Baker Towers Read Online Free Page B

everyone knew, were the success stories. No one spoke of the girls who stood at the altar six months pregnant, or the young mining widows left with more children than any sane woman could have wanted in the first place. Once, in the corridor between classes, Viola had glimpsed Joyce in conversation with a boy. Be careful, she wanted to say. Someone, she felt, ought to offer the girl some guidance. But guide her toward what, exactly, Viola couldn’t imagine.
    Her own path in life had been set from the beginning. Her father, a cousin of Chester and Elias Baker, had worked as their bookkeeper. When the mine prospered, the Peales had prospered, too. Viola’s older sister was simpleminded and hadn’t finished school, so Viola received an education for both of them. At twenty she graduated from normal school, returned to Bakerton and was hired as a primary teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in a rural township. She rose each morning at dawn and walked the five miles to school, where she fired the furnace and, in winter, shoveled a path from the unpaved road to the door. She taught all eight grades in a single room, to children whose first language was often Hungarian or Polish or Italian. Later she’d transferred to the high school, hoping to teach the literature and art history she’d learned at normal school. She’d been astonished to find that half the pupils quit before junior year, when elective courses could be taken; that those who remained chose home economics and metal shop rather than French. Each day Viola taught one section of Latin and five classes of English grammar. She delivered the grammar lessons with an urgent sense of mission, like FlorenceNightingale dressing a wound. The children’s English was deplorable. Nothing could be done about their diction— dolwers for dollars, far hole for fire hall. A victory was breaking them of ain’t and the ghastly yunz, the Appalachian equivalent of the Southern you all. Their reading skills were poor; they could barely sound out the words on the chalkboard. Pupils who might someday, at most, read the Sunday paper or the United Mineworkers’ monthly newsletter.
    Then came Joyce Novak.
    Viola made inquiries. According to Edna O’Shane, who taught art and music, Joyce could neither draw nor sing; but otherwise she was gifted in all subjects. She had a brother in the service and an older sister Viola vaguely remembered, a shy, dark-haired girl who’d watched her with terrified eyes and wouldn’t speak in class. That the older Novaks had shown no special promise confounded her; she’d long observed that intelligence ran in families. (Her own excepted: her sister’s slowness had a medical cause, a high fever she’d suffered as a child.) But like all the others, Joyce Novak was a coal miner’s child. Her aptitude could not be accounted for.
     
    T HAT AFTERNOON they sat in their usual spots—Viola at her desk, Joyce at her smaller one in the front row—eating slices of a lemon cake Viola’s sister had baked. Viola had forgotten to pack forks. Giggling a little, she and Joyce ate the cake with their fingers.
    “It was a cinch,” said Joyce, when Viola asked about her geometry test. She sat erect in her chair, a white handkerchief spread across her lap; someone had taught her excellent table manners. “The first proof I wasn’t sure about, but I got the others right.”
    They ate in companionable silence. Through the closed door Violaheard the hum of voices from the lunchroom down the hall. Most pupils went home at noontime. The few who remained were farm children who lived miles away.
    “We had a letter from Georgie,” said Joyce. “He’s coming home on furlough.” She spoke often of her older brother; indeed, he was the only family member she mentioned. The war seemed to fascinate her. She was better informed about the latest battles and casualties than Viola was.
    “How wonderful,” said Viola. “Your parents must be pleased.”
    Joyce didn’t respond.