A Northern Light(15)

I rolled my eyes. At sixteen I was too old to be attending the Inlet Common School. The leaving age is fourteen, and most don't make it that far. But our old teacher, Miss Parrish, told Miss Wilcox about Weaver and myself before she left. She said that we were smart enough to earn high school diplomas and that it was a shame that we couldn't. The only high school in the area, though, was in Old Forge, a proper town ten miles south of Eagle Bay. It was too far to travel every day, especially in winter. We would have had to board with a family there during the week, and neither of us could afford to. Miss Wilcox said she would teach us the course work herself if we wanted to learn it, and she did. She had taught in a fancy girls' academy in New York City, and she knew plenty.

She had come to my house last November to talk with my parents about my getting a diploma. Mamma made us all wash before she came—even Pa—and had Abby make a gingerbread and me do the girls' hair. Mamma couldn't get downstairs that day, and Miss Wilcox had to go see her in her bedroom. I don't know what Miss Wilcox said to her, but after she left, Mamma told me I was to get my diploma even though Pa wanted me to leave school.

Weaver and I had spent most of the year preparing for our exit examinations. We were going to take the hardest ones—the Board of Regents—in English composition, literature, history, science, and mathematics. I was particularly worried about mathematics. Miss Wilcox did her best with algebra, but her heart wasn't in it. Weaver was good with it, though. Sometimes Miss Wilcox would just give him the teachers guide. He would puzzle through a problem, then explain it to me and Miss Wilcox.

The Columbia University is a serious and fearsome place, and a condition of Weaver's acceptance is that he earn B-pluses or better on all of his exams. He'd been studying hard, and so had I, but that day in the schoolhouse, struggling with Milton, I wasn't sure why I'd bothered. Weaver received his letter back in January, and though it was now the beginning of the second week of April, no letter had come for me.

Jim Loomis leaned over and dangled his spider right in my face. I jumped and swatted at it, which pleased him greatly. "You're going to get it," I mouthed at him, then tried to put my mind back on Paradise Lost, but it was hard going. Somniferous was my word of the day. It means sleep inducing, and it was a good one to describe that dull and endless poem. Milton meant to give us a glimpse of hell, Miss Wilcox said, and he succeeded. Hell was not the adamantine chains he wrote of, though. Nor was it the ever-burning sulphur, or the darkness visible. Hell was the realization that you are only on line 325 of Book One and there are eleven more books to go. Torture without end, all right. There was no place, of course, I would rather have been than in that schoolhouse, and nothing I would rather have done than read, read anything... but John Milton was a trial. What on earth did Miss Wilcox see in him? His Satan scared no one and seemed more like the Prince of Fusspots than the Prince of Hell, with all his ranting and carping and endless pontificating.

Fesole, Valdarno, Vallombrosa ... Where in blazes are those places? I wondered. Why couldn't Satan have decided to visit the North Woods? Old Forge, maybe, or even Eagle Bay. Why didn't he talk like real people did? With a cripes or a jeezum thrown in now and again. Why did little towns in Herkimer County never get a mention in anybody's book? Why was it always other places and other lives that mattered?

French Louis Seymour of the West Canada Creek, who knew how to survive all alone in a treacherous wilderness, and Mr. Alfred G. Vanderbilt of New York City and Raquette Lake, who was richer than God and traveled in his very own Pullman car, and Emmie Hubbard of the Uncas Road, who painted the most beautiful pictures when she was drunk and burned them in her woodstove when she was sober, were all ten times more interesting to me than Milton's devil or Austen's boy-crazy girls or that twitchy fool of Poe's who couldn't think of any place better to bury a body than under his own damn floor.

"And why do we read Shakespeare and Milton and Donne? Someone other than Miss Gokey, this time. Mr. Bouchard?" Miss Wilcox asked.

Mike Bouchard turned scarlet. "I don't know, ma'am."

"Throw caution to the wind, Mr. Bouchard. Hazard a guess."

"Because we have to, ma'am?"

"No, Mr. Bouchard, because it is a classic. And we must have a good, working acquaintance with the classics if we are to understand the works that follow them and progress in our own literary endeavors. Understanding literature is like building a house, Mr. Bouchard; you don't build the third story first, you start with a foundation..."

Miss Wilcox is from New York City. Up here, you didn't build the third story ever, unless you are rich like the Beckers or own three sawmills like my uncle Vernon.

"...where would Milton have been without Homer, Mr. James Loomis? And where would Mary Shelley have been without Milton, Mr. William Loomis? Why, without Milton, Victor Frankenstein's monster would never have been created..."

At the mere mention of that magic word Frankenstein, the Loomis boys straightened up. Jim got so excited, he let go of his new pet spider. It made for the edge of his desk and disappeared, trailing its leash. Miss Wilcox had promised since November that we'd read Frankenstein as our last book of the year, as long as everyone—meaning mainly Jim and Will—behaved. She had only to whisper the name Frankenstein, and they were suddenly as still and attentive as two altar boys. They loved the idea of stitching dead things together. They talked nonstop of finding frogs and toads to kill, just so they could bring them back to life again.