Swimming in the Volcano (41 page)

With the help of a few desperate mothers, and after months of lip service from the Ministry of Health and Public Welfare, she had created a school—a breakthrough that left a lasting impression on her apprehension of power. At the ministry she smiled until the muscles in her face seemed carved out of wax, and then in frustration she changed tack and began to yell and vilify, unsuccessfully, the civil service staffers until tales of her brash conduct overflowed out onto the grapevine and she became a
topic
. Her supervisor called her in and sat her down.

“Didn't you ever think it might be a cultural thing?” he suggested, irritating her still further with his fatherly tone. “That you might not know how to communicate with these people.”

“Did you ever think these shits at the ministry might not know
how to communicate with a woman from Kansas?” she replied, gritting her teeth.

She had come to wage peace, only to discover she was equally willing to engage in warfare. The ensuing ideological crisis she experienced kept her in bed for two days, the door locked and the curtains drawn. She gorged herself with starches, those ubiquitous island roots, boiled down to a tasteless but comforting mush, and could feel herself gaining weight by the hour. Sometimes she wept because she knew she didn't belong there and there was a conspiracy to drive her out. She couldn't say how long she would have kept prostrate in her room if the mothers hadn't come, six or seven of them standing outside her window, their round faces like gloomy chocolate moons pressed one by one against the screen, like a confessional, to petition her help in doing something for the children. On her knees, leaning against the sill, she whimpered, ashamed of her weakness. “I'm trying to help,” she said, her voice catching, “but they're not letting me.”

It was one of those serendipitous accidents: her supervisor at a cocktail party of coalition notables, joking with a Banks appointee, the brilliant and never-tiring minister of education, a mere twenty-five years old, still schoolboyish enough to be convinced that everything was possible if a person showed enthusiasm and obedience. The supervisor related, in an amusing way, the anecdote of his Special Ed. volunteer stonewalled by the minister of health, one of the elite power-hoarders who had been retained in office thanks to Joshua Kingsley, and the volunteer's rather testy and insistent response to the situation. The young minister took an immediate interest in her plight, pretending the supervisor had slighted him. “But why you give her to the Ministry of Status Quo?” he protested good-naturedly. “Education is where she belong. Send her to me, mahn.”

“It seems like only one half of the government can get things done around here,” sympathized the American.

“Change is comin, my friend.”

Sally's elevation was complete before the week was out and left her shaking her head, amazed; for once, she felt
all there
, eligible, illustrious, a part of the enlivening force that had seized the island. The minister of education found her an old building on the waterfront for her school and, more than that, he seemed to want to be her friend. He invited her to his office to hear her progress reports and even introduced her to one of the island's new generation of folk heroes, the musician Saconi, one of his boyhood chums, who raised her slumbering political consciousness into the light of day, though she still
argued that if the United States was an empire, at least it was an empire of hope and reason and principle—Saconi of course would snicker.

The months of futility ended without looking back. Her dread of her own worthlessness vanished; she started eating right again, started a social life that seemed richly ored with meaning and, on its own terms, glamor (though she would
never
say as much), and she went to work in the mornings telling herself she had arrived, finally, at home.

It was in her waterfront school where the defective, shadow-filled children of St. Catherine found sanctuary. She harbored the babies afflicted by God—a blame she was willing to assign—the babies carelessly disabled in the womb, the blind lost children who were unbearable bad luck to a family already crushed by poverty, the deaf children timid as finches with no greater faculty of expression than a bird's. All the conventionally impaired were, in their deformity and hopelessness, bitter fruit fallen from the same tree as the mongoloids and autistics—untrainable, unmanageable, otherworldly beings. Occasionally in her canvassing of the villages, she would even find a child collared and leashed to a tree shading the shanty of the resigned parents, utterly frazzled or numbed by their misfortune. Struggling in the middle of the flock were the gently retarded children, submerged in their own strange joys, painful mirrors of love and horror. And even such a gathering of outcasts had its own, orphaned not by death but by virtue of their own lives; empty, nocturnal, estranged—a five-year-old with no arms, no intelligence, and a perpetually scabbed face. A boy born with flippers, which never ceased twitching. A hydrocephalic who apparently survived on insects and weeds when his distraught mother reached the point where she was too appalled by this
thing
she had made to keep feeding it.

The first week of school, one of the autistics, a small girl so feral she might have been the incarnation of an alley cat, had bitten an actual mouthful of flesh from above Sally's knee during a tantrum. With diabolically bright eyes she swallowed the bite and began to
hophophop
, still hopping when Sally returned from the hospital, the wound closed with a black web of stitches, her rear end throbbing because the RPN had broken a needle in it.

Those she couldn't educate, she struggled to pacify and soothe, and the ones who resisted domestication, she battled, for her own survival as well, telling herself it was for their souls.

*     *     *

The day had been uncustomarily trying, credit that to a new boy brought in from the countryside with scummy eyes, an eleven-year-old named Trevor about whom nobody could say what was wrong, though Sally suspected his was a hyperactivity that could be medicated down to some metabolic level of normalcy. His psychology though was another story. From the time he walked in, Trevor had persisted in a relentless, sexually precise assault on all the girls in the school, going so far as to pinch one of Sally's breasts,
hard
; she had lost control and kicked him, also hard, in the shin, hard enough for obsidian tears to pour down his cheeks. Then she wanted to run away but could only count the hours, tending to one crisis after another, before the day was through and she could bail out to Cotton Island for a weekend's r-and-r.

Keeping the school open past midafternoon was impossible anyway, a matter of passing the threshold of endurance for Sally and her two trainees, for the parents who walked from throughout the southern quarter of the island to deliver and retrieve the students, as they were euphemistically called, since education was really not the point of the school, not yet; and for the children themselves, relief from the exhausting ordeal of unscrambling the humanity that was placed so differently and behind so many obstacles in each of them. The ministry van arrived to collect the abandoned children and the eight boys and girls sent from up the northward coasts. Sally assisted the driver, loading kids, strapping the ones who required restraint into their seats, bestowing kisses, and off they went back to the convent of the Sisters of Mercy where they were monitored like clinic patients and allowed the charity of room and board. She lingered outside, mothering the rest of the group, releasing them one by one to a parent or aunt or older sibling, and then returned to the decrepit building, once a small warehouse for a cooperative of onion growers, smelling still of their harvest, its cavernous concrete walls blackened and streaked by mold. She had been promised paint, cheery colors, but wasn't going to hold her breath waiting around for it. The two aides were straightening up and she joined in to turn the tiny chairs upright, empty the chamber pots, mop urine from the floor, wash the spoons from the daily lunch sponsored by the Rotarians, gather all the toys, donated broken like her children. Sighing in unison, the three women locked the door behind them and exchanged hugs in the sunlight, laughing at the lingering smell of onions they inhaled off each other's clothes.

“Vincent stick a palmetto bug way he nose. I does have to dig it out wit me house key.”

“What's Hyacinth's mother like?” Sally wondered. “That little girl has bruises on her back. Her mother wants me to believe she fell down.”

“Watch she doan knock you too, Miss Sally. Daht womahn have a mean streak.”

“I'm going to say something to her.”

“Robert laugh today, you know, Miss Sally. Oh, what a pretty sound he mek to test a heart.”

Their throats constricted and they embraced again, wiping tears from their eyes, and said good-bye for the weekend, Sally buoyant, walking away through the crowd on the street, the emptiness that she had once felt back in her other life long gone, the island had filled it in, and why
this
place, so radically different than all she had known, she couldn't say. She could not grasp the meaning of the change, and didn't dare search for it.

She was a farm girl from the western edge of the Flint Hills of Kansas, corn-fed in the heartlands of the continent on an ocean-lonely prairie. Her body, she had told herself in college, watching slides in art history class, was classically robust, yet undernourished by a sequence of fair-skinned square-chested young men who quickly spent their brief uprisings and then settled in to make the most conservative investments in passion and joy—not quite grown-up men with plenty of convictions harvested direct from the soil, but little in their chemistry that could live beyond the county line, past Wichita, past Emporia, past Topeka. Not interested in Kansas City, some would say. Too many niggers.

She taught special children—retarded kids—in a temporary building—a trailer, really—on the grounds of the regional elementary school, after graduating from the state university in Wichita, but within two years, lethargy wrapped around her life like a blanket during a fever, empty minutes building hollow hours, fragile days, an existence that lost its grip on time and began to spoil in its protective shell. She believed herself unborn. I want more experience than seems to be available, she confided to whoever wanted to listen—Sally's problem, whatever it was, something without a true shape. She cursed the professors in Wichita for teaching her to read and appreciate and distinguish, to dream and to believe, as an act of intelligence rather than faith. She cursed them for the window of life's promises they dared to showcase, and she cursed herself for paying attention, when clearly not many did. Why get yourself educated if it only made you unhappy? She struggled to analyze whether this was a naive point of
view, or worthless cynicism. Her parents casually suggested that what she was feeling was an unadmitted desire to marry and be a mother, a path to fulfillment they would permit no one, especially their own daughter, to challenge or diminish.
That's not it
, she would snap back, though she knew she was a type, somewhere in the back of her mind—one of those females who could populate the world.

She began dating a guy she had known in high school. Nothing remarkable about him, but he had been sent to Vietnam and there had lost his boyish swagger. Now he was responsible and thoughtful but also a degree withdrawn, robbed of the spark of trouble-making she had girlishly loved to hate, and seemed more than ever of her kind—normal, a good and steady man. Liked to drink, but wasn't crazy. Before long she knew he wanted to marry her but wouldn't propose until she made it clear the answer would be yes. Yes,
darling
. Yes.

She remembered with numbing clarity the day one life ended and another stubbornly pushed out into the middle of an antiseptic wasteland, the day of a spring blizzard that frothed out of the Rockies and raced across the plains with no advance warning, burying the state in cementlike snow that froze overnight after the wind had ridged it into high dunes. She joined her boyfriend in his four-wheel drive truck, reconnoitering the vast pastures of his father's ranch on the lookout for livestock trapped by the weather. It was a profound disheartenment, to crawl across the ranch in the great primitive silence of the aftermath, her boyfriend—Jerry was his name—seeing the future, his future, theirs, knocked back away from him by just that much, what a bad spring storm could do to a herd. Then the truck went off the ledge of an old creek bed tapered by a drift and they were stuck until well after dark, when his father brought a tractor out to look for them.

They waited to be rescued and Jerry drank—not nips but deadening mouthfuls—from the fifth of peppermint schnapps he carried in the glove box. He was, in his unassuming way, a comfortable man to be with though a cautious speaker, convinced that most of what people said between themselves was more than obvious anyway. That was pride. Pride that all he did, every deliberate movement, gesture, and nuance, was rendered perfectly clear by his fundamental decency. He wished to be kind and good, and he was. And yet even that caused a bend of despair in her hope, made her see herself as a prisoner to a methodical man inspired solely by decency. She would be willing to gamble if she knew it would be enough, but she didn't know. When she felt the truck slide and whip off solid ground and sink on its frame it seemed not inevitable but a lucky breach of routine, that
what was happening was happening because they were both too weak and proud to talk about what was below the surface of their lives, air out their dreams. Shipwrecked in that frozen sea she craved that conversation then, she wanted the resolutions that would help her navigate the years she would board and ride to her prime, age thirty and beyond.

The tailpipe was beneath the snow and rather than dig it out he cut the engine, inviting the emptiness to join them. They sat and listened to the ticking of the engine fading as it cooled. Within minutes, the windows were blocked out by an opaque film of ice, forcing them to reel in their thoughts to accommodate the sudden reduced scope.