Alone in the Classroom Read Online Free Page A

teased, admired, listened to her. In her own experience brothers and sisters were close when the parents were not, and she wondered about Mr. and Mrs. Graves, the former bull-like in appearance and the latter the most attractive woman in town.
    She had also wondered about Parley alone in her classroom with Susan and had paused on the way down the front steps, unresolved. Then she had turned and gone back up the stairs and into the school.
    She waited in the hallway near the closed door, moving her load of workbooks from one arm to another. The young Prince of Wales kept her company, his framedlikeness on the wall beside the door. In those days nothing animated her mind more than fantasies of rescue, and of those fantasies, the most vivid involved rescuing not a friend, but an enemy. To rescue a lamb has merit; to rescue a wolf quickens the pulse. She was anxious on Susan’s behalf, but her inner dramatist leapt forward to Parley behind bars, and she was visiting him, bringing books into his pale, tormented, despicable life.
    The door opened and she was the guilty party.
    “Susan has agreed to help out,” he said. “We’re forming a drama club and she’s going to help me organize it.”
    Nothing bad about that, although the play in mind gave pause. Scenes from
Tess
starring Susan as the ill-fated beauty. But he was a staple of the curriculum - pessimistic, erotic Thomas Hardy.
    They were halfway through October. At midday Connie sat on the back steps of the school paring an apple with an old penknife when around the corner came Michael Graves returning from the noon-hour dinner break. Her smile, the unreserved smile of this pretty teacher, had him reaching into his pocket and offering her his jackknife, wickedly sharp. Then he simplified matters by taking over the apple. He sat on the step beside her and proceeded to display an exactitude, a hatred of waste, a remarkable aptitude with his hands. One thin, continuous peel slid off his blade and curled into his lap. His hands were sunburnt and dry and nicked, familiar with gopher holes and fox diggings and snake squirmings.
    The same feeling of fascination came over her that used to settle on her as a child watching her mother bandage a cut knee, or roll a lemon under her palm, or scrape batter off her fingers with a bone-handled knife, or peel potatoes with such infinite regard for the flesh that her peelings too were skin-thin and elegant. How it lulls a person, the sight of work done easily and well and without conscious thought.
    A shadow fell over them. Parley moved through the school like mustard gas in subtle form. You were aware afterwards that you’d been poisoned.
    From behind them, “So, there’s
something
he can do.”
    Michael’s nut-brown face went scarlet and he was gone.
    “Fifteen years old and thick as a plank.”
    An unpleasant voice. It had an unending complaint in it, a tone of resentment, a sourness.
    “Fourteen,” she said.
    She fixed her eyes on the naked apple Michael had shoved into her hands. Parley went back inside and she ate it; she swallowed it down. Then she stood up, wiped her hands on her handkerchief, and watched all the brave children come back to school.
    At home (she boarded with the Kowalchuks, who had the barbershop), she prepared her lessons, the old speller her favourite diversion, the early lessons as opposed to the advanced. Who had written this speller? Anonymous, like the makers of medieval churches. In the early sample sentences,everything was an action, a picture, and how absorbing and comforting the sentences were.
    1. Warm rain aids the growing grain.
    2. Bail the water out of the sail-boat. Do you see a fairy? No, but I hear hail on the roof.
    3. The squaw dried her hair in the sun. I spied a squaw near the church. A robin chirps on the rail fence.
    4. Mules drag loads over soft roads. Toads live away from water.
    5. A warm scarf covers my throat.
    From there she flipped ahead to advanced Grade VII , where sentences