***
School is a three-room shed as warm with the offspring of salt workers, coal
workers, ironworkers. Irish kids, Polish kids, Armenian kids. To Mother the
schoolyard seems a thousand acres of sizzling pandemonium. Don’t run, don’t
fight, she whispers. No games. His first day, she pulls him out of class after an
hour. Shhh, she says, and wraps her arms around his like ropes.
Tom seesaws in and out of the early grades. Sometimes she keeps him out of
school for whole weeks at a time. By the time he’s ten, he’s in remedial
everything. I’m trying, he stammers, but letters spin off pages and dash against
the windows like snow. Dunce, the other boys declare, and to Tom that seems
about right.
Tom sweeps, scrubs, scours the stoop with pumice one square-inch at a time.
Slow as molasses in January, says Mr. Weems, but he winks at Tom when he
says it.
Every day, all day, the salt finds its way in. It encrusts washbasins, settles on
the rims of baseboards. It spills out of the boarders, too: from ears, boots,
handkerchiefs. Furrows of glitter gather in the bedsheets: a daily lesson in
insidiousness.
Start at the edges, then scrub out the centre Linens on Thursdays. Toilets on
Fridays.
He’s twelve when Ms. Fredericks asks the children to give reports. Ruby
Hornaday goes sixth. Ruby has flames for hair, Christmas for a birthday, and a
drunk for a daddy. She’s one of two girls to make it to fourth grade.
She reads from notes in controlled terror. ‘If you think the lake is big you should
see the sea. It’s three quarters of Earth. And that’s just the surface’. Someone
throws a pencil. The creases on Ruby’s forehead sharpen. ‘Land animals live
on ground or in trees rats and worms and gulls and such. But sea animals they
live everywhere they live in the waves and they live in mid water and they live
in canyons six and a half miles down’.
She passes around a red book. Inside are blocks of text and full-colour
photographic plates that make Tom’s heart boom in his ears. A blizzard of toothy
minnows. A kingdom of purple corals. Five orange starfish cemented to a rock.
Ruby says, Detroit used to have palm trees and corals and seashells. Detroit
used to be a sea three miles deep.
Ms. Fredericks asks, Ruby, where did you get that book? but by then Tom is
hardly breathing. See-through flowers with poison tentacles and fields of clams
and pink spheres with a thousand needles on their backs. He tries to ask, Are
these real? but quicksilver bubbles rise from his mouth and float up to the
ceiling. When he goes over, the desk goes over with him.
***
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