Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  The best feature of the schoolhouse was its southeast wall, which consisted mainly of three large windows made up of sixteen small panes apiece. Through these poured an enormous flood of light, even in the winter—which was a very good thing because, as I have already mentioned, electricity did not come to Lost Nation Hollow until 1952, when I turned ten, and the school was not electrified until 1955.

  Centered over the double doors of the Lost Nation Atheneum was a plaque from Montpelier, the state capital, that said: “Superior School, 1937.” My grandfather said 1937 was probably the last time anyone from Away had ventured up into Lost Nation to inspect the Atheneum, though Kingdom County’s Superintendent of Schools, Prof Newt Chadburn, dropped by once a month or so—to make sure the roof was still on the building, my grandfather said.

  During the course of any given school year, the Atheneum’s enrollment varied dramatically. Sometimes I attended school with as many as thirty other pupils. At other times, such as during potato harvesting and maple sugaring, the number of kids in attendance dropped to as few as half a dozen. Of course chores at home were never an excuse for me to stay out of school. Neither was the most severe weather. No day, however bad, was ever deemed too inclement for a Kittredge to attend school. Nor were minor childhood ailments regarded as a valid excuse to stay home. “None of my children has ever been sick a day in their lives,” my grandmother periodically announced in a way that made me strongly suspect that it would not fare well with a grandson who broke that rugged tradition. In fact, I missed only one day of school during my eight years at the Atheneum, and that was to attend the court hearing in Kingdom Common over the matter of my grandfather’s dam and my grandmother’s apple orchard.

  How much I learned at the Atheneum is another matter. By the end of my sixth-grade year I’d raced through the entire curriculum, including Vermont history and elementary algebra. For the next two years I was pretty much allowed to read at random in a set of the Harvard Classics donated to the school by my Big Aunt Maiden Rose, who had taught there for fifty years, and to roam around in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, also presented to the school some years ago by my great-aunt. Prof Chadburn was kind enough to lend me books from his own extensive library, and my father, my Uncle Rob Roy, and my little aunts were forever presenting me with favorite books of their own. Certainly there are worse ways to spend one’s seventh- and eighth-grade years than by reading Dickens and Twain and accounts in the celebrated Britannica of the far-flung and exotic places I hoped someday to visit.

  But I do not want to make my years at the Lost Nation Atheneum sound idyllic. They were far from it. Even during the late 1940s and on into the 1950s, most of the outlying country schools in Kingdom County still had reputations as very rough places, where the code of behavior among the pupils was quite literally a tooth for a tooth. Our school was no exception. With the prickly outer shells that fell off the horse chestnut tree in late September, we played a primitive and brutal kind of dodge ball. In the winter we fired ice balls at each other, hard and from a close range. We slid down the Fiddler’s Elbow on sheets of cardboard and, when it was crusty, on our own bottoms, sailing off the hairpin bend into a great tangle of barberry bushes with the tiny bright red berries still clinging to their thorny branches. There were quarrels and fist fights and several feuds lasting for years; and all of these activities were presided over by three entrenched bullies: Hermie Hill, Pit Santaw, and Big Bob Thompkins, who lorded over us kids in the schoolyard the way, years later, he was reported to lord over his fellow prisoners in the exercise yard of Windsor State Penitentiary.

  True, some of the older students occasionally helped the younger ones with their lessons. Yet at Lost Nation there was much less of this admirable cooperative learning than I have since heard cited as one of the great merits of the one-room school—another being a close-knit family atmosphere. Maybe under the tutelage of my Big Aunt Rose such an atmosphere had existed. But if Hermie, Pit, Big Bob, and the rest of the outfit I went to school with resembled a family in any way at all, they did so only insofar as they fought tooth and nail with each other at every available opportunity.

  The Atheneum could be rough on teachers as well. After my Aunt Rose retired in 1945, the school went through a long string of them, and none lasted for more than a year. I personally recall several unsuspecting young women fresh out of school themselves, and barely out of their teens, whose faces have long since blended together in my memory into a generic expression of terror. It was as if Kingdom County’s long-standing reputation as a last New England frontier and a bastion for outlawry had devolved to a few bad schoolboys, who were determined to establish their notoriety by driving Lost Nation teachers “down the road”—as we said—before they had a chance to teach us anything.

  Two or three young men brought in by Prof Chadburn and the local school directors fared no better. In the late winter of my sixth-grade year, the year I was eleven, a man imported from New York State was beaten so badly by Hermie Hill and his cronies that he not only lost several teeth but the sight in his left eye as well. His successor, another of those hapless young women, was nailed up inside the girls’ privy late one April afternoon. No one discovered her until we came to school the following morning.

  After Miss Fennel spent the night in the privy, the Lost Nation school directors and Prof Chadburn advertised all over the state for a teacher who could keep order. In the meantime Prof himself taught us, an arrangement very much to our liking. Prof was a vigorous man in his early sixties, and a born teacher. Every afternoon after we’d finished our recitations for the day he read to us from his own favorite authors: Charles Dudley Warner, George Peck, Booth Tarkington, Francis Parkman. He had us memorize poetry, which we actually enjoyed. At recess time Prof rolled up his sleeves and played ball with us in the schoolyard. He was a well-set-up man who had “been in the war”—which war was never clear to me at the time, though I now assume it must have been the World War I. No one sassed Prof Chadburn, not even Hermie. Prof “knew jujitsu,” and could pin the biggest boy on his back in five seconds flat.

  Prof introduced friendly competition to the classroom. He conducted elaborate spelling and geography bees, with presents for the winners in every grade: boxes of Good ’n Plenties from the five-and-dime in the Common; a slightly scuffed baseball; brand-new quarters and fifty-cent pieces. Sometimes, in order to make time to visit the other eighteen schools in his district, he would let us out for the day at noon. Suddenly school had become fun. We hoped the directors would come up empty-handed in their search for a new teacher so that we could have Prof for the few remaining weeks of the school year.

  One warm afternoon in early May, when the maple trees were just putting out and the hills above Lost Nation Hollow were light gold with tiny new leaves, a battered old Ford rattletrap coughed and sputtered its way up the Fiddler’s Elbow. It pulled into the schoolyard and came to a stop with a shudder beside Prof’s Buick Roadmaster. Mr. Francis Dubois, Theresa Dubois’s father and the chairman of the school board, got out. With him was a big, beefy, red-faced woman of about forty—the driver of the rattletrap.

  Prof, who liked to tailor his lessons to the cycle of the seasons, happened to be helping us memorize Robert Frost’s short poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” He had just gotten us through the first two lines—“Nature’s first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold”—when Mr. Francis Dubois and the husky woman came through the door. She was wearing a bright green dress decorated with large purple flowers. She walked with a slight limp and carried a thick, green-handled cattle cane. In her other hand she held a very large, black metal lunch box.

  “This is Mrs. Earla Armstrong,” Mr. Dubois said to us. “She’s your new teacher.”

  He added, “We hired Mrs. Armstrong just this morning, Prof. I didn’t want to let her get away from us so I rode right up with her.”

  Mrs. Armstrong slammed her huge lunch box down on the teacher’s desk. “I’ll take the reins fr
om here,” she said in a deep, angry voice. “You two boys can skedaddle.”

  Prof looked somewhat discomposed. But he shut up his Robert Frost book, and after a few hasty words of farewell to us, and a brief welcome to Mrs. Armstrong, he drove Mr. Dubois back off down the Hollow in his Buick. Mrs. Armstrong watched them out the window, her hands on her hips, a look of disgust on her face.

  “What was that fella reading when I walked in?” she demanded after Prof and Mr. Dubois disappeared around the bend halfway down the hill.

  “He was reading us a poem,” somebody said.

  She nodded grimly. “I suspected as much. Well, that will be the last poetry recitation in this school for as long as I’m teacher here.”

  And it is a fact that not only was that the last poetry read aloud in the Atheneum for the next two years, it was the last time anyone read us anything.

  Mrs. Armstrong wrote her name on the chalkboard in large, intimidating capital letters. She turned back to face us. “My name is Armstrong,” she said. “And you’ll find that I have a strong arm.”

  She surveyed the class with marked disfavor. Very deliberately, she began to roll up the sleeve of her purple-flowered dress, revealing to us an arm that resembled nothing so much as that Herculean limb depicted on the outside of the red-and-yellow baking soda box in my grandmother’s kitchen cupboard.

  “So,” Mrs. Armstrong said. “Reports have it that you young rapscallions up here in the Nation put out your teachers’ eyes. Who proposes to put out my eye this morning?”

  She pointed her cow cane straight at beautiful, blond, sweet-tempered Theresa Dubois. “You, girl. What’s your name?”

  Theresa told her in a small, terrified voice.

  “Speak up! I won’t have mumbling in my classroom.”

  “Theresa Dubois, ma’am.”

  “Well, Theresa Dubois. Do you propose to put out my eye?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Good. Because if you do, you’ll feel the arm. You,” she said, swinging around faster than you would suppose a woman of such bulk could move. The green-handled cane was pointed straight at Johnny Pray, an undergrown little first-grader. “Do you propose to put out my eye?”

  Johnny promptly burst into tears. Within seconds he was joined by most of the rest of the first- and second-graders.

  “Hush!” Mrs. Armstrong commanded. “There’ll be no bawling in my schoolroom—or you’ll feel the arm.”

  The crying subsided into a few stifled sobs.

  “Now then,” Mrs. Armstrong said. “Report has it that you hoodlums lock up your teachers in privies. You, Kittredge . . . Where’s Kittredge?”

  I was almost too astonished to raise my hand. How had she learned my name?

  She peered at me out of her reddish eyes. “You’re the famous reader I’ve been told about,” she said with a sneer. “Don’t look so surprised, boy. Word travels. Reports travel. Do you intend to lock me up in the privy?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “No, ma’am is right,” she said. “Or you’ll feel the arm. There’ll be no favorites and no famous readers in this classroom from this minute on. My own children wouldn’t be allowed to put on such airs and you won’t, either. Not in my classroom.”

  She glared around the room until her gaze came to rest on Hermie Hill. Hermie was guffawing behind his hand over my comeuppance.

  To this day I do not know whether Mr. Francis Dubois had warned Mrs. Armstrong about Hermie. Allegedly, he was the boy who had put out the man teacher’s eye, and the ringleader of the kids who locked Miss Fennel in the privy. Obviously Mr. Dubois had boasted to Mrs. Armstrong about my being a famous reader. He may very well also have cautioned Mrs. Armstrong about Hermie. But there is no doubt in my mind that our new teacher must have planned something drastic from the moment she laid eyes on the bully.

  Without a word she descended from the teacher’s platform and limped down the aisle to Hermie’s desk.

  “Stand up,” she said.

  Hermie got to his feet, still snickering. Although Hermie Hill was as tall as most men, Earla Armstrong stood eye to eye with him and outweighed him by more than fifty pounds. Total silence had fallen over the classroom.

  Mrs. Armstrong slowly lifted her cane to about shoulder level. “Do you propose to lock me in the privy?” she said.

  “No, ma’am,” Hermie said boldly.

  “Then why are you laughing?”

  “Because,” Hermie sang out loudly for the benefit of the entire class, “I misdoubt you’d fit inside it.”

  Instantly Earla Armstrong struck Hermie Hill. But not with the lifted cane. The cane was a ruse to distract his attention. She struck him with her other fist, full in the face, as hard as I had ever seen anyone hit, and this in a place and at a time when fist fights were common occurrences.

  Hermie went over backward. Mrs. Armstrong was on him like a cat on a mouse. She grabbed him by the shirt collar and one leg and lugged him to the boys’ door and heaved him bodily out into the schoolyard. “Don’t you ever come back here!” she shouted.

  And that was the last Lost Nation Atheneum saw of Hermie Hill, and the way Mrs. Earla Armstrong established order in our school.

  Who was this woman I was destined to go to school to for the next two years? By degrees, her story filtered down to us. In plainest terms, she was a hardworking widow from the neighboring township of Pond in the Sky, who had taught several terms of school years ago, before she was married. Her husband, Nort Armstrong, had died last year, leaving Earla with an impoverished hill farm and six kids. My Uncle Rob Roy mentioned at a Sunday dinner at the Farm that it was rumored that old Nort had succumbed to husband-beatings, but my grandfather said that more probably Nort just faded out of the picture.

  It was evident to all of us from the day Mrs. Armstrong arrived with Mr. Francis Dubois, sailing into the classroom in that bright green dress overrun with big poisonous-looking purple flowers, that the school directors had not hired her for her pedagogical qualifications. It was not just that she had never graduated from high school. Many capable country teachers in those days had never attended high school a day in their lives. Earla Armstrong, however, was profoundly and militantly ignorant. More than once she boasted—with me in mind, I am sure—that she had never read a book through for pleasure in her entire life.

  Mrs. Armstrong’s teaching techniques were rudimentary. She claimed to believe in the basics. What this meant is that we worked in our books for hours on end while she sat enthroned at her desk, sipping from her gigantic black thermos, which, we quickly surmised, contained something much stronger than coffee. At unpredictable intervals she descended to prowl the aisle with her cattle cane, with which she did not hesitate to thwack us, hard and repeatedly, for real or imagined offenses.

  When her cane wasn’t handy, Mrs. Armstrong administered a series of esoteric lesser punishments of obscure nationalistic origin, which she claimed to have learned from watching “the Saturday night wrastling” on television during a stint as a waitress at the notorious Hapwell House in Pond in the Sky. (A bouncer was more like it, Uncle Rob said.) There was the Indian wrist burn, a corrective measure that necessitated her grasping our wrists in both her hands and rubbing them raw and red with a corrosive pipe-wrench motion. A somewhat similar operation known as the Dutch rub involved scouring her clenched fist over the sensitive spot at the crown of our heads for two or three minutes while holding us fast in a headlock and suffusing our olfactory senses with the redolence of sweat, chalkdust, and, if it was past ten o’clock, the sweetish fumes of the gin with which she laced her coffee.

  “Now we will take up world geography,” Mrs. Armstrong would rip out on days when she’d had frequent recourse to the black thermos; and we would fall victim to the Chinese armlock, the Hindu neck stretch, and the Borneo thumb splint.

  The most painful of these torments was the Hungarian dead finger. I have no idea where Mrs. Armstrong picked this up, but she resorted to the dead finger frequently, and
with great effectiveness, particularly on the younger pupils.

  “Hungarian dead finger!” she would announce, and start to shake her left wrist and fingers like a southpaw pitcher performing some sort of outlandish warm-up exercise. When her fingers were flapping loose and fast, she gripped the first two digits under her thumb, and tucked in her pinky, leaving her ring finger vibrating at a furious rate. Then she would raise her arm, turn her wrist over and outward, and deliver a vicious crack on the head to the nearest malefactor. The blow was all the more anguishing because of the hard, shiny wedding band she wore on her vibrating dead finger.

  All I can say on Mrs. Armstrong’s behalf is that, her additional farm chores at home considered, she was indeed a hard worker; and that although she picked on some of us more than others, she had no favorites. Sooner or later during the course of any given week, we all came in for a dose of her sadistic brand of discipline.

  “She keeps good order,” my grandfather said when I complained to him. “You have to give her that.”

  His assessment more or less summarized the entire township’s attitude toward Earla Armstrong. She’d been hired to keep order and keep order she did. Hers was a roughshod, Draconian brand of government; it was tyrannical and arbitrary and often cruel. But she kept order and in the Lost Nation of my youth, that, like being a hard worker, excused a great many other shortcomings, including a teacher’s total unfitness to teach anything but fear and hatred. As I look back now on our two years under her tutelage, I believe that we pupils were a sort of Lost Nation ourselves. We were lost in a wilderness of ignorance, with no Moses to lead us out. Only Earla Armstrong.

  One hot afternoon in the early fall of my eighth-grade year, when both of the doors of the school stood wide open, I happened to look around and see a strange boy standing in the girls’ entranceway. I put up my hand, and finally got Mrs. Armstrong’s attention. “Somebody’s at the door,” I said.