A new teacher, Aldine McKenna, arrived in Dorland from New York on September 1. She boards with the Price Family two miles from Stony Bank School. Miss McKenna has come only recently from Scotland. When Emmeline Josephson, aged 14, was asked to describe her new teacher, she said, “Her speech is very different so I try to translate for the younger children. All she really does is singing and poetry. I don’t know how I will pass my eighth grade exam.”
Toward the end of October, Charlotte found reason number six. She was helping her mother make pie with the last jar of rhubarb when they got word about Mr. Tanner. Everybody knew the Tanners had been foreclosed on and the auction date was set. Still, Mr. Tanner didn’t seem like the kind of man who would hang himself. He went to church and was so gentle with Yauncy, never ever losing patience with him, though it was plain Yauncy would never be able to do more than throw bales. It was Yauncy who found Mr. Tanner in the barn.
Who What When Where Why and How.
She didn’t know, so she just wrote: Reason #6: Mr. Tanner.
22
Some days in November, his father would ask Clare to walk to school with Neva and Aldine to help light the stove and bring water. If it was really cold he just stayed a while, keeping the fire stoked and trying with uncertain knowledge and carpenter’s mud to mend the window where wind eked in. Aldine always started the day by playing the piano and leading the children (and Emmeline, when Emmeline felt like it) through their songs and recitations. A lot of the songs seemed to be about rain. The song he liked best was one he’d never heard before, a Scottish one about some poor guy without shoes or a coat or a hat and all the odd things he wore to make do. She played the piano and sang that one herself while the little kids acted it out. It was the finale, she called it, and the way the younger kids were always calling out for “the finale” was a funny thing to watch.
The Miss McKenna of the classroom called him “Clay-dance” instead of Clare, the sound of it flipping his stomach, pushing it closed. She said “aboot” and “dinnae” and “doon.” “Coo” instead of “cow.” “Hame” instead of “home.” When she thought the school needed tidying up, she said she couldn’t stand things to be so clarty.
She had looked at him (eyes brown, but not plain brown—deep-river brown with sunlight on the surface) with amusement when he was putting coal in the bucket and she said, “Clay-dance, how aboot you?”
He stood up straight and felt the gaze of all the Josephson girls and Neva, heard their dresses rustle as they swiveled around in their seats.
“How about me?” he asked.
She asked him something that had a few familiar words in it—poem and school magazine—but the other words took him a minute to translate. He went redder still and rubbed his sooty thumb against a sooty palm.
“One ye especially luve?” she prompted.
“I didn’t mind that one in the book by Bryan,” he said.
“Bryan?” she asked, her expression meant to encourage, perhaps, though he felt an idiot always. “What did he write then?”
It wasn’t so much that he’d liked the poem—he’d just memorized it from boredom—but how could she not know which one he meant? The grammar book had only a few poems in it. Maybe this was why Emmeline Josephson was worried about passing her exams.
“Would you speak a line or two?”
He looked down and began to recite in a hurried, low monotone:
“So we’ll go no more a’roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out—”
He stopped short. The soul wears out the breast was how it went, and he wasn’t going to say that, but Aldine was smiling at him as she had never before, as if she were lit up from the inside. “Oh, that’s a luve-ly poem,” she said, “especially if you slow down a wee bit. It’s by George Gordon, also known as Lord Byron.” Then, almost to herself, “It can be sung, as well,” which of course Neva pleaded for, and so Aldine sang it, and what had just been rhyming lines lifted from the page and hung now in the air, almost touchable.
“Thank you, Clay-dance, for bringing it to our attention,” Aldine said. “We’ll absolutely put that luve-ly poem in our magazine.” She was smiling at him still, something he, in his own paralyzed manner, might have enjoyed more if he hadn’t felt Emmeline Josephson staring at him, too, and smiling a smile that she might well have borrowed from Charlotte.
One afternoon, his father felt a change in weather, appraised the massing clouds, and said, “It could storm soon.” There was hope in his voice, wary hope, Clare saw, but hope just the same. His father prized his gaze from the sky. “Maybe you should fetch coats from home and take them to Neva and Miss McKenna.”
Clare didn’t wait for his father to change his mind or for the storm to change direction (which it did of course). Still the coats were welcome and, for Clare, the walk home from school was a freezing happiness. Neva hopped and skipped to stay warm, pitching to Aldine every question Clare would have asked if he were not struck dumb by the deep-river gaze she turned on him when he spoke.
“How many brothers do you have, Miss McKenna?” Neva asked.
“Not a one.”
A cursive line of geese passed overhead.
“How many sisters?”
“One. Plus a bairn that died.”
The air smelled of frozen dust. Neva asked what a bairn was, and Aldine told her.
“How’d the baby die?” Neva asked.
“Don’t know, really.”
“Did you come here on a boat?”
“Aye.”
The sky was thick with snowless clouds.
“Was it big?”
“Enormous.”
“Sing that song! The one about Bryan O’Linn.”
“If ye’ll sing it with me.” Aldine turned her eyes to Clare and he felt himself pushed along by currents, brushed by speechless fish. “Do you sing, Clay-dance?”
He shook his head.
“Oh, just try,” she said, coaxing him, the black pom-pom quivering slightly on the top of her head as she walked, Charlotte’s borrowed coat engulfing the whole of her, except for her boots, small and precise on the dusty road. “Bryan O’Linn was a gentleman born,” she began, and Neva sang with her in a high cheerful voice. “He lived at a time when no clothes they were worn.”
Neva laughed when Clare blushed. “Isn’t it funny, Clare?” Neva asked, and she sang, “But as fashion went out, of course Bryan walked in . . .” Neva paused dramatically and then finished, “‘Whoo, I’ll set all the fashions,’ says Bryan O’Linn.”
Clare smiled but he didn’t sing, and they walked on. “My nose turned leaky here,” Aldine said, touching her glove to her upper lip. “It is this cold in Scotland but my nose never turned leaky.”
He understood every word she spoke. They were nearly home. The ground was dry. The air was still. There would be no snow, no moisture of any kind. Aldine snuffled and gave out a small moist laugh. He could have kept walking like this for hours.
“Artemis!” Neva shouted, for there she was, ambling their way, her tail wagging so hard it seemed to rock her bony rump from one side to the other.
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