While waiting for the inspector to arrive on Friday afternoon of the following week, Aldine went about the empty schoolhouse wiping dust off the bookshelves with a damp white cloth and a pail of water. It was good to work. It kept her warm. They had brought coal for the stove, but just the littlest bit, not enough for even a week. She had to stop and refill the pail with clean water every five minutes or she streaked the varnished shelves with mud instead of cleaning them. The shelves would be gritty again by Monday, but it gave her something to do.
As she worked she was aware, as she had been aware since the day of the storm, of a difference in her skin. All over her skin was the desire for Ansel, which was like the electricity that clung invisibly to her cracked fingers, which pulled her skirt against her legs and stuck her hair together and sparked on metal. In Ansel’s truck she hadn’t been able to stop shivering, had cried unintelligibly and tried to open the door again so she could go back inside the school, which at least didn’t rock back and forth in the wind, but he gathered her body against him and said, “Shh. Shh. Close your eyes, Aldine, and don’t look.”
He’d never before used her Christian name, and it made his voice sound different—closer, more intimate. “I can still hear it!” she cried. “I can still hear the hissing sound!”
“Sing then,” he said, but she cried harder and dug her hand into his shirt.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t.”
“Shh,” he murmured, just as if she were his daughter. “You’ll be all right. We’ll just wait it out, is all, just wait it out.” He had said that over and over until she stopped trying to open the door and held still. She was more or less in his lap by then, and although they were both gritty and there was on his neck the smell of dirt and the smell of sweat, she kept her face against his skin. It surprised her now that she hadn’t kissed him. She wanted to kiss him now, it was true and shameful, but in the truck, in his arms, there had been a nearly guiltless intimacy to his embrace that soothed her.
Outside, Aldine heard the motor of a car. Then a few seconds of quiet, followed by a car door slamming. Footsteps on the stairs, and then the inspector entered the schoolhouse without knock or greeting. His manner was brusque. He brought the winter in with him. He removed his hat and took up a stance ten paces from Aldine. He stared at her for a moment, and said, “There have been reports of impropriety.”
Aldine looked at her pail of dirty water, not at the man with the stiff face and brushy mustache and fancy hat. “Impropriety,” he said again.
“Meaning?” Aldine asked, looking up now. That she had worked for five months without pay was not mentioned. That was improper, if you asked her.
“The use of the school premises for non-school activities. The burning of coal for personal comfort.” The inspector might have added that Mr. Josephson had lowered his voice to mention a rumored impropriety of another sort, but that was always the problem with these unmarried schoolteachers, wasn’t it? It was the devilish bind the boards were in—they couldn’t hire a married teacher, had to fire one who got married, in fact, but unmarried women, especially those who were young and fetching, could get into trouble in a farm town just as quick as they could in the city. One more reason why, in his opinion, the country schools needed consolidation. Board them up, that was the thing now. Board them up and consolidate.
The girl had looked away from him in clear impudent disdain, and now squeezed her rag into the pail, leaning forward a bit, her thin dress pulling tight, her skin so milky and smooth it seemed nothing had ever touched it, not even the sun. There’s talk she’s set her eye on Mr. Price, Mr. Josephson had said in his murmuring voice.
“So,” he said, and when the girl turned her round, pretty face to him, he felt in a raw way the nature of her sin whether actual or contemplated, one only the necessary step to the other, and he wondered if this was the way it was in Ireland or wherever she came from—that you set your cap for a man, married or not.
“As of today,” he said, “the school is closed for the near term.” He was glad to see the hurt in her eyes, the way they lost their impudence. “You’ll need to complete your assessments of each pupil for the incoming teacher.”
Aldine suffered his words like a series of blows, and felt her skin flushing from both anger and humiliation. That this stout, stupid man with his stony face and his hairbrush mustache who knew not one blessed thing about her and her schoolteaching could make her feel like a chastened child made her livid. “I didn’t pockle the bloody cool,” she said. The muddy water had whitened the cracks in the hand that shook as she pointed at the stove. “I’ve no place of my own, have received no money at all, and have lived with a family that has not been paid to keep me. It’s the school board that has pockled my pay.”
“The board will consider your salary in the context of recent events,” the inspector said evenly. “There is the matter of deducting for the coal, of course, and also”—he seemed to be savoring his command over the situation—“other matters.”
“Other matters?” she said. “And what other matters would there be?”
The inspector set his hat on his head and turned the brim until it was just so.
“Deducting for the coal, you are saying to me?” She was yelling now. She couldn’t remember when in her life she last had. “You can’t take something from nothing!”
If her words or tone influenced the man, he didn’t show it. He kept walking. It was a large car he drove away in.
She finished the damp-ragging, she didn’t know why. Then she straightened the books and used the transom hooks to take down the planes and strings. She would save Neva’s for her, but she would burn the rest, with Emmeline’s going first. She was sorry the hideous girl had the goldfish. She who’d won it the only one in the class who hadn’t wanted it. She cleared her desk so that it was just as she had found it five months before; then she put a bit more of the coal in the stove and held her hands over it. If they gave her nothing, where would she go? How could she buy a ticket? How would she leave?
She pulled the red cloth Riverside Shakespeare from her satchel and laid it on the very pile of books where she’d found it that first day of school; then she seated herself at the desk and opened her grade book. She would do the assessments, carefully and completely. She would not give the school board one thing more to excuse their failure to pay her the wages she deserved.
40