Northern Borders (20 page)

Without a word she descended from the teacher's platform and limped down the aisle to Hermie's desk.

“Stand up,” she said.

Hermie got to his feet, still snickering. Although Hermie Hill
was as tall as most men, Earla Armstrong stood eye to eye with him and outweighed him by more than fifty pounds. Total silence had fallen over the classroom.

Mrs. Armstrong slowly lifted her cane to about shoulder level. “Do you propose to lock me in the privy?” she said.

“No, ma'am,” Hermie said boldly.

“Then why are you laughing?”

“Because,” Hermie sang out loudly for the benefit of the entire class, “I misdoubt you'd fit inside it.”

Instantly Earla Armstrong struck Hermie Hill. But not with the lifted cane. The cane was a ruse to distract his attention. She struck him with her other fist, full in the face, as hard as I had ever seen anyone hit, and this in a place and at a time when fist fights were common occurrences.

Hermie went over backward. Mrs. Armstrong was on him like a cat on a mouse. She grabbed him by the shirt collar and one leg and lugged him to the boys' door and heaved him bodily out into the schoolyard. “Don't you ever come back here!” she shouted.

And that was the last Lost Nation Atheneum saw of Hermie Hill, and the way Mrs. Earla Armstrong established order in our school.

 

Who was this woman I was destined to go to school to for the next two years? By degrees, her story filtered down to us. In plainest terms, she was a hardworking widow from the neighboring township of Pond in the Sky, who had taught several terms of school years ago, before she was married. Her husband, Nort Armstrong, had died last year, leaving Earla with an impoverished hill farm and six kids. My Uncle Rob Roy mentioned at a Sunday dinner at the Farm that it was rumored that old Nort had succumbed to husband-beatings, but my grandfather said that more probably Nort just faded out of the picture.

It was evident to all of us from the day Mrs. Armstrong arrived with Mr. Francis Dubois, sailing into the classroom in that bright green dress overrun with big poisonous-looking purple flowers, that the school directors had not hired her for her pedagogical qualifications. It was not just that she had never graduated from high school. Many capable country teachers in those days had never attended high school a day in their lives. Earla Armstrong, however, was profoundly and militantly ignorant. More than once she boasted—with me in mind, I am sure—that she had never read a book through for pleasure in her entire life.

Mrs. Armstrong's teaching techniques were rudimentary. She claimed to believe in the basics. What this meant is that we worked in our books for hours on end while she sat enthroned at her desk, sipping from her gigantic black thermos, which, we quickly surmised, contained something much stronger than coffee. At unpredictable intervals she descended to prowl the aisle with her cattle cane, with which she did not hesitate to thwack us, hard and repeatedly, for real or imagined offenses.

When her cane wasn't handy, Mrs. Armstrong administered a series of esoteric lesser punishments of obscure nationalistic origin, which she claimed to have learned from watching “the Saturday night wrastling” on television during a stint as a waitress at the notorious Hapwell House in Pond in the Sky. (A bouncer was more like it, Uncle Rob said.) There was the Indian wrist burn, a corrective measure that necessitated her grasping our wrists in both her hands and rubbing them raw and red with a corrosive pipe-wrench motion. A somewhat similar operation known as the Dutch rub involved scouring her clenched fist over the sensitive spot at the crown of our heads for two or three minutes while holding us fast in a headlock and suffusing our olfactory senses with the redolence of sweat, chalkdust, and, if it was past ten o'clock, the sweetish fumes of the gin with which she laced her coffee.

“Now we will take up world geography,” Mrs. Armstrong would rip out on days when she'd had frequent recourse to the black thermos; and we would fall victim to the Chinese armlock, the Hindu neck stretch, and the Borneo thumb splint.

The most painful of these torments was the Hungarian dead finger. I have no idea where Mrs. Armstrong picked this up, but she resorted to the dead finger frequently, and with great effectiveness, particularly on the younger pupils.

“Hungarian dead finger!” she would announce, and start to
shake her left wrist and fingers like a southpaw pitcher performing some sort of outlandish warm-up exercise. When her fingers were flapping loose and fast, she gripped the first two digits under her thumb, and tucked in her pinky, leaving her ring finger vibrating at a furious rate. Then she would raise her arm, turn her wrist over and outward, and deliver a vicious crack on the head to the nearest malefactor. The blow was all the more anguishing because of the hard, shiny wedding band she wore on her vibrating dead finger.

All I can say on Mrs. Armstrong's behalf is that, her additional farm chores at home considered, she was indeed a hard worker; and that although she picked on some of us more than others, she had no favorites. Sooner or later during the course of any given week, we all came in for a dose of her sadistic brand of discipline.

“She keeps good order,” my grandfather said when I complained to him. “You have to give her that.”

His assessment more or less summarized the entire township's attitude toward Earla Armstrong. She'd been hired to keep order and keep order she did. Hers was a roughshod, Draconian brand of government; it was tyrannical and arbitrary and often cruel. But she kept order and in the Lost Nation of my youth, that, like being a hard worker, excused a great many other shortcomings, including a teacher's total unfitness to teach anything but fear and hatred. As I look back now on our two years under her tutelage, I believe that we pupils were a sort of Lost Nation ourselves. We were lost in a wilderness of ignorance, with no Moses to lead us out. Only Earla Armstrong.

 

One hot afternoon in the early fall of my eighth-grade year, when both of the doors of the school stood wide open, I happened to look around and see a strange boy standing in the girls' entranceway. I put up my hand, and finally got Mrs. Armstrong's attention. “Somebody's at the door,” I said.

“Somebody's at the door!” barked Mrs. Armstrong, who had a habit of repeating any announcement that surprised her, however slightly. “What do you mean, somebody's at the door?”

“Somebody's at the door,” I said.

The entire class's attention was now on the strange boy. He was tall and rail-thin, with a lanky shock of coal-black hair over his forehead. Although it was exceptionally hot for September in Kingdom County, he wore a man's suitcoat with an old-fashioned herringbone pattern. Under the coat he had on a faded blue flannel shirt and a baggy pair of suit pants with dark stripes that looked as though they'd once belonged to an undertaker. On his feet was a pair of shapeless brogans, laced with baling twine, and his pants were held up not with a belt but with a longer hank of twine. He looked to be two or three years older than me, around fifteen or sixteen. He had already started a wispy black mustache.

This was our first close look at Louis-Hippolyte LaFlamme: standing in the girls' entrance of the Lost Nation Atheneum, like a hobo on the Boston and Montreal Railroad tracks in Kingdom Common.

“Well,” Mrs. Armstrong said finally, pointing her cattle cane at the new arrival. “Just what do you think you want?”

The boy hesitated. Then in a heavy French Canadian accent he said, “I come go school, me.”

Mrs. Armstrong sighted at him over her cane like a hunter sighting in a buck deer. “Well now, Frenchy.
Where
do you propose to come go school, you?”

The boy shrugged. “To school,” he said. “To . . .”

Here his meager English failed him altogether. All he could do was repeat, “To school.”

“Well,” Mrs. Armstrong announced to the class. “He wants to go school.”

She heaved herself to her feet, came lurching off the teacher's platform, and clumped down the aisle with the assistance of the ever-present cow cane. “Do you know where you're standing?” she demanded of the boy. She thumped the floor at his feet with the tip of her cane. “You're standing in the girls' entryway. What are you, a boy or a girl?”

The boy shrugged again, and said something in a soft voice.

“What?” Mrs. Armstrong yelled. “What did you say to me?”

This time I heard him quite distinctly. He said, “Yes, sister.”

“Sister!” she bellowed. “Who do you think you're calling sister, mister man? I'll sister you.”

Mrs. Armstrong gave the strange boy in the herringbone coat a terrific shove in the chest. He backed up, but only a step or two. Mrs. Armstrong gave him another shove, pushing him out through the girls' door. “You stay right there,
sister
,” she shouted. “Or go home. Stay there or go home. Until you learn you're a boy and how to address your teacher.”

Mrs. Armstrong hitched back to her platform, slamming her cane onto the floor with each stiff step. As usual after one of her outbursts, she took a long pull from her black thermos. But even as she rammed the thermos bottle back into that leviathan of a lunch box, the strange boy was watching from the girls' doorway.

He continued to stand there for the rest of the afternoon. Two or three times Mrs. Armstrong interrupted her recitations to say, to no one in particular, “He can wait until doomsday for all I care. Until he knows he's a boy.”

Once, just before three-thirty dismissal, I turned around and caught the boy's eye. And despite his outlandish appearance and the fact that he did not know fifty words of English, I sensed, then and there, the stubbornness about him that would make his subjugation the battle of Earla Armstrong's teaching career.

 

The next day it rained hard. I slogged the three miles down the Hollow road in my long India rubber coat and rubber barn boots. When I arrived at school, there was the French boy, waiting by the girls' entranceway. He was dressed just the same as the day before, but today the herringbone jacket was sopping wet and his hair was dripping steadily into his eyes. As I went through the boys' entrance I quickly pointed at it, then at him.

Mrs. Armstrong was ensconced at her desk, eating a meat sandwich with ketchup on it. I didn't know if this was her breakfast or just an early snack. No one knew such things about Mrs. Armstrong. Her ways were as different from ours as the ways of the French Canadian boy turned out to be.

“It's you, is it?” she said. “Early again.”

In fact, I was nearly always the first to arrive at the Atheneum. Of course my grandmother packed me off to school a good half hour earlier than necessary, but also I was invariably eager to find
out what happened next in whatever book I happened to be reading at school. Yet for more than a year, Mrs. Armstrong had greeted me this way, with sneering, mild incredulity: “It's you, is it? Early again.”

She scowled at me over her sandwich. “Did you see Mr. Sister?” she said. “Right smack where he was yesterday. He can stand there until the cows come home, Sis can, if he don't learn he's a boy.”

I wanted to go back and tell the French boy that he was in the wrong doorway. But with Mrs. Armstrong watching every move I made, I couldn't figure how to do it. Nor was I at all certain I could make him understand me. I slid into my seat and opened
David Copperfield.
David had just decided to run away from London, to his Aunt Betsy's in Dover, and soon I was thousands of miles from Lost Nation Hollow, adrift with my young hero on the merciless high roads of nineteenth-century England.

Although it continued to rain hard, many of the arriving students preferred to wait outside in their rain gear, under the horse chestnut tree, until Mrs. Armstrong went to the vestibule and rang the bell for morning classes. I glanced back and noticed that the strange boy watched carefully as the kids filed in through separate entranceways. Mrs. Armstrong, however, slammed the doors shut behind them with a cruel finality.

In view of the driving rain, I knew that we would not have our usual outdoor nine-thirty recess. But on the pretext of getting a drink from the water bucket in the vestibule, I got up from my seat at about nine o'clock and went to the rear of the room. When I opened the boys' door, I was not greatly surprised to discover that the French kid was standing in the entranceway.

Instantly I returned to my desk and shot up my hand. Mrs. Armstrong, in the meantime, had rooted a pickle sandwich out of her lunch box. She was preoccupied with that for some minutes and either didn't see my hand or pretended not to. Finally she snapped out, “What is it now, Kittredge?”

“That new kid's at the boys' door,” I said. “The one you call Sis.”

“What of it?”

“You said when he went to the right door you'd let him in.”

“I said no such thing, Mr. District Attorney. I said when he knows he's a boy.”

A year ago I would have been cowed. At thirteen, I stared at her hatefully, the way I had seen my grandfather stare with his pale blue eyes at his enemies in the village. Mrs. Armstrong returned to her pickle sandwich. When she looked up again I was still staring at her.

“All right, Mr. D. A.,” she told me. “Go tell Sis she can come in. She can sit with you, seeing as how you've appointed yourself her attorney. Find out if she can read—you're the famous reader.”

And she gave one of the little kids standing at her desk, waiting to recite, the Hungarian dead finger on the head and returned to her sandwich.

 

I knew that my grandfather was going to town that afternoon to deliver a load of lumber from his sawmill. Shortly after school let out, he stopped for me on his way home, and we headed back up the Hollow in the driving rain. On the way we passed Sis. He was trotting along on my side of the road in his herringbone coat, hatless in the rain.