The Winter of the School

This is the same winter I have been writing about. I am coming at it from the other side, and I am coming at it slowly, because more happened in it than in the four years before it.

The county plows the state road and does not plow County Road, so from the first of the year I walked up it and down it in whatever the sky was doing. Eight miles a day in a bad week, and I learned to keep a dry pair of socks in the schoolhouse in a coffee can on top of the stove. I have kept a lot of numbers in my life and that is one of them.

The children were the children of the men on the dairy four miles out and the orchards past the fairgrounds and the crews who came up in the fall for the picking and did not always leave. On a good day I had forty. In February I had nineteen, because the road to the dairy was drifted and three families were cut off for a week, and when those children came back they came back with the same arithmetic they had when they left, which is what happens when nobody at home has time to sit down.

I taught the way I had been taught the right way and not the way I had been taught the wrong way. From Ellerslie I took the chart on the wall with a name on it and a row of small squares, one square for each thing that had been learned, and the sounds of the letters before the names of them, and the rule that you never shame a child in front of the others, because I have been the child in front of the others and I know exactly what it buys, which is nothing. What I left behind at Ellerslie was the ledger of punishment and the standing in the corner and the way a room can be arranged so that a person is sorted before they have said a word. Half of my method, if you want to call it that, is a list of things not to do.

There was a girl of nine who could not read her own name and could do three-column multiplication in her head, and I taught her to read with the words she already had, which were the names of horses and the parts of a truck. There were twins of six who would not be separated and had to be separated, and I did it with a bench and not with a voice. There was a boy whose hands were cracked open from the cold from November to March and who could not hold a pencil in February, and I taught him his letters in the air with his arm, and he learned them, and his mother gave me a jar of jam in April and would not take it back.

Silas was there four days a week and I was there five. In the building we were a machine with two parts in it and no friction, and I want to be exact about what there was between us, because a person reading this later will want to make it something else.

He was a man who read the Bible the way a surveyor reads a plat. He was thirty and he had never in his life been liked easily, and he had decided early that being liked was not the job. I respected him the way I respect a good hinge, which is to say I noticed him only when he was absent, and for the first two months I did not think about his face at all.

Once, in the schoolroom, he put his hand on the back of my chair while he leaned over to look at the chart, and I stood up out of the chair and moved to the stove, and I did it without deciding to, the way you move out of the way of a truck. He noticed. He never did it again, and he never said anything about it, and both of those things were right.

In February he came to the cottage on a Thursday evening with a paper bag of potatoes and stood in the doorway and did not come in. He looked at the room, which had a bed and a table and a stove and my coat on a nail, and then he said, “You can do a great deal.”

Then he went down the hill.

I stood in the middle of the floor with the bag of potatoes in my arms and waited for the rest of it, because there is always a rest of it. The rest of it did not come, because there was no rest of it. He had said the largest thing he had and he had said it the way a man reads a line off a page, and I understood after a while that it had not been a compliment. It was a verdict, and it had a job waiting behind it, and I put the potatoes in the bin and did not sleep well.

I had one piece of business of my own that winter and I did it badly.

In December, while Kate was upstairs in the house on Ridge Lane looking for the insurance papers, I went back to the kitchen drawer—the one that did not open all the way, the one I have already described—and I took one thing out of it. It was the envelope with the Florida return address and my name typed on it, opened. It was dated 2003. I was twelve. I read four lines of it standing at the counter and then I folded it into my coat and I have never told anybody in that family that I have it.

I wrote to the lawyer in January. I wrote again in March. I used the address on the envelope, which was nine years old, and I put my own return address on it, 4111 County Road, and I walked up to the box at the end of the drive twice a day for six weeks and there was nothing in it but the electric bill and a seed catalog addressed to the previous tenant.

On the last Thursday in March the answer came. I read it standing at the end of the drive with the mail in one hand and the box lid still up, and the snow had started again while I was walking and it came in on the paper, the way it does, one flake at a time and then in a hurry.

The lawyer said that my great-uncle was Jack Amory, of Sarasota, Florida, that he had left Buffalo in the seventies and had done well in land, that he had written to me once, in 2003, at an address on Ridge Lane in Lackawanna, and that he had gotten no answer, and that he had assumed for eight years that I did not want to know him. The lawyer said my great-uncle had died on the fourteenth of February at seventy-nine, in a hospital, with his affairs in order and a will that was not complicated. The lawyer said that my name was in the will, spelled correctly, and that I should come to his office, and he gave the date and the flight.

I stood there and read it a second time, and the second reading was worse than the first, because it was on the second reading that I did the arithmetic about the years. Nine years. One letter in a drawer with the receipts, in a house where the mail was a thing that could be held. A man in Florida waiting for an answer from a child of twelve who never saw the question.

The snow went on coming in on the page and the ink of the letterhead started to run at the corner, and I stood at the end of the drive for a while longer than I needed to, and then I folded the letter in half and put it inside my coat against my shirt and walked down to the schoolhouse and taught nineteen children their letters for four hours with wet paper against my ribs.