Jordan County (16 page)

Hector returned to his lunchbox. He sat there eating as if nothing had happened. Miss Hobbs turned to go, then paused with one hand on the door knob, looking down at Hector. “Why didnt you stand up to them?” she asked. Her nippers glinted in the sunlight, vibrating with the flutter of the ribbons. “Even if that tow-headed one had hit you, it would have been lots easier than what they will do to you now.” Hector stopped chewing. He looked at her, his jaw bulged with food. She watched him, not unkindly, waiting, but he only looked at her with that same vacant stare, eyes bland, expressionless. “Well, maybe you know best,” Miss Hobbs said. She entered her office, closing the door behind her, and Hector resumed his chewing.

This ended that early, brief period during which the other children stood in awe of and even perhaps respected him. Now whenever the teacher assigned him a difficult passage they turned and watched as always, except that now their faces expressed not awe but derision. They smirked and sniggered at the way he dramatized the words, and sometimes when he made one of those oration gestures with a free hand to emphasize an action or a happy turn of phrase, the teacher had to rap smartly on the edge of her desk with her ruler to stop the catcalls of the boys and the giggles of the girls. It was as Miss Hobbs had foreseen.

Outside the classroom it was even worse. Beginning with the day of the boiled egg incident, it became part of the school life for a group to assemble at the carriage block for his arrival
and departure. They would stand solemnly watching him climb into the carriage with the lunchbox under one arm and an oilcloth book satchel under the other. Then, as if by prearranged signal, at the moment when Samuel lifted the reins to flick the horses into motion, they would hoot and jeer, shouting “Fancy Pants! Mister Fancy Pants! Fancy Pants!” running alongside until the carriage picked up speed and left them behind. Hector kept his eyes to the front. High on the box Samuel muttered angrily, “Trash. Nothing but trash; thats all. White trash.”

But that was not all, for soon it began to pale; it was not enough, and two weeks later a gang of boys waylaid him. He had seen them whispering behind their hands all morning, watching him out of the sides of their eyes. Obviously they were plotting something, but he did not discover what until that afternoon. The group at the carriage block, assembled to give him the jeering send-off, was much smaller than usual. He thought nothing of this, however, until the coachman slowed to turn a corner two blocks from the school and a band armed with barrel staves and lengths of lath came charging out of a clump of mulberry trees and began to beat on the sides of the carriage, cheering each other on and screaming their battle cries.

For a moment Hector was terrified by the din of sticks against the fenders and running-boards, the mass of wild, excited faces with open mouths and tossing hair. Then, drawing on some atavistic reserve — received perhaps from the man who fell near the apex of the V at Buena Vista — he stood on the seat, facing backward over the tonneau, and swung the oilcloth book satchel at their heads. He held it by the long carrying-strap and swung it with all his might. It was a gift from his grandmother, the latest model, with special compartments for books and tablets and a row of pencils stuck through little loops of elastic, each with his name stamped in gold on its shank near the rubber eraser. As he swung it he could hear the tablets and books slapping against each other
and the dry, brittle sound of pencils breaking. Samuel looked back over his shoulder. “Give it to um, Little Mars!” he cried. “Give it to um!”

That was just what Hector was doing. The satchel made really an excellent counter-offensive weapon. But the first time it landed squarely against one of the upturned screaming faces, he felt the shock of resistance travel up the strap, the momentary give of flesh and then the solidity of bone beneath: whereupon, all of a sudden, there was a flutter at the pit of his stomach and a sour taste at the root of his tongue. He dropped the satchel onto the seat and, turning, sat for an instant with a stricken, dazed expression of revulsion on his face. Then he leaned deliberately forward, placing his head between his knees, and threw up on the floorboard of the carriage.

“What you want to quit for?” Samuel said, forlorn on the box. “You was just gitting going good.”

The waylayers had been startled by the counterattack, as unexpected as it was violent, and when the satchel struck one of them they fell back. However, they recovered quickly — except the boy who had received the blow; he was nursing his face — and began to gather rocks and clods of dirt from the roadside and fling them after the carriage. One knocked Samuel’s plug hat clean off; he barely managed to grab it before it rolled into the road. Another caught Hector above the left eye just as he was straightening up. These were the only two hits, though other clods and rocks continued to clatter against the rear of the carriage until it was out of range.

When they turned in at the house Mrs Wingate was standing in a rosebed beside the drive. She wore a heavy leather gauntlet as if for hawking, with a pair of snips in one hand and some dead stems in the other. First she saw the dent in the coachman’s hat and then the cut above her grandson’s eye. She took Hector up to her room, and when she had cleaned the wound with camphor she made him tell her what had happened, from the beginning. He had been all right up
till then — in his mind at least, for the vomiting had resulted from an impulse in his stomach; it had nothing to do with his mind, he told himself — but now, as he stood in front of his grandmother, breathing the clean, medicinal smell of camphor, feeling it tingle the gash above his eye, and tried to tell about what had happened since the day of the boiled egg, he began to cry. And that was the greatest shame of all; it made him cry all the harder. When at length he had finished both the weeping and the telling, Mrs Wingate gave him his first lesson in the mysteries of human relationships.

“Now listen,” she said. Placing both hands on his shoulders, she looked directly into his eyes and held him so that he had to look directly into hers. Whenever his eyes tried to wander or lose focus she gave him a shake that brought them back where they belonged. “There are really only two classes of people in this world, those who have and those who wish they had. When those of the second class … Mind what I’m telling you,” she said sharply. She gripped him tighter, and when his eyes came back into focus she resumed. “When those of the second class begin to realize that they will never catch up with those of the first, they jeer. All right: listen. Those of the first class (which includes you,” she said, releasing one shoulder to give him a prod, then grasping it again) “must realize that the jeering goes with the having. Besides, when you are older and able to strike back at them, by foreclosing their mortgages or causing them to be dismissed from their places of employment, they will not jeer where you can hear them. They wont dare to; no. And what is said behind your back cannot matter, first because you cannot hear it and second because it is a sort of underhanded compliment in the first place. It’s a certain sign that they acknowledge your position, a proof of membership. You understand?”

“Yessum,” he said, responding to another shake. But he did not.

That was his last day in a public school; he did not go back even to clean out his desk. Mrs Wingate engaged the mathematics
and science teacher from Bristol High School to come to the house every afternoon and tutor him. This was Professor Rosenbach, a German with a dark brown beard and inward-slanting teeth: Professor Frozen Back he was called, for he walked with a stiff Prussian carriage as if he were pacing off the distance between barriers for a duel. However, there were those who said that he had left the fatherland as a youth to avoid military service in the war with France, and now he walked this way either to make up for it or to mislead suspicion. This may or may not have been true; in any event it was certainly malicious, being repeated mainly by pupils or former pupils who resented his stern classroom discipline and who could give first-hand testimony as to his zeal with the birch. But there was no doubt that he gave an impression of militarism. The seals on his watchfob made a little chinking sound wherever he went, reproducing in miniature the clink of a saber chain, and there was a cicatrice high on one cheek that might have been a dueling scar, direct from Heidelberg, except that it was rather small and neat and had been acquired in the high school chemistry laboratory when he was rinsing a beaker in which a careless or ingenious pupil had left a pellet of sodium.

The professor believed in memory work. It developed the mind, he said; he frequently referred to the mind in this manner, as if it were a muscle or a savings account or a combination of both. He sat in an armchair in the upstairs parlor during the lessons, holding the book on his knee and marking the place with a finger between the leaves, while Hector stood opposite him, arms straight at his sides, fists clenched, like a choir boy trying for a high note, and recited the multiplication tables or the rules of spelling and grammar. “Good. Very good,” Professor Rosenbach would say, stroking the underside of his beard with the backs of fingers whose nails were filed straight across like those on the statues of Greek athletes. “We are making progress. Now give me the nine-times table.” Then he would resume that curious rotary motion with his
hand under the short dark beard, nodding his head in time to the chant of arithmetic, and when it was finished he would nod once more, with a sudden, ponderous motion, and shine his eyes. “Good. Good,” he would say. “Very good, Master Hector.”

At first it was queer, being at home all morning while the others were at school and only beginning his lessons after the others had finished. Some mornings he would think about them, the way they stood in the aisles beside their desks, heads bent, reciting the prayer, then lifting their heads and shuffling their feet and singing, “We’re all in our places, With sunshiny faces; Good morning, dear teacher, Good morning to you,” while the teacher beat time with her ruler and sang louder than anyone, wishing herself good-morning. But after a while he seldom thought of them. The six weeks at the public school were a period far in the past; he might have dreamed it. Education was Professor Rosenbach, opposite him there in the armchair with the book held on one knee. If other children were herded together in an atmosphere of chalkdust and confusion, with a bell for this and a bell for that and bells for the hundred things that came between, obliged to chant in unison and wear invisible thinking caps, that was their misfortune. His grandmother had explained it, and though he did not understand the explanation, it was comforting at any rate to be told there was one.

When he was twelve and had completed a course of study roughly corresponding to the one covered by the local grammar school, he went away to boarding school in Virginia. By the time he was into his second year in the East, Bristol was secondary; he had come to think of it mainly as a place where he spent three more or less pleasant months doing nothing every summer. In dormitory conversations he dropped references to “our Mississippi plantation,” saying the words with an off-hand, studied carelessness to imply that it was one of many, just as other boys up here said “our Newport place” or “our Pennsylvania holdings.” It was that kind of school;
Mrs Wingate had chosen it after a good deal of correspondence around the country. Bristol people (which included his mother and father, but not his grandmother) became a faraway conglomerate of faceless automatons who did not wear the clothes he wore or speak with the accent he spoke with or think the things he thought. It was rather as if they were all in a cage, provincial, and he was on the outside looking in.

The center spread in his American History book was a relief map of North America. On it he traced the Mississippi River from its source to a point where it made two sharp curves, like an S laid on its back, and that was Bristol (or at any rate it might have been, for the river had many such double bends); “Thats my home,” he said, placing the tip of one finger on the lower curve. The map showed none of the man-made boundaries, only the natural formations, rivers and their tributaries, like lengths of string, and mountains like brown wrinkles on the page. It was strange, being able to point to this one spot out of all that veined and crinkled mass of brown and white, and tell someone “Thats my home” as if he owned it, river and all. He did not say it with any real conviction.

Christmas of 1892, when Hector was fourteen, he came home for the holidays for the first time in two years. He brought two classmates with him. They were out of Maryland, city boys from Baltimore, and when they had not understood what was said to them, they did not say Sir? or Maam? after the usage taught in Mississippi; they said Pardon? which would have made people think them abrupt and rude if they had not had such good manners otherwise and such expensive clothes and luggage. The highlight of their visit was the Christmas trip around the plantation. They went with Hector and Mrs Wingate in the carriage, and more than anything they were impressed with the way the tenants approached their mistress with their hats off, bobbing their heads and showing their teeth and saying, “Crissmus giff, Ole Miss: Crissmus giff! En you too, Little Mars: Crismuss giff!” and the way Mrs Wingate took silver dollars from a canvas sack
on the seat beside her, handing them out one at a time with a stern expression and calling each of the Negroes by name as he stood bobbing and grinning above the hat he held in both hands like a basin.

“You wouldnt have believed it,” the Maryland boys said afterwards. “It was like something out of the Middle Ages. It really was.”

That was the way they told about their visit when they got back to school in Virginia. They had gone down there half expecting to find it one big swamp; they admitted now that they had had misgivings. But they had been wrong and they wanted to make amends. Life in Mississippi — “the Delta, they call it, though it’s not all the way down at the mouth of the river” — was fascinating (that was the word they used, back in Virginia) and Mrs Wingate was “a lady of the old school, one of the few that are left.” Others listened while the travelers told about life on the plantation, especially the silver dollars distributed from a sack — “like something out of the Middle Ages. It really was” — and Hector’s stock went up. They had never called him anything but Sturgis, yet now they began to use his first name and even abbreviate it. They called him Heck, a devil-may-care sort of nickname. It was almost as if he had made the varsity. Classmates who formerly had cut him dead now nodded to him on the quad. There was nothing really effusive about it, but all this was quite different from anything he had ever known before.