Ms. Hempel Chronicles (13 page)

"So," Ms. Hempel began. “Is there anything that’s on your mind? Anything you'd like to talk about?”

Everyone concentrated on their lunches. No one wanted to talk. The wall clock suffered one of its attacks; the minute hand shot forward, and then jumped back again. Balancing their trays, they had come, docile and curious and considerate of Ms. Hempel, but they didn’t know what to do next. She didn't know how to show them. She exhaled noisily to signal that it was now safe to let go, but no one seemed to take her cue. Perhaps they weren’t holding in their breaths.

Perhaps they moved through this school with ease and ownership; perhaps it was unfair to expect that they should feel discomfort. But that’s what Ms. Hempel half hoped would come spilling forth: tales of woe, a collection of slights and insults and misunderstandings. Wonderment at the nature of one’s hair; clumsy impressions of the deli man’s accent. Expectations of brilliant athleticism, or of preternatural skill with calculations. A belittling of one’s dearest accomplishments:

We all know why she got in early to Yale. They could g
_a
n together here, with their lunch trays, and share these fenses. Theirs would be a kinship based on grievance.

Ms. Hempel could feel as if she were providing something.
_a
community; a sense of—affinity.

But no one was talking. Either they felt no outrage no struggle or unease, or else they felt all these things and were not comfortable enough around Ms. Hempel, or each other to

describe it. Ms. Hempel feared that the latter was true_f
_0r

she was aware of the struggle, she had been witness to it—she had seen Alex and Shanell and Andrea walking toward the bus stop, their heads bent together in solace and ConsoilpM she had seen Nestor smiling, widely, entreatingly, altogether too readily; she had seen Clive rambling down the hallway? looking as if he had lost something. It could not be easy, being at this school. She had no way of fortifying them. In fact she was making it worse—making them trail up here to her classroom, making them parade out of the lunchroom, carrying their trays.

Ms. Hempel felt the tenuousness of her claim. She wished she wasn't only half.

“Well, I have something on my mind,” said Amara, Um-oja's newly elected president. “I had an encounter with Mr. Meacham.*'

It concerned the list of research topics that he had presented to his Intellectual History class. “According to Mr. Meacham, Montaigne and Hobbes and Ralph Waldo Emerson were the only ones around doing any thinking."

Amara spoke of the great Nubian civilization, its delicate art and extensive trade and ingenious devices for irrigating the land. And the kingdom of Aksum—their alphabet and their gods, the grandeur of their obelisks! The stone thrones and colossal statues. She then leapt over thousands of years, arriving at Wole Soyinka and Leopold Senghor and Chinua Achebe. Glorious thinkers, all of them.

Amara remembered Ms. Hempel. "Look at the Chinese!" she added. “They had poetry, and philosophy, gunpowder and noodles and silk, when all those Europeans were running about waving clubs at each other. Wearing animal pelts!”

This was a way of thinking that Ms. Hempel couldn’t quite rid herself of. As she accompanied her class through the Reformation, and the growth of European empires, and the race to explore, and the discovery of the new continent, and the settlement of the first English colonies, she often found herself wondering, What was going on in the rest of the world? Her thoughts would begin, Meanwhile, back in China... but she wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.

All that she could say for certain was that the English colonists seemed an unhygienic, scrabbling bunch. They died off at an alarming rate.

“Does that mean that we re going to see people dying?” asked Jonah.

“Possibly,” Ms. Hempel said. “But if anyone dies, remember that it's a re-creation.”

“It will look real, though,” Jonah said. “Won’t it?”

It should, if Plimoth Plantation recreated death with the same devotion with which it clothed its inhabitants, bred their livestock, built their dark and smoky homes. Ms. Hempel had studied the brochure. Upon any day of the week, one could step back into the year 1627. Scores of thrifty colonists would mill about you, busy with their chores: cleaning muskets, plucking chickens. And when you asked them a question—Why did you come to America? Or, What is that there you’re growing?—

the colonists would look up mildly from their labor, and offer you an off-the-cuff and fascinating answer. They might then introduce themselves: Captain Standish, Goody Billings Governor Bradford. Each colonist’s accent was true to the English county from which he or she hailed. Even the swine were recreated: modern pigs, being too dainty, had been crossbred with a warthog; thus the hairy, truculent animals that now rooted about at the edges of the settlement. Ms. Hempel was very excited to see it all for herself) even though it did mean spending a long time on a bus.

“Ask lots of questions!” she yelled, trying to secure the seventh grade’s attention. The bus was luxurious, its seats high-backed and plush. Probably every kind of mischief was occurring, unseen. “You will get the most out of the experience that way!"

Ms. Hempel worried that her students might be overawed by the colonists, might spend the whole day staring at the strange pigs. So she had assembled a list of suggested questions, of the type that curious seventh graders might ask an English colonist. These she distributed as the kids came careening down the aisle of the bus, tangled up in their backpacks and clipboards and sweaters. Ms. Burnes waited outside to make sure they didn’t go anywhere.

Ms. Hempel stepped off the bus last. The air! It delighted her, it was brisk and wood-smoky; it smelled the way early music sounded: thin, feverish, slightly out of tune. Ms. Hempel hurried to the top of the path, flapping her hands to encourage the seventh graders, who tended to clot and clump and meander off into the distance; she touched their arms, she called to them, “Just a bit farther! Just over the crest of that hill!” And there it was: the settlement, the colonists, the sea. The blue sky, and the white smoke rising up in wispy

streams. The roofs, gray and matted; the gardens, brown and stumpy; the roosters, red-crowned and wandering, The fort, with its cannons peeking out from under its eaves. The high, ragged fence, running along the perimeter of the settlement.

Its purpose was to protect the colonists at night—to keep out the Spanish, or unfriendly Indians, or wild, hungry creatures of the forest.

“But you don’t sleep here, do you?” Jonah wanted to know. “After this place closes, you go home.”

The colonist scratched at his delicate beard. “Aye, I go home and sleep in my own bed. You can see it yonder," he said, pointing at a grey roof. “And if you happen upon my wife, you tell her that I will be back for the midday meal ”

About ten or so seventh graders had another colonist surrounded. He was leaning jauntily upon an axe.

“What was the voyage over like?”

“What was your profession in England before you came here?”

“Did you come here for religious freedom or economic opportunity?”

“How do you feel about King Charles marrying a Catholic?”

“What is the literacy rate in the colony?”

They looked up from their sheets and stood braced for his answers, their clipboards jutting forward. Soon they would be free to climb on things and poke long, tough blades of grass into the animals’ pens. But the colonist, suddenly, had turned gruff. “I was a planter there, in England, and I am a planter here,” he said, before wielding his axe and letting it fall decisively into an upended log. The seventh graders moved away, in search of a more obliging colonist, and Ms. Hempel followed, whispering, “Have conversations with them.”

But some children needed no prompting. Peering into the dim interiors of the houses, Ms. Hempel saw Annie explaining, with many violent shakes of her pencil, why Indians ought not to be called savages; Daniel squatting beside the fireplace examining the contents of a big, tarnished pot; Maria reaching out and stroking a woman’s dress, asking, Is it scratchy? Does it itch?

Jonah was looking around for the dying. He couldn’t even find a colonist who was feeling sick. He ran up to Ms. Hempel and told her this, rather pointedly.

“It isn’t winter yet," Ms. Hempel said. “Come back a few months from now, and they’ll be dropping like flies.”

She drifted about the settlement blissfully. She ran her fingertips along the fence; she pressed her nose into the marigolds that hung drying from the ceilings. She asked, in every house she entered, what was cooking for supper. The seventh graders darted about her but they seemed, to her enchanted eye, nearly invisible: a school of silver minnows, and she, a great, stately carp. All she saw were the marigolds drying, and the bread rising in the wooden trestles, and the colonists calling to each other from their chores. Ms. Hempel surrendered, without protest.

“So where are all the kids?” Jonah was asking Governor Bradford. “Why aren’t there any kids around?”

“Why, the lambing season does not come until spring!” said Governor Bradford. “You will not find any kids before April.”

"Children,” Jonah said. “You know what I mean. There aren't any children here. Because they’re all at school”

"Nay, we have neither school nor schoolmaster here, but we hope for a schoolmaster soon to come from England.”

“Their real school, Jonah said. "They can’t skip it. That's why they aren’t here.”

“Have you not seen our children?” Governor Bradford asked. “Mine own son was here not a moment ago. He went to fetch wood for the fire. And Winslow s two girls wished me
_a
good afternoon, but a minute afore you spake to me. They Lere on their way to gather crab apples, it being the season to harvest them."

“Very convenient," said Jonah.

“If you do not see our youngfolk, it is because they must work. No one rests here,” said Governor Bradford, with finality.

How magnificent! Ms. Hempel rejoiced. How unperturbed he was, how convinced. Governor Bradford was unmistakably himself. Ms. Hempel aspired to such a performance. If only she, too, were a colonist. But why not? She could learn to do these things: to sew a jerkin, render fat into soap, and muck out a barn. She could say aye, and betwixt, and if the Lord wills it so. As she herded the seventh grade back onto the bus, and frowned at the little wooden muskets they had purchased at the gift shop, and reminded them to put their notes in a very safe place, she entertained the possibility. When she returned home, she would write a letter to the Plantation. Of course, she could not ask a colonist how she might join them; they would rebuff her, good-naturedly, just as Governor Bradford had done with Jonah. She must address her letter to the administration, who were probably tucked away somewhere behind the bluffs. Perhaps a whole network of cubicles and fluorescent lights stretched out beneath the settlement, hidden and labyrinthine. Her letter would be opened by one of these underground workers; a response would be posted; by

next fall, she could be bending over, stoking a fire, and when the seventh grade came tumbling through, she would glance up; she would say, “My name is Alice Bradford, and aye, th» voyage over was a dreadful one."

The children rustled and murmured in their seats; Ms Hempel and Ms. Burnes had repossessed all of the muskets which, as it turned out, fired rubber bands; the bus hummed along the highway. Ms. Hempel dozed against the window and thought of Plimoth. But the more clearly she imagined herself there, the more she longed to be somewhere else. Somewhere the flies didn’t cluster above the food, somewhere the dresses didn't itch. Somewhere she didn’t have to spend all Sunday upon an uncomfortable bench, listening to sermons. She wanted to be somewhere clean, and civilized, and sweetsmelling, where everything she touched pleased her fingertips. She wanted to be ... in China!

If, in Plimoth, she rises before the dawn, and lugs water from the icy stream, the bucket bumping against her, then, in China, she wakes to the sound of bells tinkling in a breeze, and the patter of tiny footsteps racing across the courtyard, the plash of a fountain, and a merry child laughing. The floor is cool beneath her feet; the robe slides over her, like liquid. She has slept for many hours, and dreamt of landscapes, of journeys, of an old man living on the very top of a mountain. She will go out into the garden and her father will interpret her dreams.

If, in Plimoth, her garden is wild with tansy and mugwort and raggedy spearmint, then, in China, her garden is one of peonies, and tea roses, and lychee trees, and chrysanthemums. It is a garden of craggy rock and still water; in the pool grows a forest of lotus blossoms. Her father sits beneath the pavilion,

_{his e}
yes closed lightly in thought. Sunlight stipples his lap; a utterly alights there; a cicada chirrs by the still waters of the pool "Father,” she calls to him, “tell me the meaning of my dream. "

"You must write a poem, he says, and he summons the ink boy. A rosy child appears, round and soft as a peach, bearing the bamboo brushes, and the inkstone, and a scroll of strong, translucent paper. He lays the inkstone upon the ground; it is smooth and dark, coolness rising from its surface like a mist, and with quick, sure strokes, the ink boy grinds the cake. Upon the inkstone there appears another pool, black and still's  a perfect miniature of the pool beside which the ink boy sits and grinds. He will continue grinding as she writes, so that the pool will never shrink, so that the flow will not be interrupted once inspiration takes hold of her.

Her father is pleased with the poem. “You found the meaning of your dream,” he tells her, and he reaches inside his robe. When his hand reappears, it is holding a peach. She takes it from him, and sees that it is not a peach, that though it is round and pleasing as the boy, it is smooth and hard as an inkstone.

It is ivory, carved in the likeness of a peach. Upon looking very closely, she sees that tiny ivory monkeys are clambering up its cheek. One balances precariously atop the stem, its monkey arm outstretched in invitation. Upon looking even more closely, she sees that the top of the peach can be removed, like the lid of a teapot, and that the monkey is inviting her to open it. Off comes the top of the peach, and she is delighted to discover that attached to its underside is a delicate ivory chain, and that attached to the chain are more monkeys, hanging off wildly, in attitudes of rascality and abandon. It is as if, inside the peach, every kind of mischief is occurring, unseen. But there are not only monkeys dangling off the delicate chain,