A Plague Year

Mom asked, “So is Arthur going to graduate or not?”

“I guess so. If he does everything that Mr. Proctor says.”

“Well, that’s a shocker. People in that family rarely make it through high school, never mind college.”

Lilly challenged her. “That family? It’s your family, you know. His father was your brother.”

Mom backtracked. “I meant that side of the family.”

Lilly pressed her on it. “Oh? I’m sorry. Did someone on our side of the family, someone like you or Dad, just graduate from college? Did I miss that? If so, congratulations.”

Mom continued backtracking. “I meant that we both graduated from high school. Your father and me.”

Lilly corrected her. “It’s ‘Your father and I.’ ”

I decided to defend Mom. “It can be either one. Like ‘Your father and I want to talk to you, Lilly.’ Or ‘Don’t talk back to your father and me, Lilly.’ ”

She told me, “Butt out, Tom. Go read your vocabulary book,” and the morning’s conversation ended for good.

By then we were climbing up into the foothills. As any old person around here would tell you, we were on the road that the coal miners walked on their way to work. Some days, they’d walk up here before the sun rose, work all day in their subterranean world, and walk home after the sun had set.

Such reminiscences were supposed to inspire the kids around here, I guess. But inspire us to what? To be coal miners? They lived in a world without sun, like mole people; like people on the dark side of the moon. Not all that inspiring.

Soon the piles of black slag and rusting machinery gave way to a nicer landscape of farms, creeks, and woods. This was my favorite part of Blackwater (the part that wasn’t, technically, Blackwater).

Mom pulled into the Haven Junior/Senior High campus at 8:45, exactly thirty minutes late. She let us out next to the statue of the Battlin’ Coal Miner—our school mascot—a tall, thin guy with a pickax over his shoulder.

Lilly hurried up the ramp and disappeared under the arch of the entranceway. I took my time, gazing at the distant mountains from the high elevation of our campus.

It was a beautiful view, on a beautiful day, and I was in no hurry.

I still had about a half hour remaining with Coach Malloy. Coach Malloy, at least in our family, was known for two things—being the worst teacher at Haven and being the father of Reg “the Veg” Malloy, from the Food Giant. My school day began with ten minutes of Coach Malloy for homeroom, followed by fifty-five more minutes of him for social studies.

After a final look around, I entered the front office and stood at the junior high counter. None of the student assistants paid the slightest attention to me, like I was some invisible boy.

Finally, Jenny Weaver came out of the principal’s office. She was always nice to me (to everybody, really). She asked, “What do you need, Tom? A late pass?”

“Yes, please.”

She tore one off a pad and handed it to me. “There you go. See you in Mr. Proctor’s class.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Bye!”

I headed out into JH1, the junior high hallway, and was soon standing outside the door of my first-period class. I slipped in and found a seat in the back row. One glance up front confirmed what I had expected: Coach Malloy wasn’t looking. He never saw me come in. (This early in the year, he probably didn’t even know who I was.)

Coach Malloy was in the middle of a long, rambling complaint about “the geniuses who purchased whiteboards for Haven Junior/Senior High.” According to him, he was part of a “select group of teachers who had been given one of these boards to test.” But the test, at least for Coach, was not going well.

The whiteboard is a high-tech classroom aid. It’s about four feet high by six feet wide. It can be rolled on wheels. You write on it with special erasable markers.

The cool feature is that you can press a button and a vertical bar starts to glide across the surface. As it glides, it copies every word that has been written. Then you press another button, and it prints out a piece of paper showing exactly what was on the board.

Mr. Proctor writes on his a lot. If you miss a class, he gives you a printout of what the whiteboard said that day. That way, you know what you missed.

Coach Malloy uses his whiteboard like it’s a cork bulletin board. He attaches papers to it with Scotch tape, papers like the varsity football schedule. (Football’s a big deal in Pennsylvania, but not so much in Blackwater. That’s because we never win.)

Today’s assignment, attached to the top of Coach’s whiteboard, just said “Pick up homework sheet on way out.”

The class was devoted to one of Coach Malloy’s favorite lessons—supply and demand. He has been teaching this lesson for thirty years. (Lilly and my cousin Arthur had already told me about it.) He brings in fifty candy bars, which he sells to fifty students for ten cents each. He lets the students eat the candy in class. The next day, he brings in ten candy bars and, because many students now want them, he raises the price to a dollar, explaining, “It’s supply and demand. If demand goes up and supply stays down, the item becomes worth more.”

He’d started the lesson on Friday, so this was day two, the day when demand for candy bars exceeded supply. Some kids were surprised that the candy bars now cost a dollar.

And only those with extra money were able to afford them.

Okay. Got it. Lesson learned: no candy for the poor kids.

The class ended with Coach Malloy holding up a mason jar, opening it with a pop, and sticking in a spoon. He pulled out a faded-looking, shrunken strawberry and commented, with his mouth partly full, “My son Reg plants a garden every year. We have fresh fruit and vegetables in the summer, and we have canned fruit and vegetables in the winter.”

He put the jar down, wiped his mouth with a paper towel, and announced, “Come Thanksgiving week, I’ll be selling jars of fruit preserves just like this one. The cost will be five dollars per jar. The sale will begin on Monday, November nineteenth, and it will last through Wednesday, the twenty-first. So be ready with your money. Demand is always high, and supply is limited.”

The bell rang right after that, and the students started for the door. I walked up front to drop off my late pass and take a homework handout. Just as I got to the door, a big senior, a football player named Rick Dorfman, came in the other way. (Football players stop in to see Coach Malloy a lot.) He plowed right through, making me back up into the classroom.

Normally, I would let something like that go—him being a senior football player and me being a freshman bagger at the Food Giant. But today I felt like a hero. I had foiled a robbery. I had saved lives. So I heard myself snap at him, “Watch out!”

I started to go, but I immediately felt a hand grab the back of my shirt collar and snap my head back. The senior kept his grip on my shirt and turned me around so I was facing him, with my twisted-up collar now acting like a tourniquet around my neck. He spoke in a very low, quiet voice. “What was that, you little pissant?”

I looked toward Coach Malloy. If he knew this was happening, he didn’t let on. He spooned another strawberry into his mouth.

“I just asked you a question,” Dorfman reminded me.

I could feel the blood pooling in my head, above the tourniquet. I squirmed to break free, but his grip got even tighter. He opened his mouth to speak again, but then he suddenly stopped.

His eyes darted to a spot behind me. His grip on my collar loosened, so that I could breathe again.

I staggered and then turned around.

Arthur was standing there. My cousin, Arthur Stokes.

He was a menacing sight, as always, dressed in camo and black boots. His head was shaved as close as his face, which always had razor burns where he had scraped over his acne. His eyes looked like gray steel, and his voice was steely, too, when he said, “Is there a problem here, Dork-man?”

Dorfman’s mouth twitched upward into something between a smile and a sneer. He muttered, “Keep out of