STILL LATER, ANOTHER SHARED AND COHESIVE DISCOMFORT AMONG WE WHO CONSTITUTED THE UNWITTING 4 WOULD CONCERN THE INTENDED MEANING OF THE WORD THEM IN THE REPEATED IMPERATIVES THAT MR. JOHNSON HAD FIRST INSERTED AND THEN FINALLY EFFACED AND OBSCURED THE BOARD’S LESSON WITH. THROUGHOUT THE INCIDENT AND ITS AFTERMATH, EVERYONE CONCERNED HAD ASSUMED WITHOUT QUESTION THAT THE CHALKBOARD’S THEM REFERRED TO HIS SUBSTITUTE PUPILS, AND THAT THE INVOLUNTARY REPETITIONS WERE SOME DISTURBED PART OF MR. JOHNSON’S PSYCHE EXHORTING HIM TO KILL US EN MASSE. TO THE BEST OF MY RECOLLECTION, IT WAS MY OLDER BROTHER (WHO BY THAT TIME HAD ENLISTED IN THE ARMED FORCES BY TACIT ARRANGEMENT WITH THE FRANKLIN COUNTY COURT OF COMMON PLEAS, AND WENT ON TO SERVE IN THE SAME REGIMENT IN WHICH TERENCE VELAN WOULD DISTINGUISH HIMSELF THREE YEARS LATER) WHO FIRST SUGGESTED THAT THE IMPERATIVES’ THEM MAY NOT HAVE REFERRED TO US AT ALL, THAT IT MIGHT, RATHER, HAVE BEEN US WHO MR. JOHNSON’S DISTURBED PART WAS EXHORTING, AND THE THEM SOME OTHER TYPE OR GROUP OF PEOPLE ALTOGETHER. JUST WHO THIS THEM COULD HAVE BEEN MEANT TO BE WAS ANYONE’S GUESS—THE LATE SUB WAS HARDLY IN A POSITION TO ELABORATE, MY BROTHER’S LETTER OBSERVED.
I have only general, impressionistic memories of Mrs. Roseman’s classroom itself, which did not, even when nearly empty after the mass exodus, seem all that large. There were either 30 or 32 desks facing due north, and on the north wall was the chalkboard with its jagged mass of 212 overstruck KILL THEM’s and fragmentary portions of same, as well as the teacher’s assigned desk and a grey steel cabinet just west of the blackboard in which were kept art supplies and Civics related audiovisual aids. The east wall was partly comprised of two large rectangular windows; the lower half of each was hinged along the sill and could be opened slightly outward in mild weather. In the absence of any imposed tableaux, the reticulate wire mesh gave the windows an institutional quality and contributed to a sense of being encaged. Also, there was the chronological series of U.S. presidents running above the windows’ upper sills up near the ceiling. The ceiling itself was an institutional drop unit comprised of white asbestos tile, numbering 96 total plus 12 fractional tiles at the south end (the tiles’ dimensions did not divide evenly into the classroom’s length, which I would estimate at 25 feet). Two long, fluorescent banks of lights hung a foot or so beneath the false ceiling, supported by struts that I imagine must have been secured to the same metal grillwork on which the drop tiles rested. All acoustic tile of that era was asbestos. The interior walls’ composition appeared to be cinderblock thickly overlaid with multiple coats of paint (possibly as many as four or more coats, so that the uneven texture of the cinderblocks underneath was very much smoothed and occluded), which in the classrooms was an emetic green and in the hallways a type of creamy beige or grey. The tile floor’s pattern was an irregular checkerboard of off-grey and green as well, though a subtly different shade or hue of green, so that it was not clear whether the flooring had been selected to complement the walls or whether the whole thing was a coincidence. I know nothing about when R. B. Hayes was built, or under what arrangements—it was, however, razed during the Carter and Rhodes administrations and a new, supposedly more energy efficient structure put up in its place. On the Civics classroom’s south wall (which no one but the teacher was able to see because of the way the pupils’ desks all faced) were the room’s clock and attached bell and the P.A. speaker, whose cabinet was wood and its face covered in what appeared to be some kind of synthetic burlap, and was attached to the Public Address system in the principal’s office.
The classroom’s westernmost wall—on which were arrayed the unused coathooks, and against which just lately all of the terrified pupils had been clambering over one another to flee the room as Richard Allen Johnson stood frozen and transported, holding out the cuspate length of chalk like a toy sword—also featured, towards the back, two more freestanding cabinets containing spare or damaged copies of From Sea to Shining Sea . . . , various testing forms and supplies, construction paper and a large jar of blunt scissors, two wide boxes of filmstrips on governmental and legal systems, and several white woolen wigs and velveteen waistcoats in dark red or plum, with white ruffled plastrons safety-pinned to the lapels, together with a stovepipe hat, a lensless pair of wire spectacles, a collapsible wheelchair and lengthy cigarette holder, and over a dozen small, handheld American flags (these latter out of date as they contained only 49 stars in the corner), all for use in the annual Presidents’ Day presentation that Mrs. Roseman organized and directed every February, and in which the previous month Chris DeMatteis had portrayed Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Mrs. Roseman had felt ill and faint and had had to direct the entire show sitting down on the little set of steps leading up to the gymnasium’s stage, and in which I had had a dual role, playing a flagwaving supporter of democracy in the audiences for Thomas Jefferson’s 2nd Inaugural Address and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, as well as the thunder in the thunderstorm in which Philip Finkelpearl as Benjamin Franklin held a construction paper kite with a piece of string with a large skeleton key on it while Raymond Gillies and I stood just offstage behind the curtain and rolled a large piece of industrial tin with pieces of green felt taped over the sharp edges back and forth with a motion reminiscent of one snapping out a blanket to make it lie flat on the bed, producing a sound much like thunder if heard from the gymnasium’s seats, while Ruth Simmons and Yolanda Maldonado stood with adult supervision on the catwalk above the row of colored lights for the stage and dropped blue and white bolts of construction paper lightning that we had spent an entire class period using rulers to trace the zigzags of and cut out. My father got permission to leave work early in order to attend the presentation, and even though our mother was again not feeling up to par and could not join him, we had a fun time later recounting for her all that went on, with Terence Velan in stovepipe hat and woolen beard having memorized the Gettysburg Address and reciting it perfectly while his long beard’s glue detached at one side and began slipping further and further down, until the beard came off altogether at one side and was swinging in the breeze of sixteen furiously waving little flags, and Chris DeMatteis forgetting (or never having had the chance to even study, as he claimed) the bulk of his lines and opting to simply thrust his lower jaw and empty cigarette holder out further and further and to repeat, ‘Fear itself, fear itself,’ over and over (my father claimed it was dozens of times) while, backlit on the stage behind him, Gregory Oehmke and several other boys who had access to their fathers’ helmets and tags charged with broomsticks and aluminum foil bayonets (Llewellyn also brought a sidearm that turned out to be real, even though he claimed the firing pin had been removed, and afterwards he got in trouble, and his father had to come in and talk to Mrs. Roseman) against the papier mâché bulwarks of Iwo Jima.
INCARNATIONS OF BURNED CHILDREN
The Daddy was around the side of the house hanging a door for the tenant when he heard the child’s screams and the Mommy’s voice gone high between them. He could move fast, and the back porch gave onto the kitchen, and before the screen door had banged shut behind him the Daddy had taken the scene in whole, the overturned pot on the floortile before the stove and the burner’s blue jet and the floor’s pool of water still steaming as its many arms extended, the toddler in his baggy diaper standing rigid with steam coming off his hair and his chest and shoulders scarlet and his eyes rolled up and mouth open very wide and seeming somehow separate from the sounds that issued, the Mommy down on one knee with the dishrag dabbing pointlessly at him and matching the screams with cries of her own, hysterical so she was almost frozen. Her one knee and the bare little soft feet were still in the steaming pool, and the Daddy’s first act was to take the child under the arms and lift him away from it and take him to the sink, where he threw out plates and struck the tap to let cold wellwater run over the boy’s feet while with his cupped hand he gathered and poured or flung more cold water over the head and shoulders and chest, wanting first to see the steam stop coming off him, the Mommy over his shoulder invoking God until he sent
her for towels and gauze if they had it, the Daddy moving quickly and well and his man’s mind empty of everything but purpose, not yet aware of how smoothly he moved or that he’d ceased to hear the high screams because to hear them would freeze him and make impossible what had to be done to help his own child, whose screams were regular as breath and went on so long they’d become already a thing in the kitchen, something else to move quickly around. The tenant side’s door outside hung half off its top hinge and moved slightly in the wind, and a bird in the oak across the driveway appeared to observe the door with a cocked head as the cries still came from inside. The worst scalds seemed to be the right arm and shoulder, the chest and stomach’s red was fading to pink under the cold water and his feet’s soft soles weren’t blistered that the Daddy could see, but the toddler still made little fists and screamed except maybe now merely on reflex from fear, the Daddy would know he thought it possible later, small face distended and thready veins standing out at the temples and the Daddy kept saying he was here he was here, adrenaline ebbing and an anger at the Mommy for allowing this thing to happen just starting to gather in wisps at his mind’s extreme rear and still hours from expression. When the Mommy returned he wasn’t sure whether to wrap the child in a towel or not but he wet the towel down and did, swaddled him tight and lifted his baby out of the sink and set him on the kitchen table’s edge to soothe him while the Mommy tried to check the feet’s soles with one hand waving around in the area of her mouth and uttering objectless words while the Daddy bent in and was face to face with the child on the table’s checked edge repeating the fact that he was here and trying to calm the toddler’s cries but still the child breathlessly screamed, a high pure shining sound that could stop his heart and his bitty lips and gums now tinged with the light blue of a low flame the Daddy thought, screaming as if almost still under the tilted pot in pain. A minute, two like this that seemed much longer, with the Mommy at the Daddy’s side talking singsong at the child’s face and the lark on the limb with its head to the side and the hinge going white in a line from the weight of the canted door until the first seen wisp of steam came lazy from under the wrapped towel’s hem and the parents’ eyes met and widened—the diaper, which when they opened the towel and leaned their little boy back on the checkered cloth and unfastened the softened tabs and tried to remove it resisted slightly with new high cries and was hot, their baby’s diaper burned their hand and they saw where the real water’d fallen and pooled and been burning their baby boy all this time while he screamed for them to help him and they hadn’t, hadn’t thought and when they got it off and saw the state of what was there the Mommy said their God’s first name and grabbed the table to keep her feet while the father turned away and threw a haymaker at the air of the kitchen and cursed both himself and the world for not the last time while his child might now have been sleeping if not for the rate of his breathing and the tiny stricken motions of his hands in the air above where he lay, hands the size of a grown man’s thumb that had clutched the Daddy’s thumb in the crib while he’d watched the Daddy’s mouth move in song, his head cocked and seeming to see way past him into something his eyes made the Daddy lonesome for in a sideways way. If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child. Break your heart inside and something will a child is the twangy song the Daddy hears again as if the radio’s lady was almost there with him looking down at what they’ve done, though hours later what the Daddy most won’t forgive is how badly he wanted a cigarette right then as they diapered the child as best they could in gauze and two crossed handtowels and the Daddy lifted him like a newborn with his skull in one palm and ran him out to the hot truck and burned custom rubber all the way to town and the clinic’s ER with the tenant’s door hanging open like that all day until the hinge gave but by then it was too late, when it wouldn’t stop and they couldn’t make it the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child’s body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self’s soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.