A Place so Foreign | Page 8

the coal, chopping kindling, taking care of the milch-cows and making my bed.
I took another forkful of sausage, and a spoonful of mush, chewed, and looked at my plate.
"It's time, it's time. You can't spend the rest of your life sulking around here. Your father would have wanted us to get on with our lives."
Even though I wasn't looking at her when she said this, I knew that her eyes were bright with tears, the way they always got when she mentioned Pa. His chair sat, empty, at the head of the table. I had another bite of sausage.
"James Arthur Nicholson! Look at me when I speak to you!"
I looked up, reflexively, as I always did when she used my full name. My eyes slid over her face, then focused on a point over her left shoulder.
"Yes'm."
"You're going to school. Today. And I expect to get a good report from Mr Adelson."
"Yes'm."
#
We have two schools in New Jerusalem: the elementary school that was built twenty years before, when they put in the wooden sidewalks and the town hall; and the non-denominational Academy that was built just before I left for 1975.
Miss Tannenbaum, a spinster lady with a moustache and a bristling German accent terrorised the little kids in the elementary school -- I'd been stuck in her class for five long years. Mr Adelson, who was raised in San Francisco and who had worked as a roustabout, a telegraph operator and a merchant seaman taught the Academy, and his wild stories were all Oly could talk about.
He raised one eyebrow quizzically when I came through the door at 8:00 that morning. He was tall, like my Pa, but Pa had been as big as an ox, and Mr Adelson was thin and wiry. He wore rumpled pants and a shirt with a wilted celluloid collar. He had a skinny little beard that made him look like a gentleman pirate, and used some shiny pomade to grease his hair straight back from his high forehead. I caught him reading, thumbing the hand-written pages of a leatherbound volume.
"Mr Adelson?"
"Why, James Nicholson! What can I do for you, sonny?" New Jerusalem only had but 2,000 citizens, and only a hundred or so in town proper, so of course he knew who I was, but it surprised me to hear him pronounce my name in his creaky, weatherbeaten voice.
"My mother says I have to go to the Academy."
"She does, hey? How do you feel about that?"
I snuck a look at his face to see if he was putting me on, but I couldn't tell -- he'd raised up his other eyebrow now, and was looking hard at me. There might have been the beginning of a smile on his face, but it was hard to tell with the beard. "I guess it don't matter how I feel."
"Oh, I don't know about that. This is a school, not a prison, after all. How old are you?"
"Fourteen. Sir."
"That would put you in with the seniors. Do you think you can handle their course of study? It's half-way through the semester now, and I don't know how much they taught you when you were over in," he swallowed, "France."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I just stared at my hard, uncomfortable shoes.
"How are your maths? Have you studied geometry? Basic algebra?"
"Yes, sir. They taught us all that." And lots more besides. I had the feeling of icebergs of knowledge floating in my brain, ready to crest the waves and crash against the walls of my skull.
"Very good. We will be studying maths today in the seniors' class. We'll see how you do. Is that all right?"
Again, I didn't know if he was really asking, so I just said, "Yes, sir."
"Marvelous. We'll see you at the 8:30 bell, then. And James --" he paused, waited until I met his gaze. His eyebrows were at rest. "I'm sorry about your father. I'd met him several times. He was a good man."
"Thank you, sir," I said, unable to look away from his stare.
#
The first half of the day passed with incredible sloth, as I copied down problems to my slate and pretended to puzzle over them before writing down the answer I'd known the minute I saw the question.
At lunch I found a seat at the base of the big willow out front of the school and unwrapped the waxed paper from the thick ham sandwich Mama had fixed me. I munched it and conjugated Latin verbs in my head, trying to make the day pass. Oly and the fellows were roughhousing in the yard, playing follow-the-leader with Amos Gundersen out front, showing off by walking on his hands and then springing upright. Amos' mother came from circus people in Russia, and all the kids in his