Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [60]
“I will tell you one more story,” she said, “and then we will have to do arithmetic.” She leaned over, and her voice grew soft. “There is no death,” she said. “You must never be afraid. Never. That which is, cannot die. It will change into different earthly and unearthly elements, but I know this as sure as I stand here in front of you, and I swear it: you must not be afraid. I have seen this truth with these eyes. I know it because in a dream God kissed me. Here.” And she pointed with her right index finger to the side of her head, below the mouth where the vertical lines were carved into her skin.
Absentmindedly we all did our arithmetic problems. At recess the class was out on the playground, but no one was playing. We were all standing in small groups, talking about Miss Ferenczi. We didn’t know if she was crazy, or what. I looked out beyond the playground, at the rusted cars piled in a small heap behind a clump of sumac, and I wanted to see shapes there, approaching me.
On the way home, Carl sat next to me again. He didn’t say much, and I didn’t, either. At last he turned to me. “You know what she said about the leaves that close up on bugs?”
“Huh?”
“The leaves,” Carl insisted. “The meat-eating plants. I know it’s true. I saw it on television. The leaves have this icky glue that the plants have got smeared all over them and the insects can’t get off ’cause they’re stuck. I saw it.” He seemed demoralized. “She’s tellin’ the truth.”
“Yeah.”
“You think she’s seen all those angels?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t think she has,” Carl informed me. “I think she made that part up.”
“There’s a tree,” I suddenly said. I was looking out the window at the farms along County Road H. I knew every barn, every broken windmill, every fence, every anhydrous ammonia tank, by heart. “There’s a tree that’s … that I’ve seen …”
“Don’t you try to do it,” Carl said. “You’ll just sound like a jerk.”
I kissed my mother. She was standing in front of the stove. “How was your day?” she asked.
“Fine.”
“Did you have Miss Ferenczi again?”
“Yeah.”
“Well?”
“She was fine. Mom,” I asked, “can I go to my room?”
“No,” she said, “not until you’ve gone out to the vegetable garden and picked me a few tomatoes.” She glanced at the sky. “I think it’s going to rain. Skedaddle and do it now. Then you come back inside and watch your brother for a few minutes while I go upstairs. I need to clean up before dinner.” She looked down at me. “You’re looking a little pale, Tommy.” She touched the back of her hand to my forehead and I felt her diamond ring against my skin. “Do you feel all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said, and went out to pick the tomatoes.
Coughing mutedly, Mr. Hibler was back the next day, slipping lozenges into his mouth when his back was turned at forty-five-minute intervals and asking us how much of his prepared lesson plan Miss Ferenczi had followed. Edith Atwater took the responsibility for the class of explaining to Mr. Hibler that the substitute hadn’t always done exactly what he, Mr. Hibler, would have done, but we had worked hard even though she talked a lot. About what? he asked. All kinds of things, Edith said. I sort of forgot. To our relief, Mr. Hibler seemed not at all interested in what Miss Ferenczi had said to fill the day. He probably thought it was woman’s talk: unserious and not suited for school. It was enough that he had a pile of arithmetic problems from us to correct.
For the next month, the sumac turned a distracting red in the field, and the sun traveled toward the southern sky, so that its rays reached Mr. Hibler’s Halloween display on the bulletin board in the back of the room, fading the pumpkin-head scarecrow from orange to tan. Every three days I measured how much farther the sun had moved toward the southern horizon by making small marks with my black Crayola on the north wall, ant-sized marks only I knew were there.
And then in early December, four