Staggerford (25 page)

“They could at that.”

“Where’s the Bird kid now?”

“I took him home.”

A pause. “You’ve been out to Sandhill and back?”

“Yes.”

Another pause. “Did you ask about Sam LaGrange?”

“Who?”

“Your Indian, Sam LaGrange.”

“It slipped my mind, Wayne.”

“Pruitt, I have to have a talk with you.”

“I’m listening.”

“Not over the phone. Come over to my place tonight after supper.”

“All right.”

“You know, it’s really a shame you didn’t ask about Sam LaGrange as long as you were out there anyway. Think of the example you would have set for the rest of the faculty if you’d have gone out there and brought one back.” He hung up.

Delia Fritz said, “It isn’t turning out to be a good week for you, is it?”

“If you’re referring to the fight in study hall—”

“Monday it was Jeff Norquist jumping out the window and yesterday it was your tooth and today this. I don’t need to tell you that the superintendent was plenty upset this afternoon.”

“He was?”

“He was sitting in his office with his window open and all of a sudden he heard this screaming. Study hall is right above us, you know, and the screaming carried down here
and through our open windows. The sound was terrifying. Mr. Stevenson came out here and asked me what was happening. I said I didn’t know. He said, ‘Find out, and if it’s awfully bad don’t tell me.’ He put on his hat and went home. He was gone before you came for the keys.”

“I suppose I should tell him about it myself.”

“I think you should, Miles. Do you want me to call him and tell him you’re coming over?”

“Okay. Tell him I’ll be over after supper.”

Miles walked home and found Beverly Bingham’s truck parked in front of the house.

In the kitchen Miss McGee was showing Beverly what bleach was for. “Being clean is second,” she was saying as she added Hi-lex to a basin of water. “Being good is first, and being clean is second.”

“What’s third?” said Beverly.

Miss McGee shot her a glance to see if the girl was being insolent, and she saw Miles coming through the dining room. “Here he is now. How’s your tooth, Miles?”

“Mr. Pruitt, I came for my letter.”

“The letter is here in my briefcase. Something came up and I didn’t get a chance—”

“You two go sit in the front room and take care of that letter once and for all,” said Miss McGee. “I’ll be done here in a minute and we’ll have a glass of nectar.”

Miles saw that Beverly was wearing a blouse of Miss McGee’s. It had pearl buttons and the letters AM embroidered on the pocket. When Beverly saw that Miles noticed, she smiled helplessly and shrugged.

He said, “Really, Agatha, this isn’t the kind of thing young people are wearing these days.”

“It’s what Beverly is wearing while we wash her blouse. Tend to your letter.”

While Beverly’s blouse dried in the automatic dryer, the three of them sat around the coffee table and drank grape Kool-Aid. Again Beverly was sitting on her foot without taking off her shoe, but Miss McGee (a shrewd judge of how much learning a pupil could stand in one session) let
it pass. And the girl was smoking again. No more gracefully than yesterday, but at least more carefully. Her sparks and ashes were under control.

Folding her letter, Beverly said, “If applying for college is this much work, what’s it going to be like when it comes time to actually
go?”

To actually go—a split infinitive, thought Miss McGee. Will Miles correct her, or must I?

To actually go—a split infinitive, thought Miles. And Agatha is waiting for me to correct the girl.

He said, “In college I had to sometimes study all night.”

Miss McGee turned away, hiding her annoyance and her amusement.

In the evening, Miss McGee had unexpected company. First, Lillian Kite came across the alley, emptied her bagful of knitting onto the coffee table, and settled down for a chat. Lillian was followed by Imogene, who was hoping to find Miles at home. She had nothing in particular to say to him—she wanted to research him. The Friday-night kiss he gave her had come to be much on her mind, mainly because her mother spoke of it incessantly, and she was beginning to wonder if Miles was falling in love with her. Today, as she manned the check-out desk at the library, she brought her analytical powers to bear on him. For one thing, there was the kiss. For another, there was his uncharacteristically tender apology as he lay under the bass-wood tree this morning. He had never kissed her before. He had never apologized for anything before. She was building up evidence. Tonight she would look for more clues.

Imogene was followed into Miss McGee’s house by Thanatopsis Workman, who had been asked by her husband to clear out for the evening because he had private things to say to Miles.

“And what might those private things be?” asked Miss McGee, serving tea and sugar cookies to the three women.

“Oh, it’s all so stupid and unimportant,” said Thanatopsis, with the kind of bounce and good looks that made
Imogene glad Thanatopsis was married and out of circulation. “You know how a person will run a streak of bad luck for a few days. It’s bound to happen. It happens to all of us. Well, poor Miles has had a few days of bad luck-none of it worth mentioning, none of it important, but you know what a serious husband I have. I tell you my husband is so
serious
I can’t believe I married him. What was I thinking when I married a man that serious? I know what I was thinking, and I’ll tell you. All the while I was growing up my father told me how frivolous I was and how I should be more serious, and I got the idea that if I married someone serious I could go on being just the way I always was and my husband could take care of the serious side of things. So along came Wayne, the most
serious
man I’ve ever known, and I said that’s the man for me, and I married him just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “And it has worked out just fine. I
love
Wayne for his seriousness. Not that we don’t have our spats, but I mean how could you help loving a man that
serious
? I seem to have this great capacity for loving people—it’s just crazy. I love all my students and I love all the faculty and I love the janitors. I go to a basketball game and I love all the players. Show me a person’s most obvious trait and that’s what I love. For example, everyone pretty well agrees that poor Ansel Stevenson is a dud. That’s what Miles calls him, a dud.”

“Now, Anna Thea,” said Miss McGee, “I’m sure Miles—”

“No, that’s what he calls him, a dud, because of course that’s what he is. But for a dud, Ansel is such a dear. The poor man is so afraid of a sudden heart attack that he has become absolutely motionless. He reminds me of a little boy sitting in a chair concentrating on behaving himself. And whenever I see him sitting in a chair I want to go up to him and kiss him on top of the head, and I would, too, if I could be sure it wouldn’t kill him.”

Thanatopsis spoke at such speed that Lillian Kite, knitting to the rhythm of her voice, lost control of her needles.

“Anyhow as I was going to say about Miles—don’t you
just love Miles? Some say he’s distant, but nobody who really knows him—”

“Who says he’s distant?” asked Miss McGee.

“Miles has a reputation among some people for being distant.”

“Not me,” said Imogene Kite. Her mother nodded.

“Nor anybody else who really knows him,” said Thanatopsis. “Do you know what Mrs. Vandergar told me? Well, you remember last year when poor Fred Vandergar was home dying of cancer. Miles went over to visit him one afternoon, and Mrs. Vandergar told me that as they stood at the door saying good-by, Miles hugged each one of them very tightly. Mrs. Vandergar said that nothing else in the last months of Fred’s life meant so much to him. Now, does hugging the Vandergars sound like the act of a distant man? And what I’d like to know is why more of us didn’t have sense enough to go over to the Vandergars’ and hug both of them, Fred because he was dying and his wife because she was watching him the. Well, anyway, that’s beside the point. What I was going to say was that poor Miles has had a series of unlucky things happen to him, not that all of them taken together would fill a thimble, but last Saturday night at our party Miles frightened Ansel Stevenson, and the Stevensons went home before Wayne had a chance to talk to him about his new plan for keeping Indians in school, and Wayne resented that. Then on Monday Jeff Norquist jumped out the window during Miles’s English class and of course that made Miles look bad—”

“Miles never told me that,” said Miss McGee. “Did you actually see the boy jump out the window?”

“No, my room faces the other direction.”

“It sounds like something I’d be inclined to doubt unless I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Oh, it happened all right. Jeff Norquist is a problem to everyone, you know, Agatha, except maybe to Annie Bird his girl friend, who was waiting outside in the courtyard, and when he jumped out the window they went to the pool hall together. So that, as I say, made Miles look bad. And then that very same day—and I’m afraid I am responsible
for this—Miles had a run-in with Wayne over a ruling in the Faculty Handbook. He went over Wayne’s head and had Ansel Stevenson reverse the ruling, and of course Wayne, being the serious man he is, took that very hard. And then—well, I hate to go on. This is all so insignificant. It’s silly. I must be boring you to death.”

Thanatopsis tasted her tea, and Lillian Kite picked up the stitches she had dropped.

Miss McGee asked, “What was the ruling that the superintendent reversed?”

“It concerned funerals. According to the Handbook, I could not go to the funeral of my best friend’s mother in St. Paul without losing a day’s pay, and Miles, being chairman of the Grievance Committee, took it up first with Wayne, then with Ansel.”

“I suspect his being chairman of the Committee was not the main reason. With Miles I suspect it was his native sense of justice.”

“Of course. But Wayne took it awfully hard.” She sipped her tea.

“What else?” Miss McGee passed the cookies.

“Well, there were those two days he was absent.”

“Don’t tell me Wayne is questioning his honesty about these two days! If there is any question about Miles’s indisposition both yesterday and today, I’ll talk to your husband myself.”

“No, no, Wayne knows Miles was ill, but Miles has a class that’s very hard to handle and Wayne has a hard time finding a substitute for him. And then there was the incident this afternoon in study hall. Did he tell you about it?”

“Yes, he told me at supper.”

Imogene asked what happened.

“There was a scuffle in study hall. Little Hank Bird pulled a knife on Jeff Norquist, and Jeff Norquist beat him up.”

“And Wayne is blaming it on Miles?” asked Miss McGee.

“Of course not. In fact, if Miles hadn’t been good enough to come back to school even though he was taking
the day off, he wouldn’t have even been there to witness it. But the fact remains that it happened in Miles’s study hall with Miles present, and you know how that looks to a principal as serious as Wayne. It looks bad.”

Miss McGee filled the teacups. “I hope you have come to the end of Miles’s tribulations.”

Thanatopsis said nothing.

Lillian Kite said, “I wonder what Miles spilled on Lyle’s pants.”

Miss McGee said, “Anna Thea, is there more to tell?”

“Agatha, this is absolutely preposterous. I wasn’t going to bring it up, but it’s so absolutely preposterous that mentioning it couldn’t possibly do any harm. One of the things Wayne wants to speak to Miles about is his relationship with Beverly Bingham.”

Imogene and her mother stopped chewing their cookies.

Miss McGee spilled her tea.

The air had turned cold after sundown but Miles, as always, was warmly received by the Stevensons. He sat before the fire and described what had happened in study hall.

The superintendent took it like a man. He said, “Bennie Bird of the Sandhill General Store is not an easy man to deal with. They say he can become quite vocal. But it is our good fortune to have Alexander Bigmeadow on our side. There are two kinds of Indians, Miles, happy Indians and unhappy Indians, and Alexander Bigmeadow is one of the happy Indians. He’s been a happy Indian ever since we at the school got his daughter Nancy into the Federal Program for Apprentice Indians or whatever it was called. I shouldn’t say ‘we,’ I should say Delia Fritz and Anna Thea Workman. Those two were responsible for that. They got Nancy Bigmeadow to apply for the program and they wrote sterling letters of recommendation for her and had me sign them. Sterling letters. Two of the best letters of their kind that I have ever read. I didn’t know Nancy Bigmeadow personally, but Delia and Anna Thea assured me that she was a good Indian, a happy Indian, and of course if you
can’t take the word of Delia and Anna Thea, who can you take the word of? Delia is so up on things, and Anna Thea is such a dear girl. And Nancy Bigmeadow proved to be everything they said she was. She was taken into the program—the Apprenticeship Program for Federal Indians or whatever it was called—and she was sent to Washington, where if I am not mistaken she still resides, and that’s what made her father a happy Indian. That’s what put him in our camp.”

“And now he’s chief,” said Miles.

“And now he’s chief, and that’s more good luck. First thing in the morning would you please ask Delia to phone Alexander Bigmeadow and smooth everything over? I don’t suppose you know this, Miles—Delia is too modest to say anything—but she has taken over a good share of my work load. She will take care of this matter. Tomorrow morning you just mention this to her and she will smooth everything over.”

The logs in the fireplace shifted.

Miles said, “Do you know what else I saw out there in Sandhill today? I saw the sign about shoelaces in the General Store.”

“No.”

“Yes. It’s still on the inside of the door.”

“Think of it.” The superintendent turned to his wife, who was carrying a tray into the living room, and said, “Viola, did you forget shoelaces?”

“Please don’t say that, Ansel dear. It’s too, too vivid in my memory.” She handed Miles a spoon, a napkin, and a large raspberry sundae.