CHAPTER 13
But despite those times when I was forced to consider the end of it, as I had that day on the hill with my father, I found that I more often hearkened back to its beginning, particularly to a story Miss Channing told in class only a few days after we’d all had fruitcake and gone for a walk in the snowy woods.
At Chatham School, the lunch break was one hour, from twelve to one, and after having lunch in the upstairs dining hall I’d walked into the village, made my way to Peterson’s Hardware Supply, idly fiddled with a fancy new fishing pole, then headed back up the snow-covered hill toward the school.
As I neared Myrtle Street, I saw Miss Channing sitting on a wooden bench near the edge of the cliff, Mr. Reed standing behind her, leaning on his cane, the wind blowing back his jacket and riffling through his hair, so that he seemed momentarily captured in that passionate wildness Mr. Parsons would later describe as the origins of murder. I saw his hand touch her shoulder, then leap back, as if from a red-hot stove. Then he said something, and she glanced back at him and smiled.
That’s when she caught me with her eye, peered at me an instant, then rose and began to stride toward me. She was wearing a long, dark coat, and as she moved toward me from the crest of the bluff, the high collar raised up against the back of her neck, I remember thinking that she looked like someone from an earlier century, one of those women we’d read about in Mr. Reed’s literature class the previous year, Eustacia Vye, perhaps, or Madame Bovary, wild and passionately driven, capable of that lethal wantonness Mr. Parsons later described to the jury, and in whose presence, he said, Mr. Reed was “little more than a piece of kindling before a raging flame.”
And yet, on that particular morning Miss Channing hardly looked wanton. She had dressed herself conservatively, as she usually did, her hair tied with a dark blue ribbon, a cameo at her throat.
It was Mr. Reed who appeared somewhat emboldened, standing very erect beside her, his face full of purpose as he spoke.
“Have you seen Sarah?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Not since this morning.”
Miss Channing drew a book from beneath her arm. It was old, with a peeling cover and frayed yellow pages, its spine long ago broken, so that some of the pages were barely held in place. “I wanted to give her this,” she told me.
“It’s my primer,” Mr. Reed explained. “From grade school. I’ve kept it all these years, and now Miss Channing thinks she can use it in her lessons with Sarah.”
I looked at Miss Channing. “If you want, I could give it to her when I go home after school.”
“Thank you, Henry,” Miss Channing said. She handed me the book. “Just tell Sarah to bring it when she comes for her lesson next Sunday.”
I nodded.
“Thank you again, Henry,” Miss Channing said. Then she turned, and the two of them walked back to the bench beside the cliff, Mr. Reed now sitting beside her, though still at a discreet distance, his cane resting between them like a strictly imposed divide.
I didn’t see Miss Channing again until that same afternoon, this time as she stood behind the table at the front of her classroom.
“Today we’re going to start something new,” she said. “Landscapes.” She turned and made a broad arc over nearly the entire length of the blackboard, then flattened its upper reaches with a few quick strokes. “This is the general shape,” she said, “of a volcano.”
With that, her face took on the curious intimacy I’d become accustomed to by then, the odd intertwining of her teaching and her life. “Nothing on earth, not even the sea, will ever make you feel as small as a volcano makes you feel,” she said.
Then she told us the story of the day her father had taken her to Mount Etna. Its immensity could hardly be grasped by anyone who had not seen it firsthand, she said. It soared from its base to a height of nearly two miles, and the railway that circled it was over ninety miles long, roughly the same distance from Chatham School to Boston. “My father was in awe of the violence of Etna,” she said. “Of how powerful it was, and how indifferent to everything but itself. He wanted me to see how the lava from one of its eruptions had once flowed all the way to the sea, destroying everything in sight.”
She seemed to envision that vast smoldering flow as it had rolled down the slopes, then flowed across the valley, devouring everything in flames, consuming whole villages as it swept toward the sea.
Then, rather suddenly her face brightened. “But what I remember best about Mount Etna,” she said, “is that there were flowers everywhere. On the slope and in the valley. So many of them that even near the rim, where I could see smoke and steam rising from the crater itself, even at that point, where everything else was so desolate, I could still smell the flowers down below.” She appeared genuinely amazed at the process she described. “Flowers grown from ash.”
During all the years since then, I’ve thought of the Chatham School Affair in exactly opposite terms, the whole process utterly reversed, something that flowered briefly, gave off an exquisite sweetness, then, in a harrowing instant, turned everything to ash.
And so, just as my father later said, some part of it was good. Especially for Mr. Reed, since, as I later learned, he’d never before experienced that form of passion that turns our eyes to the far horizon, erases the past like chalk dust from a board, raises us from the dead as surely as it consigns all others to the grave.
I showed up at his rented boathouse just after Miss Channing’s class that day, images of smoldering volcanos still playing in my mind, my sketchbook already filled with my own attempts at rendering an explosive and primeval violence I was certain I would never experience.
Mr. Reed was sitting at the little wooden desk he’d placed in the corner, a pile of papers spread out across it. He turned to face me as I came through the door.
“Hello, Henry,” he said.
“I wondered if you still needed help on the boat.”
He smiled. “So, you’re still interested?” he asked, already reaching for his cane
“Yes.”
