Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch

Author:Richard Bausch
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061758102
Publisher: HarperCollins

3.

Monday, at the high school, Elizabeth goes through the long morning, giving writing assignments, filling out forms, spending time in the library. She works with Calvin Reed for a few minutes, just before the lunch hour, and the boy seems to have drawn even further down into himself. She says, “Do you think you could meet me halfway a little?”

He stares dumbly at her.

“Just make the slightest effort.”

“No.” On his assignment, which is supposed to be a narrative, he has written: “Got arrested summer. B & E. Distruckshun of goods. Nobody home. Got plasted. Thru up all over.”

She looks at it. She has learned that the best kind of response to writing is always specific and involving not the expression—at least, in the beginning—but the subject matter, to earn the student’s trust. She says, “Is this your home you’re talking about?”

He shrugs. “It says B & E.”

“Can you tell me more about it?”

“No.”

“I want to help you, Calvin. But you have to let me.” The words feel stale in her mouth.

His expression is of complete nonunderstanding. But there’s something else, too—a kind of blank coldness, as though she’s something made of metal, about which he feels only the mildest curiosity. She thinks of the cold eyes of cats, the dead stare of a snake.

When James Christ comes in, he wants to tell her about a disturbance out in the hall. He had to break up a fight between two girls. “There’s three groups in this school,” he tells her. “The leaders, the mob, and the sufferers.”

“It’s like that in every school,” Elizabeth says, barely listening to him.

“Yeah, well I got ganged up on. I was one of the sufferers. Can you imagine what I went through with my name? I’m still going through it. But you’re right. It’s the world. And I guess I better get used to it.”

“But it isn’t supposed to be about you, now, is it?”

“Oh, well pardon me all to hell.”

Sometimes it seems to Elizabeth that, in his small way, James Christ, by the very fact of his namesake, underscores the sense of Christ as historical: a man, with a man’s temperament and a man’s frailties, whatever else he was. It’s abysmal to think of the son of God being, even for a moment, petulant or irritable. Annoyed by a sound. Last spring, a bird outside her window seemed to repeat the same five syllables over and over, like a high-pitched cackle in the back of the throat of a very old witch. On and on it went, and she, who loves birds and birdsong, would gladly have shot it if she could’ve located it.

Now, in the early afternoon, she heads to the STOP room where, confirming her own unpleasant expectations, she finds Calvin, sitting in the first stall with a pencil in his hands, legs straight out under the table, down-slanting shoulders slumped, a little nervous motion of the hands with the pencil the only motion at all. He’s staring at the shiny surface of the desk, polished black slate.

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