by Ivan Doig
12
I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING WONDERING WHY MY EAR WAS stuffed with cotton, when I had no memory of an earache. Groggily I lay there, my other ear still pressed to the pillow, trying to figure this out. Usual end-of-night sounds—the wind giving the house a last visit, if nothing else—were absent; the inner works of my ear held only that plugged silence. I rolled over and the other ear was the same, not able to hear a thing. Deaf in both ears? Numbed by the silence, I sat up in bed. How could I have lost my hearing in one night with not even a dream to warn me? Then the bedroom window's blue-silver light of crystalline reflection that was spread over the still form of Damon beside me and Toby across the room registered on me. The cottony stopper on the sounds of the outer world was snow.
Morrie opened that schoolday as if the six-inch white blanket outside was nothing out of the ordinary. I noticed, however, that he petted his mustache more than usual.
I am not the giddy sort, but that morning I floated somewhere above the eternal desk shared with Carnelia. Over breakfast Father had vouched that a snowfall like this one, damp and clinging, was more than sufficient for tracking and trapping, and likely would last in the mountains and foothills until spring. Brose Turley would have to go off to the high country now for his winter harvest of pelts. Eddie himself gave us a sure sign of that when we rode into the schoolyard and there he was, a sneering grin on him for the first time in ages, getting in practice to lodge with the Johannson boys by roughhousing with them.
Mine was not the only case of euphoria left behind by the fat, lazy overnight storm. Morrie found out in a hurry that the first day of real winter substantially altered the classroom climate. Try us every way as he did on arithmetic that morning, there was only one equation on our minds: first snowfall equaled first snowballs, divided by sides. Giving in with grace, he called recess some minutes ahead of time and got out of the way of our stampede to coats, overshoes, and mittens.
Within seconds, Grover and I were pelting each other as happily as we had played baseball catch together in the months previous. Snow always turned Damon into a tundra guerrilla; he plastered Martin Myrdal three times before Martin figured out where those deadly snowballs were sailing in from. Toby's age group exploded softball-sized chunks on one another, giggling all the while. In no time, then, the schoolyard scene was as ordained as one of those medieval clocks where a troupe of figurines march out of one side and drive in the troupe on the other: every male from first grade to eighth was in the middle of the playground madly firing snowballs, and all the girls had wisely withdrawn alongside the schoolhouse to cheer and scold. Skirmishes and ambushes grew into fusillades. Before long there was as much snow being flung through the air as rested on the ground.
Satisfying as the snowball free-for-all was, the god of winter mischief suddenly offered something even better. It came when Nick Drobny, trying to dodge a snowball and at the same time reach down and manufacture his own, slipped and fell flat on his face. The rest of us could not believe our good fortune. Everyone in Nick's vicinity shouted out the opportunity. "Dogpile!"
Knowing what was coming, Nick squealed and tried to scramble onto all fours. He did not quite manage to do so before Miles Calhoun belly-flopped on him, and Izzy landed crisscross atop Miles.
"Get off me!" Nick was shrieking—shrieking was one of the best parts of a dogpile—when Anton Kratka and Gabe Pronovost added themselves crosswise onto the others, and Verl Fletcher sailed in on top of them.
This already was a highly promising pile, with Nick struggling with all his might to escape the bottom and everybody atop squirming to squash him into the snow until he gave up. Grover and Damon and I and several others cagily circled the heap, gauging when to join in; a good rule of dogpiling was to end up as far on top as you possibly could. Then something beyond precedent happened. In her usual provocateur fashion, Rabrab Rellis had been on the sidelines dishing out remarks. Abruptly she came loping out, brown-stockinged legs long and scissoring, turned in midair, and slid across the pile of boys on her back, arms wide as if to spread the gospel of dogpile.
Rabrab did not stay there any time at all—that would have been unmitigated scandal—but her teasing flight of passage had a sensational effect on every boy standing there idle. Whooping, roaring, we flung ourselves onto the heap, the whole wet, wooly mass of us rolling and growing like a gigantic snowball, Nick still at the bottom.
In the schoolhouse, the uproar must have sounded like the outbreak of war. Morrie hopped out onto the front step, one overshoe on and struggling to pull the other one on, to find us laughing like junior madmen. He stopped work on the overshoe and peered at the writhing tangle of us. "Nick? Is this satisfactory with you?"
Nick squeaked out, "Just fine, Mr. Morgan."
Morrie went back inside shaking his head, probably counting the schooldays until spring.
I sometimes wonder if education has its own omens, as the weather does. That day and the next, while the snow was fresh, so was the mood I brought to any school subject, even the ones I already knew by heart. Sitting next to Carnelia as if we were galley slaves perpetually chained to our oar did not even bother me. Then came a change of weather, in more ways than one. As the snow dirtied up and winter went back to being nothing special, a feeling I could not name came over me, although since then I have observed enough students at that age to diagnose my case as pernicious listlessness. Whenever Morrie wasn't drilling us on something the world thought essential to seventh-graders, I drifted into reading of my own or disinterestedly killed off the night's homework right there during school. The only thing I felt a serious need to study was the trajectory of snowballs. And it did not help that Damon and Toby and I came down with one of our periodic fits of tardiness, so that each morning we would gallop in at the absolute last minute and there would be Carnelia waiting like the wrath of Betsy Ross, steaming to get the flag-raising over with.
Maybe it was her way of marking our last day of flag duty, but that final morning she worked herself into more of a huff than ever. No sooner had Damon and Toby scooted into the schoolroom and she and I plucked the flag out of its drawer than she gibed, "You'd think people with a housekeeper could get up earlier."
"Don't nag." My tone was as cross as hers. "Next thing, you'll be whinnying."
"Ha ha ha. You are such a pest. Watch you don't drop the flag again."
"Look who's talking, rumble fingers. Come on, let's just get this done." We marched to the flagpole as if shackled together. The rope would not behave straight when I untied it, so I had to try to undo that while distracted by her yakking at me.
"Mr. Morgan marked me down on the question Use logical inference to determine an antipodean analogy of'Noel,'" she was telling me, as if that was my fault too. "I said 'summer holiday.' What did you put?"
'"Leon.' See, on something like that you need to think backward and that gives you—"
"What's that supposed to mean? Aren't you ever going to get over that backwards warrior business?"
"Contrary, damn it."
"Don't you swear at me."
"I'm not. That was an interjection. Look it up."
If looks could kill, there would have been a double slaying at the flagpole. At least the rope finally was under control. Still glowering at each other, we fastened the flag with fingers that knew the job automatically by now, yanked the rope for all we were worth, and without a backward look finished our civic tour of duty together.
Thank goodness, Vivian was the first that morning to heed the call of nature. When she slipped back in from the outhouse, she headed straight for Morrie's desk and whispered in his ear. I heard him murmur, "The what, Vivian?"
Just after that, Morrie instructed all the grades to carry on with what they were doing while he made a trip to the supply cabinet. "Carnelia and Paul, help me a minute, please."
We trailed him out to the cloakroom. He turned to us with his arms folded on his chest, never a good sign from a teacher.
"You two are in
distress, I take it?"
I give Carnelia full credit. She batted her eyes enough for both of us and caroled, "Not any more than usual, Mr. Morgan. Why?"
"Then how do you explain this?"
Morrie flung open the outer door. We stared at the flagpole. It was evident that what Vivian had whispered must have been something very like, "The fwag is fwying upside-down."
I tried to contribute. "We were awful busy, uh, talking."
Morrie's expression was steely. "I wonder if you have any notion of the woe that will come down on me, and that I in turn will bring down on the two of you, if anyone comes by and spies Old Glory standing on its head?"
As if in harness, Carnelia and I raced out, hauled down the flag, and put it upright in record time. Morrie herded us back into the schoolroom. Only Vivian was paying us any attention and when Morrie put his finger to his lips, she nodded.
Accordingly, I was not prepared at all for the miscarriage of justice—wasn't this called double jeopardy?—at the end of the day when Morrie dismissed everyone else and levied on me:
"Paul, I would like to see you, after."
There was something elegiac about the reaction in the schoolroom: But oh, my foes, and oh, my friends— In rapid succession, Carnelia looked panicked, furtive, relieved, then was out the door. Eddie Turley stopped for a good, long smirk. Graver pushed his glasses into place as if to reflect full sympathy. Toby was overcome, already staggered with the drama of telling Father, "Paul got kept after!" Damon went out of the schoolroom looking back at me in mystification, as if he had missed something in me.
I grumpily stayed at my desk. Morrie busied himself at his, squaring up papers and putting away books, for an interminable few minutes. Finally he looked up at me and in what I recognized as his philosophical tone began: "Now then—"
Now then nothing! My outrage could not be held in while he pontificated. "This isn't fair! Why didn't you keep Carnelia after instead of me? It was more her fault."
"Think about that," he said not unkindly. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man teacher cannot be alone with a schoolgirl on the brink of womanhood."
Carnelia?
"Besides," he added, leaving me no time to ponder that, "the flag mishap is not why I asked you to stay after. Paul, it's your schoolwork."
This was the one heresy I was totally unprepared to hear. In vain I tried to think of any subject that was giving me trouble. To my astonishment, Morrie bundled them all for me:
"You're hopelessly ahead in everything here. You know every lesson before I can give it, and you know you do. No, don't even try to play dumb on this. It's not in you."
He likely had a point there. If I couldn't feign successfully during school, I probably was no better at it while being kept after. But I needed to mount some kind of defense.
"Maybe once in a while in arithmetic, or I guess grammar, or more like geography, I know a little more than I let on. But—"
"That is exactly the sort of thing I mean." Morrie spread his hands helplessly. "Can't you see the position this puts me in? Here I am, a teacher with a pupil who is already chockful of what I am supposed to be teaching him. Every minute of that, I'm holding you back from where an ability such as yours ought to be taking you." He drew quite a breath to speak the next. "Paul, I have been around prodigies before and you are one. I see nothing to do but skip you past this grade and the next. You are ready for high school."
"You can't! I mean, please don't."
"Why ever not? You could catch up in high school courses in no time, and you're socially advanced for your age."
The reasons seemed to me beyond numbering. I babbled the first few that came to mind. "I'd—I'd need to lodge in town. I mean, I wouldn't be at home anymore. And Father—there are times he needs me for things. Mr. Morg—Morrie, I'd like to wait. Really I would."
"Well, if I at least were to advance you to the eighth grade—"
"No!" Anything but the jungle of galumphing eighth-graders. "Please, not that either." How many dooms did I have to fight off? "Can't I just be in the grade I'm already in?"
Morrie gestured to the vacant half of the double desk that constituted the seventh grade. "You and Carnelia, forever and always?"
"Maybe I could just sort of sit out of the way and read." That sounded feeble even to me.
He folded his arms across his chest, but not in commanding fashion this time, and sat there studying me. At last he said, "You are a challenge, Paul, a palpable challenge." Uneasily I watched the signs in the features of his face, the twitch of his mustache, the lighting-up in his eyes. Morries mind was making one of its balloon ascensions. "A teacher would not dare to wish for a more ardent student," he propounded, "on those occasions when something manages to catch your interest. Therefore it is a matter of bringing your imprimatur more steadily to bear. Omnia vincit ardor, let us proclaim."
"Wh-what's that mean?"
"You shall see."
13
"THIS HAD BETTER NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH FIST-fighting or horse racing," Father warned as I sidled into the kitchen with Morrie close behind me.
Obviously he'd had an earful of report from Toby or Damon or more likely the duet of them, even though they had no more idea than he did about what my offense might have been. The one other time I had ever been kept after school was the first day in the second grade, for a raging argument with Carnelia over the territorial division of our desk. Now, with Father giving me a look that would have put a blind person on notice, I had some tall explaining to do again. Was it going to make sense to anyone besides Morrie and me? All the long way home with Morrie riding in bouncy dude fashion next to me, as he rehearsed the case to be made on my behalf I sat in my saddle like a zombie. What if Morrie's enthusiasm was wildly misplaced? What if I was getting in over my head? What if Father said no?
"Father, I—" The faces of the waiting audience there in the kitchen outdid my expressive ability. Father was stuck at the stove stirring beans and ham hocks that were more hock than ham, but the distance across the room did not temper the ominous gaze he had fastened on me. Parked front and center at the table were the twin heralds of my detention, Toby owl-eyed, Damon about to faint from curiosity. "Morrie, you tell them."
"Goodness, you two." Rose popped in through the doorway, untying her apron to go home but obviously not before she had her say. "Paul of all people. Morrie, really, you are going too far with this. When boys behave some way that doesn't suit you, can't you make them wash windows or some such rather than keeping them in after? That's what I would do."
Yielding to the trend of things, Father suspended cooking for the time being and drew a chair up for Rose. He shifted Toby into sharing half of Damon's chair and indicated the vacated seat to Morrie, then gravely sat down at his cup-worn spot at the head of the table. I took my place, uneasy with the fact that my case had escalated into a conference. Even Houdini padded in from the other room as if taking an interest.
Palms of his hands flat on the oilcloth, as if a seance were about to start, Morrie squarely faced Father at the far end of the table. "Unaccustomed as I am to this particular kind of excess in a student," he began, alarming me, but then in reasonably short fashion brought the matter down to how far ahead I was in my studies.
Father looked relieved, but puzzled. Rose nodded diagnostically, as though she had always figured blindsight led to something like this.
"You're the doctor," Father granted Morrie. "But can't you just—forgive me this, Paul—pile more homework on him? Even if he does it in class, it'll keep him occupied."
"That is scattershot, if I may say so," Morrie responded, shaking his head. "Paul needs aim; he does not need to be dispersed more than he is in several different directions." I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, wishing this could be conducted in writing. Morrie, however, was just hitting his stride. "From all that I can observe, Paul manages to stay on top of things here at home: chores, and helping you, Oliver, any of that. The ordinary run of
schoolwork, I award him absolute top marks there too. But there is a neglected area, tucked away in that mind of his, that it would greatly help him to become fluent in." Here Morrie paused so long for drama's sake that even Rose puckered in impatience. When he was certain he had us all on the edge of our seats, he delivered:
"Paul est omnis divisus in partes tres, if I may slightly recast a pertinent phrase, Oliver. To make best use of that third realm, I firmly believe he must now plunge in and cross the Rubicon."
Enough silence met that to drown a barbershop quartet in.
Shifting my eyes around the table, I could see Rose and Damon and Toby were in need of an interpreter. Father was not.
"Latin? You want him to take Latin? But good grief, Morrie, for that he'd have to be in high—"
He broke that off with a glance toward his two other sons. Toby still looked blank. Damon had caught up and then some; his mouth tightened.
"Oh dear," Rose let out, winning even more of my heart. Our early-morning talks together obviously tugged at her as much as they did at me.
The entire room seemed to have been unsettled by Morrie's prescription for me. Looking troubled, Toby whispered something in Damon's ear. "It's like that jabber the Drobnys talk to each other, is all," I heard Damon whisper back.
Morrie tapped his fingertips on the tabletop as if calling the bargaining table back to order. "Not necessarily," he asserted, addressing Father's apprehension that Latin would take me out of the household. "My censorious sister notwithstanding, there's always after school."
Father sat forward and turned directly to me. "Paul? You're sure you want to take this on?"
Until that exact moment my mind was not truly made up. "Divided into three parts" probably understated my condition. I heard my decision along with the rest of them.