10. The Final Dispatch, contd.

This is how it happened.

All was in readiness for the inspector’s visit. Wholesome scenes of youthful industry were on repeat in every room. The most obliging spirits had been given their lines, the least obliging students sent to the playfield. So I was undismayed, when I repaired to my office to fortify myself with a glass of paregoric, to see that the door was open and that the ubiquitous Miss Exiguous stood just inside it holding, with a ridiculously sacerdotal air, a man’s hat.

A white cat curled around the doorjamb as I approached and scooted away, and I heard a calm voice—yours—saying, “She will be here presently.” I entered my office; a man I did not recognize but who wore the ill-fitting suit of petty officialdom and thus had to be the Regional School Inspector came toward me with his hand outstretched in greeting.

“I would like to tour the facilities, of course, and observe a class or two,” the Regional School Inspector was saying. “Then take a gander at your records. But first, a little chinwag, eh?—about some of the stories that have been going around. As I think you know—”

I heard a sudden ruction and turned. Miss Exiguous seemed to be trying to hold the door closed against some impetuous force. “No, you bold creature, you may not come in!” she exclaimed. “The idea! Return to your scheduled coursework immediately.”

There was a bang, a scuffle, a sharp cry from Miss Exiguous, and Finster’s head, braids swinging, poked momentarily through the door. “I have something to—I want to give information”—she gasped out, before a male hand, fastening on her ear, hauled her back over the threshold—“against the Headmistress!” could be heard at surprising volume, considering that it was receding down the hall, and muffled as by a hand.

The Regional School Inspector met my eyes. With an apologetic smile that was little more than a wince, he said, “I think we shall have to hear her out, don’t you?”

“Certainly not!” Miss Exiguous said, rubbing her shin, but then saw my face. Hastily, she threw open the door and called Mr. Mallow back. Finster was propelled before the School Inspector as forcefully as she had just been repelled from him.

She slouched between Mr. Mallow and Miss Exiguous, head hanging. Now that she had her way, impudence had given way to girlish shyness, and shy is not a word one would generally apply to Finster. Nor is girlish.

“And what is your complaint against Headmistress Joines, my dear?” the School Inspector said. Finster cut her eyes toward me. “Do not be afraid, you are under my protection. Speak clearly, and do not tell fibs, and no one will hurt you.”

“Shh-shh-she bothers me,” she mumbled. “She watches me. I don’t know why she has to watch me all the time! And she gives me things.”

“What things?”

“Strange things. Nasty little dolls, made of dirty old sticks and things. Th-th-they”—she sucked in her lower lip in an exaggeratedly childish expression—“fwighten me.” I recognized this for playacting, but I took the blow anyway, and unfamiliar tears sprang into my eyes. A barely nascent tenderness was spoiling into an old familiar hurt. It was rabbits all over again.

“Anything else, child?” said the School Inspector.

But of course she did not love me, or even like me. I had taken her mother away. That her mother had mothered indifferently, at best, did not matter. It had not mattered to me.

“And . . . And she touches me, during the exercises.” My head came up.

“Oh! Only the way she touches all the children, to correct their carriage, and their embouchure, and so on!” Miss Exiguous said defensively.

“But I don’t like when she touches me! I don’t want her to! I don’t, I don’t!” Cracking, Finster’s voice boomed, dropped an octave—to the register of a grown man—before resuming its childish accents.

Then I knew my enemy.

When I forget that I have seen it all before, I move through these events as liquidly as I did back then. As if anything could happen and not just the terrible thing that had to. As if the past were a great open space and not a solid mass as of pulped paper through which I follow my own inky footsteps, these, toward the inevitable moment when that small mouth opened and my father’s voice came out.

His voice plunged into me as if my skin, my meat, my bones, the marrow of my bones, my blood and water were no impediment but an invitation. (You will recall that I said something similar of my mother’s face. The effect of course was quite different.) It was not my ears that knew him; his voice rushed past my ears on its way to deeper places, and I had already practically forgotten the sound of it by the time it was rubbing against my internal organs. My kidneys remembered it, however. My duodenum, my heart. My bladder remembered it and released a tiny jet of urine into my unmentionables. My large intestine remembered it, reversing hours of peaceful peristalsis in two seconds flat. Seemlier parts remembered it too, but no part remembered it joyfully.

“That’s not the child speaking!” I cried, and looked around for corroboration.

“Why”—said the School Inspector, and if I had not been so upset, I might have laughed to see his face—“who else could it be?”

I folded my arms, pinning my trembling hands to my ribs. “On the whole I am not surprised. My father always lacked stick-to-it-iveness.”

The School Inspector laughed nervously. “You are saying it is . . . your father’s ghost.”

“Speaking through the girl,” I agreed, though my voice faltered, for already I sensed that I had made a mistake.

He looked grave. “It is not very like a man’s voice.”

“There are limits to what a child’s vocal cords . . .” put in faithful Miss Exiguous, but I shut her up with a look, for I was roused now and would not stoop to placate and explain.

“Why is she saying these things?” piped my father, in a mockery of a child’s voice. “What does she mean?” Goaded, I raised my hand, and she shrank from me. “Don’t let her touch me!” Her voice crackled like a fire.

“No one will let her hurt you, my dear,” said the School Inspector. “You are perfectly safe. Headmistress Joines, please collect yourself.”

“As if there were something sinister in—in caring for a child!” It was the first time I had acknowledged it since rabbits, caring that is, for anything but my work, and something in my chest opened—probably a pulmonary vessel, but it felt like my heart. I saw, of course, that I was doing myself no good, but I could not stop blackening my name. “When it is really all the children I have not cared for that should be charged to my account! But no, you like cruelty, you like pain, it is tenderness you want to stamp out . . .” A fit of coughing interrupted me, and I yanked out my handkerchief and buried my face in it. No one spoke until I finished.

Then in the silence, as I dabbed blood and sputum off my lip, my father piped up again. “And when I’m in bed, she—”

I flew at Finster then, intent on clamping my hand over her mouth, unwilling—unable!—to hear another nasty, sly, insinuating word. Swinging, my fichu caught on the oil lamp. I swiped at the vessel, thinking to catch it from the air, but only dashing it more forcefully to the floor. Perhaps to another it might even have appeared that I meant to do it. The flames roared up at the child’s feet, her splattered skirt caught fire, she saw my hand coming down, and with a scream that was, at least, entirely her own, she threw herself down her own throat.

I have said it many times, but it bears repeating, that in the land of the dead, it is what we say about the world that determines what world we see, and so it is not possible to tell a story about the past without living that past again, and not as a memory, but as current events. So when I say she screamed, what I mean is that she is screaming, and when I say that tears sprang into my eyes, I mean that I am crying, and when I say that I was going after her, I mean that I am going, I go, the aperture that is all that is left of her is still shimmering in the air and turning from it I am leaping down my own throat. Here I go, I fall, I fly, I swallow myself . . .