Staggerford (5 page)

“Some people refuse to give her bones, even if they have some,” said Miss McGee. “Did you know that?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“And others save bones for her the way they save papers for a paper drive. I myself would never do that because goodness knows when she’ll turn up next. It might be next week and it might be next summer, and I don’t want dirty old bones sitting in my kitchen attracting flies. If I have bones she gets them, and if I don’t she doesn’t. I never see her, though, that I don’t feel sorry for that daughter of hers.”

“Beverly.”

“Yes, Beverly. She’s so pretty and yet she’s so crude. I see her working at the Hub Cafe. What kind of home life must she have with her mother out scrounging bones?”

“Did you know her father?”

“Of course. Clarence Bingham. He was part Indian, and he was much older than the Bone woman. He was in prison for a time, and after that he was in a hospital somewhere, and that’s where he died.”

“They say he killed a man.”

“That’s why he was in prison. Surely you remember.”

“Just vaguely. I was away at summer school when it happened.”

“Beverly’s a senior, I believe.”

“Yes, and a good student. She’s likely to be second highest in her class by the time she graduates in the spring. Nadine Oppegaard has the top spot sewed up.”

“My, heart goes out to Beverly. She’s so crude. She talks so crudely. Her clothes are not clean.”

“Is there more soup?”

“No. We have apple pie for dessert.” Miss McGee brought the pie in from the back porch and cut it into seven pieces; Miles ate three of them.

At the football game Miles sat with Imogene Kite, librarian. She was director of the Staggerford Public Library. Miles had been sitting with Imogene Kite at football games, lectures, cantatas, and funerals for years. He considered her too tall and bloodless to be attractive. He noticed that as she edged into her thirties she was developing the features of a turkey, a tom. He found her company only slightly more exciting than solitude, but at present in Staggerford there was no one else.

Other single girls had come to town in Miles’s time-most of them better looking than Imogene—but all of them were in a hurry to find a husband and when they uncovered none within the two-year limit they had set for themselves they moved away. Miles had fallen in love with one of these girls. Her name was Anna Thea Hayworth and she came from St. Paul. She taught home economics. For no good reason except that he didn’t catch her name when he was introduced to her, he insisted upon calling her Thanatopsis Hayworth, which always made her laugh. Her hair was dark with a tinge of sable in it. She sewed, skied, cooked, giggled, read books, visited the sick, loved her students, and was obviously going to make somebody a nifty wife. After dating her several times, Miles began to think about marriage; but Miles’s thoughts were generally long thoughts, and before he came to a decision Thanatopsis
Hayworth married Wayne Workman, who came to town as the new high-school principal. So now she was Anna Thea Workman, though Miles still called her Thanatopsis; and to this day she taught home ec across the hall from Miles’s classroom, and Miles was still in love with her.

There was little to love about Imogene Kite. She was all warts and adenoids. Judging by how little she worked to make herself attractive, she seemed to be in no hurry to find a husband. She sewed not. Neither did she ski. She never laughed or cooked or visited the sick. She lived with her mother in the house across the alley from Miss McGee’s. What she did, incessantly, was look up information in the card catalog. Miles had never known anyone with such a respect for pure knowledge as Imogene Kite. At one time or another in their steady but distant relationship, Imogene had explained to Miles the difference between deciduous and coniferous trees, and she had told him how Egyptians made bricks, and she had cleared up his ignorance concerning the Kaiser’s problems in the Baltic states.

One evening when Miles was browsing in the public library he overheard a brief, whispered conversation between Imogene, who sat behind the check-out desk, and Doc Oppegaard’s wife, who suffered from an inferiority complex because her daughter Nadine was a genius.

“It makes me so discouraged to know so little,” Mrs. Oppegaard whispered to Imogene. “I mean facts. I don’t know anything I can tell people and be certain I’m right.” She hung her head like a winded horse, and her expensive fur piece dangled down her front like a tether.

“I know what you mean,” whispered Imogene. “Atomic Energy and should we have nationalized medicine.”

“That’s it exactly.” Mrs. Oppegaard shook her head unworthily.

Atomic energy, and should we have nationalized medicine,” said Imogene aloud. “Those are a couple of big scenes I know nothing about. But I know one thing. Before I’m through, I’m going to get to the bottom of the atomic energy scene.”

Tonight, sitting high in the bleachers, Imogene Kite was
getting to the bottom of the lending scene. “It’s a well-known fact, Pruitt”—she never called Miles by his first name—”that there are too many people in this country borrowing and spending beyond their means, and that’s the main reason our big cities are going into debt. A big city can’t expect to violate principles of sound fiscal policy and not suffer the consequences.”

Below them on the field the Staggerford Stags kicked off to the Owl Brook Owls. On the second play from scrimmage Owl Brook scored on a seventy-five-yard pass play.

“A big city has to keep tabs on its treasury the same way a private citizen like you or me has to keep tabs on his purse strings.”

The Owls missed their extra-point kick.

“Now one of the most harmful practices in city management is the accrued-income, cash-outgo system.”

After falling behind by six points, the Staggerford team began playing what Coach Gibbon liked to call inspired football. The Stags’ defensive line obviously enjoyed tackling and the defensive secondary on passes ranged across the field like leaping gazelles.

“Under the accrued-income, cash-outgo system, you compute your income on an accrual basis. That is to say, you count all your accounts receivable as hard and fast income, even when you know that a certain percentage of your accounts receivable, such as property taxes in the case of a city government, will never be paid; and you compute your outgo on a cash-only basis. That is to say, you pretend the debts you owe are not liabilities. And you know what you end up with, Pruitt? Insolvency.”

Imogene lectured until the band struck up “El Capitan” at halftime and Miles went to the food stand for hot dogs and popcorn. Roxie Booth waited on him. She said that the corporal who ate the beer bottle was from Spokane. Because of the frost in the air, Roxie was exposing very little of her skin, but she had compensated for this rare modesty by garishly painting her face. To Miles, her black eyelashes and crimson cheeks suggested a clown with high
blood pressure. He gave her a dollar and said, “Keep the change for the class treasury.”

Roxie moved her hips and shoulders and gave him half a smile and said, “Don’t be funny, Mr. Pruitt. It’s a dollar forty.”

He took back the one and gave her a five.

“Can I still keep the change?” She winked.

“Don’t be funny,” said Miles.

In the third quarter, when Imogene Kite finished her hot dog and her box of popcorn, she said that the accrued-income, cash-outgo system of bookkeeping was illegal.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Miles.

“But you can seldom discover and prosecute violators until the damage has been done. To discover the violators you would have to audit the books of every business and municipality on a continuing basis.”

Miles was watching Albert Fremling on the sidelines. The editor of the
Weekly
had interrupted his whirlwind Friday-night driving to attend this game in which his son was playing. He was sprawled at the edge of the field with his high-speed Graphlex, waiting for an exciting picture to present itself; but Miles could tell, even at this distance, that Fremling was drunk, and when a dramatic play did now and then cross his viewfinder his reactions were too slow to catch it.

“Have you any idea what it would cost to maintain a continuing audit of all the bookkeeping in the United States?” said Imogene.

“I guess it would be a lot.”

“My God, Pruitt, you have no idea.”

Late in the fourth quarter the Stags scored a touchdown, and Miles saw Coach Gibbon turn his back on the field. It was up to Coach’s son Peter to kick the extra point, and Coach could not bear to watch. The Staggerford line didn’t hold. It was Lee Fremling, son of the editor, who gave way. Playing center, Lee was at once the largest and the weakest Stag. He was pushed so far backwards that he blocked Peter’s kick with his rump. The groan of the crowd told Coach Gibbon the bad news.

“There’s a rash of insolvency across the nation,” said Imogene. “Insolvency, bankruptcy, and default.”

The game ended in a tie. Miles helped Imogene down from the bleachers.

As they walked to the gate, Superintendent Stevenson’s wife came up behind them and linked her arms in theirs. “Will you two come home with me for a cup of coffee and a rubber of bridge?” she said. “Ansel would be so pleased.”

“Of course,” said Imogene. “I love beating Pruitt at bridge.”

Mrs. Stevenson was a formidable, triple-chinned woman, trussed and stayed and never caught slouching; although it seemed to Miles that she had been altogether more human since the last faculty Christmas dinner, when a loud belch took her by surprise. It had been a remarkably resonant sound, rising from deep in her pipes, and it came early in the meal when conversation was yet relatively subdued. The belch tested everyone’s sense of decorum. Mrs. Stevenson, for her part, behaved like a perfect lady; that is to say, she behaved as though no belch had rung through the room; and except for two or three clods who looked up suddenly from their soup, so did everyone else.

The Stevensons lived in a small house in the middle of a large wooden lot. The lot was surrounded by a high iron fence. Miles and Imogene stood on the front step and waited while Mrs. Stevenson found a ring of keys in her purse and unlocked the storm door and then unlocked the inner door. This let them into a small entryway, where they waited for her to unlock the door to the living room. In the living room Superintendent Stevenson sat before the fire.

“Ah, Imogene. Ah, Miles,” he said, half rising from his chair. “Come in, come in, come in.”

Superintendent Stevenson was a man who had put his affairs in order about five years early, or so it appeared to Miles. There was once a time when the superintendent led the Community Fund Drive every spring and revised the Faculty Handbook every fall and visited classrooms every
day. But now, at sixty, he was rumored to have a heart condition, and he spent his days in almost perfect isolation. He passed his evenings and weekends in this living room, looking into his fireplace, where the flames always burned high and hot, and he passed his working days looking out his office window, which faced Miles’s classroom across the courtyard. Parents coming to school had teamed to bypass his office, for he refused to see them. The faculty had despaired of going to him for inspiration or advice. Delia Fritz, his secretary, did all his work. The school board was afraid that if they fired him he would die.

It was said by some that Superintendent Stevenson was not ill, that he used the rumor of heart trouble as a ploy to hold his job while shirking his duty, but Miles was not of that opinion. No man feigning illness could look as ill as Stevenson. When he stood, he brought his shoulders forward as if he were trying to make them meet under his chin. He was a tall man, and he walked hunched over in an attempt to curl himself around his faulty heart and ward off the blows of daily life, like a man cupping a match in the wind. He had come to an absolute standstill, devoting his days to gazing out the window and his nights to gazing into the fire.

“Sit here, Imogene, make yourself comfortable. Sit here, Miles. They say we’re in for a hard frost tonight.”

Whenever Miles stepped into the Stevensons’ living room and sank into one of the sturdy antique chairs upholstered in green brocade he felt that life could never do him any harm. The carpet was thick and it deadened all sound. The pendulum of the walnut clock swung slow, slow. The birch logs never burned with unseemly speed. Here it seemed to Miles that the river of time had receded and left him high and dry like the minnows he had found this noon in a landlocked pool.

Imogene and Miles had spent many evenings here, and the routine was this: first a chat by the fire, then bridge, then raspberry sundaes, then a tour of the dining room for a look at Mrs. Stevenson’s china and silver, then farewell.

Tonight’s chat was a reminiscence.

“The Indians,” said Stevenson. “You young people probably never knew this, but it was my reputation as a friend of the Indians that brought me to Staggerford. Twenty years ago the Staggerford School Board drove up to North Siding, where I had been superintendent for six years, and said that if I came to Staggerford I could name my own salary. Do you remember, Viola?”

“Like yesterday,” said Mrs. Stevenson, settling heavily into the couch.

“Yes, like yesterday. But it was twenty years ago. There was so much absenteeism here in Staggerford, Miles, that their state-aid money was way down and the school district was going broke. You must remember. You were in high school here at the time.”

“I guess I wasn’t aware of it.”

“So anyhow, the school board came up to North Siding—six men in one car—and that’s over two hundred miles, mind you—and they said to me, ‘Stevenson, we understand you get along with Indians.’ ”

A long pause. The fire was warm and the clock was slow.

“It was news to me. I had never thought of myself as especially good with Indians. All I knew was I had been in North Siding six years and everything was going smoothly. To tell the truth, Indians weren’t even on my mind very much in those days. We had maybe eight percent of our students coming from a nearby reservation—the Pinelake Reservation, the smallest reservation in the state—and those Pinelake Indians came to school in North Siding as regularly as anyone else, except in September when they were harvesting wild rice. You might say that the Pinelake tribe was a tribe of Indians that you never thought of as Indians. Wouldn’t you say that, Viola?”