Alone in the Classroom Read Online Free PDF Page B

dark corner. Wanting to give her more, everything she wanted, he said, “The snake hooks on and pulls itself through its mouth and then the skin drops in a ring on the floor.”
    “On the ground.”
    “I’ll bring you one if you like.” And now his voice was the confident, outdoorsy voice she knew at recess.
    “All right.” She smiled and gave him one of her winks. She could wink either eye with equal ease, a rare and enviable talent.
    He said, “You’ll be able to see the pattern the scales make on the skin.”
    And again she wrote his words on the blackboard, impressed by his turn of phrase, which brought to mind a passage in one of the
Royal Readers
about lowly earthworms - Darwin’s last book was about his future companions of the grave. She located the passage for Michael (flipping past another favourite part, the destruction of Pompeii with its haunting picture of the casts of bodies discovered in the ruins - a girl of fifteen lying on her side, legs drawn up convulsively, her hand clenched around the torn fabric of her dress, embroidered sandals on her feet, dressed exactly as she was on the twenty-fourth of August, A.D . 79, when the sky went dark and the sea rolled back, and ash poured down and buried her for seventeen hundred years). The great naturalist, she explained to Michael, had kept his worms in earth-filled pots in his study with the intention of seeing how much mental power they displayed. He concluded that although worms are deaf, have no sense of smell, and can just distinguish between light and darkness, their sense of touch is a form of intelligence in itself, for they line their burrows with their castings, or excrement, and with leaves, seizing the stalks either by their pointed ends or by their broader ends, depending on which will do the best job of plugging the mouths of their burrows.
    ” ‘It is a marvellous reflection,’ ” she read aloud, ” ‘that the whole of the superficial mould over any wide, turf-covered expanse has passed, and will again pass, every few years through the bodies of worms.’ “
    Michael was as intrigued as she was. They were intrigued by the worms, and the snake, and each other.
    “Worms,” she added, skimming the last few lines, “are surpassed only by the even lowlier corals - also animals - that have constructed innumerable reefs and islands in great tropical oceans.”
    She touched the orange-red beads at her throat. A coral necklace recently startled into nervous life by Parley Burns.
    On Friday they had left the school together - this was after he murdered the snake. They walked to the road and she realized he was walking her home; her lodgings were on the same street as his. They didn’t speak as they moved from road to wooden sidewalk. Lilac bushes grew beside several front doors, hedges of caragana separated one wide lot from another. Nine hundred and twenty people lived in Jewel. Off the main street ran side streets of smallish houses built from cement blocks and wood, most with chickens, or pigs, or horses, with crabapple trees and box elder trees and currant bushes and patches of grass.
    She held herself away from him, but rigidity gets you no further than disgust. Her discomfort seemed to please him; to be familiar, perhaps.
    When she turned to go up the beaten path to the Kowalchuks’ unpainted frame house, she finally looked him in the face, and his eyes went to her necklace. He said, ” ‘Of his bones are coral made, Those are pearls that were his eyes.’ “
    Poetry and punishment. In the 1920s children knew the difference between Shakespeare and Tennyson and Keats just as they knew the difference between a thump on the head, a pointer across the knuckles, a strap on the open palm, a belt on the backside.
    From that day forward, Parley Burns escorted her home more often than not.

5
Tutored
    She had learned to read when she was four. Great-aunt Charlotte was with them that year and it was her way of helping out, to take Connie in