In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [31]
Another classmate had pulled me aside one recess and guided me behind the huge shed that covered the playground equipment and protected us from the wind and snow. There, she whispered that her older brother often crawled into her bed at night and rubbed himself against her, and that once he had stuck it in. I listened mesmerized but could not imagine the mechanics of such an act, much less the motive.
“Why does he do that?” I asked.
“Because,” she said, “he loves me.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Sometimes. But he gives me a quarter when it does.” She pulled a fistful of penny candy from her pocket and giggled. I contemplated the sticky remains of suckers and malted milk balls but took nothing. Something wasn’t right about it, and after that I avoided her on the swings and slide, watching as she took other classmates behind the shed. Some came in wiping chocolate from their mouths, but all of them ran when back in the familiar domain of children, leaving her alone with her pocket of sweets.
After the incident with Julie’s ears, we watched Mrs. Nichols even more closely, hoping to give ourselves enough time to bolt should she move on us, although we doubted we’d have the courage to make even the smallest gesture of escape. She seemed more withdrawn, given to staring thoughtfully out the window with her lovely hands crossed behind her, her fingers entwined, her nails clicking.
It was during one of these pensive moments when she turned suddenly toward us. “You think you know things,” she said. “You don’t.” We were startled into rapt attention. “You are animals, and like all animals your bodies know only these two things: pleasure and pain.”
The best we could do was to let her go and maybe she would forget we were there, waiting for our lessons. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Brian’s hand shoot up. He was the class nosepicker, and I groaned inwardly at his foolishness.
“Mrs. Nichols, what about itches?”
She studied him intently for a moment, then walked slowly to the side of his desk. “Itches,” she echoed flatly. “Itches are slow pain. Each and every feeling you have is the man-i-fe-sta-tion of pleasure or pain.” She turned her back on us and once again focused her attention on the air outside the window.
Wasn’t what I felt when I thought of Luke a kind of pain? I ached to be with him, yet suffered no less in his presence than I did in his absence. Sometimes I thought pleasure inseparable from pain and wondered if I’d ever know when one became the other. It all seemed a riddle to me, a world in which things were not as they appeared, as though our emotions were reflected back on us, reversed, warped. What gave me worldly pleasure was the very thing that caused me spiritual pain.
But what did I know of suffering, of the makeup of souls? I must not think that the teachers of the mind such as Mrs. Nichols might have insight into the ways of the Lord. I opened my Bible to Corinthians, to the words of Paul: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through the glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
It had been three years since my mother stood at the kitchen window, pointing up and out into the haze of August sky.
“How many, Kim? How many birds on the wire?”
I looked from her to the square of light and back. The clues lay in the words—bird, wire—just as they did in my father’s riddles: If a plane crashes on the border between the U.S. and Canada, where