Page 19 of The Reformatory

Boone leaned closer. His breath smelled like rotten teeth. “Don’t listen to them haints,” he said. “Or you’ll be a haint too.”

And Boone pulled Robert up the steps to the schoolhouse.

Still shaken from the phantom fire, Robert summoned all his will to show no tears as he stood before the classroom. He was wrapped in screams, trembling from flames. He’d hoped the teacher would continue her lesson, but the hand of the young Negro woman fell still on the chalkboard and every eye turned to him.

With Boone’s shadow in the doorway, at least thirty colored boys sat with backs high in their desks, hands folded, at attention. Strangers, all of them. Not a single face from church or school. Their curiosity was deep enough to cut his skin. Robert saw noise in their faces—questions, taunts, threats. From their scowls and curled lips, three or four of the bigger boys in the back row had decided they already didn’t like him—that it would be their job, not Boone’s, to teach him about life at the Reformatory. In the front row, smaller boys looked at him with sad eyes that seemed to say, Can you smell the fire too?

“Tell the class your name and then have a seat in the second row.” The teacher spoke carefully like Mama, but her face might never have smiled once.

“Yes’m,” Robert said. When he reached for an imaginary cap on his head, almost everyone smiled, though no one laughed aloud. “I’m… Robert Stephens.”

“I’m Mrs. Pournelle. Take your seat. Thank you, Boone.” Boone half bowed to the teacher before he turned to leave.

“Paper and pencil are in the desk. You get one pencil only—and we count pencils at the end of class. Boone’s run through the rest of the rules. Find an empty cubby to put your things.”

She pointed vaguely, and Robert struggled to see past the wrenched faces and scrabbling arms that still seemed to reach for him, the BOOM of so many hands pounding the wall. He finally saw past his memories to a row of bland, open shelves. Most were empty, so Robert shoved his soiled clothes on a lower shelf and hoped no one would smell the pee.

The teacher began her lesson again, but Robert felt the boys’ eyes watching him, judging and assessing. He looked at no one as he made his way to the nearest empty desk in the second row, closer to the door than the window. No window seats were free. Far across the room, through the window, he saw thick rows of corn in the sun, too short to be ready for harvest. He sat a moment staring at the corn but only hearing screams, seeing only fire. His breathing sped until he had to curl his fingers hard around the edge of his desk to slow it.

The boy next to him roughly nudged Robert’s foot—Robert must have crossed an invisible line, an insult—so Robert moved his feet closer together. He did not look at the boy to challenge him. He was still trying to unsee the burning boys.

The fire is gone, he told himself. Those boys aren’t real.

But they had been real, once upon a time. Those boys were ghosts now. Anyone who’d been reared in Gracetown knew ghosts were real, especially to children, but some people were lucky enough to rarely, or never, cross the ghosts of strangers. Was there a marker on that spot in the empty field? He must never walk there again. Never.

Robert felt a sinking panic that he would never break free of the fire’s spell. Then he remembered the paper and pencil promised in his desk. He lifted the lid and found a fresh notebook with lined paper and one fat pencil, hardly sharp. He had not used such a fat pencil since he was in the second grade, and he was in the sixth grade now.

But Robert began writing, hardly aware of the teacher’s words. He had forgotten her name, and her voice sounded as if she bored herself, but he clung to each word and wrote everything she said to clear his head, trying to escape his horrible passage. Slowly, the classroom felt more real than the fire and his fingers stopped trembling against his pencil. He saw the room around him: the large cards with cursive uppercase and lowercase letters of the alphabet lined up above the chalkboard just like Mr. Harris’s, but Mr. Harris had a portrait of W. E. B. Du Bois pinned to the board instead of President Truman. The classroom was also bigger than his class at Douglass, the desks newer—the way he’d imagined a white school.

Mrs. (Pournelle?) was tall enough to wrestle any of the boys. She was speaking in an end-of-the-day drone, like when his real teacher Mr. Harris’s temper was short and he checked the clock as often as Robert. Finally, Robert heard the name Becky and understood she was talking about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which Mama had read to him when he was small. He’d been scribbling without thinking, catching words when he could. Now he had something to hold on to. He liked that story. The more he thought about the book, the less he remembered the fire.

Mrs. Pournelle felt his interest catch; she looked his way. “What happened to Tom and Becky in the cave?” she said. She might have been asking anyone, but Robert was so sure she wanted him to answer that he raised his hand.

“They got lost from their class,” Robert said. “For days and days. Becky was real scared. They didn’t have no food except some cake. An’ they almost got caught by Injun Joe.”

Mrs. Pournelle nodded. She made a coaxing motion. “So they really had no business wandering in that cave, did they? What should Tom have done instead? Should he have followed his whim, or should he have stayed where he ought to?” She scanned the room, settling on the rear row. “Cleo? What was the lesson of the cave?”

Robert glanced back and saw a boy with wavy hair shrug. No one else raised a hand, so Robert’s went up again. He didn’t know what whim meant, but she’d laid the answer in plain view. “He should’ve stayed where he ought to?”

Light broke across Mrs. Pournelle’s face. She could smile after all. “Yes. He should have stayed where he ought to. He should have followed the rules. That isn’t so hard, is it, Cleo?”

Robert felt Cleo’s eyes glaring behind him. Again he remembered Miz Lottie’s warning not to let anyone know he was smart. In Mr. Harris’s class, nobody liked Franklin Reese hogging up the answers and staying after class to ask Mr. Harris if he could wash his chalkboard or straighten his papers. Robert had once put a giant bullfrog in Franklin’s lunch pail, and the whole class had laughed when he yelled in the schoolyard.

“I guess,” Robert added, too late, trying to seem less sure.

He didn’t speak a word or raise his hand for the last forty minutes of class, but he’d already rubbed his classmates wrong. When Mrs. Pournelle excused them and they stood in a line to file out, no one looked at Robert, as if he had turned invisible. Once he was outside, he realized he’d taken too long to gather his soiled clothes, because the other boys weren’t in sight.

He took it all in: the schoolhouse behind him, the lush cornfields behind razor wire twenty yards to the side, the distant outbuildings beyond the school. Last, he peeked back at the long stretch of field toward the warden’s office where the burning ghosts died forever. He didn’t see the strange shimmering, but the presence of the place rang strong and sour.

I could just run—

The thought had hardly appeared when the boys were upon him and he tasted his blood. A flurry of fists and kicks made Robert cover his head. Four of them. His class had turned the corner of the schoolhouse, out of sight, and four bigger boys were waiting. He knew from radio boxing matches he’d listened to with Papa that he shouldn’t be pinned to the wall. As he moved, a kick to his rear sprawled him face-first to the ground. After that, he could only curl up. With only one or two boys, he would have gotten his own licks in, but he was helpless in an ambush. His nose was bleeding and his lip was split. A hard kick to his stomach took his breath, and someone’s boot pummeled his hand when he tried to protect his privates. These boys fought like grown men, with no sport in it except to hurt him. Pain burst everywhere.

A sharp warning whistle ended the thrashing, and the boys fell away. “And you better not say nothin’ or I’ll cut you,” Cleo hissed over him.

Since the other boys were scrambling to form a line, Robert swayed to his feet too. His vision doubled, but he saw his clothes strewn near the wall and hugged them close before he took his place at the end of a line winding around the corner of the schoolhouse. He wiped his bloody nose against Papa’s work shirt and curled his lip to hide it. Coppery blood seeped into his mouth.

“Ya’ll up to some foolishness?” Boone’s voice came. He rounded the corner, studying their faces. His gaze stopped on Robert, who was biting his bloody lip at the end of the line. If he asks, I won’t tattle, Robert thought. But Boone didn’t ask him anything. Instead, he snatched the clothes from Robert’s hands. “I’ma burn these. You don’t need ’em now.”