Before Familiar Woods by Ian Pisarcik

Author:Ian Pisarcik [Pisarcik, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

RUTH FENN

Ruth was trying to apologize for not saying anything when Elam hit Mathew that night after the school play. At least that’s what was on her mind when she turned down Schoolhouse Road and stopped in front of the old two-room schoolhouse.

It was warm, but there was a fine summer breeze in the air. Ruth and Mathew were on their way home from clothes shopping at the department store. Mathew sat in the passenger seat of the truck, drinking the last of his ice cream from a waxed paper cup. Ruth was listening to a Stevie Nicks cassette tape. She had her left hand out the window holding a cigarette.

The schoolhouse sat on a small plateau above the road, surrounded by trees and green ferns. It was where Ruth and Elam and everyone else in North Falls had gone to school up until 1958, when the town built the new public school to serve North Falls and the two neighboring towns. Ruth remembered when the schoolhouse was put on the market and how strange it had been to see her school for sale. The man who bought it was Jim Luchs, an attorney who used it as an office for several years until it was sold to the state and put on the historic register. The way Ruth heard it years later was that Vermont was the first state in the nation to authorize public education and that the little two-room schoolhouse had been one of the first of its kind in all of America.

Ruth came to a stop in front of the school and finished her cigarette with the truck running and the window rolled down. Then she flicked the butt onto the paved road and opened the door.

“I want to show you something,” she said. “Come on and follow me.”

Mathew hesitated and then got out of the truck. He looked like a little version of Elam. Ruth always noticed it in the summertime when he wore shorts and his knees stuck out from his thin legs like smoothed knots on a branch. There were times she tried to see herself in Mathew and it bothered her that she had to strain, but then he would do something small, like blink his eyes when he got excited or hold his hand over his chin when he was nervous, and she would see it and her heart would swell.

“Where are we going?” Mathew asked.

“I told you. I want to show you something.”

The sun was coming down, and it shone in slanted lines through the branches of the trees that surrounded the schoolhouse.

“This was my school,” Ruth said. “You might not think I was ever as young as you, but I was.”

Ruth headed up the steep drive to the white clapboard schoolhouse with the stone foundation. The building was in good shape save for some rust on the metal roof and some paint chipping on the low belfry that sat on the roof ridge facing north.

Ruth pointed to a wooden railing running along the west side of the four concrete steps.

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