Holding Wonder

But her tender-heartedness left her only more vulnerable to the little devils when they finally slipped back into their old ways.
We finished the first of the Oz books and were racing delightedly into the first part of The Magic of Oz, and there it was! Right on page 19! We all looked at it solemnly. We wrote it on the board. We contemplated it with awe. A real live magic word! All we had to do now to work real magic was to learn how to pronounce the word.
Therein lay the difficulty. We considered the word. PYRZQXGL. We analyzed it. We knew all the letters in it, but there were no vowels except `and sometimes Y.' How could you sound out a word with no vowels and no place to divide it into syllables? Surely a word that long would have more than one syllable!
"We'll have to be careful even trying to say it, though," I warned. "Because if you do find the right way to pronounce it, you can-well, here it tells you`. . . transform any-one into beast, bird or fish, or anything else, and back again, once you knew how to pronounce the mystical word.' "
"You could even change yourself. Wouldn't it be fun to be a bird for a while? But that's what you have to watch carefully. Birds can talk in the Land of Oz, but can they talk here?" The solemn consensus was no, except for papkeets and myna birds.
"So if you changed yourself into a bird, you couldn't ever change yourself back. You'd have to stay a bird unless someone else said the magic word for you. So you'd better be careful if you learn the way to say it."
"How do you say it, teacher?" asked Donna.
"I've never found out," I sighed. "I'll have to spell it every time I come to it in the story because I can't say it. Maybe someday I'll learn it. Then when it's Quiet Time, I'll turn you all into Easter Eggs, and we'll have a really quiet Quiet Time!"
Laughing, the children returned to their seats and we prepared for our afternoon work. But first, most of the children bent studiously to the task of copying PYRZQXGL from the board to take the word home to see if anyone could help them with it. It was all as usual, the laughing, half-belief of the most of the children in the wonderful possibilities of the word, and the solemn intensity of Dismey, bent over a piece of paper, carefully copying, her mouth moving to the letters.
The affair of Bannie and Michael versus Dismey went on and on. I consulted with the boys' parents, but we couldn't figure out anything to bring the matter to a halt. There seemed to be an irresistible compulsion that urged the boys on in spite of everything we could do. Sometimes you get things like that, a clash of personalities-or sometimes a meshing of personalities that is inexplicable. I tried to attack it from Dismey's angle, insisting that she check with me on everything the boys tried to put over on her before she believed, but Dismey was too simple a child to recognize the subtlety with
which the boys worked on occasion. And I tried ignoring the whole situation, thinking perhaps I was making it a situation by my recognition of it. A sobbing Dismey in my arms a couple of times convinced me of its reality.
Then there came yesterday. It was a raw blustery day, bone-chilling in spite of a cloudless sky, a day that didn't invite much playing outdoors after lunch. We told the children to run and romp for fifteen minutes after we left the cafeteria and then to come back indoors for the rest of the noon period. I shivered in my sweater and coat, blinking against the flood of sunlight that only made the cold, swirling winds across the grounds feel even colder. The children, screaming with excitement and release, swirled with the winds, to and fro, in a mad game of tag that consisted in whacking anyone handy and running off madly in all directions shrieking, "You're it, had a fit, and can't get over it!" It didn't take long for the vitality of some of our submarginals to run short, and when I saw Treesa and Hannery huddling in the angle of the building, shaking in their cracked, oversized shoes as they hugged their tattered sweaters about them, I blew the whistle that called the class indoors.
The clamor and noise finally settled down to the happy hum of Quiet Time, and I sighed and relaxed, taking a quick census of the room, automatically deducting the absentees of the day. I straightened and checked again.
"Where's Dismey?" I asked. There was a long silence. "Does anyone know where Dismey is?"
"She went to the restroom with me," said Donna. "She's afraid to go alone. She thinks a dragon lives down in the furnace room and she's scared to go by the steps by herself."
"She wuz play tag weez us," said Hannery, with his perennial sniff.
"Maybe she go'd to beeg playgroun'," suggested Treesa. "We don' s'pose to go to beeg playgroun'," she added virtuously.
Then I heard Bannie's high, embarrassed giggle.
"Bannie and Michael, come here."
They stood before me, a picture of innocence. "`Where is Dismey?" I asked. They exchanged side glances. Michael's shoulders rose and fell. Bannie looked at his thumb, dry of, lo, these many weeks, and popped it into his mouth.
"Michael," I said, taking hold of his shoulders, my fingers biting. "Where is Dismey?"
"We don't know," he whined, suddenly afraid. "We thought she was in here. We were just playing tag."
"What did you do to Dismey?" I asked, wondering wildly if they had finally killed her.
"We-we-" Michael dissolved into frightened tears before the sternness of my face and the lash of my words.
"We didn't do nothing," cried Bannie, taking his thumb out of his mouth, suddenly brave for Michael. "We just put a rock on her shadow."
"A rock on her shadow?" My hands dropped from Michael's shoulders.
"Yeth." Bannie's courage evaporated and his thumb went back into his mouth. "We told her she couldn't move."
"Sit down," I commanded, shoving the two from me as I stood. "All of you remember the rules for when I'm out of the room," I reminded the class. "I'll be right back."
The playground was empty except for the crumpled papers circling in an eddy around the trash can. I hurried over to the jungle gym. No Dismey. I turned the corner of the Old Building and there she was, straining and struggling, her feet digging into the ground, the dirt scuffed up over her ragged shoes, her whole self pulling desperately away from the small rock that lay on her shadow. I sawor thought I saw-the shadow itself curl up around her knobby, chapped ankles.
"Dismey!" I cried. "Dismey!"
"Teacher!" she sobbed. "Oh, teacher!"
I had my arms around her, trying to warm her stiff little hands in mine, trembling to her shivering, wincing to the shriveled blue lips that shook with her crying.
"But, Dismey, honey!" I cried. "It isn't so! You could have come back to the room anytime! A rock can't hold your shadow! It isn't true!"
But I had to move that rock before I could pick her up to carry her back to the room. It was a subdued, worried room the rest of the day. Bannie and Michael lost all interest in working. They sat apprehensively in their chairs, waiting for lightning to strike. I didn't say anything to them. I had nothing left to say. I had said and re-said everything I could ever think of. I had done what I knew to do, and it hadn't worked. Not even a trip into the office to interview Mr. Beasley had subdued them more than half a day. I couldn't even think straight about the matter any more. I had reached the point where I believed that I had felt the tug of a tethered shadow. I had found it necessary to move a rock before I could lift a child. I was out of my depth-but completely. And I was chilled to realize that not only Dismey but I-an adult-was entrapped in this believing bit. What might happen next? A feeling that must have been psychic indigestion kept me swallowing all afternoon.
In the warmth of the room, Dismey soon stopped shivering and went quietly about her work, but her eyes slid past the boys or looked through them. Donna swished her brief skirts up to the supply table for paper for Dismey, because the boys sat between her and the table. It looked as though the iron had finally entered Dismey's soul, and I hoped hopelessly that she had finally got wise to the little monsters.