Staggerford (2 page)

“The bartender said it couldn’t be done and he gave the corporal a hammer and the corporal pounded the beer bottle to dust on the bar,” said Roxie Booth, in relation to nothing that had gone before in English class. “He ate only a handful of it because ground glass is even harder to eat than sand, and he got terrible pains all over his guts and everything, and they took him to the base hospital, where he lived through the night bleeding from just about every opening it’s possible to bleed from on the human body, and then he died in the morning. It was about nine thirty in the morning that he died, the same time it is now, and that’s why I mention it.” Roxie was the youngest student in the senior class, having recently turned sixteen, but on mornings after dates her face looked puffly and forty.

Jeff Norquist was the faculty’s worst affliction this year. Yesterday during second hour, Jeff had carried his literature text to the front of the room, torn it in two, and dropped it into the wastebasket. Miles, stifling his anger, had said, “That will be four dollars and eighty cents.” Jeff laid a five spot on Miles’s desk and told him to keep the change. Today Jeff’s girl friend Annie Bird knocked on the door and said that Jeff was wanted in the office for an emergency phone call. It was a ruse, and Miles knew it, but he let him go. It was a better class—though only slightly better—without him.

Third hour, Miles toiled.

His third-hour seniors were unresponsive, almost secretive, and when he was not speaking, the room was filled
with a kind of strained silence. It was not the lazy silence of first hour; it was the intense, alert silence of students who absorb everything and express nothing. They read their assignments; they kept their notebooks up to date. They never nodded or shook their heads. Their eyes told Miles nothing. He knew that he would never lose his way in this class. His students wouldn’t allow it. He would never digress into that humorous banter which, like a dose of oxygen, could often stir a silent class to life. He would be all business. He would stick to the subject at all times. He would toil. In order to discover what these students knew, he would have to devise businesslike essay tests (the sort of thing first hour could never handle) and he would no doubt discover that they knew quite a lot.

William Mulholland was in this class. In the Staggerford Public Library every book having to do with physics, chemistry, statistics, or any other sort of coldblooded calculation contained on its check-out card the name William Mulholland, written in letters sharp and slanted, like a sketch of leaning spears. He was the largest student in high school—a husky six-feet-four—but to the dismay of Coach Gibbon, athletics did not interest him. What did interest him was computation. Today, finishing his assignment before the bell rang, he drew from his pocket a small computer and set to work calculating the cubic footage of the classroom. Only once had he spoken in this class. On the opening day of school Miles, taking roll, had said, “Bill Mulholland.”

“My name is William,” he replied.

Fourth hour, Miles came up for air.

Fourth hour was his free hour, and although it was not strictly free it allowed him the leisure to stretch. The Faculty Handbook forbade the teacher to step off school property during his free hour, lest the townspeople, seeing him loose, imagine him to be shirking his duty. The teachers of Staggerford took a constant, unhealthy interest in their public image, fancying general opinion to be more various and complicated than it really was. Actually, general opinion
of teachers was simple and constant. The women of Staggerford tended to overestimate teachers’ intelligence while the men of Staggerford tended to underestimate their ambition.

Miles took his briefcase across the street to the football field, climbed to the top row of the empty bleachers, and sat down. Behind him on the riverbank a breeze shook leaves out of the oak trees. Before him on the field a physical-education class cavorted in the end zone, waiting for their teacher. They wore red shorts and white T-shirts. The sun was warm. A plane droned overhead, its shadow crossing the field and just missing the goalposts. Presently Coach Gibbon appeared and blew his whistle and directed his students through their isometric exercises, for which, like beginners at ballet, they struck a series of laughable poses. Beyond the football field leaves and dust were raised off the highway by a grain truck speeding through town on its way to the port of Duluth. Across the highway a woman stood at her front door shaking out a mop. A few elderly men and women wearing suits and hats walked along the sidewalk from the direction of St. Isidore’s Church. Sunday clothes on a weekday was the sign of a funeral.

Miles grew sleepy in the sun. He lay down on the top plank of the bleachers, resting his head on his briefcase and folding his hands on his chest. He held himself at the edge of sleep, conscious enough to keep from falling off his perch, yet unconscious of where the hour went.

When the bell rang at noon, it was the custom of students and faculty to cascade into the basement lunchroom and devour whatever hot dish the cooks had stirred together—macaroni-hamburger-tomato, tomato-rice-hamburger, hamburger-tomato-celery, celery-barley-hamburger. A hamburger was never served as a hamburger, nor was a tomato served as a tomato. Each component was mixed with at least two other components, and there was always as much as one wanted, which in Miles’s case was not very much. Not that he had a poor appetite. Indeed, at the age of thirty-five he was growing fat from eating more than
was good for him, but he did most of his eating between four o’clock and midnight. Because he had grown up in Staggerford and attended Staggerford High School and was now in his twelfth year as Staggerford’s senior English teacher, nearly half the lunches of his lifetime had been eaten in the basement of this school, and they had lost, for him, their appeal.

Today he skipped lunch altogether, so pleasant was the autumn sunshine and so compelling was the call of a crow from across the river. Coach Gibbon, running off the field behind his hungry students, called to him, but Miles did not move from the bleachers. He sat up. He regarded his briefcase. It was full of student papers—114 essays entitled “What I Wish.” He had been putting off reading them for over a week. He opened the briefcase, then paused, reluctant to look inside. How many student papers had he read in these twelve years? How many strokes of his red pen had he made? How many times had he underlined
it’s
and written
its
. Was there ever a student who didn’t make a mischievous younger brother the subject of an essay? Was there ever a student who didn’t make four syllables out of “mischievous”? This was the twelfth in a series of senior classes that Miles was trying to raise to an acceptable level of English usage, and like the previous eleven, this class would graduate in the spring to make room for another class in the fall, and he would read the same errors over again. This annual renewal of ignorance, together with the sad fact that most of his students had been drilled in what he taught since they were in the fifth grade, left him with a vague sense of futility that made it hard for him to read student writing. But while he had lost his urge to read student papers, he had not lost his guilt about
not
reading them, so he carried around with him, like a conscience, this bulging briefcase which his landlady, Miss McGee, had given him for Christmas during his first year of teaching. It was the last of the soft-sided briefcases. All his colleagues had switched to flat cases of chrome and plastic like the one his brother, Dale, had sent him from California and which now stood in Miles’s bedroom closet holding
the three hundred or so typewritten pages that comprised his journal. For work, Miles preferred this briefcase because it was leather, not plastic, and it contributed to the hidebound appearance that for some perverse reason he enjoyed cultivating. Every few days he would dip into this briefcase and read a paper at random, but despite his resolution to read promptly and carefully, he left most of the papers for the last frantic days before grades were due.

He put his hand into the briefcase and drew out Roxie Booth’s paper. He shook his head. Before he met Roxie Booth, Miles had come to believe that there was no scribble he could not read and no tangle of clauses he could not untie, but Roxie Booth this year was challenging his reading skill as it had never been challenged before. Her writing was a riddle, which, when he solved it, said this:

Losing. That was the melancholy strain running through dozens of papers every year. Parents lost in death and divorce, fingers lost in corn pickers, innocence lost behind barns and in back seats, brothers and uncles lost in Vietnam, friends lost in drug-induced hallucinations, and football games lost to Owl Brook and Berrington.

He turned Roxie’s paper over and spent twenty minutes writing in understandable English what he believed she was trying to say. Then he climbed down from the bleachers, and he walked down the sloping bank to the Badbattle River. He crossed the river on stones without getting his shoes wet, for the Badbattle wasn’t much more than a trickle in late October, and he walked along the far bank, under oak and birch. He saw four ducks and a flock of red-winged blackbirds. He saw a garter snake, a goldfinch, and
a crow. He saw a bittersweet vine strangling a small maple tree. When the bell rang, calling him back to the classroom, he was ditching a channel in the mud and freeing a swarm of minnows that the receding water had left in a landlocked pool.

Fifth hour, Miles rejoiced.

In terms of quick minds and motivation, this was the best class he had ever had. It had been created by the haphazard process of computer scheduling, and he expected that another twelve years would pass before he was assigned another one like it. In this class if Miles paused midsentence in search of a word, one of the students, probably Nadine Oppegaard, was sure to supply the word, and if he wasn’t quick she would finish the sentence for him as well. Nadine Oppegaard had a wide, dark face with the patient, heavy-lidded look of Buddha, and her speech was deliberate, wise, and sometimes cutting. She was the genius child of the dentist, Doc Oppegaard, who seemed not at all surprised at having fathered a genius, and of Mrs. Oppegaard, who was astonished. Since the eighth grade Nadine and her violin had appeared in the all-state orchestra, which performed at the annual teachers’ convention in St. Paul. One year she was concertmistress and had her hand kissed, onstage, by the governor. At the convention this year she was to be featured in the slow movement of a Mozart concerto. Nadine’s science-club project last spring was an exhibit of two dozen gigantic oil paintings of cancer of the mouth. She had painted them from a series of photos in her father’s journal of dentistry. The exhibit hung for most of the summer in the public library, where it took up all the room between the ceiling and the top row of books. The day after the exhibit went on display, Miles had gone to the library to browse through the magazines. As he sat at a table reading
Harper’s
, he caught himself unconsciously hunching his shoulders against the purple, pink, and ochre blossoms that appeared to be growing malignantly out from the walls. The air seemed contaminated. He began breathing shallow. Such was Nadine’s impasto
technique that he was unable to think of the paintings as abstractions, or as flowers in the style of Georgia O’Keeffe. He could only think of them as cancer, and although he had always been among Nadine’s well-wishers he stayed out of the public library until they were gone.

Beverly Bingham, too, was in this class. It was a wonder to Miles how a girl as pretty and quick and cleareyed as Beverly could have emerged from the Bingham farm in the gulch—a hopeless, rocky farm on the riverbank west of town where little grew but weeds and chickens because the topsoil had long ago been washed into the river, and because Mr. Bingham had been sent to prison, and because Mrs. Bingham (it was said) was crazy. Mrs. Bingham was better known as the Bone-woman, the ghostly figure that came to town in the evening and carried a gunnysack from door to door asking for bones—chicken bones, beef bones, pig bones—which (it was said) she ground into meal for her chickens. Mrs. Bingham raised chickens for sale, and if she sold you a fryer or a roasting hen for Sunday dinner she would call at your house on Monday (it was said) to retrieve the skeleton and feed it to the chicken she would sell you next week.

Nearly every day, Beverly Bingham stayed after class to talk to Miles. Until today, the talk had been about schoolwork, particularly
Gone With the Wind
. Miles had recommended it to her, having discovered that girls with wistful blue eyes like Beverly’s always fell in love with
Gone With the Wind
. But today Beverly lingered after class to weep. During the three minutes between classes Miles was expected to stand outside his classroom door on hall duty, and it was there in the crowded corridor that Beverly broke down. At first Miles wished she had waited until after school, when he would have had more time to console her, but in retrospect he was glad she hadn’t. He was at his worst when confronted with other people’s grief, and Beverly’s sorrow seemed to spill out far beyond the borders of consolation. Her helplessness rendered him helpless. No, it was better that she spoke to him when she did, thus restricting her tears and his mumbling to the three minutes
between bells. She said, “Almost six years ago my sister married a bum named Harlan Prentiss, and nobody knows where Harlan Prentiss disappeared to, but he ran away from my sister right away after they were married and my sister has been living in Minneapolis ever since and she never comes home. She only sends a card at Christmastime and the card has no return address.” Up to this point Beverly had been speaking in a matter-of-fact voice, but now Miles saw her anguish suddenly take charge and twist her face into an expression of despair. Tears brimmed in her eyes.