A Donald Justice Reader by Donald Justice

Author:Donald Justice
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Poetry
ISBN: 9780874515671
Publisher: Middlebury
Published: 1991-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

I like to think that our experience was not unusual. Among the hundred thousand or so people in the Miami of the thirties there were probably a dozen other teachers like Mrs. L., if not more. And, in the nation at large, who can guess how many? Often there must have been a man in the background, whose chief stay and support the teacher was. During those moments in lessons when the eye begins to wander, the pupil might occasionally catch a glimpse of this mysterious figure, as I did once, though not at Mrs. L.'s. Outdoors he sat, in a sort of deck chair, under the shade of fruit trees, staring out across the half-mown grass at nothing at all. Did they drink, these lost men? Were they the victims of shellshock, or tuberculosis? Mrs. L.'s husband was none of these, but wrapped in a deeper mystery still. We saw little of him, for he was Hispanic and lived, as we pieced the story together, in Cuba. His visits were always brief, always unexpected. Suddenly he would be stepping off the bus that stopped at our corner. He was a small, fragile-looking person who carried himself stiffly and dressed in a black that seemed out of place in that climate. He sometimes carried a cane. Past one interested porch after another he would proceed, touching the tip of his cane gingerly to the sidewalk before him, like someone experimenting with the idea of blindness. A diplomat of sorts, or so we had been allowed to gather. Where the idea had come from that he showed up only to demand money from Mrs. L. I do not know. Perhaps at some point she had complained of this to my mother. In any case, we always suspected the worst of him, this courtly-looking little man who came and went like something in a dream.

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