The Language of Paradise: A Novel by Barbara Klein Moss

Author:Barbara Klein Moss [Moss, Barbara Klein]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

GIDEON ENDURED THE MORNING at his desk, his thoughts as scattered and feckless as they’d been concentrated the night before. The sermon was still unfinished, but it was already past noon, and he was anxious to get away before Sophy came to ask if he would join them at table. The idea of the visit had come to him with such force that it seemed crucial to carry out his plan without further interruption.

He threw on his coat and began to walk at a fast trot through the softening snow, slowing his pace when the house was safely behind him. He was genuinely curious about Solloway’s methods—few of the other masters had lasted more than a year—but was reluctant to invade the classroom while school was in session. Hedge had considered such visits a pastoral duty, and relished arriving unannounced, ostensibly to catechize the students, but also to observe the teacher at work; a letter, enumerating the poor pedagogue’s weaknesses and prescribing Scriptural correctives, would soon follow. Gideon had no desire to strike fear in the hearts of youth. If anything, he was terrified of young people, not individually, but en masse. He wondered what would have become of the shy, precocious boy he had been if his mother hadn’t tutored him—how he would have fared in a classroom like the one he was about to enter, with pupils of all ages and backgrounds shut in together.

When the schoolhouse came in sight, he halted. The building wasn’t identical to the ones his mother had taught in, but it was similar enough; he recognized the gray wood showing through peeling paint, the straight, plain flanks, the tarnished bell over the door. Here, too, the narrow windows, whose small panes would fracture the view of fields spreading out on either side. Even at this distance he could recall the smell of the rooms he had been banished to as a boy during the mill owner’s visits: an effluvial bleakness of damp wool, cold ash in the stove, and year upon year of unwashed bodies in close confinement. It was possible that all schoolrooms had this odor. Scrubbing could never quite expunge it.

The girl had been so lazy that she had kicked the pail with her toe to move it along, inch by indifferent inch. She rarely troubled him now. There was no room for her in his mind, or in his life, and since he hadn’t told a living soul about her, it was as if she never existed at all. Still, Gideon was grateful for the black clothes that weighed too heavy on a day as mild as this one. They bespoke his position, the man he had become.

As he walked up the muddy path, he could hear the schoolmaster’s ringing question: Who will spin the globe today? The response was immediate, a confusion of voices proclaiming that Annie had her turn last week, Eben’s spelling had improved, Caleb had helped clean the classroom two days in a row. Gideon waited until the din subsided before knocking.

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