Children,” she shouted. “Get back to work.” She began to clap her hands at us.
But for the rest of the afternoon, at least twice each hour, one of us would break the lead in his pencil so he could rise and walk to the front of the room and peer down into the wastebasket and see the gopher. It was lying on its back with its paws curled bitterly over its fawn belly. Finally, after enough instances of this, Mrs. Peach announced that if just one more kid broke the lead in his pencil we would all stay after school. We were not getting off to a good start with the alphabet at all, she said.
Thus for eight years he was passed from one grade to the next, from one old local spinster or balding man to the next one, passing, being promoted each spring not so much by his own efforts with books and maps and pencils as by the absolute refusal of our teachers to have anything more to do with him. (Because the experiment with Mrs. Peach had failed, of course. Holding him back hadn’t improved on his deportment. And none of the other teachers would even consider taking him twice.) No, he wore them all out. In fact when it was their year to have him in their classrooms our teachers, by the middle of September, were already counting the days until the end of May. They had big calendars fastened to the walls with heavy Xs scratched and double-scratched through the accumulation of finished days, and one of them, Miss Ermalline Johnson, actually resigned during Christmas break rather than return for another half year. “I won’t,” she told the school board. “I couldn’t be responsible if I did.”
Then we entered high school. At Holt County Union High School—it was redbrick too and three stories high as the grade school had been, but it stood at the south end of Main Street and it was more ambitious architecturally; it had square turrets at both ends and the roof was red tile so that it looked a cross between a prison and somebody’s notion of a Mediterranean palace; you could see it from a distance, risen up above the stunted elm trees and hackberries, standing alone at the end of Main as if blocking passage out of town, the practical and symbolic notion of what Holt County thought about higher education, standing there for fifty years and more until in the middle 1960s it was condemned and they tore it down and sold off the old redbrick for backyard patios and borders for zinnia beds and replaced it with a new low one-story pedestrian affair that had a scarcity of windows—it was there, at Holt County Union High School, that Jack Burdette was even more of a presence. And I don’t mean just in our lives, but in the life of the entire town.