In the last period of the day he sat at his desk at the front of the room, listening to their speeches and glancing out the window toward the place where the sun shone aslant on the few bare trees risen up along the street. It looked cold and bleak outside.
The tall girl talking at the head of the class was just finishing. Something to do with Hamilton. She had spent half of her speech on the duel with Burr. What she was saying was scarcely coherent. She finished and glanced at Guthrie and approached his desk and handed over her notes. Thank you, he said. She turned and sat down at her desk near the west windows, and he made a note about what to say to her in conference and again consulted the list before him and looked out at their faces. They looked as if they were waiting for some inevitable doom and disaster. Unless they had already given their speeches. Then they were bored and indifferent. Glenda, he said.
A girl in the middle row said, Mr. Guthrie?
Yes.
I’m not ready today.
Do you have your notes?
Yes. But I’m not ready.
Come ahead. You’ll have to do what you can.
But I don’t know about this, she said.
Come ahead.
She got up and walked to the front and began to read rapidly from her papers without ever once looking up, a stream of uninflected talk that would have bored even her, even as she uttered it, if she weren’t so terrified. About Cornwallis, evidently. The Battle of Yorktown. She didn’t get as far as the surrender. Suddenly she was finished. She turned her paper over and there was nothing on the other side. She looked at Guthrie. I told you I wasn’t ready, she said.
She stood facing him, then she advanced and handed him her papers and went back in a rush to her seat in the middle of the room, her face hotly red, and sat down and peered into the palms of her hands as though she might discover some explanation or at least some form of consolation and succor there, and then she looked at the girl next to her, a large brown-haired girl who gave her a little nod, but it didn’t seem to be enough because lastly she hid her hands under her skirt and sat on them.
At the front of the room at his desk Guthrie made a note and consulted the list of names before him. He called the next one. A big boy in black cowboy boots rose up and stomped forward from the back of the room. Once he got started he talked haltingly for something less than a minute.
That’s it? Guthrie said. You think that just about covers it?
Yeah.
That was pretty short.
I couldn’t find anything, the boy said.
You couldn’t find anything about Thomas Jefferson?
No.
The Declaration of Independence.
No.
The presidency. His life at Monticello.
No.
Where did you look?
Everywhere I could think of.
You must not have thought very long, Guthrie said. Let me see your notes.
I just got this page.
Let me see that much.
The big boy handed over the single sheet of tablet paper and stomped back and sat down. Guthrie watched him. The boy had sulled up now. He was staring straight ahead. The room was quiet, the students all waiting and watching him. He looked away and stared out the window. The trees along the curb in front of the school still showed sunlight at the tops; in the slanting afternoon sun the trees cast the thinnest of shadows as though they had been sprayed onto the street and the brown grass. For weeks it had been very dry and in the nights there were hard freezes. He turned back and called Victoria Roubideaux to make her speech.
When she came forward she was in a black skirt and a soft yellow sweater and her coal black hair fell down her back, and he noticed that her hair was cut off squarely and neatly at the bottom in a straight thick line. She looked better now, better kept. She stopped in front of the class and turned slowly and began at once to speak very softly. He could barely hear her.
Could you talk a little louder, please? Guthrie said.
From the beginning? she said.
No. From where you are.