Ghost Story

because even then, at the beginning of my first year, I had no certainty that I was destined for that profession. I'd signed a two-year contract, but I didn't think they could hold me to it if I wanted to leave. Well, one of the most dreadful things in my life happened to me there, or it didn't happen and I imagined it all, but anyhow it scared the pants off me and eventually made it impossible for me to stay on. This is the worst story I know, and I've kept it locked up in my mind for fifty years.

You know what a schoolmaster's duties were in those days. This was no urban school, and it was no Hill School either-God knows that was where I should have applied, but I had a number of elaborate ideas in those days. I fancied myself as a real country Socrates, bringing the light of reason into the wilderness. Wilderness! In those days, the country around Elmira was nearly that, as I remember, but now there isn't even a suburb where the little town was. A freeway cloverleaf was put up right over the site of the school. The whole thing's under concrete. It used to be called Four Forks, and it's gone. But back then, during my sabbatical from Milburn, it was a typical little village, ten or twelve houses, a general store, a post office, a blacksmith, the schoolhouse. All of these buildings looked alike, in a general sort of way-they were all wooden, they hadn't been painted in years so they all looked a bit gray and dismal. The schoolhouse was one room, of course, one room for all eight grades. When I came up for my interview I was told that I'd be boarding with the Mathers-they'd put in the lowest bid, and I soon found out why-and that my day would start at six. I had to chop the wood for the schoolhouse stove, get a good fire going, sweep the place out and get the books in place, pump up the water, clean the boards-wash the windows, too, when they needed it.

Then at seven-thirty the students would come. And my job was to teach all eight grades, reading, writing, arithmetic, music, geography, penmanship, history… the 'works.' Now I'd run a mile from any such prospect, but then I was full of Abraham Lincoln on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other, and I was bursting to start. The whole idea simply enraptured me. I was besotted. I suppose even then the town was dying, but I couldn't see it. What I saw was splendor- freedom and splendor. A little tarnished perhaps, but splendor all the same.

You see, I didn't know. I couldn't guess what most of my pupils would be like. I didn't know that most country schoolteachers in these little hamlets were boys of about nineteen, with no more education than they'd be giving. I didn't know how muddy and unpleasant a place like Four Forks would be most of the year. I didn't know I'd be half-starved most of the time. Nor that it would be a condition of my job that I report for church every Sunday off in the next village, an eight-mile hike. I didn't know how rough it would be.

I began to find out when I went over to the Mathers with my suitcase that first night. Charlie Mather used to be the postmaster in town, but when the Republicans got into office they made Howard Hummell the postmaster, and Charlie Mather never got over his resentment. He was permanently sour. When he took me up to the room I was to use, I saw that it was unfinished- the floor was plain unsanded wood, and the ceiling consisted of just the roofing joists and tiles. 'Was makin' this for our daughter,' Mather told me. 'She died. One less mouth to feed.' The bed was a tired old mattress on the floor, with one old army blanket over it. In the winter, there wasn't enough warmth for an Eskimo in that room. But I saw that it had a desk and a kerosene lamp, and I was still seeing stars, and I said fine, I'll love it here, something to that effect. Mather grunted in disbelief, as well he might.

Supper that night was potatoes and creamed corn. 'You'll eat no meat here,' Mather said, 'unless you save up and buy it yourself. I'm getting the allowance to keep you alive, not to fatten you up.' I don't suppose I ate meat more than six times at the Mather table, and that was all at once, when somebody gave him a goose and we had goose every day until there was nothing left of it. Eventually some of my pupils began bringing me ham and beef sandwiches-their parents knew Mather was a mean-fisted man. Mather himself ate his big meal at noon, but he made it clear that it was my duty to spend the lunch hour in the schoolhouse- 'offering extra help and giving punishments.'

Because up there they believed in the birch. I'd taught my first day when I found out about that. I say, taught, but really all I'd managed to do was keep them quiet for a few hours and write down their names and ask a few questions. It was astonishing. Only two of the older girls could read, simple addition and subtraction was as far as their math went, and not only had a few of them not heard of foreign countries, one of them didn't even believe they existed. 'Aw, there's nothin' like that,' one scrawny ten-year-old told me. 'A place where people ain't even American? Where they don't even talk American?' But he couldn't go further, he was laughing too hard at the absurdity of the idea, and I saw a mouthful of appalling, blackened teeth. 'So what about the war, dopey?' another boy said. 'Never heard tell of the Germans?' Before I could react, the first boy flew over the desk and started beating the second boy. It looked as though he was literally set on murdering him. I tried to separate the two boys-the girls were all shrieking-and I grabbed the assailant's arm. 'He's right,' I said. 'He shouldn't have called you a name, but he is right. Germans are the people who live in Germany, and the world war…' I stopped short because the boy was growling at me. He was like a savage dog, and for the first time I realized that he was mentally disturbed, perhaps retarded. He was ready to bite me. 'Now apologize to your friend,' I said.

'Ain't no friend of mine.'

'Apologize.'

'He's queer, sir,' the other boy said. His face was pale, and his eyes were frightened, and he had the beginnings of a black eye. 'I shouldn't never of said that to him.'

I asked the first boy what his name was. 'Fenny Bate,' he managed to drool out. He was calming down. I sent the second boy back to his desk. 'Fenny,' I said, 'the trouble is that you were wrong. America isn't the whole world, just as New York isn't the whole United States.' This was too complicated, and I had lost him. So I brought him up to the front and made him sit down while I drew maps on the board. 'Now this is the United States of America, and this is Mexico, and this is the Atlantic Ocean…'

Fenny was shaking his head darkly. 'Lies,' he said. 'All that's lies. That stuff ain't there. It AIN'T!' When he shouted he pushed at his desk and it went crashing over.

I asked him to pick up his desk, and when he just shook his head, starting to slobber again, I picked it up myself. Some of the children gasped. 'So you've seen or heard of maps and other countries?' I asked.

He nodded. 'But they're lies.'

'Who told you that?'

He shook his head and refused to say. If he had shown any signs of embarrassment, I would have thought that he'd learned this misinformation from his parents; but he did not-he was just angry and sullen.

At noon all the children took their paper bags outside and ate their sandwiches in the lot around the school. It would be window-dressing to call it a playground, though there was a rickety set of swings in back of the school. I kept my eye on Fenny Bate. He was left alone by most of the other children. When he roused himself from his stupor and tried to join a group, the others pointedly walked away and left him standing alone, his hands in his pockets. From time to time a skinny girl with lank blond hair came up and spoke to him-she rather resembled him, and I imagined that she must have been his sister. I checked my lists: Constance Bate, in the fifth grade. She had been one of the quiet ones.

Then, when I looked back at Fenny, I saw an odd-looking man standing on the road outside the building, looking across the school grounds at him, just as I was doing. Fenny Bate was sitting unaware between us. For some reason, this man gave me a shock. It was not just that he was odd in appearance, though he was that, dressed in old disreputable working clothes, with wild black hair, ivory cheeks, a handsome face and extremely powerful looking arms and shoulders. It was the way he was looking at Fenny Bate. He looked feral. And with the wildness, there was a striking sort of freedom in the way he stood there, a freedom that went deeper than mere self-assurance. To me he seemed extremely dangerous; and it seemed that I had been transported into a region where men and boys were wild beasts in disguise. I looked away, almost frightened by the savagery in the man's face, and when I looked back he was gone.

My notions of the place were confirmed that evening, when I had forgotten all about the man outside on the road. I had gone upstairs to my drafty room to try to work out my lessons for the second day. I would have to introduce the multiplication tables to the upper grades, they all could use some extremely elementary geography… things of this sort were going through my mind when Sophronia Mather entered my room. The first thing she did was to turn down the kerosene lamp I had been using. 'That's for full dark, not evening,' she said. 'We can't afford to have you using up all the kerosene. You'll learn to read your books by the light God gives you.'

I was startled to see her in my room. During supper the previous evening she had been silent, and judging by her face, which was pinched and sallow and tight as a drumhead, you would say that silence was her natural mode. She made it very expressive, I can tell you. But I was to learn that apart from her husband, she had no fear of