THE GRASSHOPPER’S BURDEN

Here was this school building in the town, holding young and old, this stone building that looked from the front like a great big head with flat skull of asphalt and gravel and face of an insect that might be eating up the young through its opening and closing mouth of doors; and across its forehead were written the words: “Dedicated to all high emprise, the building of good citizens of the world, the establishment of a community of minds and hearts, free men and women.”

In this building and in its surrounding yards were many people, children and teachers—it was a world:

This was a rainy afternoon in Social Studies and Quella could not stand hearing the story of Sam Houston read out by different people in the class. She was just waiting for two-thirty, when she would get her pass to go to the auditorium where the May Fete in which she was a Royal Princess (and one of two elected by the whole school) would be practiced.

Miss Morris, who would never at any time in her life have been a Royal Princess, she was so ordinary, was the Social Studies teacher and listening as she sat in good posture at her desk to the story of Sam Houston as if it were a brand-new tale just being told for the first time. She did not like to sign a pass—for anything, May Fetes included. Miss Morris had a puckered mouth just like a purse drawn up. She knew everything about children, whether they told a story about undone homework; and especially about boys, if they had been smoking or had a jawbreaker hidden over their last tooth, or a beanshooter in their blouse—she surmised a beanshooter so dreadfully that it might have been a revolver concealed there. And when she fussed at a boy who was mean by stealing a girl’s purse and going through it, showing all a girl’s things to other boys in the class, Miss Morris would draw her pursey mouth so tight that she seemed to have no lips at all and stitches would crack the powder around it. Then she would shake this boy hard, often causing bubblegum or jawbreakers to fall from him everywhere and roll hard on the floor under all the seats. She did not like to sign a pass.

But Quella must have an early pass, not only to keep from having to read her turn at Sam Houston but to give her time to go get her hair ready for the May Fete practice. She thought what an early pass might be for—not to go to the Nurse to see if she had mumps because it felt sore by her ear, because yesterday she had said this and caused a lot of attention, but all the M’s in her row and the L’s and N’s on both sides of her row shrank away from her and even Helena McWorthy had not wanted to go around with her between classes, the way they did, seeing what was in the halls together, or let her use her powder puff or blue woman’s comb, just to get mumps. And she could not have something in her eye because not long ago she had got an easy pass from Miss Stover in Math for this and the Nurse, a little mean woman that smelled like white, had said, “I find nothing whatsomever in your eye that does not naturally belong there,” and wrote this on a note to Miss Stover and then glared at her with the whites of her eyes.

Quella sneaked a good black jawbreaker into her mouth, acting like she was just brushing her hand across her mouth, and Miss Morris never knew. Then she sat, waiting for a reason to get an early pass to dawn upon her. She could hear the voices of this one and that one reading out about Sam Houston—forever Sam Houston! They had had him in the Third Grade and they had had him in the Fifth. And now, even in the Seventh and as far as Junior High School they had to have him again. It was Mabel Sampson, the biggest girl, reading now. If she would say thee—ee, Miss Morris would stop her and make her say it thuh; and she could not even pronounce the word that clearly spelled Puritan but said it Prutan. Mabel Sampson was so dumb. Because Mabel Sampson was bigger than the rest in the class, she deviled them and snooted them whenever and wherever she could, to make it plain that she had somewhere (and Quella was going to find out) passed all the rest of them on her way to something and would get there first.

And then it was Billy Mangus reading. He was fat and white and whined a lot, and the worst boy to sit in front of if you were a girl and an M. She and Helena McWorthy just hated him for what he would do with redhots. He would plant these little dots of sticky candy in Helena McWorthy’s beautiful hair and she would not even know it or feel them there and go all through the halls between classes having redhots in her hair until someone laughed at her and made fun of her and picked them out to eat them. Or Billy Mangus would bore a sharpened pencil into Helena’s back right through an Angora sweater or even her Mexican bolero which her aunt brought her back from Tijuana, Mexico. Helena was a very quiet girl. She would let Quella stroke her, huddled blinking in her seat, keep her always right and everything about her straight, plait and unplait and plait again her hair, arrange her ribbons. Helena would go anywhere holding Quella’s hand, submissive to be with her. She had little chinkapin eyes fixed close to the bridge of her nose like a cheap doll’s, dull and with scant white eyebrows. Her almost white hair, which was long and divided down her back, was infested with lures like sometimes two red plastic butterflies lighted there, or a green Spanish comb staked over one ear, and always red or blue knitting yarn wound through a spliced hawser of it, which arched over the top of her head from ear to ear. Helena had discovered that a pencil, too, might be stuck there and stolen often by Billy Mangus, who sat behind her alphabetically, and have to be fussed for.

Billy Mangus was reading and Quella wondered if his false tooth in front was wiggling, and she stretched over to see. No. It must be locked in place now. But if he wanted to, Billy could, by unlocking this false tooth some way with his tongue, cause it to wiggle like a loose picket in a fence. This tooth was his special thing in a class or anywhere if he wanted to unlock it. Suddenly she just had to see it wiggle and she did not know why but she shouted, right in the middle of the reading, “Wiggle us your tooth, Billy!” This made Miss Morris very outdone and Billy Mangus giggled and the whole class tittered. Miss Morris made everything quiet, then stared so hard at Quella and all the class sat very still to watch Miss Morris do one of her stares, hold her rocky eyes, never even breathing or blinking, right on a pupil until he had to look down first. Quella did not know whether to try to outstare Miss Morris by doing just the same to her until she put her eyes down, or to look to see if Billy Mangus was wiggling his tooth. But she decided she would rather see the tooth and turned to look; and so Miss Morris won. “Sit up straight, Quella, and do not talk one more time out of turn!” Miss Morris said, very proud because she had won a staring contest.

Quella sat up in her seat and there seemed nothing to do, so she remembered her lips, if they had enough lipstick on them. Very carefully she opened her nice black patent-leather purse and got out her lady’s mirror which was of red-skinned leather and had some redhots sticking to it. She cleaned them off into her purse to save them and held out the mirror for her lips to see themselves. She put her lips in a round soft circle. She saw them in her mirror, red enough, sweetheart lips, so beautiful. Then she made different shapes with them, some kissing shapes, some like “OOOOO!”; and one like being prissy, or a word like “really!”; or like the Nurse saying, “I find nothing whatsomever in your eye that does not naturally belong there.” But she would not do her lips like Miss Morris at a mean boy, for then it would spoil the lipstick. Last, she gently kissed a piece of composition paper to leave her lips there. Liz her sister kissed letters at the end and all over, she mailed her lips to boys, and she would, too, when she began to write letters to somebody besides her Grandmother in Yreka, who would certainly not be thrilled with kissing lips in a letter.

Then she put her mirror back in her purse and spied her big blue comb in there. She scraped some redhots off it and brought it out and raked her hair with it. It was a good feeling. She thought of Helena’s bunch of hair and how she wanted right now to be behind her plaiting it and fixing it as she did in Science, where they did not have to sit alphabetically. She seined her hair again through the net of her comb, right in back this time, being very careful not to comb down the red ribbon which was pinned there like an award for something. If a boy pulled at it, this would make her mad and stamp her foot and have to slap him. She lolled the black jawbreaker around in her mouth and devoured the sweet juice from it.

Then suddenly there was something being unwrapped cunningly in the L’s across from her. She looked to see Charlotte Langendorf, the ugliest girl, holding something sticky and blue in her lap. It had been wrapped in wax paper. “What is that stuff?” she whispered across to Charlotte. “A thing we cooked today in Cooking and I am going to eat it when the eating period comes,” Charlotte whispered, glad someone had noticed it. “Let me see it,” Quella whispered again. “I won’t eat it, cross my heart. I have Cooking next period and I need to know what we will cook.” Charlotte passed it secretly across and Quella looked at this peculiar thing which they would cook next period. She examined it, smelled of it, and wanted right then to taste some of it. “What is it?” she asked. “It smells funny.” “I don’t know,” Charlotte whispered back, “but it’s something we made out of ingredients. Miss Starnes told us how.” Quella tasted it. It was not good to eat at all, not even cooked; but she had another taste. “Let me have it!” Charlotte whispered severely. “Give me back my cooking!” Quella gave it back. “It smells tacky,” she said. Then she looked ahead of her in the front of the S’s and watched Bobby Sandro’s broken arm in a cast, how he was writing tattoos on it, in a cast and a sling from breaking it in Gym and he did not have to write because of it. And then at Suzanne Prince’s bandaged-up finger, so she couldn’t write, too, saying it was bitten by their cat that went insane.

And then she surveyed the whole row of mean boys, every one of them mean, not a one cute, whose names began with B as though all the meanest were named alike, and she thought how they would step on your saddle shoes to dirty them. Then she thought of several things in a row: horses and their good gentle one named Beauty they used to have; of a fight in the rain before school by Joe and Sandy and how all the girls stood purposely to get their hair wet and be so worried about it; of Liz and her boy friend Luke Shimmens who owned a hot-rod and took them riding around town and up and down dragging Main blowing the horn and backfiring and seeing different kids walking along and waving out at them.

Then there seemed nothing else going on to see or do, and Quella wanted to have an early pass again. Wayne Jinks was just finishing his paragraph. When it was over she raised her hand and popped it to jingle the jingles round her wrist. Miss Morris said, “Do you want to read next, Quella?” “Nome,” Quella said, and prissed, “it is time to go to May Fete practice.”

Miss Morris said a surprise. “All right, take a pass and go ahead.” And she took a pad of passes from her drawer and wrote on one. She tore it off and gave it to Quella, looking for a moment as if she were going to stare at her. But Quella went out of the room quickly.

She was in the hall with a pass in her hand, going down the very quiet hall that did not have another single person in it. She passed all the rooms, sometimes seeing through a door pane some teacher writing on a blackboard or standing talking to a class. She noticed as she went along that without any other kids, alone in the hall (and this same thing was true when she was by herself with a teacher) she was no more than somebody quiet and courteous. But when the others were around, she could be all the things they were, shouting and slapping boys and eating at the wrong time, provoked with the way things were or excited about them. She stopped by the closed door to the Teachers’ Room where all their mailboxes were, like pigeons’ holes. No one was in there. She remembered seeing the teachers gathered in front of their boxes before the first class began, fumbling, dipping and rising like homing pigeons. She came by Mrs. Purlow’s room where the Stuttering Class was—in there was George Kurunus and she spied him through the glass pane of the door, sitting like some kind of an animal. She heard Mrs. Purlow’s perfect words, like “lit-tle,” like “yel-low” floating across the room, how she would say every word right. And next was Mrs. Stanford, who would treat you so very nice when you met her in the grocery store after school or on Saturdays, with her hand on your head, saying, “How’s little Quella?” and patting you, but mean in class and acting as though she never had seen you in a grocery store in her life, or anywhere. Then here was the typing class. It was like a heavy rain in there. And old Miss Cross, who had been teaching how to type for thirty years, standing at the front of the class pointing with a long stick at the letters on a chart and saying “A” and then an enormous clack! to make an A, then “B” and another clack to make this letter. Then faster, and it was like a slow gallop of a horse on pavement and Miss Cross with her stick like a circus trainer, “A - S - D - F - G.” And next was Miss Winnie’s room where this teacher cried a lot and for this was called Weeping Winnie and spoke in a soft cooing voice and seemed so sad. She always lost her voice the Ninth Period and said, “Cheeldrin you will have to write today, my voice is gone.”

As she went along she would walk like different kinds of people, or in different ways, very quickly and hopping; or as she had seen Miss McMurray, the English teacher and very pretty, going down the halls—as though she were carrying a bag of eggs, afraid to break them, or a sleeping baby that might be waked; and like the Royal Princess with a train that she had been voted to be in the May Fete. Then she meandered in big S’s or in zigzags from one side of the hall to the other; or smeared one finger along the wall, loitering, browsing, lolling at every drinking fountain to sip a long time or spew the water back. She saw some faded redhots and the little stone of a jawbreaker in one fountain.

Once she thought of Helena and wished Helena could be with her. Helena was such a beautiful name. She came to her sister Liz’s room and peeked in. The good-looking Mr. Forbes was teaching them some important senior subject and they were all listening as if what he was saying had to be learned to take out in the world when they would soon go. She looked to see what color his tie was today. Liz had counted seventeen different ties in seventeen days on Mr. Forbes and he wore so many different kinds of coats and trousers that they said he changed sometimes between classes. Yes, he had his saddle shoes on, too. Then she saw Mr. Forbes looking towards the door where she was. She ducked down quickly to wait until he turned and she could look again for Liz, to see how she looked sitting up in class.

As she crouched there she suddenly heard someone coming down the hall and looked to see who could it be. It was the awful deformity George Kurunus writhing and slobbering and skulking towards her. She was afraid of him and thought she would scream as all the girls did when he came to them; but she knew if you went up to him not afraid of his twisted face and said George to him and talked to him he would not do anything to you. Together, all the kids played with him, at him, as though he was some crazy and funny thing like a bent toy on a string; but no one ever wanted to be with him alone. Often a class would hear a scratching at the door and would see his hoodlum face at a door pane like Hallowe’en and be frightened until they saw it was just George Kurunus. Then the class would laugh and make faces back at him and the teacher would go to the door and say “Now, George…” and shoo him away; and the class would titter. The boys all went around with him as if he was something they owned, something they could use for some stunt or trick on somebody, their arms around his shoulder; and they talked and laughed with him and told him ugly jokes and things about girls and sicked him on certain girls. Why did this deformity George have to be in a school? He couldn’t even hold a word still in his mouth when he said it, for it rattled or hopped away—this was why he was in Stuttering Class, but it did him no good, he still broke a word when he said it, as if it were a twig, he still said ruined words.

He could not speak a word right and whole no matter how hard he tried or how carefully. But if you live among breakage, he may have reasoned, you finally see the wisdom in pieces; and no one can keep you from the pasting and joining together of bits to make the mind’s own whole. What can break anything set back whole upon a shelf in the mind, like a mended dish? His mind, then, was full of mended words, broken by his own speech but repaired by his silences and put back into his mind. The wisdom in all things, in time, tells a meaning to those things, even to parcels of things that seem to mean disuse and no use, like scraps in a mending basket that are tokens and remnants of many splendid dresses and robes each with a whole to tell about.

Whenever the Twirling Class for girls in the Black and Gold Battalion practiced on the football field, here was this George on the field, too, like some old stray dog that had to be shooed away. And in a marching line of some class to somewhere, the library or a program in the auditorium, he ruined any straight marching line and so was put last to keep the line straight. But at the end of a straight marching line he twisted and wavered like the raveling out of a line and ruined it, even then; he was the capricious conclusion and mocking collapse of something all ordered and precise right up to the tag end. When he walked, it seemed he always ran upon himself like someone in the way—or like a wounded insect. He was a flaw in the school, as if he were a crack in the building.

This day he had sat in his row by the window and the sun was coming in upon him. It warmed his vestigial hand, lay upon a page of his book. It touched some leaves of a begonia on the teacher’s desk and showed their white lines and illuminated the blooms to like glass flowers. Flower was a word, but he could not say it. The sun came in and lay upon Miss Purlow’s face and showed where the round spot of rouge ended and her face’s real skin began. The sun made, also, between Miss Purlow and the blackboard, a little transparent ladder leading up and out through the window. Specks of golden dust were popping in it, dancing and whirling on out the window. Then suddenly Miss Purlow walked through it and broke it, but it joined together again, in spite of Miss Purlow, and made him glad. Miss Purlow went to the blackboard and wrote upon it some perfectly shaped words in her pretty curlimacue handwriting that said:

“Come into the garden, Maud,

For the black bat, night, has flown…”

Then she read them aloud, musically and perfectly, and he so wanted to have these words in his mouth. Miss Purlow asked him to say them after her but he could not, they fell away from him, they were all hers; yet he had it perfect, the little melodious collection of words, in his mind from Miss Purlow’s mouth, a small tune of sounds that hung clear and warbling in his ears like birdsong. He turned and shuffled away, to leave the room. Miss Purlow called at him that she would report him to the Principal again as soon as the class was over, but he did not care, he opened the door and went away from this room where he could not speak and where words tormented him.

Then here he was, ruining a quiet hall for Quella. Although with other children she laughed at him and thought him a funny thing, alone she was afraid of him and detested him. Where was this George going? He was shuffling closer. She stood up and pressed against the wall and watched him, hating him. It was said that if he ever fell down he could never get up unless somebody helped him, but just lie there scrambling and waving his arms and legs, like a bug on its back, and muttering. His little withered left arm was folded like a plucked bird’s wing and its bleached and shriveled hand, looking as though it had been too long in water, was bent over and it hung limp like a dead fowl’s neck and dangling head. But he could use this piece of hand, this scrap of arm quickly and he could snap it like a little quirt and pop girls as they passed him in the hall. Here he came, this crazy George Kurunus, a piece of wreckage in the school. What did he want? She looked to see if he had a pass in his hand. No. Certainly he was not going to practice for any May Fete. Why should he be in the halls and without a pass?

She shrank close to the wall, but did not want to be caught there by him. She decided to run fast past him, not looking at his goblin face and not going close enough to him to be popped by his whip of an arm. She darted and fled past him, wanting to push him down and leave him wriggling there in the hall. He said some sound, all drunken and gargled, to her as she passed him; but he did not try to pop her. She ran looking back at him and when she came to the turn of the hall that led to the lavatory, she ran around it fast, then crept back to peek around and see if he was still going on or coming after her. George Kurunus was staggering along, his knees scraping each other, sounding like a little puffing train in the hall, without ever looking back. This made her furious and she was going to yell, “Stuck u-up!” until she remembered she would be heard and was supposed to be going to the auditorium.

She ran in to the girls’ lavatory and was dramatically hiding from him there, panting faster than she really had to. She stopped to listen and heard his sh-sh-sh-sh down the hall away from her. This was another narrow escape she would tell Helen McWorthy about.

Then it was time for the May Fete practice and she went to the auditorium that always seemed so cool when the whole school wasn’t in it. There were the royalty, already assembled: Joe Wright, the handsome King, also the Chief Yell Leader; Marveen Soames, the beautiful Queen; the other Princess, Hazel May Young, not pretty but with personality, and all the Dukes and Duchesses. Miss McMurray, the perfect-walking English teacher, was there to take charge.

They all marched down the aisle, very proud, and the King and Queen mounted the throne, the Princesses and Princes, Dukes and Duchesses swaggered to their places around the throne. The King had on his silver crown and was holding his tinfoil wand. When it was time to crown the Queen, the biggest moment of all, and everything was real quiet, all the empty seats in the auditorium hushed and watching, she spied in the glass frame of the auditorium door the terrible face of George Kurunus, like a grasshopper’s face. He was watching the May Fete and had it all in his eye. This George Kurunus was everywhere, why did he have to be everywhere she was? But she turned her eyes away from him, upon all the beautiful royalty, and they went on with the practice. Then suddenly it was the bell for the next class, which was Homemaking—a dreary place for a Princess to go: to a cookstove after a coronation.

The Homemaking teacher was Miss Starnes and there she was, waiting for the girls at the door, smiling and standing straight. Miss Starnes would stand before her class reading from some book. Each day she had a fresh rose or some other flower from her own garden stuck to her strict dress, and the way she maneuvered her mouth and bowed and leaned her head towards the girls sitting before her made them know that she knew she was saying something good, as though she were smacking her lips and golloping something like a dessert. Yet Miss Starnes was very serious and meant what she would say or read and paused often, sticking out her chin (which had hairs on it) for emphasis.

The girls in Homemaking class who sat before her were not sure at all what these words meant, but they sat there, among the linen dresses and the fancy aprons hanging on hangers, which last year’s class had made with its own hands and left the prices pinned on to show that they were good enough to be bought in any store. Then there was a manikin on a stand—in a corner by the American flag, which the manikin seemed to need to drape around itself to hide its nakedness, headless and with a pole running right up through her to be her one leg; and in an adjoining room—the kitchen—there were rows of little stoves where Miss Starnes told the girls things to cook.

The bell had rung and all the girls were in their seats—any chosen seat and not alphabetically—and “responsibility” was a word Miss Starnes was already smacking off her lips to the girls in Homemaking. “Domestic re-spon-si-bi-li-ty.” These were words Miss Starnes started right in telling to the class, things they should be or do in the good home they would have or make—and which lay off somewhere in the vague unknown and which they could not quite see as something of theirs but just imagine and did not even particularly want, now. But whatever or wherever or however this place “The Home,” they would be there, all these girls, going industriously around in aprons, there would be a lot of busy sewing and a difficult cooking, and… “Domestic re-spon-si-bi-li-ty”… these words Miss Starnes was saying.

Quella was going to start in plaiting and unplaiting Helena McWorthy’s hair when Miss Starnes kneaded and worked her lips and they were getting ready to say another careful word to the class. “E-con-o-my.” The manikin was standing there in the corner trying to be that word, which was a good thing to be. The manikin was a pitiful thing, undressed, or something headless like a fowl, or something deformed, but proud and seeming to want to help Miss Starnes with the lecture by standing there as though it, too, were teaching Homemaking. It was about the size of her mother in her short slip in the summertime, Quella observed.

And then Miss Starnes led them in the kitchen and they were going to cook their lesson. “I know what it will be,” Quella told the others. “Like some stuff Charlotte Langendorf cooked first period and carried in wax paper to Social Studies—of potatoes or something.” But Miss Starnes was saying that in this class today there would be cooked pudding and to light the stoves and listen to some things she would say about the making of pudding, and to put on their white cook aprons. “Ingredients” was a word about pudding which Miss Starnes was saying, and it seemed just the word for what milk and sugar, which they were already mixing, looked like together. There was a gregarious stirring. Then Miss Starnes told about the soft ball that the mixture would make in a cup of cold water to show it was ready. Here and there already a soft ball was found in a cup and a girl would raise her hand to tell it to Miss Starnes.

Just as Quella and Helena’s mixture made a soft ball for them in their cup of cold water, a staccato bell-ringing that was certainly not the regular bell resounded in the school building, and it was fire drill. Although the mixture was ready and showed its undeniable sign, all the Homemaking girls had to leave it and line up in twos and march behind Miss Starnes through the hall smelling of their mixture, which even then, though it was not yet anything but ingredients, made them feel important because they had caused this smell to move all in the corridors just as they were moving now, and even reach around as far as the algebra room, where there were no good smells, and hang under the noses of the class doing unknowns. The girls marched and fretted.

When the Homemaking class got outside under the trees where the school busses were waiting for school to be out, and stood in their right place under the cottonwood trees, Miss Starnes suddenly thought about the windows in Homemaking and remembered she had not closed and locked them according to fire drill instructions. “Quella,” she said carefully as though she were saying “do-mes-tic” or “e-con-o-my,” “please to run back to Homemaking and close all the windows tight and see that no stoves are burning.”

“Don’t I need a pass?” Quella asked.

“No, Quella. Run.”

She was alone in the hall again. The pudding will be ruined, she thought. If the school burns, they will have to save the pudding and the May Fete pretties. She could smell smoke, and then once she was sure she saw a flame lick out of Boys’ Lavatory, but she would never go in there to put it out. She went very fast to Homemaking and in the room she went right to her and Helena’s cup with the soft ball in it. She felt it. It was still soft. She went around looking at other cups. Margy Reynolds’ was not ready but was still just ingredients in a cup of water. But some hand or finger had been in it all, in all the cups and pans, who had been meddling in Homemaking? She thought she heard the crackling of flames above her, so she rushed to close the windows, and as she ran out, she swiped her finger through her and Helena’s ready mixture and strung it along the stove and floor and on her dress; but she licked it up quick and slammed the door.

Then she ran through the hall, not liking the halls this way, with no pass, without classes in the rooms, no different teachers standing or sitting there as she passed them. How scarey the school seemed now, full of the echoes of her clapping feet and her panting. She passed Miss Purlow’s room and looked in through the door. On the blackboard were written the lines in beautiful penmanship:

“Come into the garden, Maud,

For the black bat, night, has flown…”

and under the lines was—what? Was it a joke or what? There was a curious disheveled chaos of giant and dwarf runaway shapes, tumbled and humped and crazy… like the Devil’s writing or like a ghost’s. She ran.

Then she was by the auditorium and stopped to make sure there was no flame in there to eat up all the May Fete pretties—the dresses and the paper flowers, the paper wand and all the paper streamers. She could feel something in there! There was some live thing in there! She listened. No sound. She looked through the pane of the auditorium door and what should she spy but George Kurunus sitting on the King’s Throne like a crazy king in a burning building. On his head was the silver crown and in his ruined hand the silver wand. He was into everything, who would keep him out of all the things at school; he was a disturbance in this world of school and in her own world, touching and tampering with everything she did. She thought she saw him rise and come down from the throne and down the aisle towards her, after her; and she ran away and down the hall, now full of smoke she was sure, hearing him after her—sh-sh-sh-sh—and seeing rags of flame waving out from alcoves and recesses at her. She ran out the door and into the open, without looking back. If the schoolhouse burned it would burn him like a cricket in it. She would not tell.

She was thrilled to see all the boys and all the girls lined under the trees and gladly joined them. She stood shivering under the trees in her place in line, waiting to see what was going to happen, in the unearthly quiet that lay over all the school people, over all the school building. Suddenly at a window on the second floor she saw his face, as if her fear of fire had a face and it was George Kurunus’. No one else seemed to see it—was she imagining it? for she now had the insect-headed and devil-bodied image of him in her head. No, there it was, his face, looking down at her, she was sure. And then she thought she saw him crying! If he was crying she wanted to save him from the burning building, to call out that he was in there, or to run in and save him herself; hurry! hurry! hurry! But suddenly the all-clear bell that would bring them all back to where he was, separate and waiting, but never back to him whirred out, convulsing through her whole body and through his own tilted body like electric shock…it was all a nightmare: if there had been no fire then there had been no George in the empty building, she thought.

Now they all began to move, in their colors like a field of flowers jostling in the wind; and she saw again, for sure, his grasshopper face at the window, watching them coming back to the skulled building of stone that held him like an appetite or a desire that would surely, one day, get them every one: all the beautiful schoolchildren gathered and moving like the chosen through the heavenly amber afternoon light and under the golden leaves—the lean ball-players, the agile jitterbuggers, the leaping perch of yell leaders, the golden-tongued winners of the declamation contests, Princes and Princesses, Duchesses and Kings, and she, Quella, among them, no safer than the rest but knowing, at least, one thing more than the rest.