She felt a kind of panic rising within her. Twenty-two minutes. She scanned all the flat surfaces of the room, looking for a folder or anything suggesting more thorough plans. A Master Lesson list, Mr. Price had called it. She tore into cupboards. Odd sets of three or four books, a broom, a pole for the transoms. Heavy paper in different colors. A huge spool of stout string. A rolled American flag on a stick. Boxes of old rulers, pencils, erasers. But no lesson book at all.
Fifteen minutes remained to her, according to the clock, and she had no idea how she might lead the classes. Why hadn’t she come sooner to prepare? She’d had nearly two weeks to herself and what had she done with them? Nothing except help with the household work. Why hadn’t she studied the children’s texts, written herself notes? What had she imagined? But she knew what she’d imagined. She’d returned to it often enough, the picture of herself knitting while the children worked at their lessons, quietly, heads bent over their work, a fire in the woodstove, antelope grazing outside the window. A perfect daftie she’d been. The very embodiment of.
She returned to the page where Mr. Geoph had written his Summary of Term and Inventory of Books. She tried to match up his numbers with the little row of books on the shelf, saw that only three of the books were new and the rest were just fair or poor, and decided to read the spines. Only one seventh-year reader, one sixth, one fourth, and five third. A red cloth Riverside Shakespeare, just like the one at the Price house, but dustier. Single books on physiology, geography, history, agriculture, and civil government. It was entirely possible that she had overstated her teaching abilities. Lied, even, if you looked at it in a certain way.
Through the window, Aldine could see Neva drawing in the dirt. She made a zigzag, then a curling line, then a V. Her name, of course.
Three boys stood huddled in the corner of the yard, hands in pockets, shoulders low in attitudes of resentment.
Seven minutes.
At the end of the shelf she found a slim book called The Modern Music Series Primer. Songs were arranged by subject in the table of contents, and her eye skipped past Work and Play to Rain.
Maybe they could do two things at once: summon rain and learn to sing.
At two minutes before nine, three girls appeared on the road to school, their feet scuffling dust. Two had long hair like Neva and looked to be seven or eight. The third one carried a satchel and was tall and regal-looking, with her hair cut in a bob that made her face seem a series of elegantly arranged straight lines. Aldine had seen this girl at church on Sunday, had seen Charlotte catching up to her, and Aldine had wondered whether she herself had been the subject of their conversation—twice Charlotte and the girl had glanced over at her as they talked.
Neva saw them coming and threw down her stick. “Bernie! Melba! Emmeline!” she shouted. “Come see who our new teacher is! She’s from Scot-land!”
The Josephson girls then, Aldine thought. That’s who they must be.
The two little girls ran to meet Neva but the older girl did not quicken her pace, and her gaze as she looked up at the school window to see Aldine was withdrawn and appraising, as if she knew something the others did not. Aldine smiled, anyway, as an experiment, and the girl looked away, slowly, casually, as if she had not seen anyone in the window at all.
Aldine was looking at the clock on the wall when the minute hand—it gave her a start—clicked forward to twelve and marked the hour.
16
Aldine opened the front door and called out, “And let us begin our day,” the very words Mrs. Lynch, her favorite teacher in Ayr, had used every morning, but now the children stared at her as if she’d just spoken Hebrew, so this time, when she repeated the words, she added a wave of the hand, motioning them in.
“Where do we sit?” one of the girls called out amidst the sudden shuffle in the hollow room and Aldine said, “Wherever you choose,” which none of them seemed to understand, so the oldest Josephson girl said, “Front to back, youngest to oldest.”
“Littlest or youngest?” Neva asked, and Emmeline gave her a withering look. “Didn’t I just say youngest?”
Aldine consulted her list of students. “You would be Emmeline then?” she said to the Josephson girl when they were all seated.
The girl looked up from her desk, her face very calm. “If you mean Em-me-line, yes, that is my name. Who I would be then, I couldn’t say, because I don’t know when then might be.”
Silence, until one of the younger Josephsons said, “My sister’s real smart.”
Aldine pointed to the books spread out on her desk. “Please come forward and take the one that you should be using this year.” She said it twice and then Emmeline said, “I think she wants us to take our books,” and then, as they did so, she said, “Not the one you used last year, Phay, unless you want to stay in this horrible little school forevermore.”
While the others hooted and laughed, none less loudly than his own older brothers, Phay Wright, a freckled, coarse-faced creature, ducked his reddening face.
Aldine passed out the songbooks, made an announcement, and again Emmeline translated. “I think she wants us to sing the song on page thirty-seven.”
“Yes,” Aldine said. “Page thirty-seven.”
“What about the pledge?” Emmeline asked, and Neva said, “You didn’t raise your hand!”
Emmeline raised her hand, Aldine nodded, and Emmeline said, “What about the Pledge of Allegiance?”
Aldine regarded her uncertainly.
“The pledge to the flag,” Neva said, looking toward a particular corner of the room. “Except where’s the flag?”
Aldine went to the cupboard where she’d seen an American flag wrapped on a short pole.
“Over there!” Neva said, pointing toward a receptacle mounted on a wall near the corner. “Phay will put it up. He always puts it up.”
Phay took the flag, pulled up a chair to stand on, and inserted the stick into its receptacle.
“Thank you, Phay,” Aldine said, and Phay, walking to his desk, nodded gravely, glad to have his stature to a certain degree restored.
“I’ll lead!” Neva said, and Aldine did what the children did, which was to stand upright, stare at the flag, and put a hand over the heart. While they recited, she stood and listened. At its conclusion, they all sat down. Emmeline raised her hand and, once recognized, said in a calm voice, “You don’t know the words to the Pledge of Allegiance?”
“Not yet,” Aldine said.
“I guess that’s because you’re not from here.”
“Things are new for me, yes,” Aldine said. She wanted to say that she learned quickly, because she did, but it would be too demeaning—her saying to her own students, But I learn quickly.
She raised her songbook and presented it to them, face out. “Page thirty-seven then. In the key of F.” It seemed no one understood her words. She turned the primer around and said, “A-one, a-two, a-one two three four,” and began to sing, though only Neva tried to sing along, and then she stopped, too. Aldine sang on, if only to keep these awful children at bay, and in a few moments her whole body seemed to relax and she was not just singing the words but riding them right out of the room.