Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Gryphon

ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, between the geography lesson on ancient Egypt’s hand-operated irrigation system and an art project that involved drawing a model city next to a mountain, our fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Hibler, developed a cough. This cough began with a series of muffled throat-clearings and progressed to propulsive noises contained within Mr. Hibler’s closed mouth. “Listen to him,” Carol Peterson whispered to me. “He’s gonna blow up.” Mr. Hibler’s laughter — dazed and infrequent — sounded a bit like his cough, but as we worked on our model cities we would look up, thinking he was enjoying a joke, and see his face turning red, his cheeks puffed out. This was not laughter. Twice he bent over, and his loose tie, like a plumb line, hung down straight from his neck as he exploded himself into a Kleenex. He would excuse himself, then go on coughing. “I’ll bet you a dime,” Carol Peterson whispered, “we get a substitute tomorrow.”

Carol sat at the desk in front of mine and was a bad person — when she thought no one was looking she would blow her nose on notebook paper, then crumple it up and throw it into the wastebasket — but at times of crisis she spoke the truth. I knew I’d lose the dime.

“No deal,” I said.

When Mr. Hibler stood us in formation at the door just prior to the final bell, he was almost incapable of speech. “I’m sorry, boys and girls,” he said. “I seem to be coming down with something.”

“I hope you feel better tomorrow, Mr. Hibler,” Bobby Kryzanowicz, the faultless brownnoser, said, and I heard Carol Peterson’s evil giggle. Then Mr. Hibler opened the door and we walked out to the buses, a clique of us starting noisily to hawk and raugh as soon as we thought we were a few feet beyond Mr. Hibler’s earshot.

Since Five Oaks was a rural community, and in Michigan, the supply of substitute teachers was limited to the town’s unemployed community college graduates, a pool of about four mothers. These ladies fluttered, provided easeful class days, and nervously covered material we had mastered weeks earlier. Therefore it was a surprise when a woman we had never seen came into the class the next day, carrying a purple purse, a checkerboard lunchbox, and a few books. She put the books on one side of Mr. Hibler’s desk and the lunchbox on the other, next to the Voice of Music phonograph. Three of us in the back of the room were playing with Heever, the chameleon that lived in a terrarium and on one of the plastic drapes, when she walked in.

She clapped her hands at us. “Little boys,” she said, “why are you bent over together like that?” She didn’t wait for us to answer. “Are you tormenting an animal? Put it back. Please sit down at your desks. I want no cabals this time of the day.” We just stared at her. “Boys,” she repeated, “I asked you to sit down.”

I put the chameleon in his terrarium and felt my way to my desk, never taking my eyes off the woman. With white and green chalk, she had started to draw a tree on the left side of the blackboard. She didn’t look usual. Furthermore, her tree was outsized, disproportionate, for some reason.

“This room needs a tree,” she said, with one line drawing the suggestion of a leaf. “A large, leafy, shady, deciduous … oak.”

Her fine, light hair had been done up in what I would learn years later was called a chignon, and she wore gold-rimmed glasses whose lenses seemed to have the faintest blue tint. Harold Knardahl, who sat across from me, whispered, “Mars,” and I nodded slowly, savoring the imminent weirdness of the day. The substitute drew another branch with an extravagant arm gesture, then turned around and said, “Good morning. I don’t believe I said good morning to all of you yet.”

Facing us, she was no special age — an adult is an adult — but her face had two prominent lines, descending vertically from the sides of her mouth to her chin. I knew where I had seen those lines before: Pinocchio. They were marionette lines. “You may stare at me,” she said to us, as a few more kids from the last bus came into the room, their eyes fixed on her, “for a few more seconds, until the bell rings. Then I will permit no more staring. Looking I will permit. Staring, no. It is impolite to stare, and a sign of bad breeding. You cannot make a social effort while staring.”

Harold Knardahl did not glance at me, or nudge, but I heard him whisper “Mars” again, trying to get more mileage out of his single joke with the kids who had just come in.

When everyone was seated, the substitute teacher finished her tree, put down her chalk fastidiously on the phonograph, brushed her hands, and faced us. “Good morning,” she said. “I am Miss Ferenczi, your teacher for the day. I am fairly new to your community, and I don’t believe any of you know me. I will therefore start by telling you a story about myself.”

While we settled back, she launched into her tale. She said her grandfather had been a Hungarian prince; her mother had been born in some place called Flanders, had been a pianist, and had played concerts for people Miss Ferenczi referred to as “crowned heads.” She gave us a knowing look. “Grieg,” she said, “the Norwegian master, wrote a concerto for piano that was …”—she paused—“my mother’s triumph at her debut concert in London.” Her eyes searched the ceiling. Our eyes followed. Nothing up there but ceiling tile. “For reasons that I shall not go into, my family’s fortunes took us to Detroit, then north to dreadful Saginaw, and now here I am in Five Oaks, as your substitute teacher, for today, Thursday, October the eleventh. I believe it will be a good day: all the forecasts coincide. We shall start with your reading lesson. Take out your reading book. I believe it is called Broad Horizons, or something along those lines.”

Jeannie Vermeesch raised her hand. Miss Ferenczi nodded at her. “Mr. Hibler always starts the day with the Pledge of Allegiance,” Jeannie whined.

“Oh, does he? In that case,” Miss Ferenczi said, “you must know it very well by now, and we certainly need not spend our time on it. No, no allegiance pledging on the premises today, by my reckoning. Not with so much sunlight coming into the room. A pledge does not suit my mood.” She glanced at her watch. “Time is flying. Take out Broad Horizons.”

She disappointed us by giving us an ordinary lesson, complete with vocabulary and drills, comprehension questions, and recitation. She didn’t seem to care for the material, however. She sighed every few minutes and rubbed her glasses with a frilly handkerchief that she withdrew, magician-style, from her left sleeve.

After reading we moved on to arithmetic. It was my favorite time of the morning, when the lazy autumn sunlight dazzled its way through ribbons of clouds past the windows on the east side of the classroom and crept across the linoleum floor. On the playground the first group of children, the kindergartners, were running on the quack grass just beyond the monkey bars. We were doing multiplication tables. Miss Ferenczi had made John Wazny stand up at his desk in the front row. He was supposed to go through the tables of six. From where I was sitting, I could smell the hair tonic soaked into John’s plastered hair. He was doing fine until he came to six times eleven and six times twelve. “Six times eleven,” he said, “is sixty-eight. Six times twelve is …” He put his fingers to his head, quickly and secretly sniffed his fingertips, and said, “… seventy-two.” Then he sat down.

“Fine,” Miss Ferenczi said. “Well, now. That was very good.”

“Miss Ferenczi!” One of the Eddy twins was waving her hand desperately in the air. “Miss Ferenczi! Miss Ferenczi!”

“Yes?”

“John said that six times eleven is sixty-eight and you said he was right!”

“Did I?” She gazed at the class with a jolly look breaking across her marionette’s face. “Did I say that? Well, what is six times eleven?”

“It’s sixty-six!”

She nodded. “Yes. So it is. But, and I know some people will not entirely agree with me, at some times it is sixty-eight.”

“When? When is it sixty-eight?”

We were all waiting.

“In higher mathematics, which you children do not yet understand, six times eleven can be considered to be sixty-eight.” She laughed through her nose. “In higher mathematics numbers are … more fluid. The only thing a number does is contain a certain amount of something. Think of water. A cup is not the only way to measure a certain amount of water, is it?” We were staring, shaking our heads. “You could use saucepans or thimbles. In either case, the water would be the same. Perhaps,” she started again, “it would be better for you to think that six times eleven is sixty-eight only when I am in the room.”

“Why is it sixty-eight,” Mark Poole asked, “when you’re in the room?”

“Because it’s more interesting that way,” she said, smiling very rapidly behind her blue-tinted glasses. “Besides, I’m your substitute teacher, am I not?” We all nodded. “Well, then, think of six times eleven equals sixty-eight as a substitute fact.”

“A substitute fact?”

“Yes.” Then she looked at us carefully. “Do you think,” she asked, “that anyone is going to be hurt by a substitute fact?”

We looked back at her.

“Will the plants on the windowsill be hurt?” We glanced at them. There were sensitive plants thriving in a green plastic tray, and several wilted ferns in small clay pots. “Your dogs and cats, or your moms and dads?” She waited. “So,” she concluded, “what’s the problem?”

“But it’s wrong,” Janice Weber said, “isn’t it?”

“What’s your name, young lady?”

“Janice Weber.”

“And you think it’s wrong, Janice?”

“I was just asking.”

“Well, all right. You were just asking. I think we’ve spent enough time on this matter by now, don’t you, class? You are free to think what you like. When your teacher, Mr. Hibler, returns, six times eleven will be sixty-six again, you can rest assured. And it will be that for the rest of your lives in Five Oaks. Too bad, eh?” She raised her eyebrows and glinted herself at us. “But for now, it wasn’t. So much for that. Let us go on to your assigned problems for today, as painstakingly outlined, I see, in Mr. Hibler’s lesson plan. Take out a sheet of paper and write your names on the upper left-hand corner.”

For the next half hour we did the rest of our arithmetic problems. We handed them in and then went on to spelling, my worst subject. Spelling always came before lunch. We were taking spelling dictation and looking at the clock. “Thorough,” Miss Ferenczi said. “Boundary.” She walked in the aisles between the desks, holding the spelling book open and looking down at our papers. “Balcony.” I clutched my pencil. Somehow, the way she said those words, they seemed foreign, mis-voweled and mis-consonanted. I stared down at what I had spelled. Balconie. I turned the pencil upside down and erased my mistake. Balconey. That looked better, but still incorrect. I cursed the world of spelling and tried erasing it again and saw the paper beginning to wear away. Balkony. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t like that word, either,” Miss Ferenczi whispered, bent over, her mouth near my ear. “It’s ugly. My feeling is, if you don’t like a word, you don’t have to use it.” She straightened up, leaving behind a slight odor of Clorets.

At lunchtime we went out to get our trays of sloppy joes, peaches in heavy syrup, coconut cookies, and milk, and brought them back to the classroom, where Miss Ferenczi was sitting at the desk, eating a brown sticky thing she had unwrapped from tightly rubber-banded waxed paper. “Miss Ferenczi,” I said, raising my hand, “you don’t have to eat with us. You can eat with the other teachers. There’s a teachers’ lounge,” I ended up, “next to the principal’s office.”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I prefer it here.”

“We’ve got a room monitor,” I said. “Mrs. Eddy.” I pointed to where Mrs. Eddy, Joyce and Judy’s mother, sat silently at the back of the room, doing her knitting.

“That’s fine,” Miss Ferenczi said. “But I shall continue to eat here, with you children. I prefer it,” she repeated.

“How come?” Wayne Razmer asked without raising his hand.

“I talked to the other teachers before class this morning,” Miss Ferenczi said, biting into her brown food. “There was a great rattling of the words for the fewness of the ideas. I didn’t care for their brand of hilarity. I don’t like ditto-machine jokes.”

“Oh,” Wayne said.

“What’s that you’re eating?” Maxine Sylvester asked, twitching her nose. “Is it food?”

“It most certainly is food. It’s a stuffed fig. I had to drive almost down to Detroit to get it. I also brought some smoked sturgeon. And this,” she said, lifting some green leaves out of her lunchbox, “is raw spinach, cleaned this morning.”

“Why’re you eating raw spinach?” Maxine asked.

“It’s good for you,” Miss Ferenczi said. “More stimulating than soda pop or smelling salts.” I bit into my sloppy joe and stared blankly out the window. An almost invisible moon was faintly silvered in the daytime autumn sky. “As far as food is concerned,” Miss Ferenczi was saying, “you have to shuffle the pack. Mix it up. Too many people eat … well, never mind.”

“Miss Ferenczi,” Carol Peterson said, “what are we going to do this afternoon?”

“Well,” she said, looking down at Mr. Hibler’s lesson plan, “I see that your teacher, Mr. Hibler, has you scheduled for a unit on the Egyptians.” Carol groaned. “Yessss,” Miss Ferenczi continued, “that is what we will do: the Egyptians. A remarkable people. Almost as remarkable as the Americans. But not quite.” She lowered her head, did her quick smile, and went back to eating her spinach.

After noon recess we came back into the classroom and saw that Miss Ferenczi had drawn a pyramid on the blackboard close to her oak tree. Some of us who had been playing baseball were messing around in the back of the room, dropping the bats and gloves into the playground box, and Ray Schontzeler had just slugged me when I heard Miss Ferenczi’s high-pitched voice, quavering with emotion. “Boys,” she said, “come to order right this minute and take your seats. I do not wish to waste a minute of class time. Take out your geography books.” We trudged to our desks and, still sweating, pulled out Distant Lands and Their People. “Turn to page forty-two.” She waited for thirty seconds, then looked over at Kelly Munger. “Young man,” she said, “why are you still fossicking in your desk?”

Kelly looked as if his foot had been stepped on. “Why am I what?”

“Why are you … burrowing in your desk like that?”

“I’m lookin’ for the book, Miss Ferenczi.”

Bobby Kryzanowicz, the faultless brownnoser who sat in the first row by choice, softly said, “His name is Kelly Munger. He can’t ever find his stuff. He always does that.”

“I don’t care what his name is, especially after lunch,” Miss Ferenczi said. “Where is your book?”

“I just found it.” Kelly was peering into his desk and with both hands pulled at the book, shoveling along in front of it several pencils and crayons, which fell into his lap and then to the floor.

“I hate a mess,” Miss Ferenczi said. “I hate a mess in a desk or a mind. It’s … unsanitary. You wouldn’t want your house at home to look like your desk at school, now, would you?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I should think not. A house at home should be as neat as human hands can make it. What were we talking about? Egypt. Page forty-two. I note from Mr. Hibler’s lesson plan that you have been discussing the modes of Egyptian irrigation. Interesting, in my view, but not so interesting as what we are about to cover. The pyramids, and Egyptian slave labor. A plus on one side, a minus on the other.” We had our books open to page forty-two, where there was a picture of a pyramid, but Miss Ferenczi wasn’t looking at the book. Instead, she was staring at some object just outside the window.

“Pyramids,” Miss Ferenczi said, still looking past the window. “I want you to think about pyramids. And what was inside. The bodies of the pharaohs, of course, and their attendant treasures. Scrolls. Perhaps,” Miss Ferenczi said, her face gleeful but unsmiling, “these scrolls were novels for the pharaohs, helping them to pass the time in their long voyage through the centuries. But then, I am joking.” I was looking at the lines on Miss Ferenczi’s skin. “Pyramids,” Miss Ferenczi went on, “were the repositories of special cosmic powers. The nature of a pyramid is to guide cosmic energy forces into a concentrated point. The Egyptians knew that; we have generally forgotten it. Did you know,” she asked, walking to the side of the room so that she was standing by the coat closet, “that George Washington had Egyptian blood, from his grandmother? Certain features of the Constitution of the United States are notable for their Egyptian ideas.”

Without glancing down at the book, she began to talk about the movement of souls in Egyptian religion. She said that when people die, their souls return to Earth in the form of carpenter ants or walnut trees, depending on how they behaved—“well or ill”—in life. She said that the Egyptians believed that people act the way they do because of magnetism produced by tidal forces in the solar system, forces produced by the sun and by its “planetary ally,” Jupiter. Jupiter, she said, was a planet, as we had been told, but had “certain properties of stars.” She was speaking very fast. She said that the Egyptians were great explorers and conquerors. She said that the greatest of all the conquerors, Genghis Khan, had had forty horses and forty young women killed on the site of his grave. We listened. No one tried to stop her. “I myself have been in Egypt,” she said, “and have witnessed much dust and many brutalities.” She said that an old man in Egypt who worked for a circus had personally shown her an animal in a cage, a monster, half bird and half lion. She said that this monster was called a gryphon and that she had heard about them but never seen them until she traveled to the outskirts of Cairo. She wrote the word out on the blackboard in large capital letters: “GRYPHON.” She said that Egyptian astronomers had discovered the planet Saturn but had not seen its rings. She said that the Egyptians were the first to discover that dogs, when they are ill, will not drink from rivers, but wait for rain, and hold their jaws open to catch it.

“She lies.”

We were on the school bus home. I was sitting next to Carl Whiteside, who had bad breath and a huge collection of marbles. We were arguing. Carl thought she was lying. I said she wasn’t, probably.

“I didn’t believe that stuff about the bird,” Carl said, “and what she told us about the pyramids? I didn’t believe that, either. She didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“Oh yeah?” I had liked her. She was strange. I thought I could nail him. “If she was lying,” I said, “what’d she say that was a lie?”

“Six times eleven isn’t sixty-eight. It isn’t ever. It’s sixty-six. I know for a fact.”

“She said so. She admitted it. What else did she lie about?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Well.” He swung his legs back and forth. “You ever see an animal that was half lion and half bird?” He crossed his arms. “It sounded real fakey to me.”

“It could happen,” I said. I had to improvise, to outrage him. “I read in this newspaper my mom bought in the supermarket about this scientist, this mad scientist in the Swiss Alps, and he’s been putting genes and chromosomes and stuff together in test tubes, and he combined a human being and a hamster.” I waited, for effect. “It’s called a humster.”

“You never.” Carl was staring at me, his mouth open, his terrible bad breath making its way toward me. “What newspaper was it?”

“The National Enquirer,” I said, “that they sell next to the cash registers.” When I saw his look of recognition, I knew I had him. “And this mad scientist,” I said, “his name was, um, Dr. Frankenbush.” I realized belatedly that this name was a mistake and waited for Carl to notice its resemblance to the name of the other famous mad master of permutations, but he only sat there.

“A man and a hamster?” He was staring at me, squinting, his mouth opening in distaste. “Jeez. What’d it look like?”

When the bus reached my stop, I took off down our dirt road and ran up through the backyard, kicking the tire swing for good luck. I dropped my books on the back steps so I could hug and kiss our dog, Mr. Selby. Then I hurried inside. I could smell brussels sprouts cooking, my unfavorite vegetable. My mother was washing other vegetables in the kitchen sink, and my baby brother was hollering in his yellow playpen on the kitchen floor.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, hopping around the playpen to kiss her. “Guess what?”

“I have no idea.”

“We had this substitute today, Miss Ferenczi, and I’d never seen her before, and she had all these stories and ideas and stuff.”

“Well. That’s good.” My mother looked out the window in front of the sink, her eyes on the pine woods west of our house. That time of the afternoon her skin always looked so white to me. Strangers always said my mother looked like Betty Crocker, framed by the giant spoon on the side of the Bisquick box. “Listen, Tommy,” she said. “Would you please go upstairs and pick your clothes off the floor in the bathroom, and then go outside to the shed and put the shovel and ax away that your father left outside this morning?”

“She said that six times eleven was sometimes sixty-eight!” I said. “And she said she once saw a monster that was half lion and half bird.” I waited. “In Egypt.”

“Did you hear me?” my mother asked, raising her arm to wipe her forehead with the back of her hand. “You have chores to do.”

“I know,” I said. “I was just telling you about the substitute.”

“It’s very interesting,” my mother said, quickly glancing down at me, “and we can talk about it later when your father gets home. But right now you have some work to do.”

“Okay, Mom.” I took a cookie out of the jar on the counter and was about to go outside when I had a thought. I ran into the living room, pulled out a dictionary next to the TV stand, and opened it to the G’s. After five minutes I found it. Gryphon: variant of “griffin.” Griffin: “a fabulous beast with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion.” Fabulous was right. I shouted with triumph and ran outside to put my father’s tools in their proper places.

Miss Ferenczi was back the next day, slightly altered. She had pulled her hair down and twisted it into pigtails, with red rubber bands holding them tight one inch from the ends. She was wearing a green blouse and a pink scarf, making her difficult to look at for a full class day. This time there was no pretense of doing a reading lesson or moving on to arithmetic. As soon as the bell rang, she simply began to talk.

She talked for forty minutes straight. There seemed to be less connection between her ideas, but the ideas themselves were, as the dictionary would say, fabulous. She said she had heard of a huge jewel, in what she called the antipodes, that was so brilliant that when light shone into it at a certain angle it would blind whoever was looking at its center. She said the biggest diamond in the world was cursed and had killed everyone who owned it, and that by a trick of fate it was called the Hope Diamond. Diamonds are magic, she said, and this is why women wear them on their fingers, as a sign of the magic of womanhood. Men have strength, Miss Ferenczi said, but no true magic. That is why men fall in love with women but women do not fall in love with men: they just love being loved. George Washington had died because of a mistake he made about a diamond. Washington was not the first true president, but she didn’t say who was. In some places in the world, she said, men and women still live in the trees and eat monkeys for breakfast. Their doctors are magicians. At the bottom of the sea are creatures thin as pancakes that have never been studied by scientists because when you take them up to air, the fish explode.

There was not a sound in the classroom, except for Miss Ferenczi’s voice, and Donna DeShano’s coughing. No one even went to the bathroom.

Beethoven, she said, had not been deaf; it was a trick to make himself famous, and it worked. As she talked, Miss Ferenczi’s pigtails swung back and forth. There are trees in the world, she said, that eat meat: their leaves are sticky and close up on bugs like hands. She lifted her hands and brought them together, palm to palm. Venus, which most people think is the next closest planet to the sun, is not always closer, and, besides, it is the planet of greatest mystery because of its thick cloud cover. “I know what lies underneath those clouds,” Miss Ferenczi said, and waited. After the silence, she said, “Angels. Angels live under those clouds.” She said that angels were not invisible to everyone and were in fact smarter than most people. They did not dress in robes as was often claimed but instead wore formal evening clothes, as if they were about to attend a concert. Often angels do attend concerts and sit in the aisles, where, she said, most people pay no attention to them. She said the most terrible angel had the shape of the Sphinx. “There is no running away from that one,” she said. She said that unquenchable fires burn just under the surface of the earth in Ohio, and that the baby Mozart fainted dead away in his cradle when he first heard the sound of a trumpet. She said that someone named Narzim al Harrardim was the greatest writer who ever lived. She said that planets control behavior, and anyone conceived during a solar eclipse would be born with webbed feet.

“I know you children like to hear these things,” she said, “these secrets, and that is why I am telling you all this.” We nodded. It was better than doing comprehension questions for the readings in Broad Horizons.

“I will tell you one more story,” she said, “and then we will have to do arithmetic.” She leaned over, and her voice grew soft. “There is no death,” she said. “You must never be afraid. Never. That which is, cannot die. It will change into different earthly and unearthly elements, but I know this as sure as I stand here in front of you, and I swear it: you must not be afraid. I have seen this truth with these eyes. I know it because in a dream God kissed me. Here.” And she pointed with her right index finger to the side of her head, below the mouth where the vertical lines were carved into her skin.

Absentmindedly we all did our arithmetic problems. At recess the class was out on the playground, but no one was playing. We were all standing in small groups, talking about Miss Ferenczi. We didn’t know if she was crazy, or what. I looked out beyond the playground, at the rusted cars piled in a small heap behind a clump of sumac, and I wanted to see shapes there, approaching me.

On the way home, Carl sat next to me again. He didn’t say much, and I didn’t, either. At last he turned to me. “You know what she said about the leaves that close up on bugs?”

“Huh?”

“The leaves,” Carl insisted. “The meat-eating plants. I know it’s true. I saw it on television. The leaves have this icky glue that the plants have got smeared all over them and the insects can’t get off ’cause they’re stuck. I saw it.” He seemed demoralized. “She’s tellin’ the truth.”

“Yeah.”

“You think she’s seen all those angels?”

I shrugged.

“I don’t think she has,” Carl informed me. “I think she made that part up.”

“There’s a tree,” I suddenly said. I was looking out the window at the farms along County Road H. I knew every barn, every broken windmill, every fence, every anhydrous ammonia tank, by heart. “There’s a tree that’s … that I’ve seen …”

“Don’t you try to do it,” Carl said. “You’ll just sound like a jerk.”

I kissed my mother. She was standing in front of the stove. “How was your day?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“Did you have Miss Ferenczi again?”

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“She was fine. Mom,” I asked, “can I go to my room?”

“No,” she said, “not until you’ve gone out to the vegetable garden and picked me a few tomatoes.” She glanced at the sky. “I think it’s going to rain. Skedaddle and do it now. Then you come back inside and watch your brother for a few minutes while I go upstairs. I need to clean up before dinner.” She looked down at me. “You’re looking a little pale, Tommy.” She touched the back of her hand to my forehead and I felt her diamond ring against my skin. “Do you feel all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said, and went out to pick the tomatoes.

Coughing mutedly, Mr. Hibler was back the next day, slipping lozenges into his mouth when his back was turned at forty-five-minute intervals and asking us how much of his prepared lesson plan Miss Ferenczi had followed. Edith Atwater took the responsibility for the class of explaining to Mr. Hibler that the substitute hadn’t always done exactly what he, Mr. Hibler, would have done, but we had worked hard even though she talked a lot. About what? he asked. All kinds of things, Edith said. I sort of forgot. To our relief, Mr. Hibler seemed not at all interested in what Miss Ferenczi had said to fill the day. He probably thought it was woman’s talk: unserious and not suited for school. It was enough that he had a pile of arithmetic problems from us to correct.

For the next month, the sumac turned a distracting red in the field, and the sun traveled toward the southern sky, so that its rays reached Mr. Hibler’s Halloween display on the bulletin board in the back of the room, fading the pumpkin-head scarecrow from orange to tan. Every three days I measured how much farther the sun had moved toward the southern horizon by making small marks with my black Crayola on the north wall, ant-sized marks only I knew were there.

And then in early December, four days after the first permanent snowfall, she appeared again in our classroom. The minute she came in the door, I felt my heart begin to pound. Once again, she was different: this time, her hair hung straight down and seemed hardly to have been combed. She hadn’t brought her lunchbox with her, but she was carrying what seemed to be a small box. She greeted all of us and talked about the weather. Donna DeShano had to remind her to take her overcoat off.

When the bell to start the day finally rang, Miss Ferenczi looked out at all of us and said, “Children, I have enjoyed your company in the past, and today I am going to reward you.” She held up the small box. “Do you know what this is?” She waited. “Of course you don’t. It is a Tarot pack.”

Edith Atwater raised her hand. “What’s a Tarot pack, Miss Ferenczi?”

“It is used to tell fortunes,” she said. “And that is what I shall do this morning. I shall tell your fortunes, as I have been taught to do.”

“What’s fortune?” Bobby Kryzanowicz asked.

“The future, young man. I shall tell you what your future will be. I can’t do your whole future, of course. I shall have to limit myself to the five-card system, the wands, cups, swords, pentacles, and the higher arcanes. Now who wants to be first?”

There was a long silence. Then Carol Peterson raised her hand.

“All right,” Miss Ferenczi said. She divided the pack into five smaller packs and walked back to Carol’s desk, in front of mine. “Pick one card from each one of these packs,” she said. I saw that Carol had a four of cups and a six of swords, but I couldn’t see the other cards. Miss Ferenczi studied the cards on Carol’s desk for a minute. “Not bad,” she said. “I do not see much higher education. Probably an early marriage. Many children. There’s something bleak and dreary here, but I can’t tell what. Perhaps just the tasks of a housewife life. I think you’ll do very well, for the most part.” She smiled at Carol, a smile with a certain lack of interest. “Who wants to be next?”

Carl Whiteside raised his hand slowly.

“Yes,” Miss Ferenczi said, “let’s do a boy.” She walked over to where Carl sat. After he picked his five cards, she gazed at them for a long time. “Travel,” she said. “Much distant travel. You might go into the army. Not too much romantic interest here. A late marriage, if at all. But the Sun in your major arcana, that’s a very good card.” She giggled. “You’ll have a happy life.”

Next I raised my hand. She told me my future. She did the same with Bobby Kryzanowicz, Kelly Munger, Edith Atwater, and Kim Foor. Then she came to Wayne Razmer. He picked his five cards, and I could see that the Death card was one of them.

“What’s your name?” Miss Ferenczi asked.

“Wayne.”

“Well, Wayne,” she said, “you will undergo a great metamorphosis, a change, before you become an adult. Your earthly element will no doubt leap higher, because you seem to be a sweet boy. This card, this nine of swords, tells me of suffering and desolation. And this ten of wands, well, that’s a heavy load.”

“What about this one?” Wayne pointed at the Death card.

“It means, my sweet, that you will die.” She gathered up the cards. We were all looking at Wayne. “But do not fear,” she said. “It is not really death. Just change. Out of your earthly shape.” She put the cards on Mr. Hibler’s desk. “And now, let’s do some arithmetic.”

At lunchtime Wayne went to Mr. Faegre, the principal, and informed him of what Miss Ferenczi had done. During the noon recess, we saw Miss Ferenczi drive out of the parking lot in her rusting green Rambler American. I stood under the slide, listening to the other kids coasting down and landing in the little depressive bowls at the bottom. I was kicking stones and tugging at my hair right up to the moment when I saw Wayne come out to the playground. He smiled, the dead fool, and with the fingers of his right hand he was showing everyone how he had told on Miss Ferenczi.

I made my way toward Wayne, pushing myself past two girls from another class. He was watching me with his little pinhead eyes.

“You told,” I shouted at him. “She was just kidding.”

“She shouldn’t have,” he shouted back. “We were supposed to be doing arithmetic.”

“She just scared you,” I said. “You’re a chicken. You’re a chicken, Wayne. You are. Scared of a little card,” I singsonged.

Wayne fell at me, his two fists hammering down on my nose. I gave him a good one in the stomach and then I tried for his head. Aiming my fist, I saw that he was crying. I slugged him.

“She was right,” I yelled. “She was always right! She told the truth!” Other kids were whooping. “You were just scared, that’s all!”

And then large hands pulled at us, and it was my turn to speak to Mr. Faegre.

In the afternoon Miss Ferenczi was gone, and my nose was stuffed with cotton clotted with blood, and my lip had swelled, and our class had been combined with Mrs. Mantei’s sixth-grade class for a crowded afternoon science unit on insect life in ditches and swamps. I knew where Mrs. Mantei lived: she had a new house trailer just down the road from us, at the Clearwater Park. She was no mystery. Somehow she and Mr. Bodine, the other fourth-grade teacher, had managed to fit forty-five desks into the room. Kelly Munger asked if Miss Ferenczi had been arrested, and Mrs. Mantei said no, of course not. All that afternoon, until the buses came to pick us up, we learned about field crickets and two-striped grasshoppers, water bugs, cicadas, mosquitoes, flies, and moths. We learned about insects’ hard outer shell, the exoskeleton, and the usual parts of the mouth, including the labrum, mandible, maxilla, and glossa. We learned about compound eyes, and the four-stage metamorphosis from egg to larva to pupa to adult. We learned something, but not much, about mating. Mrs. Mantei drew, very skillfully, the internal anatomy of the grasshopper on the blackboard. We learned about the dance of the honeybee, directing other bees in the hive to pollen. We found out about which insects were pests to man, and which were not. On lined white pieces of paper we made lists of insects we might actually see, then a list of insects too small to be clearly visible, such as fleas; Mrs. Mantei said that our assignment would be to memorize these lists for the next day, when Mr. Hibler would certainly return and test us on our knowledge.