A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [163]
Rafferty nodded, blowing his stuffy nose into a red bandanna.
After I looked at the records I remembered that Norman Frazer, a kindergartner, had come to my office, because of a very loose and bloody tooth. He seemed to be one of those volatile children, like Emma, who can not take the unexpected in stride. His tooth was hanging by a thread, his bloody saliva slipping down his chin as he howled. I’m sure the teacher sent him to me because he was disrupting the class. “Am I supposed to go find a picture of a tooth, show him the roots, try to educate?” I asked Rafferty. “One child is on the cot throwing up, another is waiting for medicine; I don’t have time!
“Norman was hysterical, nothing to do but hold him around his stomach with one arm and, reaching around with the other, pull out the tooth. It was so loose it came away with a pluck. It was a pluck, not a pull. I didn’t even wear my gloves as I should have, to protect myself from his blood. He was so surprised he stopped in the middle of his screech. We put the tooth in an envelope and he went back to the classroom. Howard thought it was terrible, that I had violated the child’s body. Once he made some comment to Emma and Claire, that they should watch their teeth. The remark bothered me more than I let on. Norman was so busy screaming he hadn’t really noticed, until I had the tooth in my hand.”
“That’s all you know of him?” Rafferty asked.
“Yes,” I said.
The only thing I remembered about Anthony Jenkins, another of the boys, was that he had skinned his knee and I had poured disinfectant over the gritty wounds. He had trembled with the pain and growled deep in his throat. Rafferty got a hold of a class picture so I could see what the third boy, Tommy Giddings, looked like, and still it sparked no memory. According to my log I had given him a dose of Amoxicillin for an ear infection in October. They all claimed that I had shouted, spanked, hit them across the face, held them down, that I was pernicious and preyed upon them with the greed and toothiness of a shark.
At one of our meetings, when we were trying to find any possible association between the boys and Robbie Mackessy, Rafferty leaned over the table and asked me if I was ever afraid. It was an early session, before my run-in with Dyshett. I looked to the pale yellow cinder-block wall, wondering what I should say, and also relishing, for a moment, his steadfast attention. Did he mean, I wondered, was I afraid of death? My girls have an animal terror of death, as I did at their age, but I had begun to think that I had lost that particular instinct. I wanted to avoid dying not least so that Emma and Claire wouldn’t have to go through the trauma of having a dead mother. I had seen enough death to know that it isn’t anything more startling than taking a next breath. My best and fondest hope for the hereafter was that there was some kind of design and that it was trustworthy. Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.
“Not afraid, exactly,” I said to Paul. “There’s so much good, and it’s been taken away.”
I may have been whispering because he said, “What?”
“I miss the farm,” I said.
Rafferty’s clerk spent several weeks digging up information on the boys, trying to find out if they’d been in the same class, or the same neighborhood, or day care or church school. I don’t know how he discovered that the four of them were on the same T-ball team during the month of June, and that it was highly likely that they occasionally spent time at one another’s houses. Tommy Giddings’s mother was a waitress at Dolphin Bay, the restaurant Carol Mackessy managed. Anthony’s mother was the sister of Mrs. Mackessy’s hairdresser. It seemed incredible that even Robbie could have fanned the flames and turned the boys against me. That Carol Mackessy could have done so was another matter all together.
“Can you think of a common thread with the boys?