Staggerford (4 page)

Nor were the sisters immune. More than once, for their spring picnic, Sister Judy had taken her fourth graders to a hippie farm. When Miss McGee first heard about that, she went to the pastor, Father Finn, and warned him about the return of the Dark Ages. Father Finn, ordinarily a man of understanding, did not understand Miss McGee’s anxiety. If the Dark Ages were coming back, he had not yet caught sight of them. He told Miss McGee that she was an alarmist.

This morning as she concluded with the line, “But only God can make a tree,” the door opened and Herschel Mancrief appeared. He was led into the classroom by Sister Rosie. He was untidy. That was Miss McGee’s first impression of him. Under his wrinkled suitcoat he wore a T-shirt and under his nose a thicket of hair that curled
around the corners of his mouth and ended in a stringy gray beard.

Miss McGee said, “I am pleased to meet you,” and she gracefully offered her hand.

“Groovy,” said the poet, tapping her palm with the tip of one finger. Up close she saw that his neck and his T-shirt were unmistakably unwashed. His asymmetrical sideburns held lint. She hopped silently backward and slipped into an empty desk halfway down an aisle, and Sister Rosie introduced the visitor, training a spit curl as she spoke.

“Mr. Mancrief has already been to three rooms and he has another one to visit after yours, class, and he has to leave by twelve thirty, so when his time is up please don’t bug him to stay.” On her way out the door, Sister Rosie added, “Room 102 is next, Herschel. It’s just across the hall.”

The sixth grade regarded the poet.

“I am here to make you childlike,” he began, blinking as he spoke, as though his words gave off too much light. “I am here to save you from growing up.” His voice was deep and wheezy, and his frown was fixed. “You see, grownups aren’t sensitive. They get covered over with a kind of crust. They don’t
feel
. It is only through constant effort that I am able to maintain the wonder, the joy, the capacity for feeling that I had as a child.” He quit blinking and inserted a hand under his suitcoat to give his ribs a general and thoughtful scratching. “Do you understand what I am saying?”

The class looked at Miss McGee. She nodded and so did they.

“Good. Now here’s a poem of mine called ‘What I Envied.’ It’s an example of what I’m saying.” He closed his eyes and spoke in an altered voice, a chant:

After a silent moment the poet opened his eyes signaling the end of the poem.

Miss McGee had heard worse. Except for the reference to underwear, it came as close to poetry as most of the verse she had read lately, and she set the class to nodding its approval.

Herschel Mancrief shed his suitcoat and revealed that his pants were held up by a knotted rope. It was not the white, carefully braided rope of the Franciscans, who were Miss McGee’s teachers in college, but a dirty length of frazzled twine.

“Good,” said the poet, laying his suitcoat across Miss McGee’s walnut desk. “You remember how heroic those manikins used to seem when you were small and they were larger than life. You would see one in a store window and it was enough to make you salute. The pity is that you gradually lose your sense of wonder for things like that. Take toilets, for example. My poem ‘So Tall’ is about a toilet.”

He recited with his eyes shut. Miss McGee shut hers as well.

There was the sound of a giggle, stifled.

“You are surprised I got a toilet into a poem?” He was asking Miss McGee, who had not giggled. “But poetry takes all of life for her domain. The beautiful and the unbeautiful. Roses and toilets. Today’s poet seeks to represent the proportions of life. You don’t very often pick a rose, but you go to the bathroom several times a day.”

Certain now that he had taken the measure of Miss McGee’s tolerance for the unbeautiful (color was rising in her face) the poet announced his third selection, “In My End of Town.”

He opened his eyes to study Miss McGee’s reaction, but the desk she had been sitting in was empty. She was at his side, facing the class.

“Students, you will thank Mr. Mancrief.”

“Thank you, Mr. Mancrief.” They spoke the way they prayed, in unison and without enthusiasm.

She handed the poet his coat and, not wishing to touch his hairy arms, she steered him to the door as if by remote control. “There”—she pointed—”is Room 102.”

Nothing in his government-sponsored travels had prepared Herschel Mancrief for the brush-off. “Actually,” he said, blinking as he backed into the corridor, “I hadn’t finished.”

“I regret we can spare you no more time. We recite the Angelus at twelve.”

Looking more surprised than offended, he raised a hand as though to speak, but then thought better of it and stepped across the corridor and knocked on the door of 102. It opened instantly and Sister Judy put her head out.

Miss McGee, afraid now that her treatment of the man had been too delicate, said, “Another thing, Mr. Mancrief. Your poetry is …” She searched for the word. The poet and Sister Judy listened for it.

“Your poetry is undistinguished.”

Sister Judy rolled her eyes and the poet chuckled into his hand. Miss McGee turned back to her class, pulling the door shut behind her. “Entirely undistinguished, class. You will rise now for the Angelus.”

Later, entering the lunchroom, Miss McGee saw at the far end of the faculty table Herschel Mancrief and Sister Judy ignoring their beans and tuna and laughing like ninnies.

“I thought he was to have been on his way by this time.”

“We asked him to stay for lunch,” said Sister Rosie. “He has agreed to stay a while longer. Isn’t he super?”

“He’s horribly dated. He said ‘groovy.’ I haven’t heard anyone say ‘groovy’ for at least three years.”

“Oh, Miss McGee, he’s super. Admit it.”

“Pass the relish, if you please.”

Two hours later, after putting her class to work on equilateral triangles, Miss McGee opened her door for a change of air. From behind the closed door of 102 she heard raucous laughter alternating with the excited voice of Herschel Mancrief. The man evidently could not bring himself to leave St. Isidore’s. She stepped closer and listened through the door.

“Acquainted with a toilet,” said the poet.

The fourth grade laughed.

“It would roar and swallow and scare me half to death.”

More laughter.

“There, now you’ve caught the spirit of the poem. Now repeat it after me.”

They did so, briskly, line by line.

“Now let’s try another one—a poem I wrote just the other day called ‘Be Careful Where You Grab Me.’ ”

Fierce laughter.

Miss McGee hurried to the nearest fire alarm and with a trembling hand she broke the seal and set off an ear-splitting
jangle of horns and bells that emptied the building in forty-five seconds. Two ladder trucks pulled up to the front door and while the fire chief, a former student of Miss McGee’s, gave the building a thorough inspection, Herschel Mancrief drove off in his rented car, the fourth grade throwing him kisses from the curb.

“A false alarm,” declared the fire chief, emerging from the front door of the school in his yellow rubber coat.

“Someone set off the alarm near your room,” he said to Miss McGee as she led her sixth grade up the steps and back into the building. “Did you notice anything suspicious, Miss McGee?”

“Goths and Visigoths,” she said.

Miss McGee prepared cole slaw and celery soup for supper. She had never, in her memory, tasted meat on Friday, and she was determined, despite recent revisions in canon law, that she never would. She thought of every Friday as a renewal of Good Friday, and the uniform blandness of all her Friday meals was emblematic to her of the barrenness of a world bereft of its Savior. Six days a week she had the appetite of a farmhand, eating nearly as much as Miles and never gaining an ounce (if anything she diminished slightly by the year), but her Friday suppers were invariably meager.

“I see we are being holier than Rome again tonight,” said Miles as he took his place at the kitchen table. He bowed his head while Miss McGee said grace.

Like his landlady and former teacher, Miles had been reared by Catholic parents and educated by sisters and monks, but ten years ago, at the age of twenty-five, he had lost his faith in the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the Day of Judgment, and Life Everlasting. He had lost the whole works. His faith had not been crushed by a disillusioning experience; it had not been argued away by a glib heretic, it had simply evaporated. He was not particularly pleased to have lost it, nor did he long to have it back. His faith was gone, and that was that. He lost it during his second year of teaching, his second
year in Miss McGee’s house, and he was sorry to discover that the pain of lost faith was never suffered as intensely by the one who lost it as by one’s friends who had
not
lost it. On the first Sunday that Miles stayed home from mass, Miss McGee came close to weeping, and for ten years now she had been praying daily that the precious gift he had lost would be given him again. With time, fortunately, the problem had ceased to be a debilitating drain on her nervous system; it became instead a purely intellectual matter on which she spent an earnest but unemotional Hail Mary each morning.

As for Miles’s playful remarks about her own faith—usually brought on by his first glance at Friday supper—she had learned easily to turn them aside.

“Being holier than Rome is no fun since they made it so easy,” she said. “You eat more than you should anyway, Miles. A man in his middle thirties runs the risk of becoming portly.”

“Are you saying that I’m becoming portly?” Miles was tall, heavy, square-jawed, and red-haired.

“Yes,” said Miss McGee.

Miles spread his napkin on his lap and considered his stomach. He was wearing a heavy woolen shirt of brown and gold checks, the shirt he wore to football games, and it was much tighter now than when he bought it.

“I think it is written in the stars that I shall be on the heavy side. Both my grandfathers and one of my grandmothers were very large.”

“Your father is not large,” said Miss McGee.

“Well, that’s because of his sclerosis. I think if he were healthy he would be large. He has the frame for carrying a lot of weight. He’s over six feet, you know, but it’s hard to think of him as that tall because he’s so seldom on his feet. He’s always in his wheelchair.”

“Your father was never heavy, Miles. Your father and I were just three years apart in age, so we have known each other all our lives, and he was never heavy. He was tall and handsome. His job in the creamery started when he was sixteen, and I remember how proud he was when
he first started wearing his white trousers and white shirt and white apron. He wore them to school—at least the white trousers and white shirt—not the apron—and I thought he was the handsomest boy in school. And to this day, Miles, you can still see his handsomeness in his eyes.”

Miss McGee had accompanied Miles on a recent visit to the rest home in Duluth where his father was being cared for, and she had been struck by the man’s eyes. Multiple sclerosis had crippled him and two strokes had confused him, but under his bushy eyebrows his piercing dark eyes belied the disarray that lay behind them.

“They are steady, untroubled eyes,” she said.

“Yes, they are.” Miles tasted his soup.

“You have the same steady eyes, Miles—the same untroubled look.”

“It’s a false front, Agatha. I’m a troubled man. I have this landlady that troubles me about my portliness.”

“Shush.”

“Even though it’s written in the stars that I shall be of great size.”

“Oh shush, no one’s size is in the stars. It’s in his diet, especially his diet between meals. At the game tonight you will eat hot dogs and popcorn. You never pass up food.”

“One feels a certain obligation toward the senior class. They run the food stand.”

“You could give them a dollar and abstain from the food. I’m sure they would accept a donation.”

There was a pounding on the back door that set off a drumming echo in the glassed-in back porch. Miles opened the kitchen door and crossed the porch and opened the outer door. It was dark now and he squinted, trying to make out the shadowy form standing below him on the bottom step.

“Yes?” he said.

“Bones?”

It was the Bonewoman. Miles moved aside so that the kitchen light would fall upon her, but she too moved aside, avoiding the light, and he saw only her gunny sack and the hand that held it.

“Bones?” she said again. Her voice was thin.

Miles turned to the kitchen and told Miss McGee who it was.

“Nothing tonight,” said Miss McGee.

“Sorry, nothing tonight,” he told the Bone woman.

The gunnysack moved away from the steps and across the soft earth of the garden, which was harvested now, except for cabbages and squash. Miles could hear the Bone woman’s steps on the gravel as she crossed the alley. He stood at the open door, leaning out into the night, and heard her knock on the back door of Lillian Kite’s house. In the darkness, the fragrance of Miss McGee’s old garden, turned up and tired, seemed to be rising in faint whiffs from the Bone woman’s deep footprints—the tuberous smell of roots freshly exposed and the sour smell of tomatoes spoiled by frost and left with a few blighted potatoes to blacken and nourish the spent, gray soil. He heard her knock again. He closed the door and returned to the table.