by Kurt Caswell
It came to me just then, a bit oddly, that it was true what George said. Everyone in the room except me had beautiful white teeth, all the more white and clean against their darker skin. Few white people had teeth that white, and mine were straight and healthy, the dentist always said so, but they were dullish and discolored in comparison. Was George simply asking about an ethnic difference he’d observed? Or was he insulting me?
I tried to pull myself together. I tried to regain control of the class, to redirect the students to our subject.
“All right!” I said, raising my voice. “That’s enough! Let’s get back to our lesson.”
I remembered the homework, the assignment I would give from their textbook. Perhaps they would settle down if they just had something to keep them busy. They could use the rest of the class time for quiet, individual work. At least that might take the heat off me.
“I want you to take out your textbooks,” I said. “You’ll have some homework tonight, so you might as well start on it now.”
“We don’t got no books,” Jolanda said.
“Yeah, and we don’t want none,” said Maria.
“Sure you do,” I said. “Every class has a textbook.”
“No, we don’t,” Maria and Jolanda said at the same time. They looked at each other and grinned.
“Yes, you do. Take out your books,” I ordered.
“There ain’t none,” said Clemson. “Really, Mr. Caswell. We don’t got none.”
I still didn’t believe them, but we weren’t getting anywhere. I would have to make up something for them to do, fast.
Then I had a moment of teacherly brilliance, or so I thought. If the class was not going my way, I would ask them what they wanted to do, and make it go their way. Then they would have nothing to complain about. This is a mistake many new teachers make, giving up control of the classroom to the class. It’s especially true when teaching middle school, because middle schoolers have no idea what they want, and whatever they say they want changes the moment they say it. This is a generalization, of course, but it’s true. In any case, I’d already lost control, so it didn’t matter.
“Okay,” I said. “Then your homework is to write two pages in your journal about what you think we should do this semester in language arts class. You have to start now.”
I looked at the clock. Most of the class period had slipped away into chaos, and we’d accomplished practically nothing. What a failure, I thought. I couldn’t let this happen again.
“We’ve got ten minutes left,” I said. “The more you write now, the less you have to write at home.”
“We can say anything?” Clemson asked.
“Anything,” I said. “Write down what you think we should do in this class until December.”
“All right!” Clemson said, and went straight to work on it.
Most of the class got out their journals and a pen, and some of them started writing. Others began drawing. Clemson wrote steadily, glancing up at me and then at Caleb, who sat back on his chair watching the clock.
A few minutes passed in silence. Good, I thought. I think I understand how this works now. Put them to work. Don’t allow them to have any idle time. That’s how to do it. Keep them busy.
Then Maria said, “What’re we supposed to write about?”
“Yeah,” said Jolanda. “What’re we supposed to write about?”
“I just told you,” I said. “Write about what you think we should do this semester. Do you think we should read a lot, write a lot, or both equally? Do you think we should practice spelling and grammar? Do you think we should study poetry or fiction? Do you think we should go outside often and write in the outdoors? Do you want to read stories aloud to each other, or silently to yourselves, or both? Do you want to watch movies too? Tell me what you want to do most.”
The room was silent again, and almost everyone was writing. Maria still hadn’t written anything, but she seemed to be thinking, thinking hard, her pen in hand, poised to make the first words out on the page.
“Hey, can I use a pencil, Mr. Caswell, or do I gotta use a pen?” asked Samuel Smith.
“Sure, you can use a pencil. I don’t care. Whatever you like best,” I said.
“I don’t got nothin’ to write about,” Maria said suddenly.
“Yeah, me too. And I don’t wanna do it anyways,” Jolanda said, and put her journal away in protest.
“Me too,” said Maria. “I’m not doin’ it.”
“Hey, Mr. Caswell,” Caleb said, sitting forward on his chair. “You got a woman?”
Everyone laughed.
I shook my head and looked down. I wasn’t going to respond to that question. Caleb wasn’t interested in my personal life. The question was just his way of trying to regain power, power I wasn’t going to let him have.
“Get to work, Caleb,” I said. “You’ve got only a few minutes left.”
Then George raised his hand again. It had worked the first time, he probably thought, so he might as well try it again. Everyone looked at him, waiting for his question. He smiled big, his white teeth like porcelain.
“Yes, George?” I said, a bit wiser, a bit warier, but willing. “What do ya got?”
“Or,” he said, employing a dramatic pause, “you got a man?”
The class roared with laughter.
“Goddamn it!” I said. “This room better be quiet until the end of class!”
I felt the heat of my frustration and anger surging into my face. Maybe I was turning red. I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t meant to curse. It just came out. I was certain these kids had heard “Goddamn it” before, but it was likely they had never heard their teacher cuss at them in the classroom. Maybe. I didn’t know. Caleb and George snickered, not because I had cursed, but because they knew I was at the edge of my temper. I didn’t think I had much of a temper, but maybe it just hadn’t been tested in awhile, because now I felt myself trying to hold it in. I wanted to take hold of that little shit, George, and bloody him real bad. I looked at the clock. Six more minutes. When was it going to end? I wanted it to end. At first, time had whizzed by, and now it seemed to drag on and on forever. I didn’t care if they learned anything anymore. I just wanted it to end.
Miraculously, the last few minutes leaked away, and the kids got up, gathered their things, and went out the door. Was I supposed to dismiss them? Was I supposed to say goodbye to them? Was I supposed to wish them a fine day and happy studying, be careful and say I looked forward to our next class? I didn’t. Good riddance, I thought.
I stalked around inside the empty room like a caged animal. I felt violent and defeated, cornered and desperate. I had to cool off. Another class would be coming in, a science class, and I had to walk out that door now and down the hallway through the kids crowding at their lockers, the entire middle school. I knew if my anger was visible, the word would get out that I could be easily defeated. Likely, the word would get out anyway.
I had not finished my lesson, of course. I had not really even started. All I had taught my class today was that they could tip me over the edge, that I had little defense against them. They had tested the boundaries of my anger, and now they knew right where to find it. I didn’t think of myself as an angry person, but I was angry now. I was angry that I had allowed them to make me angry. No real teacher would allow that to happen. No real teacher would curse at his students. No real teacher would treat his students that way, no matter how they behaved. I wondered if news of my cussing at the kids would get back to Bob King. Maybe I’d lose my job over it. If that happened, maybe it would be for the best. I could transform my anger into action. I didn’t have to stay here. I wouldn’t stay here in this miserable place. I’d pack up and leave. I imagined the sequence of events that would lead me down the road and back north. My anger cooled. And cooled some more. I’d find something else to do. Maybe find my way back to Japan, or even try teaching in China. I knew I could handle that. More likely I’d quit teaching all together. I never
wanted to be a teacher anyway.
I walked out of the classroom into the fray of kids in the hallway, confident that I would soon be moving on.
The school day ended. I assembled outside with the rest of the teachers to help monitor the kids as they got onto the buses. I stood next to Lauren Sittnick.
Lauren had not been living in Navajoland for very long either, just since last spring. She was from South Carolina, and fell in love with Phil Sittnick, who had been teaching at Laguna Middle School at Laguna Pueblo for some half dozen years. They met at the same place I met them and Mary Juzwik: the Bread Loaf School of English, a master’s degree program designed for working teachers, at Middlebury College in Vermont. Lauren suffered through a winter deliriously in love and in the spring told her principal that he should start looking for someone else because she was moving to New Mexico. She found work at Borrego during the final months of the previous school year. Lauren’s friends called her “Ren.” When she moved to the desert, Phil was fond of saying that she had gone from being a Carolina wren to a cactus wren. I liked that, as cute as it was.
Lauren had kind, warm eyes and an innocent manner. Until I got to know her, I thought of Lauren as spacey, naive, a little childlike, but that lightness had more to do with her willingness to bend, her openness to new ideas, the generous way in which she withdrew her force of character to allow the people around her to be themselves. Good qualities for teaching. She wanted children with Phil, she once told me, but for now she channeled all her motherly energy into her classroom. She believed very deeply in the power of education, especially in mastering the art of reading. For her, the world was a closed book, and learning to read was the key to opening it. She didn’t read very well as a child, she told me, but when she finally did learn, a world of information and opportunity came alive for her. She read as much as she could because the more she read, the more she discovered. Her world grew larger and more tragic and more beautiful. Naturally, she became a teacher to help children learn to read. And she was a masterful teacher.
“Are you all right?” she said. She let a little silence go between us. She could see it in my face. Then she said, by way of comfort, “How was your first day in the classroom?”
“It was okay,” I said. “I don’t know. I mean it wasn’t okay. It didn’t go very well.”
“It will get easier,” she said. “They’re testing you.”
“Well, I didn’t pass,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve been teaching a long time, and I’ve never had to endure anything like this. Some of these kids are really angry. Really mean. It’s not you. It’s not your fault.”
“I don’t know if I’m cut out for this,” I said.
“They’re testing you,” she said. “It gets better. A little, anyway. Ask Phil. He’ll tell you. I cried every day after school last spring.” She smiled warmly.
“Really?”
“Really. In fact, I’ll probably cry half the time this semester, too.” She laughed a little, and put her hand on my shoulder. “Just ask whenever you need something. We can help each other.”
The buses pulled away and bounced over the cattle guard.
“One day at a time,” Lauren said. “See you tomorrow.”
I walked back to my duplex apartment on campus. I felt a strange panic in my chest. I had made a mistake in coming here, I thought. Now I needed to figure out how I was going to get out of it. Would Bob King understand if I told him I could not do it? If I quit? I recalled what Louise had told me during my interview: “Some of the teachers we’ve invited out to interview,” she said, “when they get out here and see where Borrego is, they just keep right on going.” Who could blame them? Who could blame me? If I left, I’d just be one more name on that list of people who kept right on going. Or maybe, and better yet, I could come up with a plausible excuse. Someone in my family was dying and I had to return home to Idaho. Or I had proposed to Sakura, and she said yes, but only if I would return to Japan and make my life there. Or, something terrifying and secret had happened, and no one could know about it, but please trust, I’d explain, that I would not do this without good reason. Whatever, in a few years none of it would matter.
Even though my things were unpacked and arranged nicely in the duplex, the space felt unusually cold and foreign to me when I walked in. It felt empty and dead. Something in the air smelled like a sewer. I thought it was just my temperament, but the smell grew stronger as I followed my nose to the bathroom. There, coming up out of the bathtub drain—three inches of water and piss and shit. I stared at it a moment, as if maybe it wasn’t really there, just an illusion, a metaphor I’d constructed in my heated brain. But there it was, and it stank.
This was the end. I really had had enough.
I went out the front door and got into my truck. I drove south on Borrego Pass Road. I concocted a scheme as I drove, a purpose, a destination: I had to make a phone call in Prewitt; I had to buy a few necessaries in the store at the gas station; I had to put gas in my truck. I had to get out. But I drove past Prewitt and west onto Interstate 40. Soon I was in Gallup. I didn’t stop there either. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t. I pressed on and drove to Window Rock. I started to worry that I might not stop driving at all, that I might just drive north until I ran out of road, leaving all my effects in the duplex. Someone could have it all, I thought. I didn’t need any of it. I couldn’t even remember now what was in there, what stuff I owned, what stuff was so important I had humped it all the way south to New Mexico. I drove on through the cool trees on the Fort Defiance Plateau and into Ganado to Mary’s place.
I knocked on the door. She wasn’t home. I dropped the tailgate of my truck and sat on it awhile. Then I lay back and stared at the sky, my legs dangling.
Mary Juzwik taught the eighth grade at Ganado Middle School. This would be her third year teaching on the rez. Her first year, she taught the fifth grade, all subjects, at Kinlichee Boarding School, just a few miles east of Ganado. I admired Mary’s energy and optimism. She could find such excitement and hope in the world as to become giddy, to shake a little in her hands, to laugh recklessly. Of all the people I knew, she had achieved a level of physical and mental toughness that I wanted for myself. I thought of her as impervious to loneliness and pain. Her students in Ganado called her “Miss Just-wicked.” She wore her brown, curly hair cut just above her shoulders. Her face looked always brushed by the desert, her eyes gentle and open. Her ears were tiny little things. She had finished her undergraduate degree in English at Wheaton College, an interdenominational Christian school in Illinois with the motto “For Christ and his Kingdom.” But Mary had not come to the reservation to proselytize; rather, she loved the desert and she loved being outside. She was a runner, a rock climber, a backpacker. She loved big sky and open spaces. In fact, I didn’t know the side of her that would have prospered at a place like Wheaton. She mentioned her experiences there only cursorily, as if she had moved on from that life, moved on from that kind of thinking to a new cosmology founded on a love and respect for nature, perhaps not unlike that of traditional Navajos.
Mary walked up, saw my truck, and came over. She’d been working in her classroom. She seemed to know just what was going on. She invited me in and made me a cup of Navajo tea. I helped her prepare a light meal. We ate and talked and shared the closing hours of the evening. Mary consoled me, she patched me up. She said that her first year teaching Navajo kids went about the same.
“How did you survive it?” I asked, knowing she wouldn’t really have an answer.
“They’ll come around,” she assured me. “It’ll get better. They’re just testing you.”
“That’s what Lauren said.”
“It’s true,” Mary said. “I’ll help you. Whatever you need.”
I felt a little silly for feeling so weak, but better now that Mary offered her help. “All right,” I said. “I don’t like to ask for help, you know.”
“I know. But you have to. Or you won
’t make it here.”
In the morning, I got up before the sun. I had to drive the one hundred miles back to Borrego before my classes started. Mary got up with me, and made me a strong cup of coffee. Before I left she invited me to come back on Friday night and stay for the weekend, to meet some of her friends in Ganado and explore some places she knew. I said I would, gratefully. Now I had something to look forward to.
TWO
SCHOOL DAYS
I heard the big yellow school buses cross over the cattle guard on their way out. It was the double pulse of the tires over the steel grate that drew me, a rhythm I would become so accustomed to I could keep time by it. I looked out the kitchen window and watched as the red lights high on the back of the bus faded out into the milky dawn. Most mornings, I was up early, and I would hear the buses twice, first on their way out, empty and cold, and then on their way in carrying the children, who were the center of everyone’s work and life here. And when I came to know the bus drivers, I also came to know who drove which bus over which route, the drivers making the longer routes departing first, as they came to a stop at the cattle guard, idled a moment, and then pressed out into the darkness.
These were no ordinary school buses. They sat high off the ground on huge knobby tires. They were tightly sprung, so as to negotiate the rough dirt roads. One of them had four-wheel drive, so it was dependable in every kind of weather. When it snowed or rained at Borrego, I listened for the buses, my indication that the weather was or was not going to stop us from holding school. Even on days of questionable weather, however, the children of Borrego had to eat, and there was likely nothing for them at home. Classes would be canceled, but the buses would be trotted out to bring the kids in to breakfast, and then hustle them back home. Such days were known locally as “consommé days.” It was a rare and violent storm indeed that forced Bob King to cancel school completely. But it did happen, like the winter storm some years ago, Bob King told me, when the National Guard air-dropped supplies into Borrego because the snow was so deep no one could get in or out for days. When Navajos were sliding off the roads in the mud and snow, abandoning their vehicles in the ditches, the Borrego buses motored on, delivering the schoolchildren safely to their homes and sometimes collecting people along the way who found themselves unexpectedly on foot. This was an unspoken law of reservation life: never pass by someone on foot on a dirt road. You stopped and offered them a ride because it was not a matter of if, but of when that person on foot would be you.
