The School
by Donald Barthelme
Well, we had all these children
out planting trees, see, because we figured that… that was part of their
education, to see how you know the root systems… and also the sense of
responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know
what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why
they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the
stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve
got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and
we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown
sticks. It was depressing.
It wouldn’t have been so bad
except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes
all died. But I think that the snakes—well, the reason that the snakes kicked
off was that… you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of
the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the
kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross
the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So
when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too
disturbed.
With the herb gardens it was
probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater.
The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them
probably… you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking.
Or maybe… well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to
us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way
probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died,
and the salamander… well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic
bags.
Of course we expected the tropical
fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and
they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical-fish
input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you
just have to hurry past it.
We weren’t even supposed to have a
puppy.
We weren’t even supposed to have
one, it was just a puppy the Murdoch girl found under a Gristede’s truck one
day and she was afraid the truck would run over it when the driver had finished
making his delivery, so she stuck it in her knapsack and brought it to school
with her. So we had this puppy. As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, “Oh
Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then….” And that’s what it
did. It wasn’t supposed to be in the classroom at all, there’s some kind of
regulation about it, but you can’t tell them they can’t have a puppy when the
puppy is already there, right in front of them, running around on the floor and
yap-yap-yapping. They named it Edgar—that is, they named it after me. They had
a lot of fun running after it and yelling, “Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!” Then
they’d laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I
don’t mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet
and all that. I don’t know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably
hadn’t had any shots. I got it out of there before the kids got to school. I
checked the supply closet each morning, routinely because I knew what was going
to happen. I gave it to the custodian.
And then there was this Korean
orphan that the class adopted through the Help the Children program; all the
kids brought in a quarter a month, that was the idea. It was an unfortunate
thing; the kid’s name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something.
The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt
another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we
didn’t have the heart. The class took it pretty hard, they began (I think,
nobody ever said anything to me directly) to feel that maybe there was
something wrong with the school. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with
the school, particularly; I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse. It was just a
run of bad luck. We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for
instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning,
and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual
heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier this
year—it seemed so. And finally the tragedy.
The tragedy occurred when Matthew
Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they’re excavating for the new
federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you
know, at the edge of the excavation. There’s a court case coming out of that:
the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don’t know
what’s true and what’s not. It’s been a strange year.
I forgot to mention Billy Brandt’s
father, who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his
home.
One day, we had a discussion in
class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the
tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they
go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? And I
said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life?
And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but
isn’t death, considered such a fundamental datum, the means by which the
taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction
of—
I said, yes, maybe.
They said, we don’t like it.
I said, that’s sound.
They said, it’s a bloody shame!
I said, it is.
They said, will you make love now
with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know
you like Helen.
I do like Helen but I said that I
would not.
We’ve heard so much about it, they
said, but we’ve never seen it.
I said I would be fired and that
it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out of the
window.
They said, please, please make love
with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.
I said that they shouldn’t be
frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value
everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow.
We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the
door. I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered
wildly.
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