Absentee List_An Old Horse Mystery

by Elskan Triumph

  Better to ask forgiveness than seek permission.

  “When were you in the Record Room?” Horse asked.

  “Last year Ms. Binnis was looking for some change for the vending machine, and I followed her.”

  “And you remember?”

  “The sign. Yes.”

  “No, do you remember what you got at the vending machine.”

  “Yes. Yogurt.”

  “How many ounces was the container?”

  “Eight.”

  “Do you eat yogurt a lot?”

  “Not that brand.”

  “Yet you remember the ounces?” The omelet was done, and Horse had slid it from the pan to a plate. Turning his back to the stove, Horse said, “Read the file, if you want.”

  “Am I allowed to do that?”

  “I’m sure it’s in the Constitution or something. Anyway, your name is on it.”

  ‘Who else is it for?’ Horse thought.

  Peter got egg on a few pages, and grease from his fingers on even more. Each bite he stabbed the omelet, and it fell off the fork. Forced to pick pieces off the table, his fingertips got coated with grease. Ignoring the cloth napkin Horse had put out, he wiped them on his pant leg. Then, the boy picked up the fork again, holding it in an unimaginable thicket of fingers and repeated the process.

  Horse watched, noticing that he could not hold or use a fork properly. ‘Lack of small motor skills,’ he thought. ‘I suspect his handwriting is atrocious—all block letters an inch high, written as if in the dark and held between one’s teeth. They should’ve knocked that out of him in first grade.’

  “Why don’t you use the napkin?” he finally asked.

  “I don’t want to get it dirty.”

  Logical reasoning.

  Limited forethought. Greasy pants just means you have to wash the entire pair sooner, instead of wearing them a second day.

  Survival mode.

  “That’s what it’s for,” Horse said.

  “It’s cloth. Too nice to use.”

  “So you use your pants?”

  “I’m not supposed to drop my food.”

  “In theory, you don’t drop your food, so you don’t need a napkin. It stays clean. In reality, you drop your food. Using a napkin means you have to admit you have a problem.”

  No response.

  “In theory, if we teach you to use a fork, the issue is solved,” Horse said. “Or, to use a napkin.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You don’t do you laundry.”

  “I do,” Peter replied.

  This time, Horse had no immediate response.

  Then, “You can do better.”

  CHAPTER 8

  That night Horse went to the Johnson house to get… ‘well, it doesn’t really matter,’ he thought. ‘I’ll make up something.’

  The Festiva skidded as it slowly made its way up the driveway. Surprisingly, the old car was better in the snow than most of the all-wheel drive vehicles on the road; it floated on the snow and ice like a waterbug crossing a river, its diminutive R12 tires spinning the little car upward. At the top, Horse parked it by a snow bank one of Laporte’s plows had created off to the side. Putting on his beaten snowshoes, he tramped around to the back of the house with a spade in his left hand and an old sheetrock bucket swinging from his right. Overcast, there was no moon or stars to guide him, but Horse was loathe to turn on his headlamp; he enjoyed the silent dark of the night.

  Heading straight to the compost bin, Horse looked at the trampled snow from the search they had undertaken earlier. ‘Nothing,’ he thought. He began to dig into the snow covering the compost.

  And then he found the muck. Cold. Hard.

  Slowly, he pushed the feet of snow away, uncovering peels and cores.

  And…

  Paper.

  Twenty years before, the county had embraced recycling and everyone began sorting their trash. With the paper waste went bills—electric, gas, credit card—each one with personal information, neatly sorted away from the crusted yogurt cup and used paper towel. For someone with ill intent, an errant recycling bin might yield a bounty of access to a person’s financial life. Unfortunately, the sort of people who were most likely to take advantage of this spent their Saturdays at the landfill fulfilling the community service portion of their criminal sentences; every week trusting citizens had their light blue recycling bins removed from their trunks by petty felons. All of this was followed by the increasing use of technology in people’s personal lives, where numbers meant access. None of this became a problem until crystal meth infested northern Vermont. Identify theft then became a concern.

  Shredder sales at the local stores rose with news reports about people losing their savings and, worse, their good credit rating, because of sloppy recycling habits and the affinity of meth users for detail work—like rummaging through someone’s old mail and piecing together an identity. Little of that happened locally, but Vermonters are a practical lot. Banks had shredding days, where office paper hoarders dumped a year’s worth of old mail into industrial mobile shredders in the parking lot. People were careful with every piece of mail, and a lot of mental and physical energy was spent in what was supposed to be the age of the paperless office.

  Some, though, simply let the earth do the work. As a teacher Horse was forever shredding documents with CONFIDENTIAL stamped in red at the top—IEPs, 504s, emails and the like. At every meeting, each participant was given a working draft that, at the meeting’s end, needed to be properly disposed of. Over the year, he received hundreds of red stamped documents and they were dutifully put into a locked file drawer—for confidential reasons and away from curious student eyes. He rarely looked at them, but they were there by law. In June, the instructions were to shred what was not being passed to the next teacher. The school had bought a cheap shredder that jammed if more than three pages were pushed through at the same time. Considering every document was at least six pages, it made for a long day of frustration. Then, at the end of one meeting, he watched a special educator from another school simply tear her document by hand into strips. You can do that? Sure, he’d been told. Horse was doubtful, as he had little respect for the woman. That same day, though, he was reading about how to build an indoor compost bin using red worms. It required paper—the worms loved it. ‘A poor man’s shredder,’ Horse had thought. Having his students build a worm box that week, eisenia foetida, commonly known as “red wigglers”, were feasting on Sherman Delecroix’s paperwork on Monday.

  Later, he discovered he wasn’t the only one who did this. Thinking back to his last visit to the Johnsons’ house, he remembered that he had seen recycling bins for cans, glass, and plastic, but not paper.

  Turning on his headlamp, he dug about.

  Scoop.

  Dropping the semi-frozen soggy bits into the bucket, he kept digging.

  More paper.

  In the end, he filled half the bucket before he called it a night.

  In the back of his car, the pulp mix froze overnight.

  Outside of the car, Peter and Horse were fighting.

  “I’m twelve. The law says I can sit in the front.”

  “Back,” Horse commanded. He raised an impatient thumb and jabbed it towards the rear of the car to emphasize the point. The boy opened the back door.

  Peter’s hypersensitivity included smell. In this case, compost. Looking in the back, he saw the bucket.

  “What’s that?” Peter asked, climbing into the back.

  “A bucket of compost,” Horse replied.

  Peter didn’t ask a follow up; Horse was both glad and a bit disappointed in him. Where’s the curiosity, he wondered.

  As students ambled into the classroom Horse had the papers thawing on a back table. Carefully, he peeled them apart and laid them on the table top.

  “Whatchadoing, Mr. H.?” Bart asked. He was fat and looked stupid, but that hid an intelligent mind that saw deep into what he read and made incredible connections. Horse h
as told him that he needed to keep his mouth from hanging open, and to pick up his feet when he walked. “The difference between Yale or carrying heavy stuff for other people,” Horse had described it. Unfortunately, Bart saw himself more as a loser than an Eli. That sentence running together—whatchadoing—only reminded Horse that he had three months to make the kid realize he could go further than stocking Ding-Dongs at the Maplefields down the street.

  “A puzzle,” Horse replied.

  “Can I help?”

  For the next hour the entire class sifted through the mush and reconstructed bills and manifests. The students asked questions, but Horse did not answer a one. When they went off to music at nine-thirty, Horse had a pretty good picture of Dan’s life and financial commitments.

  Dan’s been gone since the fall, he thought, looking at the paper trail.

  “Where have you been?” he muttered to himself.

  An hour later the students came back with energy—the xylophones and tom-toms used in their music theory lesson had wound them up, as they always did—and they danced into the room and Joe Knox jumped up and touched the top of the door frame, landing on the back of Jenny P. who screamed and no one was doing what they are supposed to be doing, which was getting out their journals and answering the prompt Horse had forgotten to put on the board.

  “Hey!”

  It was a loud shout; a shout of last resort.

  The children froze.

  A few tried to slink towards doing the right thing, but by that point Horse wanted them to freeze and listen. His directions were brief:

  “Break into groups of three.”

  And they did. Each he assigned a document. As directed, they moved theirs to a desk. Then, sharing dispensers, they began to tape them and create a whole document. “What if a piece is missing,” someone asked, but his group has already solved the problem. Short bits of tape got stuck to desktops, near invisible. Bad fine motor coordination was on display with wrinkled pieces stuck oddly on the documents. Some people pulled pieces of tape that were too long, which folded back on themselves and were rendered useless. Mark wrapped the tape around his head, pulling the tip of his nose up, making him look like a pig, but the other two members of the group got the job done. After half an hour, Horse had nearly one hundred recreated documents.

  “Who is Phil Plowman?” Joe Knox asked.

  “I don’t know,” Horse answered, but noted the name and the paper Joe’s group reassembled. “This is just scrap paper I turned up.”

  “It kind of smells,” Lucy E. said.

  “This is a logic puzzle and a test of both following directions and fine motor skills.”

  “How’d we do?” Joe asked.

  Horse didn’t reply.

  Walking down the corridor to the kindergarten rooms, Horse felt the world getting smaller. Water fountains were only a foot off of the ground, and the open door to the bathroom revealed a toilet that scraped the floor. Chairs were tiny, pushed into tiny tables, and every sign was positioned level with Horse’s waist; the eye level of a five-year-old.

  He had hoped to talk to Ms. Bing about Peter. Actually, about his father.

  And Phil Plowman.

  “She’s gone,” the janitor said.

  All of the kindergarten and first grade teachers were gone.

  Horse thought about Ms. Bing—she had been teaching for thirty years, so her prep was quite small. She was good at what she did, and just kept doing it. And correcting… that’s something for the upper grades. Kindergarten is about instant feedback; exhausting, but done at the moment.

  “Maybe I should move down,” he muttered, not for the first time. And then he thought about the shoe tying, snot wiping, and “accidents” on top of the most demanding and important job in education. “Perhaps I’m fine.”

  I’ll be back.

  “Going through my compost?” Peter asked as they got into the car to go home.

  Horse said nothing.

  “What do you think we do at lunch?” Peter asked. His tone was cutting; someone with thin trust just betrayed. “Three kids talked to me about the smelly documents, all torn up and with my dad’s name on them, that they spent an hour putting back together.”

  The rest of the ride home was in silence.

  CHAPTER 9

  A dark room.

  Lights out.

  Horse has the projector on, a poem illuminated on the wall: the first stanza of Christopher Marlowe’s “A Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”

  Come live with me and be my love,

  And we will all the pleasure prove

  That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

  Woods, or steepy mountain yields

  They burn into the white board in front of a silent class.

  “Three words: pleasure, prove and yields,” he stated in a quiet voice, followed by a pause that penetrated the minds of these twenty-seven twelve-year-olds. “Actually, it would be more accurate to say a phrase and a word, as pleasure prove works together to produce the yield at the end of the stanza.”

  ‘Cause and effect,’ he thinks. ‘They don’t see how one action causes another in a story. To them, things just happen.’ Inside, he groans.

  “Is there anyone who, at this point, is not snickering?”

  This is where things have gone south before: a single mention of passion and three hours with Wells mitigating another complaint. It’s Marlow! Most parents know already; send them to Jones. As he looks over the uneasy faces of the children before him, he sighs. ‘Oh, well, if someone doesn’t talk about the passion yielding they’ll only find it somewhere else.’

  Taking the file from the office the day before, he had noted that Peter had been unplanned. In response to questions about his birth, Dan had written plainly, We were not ready to raise children. His mother had been quite young—a teenager—while his father—Dan—was a sinewy pistol in his early twenties. Horse had added “pistol” from the other reports he had read; Trooper Danielson had told him a little about the domestic visits they had made when Peter was still in preschool. No charges filed, but bruises noted and, having asked others with longer tenure, they remembered her being afraid. Another of his former students worked at Copely Hospital. On her late Sunday shift she managed to pull her old files and told him, over the phone after Peter was asleep, about the broken hand the emergency room doctor had noted as “suspicious.” Peter himself, she had said, had also been in for various falls, also noted as suspicious. Unofficially, Horse had seen the reports about the accident.

  Peter’s mother dead.

  Father, Dan, seriously hurt.

  Photos from the scene were graphic.

  Trooper Danielson had said many wondered what happened, but nothing could be pursued. A series of foster homes—that was in the school files—before Dan returned from the hospital and took back his kid.

  After the funeral, the files ended. Dan was a new man.

  Or at least he was more discrete.

  “The pagan gods,” he said to the students. “The soul. Those things untamed by modern man. Passion begets passion. And the pleasure of these two lovers produces a passion—it yields a passion—that moves the very earth they sit looking out at.”

  Jones was correcting at a table when Horse wandered into his classroom.

  Although the furniture was different, the basic structure of the room was the same, but in mirror image. From there, things diverged. Instead of a teacher’s desk, Jones used a table. Around the edges of his classroom were more tables, with a circle of chairs dominating the center of the room. Where Horse had bookshelves, Jones had shelves that held projects, and cubbies where students had crammed their binders.

  “I was looking at your classes’ Twentieth Century American Heroes project that you posted in the hallway…” Horse paused for dramatic effect.

  Jones looked up. He wore rectangular glasses and was clean shaven. On his feet were hiking boots and his torso was covered in a dark blue hand-knit sweater that covered a light bl
ue colored oxford. Even as he leaned over his papers, his posture fought his back into an abbreviated slouch. In his soul was the dissatisfaction that came with compromise; he had never planned to be teaching in Grace Haven this long, but he saw no reason to leave. This, he knew, was different from choosing to be here, and at night he found himself restless but unable to act on it and sometimes he drank too much, alone.

  “It’s not like you to look at the works of others. I don’t think I’ve seen you go to a single concert or school play.”

  “As much as I like twelve consecutive renditions of ‘Greensleeves’ on the cracking reed of a clarinet, I find it a good time to use up my sick days.”

  “I believe in honoring the work.” Jones put down his pen.

  “Let’s not get carried away.” Horse walked to the far wall and looked closely at a poster a student had made. It was an attempt to duplicate the cover of a popular young adult novel. As a copy, it wasn’t very good. It evoked no emotion nor communicated anything about the story other than the book had a cover and the student had looked at it. He shook his head and wondered what grade the kid had received. “We are talking about beginner flute recitals and a rousing Beginner Band version of ‘Take the ‘A’ Train’ in four-four beat. Still, there are some interesting pieces in your students’ presentations.”

  “I’m quite proud of them.”

  Horse turned and looked at Jones.

  “About those projects… I was quite impressed with some of the subjects’ obscurity. You should think that Twentieth Century American Heroes would have some obvious choices: Wright Brothers, FDR, Martin Luther King, Jr, Rosa Parks, Lindbergh… But...”

  “Is this one of those times where you come in with pretend praise, but wind up trashing what my class is doing?”