by Judy Blunt
Good morning to you!
We're all in our places
With sweet, smiling faces,
For this is the way
To start a new day!
The year progressed with few smiles. Joyce, our sweet little redheaded first grader, was the eldest in her family, the first to attend school, and had been exposed to few strangers in her life. Along with us, she had never seen anything like him at all. For weeks he tried to teach her to count, and for weeks she stood trembling at his desk carefully reciting numbers as far as she could go. Beyond the number seven, she winged it, poised to run for the safety of her desk if she guessed wrong and he lost his temper. The alphabet progressed at about the same pace, her dread palpable from the moment she was called forward to the moment she scurried back to her desk, where she was allowed to draw and color in peace for a while.
The seventh- and eighth-grade boys occasionally disappeared into the fields around the schoolhouse during morning recess, staging elaborate snowball battles and feigning deafness while Mr. Saxton rang the brass handbell and shouted, red-faced, from the porch. He taught in his bedroom slippers and changed into boots only when he visited the outhouse. He didn't go after them, though he fumed until they returned. Polite, well-behaved little girls must have seemed a blessing in the midst of this warfare, for Gail and I soon became his favorites. After finishing our own sandwiches at lunch, we often wandered out of the schoolroom through the open door of the teacherage to lean against the little wooden table where he ate, answering questions he posed to us, wrinkling our noses at his everyday fare of hard cheese and strong, rust-colored mustard. We'd never seen a human eat something that smelled like that, and its origin was a matter of much whispered speculation.
Being singled out for attention was a new experience, and the wonder of it lured us back to the teacherage day after day, curious and repelled by equal measure. He took no more liberties than a grandfather might, circling an arm around our shoulders to hold us still as he offered a piece of cheese on the point of his paring knife, laughing delightedly as we pinched our noses and ran from the smell of old socks. Still, his behavior made us uneasy. We hated having our ears chewed on, a tease he initiated with a tight one-armed hug that brought us within range, while he pretended to attack the exposed ear, gnawing and growling comically as we shrieked and twisted away. But as an elderly male teacher, he enjoyed the benefit of fitting into three categories of People We Trust and Obey. We put up with it, or more likely Gail did, for I was far less outgoing and trusting by nature and she was more often found within arm's reach of his affection. His grandfatherly presumptions didn't seem wrong, exactly, in and of themselves, aside from the rather glaring fact that he was not our grandfather. But they felt wrong enough to trigger a wariness. We knew instinctively that these things would not be mentioned at home. Had it occurred to us, we might have given his unseemly actions a truer context by imagining some other teacher, say the proper Mrs. Nesbit, growling and nibbling our earlobes—a thought that causes my scalp to ripple even now.
Late that spring, during an interrogatory session at Mr. Saxton's lunch table, he dredged up the fact that neither Gail nor I had ever attended church. When further probing revealed that we likely hadn't been baptized, he simply gaped at us. I'd already forgotten the conversation a few weeks later when he called to ask our parents' permission to take us on an outing. If Mom was surprised by this request from a teacher I'd heard her describe as "an odd old duck," she didn't let on to us. Teachers commanded great respect in our community, and having her girls singled out for special attention must have been something of an honor, albeit a strange one.
Early Sunday morning, Mom hushed our wiggling and buttoned us into our good dresses, fashioning little hats for us from scraps of netting cut from an old cancan slip. She packed our lunch and saw us off as Mr. Saxton's old sedan lurched off toward the Catholic mission in the Little Rocky Mountains, a two-hour drive. I could always depend on Gail when a situation required entertaining adults with conversation, but her chatter dwindled as we drew away from the familiar confines of family and school. For miles we rode without speaking, the silence made no less profound by Mr. Sax-ton's idle humming and the thump of dirt clods on the floorboards beneath our feet.
Each spring, the end of the school year coincided with a change of wardrobe, as I outgrew the last round of dress alterations and stepped into jeans for the summer. On this warm spring day I tugged at my skirt, conscious of the old hemlines, a double tier of faded rings encircling the bottom edge. The backs of my thighs were stuck to the plastic seat covers. Coached about proper behavior, Gail and I sat unnaturally straight, glancing sideways at each other, eyes bright with nervous laughter that we didn't dare let spill. We watched out the side window as county road gave way to highway, and the Little Rockies rose up from the prairie, their familiar distant blue turning to green as we neared.
Well into our journey, Mr. Saxton reached across and twisted the dial of the AM radio. Blips of sound filled the car until he settled on a station. I was riveted as his lips began to move in perfect sequence, making words from what sounded like the moans of a hundred ghosts: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. The flesh on my arms puckered into bumps as the faraway voices chanted full circle and began again. Catching myself staring, I quickly lowered my eyes. Surely it was rude to watch this. Surely I wasn't hearing correctly, but no—there it was again, echoed by the man beside us. "Blessed art thou amongst women," he intoned, "and blessed art the.fruit of thy womb, Jesus."
Holy moley! I risked a sideways glance at my little sister. She looked furtive, eyes darting right to left, like Mom had the day I was helping fold clothes and had asked, out of the blue, what part of the cows came out when they prolapsed. I'd been preoccupied, replaying events I had observed in the calving shed, and my question was an idle one. She had continued folding clothes; her face grew still as a mask except for her eyes, which skated back and forth as if looking for a way out of her head. "The womb," she said finally, her tone deliberately casual. "The womb is where the calf grows." The eyes darted toward me and away. Realization hit with a rush, a bloom that rose from my throat to my ears in one heartbeat. "If you ever have any questions about that. . . stuff," she went on, "you can ask me." Her eyes fell to a T-shirt and settled as she shook it out, creased it in half. Womb. Mentally I was pounding my forehead with one fist at this blunder. I had read the word, I knew what it meant. Womb. Now here was this man who said "woman," "womb" and "Jesus" in the same breath. I slouched lower against the car door.
Despite Mr. Saxton's concern for our immortal souls, we were not the little pagans he imagined us to be—at least not entirely. We did not attend church, and at that point we had not been baptized, though a couple of years later the twins and I received this rite when the Reverend Fred Fox and wife, Phoebe, made an evangelical swing through the south country. Almost every summer, a couple of high school girls from a church in Malta organized a Bible school for the children in our area, and Mom was more than glad to haul us back to the schoolhouse for five days of free child care. We learned to parrot children's prayers, sing Jesus songs and do all manner of crafty projects while our devout and genuinely kind young teachers taught us the familiar Bible stories—Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark, Jesus and the Miracles.
Mother's week of freedom was a mixed blessing. Because there were four of us attending, she was bound to admire, and somehow display, four of every craft project the school offered, and we were very speedy workers with glue and Popsicle sticks, paper plates and colored yarn. Her vacation ended abruptly on the fifth day, when she was called upon to bake goodies, don a dress and join other mothers at the Program, where we performed the skits, recited memorized Bible verses and sang songs we had practiced all week. Our religious instruction would be hard-pressed to own that title, but it had served to introduce the main players and basic story line of Christianity. However, in no verse, story or song at Bible school had we addres
sed the Main Players in the familiar vein taken by Mr. Saxton and the radio's Mournful Crooners. There followed a day of revelations no larger and no less amazing, events strung together like prayer beads on a thread of unfamiliar highway, the whole of it finally drawn full circle long after our ability to decipher the world around us had gone stone, and only shortly before our parents would have called the sheriff.
Whether our teacher had misunderstood the time of the service or planned to arrive after the traveling priest had moved on I never knew, but he didn't seem perturbed to find the church empty. As we entered a long room filled with benches, he dipped one knee and crossed himself. From there he ushered us into a bench and knelt beside us. I kept a wary eye on his hands as they clasped and rose and danced in the dim light, for they seemed to have much to do. He tapped his forehead with the tips of his fingers, he tapped his chest. Once he appeared to kiss his fingers.
At last he settled into whispering with his eyes closed while we sat on the polished boards and gathered information from the walls around us. The hall was silent now, but the air felt warm and expectant, as though a crowd had just stepped out and might be back. I retain a fragile sense of the scenes or pictures on the walls, men and women with dark faces barely discernible from the background, the style of their robes recognizable from Christmas cards and the flannel-board figures at Bible school. The statues seemed wildly colorful by comparison. Ceramic blood congealed on Jesus' stomach and dripped from his head, which appeared to be wrapped in barbed wire. Holy Mary wore a blue dress and held the Babe on her lap at arm's length, precariously close to falling, I thought, or perhaps she was offering him to someone else to hold. Little fat candles bloomed at her feet, unattended. Who had lit them? Who would blow them out?
I had given up trying to figure it all out as we took our cue and slid along the bench to follow our slow-moving teacher back up the aisle. He paused at the doorway, and when he stopped, I nearly ran over his heels in my eagerness to see daylight. His gentle smile never faltering, he dipped his fingers into a container of water and turned to us. He drew a small cross in the air over my sister's head, then touched her forehead with his wet thumb. He dipped again for me. We stood quietly until he was done, reading his face for signs that we could move on again. By then, he could have dragged a live chicken from his vest and bitten off its head and neither of us would have flinched. We followed him quietly to the car.
The next station of our journey found us puttering along a narrow blacktop through Mission Canyon, pulling off the road into a campground or parking area, where we unpacked our picnic lunch. Gail and I raced around, shrill with the exhaustion that comes from hours of being still and alert at the same time. Mindless of our slippery shoes and short dresses, we climbed sandstone boulders at the base of a natural bridge, shouting from the top to hear the canyon's echo. We ate our sandwiches perched on rocks, our skirts tucked modestly around our legs while Mr. Saxton sat in the front seat of his car far below us, watching with passive benevolence. "Like talking monkeys out of the trees," he chuckled, when he finally coaxed us back into the car. On our way once more, conversation came more easily, my confidence renewed by the final leg of our journey. As far as I knew, we had survived this strange outing and were heading home the same way we came.
Secondary Highway 66 runs roughly parallel to the mountains, connecting Montana's two major highways like the crossbar of an A. A driver with large time and no purpose might begin in Malta, drive west down 191, turn off on the connection route 66 and follow it to its juncture with Highway 2, turn east and return to Malta—a round-trip of 150 miles. Of course there are miles of mountain trails and ranch roads as well, and given the options, any number of routes might have gotten us home, or as easily have gotten us lost. Whatever his decision or inspiration, instead of arriving home in midafternoon as expected, I found myself blinking out the side window as the sun streaked through the cottonwoods along the Milk River and the town of Malta came into view
The rest of the afternoon we spent in still another rich, dark room hung with exciting scenes, this one featuring fold-down seats instead of pews and a stage instead of an altar.
Malta's Villa Theatre was no more familiar to us than the church in the mountains, but we were quickly settled in with a bag of popcorn and transported via big screen to a tropical island, courtesy of Father Goose and the antics of Cary Grant. Gail would recall her rapt immersion in this romantic comedy about a drunken recluse stranded on an island with a French woman and a flock of schoolgirls. I would not. At the end of the matinee, one of us had the sense to call home and let them know we had not been kidnapped.
We rode home in silence, both of us full of new experiences and drained by the work of not knowing what came next. By the time we rolled into our barnyard, my throat was tight with self-pity. We had been sold down the river, sent off with an Odd Duck. If we returned, I thought mournfully, it was no thanks to Mom. Gail drooped beside me, trying to stay awake. Mr. Saxton whistled contentedly, tunelessly. At the house he chuckled at their concern for our late arrival, their state of mind having been downgraded from near panic to irritation by our phone call, then bid our parents good evening as they resumed charge of us. Prompted, we thanked him for the good time.
The school year ended a couple of weeks later, and we saw the last of Mr. Saxton as we packed up our desks and cleaned the school. But it didn't end there. He sent us greeting cards for a while, and a heart-shaped box of chocolates the next Valentine's Day, addressing it all to the Regina Rascals, his nickname for us. Our brothers were off and running. "Hey, Rascal! You got a letter from your boyfriend!" Gail and I shriveled under the torture of this teasing, for we didn't know what to think of it either.
We spoke little about our day with Mr. Saxton, even to each other, until we were grown women, a conversation that began just as it might have back then, in a wondering tone: "That day trip with Saxton, you remember? . . . that church thing . . . What was that about?" We still don't know By and large, men simply did not seek the company of little girls in our community. Dad had never singled us out and taken a day off to drive us anywhere, and neither had our grandfathers. Mr. Saxton wasn't even kin. But we agree on one thing—he never stepped beyond the bounds of propriety. A lonely old man, perhaps, who thought to save our souls and broaden our horizons in one fell swoop—but not a predator. Still, something tells us we shouldn't have been there, even now—something that recognizes the intimate nature of religious worship, the sensual mixture of darkness and popcorn, the blast of color and sound and big-screen romance that held us tight against our seats until the very end. We still cannot accept his gift. "The crazy old goat was probably perfectly innocent," my sister sighs, "but you know, if he did those things today he'd get thrown in jail." For better or worse, she's right.
Lessons in Silence
The first week of school the indoor air was sultry with held-over August heat and farm kids too recently reined in and washed up. I was tall for my age and sat toward the back, looking down a row of raw necks and homemade haircuts. The sound of a pickup on the county road lured us like a bird's song. When it shifted down for the corner, we went along with it, anticipating each rev and crank of gears—some neighbor going to town, checking cattle, returning a borrowed tool somewhere up the road. In the next second the familiar pattern broke and we came to full attention. Instead of swelling, then fading into distance, the noise grew steadily louder. Dust streamed through the open windows as a rust-colored pickup eased around the building to the eastern side and rattled to a stop by the front steps. The engine cut out, lugged a few times, and was still. Five heads lifted in the sudden quiet; five pairs of eyes fixed on our teacher's desk.
Mrs. Norby licked a gold foil star, tapped it into place, then squared the papers on her desk and rose to attend to this new business. I remember the tiny catch in her posture as she glanced out the window, not a motion or a movement exactly but a slight drawing in as she smoothed her skirt. At the time I interpreted her sudd
en freezing as fear, and today, four hundred miles and forty years away from that moment, I believe my instinct was accurate. There was no reading her face as she left the classroom. I can think of nothing that would have kept the five of us from the front window when the door closed behind her.
My older brother Kenny, myself, the twins Gary and Gail, and a neighbor boy made up the student population that year, filling three of the eight grades taught at our rural school. Standing in the shadow of the drapes, we could see outside without being seen. The battered pickup was not one of ours. The driver's door opened with a stiff pop and an old man eased slowly from behind the wheel. He stood with a red-and-black-plaid cap in one hand as Mrs. Norby walked down the steps toward him. The cab rocked slightly to the passenger side as a woman got out and made her way around the dented nose of the pickup. At the steps she turned and produced a little boy from the shadow of her skirts, prodding him forward until he stood in front of her.
Mrs. Norby had her back to us, and through the window we could hear her sweet modulated voice. The man spoke very politely in reply. His smile held as many gaps as teeth. The woman said nothing. Mrs. Norby spoke in her lecture voice, at ease now; there was nodding and smiling, a gentle laugh from the man. The boy turned to hide his face when our teacher bent over to talk to him, but when she straightened and held out her hand, he took it.
When the man raised his arm to put his cap back on, we flushed like grouse and were innocently at work by the time the second cloud of dust cleared and Mrs. Norby entered, towing a small dark-eyed boy with a mop of black hair. His name was Forest, and he was starting first grade. He lived with his grandparents, who were working for one of our neighbors. These things she told us. The rest we saw in the formal tilt of her head, the blank smile, the way her hands cupped together at waist level. Our company manners appeared on cue. That he was an outsider goes without saying. We had cut our first teeth on each other, and we had never seen him before. But Forest was different in another way. Forest was an Indian, and his presence in our world went beyond our experience, beyond our comprehension. We welcomed him to school politely, as we had been taught to welcome the children of outsiders. But we would have been no less bewildered had we glanced up from our math drills and seen a grove of seedling pine take root in the hardpan outside.
