Elevated there at the high desk, I was coping with patrons’ questions when commotion broke out in the foyer.
“Don’t, pigface.”
“Can’t take it, huh, bag ears?”
“Jack and Molly, quit that or I’ll have your hides.”
The purr of threat in the teacherly voice settled things down, at least momentarily, and in trooped as rough and tough a crowd, male and female, as I had seen yet in Butte. On the other hand, they were twelve-year-olds and a freckle epidemic was loose among them. In flat caps and pigtails, hand-me-down britches and mended pinafores, plainly these were children from one of the neighborhoods on the Hill, spruced up for the library visit, but the sprucing could go only so far. Watching casually as edgy girls and pushing boys milled down the stairwell to the auditorium, I took a bit of guilty pleasure in the thought that Miss Runyon would have her hands full with this mob.
“Mr. Morgan.” The purr was close at my side. “Your mustache is back.”
I turned and was nearly startled off my sitting place.
“Rabrab!” I blurted, drawing nasty looks and one severe shhh from the Reading Room patrons.
A knowing laugh arrived with the same throatiness as the purr. “You remember. But you would, wouldn’t you. Did you know the whole school used to call you the Walking Encyclopedia?”
I had last seen Barbara Rellis as a sixth-grader, a dark-eyed willow of a girl on the lookout for intrigue. Foremost in my memory was my first day of teaching at the Marias Coulee one-room school, when she ever so innocently raised her hand during roll call and asked if for the sake of keeping up with certain contrary stunts of the boys she couldn’t turn her name around, most of it at least, just on the schoolground where name-calling ran every direction anyway? I found an appealing flavor of logic in that and let her. The Rabrab of then had filled out into a fashionably bobbed young woman, still slender but with a substantial bodice, and those eyes that so often held mischief like a flash of struck flint now had authority to them as well. She called over to the tail of the brigade dragging its feet in the stairwell. “Margie, mind them, please, give them a swat if you have to. Tell the story lady they’re all hers, she can start. I’ll be there in a minute.” An older schoolgirl, obviously conscripted for the outing, took charge and the last of the children were hustled down the stairs.
Rabrab’s-Barbara’s-attention swung back to me. “I see that little smile,” she said with one of her own, “don’t try to hide it. You caused this, you know, my ending up a teacher. A number of us have. Paul Milliron is already a county superintendent, had you heard?” She was studying me, from my mustache on in, a faint wrinkle of puzzlement at the side of her eyes. “At first I didn’t think it could be you, perched here like the head canary. In Butte, of all places. We were told you’d gone to-where was it? Transylvania?”
“Never mind. In the here and now, I-”
“Have you been back to Marias Coulee, since?”
“Not in person. I mean, no. Rab-Barbara, that is-”
This time her smile was the sly schoolgirlish one I remembered so well, as though she had something sweet tucked in her cheek. “You can call me that. It would make two of you who do. That’s rather nice.”
We were conversing in spirited whispers, not the best etiquette for the Reading Room, and I summoned Smithers from periodicals to sit in for me. Hurriedly escorting Rab out into the foyer, where there was only Shakespeare to overhear us, I began trying to contain the situation.
“About Marias Coulee. I must take you into my confidence, Rab.” It worked. The racehorse keenness she had always shown at any prospect of conspiracy was immediately there to see. “It is best if no one in our old neighborhood knows I am back in Montana,” I went on, “because of-well, possible hard feelings, you’ll understand.” I paused for what I hoped was drama’s sake. “Rose and I had a falling out. A family matter.”
She swooped on that. “It happens over and over, doesn’t it. A brother and a sister, you’d think they were built to get along, but no, they find every way there is to get crosswise with each other. I see it all the time in my pupils. So I’m not surprised-those of us at school thought you and Rose were born in different phases of the moon, as the saying goes. And you won’t go back now because you don’t want to stir up old trouble-that is so like you, Mr. Morgan.”
“I could not have put it better myself.”
Rab leaned closer, back to whispering. “Now I’ll let you in on a secret. It just happened, the other night. I’m betrothed. E-n-g-a-g-e-d,” she rattled off as if in one of Marias Coulee’s spelling bees. She wrinkled her nose, turning in an instant into the perfect facsimile of a pretty and mischievous bride.
There was no hiding my smile this time. “The lucky man is getting more than he bargained for.”
“But keep the news to yourself for now,” she added anxiously. “My pupils can be such awful teases, and I want to wait until the school year is over to-”
As if the word pupil had triggered open a gate at the head of the hall, here toward us came one of the schoolgirls, mostly knees and pigtails. Undoubtedly she had put up her hand in that urgent way that allowed her to go to the lavatory, but she marched right past it until she was practically at the hem of Rab’s smock.
“Just so you know, Miss Rellis, Russian Famine snuck off.”
“Not with you around, Peggy, I’m sure. Now do your business and scoot back downstairs.” The class tattler flounced happily into the lavatory, and Rab spun to me. “Is there another staircase?”
I took her down the hallway toward the set of stairs at the back of the stacks. “Rab,” I questioned as we quickstepped along, “isn’t your class somewhat advanced for story hour? They look very much like-”
“Sixth-graders,” she sighed. “Don’t you dare laugh, Mr. Morgan.” She herself had been a ringleader-it was the kind of class that had many-in the populous sixth grade that had been my biggest handful in the Marias Coulee schoolroom.
“I won’t bother to say justice is served,” I told her archly. “But story hour at that level-what sort of story?”
“First aid.”
It was always hard to tell with Rabrab whether she was pulling your leg. She shook her head as I scrutinized her. “It’s the school board’s big idea.” Her expression sharpened. “Most of the boys will be in the mines in just a few years, and most of the girls will be hatching other children, up on the Hill. The thinking is, it might spare the public treasury in the future if they learn some first aid before what is going to happen to some of them happens. In theory, I suppose I can’t argue with that.” Another sigh. “In any case, your Miss Runyon here is looked upon as the apostle of first aid. I’m told she was greatly disappointed that she was too far up in years to boss the nurses in France during the war.”
“I can imagine. Here we are.” I unlocked the delivery door to the stacks, and we stepped in.
To be met with sounds such as I had never heard put together before: a shoeleather chuff-chuff-chuff spaced what seemed a dance step apart, followed by a drawn-out soft whizzing like a very long zipper being drawn down.
“That’ll be him,” Rab said under her breath. “See?”
Beyond the bookshelves sheltering us, a boy as spindly as any I had ever seen was racing up the long staircase to the floors above. As if built on springs he bounded up the stairsteps three at a time, on the brink of trying for four, and when his leaps carried him to the top, the race against gravity, against himself, momentarily over, he in one swift mounting move jockeyed his legs over the banister and slid back down. There was a heart-stopping pneumatic grace, a fireman’s fearless ride down a twisting pole, in the way he shot to the bottom. The instant he touched the floor again, he was back into motion, chuff-chuff-chuff, trio after trio of stairs flown over by the broomstick legs.