Absentee List_An Old Horse Mystery

by Elskan Triumph

  “I’m going to be sacrificed, aren’t I?” he asked after several minutes.

  “You have not endeared yourself to the board.”

  “What about half of the parents?”

  “Mr. Tomlinson was one of those.”

  “But I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  Horse said this without conviction, even though both men knew it to be true. He was tired. Then, anger rose from Horse—a cold, calculated anger that Wells had seen his entire administrative career. In this mood, he knew, Horse would push the law to the letter, not understanding the concerns that were beneath it. ‘My next week will be defining that line for both sides,’ he thought. There was paperwork in his office that no one appreciated, but was required by the state and had nothing to do with the learning of reading or math but that keeps kids safe in a way that only the most vulnerable would understand. Ms. Binnis had left a new pot of coffee for him, but by now it was burnt. Those papers and reports kept him from home and two cold beers and a recording of a Red Sox game someone made for him of a good game played in July—he knew the score, but not how it played out. It made him sad that he had to be here—not here with a friend, but drawing that line for his sake as much as anyone’s. To care as Horse did was to be alone. Being here is how I help, Wells thought.

  “This is not about logic. This is about morality. This is about abortion. You can help all of the Jeffery Boochers you want. No one cares.”

  “Now you tell me.” Horse rolled his eyes with mock understanding.

  “I’ve been telling you. There are expectations that aren’t in the contract.”

  “Teaching is the only profession where doing your job isn’t good enough. But you can’t write exceptionalism into a contract.”

  “Is this what this is? Exceptionalism?”

  Horse did not reply.

  “You can do it without making waves.”

  “Mediocrity. Do you remember Amanda Tomlinson when she arrived in my class?”

  The principal thought back several years, when Amanda was young and wild. There are often a few students that every teacher is aware of—they see them in the early grades and brace themselves as they approach. As they terrorized middle school, the younger teachers laughed with war stories. Picturing Amanda sitting on his leather couch, Horse knew already what he was going to say.

  “Yes. She was a mess,” he admitted.

  “She couldn’t read. Every day she was in your office, before you gave her over to my class.”

  “You never sent her.”

  “I didn’t need to. I’m one of those exceptional teachers you read about. They should make a movie about me.”

  “I don’t know what kind of movie that would be. Horror? You used your closet as a kind of prison.”

  “A take-a-break room. It’s a place where students can go and collect their thoughts until they are ready to return to academics and contributing appropriately to learning.”

  “I know what a take-a-break is.”

  “That’s what they do with the first graders.”

  “They have a chair the kid goes off to. A chair.”

  He had heard about Horse’s take-a-break room from another student. Usually, students were angry at having to sit in the principal’s office, and often lied up a storm as to why they shouldn’t be there. This student—what was his name, Wells tried to remember—begged to do his time there. The kid was afraid of Horse. No, of the room. After school, Wells went to see it for himself.

  “I had a chair, just framed by walls.”

  “You covered the walls with mats and she wailed around there.”

  “Padding. Those walls are hard plaster. That was thoughtful of me, I think.”

  “And you took away the chair.”

  “She threw it.”

  “That’s why I had the janitor take away the door... because I was afraid of the next step you might take.”

  But Wells had implicitly allowed Horse to use the room.

  The girl was that bad.

  Amanda was unique, and Horse was her last chance. They had both gambled their careers on helping her. Until now, they felt they had been right to do it.

  “We’ll leave that part out of the made-for-television movie,” Horse muttered.

  “I don’t know how much of your style we could put in and still televise it.”

  “By November she was no longer causing trouble,” Horse said. “By April she was reading near grade level.”

  “And Mr. Tomlinson was your greatest advocate...”

  “Until his little girl got pregnant.”

  “That does tend to taint someone’s perspective.”

  “So what changed?” Horse stood. He put his hands on his hips and shook his head back and forth, trying to contain his frustration. “He got used to success and wasn’t ready for her to take a step back.”

  “It was not your place to have that conversation.”

  “If I had advised her to go to college,” Horse said, “that would be okay. If I had advised her to get a job and work hard, that would be okay. What’s the difference?”

  “Counseling someone on having a child?”

  “What, you don’t think that’s as important as choosing a good college?”

  “Too important.”

  “Too important to disagree with the parent.”

  “You are NOT the parent.”

  “She was afraid to talk to her parent.”

  “That does not mean you step into the void.”

  “This is because a girl in trouble needed information.”

  “She needed advice. She needed someone to hold her hand. She came to you.”

  “And I did none of those things. I told her to go to her father. I gave her information about her legal choices. Had I said nothing, would that have been better? More humane?”

  “You told her that she already knew what to do.”

  “She did.”

  “And you did not dissuade her.”

  “So I should have told her NOT to have the abortion? Isn’t that a position?”

  “You should have said nothing.”

  “That’s where we are?”

  “Stick to Jeffery Boocher and his disorganization.”

  “Maybe that’s too much. Perhaps I’m persecuting him for thinking non-linearly.”

  “Say nothing,” Wells said. He looked Horse straight in the eye and used a clear, firm voice. “Do nothing. Teach reading and writing and math and science.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “Let’s go over some basics,” Horse said to Peter.

  The two sat side by side on a bed in Horse’s guest room, which had housed few guests since he moved into the house thirty years before. A small room painted a color described on the paint can as Arizona Sunset—he had only been able to describe it as a “dusty yellow”—the room was large enough for a single bed, a desk, and a straight-back chair. A few framed pages of Tintin comics hung on the walls. One wall was entirely a built-in bookcase, painted white, and filled with stacks of comic books. Opposite the door was a small window looking out at a bare tree and then the street. No closet.

  In all honesty, it wasn’t a room he liked going into. The room, like the house, had been the idea of someone long out of his life. She had painted the walls and put a bed in for the guests she thought might visit them. There were other plans that came later. After she was gone, so went the opportunities for visitors. Like several rooms in his modest house, it served as storage.

  Now there was this boy.

  It was Saturday. In less than five minutes Horse went through nearly fifty rules, most involving his personal stuff and how he liked things done—don’t touch the large frying pan, which I bought for omelets and is specially seasoned—all of them clear. You are to be as little of a disruption to my life as possible, seemed to sum them all up.

  “Okay,” the boy said at the end.

  “Are you going to remember them all?” Horse asked. He knows Peter will; the list was devised to test
the extent of his ability to take in details and remember them.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to follow them all?”

  No answer.

  ‘So, he’s honest,’ thought Horse

  And cagey.

  “Why am I here?” the boy asked.

  “Is that a philosophical question?”

  Horse leaned slightly forward, enough to put weight on the hands that rested on his knees. His back hunched, his eyes wandered down on the head of the boy. Everything was meant to invade the boy’s personal space.

  Peter looked up, not intimidated.

  “No. Why did you take me in?”

  Moving his gaze out the door and into the hall, the man replied, “You’re going to be bounced around quite a bit while this thing with your dad plays itself out. I think it’s important that you go to school; the same school you have been going to and, hopefully, will go to in the future.”

  “I see.”

  Peter did not believe him. They both knew it.

  Horse got up.

  Peter’s lone bag sat on a rather dull quilt Horse had gotten from a grateful but talentless parent, in appreciation for helping her talentless daughter. It covered a mattress that lay on an iron frame, both salvaged from the Copley Hospital in Morrisville when it was renovated decades prior. The bed was springy, and every shift in weight created a slight, distracting movement. Both of them became agitated by it, but were not ready to move.

  “Where’s your Dad?” Horse asked, lightly, as if asking the boy his favorite baseball team.

  “Is that why I’m here?”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No.” Peter looked at him, hard. “I’ll go now if this is all you’re going to talk about.”

  The man looked down at the boy and smiled.

  “I just want to know if I need to sleep with a gun for protection against a twelve-year-old psychopath sleeping a few rooms away.”

  “You should,” Peter said, “but it would have nothing to do with my dad.”

  “Okay, then.” Horse said. “Then we have an understanding.”

  He stood up and a single step brought him into the doorway. Turning, he asked, “Is that all you have?” Horse looked at the lone bag, black and adorned with a Nike logo. The kid was wearing the same clothes he had worn on Wednesday.

  “Yeah.”

  “School books?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll fix that.”

  Horse took a last look at him. “Come down when you’re hungry.”

  “You have a lot of comic books,” Peter said, coming into the kitchen while Horse made an omelet. Horse’s back was to Peter, but the kid could hear the sound of a fork mixing eggs in a porcelain bowl. On the counter was a pile of eggshells. Peter estimated six eggs, and felt anxious as a bit of yoke dropped onto the tile top.

  “It’s for reluctant readers,” the teacher explained.

  “Like me?”

  “I don’t think you’re reluctant.” He continued to mix the eggs with his back to the boy. “I think you can’t read because of your disability.”

  “What disability is that?”

  Approaching Horse as he said it, the boy scooped up the shells and moved back to the other side of the kitchen. He stood there, a handful of shells, scanning.

  “Compost?” Horse asked.

  The boy nodded, which Horse could not see but he knew the kid was doing it.

  “I put it in the cabinet behind you.”

  Peter looked down at the pile of broken eggshells. Yoke covered his hands; first cold fluid, and then a sticky hardening. Without putting them down he could not open the cabinet, but if he did put them down he knew he would dirty the counter.

  Frozen, he stood still.

  Horse turned around and mercifully opened the cabinet door, then took the top of the compost bucket off. As the boy unloaded the shells, Horse dropped the metal cover onto the tile countertop.

  Clang.

  Peter flinched.

  ‘The boy has sensitive ears,’ Horse thought, noticing his reaction as he turned and back to the omelet mix. Of course, all this had been a test—from the eggshells to the dropping of the cover.

  His haphazard diagnosis techniques drove Wells mad. “You don’t have a psychology degree,” his boss had said to him years before. “No, but I read a lot of self-help and pop-psychology books.” To Horse, Wells epitomized many of the worst traits in educators—bad scientists and bleeding hearts. The administrators, coordinators, and consultants had reams of data on each kid, but their conclusions often didn’t match the data, and the solution didn’t match either of those. In the end, the adults ran around (“blowing noses and putting on band-aids”, Horse had said) in response to those the system was failing. To Wells, Horse’s methods were bad science. Does it matter if I get the disorder wrong? Horse grunted over beers one evening. None of it was official, he reasoned. In response, Wells had said that if they couldn’t match the right cure to the right disease he’d rather the school did no harm. Knowing there’s a problem and doing nothing, that’s the harm, was Horse’s reply.

  “Hypersensitivity.” Horse was ready to make an omelet.

  “What?”

  “Your diagnosis.” Taking the bowl, he poured a cup of batter in the already heated pan. Jerking his pan back and forth across the electric element on the stove, the glob of egg congealed with the heat, with each change in direction smooshing the bits together, puffing it all with air and fusing them into a whole, fluffy meal. “You see all of the letters on the page at once.”

  “How do you know this?” Standing by the table, Peter gave a sideways glance at the file on the table. “No one mentioned it before.”

  “Nobody tells kids anything,” was Horse’s reply. Then, he reminded Peter about his comment about the unshaven hairs on his neck.

  “That’s it?” Peter asked. “Aren’t there tests to take?”

  “You’ve taken them all.” He flipped the omelet in the pan.

  “Are you sure that’s it. Hypersensitivity?”

  “I am now. With a touch of OCD—obsessive compulsive disorder, I think.”

  The old man stopped moving the pan, letting it sit for a moment. Feeling that Peter was confused, Horse halted his poking at the pan, turned and looked him straight in the eye. “Before you got up I hid the compost bucket.”

  Peter turned and looked at the now closed cabinet.

  “You can take the bucket out and put it over there.” Horse pointed with his fork at a spot of counter next to the refrigerator. “I figured you would notice the eggshells. Being hypersensitive, you’d immediately want order in an otherwise orderly kitchen. That’s a little OCD, too. Once in your hand, you’d be disgusted by the tactile nature of the eggshells. Unable to find a compost container, you’d be conflicted; new house so you don’t want to be rude, but you have to get those shells out of your hand without making a second messy counter. Well, fear of being rude, really, because hypersensitivity is often a result of early childhood trauma.”

  “Like an unsafe home.”

  “Exactly.” Pan in hand, Horse used his fork to push the omelet onto a plate. On that, he sprinked a bit of grated cheese.

  “How did you know I’d want a compost bucket, and not just throw them into the garbage?”

  “You had a compost bucket in Dan’s kitchen. I also noticed the fresh compost bin in the backyard.” Pan in one hand, he carried the plate to the table besides the file folder.

  “When you poked the snow for Dan?” Peter added, more of a probing statement than a mere question. He looked down at the plate.

  “Yes.”

  “If I’m hypersensitive, why didn’t I notice there was no compost bucket?”

  “You see everything, but without a need for it—without context—it has no meaning. You aren’t photographic, or omniscient. Once you had a handful of eggs, your brain scanned everywhere for relief.”

  “Again, why didn’t I use the garbage?”
r />   “One, habit. Two, I hid that, too.”

  “That’s what you base your diagnosis on?”

  “I’ve been teaching longer than you’ve been alive.”

  “You think you’re right, don’t you?”

  Horse smiled and looked down at the table. “Context,” he said.

  “I need a fork.” As the words left his mouth, he realized what the old man had done. “A test?”

  “Eat,” he commanded.

  Nearly two inches thick, a file lay next to the plate. Worn and well used, it had Peter’s name at the top—Johnson, Peter—and seven photos of the boy stuck to the side. From the top sprouted the edges of papers. Peter looked at the photos—he was a year older in each one—and noted that each was from the school’s Picture Day. He only noted how happy he was in each photo. Staring, he tried to think what the younger versions of him were thinking about.

  Probably Dan.

  “Why the photos?” Peter asked.

  Horse had his back to the kid, bent over the stove making another omelet. “State law. If you get yourself kidnapped, we have a photo to identify the body when it turns up. The Picture Day photo companies give us those stickers for free, and in exchange we let them come in and profit off of emotional parents and grandparents who like near-lifelike images of the small children they can’t stand in person.”

  “You aren’t supposed to take that out of the office.” Peter pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. Transfixed by the file, he forgot to get a fork.

  “No?”

  “There’s a sign taped at the top of each file cabinet in the Record Room.”

  ‘Which is true,’ Horse thinks.

  In Ms. Binnis’ neat handwriting, written with a black Vis-A-Vis marker on a white three-by-five index card, lined side out, was written Files Not to Leave Room Without Permission. That the Record Room is a closet slightly larger than the fire-safe filing cabinets—marked Record Room in Ms. Binnis’ same neat handwriting, written on what Horse assumes is an index card from the same pack and taped to the door—makes removal a near certainty. Most take their needed files to the Administrative Conference Room down the hall, and let Ms. Binnis know. Ms. Binnis wasn’t at her desk when Horse came for the file; of course, he knew that when he went. Had he told her he was taking it, she would have tipped off Wells, who would have stopped him from taking on Peter as a temporary foster parent.