Alone in the Classroom (10 page)

And the farmers said swally. Don’t swally that water.

Later, when they were alone, he told her that her principal thought highly of her, and saw her face cloud over and shut down. “I gather you can’t say the same.”

She weighed her answer. “I can’t get used to him.”

“No.”

“I don’t like the way he looks at people.”

“You mean, at you.”

“Not just me.”

“Girls.”

“Not just girls.”

She stared at the floor, then raised her eyes to take in his concerned, professional face. “His qualifications are excellent, I know.” Then she said, “Michael isn’t the only boy who’s behind in reading and spelling. What should I be doing for them? That’s what I want to know.”

He liked her question. “Have patience,” he said. “Keep them at it. Give them words they haven’t seen before, but not too many at a time.”

“How many?”

“Five? Five new words and five old words every Monday. Spend the week getting them to use them over and over.”

“Repetition.”

“Mastery. Bring what they know forward every time you add something new.”

“Will you be coming back, do you think?”

“I might manage one more visit before June.
Deo volente
and weather permitting.”

Which induced her to say with a smile, “I can’t wait.”

“Listen to yourself. The poor English language. You
have
to wait.
I
can’t wait, so I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“I don’t
wish
to wait.”

“You’re
looking forward
to seeing me.”

“I know,” she said.

The next day she glanced up from deciphering a paragraph in Michael’s workbook to see his attention trained on her face. “What is it, Michael?” His eyes made a wounded swerve to the left and down.

“Tell me in writing then.”

He wrote,
You have a diskusting look on your face you don’t blev in me do you
.

How hard it was being Michael Graves. He could not keep his place on the page. He skipped lines, missed words, got shanghaied by the letters he recognized: no matter where
f
appeared in a word, he seemed to think the word started with
f
. Yet he knew everyone’s lines in
Tess
and hurled them as jokes in the schoolyard. And so she found herself preoccupied with him to the point of fascination.

“I wish you believed in yourself,” she said. He looked at her, waiting. “But that will come. I believe in you.”

His untidy grace was that of a growing thing in a field, or a loose and wild garden. So was his spelling.
Dide
for died,
crake
for crack,
padded
for paid,
wille
for while,
lockt
for locked,
loct
for looked,
wute
for what. How was it possible to read a word aloud three times, write it out three times, shoving it into your skull, then two lines later fail to recognize it?

She gave up on his ever remembering the difference between
this
and
that
and
then
, and in exasperation she wrote
concentration
on the board. It offered no difficulty.
Conservation, renovation, communion
. He got them all, spelled them all. It turned out he had far less trouble with words that were so long he went through them at a reasonable speed. The smaller ones he guessed at, trying desperately not to be slow. “Don’t try to be fast,” she said. “Take your time with every single word.”

Michael wasn’t the only child she tutored. Two others stayed afterwards for extra help. Red Peter and Ivan Munz, also hardy, muscular, energetic boys. She pulled the desks into a semicircle and got them to help each other, and they were like a wagon train drawn up against the dangers of the night.

What Michael loved most about her, I know, was that she spared him the shame of reading aloud. She never singled anyone out either for public ridicule or overpraise. One afternoon he pocketed a piece of blackboard chalk and returned it days later, setting on her desk a minute bird carved like the tiniest of lilies. She had to use a magnifying glass to really see the chalk feathers and careful beak.

The next time they were alone she called him a genius, and he felt the novelty of being a teacher’s pet. That awkward glory. He asked her when her birthday was. After that, April 20 wasn’t like any other day in the year.

In March the light advanced at such a pace that restlessness overtook them all. Connie considered taking the train to Swift Current to buy herself a spring hat. A new boy had entered the class. Small, neat Herbert in his
diamond-patterned cardigan of red, blue, and green. His forehead was wide, his brown eyes were steady, he learned at lightning speed. After several weeks of her devoted attention, and knowing he would surprise his classmates, she asked him to read aloud. He stood beside his desk and read a page from the
Reader
almost perfectly. Then to make him feel less conspicuous, she said he could pick someone else to take a turn. Surveying the class, he pointed at Michael. Connie did not save him. He read not nearly so well as Herbert Unger with his month of English.

Outside, the sunlight was lean and long and leading up to something. Red Peter set up a scuffle in the back of the room - noise and movement, and he was at the centre of it. She called him forward and he took his time. He, too, had been neglected in favour of Herbert. She meant to exile him to the hall for twenty minutes, but his slowness provoked her into saying his name more sharply than she intended, and the class went quiet. She folded her arms. They thought she was angrier than she was, and suddenly she was even angrier than they thought. It happens to every teacher. Red, a tough little bruiser of a boy, pretended to trip and earned himself admiring titters. Then he turned his head and mouthed something, and the class broke into laughter. What did it matter? Send him outside, isolate him. Instead, she opened the deep bottom drawer on the right side of her desk and took out the strap.

She discovered that she knew exactly how to use it, as if a long line of teacher-ancestors had passed on the knowledge. The length of black rubber with heavy fibre worked into it had the texture of a thin tire. It was a foot and a half
long, three-eighths of an inch thick, and a little over two inches wide. Corporal punishment. The hand turns pink, orangey red, brick red, engorged - the colours come fast. Her face was hot, furious, and that too came from a place so old she wouldn’t have known it existed in the ordinary course of things. Do we take on anger the way we take on our names? She saw a tear roll down the boy’s cheek and her hand began to shake and she put down the strap.

They stared at her. Not a stranger, but not the teacher they had thought she was. And they gave her no more grief that day.

After school she walked home by herself. At the sound of Parley’s steps behind her, she turned around and told him no. She felt the heat in her face. Not today, she said. He backed up, then stepped to the side and went around her. She watched him until he was well along and then she resumed walking. The blood was still pumping through her. She thought it had drained away in shock, but it was still on the warpath.

We are frail at this time of year, she would say to me years later. February, March. More vulnerable than at any other time. Oppressed by the leaden sky outside, and winds of doubt inside. It’s a big job not to turn everything into a test, an opportunity to deride one’s intelligence. My bad memory, my brains such as they are, my soul such as it is. She saw it every year among her students. She recognized it in herself. We are vulnerable and exposed and given to sudden ferocities.

Something terrible had happened to her when she strapped that boy. The pleasure she had felt, whamming his powerless, insubordinate hand, shamed her. The savage satisfaction. No wonder punishment ruled the world. She recalled in the same breath Parley’s arousal when he beat the snake to a pulp, and felt revolted by herself.

The wind was cold. New snow skiffed across the crusty surface of old snow and she watched it for a while. There was the immediate question of tomorrow and how she was going to carry on. She could not apologize. She was the teacher. How she felt wasn’t their problem. She would have to look them in the face and find a tone and a manner that were not contrite and not defensive and not unaware: yesterday was yesterday, today is another day.

Tomorrow came. She put on her coral necklace for luck and because it had been admired by small Tula, among others. She put on a freshly ironed blouse and skirt. She went to school early and was standing next to the windows when the children filed in, her arms folded, and her expression as neutral as she could make it. But what awkwardness, skittishness, avoidance of eyes. They seated themselves. She went to her desk to open the attendance book and discovered another piece of carved chalk sitting on the book, and looked up to see Michael staring down at his hands. She picked up the chalk and saw the spout and handle of a teapot, so ingenious, and she smiled and opened the wide shallow drawer of her desk and put it beside the carved bird. His thoughtfulness and skill.

Her voice was husky when she called out their names and ticked them off.

Michael saw the effect of his gift on her face and posture. Later that morning, their eyes met and she gave him a small, acknowledging wink, and the bond between them was stronger and deeper.

It would seem that she had gained ground. All day the children worked hard to please her.

Something else every child present remembered was the day a week later when Miss Mary Miller unravelled in front of them. She was doing cursive on the blackboard, writing the word
tramp
in sweeping letters. She stopped on the
p
and stood motionless. The children, quiet to begin with, went silent. They saw the back of her neck below her bobbed hair go pinkish red - a new eraser, the pink of the British Empire. She put down the chalk and walked out the door, and she didn’t come back.

Parley found her in his office after the four o’clock bell. Her face was damp with half-dried tears. “Go home,” he said. “Rest. We’ll manage.”

He and Miss Fluelling shared Mary’s workload. They spread themselves out as the mud of spring appeared and exposed skin turned even more chapped and raw. The earth, formerly locked and secure, became unstable, and grasses shot up from below and parted the firm ground.

Into this wound-up setting came Syd Goodwin one more time.

Connie was the first to arrive that morning, drawn outside by the April warmth. She saw the automobile parked beside the school, a blue Whippet, a two-door sedan with an emblem on the back, a red triangle indicating the novelty of four-wheel brakes. Syd was behind the wheel, hat over his eyes, asleep. On the seat beside him lay a Thermos inside its leather sleeve and a folded newspaper. In the back, a battered suitcase and some rolled-up maps and several books. “Good morning,” she said close to his ear.

He gave a stir, pushed back his hat, and they were laughing together. She told him he looked more like a travelling salesman than a school inspector, and he said he happened to come from a long line of noble peddlers.

That day he took the entire school on a field trip south to the swollen creek and the weir, leading the way in his grey flannels and white shirt and heavy shoes. What was paradise? It was Syd Goodwin saying, “Find five things that move.”

The gush and gurgle of ice water cooled the air. Michael, also in a white shirt, pointed out migrating ducks, muskrats, a hawk skimming low over the ground, spreading terror.

“A harrier,” Mr. Goodwin said. “You can see how it got its name.”

The children were more intelligent as soon as they stepped outside, except for a few, like reading Elsa, who stumbled about as if she were lost. Parley Burns was the last to arrive and the first to leave, not an outdoorsman, fastidious about his shoes. But there was a moment when Michael asked in his carrying voice what was the inspector’s opinion of snakes. Mr. Goodwin replied that they
were among the most useful of beings. Small snakes, he said, were the jewellery of the earth. And Michael’s look lorded it over Parley.