Staggerford (9 page)

Coach Gibbon was officious too, but without being efficient. His won-lost record was such that he wouldn’t have lasted very long in a sports-minded community like Owl Brook or Berrington. Lucky for Coach Gibbon and his kind, thought Miles, that there were towns like Staggerford to harbor unsuccessful coaches. Staggerford was used to losing.

How did coaches in Owl Brook, Berrington and Gopher Prairie handle the problem of fluid and fat? Miles knew of at least three methods employed by Coach Gibbon to rid his wrestlers of fluid and fat. For several hours before a wrestling meet, Coach had his athletes run, he had them wear long underwear and overcoats to class, and he had them spit into tin cans. Coach Gibbon had read in a coaching journal that a boy jogging steadily for an hour could lose as much as five pounds, that a boy sweating in class all day could lose a pound and a half, and a boy spitting until he was dried out lost whatever the spit in the can weighed.

Only once had Miles seen Coach impose all three methods
on one wrestler at one time, producing a sight so remarkable that Miles never forgot it. This had occurred several years ago, and the wrestler’s name was Flaskerude. Young Flaskerude came to school one morning and found Coach Gibbon waiting for him at his locker. Coach had just learned that the Gopher Prairie team, whom they were to wrestle that afternoon, was going to forfeit the 170-pound match for lack of a wrestler in that division. All that was needed for Staggerford to win that particular match was to have a 170-pounder step into the ring and step out again. But Staggerford’s 170-pounder was home with the flu. Coach Gibbon had two boys at 160 and two boys at 180. First he considered putting ten pounds on one of his 160-pounders by feeling him bananas (his coaching journal said that five bananas, eaten fast, put on one pound) but neither boy could be talked into eating fifty bananas. So it was up to Flaskerude, the weaker wrestler of the two heavier boys, to come down from 180. Coach Gibbon decided that instead of running laps in the gym, Flaskerude would run through the corridors of the school, where he would have to climb steps with each lap. And so all morning poor Flaskerude, clad in long underwear, a sweatsuit, and an overcoat, loped and jogged and walked and finally stumbled through the corridors of Staggerford High, spitting into a can clutched to his heaving breast. And it didn’t work. When the Gopher Prairie team arrived, Flaskerude had lost only eight pounds, though it was agreed that even if he had lost ten he wouldn’t have had the strength to step into the ring and step out again. The next day while Flaskerude was home in bed with acute exhaustion, his eight lost pounds, in the form of perspiration odor, lingered in the stairwells of the school.

Since graduating, Flaskerude had gone, at his normal weight of 180, into insurance.

Evergreen Cemetery was on high ground. It offered long vistas in all directions. It was surrounded by a new fence erected to keep out snowmobilers, and Miles, climbing up from the riverbank, had to go around to the gate facing the
highway. He passed under the wrought-iron arch and left the gate open out of superstition. He followed a row of tall cedars to his mother’s grave.

PRUITT, said the polished gray stone at the center of the four-grave plot,
AMY
, said the small stone at the foot of the only grave occupied. To Miles, Amy Pruitt was the definition of the word “helpmeet.” For most of her married life—besides leaving the impression that homemaking was a joy—Amy Pruitt had been her husband’s bookkeeper in the Staggerford Creamery; and after her husband was stricken with sclerosis and confined to the house, she ran the business herself until she found a buyer who suited her—a buttermaker with a large down payment and an honest reputation and a respect for dairy farmers. She had always been the decision maker in the family. She had directed the choir at St. Isidore’s. She had suffered a fatal blood clot in her brain while Miles was away at college. After her death, the Pruitt sons, Miles and Dale, transferred their father, who was failing fast, to a Benedictine nursing home in Duluth, and they sold the house.

The Pruitt plot was the highest point in the cemetery. Miles looked south across the highway to the flat farmland. Miss McGee had been right about the weather. Strands of cloud were advancing across the sky, and under them strands of shadow moved across the prairie. The stubble fields were gold where the sun shone and gray where it didn’t.

He looked back east, the way he had come. Showing above the distant trees were the grain elevator, the water tower (
STAGGER
, it said from this angle), the belfry atop the city hall, and the spire of St. Isidore’s.

He looked north across the river: woods and more farms and on the horizon a smudge of smoke from the power plant in Berrington.

He looked west. The land dropped away from the cemetery and into the gulch, then rose again beyond the gulch and climbed to the forested hills of the Sandhill Reservation.

Miles moved along the path from his mother’s grave to Fred Vandergar’s, and found it still unmarked. Fred Vandergar had been one of his colleagues at the high school, a teacher of bookkeeping and typing. Last December, at the age of fifty-eight, Fred had lost a lung. In January he had lost part of his lower bowel. From that time until his death in June, Miles had seen him only twice.

The first time was in February, when Fred had come home from his bowel operation and Miles, at the request of Superintendent Stevenson, took him a sick-leave form that required his signature. The superintendent was afraid to go, and his secretary, Delia Fritz, didn’t have time. It was a dark winter afternoon. The sky was dark, the deep snow was dark, the Vandergar house was dark.

“Fred’s not feeling well,” said Mrs. Vandergar, answering Miles’s knock at the door. She was the only faculty wife whose first name Miles had never learned. The Vandergars were very private people—childless and friendless—and Miles had never been in their house before.

“If I could just get Fred’s signature on this form, Mrs. Vandergar.”

“All right, come in. You may put your overshoes on this paper.”

She showed Miles into the living room, where one small lamp burned. Then she went to the bedroom to rouse Fred.

Presently Fred appeared, hobbling carefully and wearing a bathrobe and doing his best to smile. His medicine had caused most of his hair to fall out, and what remained was standing on end. He seemed to have lost height as well as weight, and his handshake was feeble.

“The superintendent has asked me to give you his best wishes,” said Miles.

“Do you take cream in your coffee?” asked Mrs. Vandergar.

“Yes, please.”

She went to the kitchen, and Miles and Fred sat down together near the one small lamp. After a few words about basketball and faculty meetings, Fred put his hand over his
remaining lung and said, “We’re not sure it’s cleared up in here. They want me to go to cobalt.” Then he put his hand on his belly and said, “I’m waiting for word on my liver, too. If it’s in my liver, then it will be no use going to cobalt … It’s a terrible thing, this waiting to hear …”

Miles was speechless. The English language seemed to contain not a single word for him to utter at this moment.

Mrs. Vandergar brought Miles a cup of lukewarm coffee and a dry cookie. “Fred tires easily,” she said.

Taking this as a cue, Miles drank the coffee in three quick swallows and stood up to leave. Fred tottered after him to the front door. His wife followed.

“Thank the superintendent for his good wishes. One can always hope.” Fred’s voice was hollow and hopeless.

“Be careful on the step,” said Mrs. Vandergar. “It’s icy.”

Miles nodded, and as he opened the door he felt Fred’s hand on his shoulder.

“It’s a terrible thing, this waiting to hear about my liver, Miles.” His eyes were dry and there was no emotion in his face, but he did not remove his hand from Miles’s shoulder until he was satisfied that Miles understood his terror.

Miles took the man in his arms and embraced him tightly. This act surprised Miles as much as Fred, but it was the only way to express what he felt. Then he embraced Mrs. Vandergar—awkwardly, for she was very short and standing behind her husband. Then he hurried away, and when he got home he found in his pocket the sick-leave form he had forgotten to ask Fred to sign.

The following week, the doctor told Fred that instead of going to cobalt he should trust in the natural ability of his body to throw off the disease. Fred took this to mean that he was a goner. He was right. He lost more hair and more weight and never left the house but once before he died. His only venture into society was to attend his retirement party on the last day of May.

It was a difficult party to plan for. If the social committee,
chaired by Thanatopsis Workman, scheduled the party for late May (the customary time for honoring retirees) the guest of honor might be dead. On the other hand, if they held it earlier they would be calling attention to the pre-cariousness of Fred’s condition: No one could pretend in March, say, that Fred was not dying, and Thanatopsis had hosted enough social functions to know that any party lacking pretense and make-believe might as well be called off. She set the date for the last of May.

The party was to be held in the private dining room of the Hub Cafe, and Miles dreaded it. The night before the party this is what he wrote in his journal:

The next day it was Miles himself who was pushed into the river, but keeping his balance, along with his temper,
he got wet only up to his knees. It happened last hour and he was able to go straight home and change. Then he went to the Hub.

Fred and his wife were escorted to the party by Thanatopsis Workman, and word of Fred’s approach spread through the Hub like the news in Poe’s story of the approaching Red Death. When Fred walked through the door of the dining room, the faculty was horrified. Though he still breathed, the process of corruption seemed to have begun. His eyes had sunk deep in their sockets and the cords stood out in his neck. He tried to be sociable and he succeeded, but at some obviously terrible cost to his stamina, for in his advance to the head table he had to sit three times on three different chairs.

Some of the faculty gingerly sidestepped Fred entirely, preferring to study him from a distance while pretending to be in conversation with someone else. Some shook his hand, backing away even as they did so. Some went to the rest room until dinner was served, and only when Fred was occupied with his food did they come out of hiding.

Superintendent Stevenson strove valiantly against his dread of death. Supported by his wife on the right and by his secretary Delia Fritz on the left, he approached Fred, gave him the most timorous of smiles, and said, “It’s great seeing you again, Fred.”

“You too.” Fred at this point was halfway to the head table and being helped up from a chair by Miles and Thanatopsis. There was a long silence, during which the superintendent cleared his throat and tried to think of more to say. Miles in a clumsy attempt to help him said, “Mr. Stevenson, I don’t believe Fred has heard the name of the smallest fish in Hawaii.”

“Humuhumunukunukuapuaa,” blurted the superintendent, relieved that Miles had thought of it. During Christmas vacation the Stevensons had flown to Hawaii and brought back this memorized word, which they uttered whenever anyone asked about their trip.

“Humuhumunukunukuapuaa,” echoed Mrs. Stevenson.

“That’s the name of the smallest fish in Hawaii, Miles explained to Fred.

“Where?” said Fred.

“Hawaii,” said Miles. “You see, the name is longer than the fish. That’s the funny part of it.”

Stevenson held his thumb and forefinger about three inches apart to indicate the length of the fish. Or the word.

“Hawaii?” said a waitress pushing into the room a cart of salad bowls. “Who’s been to Hawaii?”

“I have!” said Stevenson, and he made his getaway with the waitress, walking beside her to the head table and teaching her to say humuhumunukunukuapuaa.

After dinner, Superintendent Stevenson took his place at the lectern and from notes supplied him by Delia Fritz he reviewed Fred’s career: four years in college, four years in the army, four years in the office-machine business, twenty-seven years in the classroom.

Then Thanatopsis, representing the faculty, gave Fred a watch.

It was Fred’s turn to speak. He remained seated at his place and delivered a short, surprisingly sensible speech, concluding thus:

“I was a teacher at the best possible time. Public-school teaching wasn’t much of a profession, at least for a man, before my time, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be much of a profession after my time. But
during
my time it was good. Before my time, the majority of teachers were women, most of them underpaid, overworked, and under-trained. And now as my time comes to an end, the majority of students are falling into a mood of sullen defiance. The majority of students, though they graduate all right, have no interest in learning, except learning the things they suspect their elders might not approve of. And the majority of teachers are shifting their attention from teaching to collective bargaining. But my time was a good time. During most of my teaching years, teaching was a good profession. Most of my colleagues were conscientious, and so were most of my students. I saw my students go out and become stenographers and office managers, and some of them worked
themselves into a business of their own. I saw new respect for education among the legislators in St. Paul. I saw federal money come in and buy electric typewriters for my classroom. I did my best. I have no regrets. Thanks for the watch.”