Jack blinked. Shepherd. Did that make the Gestapo sheepdogs? What breed was the Inquisition? All he said was, “Ah,” and nodded.
Barstow took this as some kind of conclusion. She rose and held out her hand. “I’m glad we could find some path to resolution, Mister Phillips. We can work this out.”
Jack rose as well and shook her hand. It didn’t feel like a talon at all. “Thank you for your time, Miss Barstow,” he said automatically, and left.
He paused in the hallway as the door closed behind him. Still a little shaken, a little disoriented, he wanted some time to himself. He turned away from the short route to the stairs, intending to circuit this floor and arrive at the stairs from the other side. He wandered slowly down the middle of the empty corridor and turned the first corner.
Classroom doors alternated with big old-fashioned corkboards on both walls of this corridor. Jack paused before the first board.
A small brass plaque at the bottom of the board was engraved “First Grade.” Tacked in one corner of the board was a small card that read, “Our First Thanksgiving.” The theme of the display, he supposed. The children’s tributes filled the rest of the board, each a single piece of paper cut in the shape of an oversized leaf. One had just the word “Pilgrim,” with each letter a different fall color. Another showed a three-quarter profile of a turkey, tail spread wide and colored, oddly, like a peacock’s. A third was a hand-colored clip-art print of a cornucopia. Phillips relaxed a little. Traditional indeed, he thought, I did the same kind of stuff myself.
He moved down the hall and stopped before another board on the opposite side. “Fifth Grade,” read the plaque on this one and the card, “Freedom From Fear.” The medium for this art class looked like stock clips pulled from some common classroom file arranged with some kind of software. Composition and treatment were childlike but the perspective and surfacing were perfect. It was a weird effect.
Here was a scene under a mare’s-tail sky, perfectly rendered. A street divided the scene from lower right to center, where it disappeared behind a multistory brick building dominating the left foreground. To the right of the street, a sunlit field, a park maybe, stretched off to distant mountains that were oddly placed but perfectly lit. A family of three walked away from the viewer along the sidewalk bordering the park side of the street: man in a loose fitting brown suit, woman in an ankle-length green dress, walking behind a pigtailed blonde girl in the Franklin school uniform. With the Sun to the upper left, they cast three perfect shadows on the perfect lawn. The same light put the leftmost half of the building’s brick wall in shadow. In the dark corner crouched a figure, a cartoon stereotype of a criminaclass="underline" knit cap, bandanna, running sweats, holding some kind of sack in one hand and a stick or pipe in the other. The figure was stopped in mid-stride, twisted away from the wall and looking up as if from concealment. Jack followed its gaze to find, at the top of the building, four, no, make that six, figures—properly scaled and in perspective, of course, lined up along the edge of the roof facing the street. He looked more closely. They were armed and uniformed police officers, standing at ease in a wide-spaced line, gazing benignly down at the family walking along the sunny side of the street.
Jack pursed his lips at that message and moved at random to another picture on the same board. This was also a street scene; looking around briefly he saw now that all of them on this board were. It must have been part of a recent lesson. In this one, the point of view was from standing eye-level in ,the middle of the street, a tree-lined street empty of traffic or people. Lawns backed the trees and houses stood on the lawns, the whole arrangement marred only by the eerie flatness of the surface. The low angled light reinforced the perfect perspective and drew the eye to the end of the street, to the sky above the horizon, the center of the composition. The upper two-thirds of the work was a gorgeous cloud-filled sky, full of pinks, reds, andoranges that were all the warmer for the deep, deep blue seen through the occasional break in the clouds. A couple of bright yellow beams forced attention back to the center where the clouds concealed the low Sun. Or was it just the Sun? He looked more closely. No, not quite. It looked like a face morphed with the Sun, yes, it was, he was quite sure. It was a face. It was a smiling face. It was a smiling, ruddy, jolly face with—was that a peaked octagon cap?
Jack turned away and walked around the next corner, to find more cork boards. He intended to leave the building but now he was sensitive to the displays and they kept intruding at the edges of his vision. At the end of the corridor the last bulletin board looked different from all the others, busier, and it stopped him.
“Eighth Grade,” the plaque read, and the card “We Become One Country.”… Under God, completed Phillips, despite himself, and he thought of Sue Waters’s little game in the deli. This board was filled with comic strips. He corrected himself. Graphic stories, they called them now. They were all done in black and white and all obviously used the same clip-and-crunch technique that the fifth graders had used, but these all told stories. Some were single panels, like editorial cartoons. Most were multiple panels, although all were done within the boundaries of the same size sheet of paper. None of the panels used dialogue balloons; there were no individual characters here. Instead, the panels all bore captions that he would have taken for the lettering of an experienced hand had not the sameness across the works given it away as simply a common machine font.
Here was a particularly intricate work. The first panel was a cartoony aerial view of the northeastern United States. The physical map had its own scale, the figures overlaying it quite another. It was the kind of effect Rocky and Bullwinkle used so often for their travel scenes. Off the New England coast a ship, of the wrong period, was run aground on an oversized rock. Some small distance inland was an arc of stockade fence, starting and ending at the seashore and centered on the rock. Within the protected arc, a group of stock Pilgrim figures—men, women, and children—knelt in an inward-facing circle. Outside the stockade, scattered here and there across the landscape, were small groups of Indians. All were male, all had a feather or two in their hair, and all looked intently towards the group behind the stockade. “We give thanks for our new land,” read the caption.
The next panel showed more of the country, the stockade now running just west of the Mississippi. Caricature towns with prominent church steeples dotted the east. Family groups stood here and there, but the figures were in colonial dress now. Indians, still feathered and glaring, stood in groups to the west of the stockade. To the south, two circular areas were marked off with split-rail fences; inside the fences, black figures in ragged dress stood in ranks, singing to the leadership of a single white figure in a frock coat holding a book. The caption read, “We explore our new land and come to love her. Not everyone who came with us could learn our difficult ways quickly...”
The caption finished in the next panel, “...but in time they did and together we settled the whole of our beautiful new country together, as one people, from sea to shining sea.” Now the view showed the entire country. The stockade fence lined only the border with Mexico and Canada. Within those boundaries small towns, each still with a prominent church steeple, dotted the landscape. A railroad snaked across the center of the landscape. Figures of family groups filled the rest of the space. Some of the figures were black, mostly in the South; some of the figures had feathers in their hair, mostly in the West; all of them were now dressed in stereotypical Victorian upper-class garb from the late nineteenth century.