But, back to the schoolroom. Faces and names have a habit of repeating and repeating in your classes over the years. Once in a while, though, along comes one of the indelible kind—and they mark you, happily or unhappily beyond erasing. But, true to my nature, I didn’t even have a twinge or premonition.
The new boy came alone. He was small, slight, and had a smooth cap of dark hair. He had the assurance of a child who had registered many times by himself, not particularly comfortable or uncomfortable at being in a new school. He had brought a say-nothing report card, which, I noted in passing, gave him a low grade in Group Activity Participation and a high one in Adjustment to Redirective Counseling—by which I gathered that he was a loner but minded when spoken to, which didn’t help much in placing him academically.
“What book were you reading?” I asked, fishing on the shelf behind me for various readers in case he didn’t know a specific name. Sometimes we get those whose faces overspread with astonishment and they say, “Reading?”
“In which of those series?” he asked. “Look-and-say, ITA, or phonics?” He frowned a little. “We’ve moved so much and it seems as though every place we go is different. It does confuse me sometimes.” He caught my surprised eye and flushed. “I’m really not very good by any method, even if I do know their names,” he admitted. “I’m functioning only on about a second-grade level.”
“Your vocabulary certainly isn’t second grade,” I said, pausing over the enrollment form.
“No, but my reading is,” he admitted. “I’m afraid—”
“According to your age, you should be third grade.” I traced over his birthdate. This carbon wasn’t the best in the world.
“Yes, and I suppose that counting everything, I’d average out about third grade, but my reading is poor.”
“Why?” Maybe knowing as much as he did about his academic standing, he’d know the answer to this question.
“I have a block,” he said. “I’m afraid—”
“Do you know what your block is?” I pursued, automatically probing for the point where communication would end.
“I—” his eyes dropped. “I’m not very good in reading,” he said. I felt him folding himself away from me. End of communication.
“Well, here at Rinconcillo, you’ll be on a number of levels. We have only one room and fifteen students, so we all begin our subjects at the level where we function best—” I looked at him sharply. “And work like mad!”
“Yes, ma’am.” We exchanged one understanding glance; then his eyes became eight-year-old eyes and mine, I knew, teacher eyes. I dismissed him to the playground and turned to the paper work.
Kroginold, Vincent Lorma, I penciled into my notebook. A lumpy sort of name, I thought, to match a lumpy sort of student—scholastically speaking.
Let me explain Rinconcillo. Here in the mountainous West, small towns, exploding into large cities, gulp down all sorts of odd terrain in expanding their city limits. Here at Winter Wells, city growth has followed the three intersecting highways for miles out, forming a spidery, six-legged sort of city. The city limits have followed the growth in swatches about four blocks wide, which leaves long ridges, and truly ridges—mountainous ones—of non-city projecting into the city. Consequently, here is Rinconcillo, a one-roomed school with only 15 students, and only about half a mile from a school system with eight schools and 4800 students. The only reason this school exists is the cluster of family units around the MEL (Mathematics Experimental Laboratory) facilities, and a half dozen fiercely independent ranchers who stubbornly refuse to be urbanized and cut up into real estate developments or be city-limited and absorbed into the Winter Wells school system.
As for me—this was my fourth year at Rinconcillo, and I don’t know whether it’s being fiercely independent or just stubborn, but I come back each year to my “little inside corner” tucked quite literally under the curve of a towering sandstone cliff at the end of a box canyon. The violently pursuing and pursued traffic, on the two highways sandwiching us, never even suspects we exist. When I look out into the silence of an early school morning, I still can’t believe that civilization could be anywhere within a hundred miles. Long shadows under the twisted, ragged oak trees mark the orangy gold of the sand in the wash that flows—dryly mostly, wetly tumultuous seldomly—down the middle of our canyon. Manzanitas tangle the hillside until the walls become too steep and sterile to support them. And yet, a twenty-minute drive—ten minutes out of here and ten minutes into there—parks you right in front of the MONSTER MERCANTILE, EVERYTHING CHEAPER. I seldom drive that way.
Back to Kroginold, Vincent Lorma—I was used to unusual children at my school. The lab attracted brilliant and erratic personnel. The majority of the men there were good, solid citizens and no more eccentric than a like number of any professionals, but we do get our share of kooks, and their sometimes twisted children. Besides the size and situation being an ideal set-up for ungraded teaching, the uneven development for some of the children made it almost mandatory. As, for instance, Vincent, almost nine, reading, so he said, on second-grade level, averaging out to third grade, which implied above-age excellence in something. Where to put him? Why, second grade (or maybe first) and fourth (or maybe fifth) and third—of course! Perhaps a conference with his mother would throw some light on his “block.” Well, difficult. According to the enrollment blank, both parents worked at MEL.
By any method we tried, Vincent was second grade—or less—in reading.
“I’m sorry.” He stacked his hands on the middle page of Through Happy Hours, through which he had stumbled most woefully. “And reading is so basic, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said, fingering his math paper—above age-level. And the vocabulary check test—“If it’s just words, I’ll define them,” he had said. And he had. Third year of high school worth. “I suppose your math ability comes from your parents,” I suggested.
“Oh, no!” he said, “I have nothing like their gift for math. It’s—it’s—I like it. You can always get out. You’re never caught—”
“Caught?” I frowned.
“Yes—look!” Eagerly he seized a pencil. “See! One plus one equals two. Of course it does, but it doesn’t stop there. If you want to, you can back right out. Two equals one plus one. And there you are—out! The doors swing both ways!”
“Well, yes,” I said, teased by an almost grasping of what he meant. “But math traps me. One plus one equals two whether I want it to or not. Sometimes I want it to be one and a half or two and three-fourths and it won’t—ever!”
“No, it won’t.” His face was troubled. “Does it bother you all the time?”
“Heavens, no, child!” I laughed. “It hasn’t warped my life!”
“No,” he said, his eyes widely on mine. “But that’s why—” His voice died as he looked longingly out the window at the recess-roaring playground, and I released him to go stand against the wall of the school, wistfully watching our eight other boys manage to be sixteen or even twenty-four in their wild gyrations.
So that’s why? I doodled absently on the workbook cover. I didn’t like a big school system because its one-plus-one was my one and one-half—or two and three-fourths? Could be—could be. Honestly! What kids don’t come up with! I turned to the work sheet I was preparing for consonant blends for my this-year’s beginners—all both of them—and one for Vincent.
My records on Vincent over the next month or so were an odd patchwork. I found that he could read some of the articles in the encyclopedia, but couldn’t read Billy Goats Gruff. That he could read What Is So Rare as a Day in June, but couldn’t read Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater. It was beginning to look as though he could read what he wanted to and that was all. I don’t mean a capricious wanting-to, but that he shied away from certain readings and actually couldn’t read them. As yet I could find no pattern to his un-readings; so I let him choose the things he wanted and he read—oh, how he read! He gulped down the material so avidly that it worried
me. But he did his gulping silently. Orally, he wore us both out with his stumbling struggles.
He seemed to like school, but seldom mingled. He was shyly pleasant when the other children invited him to join them, and played quite competently—which isn’t the kind of play you expect from an eight-year-old.
And there matters stood until the day that Kipper—our eighth grade—dragged Vincent in, bloody and battered.
“This guy’s nearly killed Gene,” Kipper said. “Ruth’s out there trying to bring him to. First aid says don’t move him until we know.”
“Wait here,” I snapped at Vincent as I headed for the door. “Get tissues for your face!” And I rushed out after Kipper.
We found Gene crumpled in the middle of a horrified group gathered at the base of the canyon wall. Ruth was crying as she mopped his muddy forehead with a soggy tissue. I checked him over quickly. No obvious bleeding. I breathed a little easier as he moaned, moved, and opened his eyes. He struggled to a sitting position and tenderly explored the side of his head.
“Ow! That dang rock!” He blinked tears as I parted his hair to see if he had any damage besides the egg-sized lump. He hadn’t. “He hit me with that big rock!”
“My!” I giggled, foolish with relief. “He must have addled your brains at the same time. Look at the size of that rock!” The group separated to let Gene look, and Pete scrambled down from where he had perched on the rock for a better look at the excitement.
“Well.” Gene rubbed his head tenderly. “Anyway, he did!”
“Come on inside,” I said, helping him up. “Do you want Kipper to carry you?”
“Heck no!” Gene pulled away from my hands. “I ain’t hurt. G’wan—noseys!” He turned his back on the staring children.
“You children stay out here.” I herded Gene ahead of me. “We have things to settle inside.”
Vincent was waiting quietly in his seat. He had mopped himself fairly dean, though he still dabbled with a tissue at a cut over his left eye. Two long scratches oozed redly down his cheek. I spent the next few minutes rendering first aid. Vincent was certainly the more damaged of the two, and I could feel the drumming leap of his still-racing heart against me as I turned his docile body around, tucking in his shirt during the final tidying up.
“Now.” I sat, sternly teacher, at my desk and surveyed the two before me. “Gene, you first.”
“Well.” He ruffed his hair up and paused to finger, half proudly, the knot under his hair. “He said let my ground squirrel go and I said no. What the heck! It was mine. And he said let it go and I said no and he took the cage and busted it and—” Indignation in his eyes faded into defensiveness. “—and I busted him one and—and—Well, then he hit me with that rock! Gosh! I was knocked out, wasn’t I?”
“You were,” I said, grimly. “Vincent?”
“He’s right.” His voice was husky, his eyes on the tape on the back of one hand. Then he looked up with a tentative lift of his mouth corners. “Except that I hit the rock with him.”
“Hit the rock with him?” I asked. “You mean like judo or something? You pushed him against the rock hard enough to knock him out?”
“If you like,” he shrugged.
“It’s not what I like,” I said. “It’s—what happened?”
“I hit the rock with him,” Vincent repeated.
“And why?” I asked, ignoring his foolish insistence.
“We were having a fight. He told you.”
“You busted my cage!” Gene flushed indignantly.
“Gene,” I reminded. “You had your turn. Vincent?”
“I had to let it go,” he said, his eyes hopefully on mine. “He wouldn’t, and it—it wanted to get out—the ground squirrel.” His eyes lost their hopefulness before mine.
“It wasn’t yours,” I reminded.
“It wasn’t his either!” His eyes blazed. “It belonged to itself! He had no right—!”
“I caught it!” Gene blazed back.
“Gene! Be still or I’ll send you outside!”
Gene subsided, muttering.
“You didn’t object to Ruth’s hamster being in a cage.” “Cage” and “math” seemed trying to equate in my mind.
“That’s because it was a cage beast!” he said, fingering the taped hand again. “It didn’t know any better. It didn’t care.” His voice tightened. “The ground squirrel did. It would have killed itself to get out. I—I just had to—”
To my astonishment, I saw tears slide down his cheek as he turned his face away from me. Wordlessly I handed him a tissue from the box on my desk. He wiped his face, his fingers trembling.
“Gene?” I turned to him. “Anything more?”
“Well, gollee! It was mine! And I liked it! It—it was mine!”
“I’ll trade you,” said Vincent. “I’ll trade you a white rat in a real neat aluminum cage. A pregnant one, if you like. It’ll have four or five babies in about a week.”
“Gollee! Honest?” Gene’s eyes were shining.
“Vincent?” I questioned him.
“We have some at home,” he said. “Mr. Wellerk at MEL gave me some when we came. They were surplus. Mother says I may trade if his mother says okay.”
“She won’t care!” cried Gene. “Us kids have part of the barn for our pets, and if we take care of them, she doesn’t care what we have. She don’t even ever come out there! Dad checks once in a while to be sure we’re doing a decent job. They won’t care.”
“Well, you have your mother write a note saying you may have the rat, and Vincent, if you’re sure you want to trade, bring the rat tomorrow and we’ll consider the affair ended.” I reached for my hand bell. “Well, scoot, you two. Drinks and rest room, if necessary. It’s past bell time now.”
Gene scooted and I could hear him yelling, “Hey! I getta white rat—” Vincent was at the door when I stopped him with a question. “Vincent, did your mother know before you came to school that you were going to let the ground squirrel go?”
“No, ma’am. I didn’t even know Gene had it.”
“Then she didn’t suggest you trade with Gene.”
“Yes, ma’am, she did,” he said reluctantly.
“When?” I asked, wondering if he was going to turn out to be a twisted child after all.
“When you were out getting Gene. I called her and told her.” He smiled his tentative lip-smile. “She gave me fits for fighting and suggested Gene might like the rat. I like it, too, but I have to make up for the ground squirrel.” He hesitated. I said nothing. He left.
“Well!” I exploded my held breath out. “Ananias K. Munchausen! Called his mother, did he? And no phone closer than MONSTER MERCANTILE! But still—” I was puzzled. “It didn’t feel like a lie!”
Next afternoon after dismissal time I sighed silently. I was staring moodily out the window where the lonely creaking of one swing signified that Vincent, as well as I, was waiting for his mother to appear. Well, inevitable, I guess. Send a taped-up child home, you’re almost sure to get an irate parent back. And Vincent had been taped up! Still was, for that matter.
I hadn’t heard the car. The creaking of the swing stopped abruptly, and I heard Vincent’s happy calling voice. I watched the two of them come up onto the porch, Vincent happily clinging.
“My mother, Teacher,” he said. “Mrs. Kroginold.”
“Good afternoon, Miss Murcer.” Mrs. Kroginold was small, dark haired, and bright eyed. “You wait outside, erring man-child!” She dismissed him with a spat on his bottom. “This is adult talk.” He left, his small smile slanting back over his shoulder a little anxiously.
Mrs. Kroginold settled comfortably in the visitor’s chair I had already pulled up beside my desk.
“Prepared, I see,” she sighed. “I suppose I should have come sooner and explained Vincent.”
“He is a little unusual,” I offered cautiously. “But he didn’t impress me as the fighting kind.”
“He isn’t,” said Mrs. Kroginold. “No, he’s�
��um—unusual in plenty of other ways, but he comes by it naturally. It runs in the family. We’ve moved around so much since Vincent’s been in school that this is the first time I’ve really felt I should explain him. Of course, this is also the first time he ever knocked anyone out. His father could hardly believe him. Well, anyway, he’s so happy here and making such progress in school that I don’t want anything to tarnish it for him, so—” she sighed and smiled. “He says you asked him about his trading the rat—”
“The pregnant rat,” I nodded.
“He did ask me,” she said. “Our family uses a sort of telepathy in emergencies.”
“A sort of telepathy—!” My jaw sagged, then tightened. Well, I could play the game, too. “How interesting!”
Her eyes gleamed. “Interesting aberration, isn’t it?” I flushed and she added hastily, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—to put interpretations into your mouth. But Vincent did hear—well, maybe ‘feel’ is a better word—the ground squirrel crying out against being caged. It caught him right where he lives. I think the block he has in reading is against anything that implies unwilling compulsion—you know, being held against your will—or prevented—”
Put her in a pumpkin shell my memory chanted. The three Billy Goats Gruff were afraid to cross the bridge because—
“The other schools,” she went on, “have restricted him to the reading materials provided for his grade level, and you’d be surprised how many of the stories—
“And he did hit the rock with Gene.” She smiled ruefully. “Lifted him bodily and threw him. A rather liberal interpretation of our family rules. He’s been forbidden to lift any large objects in anger. He considered Gene the lesser of the two objects.
“You see, Miss Murcer, we do have family characteristics that aren’t exactly—mmm—usual, but Vincent is still just a school child, and we’re just parents, and he likes you much and we do, too. Accept us?”
Ingathering Page 71
