HAYNTA-2
Although Mrs. Camden excelled, in my illustrious opinion, in every facet of teaching, I think of her as a storyteller. Actually not so much a storyteller as a story-be-er; but that’s another story. For now, let’s just say she was a storyteller. I loved her stories. They were a cool drink in the desert, a cure-all for the dreariness and boredom of Clarks Hill.
It may seem an exaggeration to say that a few stories could offset an abiding misery, but I maintain that for awhile, they did. This panacea-ness, if you will, of her stories, started with the very first one she told me, which was on her fourth day as our teacher. Well, let’s say she told it to “us,” meaning her class, rather than “me,” since I wasn’t the sole beneficiary of her eloquence. But since “me” is part of “us,” she did, as a point of literal truth, tell it to me. Just saying.
The Reading, Writing, and Language class at Clarks Hill, or RWL as the students referred to it, consisted of four categories of study, or sections, as they were creatively called, the concentration of which rotated over the course of four days. Day one was Language and Grammar, day two was Reciting, day three was Reading and Analyzing (with the assignment of what to read given on day two, Reciting), and day four was Storytelling.
By chance, the day Mrs. Camden took over as our teacher was a Language and Grammar day, which meant that her fourth day as our teacher was a Storytelling day; and that day, she started the class by prompting us, “I was walking into town this morning, and you know what I saw?”
We all stared at her, waiting for her to tell us what she’d seen, but she just returned our gazes impassively, until at last Frumey Badger asked, “What was it, Mrs. Camden, what did you see?”
“It was a glass bottle, thank you for asking, Frumey,” she said, eyeing the rest of us in a way that inquired, “And why didn’t any of you ask?”
Once again, everyone just stared at her, waiting for her to tell us why seeing a glass bottle was worthy of remark. This time, she didn’t wait for anybody to prompt her, but added, “It was atop a fencepost,” in a way that suggested that the matter should now be thoroughly elucidated.
Observing the puzzled looks that we gave her, she continued, “I was passing by the same farm I always do on the way in, and there it was, right on that fencepost, catching those sideways morning sun rays, and shining there like a beacon, or more like, a, I don’t know, something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Well, I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. It had never been there before; I’d passed that farm, I’d passed that fencepost, several times, and it had never been there. What was it doing there now? That’s what I was thinking.”
She paused, eyed us, and then went on, “Pondering the presence of this beautiful bottle, I halted on the road, and as I stood there thus entranced, I saw a rock wedged under a tuft of yellow grass a step or two into the roughage beside the road. A nice round rock. About the size of a fresh walnut.”
She paused again, with exaggerated dramatic emphasis, before continuing, “I picked up this rock, and looking at it there in my hand, and then looking at the bottle again, then the rock again, then the bottle again, then the rock, then the bottle, rock, bottle, rock, bottle, I knew what it was that, before, I hadn’t quite been able to conceptualize. The bottle wasn’t shining in the dawn like a beacon, but like an invitation!”
She paused yet again, then elucidated, “That rock and that bottle were destined for each other, they were part of a…a pattern. The rock arcing through the air and colliding with the bottle was written eternally into the story of Creation. That is, the inevitable shape of Creation, extant in the idea of Creation before the world came into existence, included that collision. That was what the bottle was telling me. So naturally, I had to throw that rock at that bottle. It was my place—my destiny—in the grand scheme of Creation, in that moment, to do so.”
Giggles ensued. It was funny to think of dowdy, goofy, old Mrs. Camden throwing anything at anything, and several students tittered at the thought of it. She was an aging if not actually old woman, her hair, oh, about fifty percent gray, and dry and flaky. Her complexion gave the impression of being naturally dark but was pale-ish and powdery, from, despite her insistence that she walked to school every morning, an obvious lack of exposure to the sun. Sharp, angular, perhaps once upon a time striking, facial features were rendered indistinct by this chalkiness of her complexion, as well as by her spectacles, which, as the center piece of her appearance, drew attention away from other features.
Her spectacles dominated her appearance because their lenses were so thick that they crossed and magnified her eyes to, for many of her students, hilarious dimensions—an effect which she, herself, exacerbated by doing such things as holding a textbook up to the light after reading a passage from it, squinting at it as if having difficulty seeing the little words on the page, and saying something like, “Can that be true? Am I seeing that right?” or otherwise looking at things, or students, under or over or to the side of her spectacles with an assortment of odd head-tilts and neck-cranes.
These spectacles she adjusted with unceasing regularity, either by pushing them up her nose or by grabbing one or another of the eye circles between thumb and forefinger, or, occasionally, and to the delight of the students, when somebody said something that was both piquant and controversial about a topic of study, jerking them off with an expression on her face somewhere between injured propriety and understated delight. (It was a matter of some smug satisfaction to me that because making a remark adroit enough to elicit this “spectacle jerk” required a thorough understanding of the topic about which one was remarking, some of her students, as was obvious by the very adroitness of their remarks, began studying the assigned material with a diligent studiousness that they would never have admitted to, such an embrace of intellectual pursuit being inappropriate to their high and mighty, fashionable selves.)
Without fail, Mrs. Camden wore a bulky knitted gray-white sweater that gave her a shapeless appearance, along with a similarly colored knit skirt that hung to well below her knees, where gray woolen socks took over the coverage of her legs. This attire didn’t provide her students the ongoing entertainment that her spectacles did, because it wasn’t, in fact, much more conservative than the attire of the typical teacher at Clarks Hill, but it did elicit an occasional comment about what an old maid she was, or about just how dowdy she was. In the panegyric words of Ubanne Tang: “It’s unbelievable!”
She had an absentminded clumsiness about her that made it hard to imagine her doing something so deft as rifling a rock at a bottle: that is, while not clumsy per se, not heavy-footed, or uncoordinated or otherwise awkward, she seemed at times to forget where she was, and, for example, bump into her desk or walk into the door before opening it, or simply drop something, the object that she dropped—a book, or paper, or pencil, most often—falling out of her hand not because her fingers weren’t dexterous, but because she seemed to forget she was holding anything.
She had an archaic way of speaking that appealed to the funny bones of everyone, as well: not formal—I would say that she was less formal in her interactions with her students than any other teacher at Clarks Hill—but somehow stilted, or just different, as if she was from a different time or place, and not quite in touch with the ways and ideas of the here and now. She used words that weren’t used much anymore, such as widdershins or loggerheads or jackanapes (as in “Just a moment, Keeny, we will have to delay this learning opportunity until yon jackanapes have learned something of a different stripe,” which she said once as she grabbed the leather whip that she always kept in a corner of the room but never used, when Keeny Springbok was trying to ask a question and Wimblow Wild Turkey and Poldo Pirto were laughing and snorting on the outskirts of the class circle). Her vocabulary, itself, however, only contributed to, or enhanced, the feeling you got when she was talking that she was endearingly out of touch, a feeling that was further accentuated by her habit of getting lost in thought. While explaining things, it was not unusual for her to become distracted by something within her own mind; at such times, she would stare without expression at the wall or into a hypothetical distance and mumble incoherently a moment or three, until, abruptly regaining focus, she would look up and say something like, “Ah, where were we,” and continue on with the lesson (to, of course, the great entertainment of everyone present).
I had an immediate affection for Mrs. Camden. I would have liked her even if she’d been as boring as the rest of my teachers insisted on being, for no other reason than that everybody sniggered at her, and having been on the receiving end of so many sniggers in my life, I felt a kinship with her. But she wasn’t boring, her class was fun, and she was as kind as a person could be—and in an understated, unobtrusive, non-look-at-me-I’m-nice kind of way. Which is rare: most people, if they’re nice to you, want you to be aware of it.
As time went by, many, if not most, of my fellow students came to enjoy her class in and of itself, but at first, they liked her class, or liked going to her class, only because it was an opportunity to elbow each other in the ribs and snigger at her like unseasoned conspirators, or in other words, to show off, impress each other with their shared knowledge of the snigger-worthiness of her appearance, her clothes, her bearing, and her mannerisms. They came to class with eager faces, but that eagerness wasn’t to learn, but to see what entertaining thing their teacher would do next, or to revel with each other in her oddness. I, however, if I may pat myself on the back, found the class very appealing from the beginning, because of what she taught and how she taught it, and probably most of all for no other reason than that I liked her, I, whose heart so needed somebody to like.
We did go over grammar rules one out of every four days, and there was nothing she could do to make that part of the class not boring, but when it came to reciting, and reading and examining stories, and writing and telling stories, things got good.
She was a magnificent reader, an extraordinary reciter. To listen to her read or recite, after being subjected for a year and a half to the monotonous whining drones of the rest of the teachers at Clarks Hill, was like entering a lush green glade after crossing a swamp of feces. Reciting, her voice, rich as an old man’s and sweet as a young woman’s, rose and fell, rose and fell, like a rolling river, the rhymes lapping against the shore like the laughter of water spirits, the lines and verses of the recitation disappearing into the beauty of the cadence, so that the images and action of the poem came alive in my mind without me actively processing its words.
Reading, she was every bit as entertaining as a traveling troubadour (other than the fact that the troubadours have everything memorized). She effected a different and unique voice for every character in every story she read, capable, it seemed, of a near infinite number of similar but different inflections, accents, and timbres. She was a master of the dramatic pause, and just all in all read with such gusto that everyone paid attention to her, and I, for one, looked forward to listening to her, and enjoyed whatever story she chose even when its setting, plot, and characters didn’t catch my fancy.
She was, as I perceived it, so skilled at reading and reciting that when it came time for her students to take their turns, it would have been quite understandable if they had been inhibited by their comparative lack of skill; but this was not the case. In fact, just the opposite was true: They were much less inhibited than they would have been had she not set the example. I think that many of them, so accustomed to having to restrain themselves in class, secretly wanted to read with gusto, to have fun, to give some kind of expansive, dramatic expression to undefined and unknown inner impulses; and given reign by Mrs. Camden’s admittedly grandiose delivery to do so, and further released by whatever silly reading they might do that might be expected to invite the snigger of one of their friends having the backfall of being an imitation or lampoon of Mrs. Camden, they immersed themselves into their performance with open hearts. And it was amazing how entertaining, even inspired, were the reading and recitation of many a student, such as Poldo Pirto or my old roommate Pindy Jorse, who I had considered dimwitted and uncreative beforehand.
I loved Mrs. Camden’s explications of stories, as well, because, well, she never provided any. She would begin every Explanation/Analysis discussion by asking simple questions about whatever story we’d been assigned to read, and when, especially in the early days of her appointment to our class, very few students had any response, she’d cajole us with a bevy of put-upon and good-naturedly exasperated expressions until finally somebody would say something. She would then either paraphrase or elucidate or expand or clarify what that person had said and ask what we all thought about his or her statement. Most days, it didn’t take long for a second person to respond to the first person, which often opened the floodgates of discussion, with several students, if not most of the class, getting involved in the discussion. (This had an added effect as time went on of inducing a greater and greater percentage of the students in the class to read the assigned story, since everyone wanted to be a part of the high-spirited, humorous discussion.) It was quite enjoyable to watch her draw this analysis out of us, like an expert technician, an artist. Sometimes it was more effective than other times, but we always came up with a reading of the story—sometimes a ridiculous one, but a reading nevertheless. And we felt we had figured it out, with Mrs. Camden a mere facilitator.
All of this reading, recitation, and story analysis was enjoyable enough for me, particularly in comparison with what I was used to, but the fourth ingredient of the class, the storytelling part, was my favorite. And while in the same self-deprecating way, or more to the point, the same self-open way, rare in adults, that she had of being willing, for example, to look silly, that she used in the reciting and the analysis portions of the class to alleviate the tension and self-consciousness of her students, Mrs. Camden induced everybody, in the storytelling section of her class, to tell a story or to read a story they’d written, it was the examples, that is, her stories, that made that part of the class magical for me. I have no doubt that some self-appointed story experts would dismiss hers as having no plots or surprise endings or interesting bad guys, and would say that her heroes were too good, her view of existence laden with naïve and childlike optimism; but her tales were magical to me; and it all began with the one about throwing a rock at a bottle. Of course, I consider good guys, especially the ones that are too good, to be a lot more interesting than bad guys.
In response to the students’ laughter when she said she had decided she was going to throw the rock at the bottle, she gave us a look, a not uncommon one for her, that was about half way between What are-you laughing at? and I know what you’re laughing at and it’s ridiculous for you to be laughing at such a thing, and went on, “As, clutching the rock in my palm, I came closer to the post and the bottle, I decided that I should only get one throw, that would be only fair, and it should be at a distance of at least thirty or forty paces.” She went on to describe the farmhouse that was silhouetted in the distance, a fortress of silence in the misty stillness of the morning that, she said, “a crashing of glass would surely disturb.” She crept along the road, the cows and horses watching her, as the big silent rolls of hay in the field, “avatars of eternity,” she called them, waited for her to act. She finished by saying, “And I knew that if I did hit it, I would have to be ready to run.” This was greeted by another giggle: The thought of Mrs. Camden running was just as funny as the thought of her throwing a rock, as was the supposition that she would have to be ready to run away for no more reason than breaking a bottle, because it fit with the being-book-smart-but-not-quite-comprehending-real-life quality that Mrs. Camden possessed. Everybody knew that nobody would care if a bottle was broken, or that the silence of the morning was broken for a moment, except Mrs. Camden.
At this point, all of her students, including me, I’m not afraid to admit, just had to know (even though none of us were sure whether she was making up the story, or not) whether she had hit that bottle with that rock or not, and what had happened if she had.
“But I digress,” she said, pulling her white story text from under a number of other books (including the brown reading text and yellow language text) that were stacked on the small sousewood desk-table behind which she was sitting, at the head of the messy half-circle we the students had formed of smaller desks, “Open your texts to page eleven, if you would.”
A groan escaped the class.
Mrs. Camden feigned puzzlement. “Is something the matter?”
“Mrs. Camden!” Keeny Springbok protested.
“What is it, Keeny?” she asked, and then with a look of mock outrage that was a fairly common one in her arsenal of expressions, and which while it didn’t capture the imaginations of the students quite so much as the look of injured propriety and understated delight that they so strove to elicit with controversial explanations of stories, was quite entertaining in its own right, “And why is nobody opening their books?”
“What happened?” Keeny demanded, her query echoed by the nods and eager looks of many of the other students.
“With the bottle!” someone clarified, “Did you hit it?”
“Well!” Mrs. Camden said, “If you must,” and with demure pizzazz, opened the little drawer of her table and produced from within a clear shard of glass.