Memories of the Future

Little Red Schoolhouse

R
ONNIE AVOIDED THE TOWNS.
Whenever he came to one, he made a wide detour, coming back to the tracks miles beyond it. He knew that none of the towns was the village he was looking for. The towns were bright and new, with white streets and brisk cars and big factories, while the village in the valley was old and quiet, with rustic houses and shaded streets and a little red schoolhouse.

Just before you came to the village, there was a grove of friendly maples with a brook winding through them. Ronnie remembered the brook best of all. In summer, he had waded in it many times, and he had skated on it in winter; in autumn, he had watched the fallen leaves, like Lilliputian ships, sail down it to the sea.

Ronnie had been sure that he could find the valley, but the tracks went on and on, through fields and hills and forests, and no familiar valley appeared. After a while, he began to wonder if he had chosen the right tracks, if the shining rails he followed day after day were really the rails along which the stork train had borne him to the city and to his parents.

He kept telling himself that he wasn’t truly running away from home, that the aseptic three-room apartment in which he had lived for a month wasn’t his home at all, any more than the pallid man and woman who had met him at the bustling terminal were his mother and father.

His real home was in the valley, in the old rambling house at the outskirts of the village; and his real parents were Nora and Jim, who had cared for him throughout his boyhood. True, they had never claimed to be his parents, but they were just the same, even if they put him on the stork train when he was asleep and sent him to the city to live with the pallid people who pretended to be his parents.

Nights, when the shadows came too close around his campfire, he thought of Nora and Jim and the village. But most of all, he thought of Miss Smith, the teacher in the little red schoolhouse. Thinking of Miss Smith made him brave, and he lay back in the summer grass beneath the summer stars and he wasn’t scared at all.

On the fourth morning, he ate the last of the condensed food tablets he had stolen from his parents’ apartment. He knew that he had to find the valley soon and he walked faster along the tracks, staring eagerly ahead for the first familiar landmark—a remembered tree or a nostalgic hilltop, the silvery twinkle of a winding brook. The trip on the stork train had been his first trip into the outside world, so he was not certain how the valley would look, coming into it from the surrounding countryside; nevertheless, he was sure he would recognize it quickly.

His legs were stronger now than they had been when he had first stepped off the stork train and his dizzy spells were becoming less and less frequent. The sun no longer bothered his eyes and he could look for long moments at the blue sky and the bright land with no painful after-images.

Toward evening he heard a high-pitched whistle and his heart began to pound. He knew at last that he had the right tracks and that he couldn’t be very far from the valley, for the whistle was the shrill lullaby of a stork train.

Ronnie hid in the weeds that lined the embankment and watched the train pass. He saw the children reclining on their chairbeds, staring curiously through the little windows, and he remembered how he had stared, too, on his trip to the city, how surprised—and frightened—he had been, upon awakening, to see the strange new land unrolling before his aching eyes.

He wondered if his face had been as white as those he was seeing now, as white and as peaked and as sickly, and he guessed that it had been, that living in the valley affected your complexion some way, made your eyes sensitive to light and your legs weak.

But that couldn’t be the answer. His legs had never been weak when he had lived in the valley, he remembered, and his eyes had never bothered him. He had never had trouble seeing the lessons on the blackboard in the little red schoolhouse, and he’d read all the printed words in the schoolbooks without the slightest difficulty. In fact, he’d done so well with his reading lessons that Miss Smith had patted him on the back, more times than he could remember, and told him that he was her star pupil.

Suddenly he realized how eager he was to see Miss Smith again, to walk into the little classroom and have her say, “
Good
morning, Ronnie,” and see her sitting reassuringly behind her desk, her yellow hair parted neatly in the middle and her round cheeks pink in the morning light. For the first time it occurred to him that he was in love with Miss Smith, and he recognized his real reason for returning to the valley.

The other reasons were still valid, though. He wanted to wade in the brook again and feel the cool tree shadows all around him, and after that he wanted to meander through the maples, picking a slow way homeward, and finally he wanted to wander down the lazy village street to the house and have Nora scold him for being late for supper.

The stork train was still passing. Ronnie couldn’t get over how long it was. Where did all the children come from? He didn’t recognize a single one of them, yet he had lived in the valley all his life. He hadn’t recognized any of the children on his own stork train, either, for that matter. He shook his head. The whole thing was bewildering, far beyond his understanding.

When the last of the cars had passed, he climbed back up the embankment to the tracks. Dusk was seeping in over the land and soon, he knew, the first star would appear. If only he could find the valley before night came! He wouldn’t even pause to wade in the brook; he would run through the maples and down the street to the house. Nora and Jim would be delighted to see him again and Nora would fix a fine supper; and perhaps Miss Smith would come over during the evening, as she sometimes did, and discuss his schoolwork, and he would walk to the gate with her, when she was ready to go, and say good night, and see the starlight on her face as she stood goddess-tall beside him.

He hurried along the tracks, staring hungrily ahead for some sign of the valley. The shadows deepened around him and the damp breath of night crept down from the hills. Insects awoke in the tall meadow grass, katydids and crickets and frogs began singing in ponds.

After a while, the first star came out.

He was surprised when he came to the big broad-shouldered building. He did not recall having seen it during his ride on the stork train. That was odd, because he had never left the window once during the whole trip.

He paused on the tracks, gazing at the towering brick façade with its tiers and tiers of small barred windows. Most of the upper windows were dark, but all of the first-floor windows were ablaze with light. The first-floor windows were different in other respects, too, he noticed. There were no bars on them and they were much larger than the higher ones. Ronnie wondered why that should be.

And then he noticed something else. The tracks stretched right up to the imposing façade and entered the building through a lofty archway. Ronnie gasped. The building must be a terminal, like the one in the city, where his parents had met him. But why hadn’t he seen it when the stork train had passed through it?

Then he remembered that he’d been put on the train when he was asleep and could have missed the first part of the journey. He’d assumed, when he awoke, that the train was just pulling out of the valley, but perhaps it had pulled out some time before—a long time, even—and had passed through the terminal while he was sleeping.

It was a logical explanation, but Ronnie was reluctant to accept it. If it was true, then the valley was still a long way off, and he wanted the valley to be close, close enough for him to reach it tonight. He was so hungry he could hardly stand it, and he was terribly tired.

He looked miserably at the big hulking building, wondering what to do.

“Hello, Ronnie.”

Ronnie almost collapsed with fright on the tracks. He peered around him into the shadows. At first he saw no one, but after a while he made out the figure of a tall man in a gray uniform standing in a grove of locusts bordering the tracks. The man’s uniform matched the shadows, and Ronnie realized with a start that he had been standing there all along.

“You
are
Ronnie Meadows, aren’t you?”

“Yes—yes, sir,” Ronnie said. He wanted to turn and run, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. He was so tired and weak that the tall man could catch him easily.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Ronnie,” the tall man said, a note of warmth in his voice. He left the tree shadows and walked over to the tracks. “I’ve been worried about you.”

“Worried?”

“Why, of course. Worrying about boys who leave the valley is my job. You see, I’m the truant officer.”

Ronnie’s eyes got big. “Oh, but I didn’t want to leave the valley, sir,” he said. “Nora and Jim waited until I went to sleep one night, and then they put me on the stork train, and when I woke up I was already on my way to the city. I
want
to go back to the valley, sir. I—I ran away from home.”

“I understand,” the truant officer said, “and I’m going to take you back to the valley—back to the little red schoolhouse.” He reached down and took Ronnie’s hand.

“Oh, will you, sir?” Ronnie could hardly contain the sudden happiness that coursed through him. “I want to go back in the worst way!”

“Of course I will. It’s my job.” The truant officer started walking toward the big building and Ronnie hurried along beside him. “But first I’ve got to take you to the principal.”

Ronnie drew back. He became aware then of what a tight grip the truant officer had on his weak-feeling hand.

“Come on,” the truant officer said, making the grip even tighter. “The principal won’t hurt you.”

“I—I never knew there was a principal,” Ronnie said, hanging back. “Miss Smith never said anything about him.”

“Naturally there’s a principal; there has to be. And he wants to talk to you before you go back. Come on now, like a good boy, and don’t make it necessary for me to turn in a bad report about you. Miss Smith wouldn’t like that at all, would she?”

“No, I guess she wouldn’t,” Ronnie said, suddenly contrite. “All right, sir, I’ll go.”

Ronnie had learned about principals in school, but he had never seen one. He had always assumed that the little red schoolhouse was too small to need one and he still couldn’t understand why it should. Miss Smith was perfectly capable of conducting the school all by herself. But most of all, he couldn’t understand why the principal should live in a place like the terminal—if it was a terminal—and not in the valley.

However, he accompanied the truant officer dutifully, telling himself that he had a great deal to learn about the world and that an interview with a principal was bound to teach him a lot.

They entered the building through an entrance to the left of the archway and walked down a long bright corridor lined with tall green cabinets to a frosted glass door at the farther end. The lettering on the glass said:
EDUCATIONAL CENTER 16, H. D. CURTIN, PRINCIPAL
.

The door opened at the truant officer’s touch and they stepped into a small white-walled room even more brightly illumined than the corridor. Opposite the door was a desk with a girl sitting behind it, and behind the girl was another frosted glass door. The lettering said:
PRIVATE
.

The girl looked up as the truant officer and Ronnie entered. She was young and pretty—almost as pretty as Miss Smith.

“Tell the old man the Meadows kid finally showed up,” the truant officer said.

The girl’s eyes touched Ronnie’s, then dropped quickly to a little box on her desk. Ronnie felt funny. There had been a strange look in the girl’s eyes—a sort of sadness. It was as though she was sorry that the truant officer had found him.

She told the little box: “Mr. Curtin, Andrews just brought in Ronnie Meadows.”

“Good,” the box said. “Send the boy in and notify his parents.”

“Yes, sir.”

The principal’s office was unlike anything Ronnie had ever seen before. Its hugeness made him uncomfortable and the brightness of its fluorescent lights hurt his eyes. All the lights seemed to be shining right in his face and he could hardly see the man behind the desk.

But he could see him well enough to make out some of his features: the high white forehead and receding hairline, the thin cheeks, the almost lipless mouth.

For some reason the man’s face frightened Ronnie and he wished that the interview were over.

“I have only a few questions to ask you,” the principal said, “and then you can be on your way back to the valley.”

“Yes, sir,” Ronnie said, some of his fear leaving him.

“Were your mother and father unkind to you? Your
real
mother and father, I mean.”

“No, sir. They were very good to me. I’m sorry I had to run away from them, but I just had to go back to the valley.”

“Were you lonesome for Nora and Jim?”

Ronnie wondered how the principal knew their names. “Yes, sir.”

“And Miss Smith—were you lonesome for her?”

“Oh, yes, sir!”

He felt the principal’s eyes upon him and he shifted uncomfortably. He was so tired; he wished the principal would ask him to sit down. But the principal didn’t and the lights seemed to get brighter and brighter.

“Are you in love with Miss Smith?”

The question startled Ronnie, not so much because he hadn’t expected it, but because of the tone in which it was uttered. There was unmistakable loathing in the principal’s voice. Ronnie felt his neck grow hot, and then his face, and he was too ashamed to meet the principal’s eyes, no matter how hard he tried. But the strange part of it was, he didn’t understand
why
he was ashamed.

The question came again, the loathing more pronounced than before: “Are you in love with Miss Smith?”

“Yes, sir,” Ronnie said.

Silence came and sat in the room. Ronnie kept his eyes down, fearfully awaiting the next question.

But there were no more questions and presently he became aware that the door behind him had opened and that the truant officer was standing over him. He heard the principal’s voice: “Level Six. Tell the tech on duty to try Variant 24-C on him.”