Free The Hour of Lead by Bruce Holbert Page B

discipline for destructive little boys and men who took pleasure from spreading animals asunder to see how they functioned. The finest knowledge could not be gutted and cleaned like mule deer or river trout. Instead, she thought the world possessed its own order, without explanation, cruel or kind.
    Watching the twinless survivor flounder through simple long division and sentence parsing children four years his junior had mastered, she worried his rescue from the storm did him no favor. He made his marks only through graceless effort, an inadequate boy in so many ways. She was concerned the children would tease him—despite his size, he was not intimidating—but few ventured a word one way or another. They admired his resolve and they were frightened by it.
    She had joined him at that portal through which men must pass to be born and pass again to be men. The boy had cut the loop too abruptly, she realized, returning to nature so swiftly after leaving it, he’d not forgotten enough of the first to uncloud the second and her living body lay between them as if reason itself.
    Over the years, she found herself assigning her classes whole books to read or an impossibly long series of problems from the primers then setting a teakettle on the stove. From her desk, she sipped her porcelain cup and made each child a study, shifting from one to the next wordlessly. If they met her eyes or shied and fidgeted,she would loosen her gaze a moment then return when the child had forgotten her. Often, as the children walked or rode horseback along the paths and roads leading them to their families, she found herself weeping, and those nights she’d lie on the schoolroom’s hard floor and stare into the beams until her eyes blurred and she could conjure and scrub clean the faces of the children, and search for any crumb of herself that might allow her a share in them.
    Linda had thought it silly, any adult putting so much stock in something impermanent as a child. Such vanity begged the stars to differ. Occasionally, she believed she had not considered the twins and the storm in years, but realized, each time, in doing so, as with things truly tragic, she had recalled the event every day. She was no seer, but, in the images she found filling her thoughts, Linda recognized her own face rising. Like taming her reflection in a pond, the harder she looked, the stiller she became, until she felt steadied and almost right, then something she couldn’t say roughed the picture, like a wind or duck landing, the stirrings distorting her likeness until it went monstrous, and she marked that twisting as in herself, and understood, finally, the wanting of another past just company, if only to offer a face to stare into that belongs to you but is not your own. She bore this strangeness through the winter and spring following and, when school let out for summer, she visited the empty building anyhow, smelling for the children and leafing the primers for their grubby fingerprints and scratchy letters.
    Mid-June, she was called upon at home by the new superintendent of county schools. The man dismounted and trudged the porch steps. His prominent stomach unfolded beneath his chest, and his shoulders stooped from decades of bearing the girth. He knocked a pipe against his pantleg, loaded it, and struck a match. His face, slack as a bulldog’s, pinked as he puffed and exhaled.
    The man’s name was Superintendent Harrison, and he insisted on being addressed as such. She filled a bucket and watered hisanimal while politely allowing him to prattle his opinions on the keeping of schools. He inquired, finally, if she would be requesting textbooks or desks. The school board had replaced those lost in the storm a few months after. She told him they were holding up well.
    â€œYou are a relief,” he said to her. “Most of the others are clamoring for them.”
    â€œI am in need of your assistance,” she said.
    She stood and