Where You Once Belonged(5)

Well, he was a tough kid. He had a shock of black hair and he was always big for his age. Then when he was six they sent him to school. With his hair combed flat on his head and dressed in new shirt and pants, he entered for the first time that old red three-story brick building on the west edge of town, with its wide foot-hollowed stairs and its tall windows and that familiar smell of swept dust, and he didn’t like it. At school they expected him to sit still, to raise his hand and be quiet. So at recess he walked off the playground and went home. He did this about once a week. And when he arrived at home Mrs. Burdette, that serious little pious woman, would take him by the back hair, lean him across the kitchen table and hit him with the spatula. Then she would send him back. Except that he didn’t always go back; instead he often wandered about town, through the back alleys behind the Main Street businesses and out along the railroad tracks into the country. So in April they decided that another full year of the first grade and another complete term with Mrs. Peach would do him good. I don’t think they believed that Jack had been fully socialized yet.

Still I can’t imagine that Mrs. Peach had any part in this decision or that she was excited by it personally. But, in any case, it was because of that routine first-grade truancy of his that Jack was there again the next year when I entered school in 1948. And since his name came after mine in the class rolls he was assigned the desk behind me. He was already there that first morning. He had arrived early; his wet-combed hair was stiff on his head and he was sitting at his desk with his hands folded as if he were bored with it all already and was merely waiting for a chance to escape. We didn’t interest him at all. He was a veteran of the first grade and beyond us. Besides he was at least twenty pounds heavier and a good head taller than we were. We didn’t even exist for him yet.

But later, on the second or third day of school—in the middle of the afternoon when it was hot and still in the room and when the old high windows were open to the air and there wasn’t any air, and while we were sweating over the alphabet, copying out the letters onto lined sheets of paper—Jack popped me on the head. I turned around. I don’t know what I expected. But on his desk there was a dead gopher. He had it stretched out over his attempts at some As and Bs. He had squeezed out a drop of gopher blood onto the paper below his name. “You want him?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want him.”

“Well I’m done with him.”

“I don’t want him.”

Then Mrs. Peach was standing over us. She was standing back a little too. She ordered Jack to deposit the dead gopher in the trash immediately.

Jack stood up and walked to the front of the room. In the far corner, beside the pencil sharpener where the wastebasket was, he turned and faced us. We were all watching him. He raised the gopher by the hind leg and held it there at eye level for a moment, suspended, as if he were about to make a little magic or as if the gopher itself still knew a trick or two. Then he let it go. It seemed to dive into the wastebasket. When it hit bottom it made a satisfactory bang.

“Jack,” Mrs. Peach said. “You sit down.”

Jack walked back slowly to his desk. At his desk he faced straight ahead and grinned. So we were not just watching him now. We were staring at him—in wonder and awe, and shocked admiration too.

Meanwhile Mrs. Peach had begun to shout at us: “Children.

Children,” she shouted. “Get back to work.” She began to clap her hands at us.

But for the rest of the afternoon, at least twice each hour, one of us would break the lead in his pencil so he could rise and walk to the front of the room and peer down into the wastebasket and see the gopher. It was lying on its back with its paws curled bitterly over its fawn belly. Finally, after enough instances of this, Mrs. Peach announced that if just one more kid broke the lead in his pencil we would all stay after school. We were not getting off to a good start with the alphabet at all, she said.

Thus for eight years he was passed from one grade to the next, from one old local spinster or balding man to the next one, passing, being promoted each spring not so much by his own efforts with books and maps and pencils as by the absolute refusal of our teachers to have anything more to do with him. (Because the experiment with Mrs. Peach had failed, of course. Holding him back hadn’t improved on his deportment. And none of the other teachers would even consider taking him twice.) No, he wore them all out. In fact when it was their year to have him in their classrooms our teachers, by the middle of September, were already counting the days until the end of May. They had big calendars fastened to the walls with heavy Xs scratched and double-scratched through the accumulation of finished days, and one of them, Miss Ermalline Johnson, actually resigned during Christmas break rather than return for another half year. “I won’t,” she told the school board. “I couldn’t be responsible if I did.”

Then we entered high school. At Holt County Union High School—it was redbrick too and three stories high as the grade school had been, but it stood at the south end of Main Street and it was more ambitious architecturally; it had square turrets at both ends and the roof was red tile so that it looked a cross between a prison and somebody’s notion of a Mediterranean palace; you could see it from a distance, risen up above the stunted elm trees and hackberries, standing alone at the end of Main as if blocking passage out of town, the practical and symbolic notion of what Holt County thought about higher education, standing there for fifty years and more until in the middle 1960s it was condemned and they tore it down and sold off the old redbrick for backyard patios and borders for zinnia beds and replaced it with a new low one-story pedestrian affair that had a scarcity of windows—it was there, at Holt County Union High School, that Jack Burdette was even more of a presence. And I don’t mean just in our lives, but in the life of the entire town.