by Ivan Doig
If only I could bottle it for every teacher under my jurisdiction, the fluid passion Morrie put into those class hours of cosmic science. Naturally I would like to think it was the whetstone of daily Latin with me that sharpened his teaching mentality to a razor's edge those times, but that's awfully nearsighted. Much more likely, given the coming of the comet he simply performed up to the role he had been handed, the way a stand-in might deliver better than his best when allowed onto a hallowed stage. Whatever accounted for it, in those winter weeks when the dragon-tailed satellite was racing across its millions of miles toward us, Morrie teetered on the astronomical highest wire-some days more than others, but never did he plummet.
***
"I DID AWAY WITH THE WALLPAPER IN MY PARLOR LAST NIGHT," Kose typically would report in our hushed dialogues these mornings. She practically crackled with energy now that she had another house to maintain counting her attention to Morrie's teacherage, this made three. "I took exception to purple flowers as big as cabbages."
They reminded me of squashed bats, I whispered back. Damon and I were convinced Aunt Eunice decorated that parlor as a chamber of horrors for boys.
Paul, do you know, I'm ever so glad I bought the homestead, Rose rushed on. There is one thing, though. May I ask you something?"
"I—I guess so." I sat forward in my chair at the table, tensed for what deluge might come.
"Plowing." When whispered that way, it did sound mystifying. The isthmus between Rose's eyebrows scrunched into a tiny wrinkle as she reported her perplexity. "The ground just sits there. But every time I ask your father how soon he will start plowing my field, he gets a funny look on his face. So, tell me when does plowing occur?"
"When you can't see frost on the ground by the light of the first full moon after the equinox."
"Oh."
***
"PAUL, PAUL, PAUL." MORRIE RESORTED TO THIS ONLY WHEN my translations were at their most dire.
It was a Friday, and both of us had already had another strenuous week of school. Daylight was lengthening by leaps and bounds now—looking out at the snowless prairie, a person might have declared winter was waning, except that this winter had been on the wane from the start—and the after-school classroom was not quite as cozy with dusk as it had been. Nonetheless, Morrie kept company with my Latin just as if he wouldn't have preferred to be over in the teacherage with his feet up. "Let's try it again. Listen for the footsteps of the language, all right? Veni."
"'I came.'"
"Vidi."
"'I saw.'"
"Vici."
"'I was victorious.'"
"No!" He slumped at his desk. "Why oh why, why would you follow two active verbs with a passive one?" Possibly he had a point. I shrewdly switched to:
"'I got the better of the fight.'"
Pain entered his expression.
"But why not?" I defended. "You keep telling me to look to the root and victoria means 'victory.'"
"Perfectly reasoned," he said tiredly, except that you are resorting to the root of a noun when we happen to be dealing with a transitive verb. Vinco, vincere, et cetera as in invincible in case it has escaped your attention?
I brooded. This had the flavor of Father negotiating with Rose. Try to be logical, and the next thing you knew, terms had shifted shape and left you pawing the air.
Sympathy was not in Morrie's repertoire today Something like a groan came either from his desk chair or him along with his next instruction to me. "The pertinent verb. Look it up." I made the trek to the Latin dictionary one more time and came back.
"'I conquered,'" I conceded. "Morrie?" We had arrived at an understanding that I did not need to call him "Mr. Morgan" in the after-school sessions if no one else was around. "Have you ever been to Rome?"
"Hmm? Rome? Yes, twice—or was it three times," he said absently. As if reminded, he glanced up at me. "The leather trade involved travel, you know."
The thought of going to the Roman heart of things made me breathless. "Did you see the Colosseum and all?"
"Of course. It is a few thousand years past its prime, but still impressive. You can feel the layers of time there," he mused. "Antiquity is a strange commodity. Dilapidation adds to its worth." He caught himself. "We are straying from the topic here." Pulling my pages of homework to him, he did a rapid appraisal. "Conjugations do not particularly bother you, do they."
I shook my head. Amo, amas, amat, all that—much easier playmates than the Drobnys, as far as I was concerned.
"And," he cast a glance over last night's assignment again, "you seem to be quite up on declensions."
I nodded. I gobbled those.
Morrie sat back in his chair and the indeterminate groan came again. "Then why are your translations stiff as a corpse?"
The answer to that was out of my reach. Novice that I was, I didn't fully comprehend he was galloping me through Latin at such an intense pace that my vocabulary was always being left in the dust. With Father's help, I was memorizing ten new words a night. Morrie could spring that many on me in just a couple of his damnable sentences to be translated.
"Here's one for you." I thought I caught an impish gleam in him as he stepped to the blackboard and wrote it out: Lux desiderium univeritatis. It did not look hard, which made me suspicious. "It is one of my favorites," Morrie was saying. "Quite a nice Copernican line." Copernicus was not there to decipher it into English, I was. Morrie looked at me sternly. "A hint. It does not have to be translated into precisely three words, nor does it need to be cumbered up with passive verbs and whatnot into a dozen or more. There's a lovely balance in the middle, to this one. Translate away, discipule."
I worked on it for some while. Knots of language entranced me even then, even through my fumbling and bad splices and hauling in heavy bowlines where I should have been threading slipknots. Finally, I cleared my throat and spoke: "'Everything wants to have light.'"
Morrie pursed his lips, lifted his eyebrows, and eventually shook his head.
"Uh, 'wishes' it," I backpedaled, "'is homesick for' it—"
"Latin is the subject you are purportedly studying at this moment, I believe, Paul, not guesswork," he closed me off. "I want you to keep at this line; it will do you good." Morrie pinched the bridge of his nose, one of his thinking postures. "In dealing with a language you must have an organizing principle. Just remember, in translating always work outward from the word to find its best equivalent in English. You must appropriate another sense of the word if necessary—"
"What's that mean, anyway?" I was grouchy by now, tired of getting ambushed by both languages. "You told me you were appropriating' me when you glommed onto me for the cleanup crew for the supply room, and now it sounds like it means you want me to grab off one word for another. I thought 'appropriate' was nice manners or something."
"It is a homonym, something spelled the same as another word but with a different meaning." He considered for a moment. "In fact, when all is said and done, I suppose it is a multinym." Oh, fun, I despaired to myself, now a word could have any number of meanings.
This was just the kind of thing that always lit Morrie up. "Appropriate behavior, yes," he was merrily counting off on his fingers, "and as a verb of possession, to claim for one's own use, or maybe better, to take possession of. 'Glom onto' is not a bad colloquial rendition, actually. And, not to forget—" He dug in his pocket and flipped a penny to me. "Here, yours to keep. What have I just done?"
"Given? Donated? No, wait, I get it—an appropriation, like the legislature in Helena does with people's money?" Little did I know, then, what an adversary a predatory species called appropriations chairman would prove to be in my life.
"Top mark," Morrie granted, and for the first time all session he looked vaguely satisfied with my progress. "Now then, back to Lux desiderium universitatis—
"WHOA." The command was accompanied by the harness jingle of the dray team pulling to a halt at the front of the school and the familiar screech of the hand brak
e being set. "Slack up, Blue, old fellow." Father always used a stentorian tone on the horses. "Steady there, Snapper." This was a finis to our Latin session neither Morrie nor I had anticipated. Well, at least I had gained a penny on the day.
"Young Cato's chariot awaits," Father announced as he joined us in the schoolroom. "I thought I'd swing by and give Paul a lift home."
"Always glad to see the president of the school board," Morrie greeted him. "Among other glories of office, in charge of replenishing the coal bin, am I right?"
Father found something in a pocket to write coal on, and they visited man-to-man while I went to my desk and gathered my books. I was more than ready to go, but Father was gazing around the room as if visiting a museum. "By the way, Morrie. I don't seem to recall an orrery or a rain gauge in our school budget."
Morrie was grandly dismissive of that. "Don't give it a thought. I have provided them myself. Oliver, you are looking at me crossly."
"It's irregular, to say the least," Father was plainly uncomfortable, "for the teacher to be dipping into his own pocket for classroom equipment. You could have come to the board and—"
"—Walter Stinson would have wanted to know the total history of the orrery and of the solar system as well, and Joe Fletcher would have wondered if a tin can wouldn't catch as much rain as a pluviometer. They are good men, but gradual in making up their minds, aren't they." Morrie gestured upward, his customary field of interest. "Halley's comet and the attending science coincide like this only rarely, as you know. I cannot wait on budget considerations." All at once a helpless smile played across his face. "I have been accused before of being prodigal with my funds. It's not a hanging offense."
"Something has been bothering me," Father came out with, and the way this was going, I set my books back down. "This school and our children are absolutely the best thing Marias Coulee has to offer, but it's plain as day you're used to a higher mental plane." Father's gaze probed around the schoolroom again until coming to rest on the man at the teacher's desk. "Yet here you are. If you don't care a fig for wages or other attainments, what do you gain from this?"
"I'm surprised you need to ask," Morrie responded, indeed blinking a bit. "A job of this nature is a preventative."
It became Father's turn to blink. "Against what, may I ask?"
"The acid of boredom. Surely you have experienced something of the sort, Oliver. The drayage business in the well-worn streets of Manitowoc?"
Father became aware I was closely following this back and forth. I much wanted the debate to go on—Latin had whetted my appetite for verbal thrust and parry—but he called a halt. "Speaking for the school board," he accorded Morrie, "we're lucky you find life here unboring enough. We hope you'll take the school for us again next year."
Morrie looked pleased enough to purr, although he only said, "The possibility exists." I was way ahead of him on possibility: Greek from him, after school next year—after Rome, Athens!
"Paul," Father broke in on my thoughts, "get yourself together, we'd better be on our way."
"Before you depart." Morrie rose and beckoned Father over to the weather ledger. "I have a matter of agricultural interest to show you."
With Father reading silently over his shoulder, he paged through the weekly precipitation readings since the start of the year. I knew it was dehydrated arithmetic in more ways than one. My turn as inspector-general of the weather had not come around yet, but Damon said he could have spit more than the pluviometer held during his.
Morrie flipped the last page and said in the expectant tone he used when he called on one of us in class, "Oliver?"
"It's not news that this is a dry year, so far."
"I would say more like arid."
"Now, now, Morrie. Any land agent worth the silver in his tongue will tell you aridity is insurance against flood."
Morrie's expression conveyed that if Father wanted to jest his way out of this, that was up to him. He clapped the weather ledger shut. "I confess I can't read Montana seasons," he said with a grunt, "they all seem to be one long brown patch. Exactly when do you plow?"
The lunar law as recited for Rose was recited again.
"Fascinating," was all Morrie said.
Father was quiet on the wagon ride home. I enjoyed the privilege of sitting up there in the dray seat beside him, and the day decided to put on a show as the sun went down, a seep of golden-orange between the strata of clouds over the white, white Rockies. It seemed singularly unfair to me that the irrigation project was hogging all the water—the snow there in the mountains that would fill its dam and canals—but I didn't think Father cared to hear that from me right then.
Home was hardly soothing when we got there, what with the maelstrom of Toby and Houdini wrestling on the parlor rug, and Damon all over the kitchen table making flour paste and butchering newspapers for his scrapbooks. Snatches of whistling traced Rose's route elsewhere in the house as she busily closed up her housekeeping day. Father slung the gunnysack of comestible and postal goods onto the cupboard counter and shook out the makings of supper. Ham hocks and beans again, I foretold with a sigh, and claimed a corner out of Damon's clutter to deposit my books. With water on to boil, always the first step in Milliron cuisine, Father settled to his place at the table and thumbed into the mail. He still seemed preoccupied.
Not Damon. He gave me a full devilish grin while scissoring the next sports article out of his newspaper heap. "How was dusty fiddles today?" He had been calling Latin that ever since Christmas, when I'd made the mistake of citing the linguistic birthright of "Adeste Fidelis" to him.
"Only the brave survive it," I told him in Roman fashion. "Who's this mug?" A beetle-browed prizefighter scowled straight up at me out of Damon's newsprint Utter. "I'd hate to meet him in a dark alley."
"Rube Killian." Damon spun the scrapbook to show me the freshly pasted headline: KILLIAN HOLDS CROWN IN MIDDLE-WEIGHT SLUGFEST. "He's 'the Ashtabula Assassin.' That and 'Killer Killian,' and 'Ruination Rube.'"
"Swell." The plentiful murderous nicknames of Damon's rogues' gallery reminded me. "Father, we need to look up multinym tonight."
He did not hear me. The reading finger was going over a letter.
"Damn."
From Father, this was volcanic.
Toby and Houdini stopped their din. Damon let the scissors drop.
"Oliver?" Rose called, and along with it appeared anxiously in the doorway. "Is something wrong?"
"The inspector is going to pay us a visit."
"Inspector?" Rose shot a look around the room as if a phantom were on the premises. "Inspecting—?"
"The school, what else."
Morrie flapped a hand at the letter the next morning, Saturday. "Oliver, forgive me, but I see nothing in this that specifically pertains to my tenure as teacher. The 'unusually high level of turnover'?"
The bunch of us were in the teacherage en masse. Rose had ridden over with us, and Father could not in good conscience leave Damon and me and therefore Toby out of a matter that all but screamed the school! Now, as if it were an inconsequential bit of arithmetic, he alluded to Morrie's query. "Ah, that. Marias Coulee has had—what is it, four different teachers now in four years?"
"Five," Damon corrected him, while I pointed out, "You're forgetting to count Morrie."
"Miss Trent was the worst," Toby announced as if he had just decided, evidently still stung by the memory of the ruler slap on his knuckles for the misdemeanor of whispering.
"They keep getting married off." Father passed a hand in front of his face helplessly. "We figured we had that cured with Addie Trent." He cocked a glance at Morrie in sudden suspicion. "I didn't think to ask. You don't happen to have a fiancee in the wings in Minneapolis, do you?"
"I am not matrimonial at the moment, am I, Rose."
"Not that I've ever been aware of."
Morrie deposited the letter on his table and we all stood back looking at it as if it might be rabid. Across the years since, any number of su
ch letters have gone out over my signature, and I am never unaware of the impact of the tide of office, Superintendent of Public Instruction. Then, innocent of office-holding, I merely stared at the dangerous piece of paper with everyone else. Rose shook her head crossly, no doubt wishing she could sweep the thing out of the room.
Morrie rallied first. "At least this bogeyman does not sound imminent." He peered and read off: "'Due to a backlog of schools to be inspected, a member of our staff will visit Marias Coulee School on a schedule yet to be determined.' I can tell, Oliver, you still do not welcome the prospect. Why?"
