The Nix(33)

His paddlings were legendary for their force, for the technique required to generate enough power to, for example, shatter Brand Beaumonde’s glasses, which was a historical fact that lived on as oral history among the members of the sixth-grade class, that Large struck Beaumonde’s ass so hard the shock wave traveled up through the poor boy’s body and cracked his high-prescription lenses. Comparisons were made to professional tennis players uncoiling 140-mph serves, how Large could transfer his weight in such a way to deliver a devastating—and athletically unlikely—blow. Sure, occasionally a parent might complain about the principal’s retrograde punishment system, but since a paddling was the ultimate misbehavior prevention and deterrent, it was, for the most part, pretty rare. Certainly not frequent enough to spur any PTO campaigns. The absolute fact of assured backside annihilation was enough to keep even the rowdiest children in a more or less calm and low-decibel and narcotized fearful stupor for the whole of the school day. (That they went into spasms of wild hyperactivity as soon as they got home was something parents sometimes grumbled about to teachers, who quietly nodded their heads and thought: Not my problem.)

Every teacher had a unique point at which rebelliousness would no longer be tolerated. For Miss Bowles, that moment came after twelve seconds. For twelve seconds Bishop was at the water fountain. For twelve seconds he stared at Miss Bowles as she demanded he move along until finally she yanked Bishop by his shirt, physically grabbed him near the neck and with a stitch-tearing noise pulled him momentarily up off the ground before marching him toward the terrifying office of Principal Large.

What typically happened when a kid came back from a paddling is that somewhere between ten and twenty minutes after being sent away there would be a knock on the classroom door and Miss Bowles would open it and there would be Principal Large with his big hand on the back of some crimson-faced, snotty, sniveling kid. The faces of the recently paddled were always the same: wet and grim, eyes rubbed red, runny-nosed, defeated. There was no more rebellion in them, no more bravado. Even the loudest, most attention-seeking boys looked in this moment like they wanted to curl up under their desks and die. Then Large would say “I think this one is ready to rejoin the class” and Miss Bowles would say “I hope he’s learned his lesson,” and even students as young as eleven were sophisticated enough to know that this bit of dialogue was all theater, that the adults were not talking to each other but rather to the whole lot of them, the easily grasped subtext being: Don’t step out of line or you’re next. The kid would then be allowed to return to his seat, where his secondary punishment would begin, since his ass would be throbbing and bright red and tender as an open wound all over, and so sitting on the school’s hard plastic chairs brought a sharp pain that felt, they said, like being paddled again. And so the kid would sit there in misery and cry and Miss Bowles would say “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. Do you have something to add to our discussion?” and the kid would shake his head no in this pathetic, broken, miserable way and the whole class knew that Miss Bowles wanted to draw everyone’s attention to his crying as a way to shame him more. In public. In front of his friends. There was a ruthlessness in Miss Bowles that the genderless blue sweaters she wore just barely contained.

That day they were all waiting for Bishop to return. They were excited. They were eager to accept him, after this initiation. Now he’d know what they’d been through. He was one of them. So they waited, ready to welcome Bishop back and forgive him for crying. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, and finally right at the eighteen-minute mark came the inevitable knock on the door. And Miss Bowles made a big show of saying “Who could that be?” before putting the chalk onto the blackboard tray and striding to the door and opening it. And there they were, Bishop and Principal Large, and she was shocked, and the whole class was shocked, to see that not only was Bishop not crying, but he was also visibly smiling. He looked happy. Large’s hand was not on Bishop’s back. In fact, the principal was an odd two to three feet away from Bishop, as if the boy had some contagious disease. Miss Bowles stared at Principal Large for a moment, and Large did not stick to his usual script about Bishop being ready to rejoin the class, but only said, in a kind of distant way that soldiers sometimes talk about war: “Here. Take him.”

And Bishop walked to his desk and every kid in the class watched him go and sit down, jumping into his seat and landing hard on his butt and looking up fiercely as if to challenge anyone to try to hurt him.

It was a moment that lived in the heart of every sixth grader who saw it. One of their own had taken the worst of the adult world and come out victorious. Nobody ever f*cked with Bishop Fall after that.





5


SAMUEL’S MOTHER told him about the Nix. Another of her father’s ghosts. The scariest one. The Nix, she said, was a spirit of the water who flew up and down the coastline looking for children, especially adventurous children out walking alone. When it found one, the Nix would appear to the child as a large white horse. Unsaddled, but friendly and tame. It bowed down as low as a horse was able, so the kid could leap onto it.

At first the children were afraid, but, ultimately, how could they refuse? Their very own horse! They jumped on and when it stood up again they were eight feet off the ground and they were delighted—nothing this big had ever minded them before. They became bold. They would kick at the horse to go faster, and so it broke into a light trot, and the more the kids loved it, the faster the horse would go.