A Piece of the World(19)

“Um . . .” I scan the first few lines of the poem:

I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air—

Between the Heaves of Storm—

“The people standing around the bed, mourning the one who died?”

Mrs. Crowley nods. She hands me the book. “If you’d like, you may take this home for the weekend.”

Sitting on the front stoop of my house after school I thumb through the pages, alighting here and there:

This is my letter to the world

That never wrote to me—

The simple news that Nature told—

With tender majesty . . .

The poems are peculiar and inside out, and I’m not sure I know what they mean. I imagine Emily Dickinson in a white dress, sitting at her desk, head bent over her quill, scratching out these halting fragments. “It’s all right if you don’t exactly understand,” Mrs. Crowley told the class. “What matters is how a poem resonates for you.”

What must it have been like to capture these thoughts on paper? Like trapping fireflies, I think.

Mother, seeing me reading on the stoop, dumps a basket of air-dried sheets in my lap. “No time for lollygagging,” she says under her breath.

NEAR THE END of eighth grade—the final year of Wing School Number 4, and the last year of any kind of schooling for most of us—Mrs. Crowley takes me aside during a lunch period. “Christina, I can’t do this forever,” she says. “Would you be interested in staying on for another few years, to get qualified to take over the school? I think you’d make an excellent teacher.”

Her words make me glow with pride. But at supper that evening, when I report the conversation to Mother and Papa, I see a look pass between them. “We’ll talk about it,” Papa says and sends me outside to sit on the stoop.

When he calls me back in, Mother is looking at her plate. Papa says, “I’m sorry, Christina, but you’ve had more schooling than either of us ever did. Your mother has too much to do. We need your help around here.”

My stomach plummets. I try to keep the hard edge of panic out of my voice. “But, Papa, I could go to school only in the mornings. Or stay home when I’m needed.”

“Trust me, you’ll learn more on this farm than you’ll ever learn from a book.”

“But I like going to school. I like what I’m learning.”

“Book learning doesn’t get the chores done.”

The next day I plead my case to Mamey. Later I hear her talking to Papa in a low voice in the parlor. “Let her stay in school a few more years,” she says. “What can it hurt? Teaching is a fine profession. And let’s face it: There’s not much else available to her.”

“Katie isn’t well, you know that. Christina is needed here. You need her here.”

“We can manage,” Mamey says. “If she doesn’t do this now, she might end up on this farm for the rest of her life.”

“Is that so intolerable? It’s the life I chose.”

“But that’s it, John. You saw the world and then you chose it. She’s never been farther than Rockland.”

“And remember what a success that was? She couldn’t wait to get home.”

“She was young and scared.”

“The wider world is no place for her.”

“For pity’s sake, we’re not talking about the wider world. We’re talking about a small town a mile and a half from here.”

“My decision is made, Tryphena.”

Telling Mrs. Crowley at recess the next day that I can’t stay in school is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. She is silent for a moment. Then she says, “You’ll be fine, Christina. There will be other opportunities, no doubt.” She seems a little teary. I am teary too. She has never touched me before, but now she puts her delicate hand on mine. “I want to say, Christina, that you are . . . unusual. And somehow . . .” Her voice trails off. “Your mind—your curiosity—will be your comfort.”

On the last day of school, I am so full of self-pity that I can hardly speak. On my way out the door I linger in front of Mrs. Crowley’s globe, ordered from a Sears, Roebuck catalog, and turn it with a finger. The ocean is robin’s egg blue, with bumpy raised green and tan parts representing continents. I run my fingers over Taiwan, Tasmania, Texas. These faraway places are as real to me as the treasure buried in Mystery Tunnel. Which is to say: It’s hard for me to believe they actually exist.





AFTER I LEAVE school, time stretches ahead like a long, flat road visible for miles. My routine becomes as regular as the tide. I rise before dawn to collect an armload of firewood from the shed, dump it into the bin beside the Glenwood range in the kitchen, and go back for another. Open the heavy black door of the oven, use the poker to stir the ashes, find the faint embers. Add several logs, coax the fire along with kindling, shut the door and press my cold stiff hands against it to warm them. Then I rouse my brothers from bed to feed the chickens and pigs, the horses and the mule. They grumble all the way down the stairs about who scatters the feed, mucks the stalls, collects the eggs. While the boys are in the barn I fix a pot of boiled oats with currants and raisins for their breakfast and make sandwiches of butter and molasses on thick sourdough bread, wrapped in wax paper, for their lunches; gather vegetables and apples from the cellar, a basket looped over my arm as I make my way down the rickety wooden ladder.