“Almost finished, Mr. Robinson,” waving a soiled disposable diaper in the air. Its sweet, rotted-fruit smell filled the room. The Harris twins, having gotten a whiff, held their noses and trembled with church giggles. Getting Matt and Larry to hush was easy — all I had to do was make a reproachful face and subtly caress the copper tail of the plumber’s snake dangling like a live thing over the leather edge of the upended trunk/podium. Meanwhile David was searching in vain for a place to dispose of brother Tim’s used diaper. Missing from the basement was a garbage can. The one available cardboard box was in use as toy storage. I told David to please fold the diaper neatly and slide it beneath the furnace.
“Mr. Robinson?”
“Yes, Susy?”
“What are those spots on your arms?”
She was right. The cuts and scratches, formerly reddish, light abrasions, had, over the course of the night and the early morning, blossomed into purplish volcanic flowering splotches. Had the thorns responsible for these welts contained some malevolent toxin? The pain, now that I paused to think about it, to consider it, was acute. I grimaced, told Susy not to worry, it was nothing, an allergic reaction perhaps; and she said, “There’s a big one on your neck.” Then suddenly Tim was crying again, unintelligible sputtering howls that charged the basement air with anxious chaos. I shouted at David, “Would you mind keeping him quiet?” David stuffed a pacifier in Tim’s face. Sarah, who’d been watching, over her shoulder, the entire changing operation, reprimanded David for his lack of gentleness.
“Mind your own business,” he told her.
Sarah turned to me for support. She was an ace flirt for a toddler; she had those enormous eyes, that moist, father-seducing grin. I think it is fair to say that the feelings she aroused in her teacher are best left, in the interests of seemliness, undiscussed. I said to her, “Generally, methods of child rearing are considered to be discretionary. Who can tell us what ‘discretionary’ means? Anyone? Yes, Susy?”
“Private?”
“Close enough.”
Sarah pouted. Under her breath, yet loud enough to be heard, she growled, “Monster.”
The whole class tensed. You could feel it. The silence was immaculate, breathless, complete. Even Tim quit his yowling. It broke my heart to have to exercise discipline on a cutie like Sarah. I had no choice. I addressed the class in a sonorous voice, “It is my sad burden to advise you all of the consequences of calumny and slander in the classroom.”
They looked nervous. This at least was gratifying. I waited awhile in order to let the kids worry sufficiently (a tried-and-true discipline technique — abject silence), before continuing, “Sarah, please rise and come forward.”
She got to her feet. Attempted unsteady progress toward the head of the class. She was, obviously, unnerved. I encouraged her to please get herself moving, and I asked her, “What do you think we ought to do with you?”
She gazed floorward. Her shoulders were trembling. Sarah’s soft lips moved, but no sound came out.
“Class, what should we do with Sarah?”
It was only a matter of time before a hand went up. Then another. And another.
“Steven?”
“I think Sarah should apologize.”
“Thank you, Steven. David?”
“Let her stay late after school and write a hundred times or something?”
“Make her do blackboard-washing duty,” offered Jane, though there were no blackboards to wash.
Leave it to Susy. “Expel her.”
After that I didn’t hazard calling on the Harris twins for their suggestions. There’s a limit. I pointed to a musty unlit corner of the basement, where fungus carpeted the floor and web-enshrouded water pipes plunged down through holes in the ceiling. The straight-backed chair, the one from the living room, sat facing a wall.
“Go over there and sit down, young lady. When you’ve decided you feel ready to behave, maybe you can come back and try to be a member of this class.”
Sarah walked to that chair like she thought it was electric. Her auburn-curled head bobbed low; her arms hung at her sides as if drained of life. I couldn’t help noticing how the basement’s lamplight cast Sarah’s shadow onto the dark far walclass="underline" as Sarah walked away from the light, so did her shadow — diminishing, rapidly, in height — walk away from us; it was as if a phantom Sarah were speeding away on a long journey. It was heartbreaking. It was too much for Jane, alone at the back of the class, to bear; she broke down sobbing. Tim spit out his pacifier and joined in. The noise became gruesome. I shouted, “Hey! Hey!” as the wailing swelled to higher and higher intensity. Sure enough, the knob of the basement door at the crest of the stairs began rattling, and Meredith’s muffled voice tumbled down from on high. “What’s all that crying? Pete! Why is this door locked?”
“It’s okay, honey. No problem. No need to worry. Everything’s under control,” I called, merrily.
And, to the kids: “Let’s all settle down. All right?”
Then, loudly: “Listen up and I’ll tell you about a time before democracy was born. A time when affliction and suffering were the bread and water of daily life. Ignorance and rampaging diseases governed men’s lives. Diversity in all its forms was punishable by death or imprisonment, and you were guilty until proven innocent.”
Well, the children did listen. They craned forward on their storage trunks. Their eyes opened wide, their weeping diminished; they wore studious faces. Sarah, her face to the wall, even little Sarah seemed to tune in — you could see it in her hypererect posture. Of course, that might’ve been the chair. For my part, I was in the groove, gathering steam and rolling through the terrible centuries, telling tale after tale to the finest audience in the world.
“And then what happened?” the kids would eagerly demand whenever I paused for breath.
“He received the tongue screws and never was able to utter a word again, but using blood as ink, he wrote a diary of his dying days in a worm-plagued prison cell, and was declared a martyr,” I would tell them.
Or:
“They took hold of her and viciously tore the flesh from her sides, only to discover that her smile grew, and she was in ecstasies for her pain.”
Or:
“Flames leapt into air, licking the tender soles of their feet, and yet they sang on, a great chorus of voices offering exaltations on high.”
Later, during a generalized discussion of fortified castle keeps, I brought forward the 1:32-scale model, which I carefully showed around, in order to point out salient features of bastille design.
And when we got to the rack — when we got to the rack, I knew, before the familiar queries had barely flown from those six-, seven-, and eight-year-old mouths — I knew the very questions the students would ask:
“Did the torturers leave the people on that thing for a long time?”
“Did you get taller?”
“Could you get torn in half?”
“One at a time,” I implored, raising in the air a steady if scarred hand. I wanted to savor the moment. Those upturned faces before me seemed the faces of angels; pure and spirited, they radiated light. It’s a light every teacher lives to bathe in: the luster of the young soul.
“Mr. Robinson?”
It was Sarah. She was sitting in her chair, forsaken. She seemed so far away. Her head was turned to face her peers, and her eyes were full of longing.
“Yeah, Sarah?”
“I think I’m ready to join the class now.”
“Are you?”
“I think.”
“And what makes you think you’re prepared to come back and be one of us?”
All eyes regarded her. We waited. It was a tense moment before Sarah, whispering, explained, “It’s dark here. I don’t like it.”