Free A Terrible Beauty: What Teachers Know but Seldom Tell outside the Staff Room by Dave St.John Page B

make it. She checked the slow lane and found it blocked by a
land yacht, car in tow.
    Damn, damn, damn! At that moment the truck passed
into a stretch of highway becalmed, and the quarter ton gate, freed
from the constant pressure of wind, slammed back against its safety
chain. A gust from the west sent it back again, harder this time,
and a hairline crack appeared in the tack weld binding chain to
frame.
    Patti looked down and saw a single pinhead size
bloodstain on her bone silk blouse.
    Dh, just great. She dabbed a tissue to her tongue and
worked at it. It was no use. She would never get the blood out of
her blouse, now.
    A second gust and the chain tore free, sending the
gate in a slow arc downward. When it reached horizontal it severed
the remaining pin. Caught up on the eighty-five mile an hour draft,
the rearward edge, worn smooth and sharp, knifed downward through
the air.
    Patty, seeing it come at her on the slipstream,
knowing in that instant she was to die, opened her mouth wide as
she reached out to shield Nikki with her right hand.
    There was time for nothing more.
    • • •
    O’Connel, grunting in terror, flung back the covers
on the four poster and came erect.
    The dream again.
    A peacock shrieked from its perch high in a fir along
the bank of the river, and shivering with cold sweat, he staggered,
trembling, to the toilet. Just the dream again.
    Returning to sit on the side of the bed, he squinted
through sand-filled eyes to see the time, 5—58. Groaning at his
dashed hope for further sleep, he switched on the lamp and, wiping
his face, hoisted himself to his feet.
    Stiff of mornings. Forty, and mornings he felt every
day of it.
    Drawstring O.R. scrubs barely hung on his hips as he
padded bare foot down the squeaking stairs. He’d worn them in the
delivery room the night Nikki was born, and worn them every night
since.
    He hit the power button on the stereo as he went by
on his way to the laundry room, and the house echoed the trill off
lute and orchestra as he rummaged in the dryer for a clean pair of
socks.
    “Jean Pierre Rampal with the Academy of St.Martins in
the Fields, Sir Neville Mariner, conducting,” he said.
    Roused by his voice, an old liver Dalmatian bitch
teetered through the kitchen, hindquarters wobbling.
    With a grunt of disgust, he settled for a navy and a
black. “I’m telling you I’m right this time, Sonny.” A mellifluous
voice named the performers. “There, you see? What’d I say.” Happy
for the attention, the dog’s eyes brimmed.
    • • •
    About the house hung tenebrous phantoms of wife and
child—a family dissolved into mist. When least on his guard they
came, leaving him shaken and trembling.
    Up on the mountain, in the midst of thinning, over
the growling of the chain saw, he’d hear Patty’s call to dinner
echoing up the mountain. So real, he would kill the saw, raising
his hardhat to listen, voice still sounding in his mind. There was
never more than the wind in the firs—just that.
    More than once he’d started from sound sleep,
‘Daddy!’ whispered an inch from his ear. A two-year-old��s laugh in
the silent kitchen, the sound of bare feet on the stairs.
    Once while shaving, he felt Patty’s cool hand on a
bare shoulder.
    A presence so tangible, he’d smelled her hair. Gone
in an instant, the feeling of her hand on his skin he would keep.
He could feel it now.
    Her last morning she’d been in a hurry, as she was
every day of her life. Making tea, she slammed the pan down on the
stove, spilled water sizzling on hot iron. “The boat needs oil and
there you sit! I’ll be late again!” To his shame, he had teased her
about being in a hurry to die.
    “And why in the name of all that’s holy do we have to
live way to hell and gone? Why can’t we live on a street like
normal people? With garbage collection, and electricity that
doesn’t go out every time a leaf falls, and neighbors, and children
for Nikki to play with?” After five years, he’d