Staggerford (3 page)

“Goddamn it,” she said. “I told myself I wasn’t going to cry today.” She stepped back into the classroom and put her books on Miles’s desk and sobbed silently into the short sleeve of her soiled blouse.

Miles couldn’t think of anything to say. His words of solace were blurted out in choppy phrases that he himself did not entirely understand, but which—the wonder of it!—Beverly seemed to find valuable. She wiped her face and smiled at him through her tears. Miles mumbled something more. Sixth-hour bell rang. She picked up her books and went to the door, then turned and said, “I’m sorry, but you’re the one I had to tell because you always seem to have your shit together.”

As Miles closed the windows of his classroom he saw Superintendent Stevenson looking at him from his office across the courtyard. Miles waved at him. Stevenson carefully nodded, or rather wobbled, his head. Miles turned out the lights and locked the door and climbed the stairs to last-hour study hall.

Last hour, Miles wilted.

Last-hour study hall was large and dismal and entrusted only to veterans. There were five teachers on the Staggerford staff who took charge of it, a year at a time, and this was Miles’s year. He entered the long, ill-lighted room containing a hundred stationary desks that had been carved on by three generations of students. Some of the names on the desks matched the names on the World War Two memorial in front of the public library. The study-hall teacher’s
duty was simply to see that everybody kept his mouth shut. Miles took his place on the platform at the front of the room, scowled at a couple of potential whisperers, and tried to ignore the age-old smells of study hall, which were three in number.

Sweat, at low intensity, smelled much like a salty bowl of chicken soup. Is anyone’s nose so well trained (Miles wondered) that he can differentiate between the smell in a gym that tells you where the locker room is and the smell in a dimestore that tells you the lunch counter is in the next aisle?

The second study-hall smell arose from the mixture of manure and Berrington County topsoil, which by this time in the afternoon had dried and was flaking off the boots of the farm boys. The smell, to Miles, was not entirely bad, for it brought to his mind, when he tried for them, images of red barns and rolling pastures. Corn fields and windmills. Lowing herds at sundown.

It was the third smell that bothered him most, for it was without a redeeming feature. It was the inevitable midafternoon smell of hot lunch being converted into air.

This hour, between two and three, Miles wilted. Because he had been stern from the beginning, study hall gave him no sass, but it gave him the blues. The lighting, as mentioned, was dim, and the afternoon sun, when it shone, did not shine on this side of the building. The students’ minds were not fresh. They made a weak attempt at homework, then pushed it aside, tomorrow’s classes being too distant to imagine. They watched the clock. They dreamed daydreams so dull that they fell asleep. Miles sat on his platform wondering if he would be able to rise from his chair when the bell rang, wondering if he would have the strength to walk home, wondering if life was worth living.

There was a moment today, at 2:25, when study hall came suddenly to life. Heads were lifted and cocked as the siren in the belfry of the city hall announced trouble, probably a fire, somewhere in Staggerford. Students stood up at their desks and strained to see outside. Miles found this sign of vitality so reassuring that he allowed everyone to
go to the windows and watch the volunteer firemen run into the fire hall across the street and come out wearing yellow rubber coats and clinging to the handholds of two shiny ladder trucks. When the trucks were out of sight there was a little chatter, which Miles quickly scotched, and then everyone returned to his desk and to his dim and vapid daydreams.

At the final bell of the day, Miles dismissed study hall and went downstairs to take up his hall-duty post outside his classroom. He said goodnight twenty-five or thirty times. When the halls emptied, he put in the required quarter hour at his desk; then he picked up his briefcase, put his coat over his arm, and stepped outside into the perfume of dying leaves.

He crossed the street and walked past the fire station. The firemen, sweating in their yellow rubber coats, had returned from the fire and were backing the trucks into their stalls. He passed the city hall and he passed the spacious lawn of the Staggerford Public Library. At the corner of Main Street he turned and walked past the
Weekly
office, where Albert Fremling was licking address labels and Mrs. Fremling was talking on the phone and Lee Fremling was cleaning the drum of the press with a rag dipped in denatured alcohol and Grandma Fremling was sweeping the floor. He walked past the Hub Cafe, the Morgan Hotel, the hardware store, the bakery, and the bank. He turned right at the next corner and walked down River Street past the houses of Oppegaard the dentist, Hoover the retired farmer, Droppers the mayor, Handyside the baker, and Kelly the auto mechanic. The last house at the end of the second block was Miss McGee’s. He climbed the three steps to the wide front porch. The front door with its thick pane of oval glass stood ajar. He went inside and hung his coat in the closet at the foot of the stairs.

“How was your day?” Miss McGee called from the kitchen.

“A good enough day. It seemed long though. How was yours?”

“The Dark Ages are beginning all over again, Miles.”

“What makes you say that?” She often told him this, but her reason for saying it differed from day to day. He walked through the living room (deep soft chairs with worn upholstery, dark woodwork, a bookcase with glass doors) and through the dining room (a round oak table, six chairs, a mirror over the sideboard, linen curtains) and stood in the kitchen doorway.

Miss McGee was gathering together bottles and vegetables from the refrigerator—the makings of a salad—and listening to news on the radio. Miss McGee was a spinster. This was her forty-first year teaching sixth grade at St. Isidore’s Catholic Elementary, and this was the house she had been born in.

“How is the world going wrong, Agatha?”

“Oh, I don’t know. One thing and another.”

It was not like her to be vague, and Miles waited for her to tell him what had happened, but she said no more. She stood at the counter, chopping celery stalks to pieces. She was wearing one of the neck-to-knee aprons that she tied on herself every afternoon when she got home from school.

Miles loosened his tie and said, “I wonder where the fire was.”

Miss McGee shot him a quick glance, then went out the back door to her garden, where she lopped a head of cabbage off its stalk.

Miles went upstairs to the room he had been living in for twelve years, the first room on the right at the head of the stairs.

Few could remember a time when Miss McGee—slight and splay-footed and quick as a bird—was not teaching at St. Isidore’s. This was her forty-first year in the same classroom, her forty-first year of flitting and hovering up and down the aisles in the morning when she felt fresh, and perching behind her walnut desk in the afternoon when fatigue set in. In the minds of her former students, many of whom were now grandparents, she occupied a place somewhere between Moses and Emily Post, and when they
met her on the street they guarded not only their speech but also their thoughts.

They knew of course—for she had been telling the story for over half a century—that when she was a girl she had met Joyce Kilmer, but who would have guessed the connection between that meeting many years ago and the fire alarm this afternoon? Standing at the garden among her cabbages, she decided that she would never tell a soul—not even Miles—about the cause of the fire alarm. She could not lie, but she could keep a secret.

Agatha McGee met Joyce Kilmer when she was six. She was a first grader st St. Isidore’s. The year was 1916 and her teacher, Sister Rose of Lima, primed the first grade for months, leading them in a recitation of “Trees” every morning between the Apostles’ Creed and the Pledge of Allegiance; and then on the last day of school before Christmas break, Joyce Kilmer stepped through the classroom door at the appointed hour, casting Sister Rose of Lima into a state of stuttering foolishness and her students into ecstasy. Miss McGee remembered it like yesterday. Mr. Kilmer was handsome, cheery, and a bit plump. He wore a black suit and a red tie. With a playful sparkle in his eye he bowed to Sister Rose of Lima, saying he was delighted to meet her, and then he walked among her students, asking their names. The children’s voices were suddenly undependable, and they told their names in tense whispers and unexpected shouts. Jesse Farnham momentarily forgot who he was, and the silence was thick while he thought. When he finally said, “Jesse,” Mr. Kilmer told him that he had known a girl by that name, and the first grade exploded with more laughter than Sister Rose of Lima permitted on ordinary days. (Priests and poets melted her severity.) The laughter, ending as suddenly as it began, was followed by a comfortable chat, the poet telling stories, some without lessons. Before Mr. Kilmer left, his admirers recited “Trees” for him. For Agatha McGee his visit was, like Christmas in those years, a joy undiminished by anticipation.

But that was long ago. Nowadays poetry, among other
things, wasn’t what it used to be. Yesterday at St. Isidore’s as Miss McGee sat at the faculty lunch table she overheard Sister Rosie tell Sister Judy in an excited whisper that Herschel Mancrief was coming to town. He was touring the Midwest on a federal grant, and would arrive at St. Isidore’s at ten the next morning. The two sisters were huddled low over the Spanish rice, trying to keep the news from Miss McGee. She wasn’t surprised. She was well aware that the new nuns, although pranked out in permanents and skirts up to their knees, were still a clandestine sorority. How like them to plan an interruption in the schoolday and not let her know.

“About whom are you speaking?” she asked.

“Oh, Miss McGee,” said Sister Rosie, the lighthearted (and in Miss McGee’s opinion, light-headed) principal of St. Isidore’s. “We were discussing Herschel Mancrief, and we were not at all sure you would be interested.” Sister Rosie was twenty-six and she had pierced earlobes.

“I will be the judge of my interests, if you please. Who is Herschel Mancrief?”

“He’s a poet the younger generation is reading,” said Sister Judy, blushing behind her acne. “We studied him in the novitiate.”

“His credentials are super,” said Sister Rosie.

“And he’s coming to St. Isidore’s? I might have been told. Will he visit classes or speak to an assembly?”

“He will visit classes. But of course no one is obliged to have him in. I know what a nuisance interruptions can be.”

“Poets are important to children. I was visited by Mr. Joyce Kilmer when I was a girl, and I treasure the memory. Please show Mr. What’s-his-name to my classroom when the time comes. What’s his name?”

“Herschel Mancrief. He can give you twenty minutes at quarter to twelve.”

So this morning Miss McGee announced to her sixth graders that they were about to meet Herschel Mancrief.
They looked up from their reading assignment, a page headed “Goths and Visigoths,” and as a sign of their undivided attention they closed their books. Divided attention was among the things Miss McGee did not permit. Slang and eye shadow were others.

“Meeting a poet is a memorable experience,” she said. “When I was a girl, my class was visited by Mr. Joyce Kilmer, who wrote ‘Trees,’ the poem every child carries in his heart from the primary grades, and to this day I can recall what Mr. Kilmer said to us. He came to Staggerford a mere two years before giving his life for his country in World War One.” She tilted her head back, in order to read her twenty-four sixth graders through her bifocals—difficult reading these days, for they lurked, boys and girls alike, behind veils of hair.

“The poet, you understand, is a man with a message. His mission is to remind us of the beauty God has made. He writes of the good and lasting things of life. His business is beauty. Are there any questions?”

There was one, and several students raised their hands to ask it: “How does ‘Trees’ go?”

“Heavens, surely you remember.”

But it was discovered that no one in the class had heard it. As Miss McGee began reciting, “ ‘I think that I shall never see,’ ” a frightening sensation crept up her spine and gripped her heart—an invisible tremor like the one she had felt in 1918 when her third-grade teacher said that Joyce Kilmer was dead in France. An imperceptible shudder that moved out along her nervous system and left her nauseous. Her name for it was the Dark Age dyspepsia, because it struck whenever she came upon a new piece of alarming evidence that pointed to the return of the Dark Ages.

Dark Age evidence had been accumulating. Last month at Parents’ Night, Barbara Betka’s father and mother told Miss McGee they would see her fired if she did not lift her prohibition against the wearing of nylons by sixth-grade girls. They were standing in the assembly room where coffee was to be served. Mr. Betka, fidgeting and averting his
eyes, did most of the talking while Mrs. Betka, having called the tune, stood at his side and fingered his arm like a musical instrument. “Fired indeed!” said Miss McGee, turning on her heel and snatching up her purse in a single motion of amazing agility, like a move in hopscotch, and she flew from the assembly room before coffee was served. She was followed home by the Dark Age dyspepsia and scarcely slept that night, haunted by the specter of a man in his fifties sent out by his wife to do battle for nylons. “The craven ninny,” she said to herself at dawn, rising to prepare the day’s lessons.

And that was the day Dr. Murphy from the State Department of Education came to town to address a joint meeting of public and parochial school faculties. Both Miles and Miss McGee attended his lecture. “Never,” Dr. Murphy said at the end of a tedious address on language arts, “never burden a child with a book written earlier than the child’s date of birth. That way you can be confident that you and your students are in tune with each other, that you are moving with them on a contemporary plane.” This harebrained proposal proved to Miss McGee that not even the State Department of Education was immune from the spreading plague of dark and crippling ignorance.