“People!” The word was profanity.
I drew a long breath. If he were younger… You can melt stiff rebellious arms and legs with warm hugs or a hand across a wind-ruffled head or a long look that flickers into a smile, but what can you do with a creature that’s neither adult nor child but puzzlingly both? I leaned forward.
“Francher,” I said softly, “if your mother could walk through your mind now-“
He reddened, then paled. His mouth opened. He swallowed tightly. Then he jerked himself upright in the doorway.
“Leave my mother alone.” His voice was shaken and muffled. “You leave her alone. She’s dead.”
I listened to his footsteps and the crashing slam of the outside door. For some sudden reason I felt my heart follow him down the hill to town. I sighed, almost with exasperation. So this was to be a My Child. We teacher- types sometimes find them. They aren’t our pets; often they aren’t even in our classes. But they are the children who move unasked into our hearts and make claims upon them over and above the call of duty. And this My Child I had to reach. Somehow I had to keep him from sliding on over the borderline to lawlessness as he so surely was doing-this My Child who, even more than the usual My Child, was different.
I put my head down on the desk and let weariness ripple up over me. After a minute I began to straighten up my papers. I made the desk top tidy and took my purse out of the bottom drawer. I struggled to my feet and glared at my crutches. Then I grinned weakly.
“Come, friends,” I said. “Leave us help one another depart.”
Anna was out for a week. After she returned I was surprised at my reluctance to let go of the class. The sniff of chalk dust was in my nostrils and I ached to be busy again. So I started helping out with the school programs and teen-age dances, which led naturally to the day my committee and I stood in the town recreation hall and looked about us despairingly.
“How long have those decorations been up?” I craned my neck to get a better view of the wilderness of sooty cobwebby crepe paper that clotted the whole of the high ceiling and the upper reaches of the walls of the ramshackle old hall that leaned wearily against the back of the saloon. Twyla stopped chewing the end of one of her heavy braids. “About four years, I guess. At least the newest. Pea-Green put it all up.”
“Pea-Green?”
“Yeah. He was a screwball. He used up every piece of crepe paper in town and used nails to put the stuff up- big nails. He’s gone now. He got silicosis and went down to Hot Springs.”
“Well, nails or no nails we can’t have a Hallowe’en dance with that stuff up.”
“Going to miss the old junk. How we going to get it down?” Janniset asked.
“Pea-Green used an extension ladder he borrowed from a power crew that was stringing some wires up to the Bluebell Mine,” Rigo said. “But we’ll have to find some other way to get it down, now.”
I felt a flick of something at my elbow. It might have been the Francher kid shifting from one foot to the other, or it might have been just a thought slipping by. I glanced sideways but caught only the lean line of his cheek and the shaggy back of his neck.
“I think I can get a ladder.” Rigo snapped his thumbnail loudly with his white front teeth. “It won’t reach clear up but it’ll help.”
“We could take rakes and just drag it down,” Twyla suggested.
We all laughed until I sobered us all with, “It might come to that yet, bless the buttons of whoever thought up twenty-foot ceilings. Well, tomorrow’s Saturday. Everybody be here about nine and we’ll get with it.”
“Can’t.” The Francher kid cast anchor unequivocally, snapping all our willingness up short.
“Oh?” I shifted my crutches, and, as usual, his eyes fastened on them, almost hypnotically. “That’s too bad.”
“How come?” Rigo was belligerent. “If the rest of us can you oughta be able to. Ever’body’s s’posed to do this together. Ever’body does the dirty work and ever’body has the fun. You’re nobody special. You’re on this committee, aren’t you?”
I restrained myself from a sudden impulse to clap my hand over Rigo’s mouth midway in his protest. I didn’t like the quietness of the Francher kid’s hands, hut he only looked slantwise up at Rigo and said, “I got volunteered on this committee. I didn’t ask to. And to fix this joint up today. I gotta work tomorrow.”
“Work? Where?” Rigo frankly disbelieved.
“Sorting ore at the Absalom.”
Rigo snapped his thumbnail again derisively. “That penny-picking stuff? They pay peanuts.”
“Yes.” And the Francher kid slouched off around the corner of the building without a glance or a good-by.
“Well, he’s working!” Twyla thoughtfully spit out a stray hair and pointed the wet end of her braid with her fingers.
“The Francher kid’s doing something. I wonder how come?”
“Trying to figure that dopey dilldock out?” Janniset asked.
“Don’t waste your time. I bet he’s just goofing off.”
“You kids run on,” I said. “We can’t do anything tonight. I’ll lock up. See you in the morning.”
I waited inside the dusty echoing hall until the sound of their going died down the rocky alley that edged around the rim of the railroad cut and dissolved into the street of the town. I still couldn’t reconcile myself to slowing their steps to match my uncertain feet. Maybe someday I would he able to accept my braces as others accept glasses; but not yet-oh, not yet!
I left the hall and snapped the dime-store padlock shut. I struggled precariously along through the sliding shale and loose rocks until suddenly one piece of shale shattered under the pressure of one of my crutches and I stumbled off balance. I saw with shake-making clarity in the accelerated speed of the moment that the only place
