One Child (9 page)

"Sweetheart, you're doing a nice job," I said. I hadn't expected her to take the test so seriously and become so involved, to try so hard and to last so long. I really could not believe she knew these words.

She looked up at me. Her eyes were dilated, the soft skin at her throat mottled with nervousness. "I ain't getting them all right."

"Oh, that's okay, honey. You aren't supposed to get them all right. These are words for great big kids and you're not expected to know them all. This is just to see which ones you do know. But it doesn't matter if you get some wrong. I'm proud of you for trying so hard."

Her face puckered and she looked on the verge of tears. "These be fierce hard words now." She looked down at her hands. "Fust they be easy, but these do be terrible hard for me. I don't know them all."

Her tiny voice, her slipping hold on her composure, her small shoulders hunched up under the worn shirt all combined to rip at my heart. Such innocence, even in the worst of these kids. They were all simply little children.

I reached an arm out. "Come here, Sheila." She looked up at me and I leaned over and pulled her up into my lap. Under my hands her little body was tense, the omnipresent odor of old urine floating around us. "Kitten, I know you're trying your best. That's all that counts. I don't really care which ones you get right or wrong, that doesn't matter. Why, these are really hard words. I bet there isn't another boy or girl in here who could do better."

I held her, smoothing back the tangled hair from her face. Waiting for her to relax I looked over the test score sheet, mentally subtracting out the errors. I suspected she was very close to reaching the ceiling of her ability on the test. She was missing three and four at a time. But even so, she had surpassed any other child I had ever tested.

"How do you know all these words?" I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me.

She shrugged. "I dunno."

"Some of these are big kids' words. I just wondered where you heard them."

"My other teacher, she let me have magazines. Sometimes I read the words in there."

I looked down at her. Her body was still rigid against mine and light as that of a little bird. "Can you read, Sheila?"

She nodded.

"Where'd you learn to do that?"

"I dunno. I always read."

I shook my head in amazement. What sort of changeling did we have here? At first I had been titillated by the thought of a bright child, because as dear as the others were, most were slow learners and it was always hard to know where the disturbance left off and the retardation began. Some, like Sarah and Peter, were average, but I had seldom had an above-average child. At first, the thought had excited me. But clearly Sheila was not simply above average. She was way beyond the comfortableness that came with easy learning and mastery. Instead, she had been catapulted into that little-known realm of true giftedness. I feared that fact would not ease my job at all.

There was no scale to measure Sheila's score on the PPVT. For her age group the scale stopped at 99, which translated into a 170 IQ. Sheila had a score of 102. I stared at the test sheet. We don't have a concept for that kind of brilliance. Statistics tell us that less than 1 in 10,000 has that high a level of functioning. But what does it mean? It is a deviant score, an abnormality in a society that worships sameness. It would set her apart as surely as her disturbance could.

I looked across the room to where Sheila sat. It was playtime now and Sheila had resumed her favorite chair. I looked at her as she sat, thumb in mouth, limbs wrapped around herself protectively. She was watching Tyler and Sarah, who were playing with dolls in the housekeeping corner. I wondered. Under that long matted hair, behind those wary eyes, what kind of child was there? I now felt more concerned than ever before, because if anything, the situation had become more complicated.

After lunch I showed Anton the test. He shook his head in disbelief. "That can't be right," he muttered. "Where would she learn those words? She just had to guess lucky, Torey. No kid in the migrant camp is going to know those kinds of words."

I could not believe it myself. So I put in a call to Allan, our school psychologist. He was out of the office but I left a message with his secretary saying I had a child that I wanted tested.

One thing from the testing situation puzzled me. As Sheila spoke to me more, it became increasingly apparent that she used a highly idiosyncratic dialect. I hadn't heard her enough to pick out the unusual features precisely, but the grammar was bizarre. Most of the migrant camp children came from Spanish-speaking homes and often their command of English vocabulary was below age-level but within normal limits grammatically. There was no other major speech variation in the locality. Sheila was not from a Spanish-speaking home; the IQ test substantiated that there was nothing wrong at all with her vocabulary. I could not fathom why she spoke so oddly. To me her dialect almost sounded like the inner-city blacks I had worked with in Cleveland. But Sheila was not black and our small Iowa farming community was far from inner-city Cleveland. Perhaps it was a family speech pattern. I decided I would have to investigate because the phenomenon left me so perplexed.

The remainder of the day went uneventfully. I still made minimal requirements of Sheila. I wanted to give her ample time to adjust to us without taxing the other kids too much. After the first tumultuous days, this was a welcome relief. She moved willingly with us, but participated infrequently and only when coaxed. She would not talk to the other children or to Whitney. In most instances she would not speak to Anton or me unless we were quite isolated. Yet, she was peaceful, sitting in her chair when given the opportunity and watching us with guarded interest.

The next major step that had to be taken with Sheila concerned her hygiene. Every day she arrived in the same denim overalls and boy's T-shirt. Apparently, the clothes had never been washed from the first day she wore them and she reeked of urine. I suspected she wet the bed and dressed each morning without washing. Consequently, she was extremely unpleasant to be near for any length of time. Both Anton and I were used to the strong odors of unchanged pants, since Max, Freddie, and Susannah were all not reliably toilet trained. But Sheila was even stronger than we were accustomed to. Moreover, the plain everyday grime was crusted over her face and arms. When I had sent her in to wash off the chocolate from cooking the day before, there were lines on her forearms indicating how high she had washed. Those same lines were visible today. She had long hair that went halfway down her back in tangled strands. I had checked the first day for lice or mites. We had struggled twice with lice already and I was not game for another encounter. The second time I had ended up catching them myself and had been furious. Sheila did not appear to have any, although she did have impetigo around her mouth, which I hoped none of the other children would catch.

A school nurse came once a week for an afternoon. I had tried to send my children down. Most of them had had impetigo or rat bites or other evils of poverty. But I ended up getting the salve and Kwell shampoo from the nurse and taking care of the kids myself, simply because once a week on Thursday afternoons was not often enough to tend to all the problems.

I waited until all the children had left at the end of the day to tackle Sheila's hygienic needs. She had remained sitting in her chair while the others had gotten ready to go home. She was still sitting when I went to the cupboard and got out the combs and brushes I kept there. The night before I had stopped at the drugstore and bought a little package of hair clips.

"Sheila, come here," I said. "I got something for you."

She rose and came over. Her brow was furrowed with wary interest. I handed her the sack. For a moment she just held it, looking at me quizzically. But I urged her to open it and she did. Taking the clips out she looked at them and then at me. Her forehead was still wrinkled in puzzlement.

"They're for you, sweetheart. I thought we could comb your hair out nice and put clips in it. Like I've got in mine." I showed her my hair.

She fingered the clips carefully through the plastic wrapping. With a frown she regarded me. "How come you do this?"

"Do what?"

"Be nice to me?"

I looked at her in disbelief. "Because I like you."

"Why? I be a crazy kid; I hurt your fishes. Why do you be nice to me?"

I smiled through my own perplexity. "I just wanted to, Sheila. That's all. I thought you might like something nice for your hair."

She continued to rub the clips through the wrapping, feeling the plastic shapes with her fingertips. "Ain't nobody give me nothing before. Ain't nobody be nice to me on purpose."

I stood watching her in bewilderment. There was nothing in my experience to relate to that. "Well, things are different in here, kiddo," was all I could reply.

I brushed the tangles out of her hair carefully. It took much longer than I had anticipated it would because I did not want to hurt her in any way. I was fearful of this fragile relationship we were forming, of accidentally harming it because we were from such different worlds. She sat very patiently clutching the clips in her hands but never taking them out of the wrapping. Over and over again she fingered them, but she would not open the package. Her hair was that fine, soft, impossibly straight hair that fortunately never tangles too badly. When brushed out, it hung down below her shoulder blades in a thick curtain. In front I combed her bangs. They were too long, falling into her eyes. She was a pretty girl with bold, well-formed features. With soap and water she would be even lovelier.

"There you are. Here, give me the clips and I'll put them in your hair."

She squashed the clips to her breast.

"Here, let's put them in your hair."

She shook her head.

"Don't you want them there?"

"Pa, he take them away from me."

"He wouldn't do that, would he? Just tell him that I gave them to you."

"He say I steal them. Nobody give me nothing before." She held on to the clips tightly, looking at the plastic bluebirds and ducks through the wrapping.

"Maybe for now, you can leave them at school until I get hold of your dad and tell him I gave them to you. How's that sound?"

"You fix my hair nice again?"

I nodded. "I'll fix it tomorrow morning when you come."

She looked at the clips a long moment and then hesitantly handed them to me. "Here. You keep them for me."

My heart thumped within my chest as I took the clips. It was so obvious how hard she was finding giving them back. At that moment Anton came into the room with an armload of dittos he had been running off. He reminded me that it was almost time for him to walk Sheila over to the high school to catch her bus. I was surprised that so much time had slipped by. We hadn't even gotten around to washing up and she did smell so terrible.

"Sheila," I asked, "do you get a chance to wash yourself at home?"

She shook her head. "We ain't got no bathtub."

"Can you use the sink?"

"Ain't got no sink either. My Pa, he brings us down water in a bucket from the gas station." She paused staring at the floor. "It just be to drink out of. He'd be fierce awful mad at me if I get it dirty."

"Do you have any other clothes?"

She shook her head.

"Well, I'll tell you what. We'll see what we can do about that tomorrow, okay?"

Nodding she went to the coat hook to find her thin cotton jacket. I sighed as I watched her. So much to do, I thought. So much to change. "Good-bye, Sheila. Have a nice evening. I'll see you tomorrow."

Anton took her hand and opened the door into the blowy January darkness. Just as he was shutting the door behind him, Sheila paused, peering under his arm and toward me. She smiled slightly. "Bye, teacher."