He smiled.
“Why did you wait so long?” he asked me before he left.
“I don’t know,” I said.
The next morning I stood at the kitchen door and waved the Draper Man back off down the lane.
“I’ll call to see your husband, who owes me money from our business together, before the fortnight, Mrs. Lancaster,” he called. “I’ll add that it will be a pleasure to see you again too.”
“Good journey, Mr. Bennett Marsden,” I called back.
Before he had broken out of sight I had stepped back into the kitchen again.
8
IT WAS LUCIOUS WILSON thought I might be quick with a piece of chalk and one day asked me was I interested in tending the school he had it in mind to set up. He had people in his employ, and those people had children and he had his own, and the only school nearby was farther away than he liked to send them. He had seen me gobbling at the books on his shelves and had watched me help his children make their numbers and letters and had a feeling it would work out right. He had hired a teacher from Marion to come out by autumntime and had a shed at the edge of one of the fields that would make a fine school by then, but if I was willing to work in rough conditions I could get it going now. He would see to the slates and primers and make sure I had what I needed.
He put this to me while I was scraping spilled oatmeal off the wall in his front hall. He had his hands kind of slipped into the pockets of his purple vest as he spoke. This was still in my early days in his employ. They hadn’t started in to call me Scary. He had seen the fresh blood on my ankle but hadn’t blinked. I was still what you could call young then and had been some time away by then from Charlotte County, and some of the freshness of strong young arms and strong young legs had likely bubbled up into my head and made me think some of the furniture had floated back into its right place, and I set down my scraper and looked up at Lucious Wilson and told him, yes.
“Good,” he said and went away with a whistle, and I picked my scraper back up and went to work on the oatmeal, but a week later I found myself wearing a snug black dress and neat black shoes and standing at the front of the room. There were six or eight of them, depending on the day and the farming weather, that Lucious Wilson had directed into my charge. They sat on benches with a slate each in their laps, and I had a chair in the corner I could move to if I needed it and there were windows to look out of and fine black fields all around. I had asked Lucious Wilson for a map of the country and some paper to draw big letters and numbers on and with them had decorated my abode. The pride of the whole thing was the chalkboard. It had been brought up by wagon from Indianapolis. Lucious Wilson said the shed might still be rough, but it would have a chalkboard. I wrote my name on that board the first day. I wrote, “Miss Sue.”
She’s dreaming, you will have said to yourself by now. She’s old and life-kicked and set to dreaming about things that never happened. Ginny Lancaster of Charlotte County, Kentucky, or Scary Sue the oatmeal scrubber, a schoolteacher. And yet there I stood those mornings in my black dress. There I was.
There wasn’t much to the first day or two. I had Lucious Wilson’s little ones and another little one and then a fistful that were all but grown. Not a body in the room knew its letters to speak of, so we started there. My trick about it was to pretend I was in that old schoolroom of mine, that room where I had written my story and been called to the front of the class. I could even bring up the pine smell of that place, and it wasn’t a thing to imagine that my old teacher was standing just behind me with a little smile, whispering at me about what to say. We did letters and took a peek at numbers and sang songs, and another few of those days mooed and grazed their way by. Lucious Wilson liked to come in at the end of a morning and stand in the doorway. Once he came a nob early, and I had him step up to the front of the room and give us a song. He couldn’t sing worth shooting, but there was fun in it and we all clapped.
“This is fine, Sue,” he said afterward. “Just fine.”
The trouble came up on the second week. It sat in the lap of one of the bigger ones, who one morning looked me up and looked me down, then said, “You ain’t our teacher. You ain’t any teacher at all.”
I came over to see if she was having trouble with the letters I had set them to practice. It was when I got up close and saw her in her profile, her profile with its little bit of a snarl to it, that I started to smell the trouble that had snuck its way into the room through the chinks in the shed wall while I had stood there in my teacher dress and teacher shoes, while I stood there with my chalk and letters and chair in the corner to sit on. I smelled the trouble, but still I looked down at what she had marked on her slate. She tried to hide it away from me but I saw it before she did. It was a pig dressed as a teacher. Thick of middle and long of snout. A pig to switch off to market. To stick and hang. To have its hairs scalded off. To butcher into its portions of truth. It was easy to see even at a quick glance that she had some talent with an image, that the rendering was fair. I went back and stood in front of them for a minute. Only I wasn’t in my teacher’s dress and my teacher’s shoes any longer, and my old teacher had left me to myself and I could feel the weight of Zinnia’s pig-slop hat on my head.
“She’s crying,” one of them said.
I hadn’t known it. But I was.
The shed had a little door to its back, behind the chalkboard. I stood there and cried a stretch longer then stepped through it. I went around the side of the shed and bent and picked hard at my ankle, then stood and smacked my face into its wall.
She was nice to me afterward, the one who had drawn the pig on her slate. She grew all the way up and got married to a blacksmith who put her into nice dresses and got her a nice carriage to drive around. I used to see her at the church. She died some time ago. Not of anything special.
It wasn’t any length of time after I had left off playing schoolteacher and gone back to the scrub brushes and oatmeal that my employer Lucious Wilson called on me to keep him some company. He was drifting through his days and wanted someone to latch an anchor to them, is what he told me. He also told me I had a glow on me that he admired the sheen of. His children favored me. They had cried when I stopped being their teacher. They were always hollering for more of my stories. My stories that weren’t about black bark or wet dough. Just those good old ones about falling down wells and burning boots and girls with long golden hair. He wanted to know was I committed elsewhere. Did I have any company I was keeping or hoping to keep? Was anyone waiting on me wherever it was I had come up from? He knew the answer to this but asked it anyway. He was young then. He bowed a little with his head when he talked and didn’t look at me too long in the eyes.
He made me this little speech and question as we walked out in the west flatlands where they kept the cattle back then. Everywhere you looked there were beasts working the green. A young bull came up and snuffled Lucious Wilson’s fingers. Turkey buzzards lolled circles above the north woods. There was sun on it all. A good sun. Lord of days, a glow to me, the pig lady from Charlotte County that the water doesn’t want, I thought.
I kept a kind of company with Lucious Wilson for a time then. For a time, after it was dark and his children were asleep and it was only me and the drafts in the halls, I would trip along to my employer’s room and take off my bonnet and, at his bidding, crawl into his bed. Night after night and time after time I would trip up the stair and down the corridor and tap on his door. There was things I thought as I made that passage, and times the trouble that had found me out in that school shed found me out in that passage, and it took me to turn around midway and run back to my own room and hide under the covers and scratch at my ankle with a paring knife. Times as I walked that my legs grew longer and my feet heavier and my chest as big as a barrel and my head the size of a salt block. My hands would swing like slabs of hard stone and I would walk down that corridor, ahead and alongside of myself with a different door in mind. Here I am a-comin’, girls, I thought. I might even have said it aloud. Linus Lancaster said it once in Kentucky as he passed my shut door and went toward the other. So I might have said it too.