Holding Wonder

HOLDING WONDER
Zenna Henderson
To my rainbow of cherubs who are cherubs before they are rainbow components
THE INDELIBLE KIND
I'VE ALWAYS been a down-to-earth sort of person. On rereading that sentence, my mouth corners lift. It reads differently now. Anyway, matter-of-fact and just a trifle skeptical-that's a further description of me. I've enjoyed-perhaps a little wistfully-other people's ghosts, and breathtaking coincidences, and flying saucer sightings, and table tiltings and prophetic dreams, but I've never had any of my own. I suppose it takes a very determined, or very childlike not childish-person to keep illusion and wonder alive in a lifetime of teaching. "Lifetime" sounds awfully elderly-making, doesn't it? But more and more I feel that I fit the role of observer more than that of participant. Perhaps that explains a little of my unexcitement when I did participate. It was mostly in the role of spectator. But what a participation! What a spectacular!
But, back to the schoolroom. Faces and names have a habit of repeating and repeating in your classes over the years. Once in a while, though, along comes one of the indelible kind-and they mark you, happily or unhappily beyond erasing. But, true to my nature; I didn't even have a twinge or premonition.
The new boy came alone. He was small, slight, and had a smooth cap of dark hair. He had the assurance of a child who had registered many times by himself, not particularly comfortable or uncomfortable at being in a new school. He had brought a say-nothing report card, which, I noted in passing, gave him a low grade in Group Activity Participation and a high one in Adjustment to Redirective Counseling-by which I gathered that he was a loner but minded when spoken to, which didn't help much in placing him academically.
"What book were you reading?" I asked, fishing on the shelf behind me for various readers in case he didn't know a specific name. Sometimes we get those whose faces overspread with astonishment and they say, "Reading?"
"In which of those series?" he asked. "Look-and-say, ITA, or phonics?" He frowned a little. "We've moved so much and it seems as though every place we go is different. It does confuse me sometimes." He caught my surprised eye and flushed. "I'm really not very good by any method, even if I do know their names," he admitted. "I'm functioning only on about a second-grade level."
"Your vocabulary certainly isn't second grade," I said, pausing over the enrollment form.
"No, but my reading is," he admitted. "I'm afraid-"
"According to your age, you should be third grade." I traced over his birthdate. This carbon wasn't the best in the world.
"Yes, and I suppose that counting everything, I'd average out about third grade, but my reading is poor."
"Why?" Maybe knowing as much as he did about his academic standing, he'd know the answer to this question.
"I have a block," he said, "I'm afraid-"
"Do you know what your block is?" I pursued, automatically probing for the point where communication would end.
"I-" his eyes dropped. "I'm not very good in reading," he said. I felt him folding himself away from me. End of communication.
"Well, here at Rinconcillo, you'll be on a number of levels. We have only one room and fifteen students, so we all begin our subjects at the level where we function best-" I looked at him sharply. "And work like mad!"
"Yes, ma'am." We exchanged one understanding glance; then his eyes became eight-year-old eyes and mine, I knew, teacher eyes. I dismissed him to the playground and turned to the paper work.
Kroginold, Vincent Lorma, I penciled into my notebook. A lumpy sort of name, I thought, to match a lumpy sort of student-scholastically speaking.
Let me explain Rinconcillo. Here in the mountainous West, small towns, exploding into large cities, gulp down all sorts of odd terrain in expanding their city limits. Here at Winter Wells, city growth has followed the three intersecting highways for miles out, forming a spidery, six-legged sort of city. The city limits have followed the growth in swatches about four blocks wide, which leaves long ridges, and truly ridges-mountainous ones-of non-city projecting into the city. Consequently, here is Rinconcillo, a one-roomed school with only 15 students, and only about half a mile from a school system with eight schools and 4800 students. The only reason this school exists is the cluster of family units around the MEL (Mathematics Experimental Laboratory) facilities, and a half dozen fiercely independent ranchers who stubbornly refuse to be urbanized and cut up into real estate developments or be city-limited and absorbed into the Winter Wells school system.
As for me-this was my fourth year at Rinconcillo, and I don't know whether it's being fiercely independent or just stubborn, but I come back each year to my "little inside corner" tucked quite literally under the curve of a towering sandstone cliff at the end of a box canyon. The violently pursuing and pursued traffic, on the two highways sandwiching us, never even suspects we exist. When I look out into the silence of an early school morning, I still can't believe that civilization could be anywhere within a hundred miles. Long shadows under the twisted, ragged oak trees mark the orangy gold of the sand in the wash that flows dryly mostly, wetly tumultuous seldomly-down the middle of our canyon. Manzanitas tangle the hillside until the walls become too steep and sterile to support them. And yet, a twenty-minute drive-ten minutes out of here and ten minutes into there-parks you right in front of the MONSTER MERCANTILE, EVERYTHING CHEAPER. I seldom drive that way.
Back to Kroginold, Vincent Lorma-I was used to unusual children at my school. The lab attracted brilliant and erratic personnel. The majority of the men there were good, solid citizens and no more eccentric than a like number of any professionals, but we do get our share of kooks, and their sometimes twisted children. Besides the size and situation being an ideal set up for ungraded teaching, the uneven development for some of the children made it almost mandatory. As, for instance, Vincent, almost nine, reading, so he said, on second-grade level, averaging out to third grade, which implied above-age excellence in something. Where to put him? Why, second grade (or maybe first) and fourth (or maybe fifth) and third-of course! Perhaps a conference with his mother would throw some light on his "block." Well, difficult. According to the enrollment blank, both parents worked at MEL.
By any method we tried, Vincent was second grade-or less-in reading.
"I'm sorry." He stacked his hands on the middle page of Through Happy Hours, through which he had stumbled most woefully. "And reading is so basic, isn't it?"
"It is," I said, fingering his math paper-above age-level. And the vocabulary check test "If it's just words, I'll define them," he had said. And he had. Third year of high school worth. "I suppose your math ability comes from your parents," I suggested. "Oh, no!" he said, "I have nothing like their gift for math. It's-it's-I like it. You can always get out. You're never caught-"
Caught?" I frowned.
"Yes-look!" Eagerly he seized a pencil. "See! One plus equals two. Of course it does, but it doesn't stop there. if you want to, you can back right out. 'Two equals one plus one. And there you are-out! The doors swing both ways!"
"Well, yes," I said, teased by an almost grasping of what he meant. "But math traps me. One plus one equals two whether I want it to or not. Sometimes I want it to be one and a half or two and three-fourths and it won't-ever!"
"No, it won't." His face was troubled. "Does it bother you all the time?"
"Heavens, no child!" I laughed. "It hasn't warped my life!"
"No," he said, his eyes widely on mine. "But that's why –" His voice died as he looked longingly out the window at the recess-roaring playground, and I released him to go stand against the wall of the school, wistfully watching our eight other boys manage to be sixteen or even twenty-four in their wild gyrations.