by Julie Berry
I set to work copying the letters carefully. My fingers are nearly as clumsy as my mouth, but I write smaller and find room to copy each letter not three but five times. Midway through the alphabet, I can tell that I’m improving. Even at this beginner level, there’s a thrill to grasping the smooth pencil between my finger and thumb, smelling the paper, blowing away the little flecks of gray dust that trail after the marks I’ve made. I envy the schoolmaster. Even as green as I am at this, I can easily see that I would rather spend my days with words than with chickens and mothers and brothers.
Rupert Gillis slides noiselessly into his chair. He peers over my work.
“You have exquisite hands.” He is so quiet, not even the six-year-olds in front can hear.
The lead snaps off the tip of my pencil. He is not referring to my penmanship.
“Let me show you how to slant your letters.” He envelops my hand in his and guides the pencil stump in forming a T. As soon as he pauses, I pull my hand away.
“Now you see how it goes,” he says, and slides back to his regular place.
XXV.
Later in the morning, he sets the class to reading in pairs. Their murmurs make a timid if polite chorus that obscures his voice when he talks to me. This cover encourages him to talk more. I rather miss the silence. I open the primer he loaned me yesterday and begin wallowing through the second lesson. I haven’t gotten far when he places his long-fingered hand over the pages.
“Someone of your maturity must find these elementary primers dull,” he says. “I wonder if you would be more interested in the classics? A bit of Roman poetry? I’ve made a particular study of it myself. Let me read to you.”
Roman poetry, on my second day of school?
“Don’t worry.” He laughs softly. “It’s not in Latin.” He opens the bottom drawer of his desk and removes a
box. With a key from his vest pocket, he unlocks the box and pulls out a canvas-covered volume. O, V, I, D, I read on the front.
“These are tales of the pagan gods,” he whispers with a glance toward the little ones in the front row. “They predate Christianity. Reverend Frye might not endorse them, but I find them quite diverting.” He thumbs through the pages.
“Ah,” he says. “Here’s something you’ll enjoy. It’s the story of Io. She was forced by Jove, the king of the gods.”
It takes me a second to comprehend his meaning of “forced.” Rupert Gillis seems to find this amusing.
“Jove turned her into a lovely white cow,” he said, “to hide his deed from Juno, his wife. Juno tormented Io, until finally Jove appeased Juno and she relented. Here we are.”
And Juno, satisfied, gave Io back
The shape to which she had been born. Rough, hairy cow’s hide sloughed away From off her body and her breast,
Leaving tender flesh behind.
Her horns shrank back into a head
More delicately sized, with eyes
And mouth of womanly proportion.
And where hooves and cattle legs had been, Came graceful shoulders, round arms, hands— Slender hands with fingers five, each tipped With nails like polished gems.
Gillis bestows another meaningful glance upon my hands, and I hide them under the desk.
Gone, all trace of the cow she’d been, Save the snowy whiteness of her skin. I never heard a man speak so boldly, so rudely to a woman. I never knew words could act like fingers, touching where they ought not, grasping their pleasure at the victim’s expense.
On two uncertain feet she stood
And feared her long unpracticed throat, If tested, might, instead of speech,
Keep the mournful lowing she had known. So hushed, and secretly she parted lips,
Gillis turns to look at me.
And trembling, spoke in her lost voice. “So,” he says, looking pleased with himself, “you and Io could understand each other, couldn’t you? Yet you might say, if you could, that Io was the lucky one.”
Because her voice came back.
Whatever pleasure Rupert Gillis intended to taste by exposing me to these words, I will not give up willingly. My face is flat, my soul elsewhere, my expression as numb as my feelings.
Not his. He puts away the Latin book and wipes the surface of his desk, as if crumbs of filth might have fallen from its pages. He folds his hands leisurely and surveys his pupils with a placid air of contentment.
Io was the lucky one. It is tempting to try my hand at some words a Christian young lady ought not to know. They are part of the colonel’s legacy to me. But speech feels like intimacy now. Like a sacrament, a consummation. My words are not for Rupert Gillis. So instead I let my body speak.
I rise from my seat, gathering my slate and stylus, and move toward the third row of desks, where Eunice’s twin younger sisters, a pair of plump, fair-haired girls of around twelve have room enough to admit me to join their bench. They don’t like me being there, but they say nothing.
I return the schoolmaster’s gaze and see pink spots form on his cheeks. He digs for a kerchief in his jacket pocket and wipes his forehead, then rings the bell for dinner.
XXVI.
He submits the class in the afternoon to oral spelling, arithmetic, and grammar examinations with cold-blooded determination. He even quizzes me, and when I won’t answer, he brings his ruler down on my outstretched hand. Three times he summons me to the front of the room, demanding that I spell “funerary” and “pristine” and “obsidian.” I say nothing and take his strokes, then return to my seat where the blonde girls regard me with either admiration or terror. Elizabeth Frye doesn’t dare meet my eye. I listen as the other students recite their answers. A few make mistakes and receive strokes, but not, I think, as fierce as mine. Darrel answers all his questions quickly and well, and in spite of my stinging hand, or perhaps because of it, I am proud of my clever brother.
His wrath appeased, the schoolmaster finishes the afternoon’s lessons, skipping me entirely when he makes his rounds. I watch clumps of soft snow fall from branches outside the window until it’s time to leave. They are white, and soft, and lovely. Like Io, when she was a cow.
I think of myself transforming—the horns that aren’t there, that everyone sees, receding into my head.
But I am no cow, and there is no goddess to forgive me for what I never did.
XXVII.
You pass by the window. I turn to see. Is that, in fact, you? It’s you, and you see me now. The schoolmaster half rises from his seat. He rings the dismissal bell and reaches the door before the students can grasp their freedom and get there first.
“Whiting.” His voice is hearty and convivial. As if you and he are longtime friends. “Good to see you. What brings you here?”
“I’ve come to help the Finches home.” Your voice reaches me through the press of students jostling for their coats.
His delay betrays him, but only to me. “Good man,” he says. “Right neighborly. Judith! Darrel!” Not Master and Miss this time. He turns and catches me with a gleaming eye. “Your royal escort awaits.” The girls titter, the boys scoff, and the schoolmaster returns, satisfied, to his seat.
XXVIII.
You lean against a tree, with Jip romping around your heels. Good old Jip. “Good afternoon, er, Miss Finch,” you say, and extend me a hand, then seem to hesitate, as if embarrassed. I seize your hand and shake it.
Darrel’s comrades, two tall boys, drag him out, his good leg and his bad one dangling over the snow. They deposit him on his sled and clap you on the back, eager to show they’re nearly men now themselves. Which one of them plastered me with snow this morning, I wonder.
“I thought you could use a hand with the sled this afternoon.” You take hold of the rope and start out over the muck. “This thaw makes the going rough.”
“Thank you,” I say, nearly as well as anyone else might. “Tomorrow, why don’t I pull you in the mule cart?” you say. “This mud will only get worse.” “You are a royal escort,” Darrel calls out. “Driven t
o school in the mule cart! Hurrah!”
You glance at me, and we both smile.
The school is far behind us now, and the air feels freer to me already. Only when my shoulder aches begin to fade do I realize how much the day’s worry has tied up my flesh into tangled knots.
“Say, Lucas,” Darrel calls out, “you wouldn’t believe how Gillis treated Judith today. Something awful.”
You stop pulling the sled, and Darrel flops forward.
“Watch it!” he calls. I look to see if his fall affected his stump.
“You all right, Darrel?” you ask. When he says yes, you turn to me.
“What did he do to you?”
I try to remain nonchalant. Are you angry? Not at me, surely?
I speak slowly, which gives me time to form the sounds as near as I can. “He didn’t care for how litthle I know.”
Darrel can’t bear this. He waves wildly to get your attention. “He sat her in the front of the class, right at his desk, so he could tutor her specially. Whispered in her ear all day, more like. But he must have said something cruel, because she up and left his desk in the morning and sat with the fifthlevel girls. Did he ever get vexed! So then in the afternoon he made everyone do double recitations and examinations, and he punished her for saying nothing! Gave her fifth-level words to spell, too.”
Your fingers flex inside your gloves. “What did he say that upset you?”
Darrel! I glare at my brother. Why did you do this to me?
“I can’t sshay,” is my answer. The words come out limp and pathetic, as they are.
“Won’t say, you mean.” Your voice is bitter.
You set off again with a heave at the rope on Darrel’s sled. I’m glad to be moving. But what have I done wrong?
“Show him your hand, Judith,” Darrel calls.
You stop once more, and I know you won’t be appeased until you’ve seen my palm. I peel off my mitten and hand it to you. There’s a raised welt where he struck me. On the third stroke it bled.
You take my hand carefully and examine the stripe. “I should report this to the aldermen.”
“Dhon’t,” I say. “They care for me lesh than for you, now.”
And that, I can see, was both foolish and mean. You deposit the sled at the door of the house and retreat after the briefest of good-byes.
Maria has taught me anew how to speak; I must teach myself better, when not to.
XXIX.
Darrel sits up after Mother has gone to bed, listening to me read through my primer that night. The words are easy to read: cat, rat, sat, sit, bat, bit, fat. They’re less easy for me to say. Catth. Ratth. Satth. My thick stump of a tongue can’t make the delicate sound of a single T. That requires the flick of a narrow tip. Whatever I do, a th tail lingers behind. “Try them again, Judy,” Darrel says. He’s caught Maria’s fever, and forgotten that his job is to be my reading tutor, not my elocution mistress.
“Sitth. Batth. Bitth.”
“Cut it off shorter,” he says. “You’re almost there.” “Catt. Ratt. Satt.”
He’s right. It is sounding better. The H is fading. But it
will never sound right. Thrusting my tongue so far forward to compensate for what it has lost makes me sound mentally weak.
There was a big lad in the village when I was young whose mind wasn’t fully right. Nor was his speech. He didn’t live long. He drowned in the river when the spring floods were high. I hear his odd voice in my attempts, and I close the primer.
XXX.
A warm wind blows through the night and I lie awake in bed listening to icicles melt and drip off the eaves. I think of returning to school. I’d rather disappear. Or better, strangle Rupert Gillis.
No. I should never jest like that, not even to myself.
I saw Lottie strangled. Her life was snuffed out like the wick of a lamp. Even foul Rupert Gillis deserves his fetid breath.
But how can I let his Latin poems and his stinging ruler prevail? I want to learn. I deserve to read and write. Thoughts for company, and a pen for a voice. Who is more entitled to those privileges than I?
XXXI.
I saw life choked out, squeezed out of my young friend. Saw the lights in her eyes extinguished by a pair of hands, hands so filthy they soiled the triangle lace of her dress collar.
To think of dirty collars at such a time.
Whose hands they were, I couldn’t see.
I watched her lose her breath forever while I sat in the
willow tree holding mine, lest he find me, too, and his hands press into my soft neck like dirty boots into new-fallen snow.
XXXII.
Morning comes, and nearly all the snow is gone. There is no need for you to drive us to school in the mule cart. But you come. Darrel sits in back on a hay bale, and Jip twists in happy circles at his feet. I go to sit next to him, but you insist I sit beside you. A courteous gesture. I fix my eyes on your mule’s rump and smell the woodsmoke scent that rises off your brown wool coat.
You chuck the reins and we set off.
“Ugly, isn’t she?”
I look up. You mean the mule.
I protest this. My speech is slow and careful. “Nott for whatt she is.”
You grin. “Where’d you get your speckled mare?”
I wait for Darrel to answer but he doesn’t. I turn to see him; he’s watching the passing scenery with a determination that I don’t trust for an instant. But it appears I must speak. I choose my words carefully.
“At the battle. Her owner was killed.”
“Oh?”
Phantom could have been one of the soldiers’ from Pinkerton, but I imagine you know she wasn’t.
“I call her Phanttom.” My conscience compels me to add, in a lower voice, “She should be yours.”
“Get along! Git!” you shout to your mule, who has found a patch of greens unearthed by the snow.
You settle back into your seat. “Phantom. Where’d you come up with that name?”
“She’s more ghostht than animal.”
Your eyes invite me to keep talking.
“Shometimes I think she reads my thoughts.”
You laugh a little. “My thoughts would make dull reading. Git along, you dumb mule!”
Then I start to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“Dhumb mule.” I tap my breastbone.
Your face flushes. I try to suppress my laughter.
“Well, you’re not!” you say.
I’m surprised at your vehemence. “Mostt people think I am.”
“Hmp.”
You turn back to the road, even though your mule could drive us to town blindfolded. I go back to watching her swaying rump and trying not to laugh.
“Why have you waited so long to speak?”
It is Darrel’s question all over again, and still I’m unprepared for it. No one wanted to hear what I had to say. I didn’t think I could. Mother wouldn’t let me. I didn’t want to. I don’t know. I was waiting for Maria to decide I could. None of your affair.
I sit up a little taller in my seat. “Now is better than later.”
You watch me, then turn away, but not before I catch you grin. You tip your hat to me, like one who admits he’s been bested in a friendly duel. “And so it is, Ladybird.”
I turn in astonishment, but your gaze is fixed upon the road.
XXXIII.
We pass the first houses of town. When you speak again, it startles me. “So, a horse that can read your thoughts. Wonder what she sees.”
I speak without thinking. “You do?”
“I figure you do some of the better thinking that goes on in this town.”
Ah. Men in Roswell Station, men everywhere for that matter, don’t usually consider it a virtue for a woman to be adept at thinking. But I wonder. I think about my father. I believe he was proud of Mother’s strong will and quick wit. Perhaps I judge too quickly.
“Mother isn’t happy about Phanttom,” I say.
“Oh?”
“Too much for feed.”
“Hm.”
We pull up in front of the schoolhouse. I see Rupert Gillis’s face peering out through a smeared windowpane. Darrel is grabbed bodily by two of his friends and hauled into school, leaving Jip yapping.
“You could stable Phantom at my house,” you say.
I feel conscience pressing in on me. I should have given her to you at the start.
“She should be yours,” I repeat.
“No,” you say, “she’s yours. But I can board her for you. And you can come visit her as often as you like.”
Before I can comprehend your words, I’m nodding and accepting the offer. If you take her, I don’t really lose her, and I never want to say good-bye to Phantom.
Jip squirms into the front of the cart and licks your face. You shoo him off and help me down from the cart.
“Don’t be upset, though,” you say, “if I ask Phantom to tell me what she sees when she reads your mind.”
XXXIV.
Rupert Gillis shows no reaction when I sit down in my seat with the fifth-grade girls. Throughout the morning he operates as if all is normal. He comes to my seat, corrects my work, and assigns me new exercises and words to copy. He gives me nothing beyond my grasp. He instructs indifferently and moves on to the next pupil. I begin to think I’ve prevailed. Perhaps yesterday was nothing more than a juvenile attempt he’ll abandon. We can move forward as teacher and student, and I can learn to read. Already my writing is improving, and I’ve read several lessons ahead in my primer.
At lunchtime he dismisses the class, but calls me to his desk. I prepare myself to be silent in both face and body.
“I had some visitors yesterday, Miss Finch. Interestingly enough, they all came to see me concerning you.” He waits for me to respond, then continues. “The first ones were Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, whose girls sit by you. Mrs. Robinson objects to your presence in the school. She claims you are an immoral influence on her girls. Her husband shares her concern.”
