Waking from a Dream

Prologue

Night One Writing

I think a good sized majority of the people who take up breathing space for too many years, believe their lives weren’t that special, even if God were to disagree. And if my opinion is worth counting, I’m of a mind to side with them, except that a smidgeon of special happenings occurred along the winding road that gave me passage throughout my particular journey. Those special happenings saw me share fortune and misfortune, where events went beyond the idea of normal embodiment.

Old Quincy Rawlins, whom I’ll write more about later, spoke to me one morning while we were tending the legumes on my daddy’s plot. Around that time, daddy worked the quarry face five long days of the week and I saw what needed seeing to as regards his home produce. He laboured on his plot Saturday and Sunday but, compared to blasting and toting stone, it was relaxation, as far as he was concerned.

Anyhow, that day, Quince set me down on an upturned pail and balanced himself on the edge of a mulch bin. He glanced up at the sun and around the plot field before he turned his wise old eyes on me. I’m gonna tell you about the night you came to this World and it’ll sound a mite like something that Poe fella might pen. I was familiar with Edgar Allen Poe and his dark writing even then. Miss MacPhearson, my teacher at that time, read us a poem called The Raven and, after that was done, she told us about him dying mysteriously in Maryland. Only in this case, it be the truth, Quince continued. That night you’se born, Chester, I came to your mammy’s bedside, kissed her cheek and held her hand. I’m past half a century of years now and I tell you, son, I’ve yet to see a more beautiful woman than Emily Hanley; specially so after bearing a new life into the World. Now you; you was uglier than the skin on a rotten pumpkin. He smiled to lighten the insult, which I didn’t take as such. Your daddy had this brightness in his eyes and he was fair flushing with pride, seeing as how you was the first born to him and Emily.

He went quiet for a short time and I looked at his face. It was clear from his expression, he was dragging memories from somewhere deep down in his mind. I didn’t push him to carry on; I remember that touch of maturity on my part, even though I was only rising eight years. "Your daddy passed you into my arms and, when I touched your face, I knew straight off you was, and is, what my kinfolks call a Dreamer, Chester. Inside here, he tapped my forehead at that point, you’re carrying a curse and a blessing. Those two things will bring good and ill to your family but you being the transporter, so to speak, you’re never to seek profit from what you dream. If you do, you could bring unfortunate bearing down on Billyjoe and Emily. Now, they might gain from your gift and, then again, maybe they won’t. Too early in your life to tell." It turned out that old boy was kind of wrong about me profiting but right about the ill bearing.

—

Before I set about the real story over the coming time, I want you to understand that there was a time in my life I could write as well as anyone, and I penned some real good stories but after the death of my last wife, in the Spring of 1959, the magic I had felt, on and off, went dormant in my brain. With that latency, a mist as thick as the early morning Autumn air, that lies in the dips and valleys of the lower Osarks, took up residency in the creative parts of my mind (you’ll know what I mean when you read). So, forgive an old man whose grammatical ability is shot all to hell and whose relying on phonetics at times to spell his way through the story. It won’t bother me if it stays in the family but if you’re a stranger reading this, accept my excuses.

—

I resided all my days in or near the small towns of Laclede County, Missouri, and never had the want to live in a big city such as St Louis or on the wide open plains of Kansas and Oklahoma. When I was a tyke, I loved laying in my bed on clear nights—I slept upstairs then—looking through the window at that big old moon perched like a rooster on top of the Osarks. It was a small part of what fashioned my preference for life in small towns like Gault’s Dip, Stockton, Preston, Lebanon and the like. As a boy approaching his teen years, I enjoyed exploring the high and low places close to home or moving further out past the town limits, to walk and play in the woods that covered the lower slopes and valleys of the Ozark Plateau with elm, oak, chestnut, hackberry, boxelder, cedar and a few more trees which were simply trees with no names. Closer to the ground, we’d know where to find the wild plum trees, the wild black cherry trees, the hazelnut bushes and the crab apple trees. In Summer, me and my friends, Abe and Jimmy, would occasionally bring home sacks of highbush blackberry and blueberry and our mammies could make enough apple pies and berry jams to last until Fall.

Before he went off to learn about soldiering in 1916, there were occasional Sundays, when we took time away from the plot, daddy and me would walk to the Apoko, or as far away as the Niangua, and fish for whatever we could catch on a juicy worm or grub; bass, bluegills, crappies or trout were all tasty when mammy cooked them. Daddy had a .22 rifle but mammy would never let him use it to shoot the wild animals. There were white-tailed deer, beaver, opossum, cottontail rabbit, skunk, muskrat, raccoon and plenty of quail in the air but they never fell to a bullet from a Hanley gun. Mammy was happy enough to prepare what others traded at our plot but wouldn’t kill nor let daddy kill. Killing fish for some reason was okay. Maybe a stray hook wasn’t as dangerous as a stray bullet.

Here and there, on that Ozark ridge, there were mineral springs and deep caves that weren’t wired or fenced off the way they are nowadays. We, us three friends, were well warned about the dangers they posed to young boys and girls. We were also warned at school never to go into the caves unless we were accompanied by our daddys because in 1905, the year of the big Missouri chill, Kitty Millar (the sister of Lennard Millar who was in my class), had disappeared when her mammy decided to shelter out of the rain and eat their picnic lunch inside a cave. That girl, or her remains, has never been found to this very day. Now me, I was 15 years before I ventured into those caves without daddy. I could be brave sometimes but I wasn’t deaf, nor stupid.

—

My days are numbered and I’m not sure I’ll reach the end of this story before the end of my days reaches me. I should’ve commenced the story even before the time that lovable repribate, Kennedy, got his comeuppance. When that mad gang of people from the desert came to my country, knocked those big New York buildings down and killed an awful lot of innocent folks, something awoke deep in my brain, and now I’m tryin to be one of those fancy writers (as I was at one time) that’s so full of shit, they need to have a toilet pan permently glued to their asses. I can hardly see the paper, let alone write on it, and I’m thinking the words will be spelled wrong here and there, and the grammar… well, early in my second year of schooling, Miss Elsie MacPhearson said, when she was teaching us the language, that my head was so far in the clouds, I must be talking with angels, because I sure as hell wasn’t taking in what she was teaching. So, I’ll make sure this pencil is kept sharp and I’ll plod on until that nice young nurse makes me lie down. Eighty year past, and Id’ve chased that little diamond round the Maypole.

I’m close on 95 now, if my mathematics is correct, and the very last of my siblings. I’ve even outstayed most of them useless offspring my brother made the mistake of fathering. I only had one son from three wives but it was enough for me. I’ve never been a family man, to tell you the God’s honest truth. I loved the boy but when he grew to a reasonable semblance of a man, he went marching along his path and I stumbled away on mine. He had his own children, and did a fair job of raising them since their mother took a fast track to God, but I was never a child person and, once the grandchildren were rising 10, I only saw them if I was in the mood or they were after something of mine. Apart from Alden and his shrew of a wife, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of them for nearly five years but they’re going to be a mite disappointed when they discover there’s nary a pin left in the cushion for them.

—

My daddy rented a plot on the high pasture above Raider’s Bridge. It was called that because there were those who said Quantrill crossed the Apoko at that spot, but the story goes that folks round Laclede County never wanted that baddie’s name to be recorded as part of the local history, so they made a general statement. I never did figure out the good sense was in that; naming the bridge after his gang like they did. Why not The Apoko Bridge or Gault’s Bridge or 100 other names? And the weirdest thing of all; that old timber structure, built in 1882 and replaced in 1952 with an iron bridge, is still called by the same name. Go figure.

The plots were the division of a four acre field that the Town Council had bought from the miser, McCreedy, and in their wisdom, they leased little squares—you could spit across from one side to the other on a still day—to the people who lived in the shantys and wee houses back of Main Street. Those poor folk had no space for a home growing garden of much use to man nor beast. My daddy’s spitting square was right in the middle, number 111 (now, we did have a reasonably sized rear garden at the house but I think the plot was a kind of retreat for daddy).

Wilfred Jacob, a dark and moody individual, who later lost two sons in the Great War, fighting in The Battle of Marne as I heard, had 110, and Mattie Jacks, a negre, she had 109. Mattie, it was whispered by the white church-going gossips, got her second husband from one of those big city magzines and he hung round long enough to get the key, empty her money tin and vanish back down whatever hole he crawled out. Gossip can be a cruel thing. I remember her as being a loyal and loving friend to my family. She was a big, jolly woman, with a booming, sweet, chanting voice, who occasionally slipped me candy or a tomaty from her plot. She went on her way to God in 1938 and, if I believed in a merciful man-in-white, she would surely have ended up singing in his heavenly choir. Wilfred now, the tight-fisted sod, had he found a back door into heaven, I’d surmise he’d have been on shitcan scrubbing duty.

The whole plot squares were crisscrossed with thin paths that made passing a shoulder-nudging meeting. Across the path from daddy sat plots 62, 63 and 64 and on the other side, 46,47,48. Growing, I knew them all well, and their children. Three whites and three negres and none of that color bother that was a part of the great, American, bigoted way back then. They all grew their vegetables, fruits and flowers and traded with each other so that a balance was created and we all got a taste of everything that nature, and a bit of toiling, gifted us.

On Saturdays and Sundays, the local folk were permitted to wander the paths through the plots and, if the mind took them, they would purchase the grown produce from plot owners. Everybody won. The people of the district got good quality food and the plot owners covered their costs and made a small profit. The council and the local farmers’ co-op turned a blind eye to the practice.

On some Summer evenings, daddy, and the those who owned nearby plots, would sit on rickety seats beside somebody’s briar, dispensing wisdom of a sort, sip what looked like water to me, and talk til the cooler air, the skeeters and the moths came to visit. It was some time before I found out it was potato shine they were drinking.

—

Tretton Street, where I’ve spent the most of my days on the Earth, held 10 houses back in my youth, all situated on the south side. They were numbered in two’s, waiting for the north, lower side to come into existence. That didn’t happen til the Spring of 1956 when I reached 49 years. The north side had a stormwater ditch which was unfenced up to and one week beyond the mud drowning of Andrea Culver in July of 1929 (I helped search for that poor child but it were her pa, Namath, who found her face down in the mud and Summer weeds. Seems she slipped, fell down the levy and was knocked unconscious. I heard Namath Culver’s scream half a mile away in Black Bark Wood where me, Jimmy Babcock and a dozen others were combing the undergrowth).

Down the very end of the street, the old widower, Jarvis Lefroy, had a ramshackle building at number 20 which, being charitable, could be roughly described as a house. Timber, tin and stone were thrown together haphazardly and, being on the low west end of Tretton, it was under two feet of water every Spring. The house was long gone before we had our first hard top surface in the street (in 1935), the council piped the stormwater drain and Lefroy’s midden, as we had named it, became a sump.

Our home, which mammy kept looking like a new pin, had three bedrooms up and, down the stairs, a big, open, bright area. Even when the rain fell hard and constant, the place was still full of the light from outside. I loved the rain drumming on the tin roof and beating a rhythm on the hard-sheet walls. To this day, falling rain gives me comfort. I hope it buckets on the near-coming day they pour my ashes from Raider’s Bridge into the Apoko River and, when it floats away, long before the Apoko joins the Niangua River—which pours all the way down to the Lake of the Osarks—I know I’ll drink my last raindrops and be diluted back to nature. Maybe I’ll join up with ol’ Pierre Laclède, the pappy of St. Louis and the individual who lent his moniker to the county (I recall that was told to us in 1915 in our first and last week of being taught by old raw-face Fleece. She looked after our third and fourth year at Beecham School of learning. Named for Mildred Beecham who was the first teacher in the Dip. As I remember, from the history of the town I was taught, that was somewhere back around 1854).

I saw the light of the world in that house on Tretton Street, two removed from Main and bordering the mill dam track. It was a bigger place than most on the downside of a town called Gault’s Dip (Population 1,215 at the 1926 count). Herman Gault was voted in as the first Lord Mayor in 1852 but, as regards the Dip tag, well, I reckon they filled that in, if my understanding of a dip is correct because, although the town sits at the descending tail of the Ozark Plateau, the land is pretty much regular and flat all the way to Kansas and Oklahoma.

So, as I said, I came out of my mammy on March 15 (the Ides), 1907. From when I could first recall, I knew that the Ides was a Latin word for the middle and Mrs MacPhearson told me, on the very day she made roll-call for the first time, that a famous old Roman soldier was murdered on my birth date. All through the years of schooling until I quit in 1921, I was called Cheeser by my pals and I was of a mind to believe, although the opinion is misty now, that they meant Ceaser. Mattered none. My mammy, when she was angry, called me by my full name; Chester Hanley, git yourself up to your room! That was me. Thinking of it now, maybe Cheeser were a form of Chester.

Chapter 1

Night Two Writing

Directly behind daddy’s plot, across the path, was lot 47, the patch of Earth rented by Mister Quincy Rawlins. When I was a youngster, I thought that Quince was not far off 10 feet tall and later, when I was blessed with more maturity, I heard my daddy say, the old boy could’ve gotten a job as a pull-through for one of the ancient muskets that made Mister D. Boone such a hero of our early history. He was the quietest human I’ve ever met in my long journey to this last place. I, maybe, heard that man speak but 20 or 30 times yet, when he was of a mind to open his mouth, daddy said he always made good sense and gave advice that was nearly always there to be acted on with confidence.

He kept himself to himself as a rule and didn’t even partake in the Summer night, shine get-togethers. Daddy told me, down the road when I was worth talking to, that on the night I was born, Quince came calling at our house and brought a present for the newborn. How he knew I was coming into the World that particlar night, daddy didn’t find out for nigh on eight years and I don’t rightly know if he ever asked. The present he brought was a baby plant. Now, common sense would dictate that something for a cradled baby would be more along the lines of a bead-shaker or one of them things that turns in the wind; the name of that item escapes me now. Daddy took the small plant over to his plot and, according to instruction from Quince, put it in a nice, warm setting in the greenhouse.

Daddy’s greenhouse occupied one half of his plot. On half of the rest of the plot, he grew green beans, runner beans and a few sticks of corn. (Along the road, I was told these were generally called legumes.) With the land he had left, he rotated a few carrots, potatoes, parsnips, turnips and such (tubers). Because of the greenhouse, we ate all those things year round and didn’t trouble McCauley’s Market on Main for much.

Wilbur Watten, on plot 62, had two milk cows standing in one of McCreedy’s tumbling down sheds and he sold their milk to a few lucky plotters, like us. Old Wilber gave it at a third the price the town’s folk paid at the Market on Main. I recall somewhere around ‘20 or ‘21, he had to stop doing us favours—selling milk that is—and those fat, milking cows were taken away and killed. It was the first time I heard about that sickness of the breathing bags; it was called TB which was short for a long word that won’t come to my decrepit mind right now. All who worked the plots and received the milk were lucky because we came up clean of the sickness.

—

Daddy told me, back when I was rising five or six, what Quince had talked to him about on the night I came into the world. I, truly, don’t recall all that he spoke that morning, but the important bits, the words that mattered, they’re still with me now. It was the most, except for a few times, as I said, ol’ Quince ever spoke at one sitting, according to Daddy. Billy boy, you look after that small tree and it’ll grow and reward you with sweet fruit just like your boy gonna reward the world by being in it. Just like me, that boy is blessed and cursed with a ‘seein’ mind’.

That was early 1912, when daddy spoke to me in his greenhouse; the same year, round Easter as I recall, a big passenger boat hit a lump of ice that had sailed all the way from the top of the World just to be on time for the meeting of the twain. He didn’t tell me til early 1913, in the morning again I think, that Quince had spoken to him a year past of a coming disaster concerning a giant boat. He explained it away by saying that one of his tomatey climbers had born a a piece of fruit as bitter as the spit of the Devil but old Quince, never a one to waste anything, put the yellow thing in his evening stew and ate it. He reckoned he nitemared something fearful that night, all about a big ship going to the ocean floor and drowning a lot of poor souls. Now, that was for sure and certain, the most speaking Quince could manage at one sitting. Daddy had a look akin to wonder on his face as he spoke to me. Being nigh but six years growed, I forgot what was told me nearly immediately but some time later, I had cause to recall it.

—

In September of 1913, I started school and for seven years we Dip young’uns packed into that old building at the far edge of town from where I lived. The school was, in actual fact, the old Town Hall. A better, stone version, for them fat men, who sat deciding what we could and couldn’t do, had been built right plumb on Main, facing Doc Pardoe’s treating rooms. The run down place we went to had one big room divided in three, crosswise, by heavy curtains that didn’t stop sound distracting us. If the Bradley twins, who were three years older than me, were getting a whooping in room one from Caning Cooper, we heard the yells of pain and protest way back in room three. Their pretty sister, Hazel, was in my class and, when the yelling was going full bore, she never turned a hair. Miss MacPhearson didn’t believe in using violence on her charges. She could be a hard task-setter if you stepped over the stupid line or spoke back. I wished, by the time we were in room one, that I could’ve stayed all my time in her class. Two years, we were in the care of that fair and genteel female.

Third year, we were introduced to the stick by Mrs Emerald Fleece. (That teacher only caned me once, thanks to mammy and daddy.) The woman had a parched and creased face like that stuff those old gipshins writ on. She never smiled nor laughed that I ever heard or saw and, when we sat out on the grass, or sheltered under the tin porch roof in rain or snow, to eat mid-day tuck, she was leaning against a tree, near to where we ate, puffing on a baccy stick and sipping coffee (I guess it had to be coffee. Her teeth was yella, just like daddy’s were startin to be before he had no more use for coffee or baccy). There was some who said she’d succumb to the lung cancer but, before that could happen, she up and disappeared (I believe she was 48 then).

In the very short time we spent in Fleece’s torture chamber, her stick and baccy breath were bad enough, but Mr Jonas Cooper, in Room One was a fearsome individual. He wielded that cane like a saber and when it smacked into the palms of those he reckoned deserved it, they said it was like being stabbed, and no exaggeration. That man was tall, big built and wooly haired and sported a black beard that, near as dammit, touched his chest. He’d swing round from the writing board, point at someone and ask a question of them concerning what he was teaching that day. After the first week with him, we knew to get up from our desks and answer strait off; no ah’s or I think’s. If a pupil was to set off with ah, which is an almost natural thing to do, he’d yell, ‘No ah’s; get out here!’ and it didn’t matter a dang if the poor soul was big or small, girl or boy, they were the recipient of one on each hand. The other side of Mr Cooper was an enigma. At times he would spend a whole Spring or Summer afternoon telling us about his great love, watching birds; and on those days he’d send us on our way home an hour early. The next morning, he’d be Caning Cooper again.

Chapter 2

When I turned 7, in the early Spring of 1914, the orange bush did as well, turn 7 that is, and it blossomed. By late June, there were two small oranges bending the fine branches of the five feet high stub. Daddy had it living in a big old barrel by then and what he did was drag that tub outside in the warm months. See, in the Summer, the State of Misery (as daddy named it) has, what Miss MacPhearson called a Mediterranean climate, and the day temperature could get up as far as 110°. In the Winter, it was known to go way down to—30° and that’s why daddy put the bush back inside by early September. When he said it was going to be a harsh night, he also wrapped the bush in sacking.

By July of that same year, I had to cross to the plots to do my after school chores like watering and weed clearing and such; nothing that took muscle or brains, but big Mattie was there to see me right anyhow. Daddy toiled Monday to Friday, for 10 hours a day, at a limestone quarry over in Howell County, at the foot of the southern plateau. He met the open wagon up on Main Street before sun-up, long before we woke, and he’d come home well after Winter dark or Summer dusk. He’d wash, sit with mammy after supper for an hour then hit the hay, wiped out from his labours. That was why I tended the plot except for Saturday and Sunday. More often than not, daddy would have to put a few things to right over the weekend. He’d be only a mite put out but even when he was real mangy with me, he never hit. Daddy and mammy, as far as I can recall, never hit any of us young’uns or each other (at that time of my childhood), for that matter of fact. There were those who came to school with bruises and we knew who did the marking.

By the second week of July, mammy was well along with another swelled belly so she stayed most times close to home with my sister, Tilly. That three year-old annoyed the poop out of me, I have to tell it true; constant yippety-yapping and getting herself where she wasn’t supposed to go, and mammy yelling at me as if I was at blame for that nuisance doing wrong.

Come Saturday, July 18 (I recall that date very well, even after 87 years has come and gone), daddy says to me, Boy, fetch the plant clippers and we’ll try one of your oranges. So, he snipped the bigger one off the bush and, with his pocket blade, cut it in half. Now, the sun was beating bown on us and we’d been toiling fierce so there was going to be nothing more refreshing than a home-grown orange; and let me tell you, that inside meat was deep as deep orange. We smiled at each other, sunk our teeth way in the flesh and the juice ran around our gums and over our teeth and under our tongue til it finally hit the taste buds. In my time on this planet, I’ve swallowed a lot of bitter pills and liquids, but that juice made me and daddy retch for nigh on 10 minutes and neither water nor apple juice could wash that acid taste out of our mouths. Even writing it here by the light of my lamp, my mouth is prickling, I swear. Daddy wanted to cut the other orange off and toss it into the mulch bin but I begged him not to because I remembered what Quince had said and considered the little orange could be the sweet fruit he talked about. Daddy looked at me and, for a rarity, he smiled and went on about his Saturday business. You make sure you toss that poison we tasted in the mulch, Boy, was all he said. He sent me home at five as Mattie, Wilfred and others wandered onto our plot. Mattie was toting the water.

I was asleep and in the throes of a nightmare by the time daddy came home and collapsed into his cot. That bad dream lives with me to this very day. I saw dead men to the horizon, some suffering bad, bad burns and blisters all across their bodies, and I flew threw deep pits where soldiers were knee-deep in mud carrying bleeding men on stretchers. I saw men having legs and arms blown off and the screaming was born out of hell itself. Sometime in the night, I was dragged up out of that corner of hell, soaked in sweat, and into the safe, loving embrace of Mammy. She was holding me tight, saying Just a dream, Darling, just a bad dream. She dried me away and put fresh bed sheets down.

Morning came and the rising sun moved across Gault’s Dip like it was God washing away that terrible memory of my night in Hades. When I joined the breakfast table, mammy was railing on daddy. Just who you think you are, Billyjoe? Here’s we alone in the night, me and two babes, and there’s you, up on that square of dirt, drinking shine and stumbling home at midnight. For a 24 year old woman, my mammy was a tough, no-back-downer and, apart from one other woman, for all her years alive, I loved her deeper than anybody that ever crossed my path, even though we went through a real painful patch later on when I matured. Course, I loved daddy, which I would never have said to his face, but mammy was the real power in our famly, the foundation, you might say. She had hair the color of ripe corn and eyes like the blue sky beyond the sun. High bones on her cheeks and a neck that could have graced a swan.

Tilly was making her usual mess of what she was supposed to eat and daddy, well, he had his head down looking like he was ashamed and listening, or maybe suffering from drinking too much, but he slowly raised his eyes to me across the table. You dream bad last night, Boy?

Yes, Daddy.

He had a nitemare, Billyjoe, and I went to comfort him. You was too drunk to be any use to man or beast.

What you dream about, Chester?

Men dying, Daddy, a whole big bunch of men; and bombs and arms and legs being shot away, and blood, Daddy, a river of blood and mud.

Mammy came and put her arms round me. Billyjoe, don’t make him remember. He’s been terrified enough.

Okay, Emily, I’m done and we can enjoy our eats. No more late nights, I promise. Chester, when we finish breakfast, you ‘n me’s going to the 111.

And on our walk, with a packed lunch of mammy’s bread and cold sausage left overs, my daddy said, almost whispered, Full of shine and all as I was, I think I can recall having a bad dream with some of them things you described in it. I had nothing to give back because I already knew at seven and a half years what Quince had said on the night I was born. Just beyond two weeks from that sunny Sunday, The Great War started in all its blood-letting, sacrifice and fury. That day entered my mind 28 years on from then, when I was 36 and lying low in a jungle of Guadalcanal, surrounded by wounded men and bodies, that my daddy understood what was coming our way. He went to the war in 1917, (at the ripe old age of 28) and he came back in one piece, physically. One time, when I was 13 I’d say, I got up the nerve to ask him what the war was like. This man, who was a shell of my daddy, looked at me sadly and said, You saw it, Chester, you saw it in a bad dream you had at seven and one half years. And yet, ignoring my wife’s entreaties, I went down to Springfield and volunteered, at 34, for the second bash.

Chapter 3

Night Three Writing

I recall clear as day, the first time the change arrived inside me. I had been sleeping when my eyes snapped open and I was wide awake in an instant. I didn’t have any sickness or headache but I felt a gentle, receding pressure inside my head and lay there for a long time before drifting away again. Not a full week had passed when I began to feel different inside. I can’t rightly recall if I knew what was happening but Miss MacPhearson saw it as well during Summer school and, on the day before we broke up for the rest of July and all of August, she took me aside for a talk.

Chester Hanley, she said at day’s end, in that firm but nice way she possessed, please stay behind for a few moments. Naturally, I was thinking about the rassling me and Jimmy Babcock had been doing at break. Jimmy was a year older than me, but my mammy said I was inheriting daddy’s build, and I was getting the better of the rassel when Miss MacPhearson pulled us off the ground and scolded us.

When the other six kids, who needed extra teaching, were gone, I sat at my desk waiting for the punishment work. She surprised me when she carried a chair over and sat down facing me. Chester, she said, softly, with a smile, have you been doing extra lessons at home?

As you can guess, her question threw me. No, Miss. Don’t have the time when chores on the plot are finished and I help mammy wash up. I have to mind after little Mildred (Tilly) til her bedtime then. Don’t have time for books and such.

I can understand and sympathize with you there. Chester; I’ve always found you to be an honest and well behaved student but, let’s face it, you’re not the brightest apple in the barrel so I have to ask you this question; did you cheat on your test yesterday?

I was totally taken off guard. I would never shame my mammy or daddy by cheating. I looked at her, and I could feel the tears forming. No, Miss, I don’t ever cheat at anything.

And again, I believe you, Chester, but I had to ask. I want to show you your test mark. And with that said, she handed me my paper. Ninety-eight per cent and a gold star. Now, they were my pencil marks, no doubt, but the words looked like something Miss MacPhearson would write. She had asked us to write a short poem, no more than four lines, so I wrote about daddy’s plot. I looked at the words in astonishment.

I look around my daddy’s patch,

The green, the red, the yellow hues,

And I thank the Lord for all that’s grown,

When we sit down to evening stews.

This, Chester, is poetry. Did someone teach you this and you wrote it down in class?

I don’t rightly know, Miss, because, to be true and all, I can’t remember if I writ that or not.

I saw you writing and straight off, I collected the paper. It’s okay, you know, if you wrote something from memory. You’re not plagiarizing anyone’s work because this is a personal perspective. That’s plain to see. I want to keep you another five minutes, Chester, because I’m going to give you a sheet of paper. You get your pencil out and write one sentence that describes what you think of me. Okay?

I’ll try, Miss.

She fetched me a paper and I pulled my pencil out. She went back to her teaching seat and I looked down at the empty page. Next thing I knew, there were words there and she’s lifting the paper. Miss MacPhearson is the most gentle, beautiful soul I know and, if I am blessed with a wife someday, I would pray she has all of the qualities displayed by this lady. When she lifted her face from the paper, a tear rolled down her cheek. She reached out and touched my face. I apologize, Chester, you certainly were not cheating or repeating. This is a lovely statement and a wonderful sentiment. The way you talk, is that to fit in with the other students?

Miss, I don’t rightly know what you mean. Those words just appeared on that there paper.

"Well, you can go home now but here’s a word for you to look up at home; enigma, because suddenly, that’s what you’ve become to me."

The next day our class would be breaking early seeing as how we were going to be on holidays. In the morn, Miss MacPhearson asked us to write something about our past school year. When time came to collect those sheets, she came and took mine first. Class dismissed; see some of you in September and to the others, good luck in class three. Naturally, it was a headlong stampede to get through the door first.

Later in the day, when we were rising from eating supper, there came a rap on the door. Mammy crossed the big space and opened up. I suffered a mighty shock when I heard Miss MacPhearson’s voice. Mammy welcomed her inside and to our table where she partook of a lemonade (Mammy got the lemons from sullen Mr Jacob when she went across to daddy’s plot on occasion. Only time that dark individual smiled was when mammy came a-calling).

Well, they spoke about the heat and the church (where we tended the Revernt Krimmel’s sermons on a Sunday morn.) and such before we found out why that young lady had come calling. She handed mammy the very sheet with my name on it. I saw mammy’s eyes widen as she read and she would’ve passed it to daddy but he was doing overtime at the quarry. Did you write this, Chester Hanley?

Before I could answer, Miss MacPhearson chimed in on my behalf. He surely did, Emily. I watched him the entire time, and don’t ask me why, yet. When he was finished, I went directly to his desk and collected the paper. Now I want Chester to read it.

So mammy made me stand up and take the paper and read the words. I looked at them and, I swear, I don’t recall the writing. I even had a struggle to read what was written there.

Beecham Primary and Middle School is situated on the outskirts of Gault’s Dip. It is clean, fresh-painted and the play areas are soft and grassy. There are three teachers and I thank the Lord that I had the good fortune to be taught by Miss Elsie MacPhearson, a fair and compassionate woman. Going on reputation alone, I am not looking forward to the classes conducted by Mrs Emerald Fleece and Mr Jonas Cooper but, as I always do, I will try my very best. When the cane falls on me, as it surely will, it will not be because I was misbehaving or that I am an idiot; no, it will be used to satisfy the cruel urges of Mrs Fleece and Caning Cooper. When or if I eventually attend high school in Lebanon, I will always remember Miss MacPhearson with a deep and abiding fondness but the other two I will cast from my thoughts permanently.

If I’d known the trouble that unremembered piece of writing would cause, I would’ve torn it up in pieces there and then, but I didn’t and my teacher took it away with her when she left. Mammy praised me no end but was still curious as to how I could write like that and could not speak in a simlar fashion. I never knew nor cared. Daddy came in an hour later and I was quizzed again.

Chapter 4

Night Four Writing

Daddy let me have the other orange on the very last day of July. When I’d finished my plot chores, I cut the fruit off the branch and walked home to Tretton Street. After supper—daddy was absent again with overtime—I went up to my room. I took with me daddy’s copies of some magazines that he’d received by the post from his brother, Patrick, who lived way up top of America in a big city called Chicagy (leastwise, that’s the way I was thinking in those years. I know better now, even with the failing English. I think those papers were a peace offering because the brother was an outcast). I didn’t read the fancy words on the paper. They were worth less than a penny to me. I opened those big sheets of paper to where there was pictures drawn by a man called Clare A. Briggs. They told stories in pictures just like in our learning books; Danny Dreamer and Little Silly Sally and A. Piker Clerk. Daddy told me they were political satire (and satire was something I knew nothing about), but I enjoyed them just the same, even if I didn’t know what in tarnation the real meaning was intended to be.

I sat on my cot and peeled the orange. The skin just about fell off that fruit because it was so ripe. I split inside with my fingers and where the juce ran down to my nuckles, I tried a lick. I got a rare feeling you’d know it was sweeter than candy. I could’ve run down and shared it with