Then the door of the cottage opened, and Miss Channing walked out onto the cool grass of the front lawn. She was barefoot, and as she came toward us, I noticed that my father’s eyes dropped toward her feet, his lips parting. Then, just as suddenly, he returned to himself, opened the door of the car, and stepped out.
“I have only a moment,” he said a little stiffly and hurriedly, like a man who had more important things to do.
Miss Channing continued to move toward him, her feet padding softly across the grass.
“But I wanted to make sure that everything was in order,” my father added in the same vaguely harried tone. I remained inside the car, but despite its dusty windshield, I could see that she had washed her hair so that it now hung wet and glistening in the darkening air, giving her that appearance of female dishabille that has forever after seemed so beautiful to me.
“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” my father continued.
She came to a halt perhaps no more than three feet from where he stood. “Thank you for sending Henry to me this morning,” she said. “There was really nothing more for him to do.”
“Yes, he told me that.” My father paused for a moment, lifting his eyes upward slightly as he reached into the pocket of his jacket. “I wanted to bring you this,” he said, drawing out a large envelope. “It’s the schedule for the school. It tells you when your classes are held, when you take lunch, that sort of thing. You should bring it with you Monday morning. I would have mailed it to you, of course,” my father added quickly as she took the envelope from him, “as I generally do with the other teachers. But then, you were in Africa, and so … well …”
A silence fell over him and I expected him to break it with a quick good-bye, then get back into the car. Instead, he uttered a question that seemed very odd to me. “Do you ever plan to have a family of your own, Miss Channing?”
I could tell that she’d never been asked such a question, so ordinary and domestic, nor once considered the way of life it suggested. “I don’t know,” she answered quietly.
“It has its compensations,” my father said, though more to himself, it seemed, than to her. “Family life.”
She stared at him, puzzled, as I was, by his remark.
He looked suddenly embarrassed by what he’d said, like a man who’d inadvertently revealed some small, sad aspect of himself. Then he spoke hurriedly again, resuming his schoolmaster pose. “Well, Henry and I had best be getting home. Good night, Miss Channing.”
“Good night,” she answered, the same quizzical look in her eyes as she watched my father stride back to his car, get in, and pull away.
We arrived back home a few minutes later. My mother had prepared one of her pot roasts and throughout the meal my father appeared no different than usual, eating with the same careful attention to manners, dabbing the white cloth napkin at the corners of his mouth after almost every bite.
But when it was over, rather than retiring to the parlor as was his custom, he walked down Myrtle Street to the school, saying only that he had “a few last minute details” he wanted to look over before classes started the following Monday morning.
My mother didn’t question him. Nor did I. But toward sunset, while I was sitting on the front steps of our house, I glanced up and saw my father standing in the school’s bell tower, alone, facing out over the village. It was only minutes before nightfall, and a great stillness had settled over everything. I knew that from his place in the bell tower my father could stare out over all the roofs of Chatham and watch the low, unhurried beam of the lighthouse as it swept smoothly across the darkening sea, then over the village and finally beyond it, to the ebony waters of Black Pond.
I have always believed that at that moment he was thinking of Miss Channing, of her oval eyes and wet, glistening hair, seeing her again as he had earlier that afternoon, her bare feet nestled in a cool bed of dark green grass, his eyes closing for a moment as he reveled in that vision, then opening again, focused now upon the village, the school he’d labored all his life to build, the house on Myrtle Street, its small lights, his mind accepting without bitterness or rancor the path that he had taken, along with all the obligations it required, yet recognizing, too, as I believe he must have, that there was a certain shuddering ecstasy he would never know.
CHAPTER 5
I’ve kept only a single photograph to remind me of what I was, what I aid, all that followed after that. It is a grainy photograph, artlessly taken from the roof of one of the buildings across from the courthouse, its vista crosshatched with wooden poles and power lines, but clear enough to show the swarm of men and women who’d gathered around the building that day, their numbers pouring down its wide cement steps. And yet, it wasn’t the crowd of people that had caught my attention when I’d first seen it, but a single, crudely written sign thrust up from among them, its message scrawled in huge black letters: Hang her.
It is a phrase that has returned to me often over the years, and which can still prompt my deepest speculations. Especially given the fact that on her arrival at Chatham School, no one would have been able to suggest that Miss Channing might ever stir up such violent emotions, or even that her time among us would be any different from that of the many other teachers who’d come and gone over the years.
On that first day, as I stood with the other boys, all of us gathered in front of the school to hear my father’s customary opening remarks, I saw her turn onto Myrtle Street, her arms at her sides, no books or papers in them, no overstuffed briefcase dangling from her bare hand.
In all other ways, however, she’d done her best to blend in, wearing a plain white dress with a pleated skirt, and a pair of square-heeled black shoes with large silver buttons. She’d changed her hair as well, so that it was now wound in a tight bun at the back of her neck and secured with an ornate silver clasp. I could almost imagine her standing before the mirror in her bedroom a moment before leaving the cottage, looking herself over, her mind pronouncing an identity that—given the exalted vision of life her father had presented to her—she may well have found rather uninspired: School marm—
“Good morning, Miss Channing,” I said as she passed by.
She glanced toward me, smiled, then continued on across the lawn, over to where the other teachers were assembled. I saw a few of them turn and greet her, Mr. Corbett, the math teacher, even going so far as to remove his old felt hat. Later, some of them would tell their fellow villagers that she’d never really fit in, that from the very beginning she’d set herself apart, telling the boys grim and savage tales from her travels with her father, creating dark and bloody landscapes in their young minds. Some went even further, claiming powers of clairvoyance, as if they’d known all along that Miss Channing was destined to be the prime mover in what Professor Peyton would later call with typical hyperbole “a grim Shakespearean orgy of violence and death.” “I saw trouble the minute I laid eyes on her,” I heard my history teacher Mrs. Cooper say one afternoon in Warren’s Sundries, though I’m sure she’d seen nothing of the kind.
Of course, the one thing that did unquestionably separate Miss Channing from me other teachers at Chatham School was her youth and beauty, and from the way my fellow students watched her as she approached that morning, it was clear that their interest in her went far deeper than the usual curiosity inspired by a new teacher.
“Who’s that?” I heard Jamie Phelps ask Winston Bates, poking him with his elbow.
I took the opportunity to demonstrate the insider’s knowledge I possessed as the headmaster’s son. “That’s the new teacher,” I told them authoritatively. “She came all the way from Africa.”