Part 16 (2/2)

After we had gone around and around a couple more times, I sternly sent them outside. The two ran shrieking, holding the seats of their Levi's, yelling, ”We got a licking! With the 'lectric paddle! A-wah! A-wah!”

And my heart sank. I had a premonition that the Baby Phase was about to give way to a Tease Dismey Phase.

Dismey came slowly to life in the cla.s.sroom. She began to function with the rest of the cla.s.s, catching up with ease with the children who had been in school a month before she arrived. She swooped through long and short vowels and caught us in initial consonants. She showed a flair for drawing andpainting. Her number work and reading flowed steadily into her-and stayed there instead of ebbing and flowing as it does for so many children. But all the rest of the cla.s.sroom activities paled to insignificance as far as Dismey was concerned before the wonder of story time. it was after the first few sessions of story time immediately following the afternoon recess that I realized what Dismey's mother meant by calling her a believin' child.

Dismey believed without reservation in the absolute truth of every story she heard. She was completely credulous.

It's hard to explain the difference between the fairy tales for her and for the rest of the cla.s.s. The others believed whole-heartedly while the story was in progress and then set it aside without a pang. But there was a feeling of eager acceptance and-and recognition-that fairly exuded from Dismey during story time that sometimes almost made my flesh creep. And this believing carried over to our dramatization of the stories too, to such an extent that when Dismey was the troll under the bridge for The Billy Goats Gruff, even Bannie paled and rushed over the bridge, pell-mell, forgetting the swaggering challenge that he as the Big Billy Goat was supposed to deliver. And he flatly refused to go back and slay the troll.

But this credulity of hers served her a much worse turn by making her completely vulnerable to Bannie and Michael. They had her believing, among other unhappy things, that a lion lived in the housing of the air-raid siren atop the cafeteria. And when the Civilian Defense truck came to check the mechanism and let the siren growl briefly, Dismey fled to the room, white-eyed and gasping, too frightened to scream. She sat, wet-faced and rigid, half the afternoon in spite of all my attempts to rea.s.sure her.

Then one day I found her crying out by the sidewalk when she should have been in cla.s.s. Tears were falling without a sound as she rubbed with trembling desperation at the sidewalk.

”What's the matter, Dismey?” I asked, squatting down by her, the better to see. ”What are you doing?”

”My mama,” she choked out, ”I hurt my mama!”

”What do you mean?” I asked, bewildered.

”I stepped on a crack,” she sobbed. ”I didn't mean to but Bannie pushed me.

And now my mama's back is busted! Can you fix a busted back? Does it cost very much?”

”Oh, Dismey, honey!” I cried, torn between pity and exasperation. ”I told you not to believe Bannie. 'Step on a crack and break your mother's back' isn't for true! It's just a singing thing the children like to say. It isn't really so!” I finally persuaded Dismey to leave the sidewalk, but she visibly worried all the rest of the day and shot out of the door at dismissal time as though she couldn't wait to get home to rea.s.sure herself.

Well, school went on and we switched from fairy tales to the Oz books, and at story time every day I sat knee-deep in a sea of wondering faces and experienced again with them my own enchantment when I was first exposed to the stories. And Dismey so firmly believed in every word I read that Michael and Bannie had her terror-stricken and fugitive every time a dust devil whirled across the playground. I finally had to take a decisive hand in the affair when I found Michael struggling with a silently desperate Dismey, trying to pry her frenzied hands loose from the playground fence so the whirlwind could pick her up and blow her over the Deadly Desert and into the hands of the Wicked Witch of the West.Michael found his Levi's not impervious to a ping-pong paddle, which was the ultimate in physical punishment in our room. He also found not to his liking the Isolation outside the room, sitting forlornly on the steps by our door for half a day, but the worst was the corporate punishment he and Bannie had visited upon them. They were forbidden to play with each other for three days.

The sight of their woebegone, drooping figures cast a blight over the whole playground, and even Dismey forgave them long before the time was up.

But her tender-heartedness left her only more vulnerable to the little devils when they finally slipped back into their old ways.

We finished the first of the Oz books and were racing delightedly into the first part of The Magic of Oz, and there it was! Right on page 19! We all looked at it solemnly. We wrote it on the board. We contemplated it with awe.

A real live magic word! All we had to do now to work real magic was to learn how to p.r.o.nounce the word.

Therein lay the difficulty. We considered the word. PYRZQXGL. We a.n.a.lyzed it.

We knew all the letters in it, but there were no vowels except 'and sometimes Y.' How could you sound out a word with no vowels and no place to divide it into syllables? Surely a word that long would have more than one syllable!

”We'll have to be careful even trying to say it, though,” I warned. ”Because if you do find the right way to p.r.o.nounce it, you can-well, here it tells you- '. . . transform any-one into beast, bird or fish, or anything else, and back again, once you knew how to p.r.o.nounce the mystical word.' ”

”You could even change yourself. Wouldn't it be fun to be a bird for a while?

But that's what you have to watch carefully. Birds can talk in the Land of Oz, but can they talk here?” The solemn consensus was no, except for papkeets and myna birds.

”So if you changed yourself into a bird, you couldn't ever change yourself back. You'd have to stay a bird unless someone else said the magic word for you. So you'd better be careful if you learn the way to say it.”

”How do you say it, teacher?” asked Donna.

”I've never found out,” I sighed. ”I'll have to spell it every time I come to it in the story because I can't say it. Maybe someday I'll learn it. Then when it's Quiet Time, I'll turn you all into Easter Eggs, and we'll have a really quiet Quiet Time!”

Laughing, the children returned to their seats and we prepared for our afternoon work. But first, most of the children bent studiously to the task of copying PYRZQXGL from the board to take the word home to see if anyone could help them with it. It was all as usual, the laughing, half-belief of the most of the children in the wonderful possibilities of the word, and the solemn intensity of Dismey, bent over a piece of paper, carefully copying, her mouth moving to the letters.

The affair of Bannie and Michael versus Dismey went on and on. I consulted with the boys' parents, but we couldn't figure out anything to bring the matter to a halt. There seemed to be an irresistible compulsion that urged the boys on in spite of everything we could do. Sometimes you get things like that, a clash of personalities-or sometimes a mes.h.i.+ng of personalities that is inexplicable. I tried to attack it from Dismey's angle, insisting that she check with me on everything the boys tried to put over on her before she believed, but Dismey was too simple a child to recognize the subtlety withwhich the boys worked on occasion. And I tried ignoring the whole situation, thinking perhaps I was making it a situation by my recognition of it. A sobbing Dismey in my arms a couple of times convinced me of its reality.

Then there came yesterday. It was a raw bl.u.s.tery day, bone-chilling in spite of a cloudless sky, a day that didn't invite much playing outdoors after lunch. We told the children to run and romp for fifteen minutes after we left the cafeteria and then to come back indoors for the rest of the noon period. I s.h.i.+vered in my sweater and coat, blinking against the flood of sunlight that only made the cold, swirling winds across the grounds feel even colder. The children, screaming with excitement and release, swirled with the winds, to and fro, in a mad game of tag that consisted in whacking anyone handy and running off madly in all directions shrieking, ”You're it, had a fit, and can't get over it!” It didn't take long for the vitality of some of our submarginals to run short, and when I saw Treesa and Hannery huddling in the angle of the building, shaking in their cracked, oversized shoes as they hugged their tattered sweaters about them, I blew the whistle that called the cla.s.s indoors.

The clamor and noise finally settled down to the happy hum of Quiet Time, and I sighed and relaxed, taking a quick census of the room, automatically deducting the absentees of the day. I straightened and checked again.

”Where's Dismey?” I asked. There was a long silence. ”Does anyone know where Dismey is?”

”She went to the restroom with me,” said Donna. ”She's afraid to go alone. She thinks a dragon lives down in the furnace room and she's scared to go by the steps by herself.”

”She wuz play tag weez us,” said Hannery, with his perennial sniff.

”Maybe she go'd to beeg playgroun',” suggested Treesa. ”We don' s'pose to go to beeg playgroun',” she added virtuously.

Then I heard Bannie's high, embarra.s.sed giggle.

”Bannie and Michael, come here.”

They stood before me, a picture of innocence. ”'Where is Dismey?” I asked.

They exchanged side glances. Michael's shoulders rose and fell. Bannie looked at his thumb, dry of, lo, these many weeks, and popped it into his mouth.

”Michael,” I said, taking hold of his shoulders, my fingers biting. ”Where is Dismey?”

”We don't know,” he whined, suddenly afraid. ”We thought she was in here. We were just playing tag.”

”What did you do to Dismey?” I asked, wondering wildly if they had finally killed her.

”We-we-” Michael dissolved into frightened tears before the sternness of my face and the lash of my words.

”We didn't do nothing,” cried Bannie, taking his thumb out of his mouth, suddenly brave for Michael. ”We just put a rock on her shadow.”

”A rock on her shadow?” My hands dropped from Michael's shoulders.”Yeth.” Bannie's courage evaporated and his thumb went back into his mouth.

”We told her she couldn't move.”

”Sit down,” I commanded, shoving the two from me as I stood. ”All of you remember the rules for when I'm out of the room,” I reminded the cla.s.s. ”I'll be right back.”

The playground was empty except for the crumpled papers circling in an eddy around the trash can. I hurried over to the jungle gym. No Dismey. I turned the corner of the Old Building and there she was, straining and struggling, her feet digging into the ground, the dirt scuffed up over her ragged shoes, her whole self pulling desperately away from the small rock that lay on her shadow. I sawor thought I saw-the shadow itself curl up around her k.n.o.bby, chapped ankles.

”Dismey!” I cried. ”Dismey!”

”Teacher!” she sobbed. ”Oh, teacher!”

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