fry put his arms around me: Stay.
When he’d finished, Baylor turned and looked at Fenshaw, who was definitely on the spot. The prof hugged his chest, shook his head. “I thought I knew your work, sir.” The tighter he hugged, the more he showed off the perspiration moons under his arms. “But I’m afraid I’ve never read that poem before.”
“That’s because I just wrote it, Dr. Fenshaw.” Baylor looked pointedly at our intrepid mentor’s name tag. “Do you have a first name, young man?”
“Charles,” the teacher said, glad to know something. “It’s Charles.”
“Well, Charles,” Baylor told him, “that’s part of the reason I’m here. I wanted to thank these folks for the first poem I’ve written in years.”
“Sir?” Fenshaw was back to knowing nothing.
But Baylor wasn’t looking at him anymore. He’d turned to us, instead. “You see, if y’all hadn’t broken into that old summer place of mine, I might not have gotten to thinking about the good times, the sweet times I had there.”
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in that stuffy, bile-colored room who was surprised that Baylor was thanking us for anything. It made what we’d done seem worse, like we’d run over a puppy with a Mack truck. A puppy who had stumbled to its feet and was licking our faces.
“And if I hadn’t thought about those times,” Baylor told us, “and realized they were over and that I could never get them back, I don’t suppose I would have written a poem about them.” The way he looked at you! It wasn’t like being under a microscope. It was more like he thought you were special, one of a kind. Like there was nowhere else he’d rather be, no one else he’d rather see.
“I’m not saying what you did was right, mind you. In fact, it was much closer to dead wrong. But I am saying the longer I live, the easier it gets to believe that our darkest moments have lessons hiding in them. And if that lesson is a poem? Well, for a fossil like me, that’s pretty close to a miracle.”
He wasn’t handing us a line, you could see that. He wasn’t talking down to us; he was telling us the simple truth: We’d trashed his house. And we’d helped him write a poem. How long had it been between poems? Maybe it felt like forever. Maybe that’s why he was here.
Now he asked us to take his new poem apart. He said it again, line by line, and told us he wanted to know how it made us feel. “I don’t give a rat’s rear end what you think it means,” he warned us before anyone had time to raise their hand. I thought of Miss Kinney telling us that every poem had a message, that it was our job to read between the lines.
“I want to know what the sound of the words does to your gut,” Baylor told us. “I want to know what pictures it puts in your head.”
Even after Fry took his hand down, I kept seeing it up in the air. It was that hard to believe. But Baylor called on him like he was just anyone, not the Absolute Last Person in the Universe Who Would Ever Under Any Circumstances Be Expected to Volunteer in Class.
“That line about the girl’s neck bones?” Fry asked. “Maybe the poet wants to choke her?”
Fry grinned at me then. I couldn’t figure out if he was teasing our famous teacher, or if he really meant what he’d said. (Lately, the way he’d been acting, it could have gone either way.) H, Faithful Shadow and Sucker Up, was sitting on the other side of Fry, the way he always did. He started to smile, then took it back. Just like me, he wasn’t sure if his jefe was serious or not.
But Baylor? Baylor laughed right out loud. “That’s a pretty drastic way to get the last word.” He shook his head. “Frankly? This poet hadn’t considered that.” He stopped then, ducked his white head, and brushed his lips with one hand. “But you know what, young man? A lot of tenderness is very close to violence, isn’t it? We take the best care of things we could easily crush.
“Yes,” he said, looking at Fry as if Mr. Laid-Back had just shown him how to solve a really tough quadratic equation. “Yes, that’s in there, too.”
Baylor didn’t know it, of course, but Fry had just done him an even bigger favor. Because once the coolest guy in that room, possibly in the whole school, had answered his question, it was like dominoes falling. A mini forest of hands shot up, and Baylor beamed. He nodded toward a girl I recognized from Miss Kinney’s class, a girl I couldn’t remember saying a single word in school. But here she was, telling Baylor how she understood the line about eyes giving you away. “My mother knows whenever I’m lying,” she said. “She says she can read it in my eyes.”
“And that’s because she loves you.” Baylor was thinking it through, what the girl had said. “How about you?” he asked. “You know when she’s not telling the truth?”
“Yes,” said the girl. “Every time, even when she says nothing’s wrong.”
“Eye language, right?”
“Yeah. I guess I speak it, too.” The girl was smiling, proud of herself. She was sitting in this class to avoid going to jail, and she was actually proud. I didn’t know if anyone else thought this was as preposterous as I did. I looked around the room: Two kids were texting, and Thatcher the Moose had put on a serious mask, but you could tell he was sleeping behind it. Which meant Rufus Baylor had achieved a minor miracle, a response way better than the usual half-listening–half-out-to-lunch ratio in most classes at WPH.
And if more kids than usual were paying attention, a whole lot more were actually taking part. Pretty soon, most of the kids in that room had talked about Baylor’s poem. Sometimes they said interesting stuff, sometimes not. But he listened, thought about everything, and never made anyone feel stupid or wrong. He always found something in what we said, something that grew the poem, made it even bigger.
Of course, no one had talked about the sound of the words yet. And sound was what he’d asked us about, what I’d noticed right away. What I always noticed if I stopped to listen: the grill in the kitchen at work, leaves whispering to each other in the rain, furniture breathing at night—voices everywhere. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right. I raised my hand.
“Name and serial number,” Baylor said.
“Sarah,” I told him. “My name is Sarah Wheeler.” I kept going while I still had the nerve. “It felt like your poem didn’t really end,” I said. “That last line?”
Baylor nodded.
“It sounded like a bell or an echo, something that should keep going and going.”
As soon as I heard myself say it, I wanted to take it back. Baylor stared at me, and for a minute, I thought he didn’t understand. I wanted to explain that the words repeated in my head, not in a bad way, not like leaf blowers on Sunday. More like a prayer or a heartbeat.
“Going and going.” The poet put his head to one side, the way Fry sometimes did when he wasn’t sure about something, when he needed to check it out.
“Yes,” Baylor said now. “That’s just what I wanted it to do.” He sounded as if he and I were talking about hanging a picture frame or planning a garden. Something we were doing together, just the two of us. “I had in mind that the reader would keep hearing it over and over in his brain or his heart, or wherever things stay.” Head still cocked, he pointed a trigger finger at me. “Is that what you mean?”
It was my turn to nod. To wonder if he could read minds. And to feel very relieved I hadn’t made a total jerk of myself.
Now Baylor pointed the finger gun at his own head. “Of course! Why can’t it be out loud?” He seemed to be asking himself more than us. “Why can’t we be the bell?”
And believe it or not, we were. He took the two words in the poem’s last line, and he split them apart. He helped all the boys get a slow, steady drumbeat going. He even had the prof reciting it with them. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” they said, over and over. Or most of them did. I was amazed to see H start in before Fry. He didn’t even check with the boss before he
was tapping his foot and repeating the word, over and over. And the hard cases like Thatcher? They just sat there, no laughter, no talking. I guess they were trying to figure out what the old man was up to.
Next, Baylor asked the girls to jump in just behind the guys, with the same beat, different word. “Try,” we chimed, “try, try, try.”
After we got going, it was just like I’d imagined it, only better. The guys’ deep thrumming wove in and out of our higher, softer sound. “Don’t,” they rumbled; “Try,” we answered. Those two sad words, over and over. But together like that, they weren’t sad at all. They were voice music. Water words rushing, brushing, tumbling over each other.
Each time I joined in, I got this thrill, like I was doing something too loud and too much fun. I was three years old again, and I’d found this giant pot I couldn’t lift off the kitchen floor. I took a spoon and a smaller pot, and slammed them both against its fat sides. The spoon made a high, silver sound. The little pot made a dull, hollow thud. I slammed harder and harder till the sounds vibrated inside me. A whole world opened up then—a world where everything talked. Not just people, but pots and spoons and floors and the fat, stolid sides of cupboards:
SPOON AND BIG POT
Tiiiiinnnnng! Tiiiiiiiiinnng!
BIG POT AND LITTLE POT
WHUUMP! WHUUUUUMP!
SPOON AND FLOOR
Phat, phat, phat.
HIGH HEELS AND STAIRS
Tlik, tlik, tlik, tlik, tlik, tlik, tlik.
I heard my mother’s anger before I saw it. But by the time she and Auntie J. appeared at the kitchen door, I had three more pots and their lids out, along with a ladle, a fork, and a corkscrew with silver curls that whispered and crunched instead of banged. I kept laughing and beating and thumping, even while Mom knelt down and started picking everything up off the floor. She didn’t say a word to me, just turned to my aunt beside her. “We’re going to have to childproof that cabinet door,” she said.