Billy liked her holding him more than he ever thought he would. Lately he had felt riven from the human world, and the innocence of her heart beating against his brought tears to his eyes. She thrust him back from her and held him by the upper arms. “You’re living here… in the dark? Afraid of what they—?”
“I’m not afraid.” He stepped back, hiding the knife behind him.
She hesitated, her hands tense at her sides. “Well, good.”
He could see only the shape of her face, could not see her eyes, wondered what was in them. “Uh, come in,” he said, walking toward the sitting room. When he turned back, she was groping, hands probing the dark. He said, “Sorry,” put the knife on the counter, and took her hand. He led her to the couch, went to the window behind her, and opened blinds to the moonlight.
She sat down with a rusty protest of old springs. Her hands fumbled in her lap, and then she was holding something out to him. “I came to give you this. It’s your mother’s number. I went to Jordan Marsh looking for her. I wanted her to know… what was happening up here. She’s no longer employed at the store, but she left a phone number with the payroll office.”
“Thank you, Mrs. English. I appreciate you coming here.” He could think of nothing else to say.
“Billy, what are you going to do? You can’t stay here like this.”
“Not much longer,” he told her. “The rent’s only paid to the end of the month.” He tried to make it sound funny, shrugged, and winced in the dark. “How are you, Mrs. English?”
“Oh, pretty good, Billy. Did you notice that Mr. Sowers described—what was it quaintly called, Mystery Night—in the same way he depicted my little parties? Inappropriate activity off school grounds. The irony is massive. He equates me with those men who sent you poor boys out to the woods.”
“Moira told me they’re sending you to another school.”
“Oh. Yes… Moira. I did mention it to her. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. But it’s true. Or it was. After the Christmas holidays, I was supposed to start at the Holland Training Center. It’s a school for troubled youth. Well, there was a certain dark humor in that, but now the school board has reconsidered its decision. I’ve been fired.”
“I’m sorry.” Did she suspect Moira? God Almighty, does she suspect me? The only football player at her parties. A spy.
“Oh, no, Billy. Don’t worry about it for a minute. I’m going to appeal.” She spoke now with a cold resolve. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll hire an attorney. Of course, it will take all of my savings, but sometimes you just have to…”
Billy stood dumb in the dark. She had called him brave. He doubted his own courage, but he was certain of hers. The silence lengthened, then Mrs. English pushed herself up with a sigh and started for the back of the house. Billy followed.
In the kitchenette, she said, “Billy, I wrote my own number on that piece of paper, too. Call if you need anything. Money. A place to stay. Anything at all, you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
On the landing she turned, snugged her coat lapels to her neck, and studied him by moonlight. He wished she’d hug him again, or touch his cheek like she had before. Then he remembered something. He took out his wallet, removed from it a piece of paper, and handed it to her. “Uh, Mrs. English, do you know what this is?”
She unfolded the paper and read aloud:
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
She looked up at him. “It’s Housman, of course. Where did you get this?”
“From my dad. He… wrote it for me.”
“Oh, I see.” She handed the paper back to him carefully, the way she always touched books. They stood in the moonlight, remembering Billy’s father. Mrs. English brightened her voice. “Do you know the rest of it?’
“No.” Do I want to know it?
She closed her eyes and lifted her chin. “Well, this puts some pressure on an old girl’s memory, but…”
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home.
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
She opened her eyes and looked at Billy.
“Go on,” he said. “Please.”
In her classroom voice, a little like his father’s when he recollected poems, she recited:
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
“It’s sad,” Billy said.
“Yes, it is,” Mrs. English whispered. She touched her eyes with the sleeve of her coat. “Forgive me.”
Briefer than a girl’s. Billy wondered at the words, why his father had chosen them to write on the night his son had caught the pass. Coffin corner. The night he had been lifted to the shoulders of boys crazed with happiness. He was there. Billy smiled thinking of his father’s face high in the crowd, his eyes full of joy at Billy’s work.
Mrs. English took a deep breath and fanned her eyes with pale fingers. “Speaking of garlands and girls… Moira, she’s a complicated girl. She likes you very much, but you be careful with her. Will you do that for me, Billy? Will you be careful?”
He was not sure what she meant, couldn’t ask. Had Moira told her about the day at the lake? Told her they had not been careful? He doubted it. Not even bold Moira would tell a teacher such a thing. Mrs. English meant some other kind of care. “Yeah. I mean, yes, I will.” His own bold impulse was to reach out and put his hand on Mrs. English’s shoulder. “Thank you,” he said. “For… caring about me.”
When she was gone and he turned back to the dark office, he thought, The title. I forgot to ask the title of the poem.
Billy called his mother.
“Mom, I want to give you Dad’s ashes.”
“Half.”
“Mom?”
“You mean half. You’re keeping half, aren’t you? That’s what I want you to do.”
“Sure, Mom. Half.”
“I’m living in Venice now, Billy, in an apartment. It’s small but it’s nice, and… there’s room for you. I’ve got a new job. I’m keeping the books for a dress shop. Imagine me a bookkeeper. But I like it. I don’t have to worry about how I look, and the debts are somebody else’s.”
Venice. Still farther away from Oleander.
“Okay, Mom. I’ll come see you. I’ll come soon.”
His mother breathed long and soft into the phone, and then, in the background, Billy heard a man’s voice, deep, like a saw blade burring through wood. The man said, “Marian? Who’s that, Marian?”
*
In the morning Billy drove to downtown Oleander, parked the Ford, and walked the early-morning streets. He stood on corners looking mean at the meanest-looking men. He glared at faces that stared from passing cars, knowing him. His eyes, his clenched fists, the way he stood, said, Here I am, tired of hiding, ready to fight. A few cars honked, an old woman gave him the finger, a man shouted, “Asshole!” from the window of a Cadillac, but no one accepted Billy’s invitation
to fight. After an hour of prowling, glaring, and bumping the shoulders of men who passed, he stepped into McCrory’s and, his heart full of a dark joy, sat in the booth where he and his father had talked last August. The day his father had asked him to quit.
It starts when they’re born into luck and money, and people like us, we don’t know what it is. We don’t know, and we aren’t included, so… take what happened to your head as a letter from the Fates and get out now with grace. You don’t know all that football is, and all that it will require of you and take from you in a place like this.
Billy ordered eggs, bacon, and toast, and ate with appetite for the first time in weeks. A copy of the Grower lay on a nearby table, and a headline caught his eye: Teacher Appeals Board’s Ruling. He read the article.
Mr. Blake Rainey, chairman of the Oleander County School Board, announced yesterday after an emergency meeting that the school board had reconsidered its decision to transfer controversial William B. Carr High School teacher, Mrs. Judith English. Board members interviewed by the Grower said that, after a heated debate, a majority of members had agreed that Mrs. English’s actions were so irresponsible as to merit dismissal. A vote was taken resulting in a decision to dismiss for cause. A board member who asked not to be identified said that there had been one dissenting vote. Contacted for a comment, Mrs. English said that she had formally requested that the board hear an appeal before concluding the matter.
Billy put the Grower aside, drank the last of his coffee and, with the last of his money, left a generous tip. He went outside and sat in the Ford resting his hand on his father’s worn brown leather satchel. He leaned his head against the steering wheel and closed his eyes.
Football Player’s Father Was Bagman.
All morning a question had been forming: Who or what is your father now? If the soul lives, how can it be troubled by a newspaper? You are the breath and bone of a man you loved, and The Story of Billy, your own record of truth and falsehood, even when you are surrounded by lies, is part of your father’s legacy. What man in life was perfect? What legacy completely clean?
Rainey had told one truth.
He leaves his name behind. His good name.
FORTY-FOUR
Billy sat alone in the darkened balcony of the cavernous municipal auditorium watching the people of Oleander fill the five hundred seats on the ground floor. In the aisle beside him was a large cardboard box. An hour before the doors of the auditorium were opened to the public, he had used a screwdriver to pry open a rear window and sneak in. From here he could watch in peace. For years, this balcony had been closed for repairs.
Crouching, peering over the balcony railing, he counted the clans of Oleander as they gathered by class, religion, and politics. The Unitarians had turned out for Mrs. English’s appeal. So had the town’s beatniks, the owner of the local bookstore, the League of Women Voters, a few vagrant men who used public gatherings for entertainment, and the town’s prominent Jews. Two men slouched in the front row in motorcycle jackets and black leather hats bearing the silver wings of Harley-Davidson. A policeman standing near the flags of the State of Florida and the United States pointed at their hats and frowned while they bared their heads. The Unitarians, mostly women, wore drab, unfashionable dresses or pants. Several stared fiercely at books they had brought, as though even the brief interval before this meeting began could be a sinful waste of time. The League of Women Voters and the Junior League sat together in the middle of the auditorium dressed in the finest from Turville’s Department Store. They held fashionable handbags primly in their laps and chatted quietly, waiting for the school board to mount the stage. Billy knew that many of them were the mothers of Monmouth Park.
Most of the men in the audience wore business suits. Tradesmen and laborers wore white shirts buttoned at the neck and blue denim or khaki trousers. Women chatted or whispered, but men sat quietly, faces grimly set, waiting. Policemen stood at the four corners of the hall. Conspicuously missing were the faculty of William B. Carr High School.
Billy peered down from the darkness at what looked to him now more like a performance than an audience. Moira Davison arrived with Derek and several more of Mrs. English’s special students. As Moira came down the aisle in a black dress, her dark hair pinned back with ivory combs, a man in bib overalls rose and thrust an angry red face at her. “You students of that Commonist bitch? She corrupt your minds to hate America?” Saliva flew from his lips. Moira quickened her pace to a row of empty seats near the front of the auditorium. The man shook a worn black Bible at her back. “And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.”
People booed. One of the Unitarian women called, “Sit down, you fool!”
The school board filed in from a wing of the elevated stage, and Moira’s mother, Dr. Harriet Davison, led the way. Three vagrants wandered through a side door, blinking in the bright light. They stopped in the aisle and clapped comically when the last of the dignitaries, Board Chairman Blake Rainey, walked on stage. A policeman moved toward them, and they hushed one another like rowdy children.
The eight board members, merchants and professional men in dark suits, and Dr. Davison, wearing a navy-blue dress and a string of pearls, seated themselves. Two board members lit cigarettes, and one a cigar. At a nod from Blake Rainey, a tall man in a black suit rose from the audience, stepped into the aisle, and invited the crowd to bow their heads in prayer. As the minister rumbled on in a musical baritone, Billy counted six references to Christ, the Son of God, and five to the benefits and bounties of the country most blessed by Him—these bounties were the freedoms to vote, assemble, worship as you liked, speak your mind, and petition for the redress of grievances. It was a civic prayer, and Billy sensed in it the restraint of the preacher’s passions. When Oleander prayed, the beatnik couple in black jerseys and the several Jewish families sat heads unbowed, the men in yarmulkes, staring stoically ahead as the preacher ascended with grand feeling toward his conclusion. Billy looked into the blue haze of cigarette smoke that hovered below the ceiling where rows of old paddle fans stirred the desultory air. He closed his eyes and whispered, “Let me be clean.”
Blake Rainey rose and told the crowd that he knew why they had come, but that some routine business of the board must nevertheless be done. And so followed the approval of the minutes of the last meeting and the reading of a report on the cafeteria renovation at Carr High School.
During this reading, Mrs. English and her husband arrived. She entered dressed not as she would have for one of her parties in some futuristic rig, but as she did for school. She wore a white blouse closed at the throat by a pearl pin, a black skirt, and black pumps. A gray sweater draped her shoulders, the gold pin of Phi Beta Kappa gleaming from its collar. She walked with eyes downcast, carrying a black leather folder. Her husband wore the usual earthy tweeds and puffed the usual pipe, his eyes challenging the crowd as he escorted his wife down the aisle to the front row.
The final paragraph of the cafeteria report was lost in this entrance, and one or two board members blew plumes of smoke to show their irritation.
A table with a chair and a microphone had been placed in the space between the front row and the stage. To Billy, the chair looked ominously empty and piteously small waiting between the audience and the board looking down from the stage. He searched for Herb Klein, found him at the far side of the auditorium, stooped in a gray suit, notebook poised on his knee. Helen Dane, the white-haired owner of the Grower, was there beside him, and not far away sat Cam Sizemore.
Chairman Blake Rainey cleared his throat, tapped his microphone, and said, “By action of this board and on the recommendation of Mr. Boyd Sowers, principal of William B. Carr High School, Mrs. Judith English, a teacher at Carr High, was dismissed for cause on November fifteenth.” Rainey paused and swung his eyes over the crowd looking for a challenge or a question.
Wh
en his gaze yielded nothing but an expectant hush, Rainey continued, “In this case, dismissal for cause means violation of a contract and failure to comply with the instructions of school administrators. The particulars of the violation and failure to comply are as follows: The teacher, Judith English, deviated from the curriculum written by the faculty of Carr High School and approved by this board by introducing into her classroom books not approved for study. Mrs. English also violated her contract, specifically the clause forbidding moral turpitude, by meeting off school grounds and after hours with students, and allowing them to engage in illegal activities in her presence.”
Rainey lifted his eyes to the audience as the word illegal brought murmurs and gasps. He said, “Now let me explain something very clearly to all of you. Mrs. English, like any teacher in this district, serves at the pleasure of this board. The burden of proof, and I emphasize this, the burden of proof here is not on this board. This board has made its decision. We are not legally required to be here tonight. We have generously agreed to hear an appeal.” Rainey watched the audience again, his dark eyes moving from aisle to aisle. Whispers rippled across the crowd, broke against the walls, and subsided into silence.
Blake Rainey called Mrs. English to the table below the stage. She rose, holding the folder. Her face was pale, and Billy saw that she gripped her husband’s hand until she stepped into the aisle and their connection was broken. Billy’s eyes swung to Moira. She sighed and snatched a tear from her cheek.
When Mrs. English was seated and blinking up at the stage, Blake Rainey said, “Tell us please, Mrs. English, why we are here tonight.”
She peered at Rainey, then over her shoulder at the crowd. “Sir, I—”
“Ma’am,” Rainey interrupted, “we have dismissed you and told you why. I have just repeated for the benefit of everyone here tonight the reasons you have been terminated. Now, please tell us why we are here.”
Mrs. English found her voice: “We are here tonight, Mr. Rainey… I suppose because I believe it is unfair that I was fired from a job I love, teaching the young people of this community, a job I am good at. And for which, I might add, I have received only the best fitness reports from my principal… at least until very recently.”
Fighting in the Shade Page 27