Free How to Read an Unwritten Language by Philip Graham Page A

pauses between their plaintive moans they waited for my reply. I listened closely, just on the point of understanding, when an ugly amplified scrape cut through the room—Mrs. Lawler had wrenched the needle off the record.
    â€œWell, it’s getting late,” she said, turning on a slide projector. “If we don’t hurry, we’ll never get through today’s lesson.”
    I closed my eyes in an attempt to continue those whale songs inside me. But the breathless flutter of Mrs. Lawler’s voice, the hum of the projector’s fan and the metallic slap of each new slide clicking in defeated me, and I looked up at the screen. A large, simple building stood in the distance, with a long grassy roof supported by wooden pillars, and walls that rose only halfway up. Squinting at her notes, Mrs. Lawler said, “This is a Northwest Coast Indian shrine devoted to attracting whales.”
    I barely heard her. What I’d first thought were walls I now saw were people, standing stiffly shoulder-to-shoulder. Something about them seemed odd, but before I could really concentrate, my restless teacher clicked to the next slide.
    We were inside the shrine, and now came another surprise: those people were life-size wooden statues, their torsos stiff, their hands and feet stumps. Their openmouthed, flat faces seemed to be shouting out a warning at the approach of trespassers.
    â€œThese are the wooden images of dead whale hunters,” Mrs. Lawler announced. “The Indians held ceremonies in this shrine, and they sang songs that they believed would cause whales”—she paused and turned a page—“to drift close to shore, where they could then be caught.”
    Now another slide filled the screen: a close-up of maybe half a dozen statues, their identical, plaintive expressions so much like the three-holed faces of bowling balls, so much like my mother’s own unhappy features that last terrible day. I blinked back tears at the thought, yet still I couldn’t look away from that wall of faces. And then I knew why: they could just as easily be Mother’s hidden characters. I longed to hear them sing out keening songs like the whales, songs filled with secrets that I would finally understand.
    I raised my hand and waved it wildly, trying to think up a question that would keep Mrs. Lawler from the next slide. She wasn’t looking my way, and even if she were, I knew she’d say her usual, “Let’s save our questions for later, okay?” I wouldn’t let her do that to me. I dropped my thick science textbook on the floor, for a nice, solid thump .
    As the class tittered I quietly dragged the book under my seat with my foot. Mrs. Lawler turned to us. “And who, may I ask, did that?”
    Of course no one gave me away. “I’m waiting,” Mrs. Lawler said. “We’ll just sit here in the dark until the smart aleck confesses.”
    I knew from previous class disturbances that only a minute or two would pass before Mrs. Lawler lost her patience and made the kind of threat that usually drew a confession. So I placed myself inside the shrine with the statues and I peered into their faces, I grasped the rough grain of their wooden shoulders and tried to draw out their voices.
    â€œI’m waiting,” Mrs. Lawler said, and still no song rose above the hum of the projector.
    â€œI’m waiting,” she repeated, and the weariness beneath the impatience in her voice belonged to someone I’d never noticed before: a teacher afraid of her students. That’s why she rushed through the class lessons, leaving us breathless or bored behind her. Mrs. Lawler fiddled with the record player, examined a button on the slide projector, trying her best to pretend indifference, but now I knew that she was most wary of us during these moments of classroom tension.
    I raised my hand. “I dropped the book, Mrs. Lawler.” Then I added something I thought