Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [57]
After noon recess we came back into the classroom and saw that Miss Ferenczi had drawn a pyramid on the blackboard close to her oak tree. Some of us who had been playing baseball were messing around in the back of the room, dropping the bats and gloves into the playground box, and Ray Schontzeler had just slugged me when I heard Miss Ferenczi’s high-pitched voice, quavering with emotion. “Boys,” she said, “come to order right this minute and take your seats. I do not wish to waste a minute of class time. Take out your geography books.” We trudged to our desks and, still sweating, pulled out Distant Lands and Their People. “Turn to page forty-two.” She waited for thirty seconds, then looked over at Kelly Munger. “Young man,” she said, “why are you still fossicking in your desk?”
Kelly looked as if his foot had been stepped on. “Why am I what?”
“Why are you … burrowing in your desk like that?”
“I’m lookin’ for the book, Miss Ferenczi.”
Bobby Kryzanowicz, the faultless brownnoser who sat in the first row by choice, softly said, “His name is Kelly Munger. He can’t ever find his stuff. He always does that.”
“I don’t care what his name is, especially after lunch,” Miss Ferenczi said. “Where is your book?”
“I just found it.” Kelly was peering into his desk and with both hands pulled at the book, shoveling along in front of it several pencils and crayons, which fell into his lap and then to the floor.
“I hate a mess,” Miss Ferenczi said. “I hate a mess in a desk or a mind. It’s … unsanitary. You wouldn’t want your house at home to look like your desk at school, now, would you?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I should think not. A house at home should be as neat as human hands can make it. What were we talking about? Egypt. Page forty-two. I note from Mr. Hibler’s lesson plan that you have been discussing the modes of Egyptian irrigation. Interesting, in my view, but not so interesting as what we are about to cover. The pyramids, and Egyptian slave labor. A plus on one side, a minus on the other.” We had our books open to page forty-two, where there was a picture of a pyramid, but Miss Ferenczi wasn’t looking at the book. Instead, she was staring at some object just outside the window.
“Pyramids,” Miss Ferenczi said, still looking past the window. “I want you to think about pyramids. And what was inside. The bodies of the pharaohs, of course, and their attendant treasures. Scrolls. Perhaps,” Miss Ferenczi said, her face gleeful but unsmiling, “these scrolls were novels for the pharaohs, helping them to pass the time in their long voyage through the centuries. But then, I am joking.” I was looking at the lines on Miss Ferenczi’s skin. “Pyramids,” Miss Ferenczi went on, “were the repositories of special cosmic powers. The nature of a pyramid is to guide cosmic energy forces into a concentrated point. The Egyptians knew that; we have generally forgotten it. Did you know,” she asked, walking to the side of the room so that she was standing by the coat closet, “that George Washington had Egyptian blood, from his grandmother? Certain features of the Constitution of the United States are notable for their Egyptian ideas.”
Without glancing down at the book, she began to talk about the movement of souls in Egyptian religion. She said that when people die, their souls return to Earth in the form of carpenter ants or walnut trees, depending on how they behaved—“well or ill”—in life. She said that the Egyptians believed that people act the way they do because of magnetism produced by tidal forces in the solar system, forces produced by the sun and by its “planetary ally,” Jupiter. Jupiter, she said, was a planet, as we had been told, but had “certain properties of stars.” She was speaking very fast. She said that the Egyptians were great explorers and conquerors. She said that the greatest of all the conquerors, Genghis Khan, had had forty horses and forty