“And if you don’t mind, Mary, I’d like Vernon Schofield,” said John Hudson. “I think I’d do better with a fifth grader.”
If I had been asked, I would probably have picked Milt. It took a certain amount of something to swim like a fish on a desk in a third-grade classroom, but it didn’t really matter. I could never tell anything anyway until I saw the child.
“Fine. I’ll work with Luke.”
Jerry glanced at his watch. “Suppose I take each of you down to the classrooms. Let’s see, Vernon is in Mrs. Jacobson’s class, you say? That’s on the second floor, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Karras responded. “And Luke is in Miss Eckhardt’s class and Milt in Miss Fuller’s, both just down the hall. I’ll show you.”
Miss Eckhardt’s class was first, a jumble of confusion and noise that was instantly quiet when Mrs. Karras walked in.
“Miss Eckhardt, would you please go out to the hall for a moment? I’ll take the class. All right, class. Get out pencil and paper and copy these five words that I dictate.
“Hen. The hen laid an egg. Hen.”
A boy in the third row laughed out loud.
“I’d like to see you in my office at three o’clock, Jimmy,” Mrs. Karras said. The room was absolutely silent as Mrs. Karras said, “Hen. Do you have that? All right. Your second word is ran. The dog ran after the ball. Ran.” One thing was obvious. You didn’t fool around with Mrs. Karras.
Miss Eckhardt walked through the room, which was now absolutely silent.
In the hall, Jerry held out his hand. “Lisa, do you remember me? Jerry Cotter from the Mental Health Clinic. We met at Bernie’s a couple of months ago.”
“Of course, Jerry. I’m glad to see you.” Lisa Eckhardt’s voice was warm and deep dimples appeared by the corners of her mouth when she smiled. Her brown hair was cut short and it curled in disarray around her pretty face.
Jerry introduced me as the tutor for Luke Brauer and Lisa immediately invited me into her classroom. Jerry pressed a data sheet and stopwatch into my hand. “Good luck.”
Lisa and I went back together, and it was then that she pointed Luke out to me. He was just a little kid, I thought once again, as I watched him from my seat on the radiator.
As Lisa took over from Mrs. Karras, she said, “Class, we’re lucky to have a visitor today. Mary MacCracken is here.”
The kids paid no attention. A boy in the back wadded the paper he’d been writing on into a ball and, as soon as Mrs. Karras closed the door, threw it at the girl across the aisle. She yelled and the others immediately joined the fracas.
Except Luke. He turned and looked at me as though from a million miles away, and then turned back to his desk. It was as though he looked but didn’t see me, any more than he heard the shouts and yells around him.
At his desk, small and alone, Luke drew something on a paper. I put the stopwatch and data sheet in my pocket and moved to a windowsill near his desk.
What was he drawing? Horses? I couldn’t quite tell.
“The first two rows go to the board.”
Eleven bodies crowded along the blackboard at the side of the room, grabbing chalk from one another.
“Luke,” Lisa said, “aren’t you in the first row? Go to the board.”
Reluctantly, Luke stuffed his picture in his desk and walked to the blackboard.
By the time he arrived, there was no chalk left and almost no space. He wedged himself in between two other boys, looked up and down the chalk rail and then, seeing no chalk, just stood silently.
“All right, now,” Lisa said. “I’ll call out a problem for each of you. You write it on the board, figure it out, and then we’ll check it. John, nine plus five. Ed, seven plus six. Luke, eight plus six.”
Luke had no chalk. He could easily have asked to borrow some, or told Lisa. He did neither. He just stood, doing nothing, and then returned to his seat.
“Luke,” Lisa called sharply. “Where are you going? I told you to write your problem on the board. Eight plus six. Go on now.”
But Luke’s head never turned. He hunched down in his seat, turning his picture over and over.
A boy at the board hit his neighbor with an eraser.
“John! Stop that! Now read your answer to the class and see if they agree.” As Lisa talked she went toward Luke, then stood in front of his desk. “What’s the trouble, Luke? Don’t you feel well?”
Luke shrugged without looking up. A boy in the back row yelled, “John’s hittin’ Ed again. Lookit him, Miss Eckhardt.”
“John, get back to your seat, since you can’t behave at the board.”
As soon as Lisa turned away, Luke pulled out his picture and spread it on the desk, his head bent down so that it almost touched the paper.
I edged closer, trying to make out what he was drawing. Maybe they were lions. One large one lying down and three little ones on the far side of the paper.
I squatted beside Luke’s desk. “Hello,” I said. “I’m Mary. Will you come with me for a minute? Bring your picture.
“Luke and I are going to do a little work,” I said to Miss Eckhardt. “We’ll be back in about a half hour.”
I knew I shouldn’t be doing what I was doing. I could feel the stopwatch pressing on my thigh in the front pocket of my jeans. I knew both Luke and I should still be in his classroom while I “charted” his behavior. But I couldn’t stand to waste the time. It was already clear that he did no work and his behavior was negative. What I had to know was why and I couldn’t find that out with a stopwatch. I had to listen to Luke, even when he wasn’t talking, and I couldn’t do that in a roomful of thirty kids.
I walked down toward the music room, Luke beside me, hoping that Jerry had gone back to the clinic.
I was glad to find the music room empty, filled only with a musty, unused smell.
“Let’s sit here,” I said to Luke. He wiggled onto a chair at the long table and I sat beside him. He kept his picture under the table.
“I think,” I said, “that those were tigers on your paper. Very, very tired tigers.”
Luke’s round eyes stared at me.
“They probably get very tired because of all the noise in the zoo and had to lie down,” I said.
Luke turned away and we sat silently for three or four minutes. I concentrated on Luke – the ring of grime on the back of his neck, the sharp points of his elbow bones. What went on in his head when he set fires? What was he thinking right now? I felt, rather than saw, Luke move, and then slowly he brought his piece of paper up from under the table.
“Nope,” he said in a voice so soft I could hardly hear him. “They’re lions. They got no stripes.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I should have noticed.”
Luke got a little stub of a pencil from his pocket. “And this one’s got fur around her face,” he said, drawing whirls around the lion’s face.
“It’s a her,” I said.
“Yup. Even though she’s got fur like a beard.”
“It must be a pretty big cage,” I said. “Those little lions are so far away from the big lion.”
“It’s not a cage. It’s Africa. It’s the mother lion and her babies in Africa, and then a zoo keeper came to Africa and they got caught and