The Language of Paradise: A Novel (28 page)

“I don’t know. The way he said my name—as though he owned it. He’s too sure of himself, too forward. Assuming we would have him for a friend . . .” She turned away, shoulders drooping, and he saw that however she felt, she would give in.

“Those overgrown sorts may look like scarecrows, but they eat enough for an army. I wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of them harbor worms.” Fanny had installed herself at the loom, and she pumped the treadle for emphasis.

GIDEON ENDURED THE MORNING
at his desk, his thoughts as scattered and feckless as they’d been concentrated the night before. The sermon was still unfinished, but it was already past noon, and he was anxious to get away before Sophy came to ask if he would join them at table. The idea of the visit had come to him with such force that it seemed crucial to carry out his plan without further interruption.

He threw on his coat and began to walk at a fast trot through the softening snow, slowing his pace when the house was safely behind him. He was genuinely curious about Solloway’s methods—few of the other masters had lasted more than a year—but was reluctant to invade the classroom while school was in session. Hedge had considered such visits a pastoral duty, and relished arriving unannounced, ostensibly to catechize the students, but also to observe the teacher at work; a letter, enumerating the poor pedagogue’s weaknesses and prescribing Scriptural correctives, would soon follow. Gideon had no desire to strike fear in the hearts of youth. If anything, he was terrified of young people, not individually, but en masse. He wondered what would have become of the shy, precocious boy he had been if his mother hadn’t tutored him—how he would have fared in a classroom like the one he was about to enter, with pupils of all ages and backgrounds shut in together.

When the schoolhouse came in sight, he halted. The building wasn’t identical to the ones his mother had taught in, but it was similar enough; he recognized the gray wood showing through peeling paint, the straight, plain flanks, the tarnished bell over the door. Here, too, the narrow windows, whose small panes would fracture the view of fields spreading out on either side. Even at this distance he could recall the smell of the rooms he had been banished to as a boy during the mill owner’s visits: an effluvial bleakness of damp wool, cold ash in the stove, and year upon year of unwashed bodies in close confinement. It was possible that all schoolrooms had this odor. Scrubbing could never quite expunge it.

The girl had been so lazy that she had kicked the pail with her toe to move it along, inch by indifferent inch. She rarely troubled him now. There was no room for her in his mind, or in his life, and since he hadn’t told a living soul about her, it was as if she never existed at all. Still, Gideon was grateful for the black clothes that weighed too heavy on a day as mild as this one. They bespoke his position, the man he had become.

As he walked up the muddy path, he could hear the schoolmaster’s ringing question:
Who will spin the globe today?
The response was immediate, a confusion of voices proclaiming that Annie had her turn last week, Eben’s spelling had improved, Caleb had helped clean the classroom two days in a row. Gideon waited until the din subsided before knocking.

Leander Solloway opened the door himself. “Pastor Birdsall! Marvelous!” His body was too big for the miserly proportions of the doorframe; his head jutted forward to avoid grazing the top. He gazed at Gideon for a moment, his eyes bright, before turning back to his pupils. “We have a guest, ladies and gentlemen. Will you rise and give Pastor Birdsall your warmest greeting?”

The students were seated in a semicircle, with the youngest at each end and the tallest in the middle. Gideon judged that their ages ranged from six or seven to at least sixteen; a couple of the older boys had nascent beards and were almost as tall as Solloway. Yet they all rose as one, like a well-trained chorus, and parroted, “Good afternoon, Pastor Birdsall.”

“Good afternoon . . . children.” He could not bring himself to address this ragtag bunch as their teacher had; in his mouth the words might seem like mockery. “Please continue with your class. I am only here to observe.” Solloway indicated that he should sit on a mangy velvet couch wedged into a corner.

“We are just about to begin our geography lesson—the last class of the day, and the one where we travel farthest—if . . .
Clara Hooper
will spin the globe for us and send us on our way.”

Clara, a thin, freckled girl of about ten, frowning to conceal her pleasure, made her way to the center of the room, where the globe was enthroned atop a carved pedestal that looked, Gideon thought, as if it ought to hold a bust of Homer. It was a handsome globe suspended in a brass meridian, the continents discreetly colored on a background of old vellum—as fine as any Gideon had seen at college. Clara, standing at a respectful distance, stretched out her arm and applied one forefinger, a timid attempt resulting in a wobbly half-circuit, but, with her classmates urging her to “give it some go,” propelled the sphere into such a frantic spin that it creaked on its axis. “Now!” Solloway commanded, and the girl shut her eyes, and with a firm touch, stopped what she had set in motion. Gently he lifted the finger she had pasted on the globe’s surface. “New South Wales! Well done, Clara. You have taken us to the other side of the world, where even the weather is reversed. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, at this very moment the duckbill and the laughing kookaburra-bird sport in the summer sun, and our brother Aboriginals launch their canoes on white beaches, sweating while we shiver. How appealing it seems, does it not? Perhaps one or two of you are even sailing southward in your thoughts—but I warn you, my friends, take care how you get there!”

For the next hour Gideon listened, as enthralled as any of the children, as Solloway emoted the story of a land few had heard of and none were likely ever to see. In between kookaburra calls and terrifying descriptions of convict ships, he managed to insert nuggets of solid history: Captain Cook, the penal colonies, the Aborigines’ intricate tales of how the world began. Periodically, he paused to draw out a pupil’s thoughts or opinions, breaking the question down into smaller and smaller components until even the slowest student was able to offer some response. When, after glancing at the clock, he tapped the globe sharply with two fingers—as if boisterous New South Wales must be summoned home and put to bed within its outline—the entire class stayed seated, rising only gradually, one by one, and shuffling to the door. Gideon felt pity in his heart for the children; some, he knew, must walk miles to isolated farms or cottages through snow higher than their boots after spending a glorious hour in the sun. One hulking boy lingered to line the chairs neatly against a wall and sweep the floor.

“I have nothing more for you today, Lem,” his teacher said, “but come early tomorrow and we’ll hang some of the pictures I told you about.” He put an arm around the boy’s shoulders. “You’ll enjoy that, won’t you?”

Lem’s look of gratitude was so ardent that Gideon was startled, unsure whether he ought to be moved or embarrassed. “Your acolyte?” he asked, after the boy had gone.

Solloway knelt to feed another log to the stove. “My adversary, at first. I was warned against him before I ever met him. Lem and his brother had been intimidating schoolmasters for years, with some success. My predecessor was one of several who were driven away. The boys were taught to speak with their fists; it is the only language they know. The brother is long gone, but there was Lem on my first day, sprawled in the front row, emitting great snorting yawns and tipping his chair back into the lap of the boy behind him. I knew it would do no good to rebuke him. Very softly I asked him what he liked to do. Kill chickens, he said, making a wringing motion with his hands. With those arms I took you for a wrestler, I told him, and he brightened right up: he had done some ‘wrassling’ with his brother. I mentioned, in the most modest way, that I had some skills in that area myself. When class was dismissed I found him waiting for me outside. I won’t belabor you with brute details, Pastor. I’ll just say that he had strength but no skill. I pinned him easily enough, but he thrashed in my grip like a big fish. I hurt him only as much as I had to.” The teacher stood and brushed off his trousers. “He’s been a lamb ever since. I treat him with affection and respect, and praise him when he does his little tasks. You’ve seen how devoted he is.”

“And do you still speak the language of fists with him?” Gideon moved to make room for Solloway, who had settled on the couch beside him.

“I give him what I give the others, and hope he takes some of it in. Poor boy, he hasn’t much of a brain left. What can one expect, when his father has been clapping him on the head since he was old enough to crawl? You would be appalled at how many of the children are disciplined in that brutal way. I do what I can—which is little enough. My knowledge is broad, but not deep. I tell them stories about the world. I try to make them understand there is something larger than the patch of earth they were born on.”

“You performed wonders with the globe,” Gideon said.

Solloway smiled. “A cherished possession of mine. I found it in Amsterdam and carried it across two oceans in my trunk, swaddled in a nightshirt. Never did I imagine it would end up in a country schoolhouse, claimed by the offspring of illiterate farmers. Until I brought the globe in, they would not believe the world was round. Why should they, when their only image of the planet was flat?” He pointed to a fly-spotted map on the wall, mildew stains competing with the continents; Gideon remembered one like it in his mother’s classroom. “Children of this sort—deprived from birth, taught to keep their eyes down and their ambitions low—must be
shown
. They haven’t the capacity to imagine the sphere, so they must see it. Mind you, they’re quite the cosmopolites now. There is no place they won’t travel. The more exotic, the better.”

“If only I could bring that tangibility to my sermons,” Gideon said. “I do my best to describe the vivid thoughts in my mind, but I get tangled up in words. What I experience as physical becomes abstract in the telling. I suppose there’s no help for it. I don’t have your commanding presence, or your gift for theater. One must be born with such talents.”

“You are mistaken, my friend. You exaggerate my abilities and greatly diminish your own. You are a visionary. I saw it as soon as you began to preach.” The schoolmaster spoke in a low tone, his eyes fixed on Gideon’s face. Although the man didn’t move, Gideon had the impression that he had leaned closer, so thoroughly did his conviction fill the space between them.

“I have been granted just one gift,” said Leander Solloway. “I am tinder. I spark others into flame.”

CHAPTER 24

____

THE GUEST

H
ER OLD BED IS TOO SHORT. SOPHY CLINGS TO THIS
simple fact as to a mast in a storm, though the rest of her family blithely discounts it. She told them so after dinner, when it was clear their guest would stay, and they looked at her as if she’d lost her wits, and Mama said, all tartness, “It will have to do, since I’m not aware of another.”

The others are only too eager to accommodate him. Without asking her, Gideon offered their own bed—presumably, the only one capacious enough to receive the visitor’s extraordinary length, not to mention his great soul!—and assured him they would be more comfortable in the sitting room, knowing full well that the settee wasn’t wide enough for two. Not to be outdone, Micah volunteered to give up Sophy’s closet of a room that he’d only recently inherited and sleep in his old place in the attic with James, and James—silent, brooding James—said he would be glad of another warm body on a wretched night like this. It was left to Sophy to remind them that Papa had made that bed to her measure, and if Micah couldn’t stretch his legs out, what would Mr. Solloway do?

Leander (he has instructed them to call him Leander) refused these kind offers and begged to be allowed to curl up near the kitchen hearth. “I can sleep anywhere,” he said, “for I sleep deep but not long. Three or four hours at most. When I lay my head down, a wood floor is as good as a feather bed.” But Mama wasn’t swayed by his tales of sweet slumber in the Black Forest or on Carpathian mountain crags. She decreed that Sophy’s room would be suitable for a night, making up in privacy what it lacked in size, and that a clever man like Leander would find a way to rest, even if he had to sleep sitting up.

Once all was decided, Gideon had looked out the window. “Old Man Winter is having his revenge for our taste of spring,” he said. “I doubt you’ll be ringing the school bell tomorrow. All the better! We’ll spend the morning in the study, if we can find the path.”

Now Sophy lies beside her sleeping husband in a state of wakefulness so keen she believes she can hear the snowflakes as they fall. Gideon is on his back, his head sunk in the pillow and his arms flung up; he sleeps the way Micah used to, with complete abandon, as if he’d dropped from exhaustion while running. In his nightshirt, his light hair loose around his face, he could pass for a child, which might explain her nervy vigilance. She isn’t sure what she is watching for. Leander is hardly the first stranger to spend a night under this roof, and not all of them were schoolmasters. In Papa’s day, drunkards and tramps sheltered here; Mama used to say that only the Lord’s mercy preserved them from being murdered in their beds.