What we were witnessing was nothing less than a practical demonstration of the plight of the pariah. I took the opportunity for a brief discussion of caste, class, and the thorny social problems surrounding taboo violation and the exclusion and/or integration of individuals and groups according to religion, ethnicity, and “lifestyle.”
After which Susy raised her hand and suggested, from the front row, “Make her prove she’s ready!”
She was so excited, she inadvertently (or so it seemed) struck her brother in the side of head with her elbow. Brad screamed, pitched forward from his seat, and collapsed to the floor. Susy gazed coolly down at her brother and said, “Stop crying, baby.”
And to me, she explained, “He pulls this all the time at home, Mr. Robinson.”
I wasn’t sure. There are widely ranging schools of thought concerning children who act out dramas of suffering. Do you hasten to their aid? Or do you leave them to sort themselves out, dignify them with the autonomy necessary for growth and individuation? I elected to follow the boy’s sister’s lead. Fortunately, the distressing noises of Brad were soon drowned by hearty cries from the Harris twins: “Let’s see if Sarah’s ready to be one of us!”
Up went a chant: “See if she’s ready. See if she’s ready. See if she’s ready. See if she’s ready.”
It was like a pep rally, or a political convention: total group dynamics, increasing frenzy, catcalls from the ranks of the class. Even overweight Steven got caught up in the excitement of the moment, stamping his feet and motioning with a fist in the air. In the back of the class David, the better to wave his own arms, plunked his infant brother belly-up on the leather edge of their trunk.
Then Susy was on her feet, standing tall before her classmates. Light from the overhead bulb made a shining halo of her hair. And down at her feet: her brother, one hand holding his head, the other reaching out to touch the hem of his sister’s dress.
Susy waited for the ruckus to die down. She rested her gaze on Sarah. And said, simply, “The rack.”
Well.
I’ll admit I was feeling less than one hundred percent that Monday morning. There were, for instance, those sprouting purple welts; no telling the effect, on the brain, of these venomous blemishes. I’d gone without sleep, and it’s a sure bet I was running a fever, even a considerable one. Should I have seen it coming, that inaugural — and, as it turned out, final — session of the Pete Robinson Institute, when all the kids (injured Brad excepted; he continued to worm around on the floor, like a hurt animal) turned to see what I would do?
Likewise, how much responsibility must I bear, for what eventually, inevitably occurred, simply because I suggested using the flat, hard surface of a leather-decorated steamer trunk, and Matt and Larry Harris’s strong young arms and backs, in lieu of a real rack?
“Go ahead, boys,” I said. They didn’t need to be told twice. Matt and Larry dove on Sarah like football tackles. Sarah let out a series of impressive screams truly painful to the ear. Finally one of the boys got wise and stripped off his shirt (a “rugby” stretch-knit pullover) and stuffed it in her mouth. “Way to go, Matt. Way to go, Larry,” cheered Susy, obviously suffering a wicked crush on one or both of the twins. Other voices shouted more specific encouragements. David, who seemed to appreciate the symmetry between the shirt in Sarah’s mouth and the latex pacifier he’d used earlier on Tim, side-coached, “Pick her up. Get her off her feet.”
Get her off her feet they did. They hauled Sarah like plunder to David and Tim’s trunk. (It was closest.) “Get the baby off there,” a Harris shouted. No one wanted to touch Tim. He’d wet himself. It fell to David to scoop him up and carry him, wailing, back to the furnace for another changing. Meanwhile Matt and Larry drop-loaded Sarah onto the trunk. She kicked like a genuine victim of oppression, and it took many hands to restrain her. It was something to see. And to hear, too, when the wadded-up shirt fell from Sarah’s mouth, and her shrieking began again, as, from upstairs, the clamor of Meredith’s entreaties poured down upon us: “Pete! What’s going on down there? Is everything okay? Open this door! What’s happening down there? Pete?”
“Ignore that,” I instructed the students.
And to my wife: “Hey, stop bothering us. We’re trying to do some in-class playacting down here. We’re doing an Improvised Creative Activity!”
Eventually the twins managed to get Sarah’s mouth replugged. This was a good thing, because Jane was presenting symptoms of really grave nervousness, fretting and trembling. I reminded Jane of her humiliation by Sarah, at the outset of class, for having a straggly little pathetic twig as a toy. This only seemed to confuse her. I still clutched the curled, dripping plumber’s snake in my hand; now I offered it to the maudlin girl. “You’ll feel better once you get involved in some activities with your friends.”
“Mr. Robinson?”
“Yes, Jane?”
“Didn’t you say something about people who would kneel down and pray for the people who were getting persecuted?”
“That’s right, Jane. The prayers of the faithful accompany the souls of martyrs to the gates of heaven.”
“That’s what I want to do.”
“Pray?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Fine. Why don’t you do that.”
She did. She retreated to a quiet corner and knelt bare-kneed on the floor and raised her hands in the customary palms-together-before-the-breast posture of pious devotion. “Dear Lord, I am praying for the soul of our classmate Sarah who isn’t the nicest person in the world. In fact she’s stuck up. But she’s still a person.”
Back at the trunk/rack the Harrises had arranged themselves at either end of Sarah. One Harris struggled with Sarah’s bicycle-kicking feet, while the other, the bare-chested twin, yanked more or less viciously on her arms, arms that were thrashing about her head — or, if not thrashing exactly, certainly would’ve been if only Sarah’d had the strength to liberate her wrists from the boy’s grip. “Be still,” Susy commanded as the Harrises stretched away, building a rhythm. Gasping sounds escaped Sarah. Her face, with the wet knit shirt spilling about mouth and chin, was a mask of wildness. I noticed Steven backing away from the scene. He watched as if hypnotized, from a distance — like a reticent voyeur fixed on an accident site.
I, too, kept my distance from the low black trunk where Sarah resisted and turned blue.
“Do you hear me?” Susy said over and over again to the gagged girl. “Be still.”
It was then I noticed the water coming through the rusted drain grating in the middle of the basement. A tide of brackish backwash was rippling in, seeping in slow estuaries onto the unpainted concrete floor, pooling there and rising like suddenly surfacing groundwater to immerse the padded feet and straggly stomach hairs, and the black tip of the nose of the stuffed bison. It was as if the bison had waded into a watering hole for a cooling drink. Often, during a heavy rain, the basement will flood. Was it raining now? There was no way, down here, of knowing. For a variety of reasons — it being our mascot not least among them — this wetting of the bison was dismaying to me. But due to its location (directly adjacent to the trunk where one of the great — in my opinion — dramas of our culture was currently being enacted, in microcosm), I felt it best to leave it. Let things take care of themselves. The Harrises certainly didn’t appear in any mood to welcome interruption, they were working hard. The bare-chested boy, in particular, showed impressive upper-body muscle development for a pre-teen. Must’ve been all that bow shooting. Hypertrophied lats and ripped abdominals, with minimal subcutaneous fat around the belly, and biceps that sported a handsome blue vein when he closed his hands tightly over Sarah’s, breathed in deeply, braced his sneakered feet (splashing, now, in the rapidly expanding lake of drain water), and pulled hard to the cadenced call of Susy’s voice, like a sculling captain’s, encouraging, “Pull. Pull. Pull. Pull. Pull. Pull. Pull.” Pull the boys did, repeatedly, vigorously, splendidly, as, from the shadows nearby, the small voice of Jane proffered blessings: “Dear God, please let Sarah sit with you in the bright blue where all the dead people go who were good when they were alive, because even though Sarah wasn’t what you’d call good she wasn’t exactly a murderer, she was a kid like me.” And so on. The basement air was rank with smells of boys’ sweat and Sarah’s fear and Tim’s soiled diapers. The Harris twins looked huge. The one clutching Sarah’s ankles had a moment of difficulty holding on, due to Sarah’s schnauzer-faced lace-ups, locked tight in his grip but slipping off her stockinged feet, causing him to pitch suddenly backward and almost lose his balance. But not quite. He was a natural athlete. He snatched the oxfords from Sarah’s feet — keeping a firm grip, all the while, on one or the other of her pale thrashing legs — and tossed them furiously away, one shoe spiraling high to crash like a rocket into the basement door, the other speeding heel over toe in the direction of Jane, who, fortunately, saw it flying toward her head and ducked. Now from above came another round of insistent cries from Meredith (“What was that? Open this door!”), accompanied by the hysterical metallic rattling of the doorknob against the bolt, and fists or something weightier — Meredith’s body? — slamming that sturdy old wooden door, sending audible and sub-audible concussions rumbling thunderously over our heads. Yet it was as if those detonations occurred somewhere far away. Not one among us, neither David nor Tim, nor Steven nor Jane, nor even little Brad, moved. (Brad did, however, clutch his head, which was bleeding; it would subsequently be revealed that the child suffered partial sight loss damage from sister Susy’s lacerating elbow, though at the time who could know this?) We were busy watching the terrible cleaving of Sarah; listening to Susy’s shrill trumpeting, the twins’ virile grunting, and to new and stranger sounds arising from the elongate form of Sarah’s body stretched like pink corpulent matter across a grimy storage trunk, her innocent bloodless face rag-stuffed and screaming silent screams at the ceiling while shoulder and hip and wrist and ankle bones pitched and rocked and pivoted grotesquely before at last tumbling free from their sockets as the grim separation took place at the soft center of her, the tearing of Sarah’s muscle and cartilage and bone.