Staggerford

by Jon Hassler

Genres: Literary Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

"A writer good enough to restore your faith in fiction."
THE NEW YORK TIMES
It is only a week in the life of a 35-year old bachelor school teacher in a small Minnesota town. But it is an extraodinary week, filled with the poetry of living, the sweetness of expectation, and the glory of surprise that can change a life forever....
"Absolutely smashing....An altogether successful work, witty, intelligent, compassionate."
THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

Release date: January 12, 2011

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

FRIDAY
 
 OCTOBER 30
 
FIRST HOUR, MILES YAWNED.
 
It seemed to Miles that while the faces changed from year to year, the personality of a first-hour class never varied. It was a tractable class. Most of the thirty students hadn’t been out of bed for more than half an hour and they weren’t yet sharp or restless. Like Miles, they were sleepy. Moreover, they were slow-witted. The Staggerford High School band rehearsed during first hour, and the better students for some reason were inevitably drawn to band. Each morning as the band marched across the street to the football field, high-stepping and tooting in preparation for its halftime formations, these thirty students were left in the classroom to puzzle over the formations of the compound sentence or the working parts of the business letter. Love poems by Rod McKuen were beyond them. To say that all nonmusicians were dull would have been unwarranted, and Miles would not have said it. What he would have said, however, was that Staggerford’s nonmusicians were dull. But it was an agreeable, easygoing sort of dullness that would never lead to trouble; and since Miles himself was no ball of fire at eight in the morning, he and these thirty seniors moved comfortably through the weeks together, rubbing the sleep from their eyes.
 
Miles thought of Lee Fremling, who sat facing him in the front row, as the emblem of first hour. Lee Fremling was heavy, good-natured, and lethargic. He was the son of Albert Fremling, editor of the Staggerford Weekly and the wildest father a boy could possibly have. But none of this wildness seemed to have been handed down to Lee. Albert Fremling was an alcoholic with a passion for driving on Friday nights as fast as he could go. One Friday last spring Albeit Fremling had swerved to miss a tree and smashed, doing eighty-five, into a small house at the edge of town. At the time, fortunately, the widow who lived in the house was in the hospital with a broken hip (she had fallen from the bottom rung of a stepladder while taking off storm windows) and so was spared being run over in bed, but the editor was left with a permanently crippled left arm and a scarred forehead. Mrs. Fremling could recall the names of at least seventy-five people who had tried over the years to cure her husband of his drinking and his suicidal driving—the names of highway patrolmen, psychiatrists, businessmen, neighbors, jailers, and the pastors of three Lutheran churches—all to no avail. By nightfall on Fridays the Staggerford Weekly was out on the street, and that was when its editor drank himself cockeyed and got into his red Pontiac and flew off down the highway to Berrington or crisscrossed the prairie south of the river, his headlights sailing over the dirt roads and lighting up, when he doubled back, the clouds of his own dust. People sitting in their houses with their windows open could hear the squeal of the editor’s tires as he left town, and sometimes they could hear, shouted from his car, his pledge never to return; but he never traveled beyond the limits of Berrington County and he always came home before morning, sometimes on bail, often sick, and always profoundly depressed.
 
How then (Miles wondered) could there have come from Albeit Fremling’s house such a son as Lee—slow and congenial and even-tempered? Lee must have been what his mother and grandmother had made him. Mrs. Fremling was a small, cool woman, and Mrs. Fremling’s mother who lived with them, was just like her. These two women—neat and efficient, smart and silent—kept the house and yard and newspaper office and Lee (all except the editor himself) orderly. But in sheltering Lee from the grossness of his father, it seemed to Miles that these two women had prolonged in him the illusions of childhood, and had delayed the coming on of worldly wisdom. Lee’s eyes were full of innocence. On the football field, despite his size, he was pushed around a good deal. He was large like his father, but this largeness was not, like his father’s, the bulk of self-indulgence. It was baby fat.
 
Second hour, Miles was off balance.
 
The issue hadn’t been settled yet, but he suspected that second-hour English was out of his control. It was a rowdy class—a mixture of athletes, flirts, musicians, and show-offs. The band was back indoors now, full of fresh air and smart remarks, and the sun was up over the administrative wing across the courtyard, filling Miles’s classroom with intense light and shadow. Unable to channel all this nine-o’clock pep where he wanted it to go, Miles had to spend most of second hour patrolling the aisles and twirling about on his toes to see the antics going on behind his back.
 
Among the students who never sat still were Roxie Booth and Jeff Norquist. In the faculty lunchroom it was said that if something wasn’t done about Roxie Booth, she would be the death this year of old Ray Smith, who kept trying to teach history long past his time. At the end of the day Ray Smith’s suits were covered with chalk dust where Roxie had clapped erasers on him. Roxie was fat and slung with gold and silver chains from the dimestore. She wore rings on eight of her fingers. She could barely read, but she remembered in detail all the classic stories of world literature that had been made into movies. She was a predator, smiling, batting her eyes, and continually testing Miles’s tolerance for suggestive remarks. She exposed more of her skin than was modest. Her father, a career man in the army, had moved his children through seventeen schools in fifteen states, and there was nothing about school curriculum, army lore, or the dark side of human nature that Roxie did not know. She was also nervous and she sometimes broke out in a talking jag. The stories she told were mostly those gathered up in camps where her father had been stationed, and she dumped them now, like garbage, in the middle of Berrington County—five hundred square miles of farmland in the center of Minnesota, where people were unaccustomed to hearing about such things as the corporal who stood at a bar and ate, on a bet, a beer bottle.
 
The bartender said it couldn’t be done and he gave the corporal a hammer and the corporal pounded the beer bottle to dust on the bar,” said Roxie Booth, in relation to nothing that had gone before in English class. “He ate only a handful of it because ground glass is even harder to eat than sand, and he got terrible pains all over his guts and everything, and they took him to the base hospital, where he lived through the night bleeding from just about every opening it’s possible to bleed from on the human body, and then he died in the morning. It was about nine thirty in the morning that he died, the same time it is now, and that’s why I mention it.” Roxie was the youngest student in the senior class, having recently turned sixteen, but on mornings after dates her face looked puffly and forty.
 
Jeff Norquist was the faculty’s worst affliction this year. Yesterday during second hour, Jeff had carried his literature text to the front of the room, torn it in two, and dropped it into the wastebasket. Miles, stifling his anger, had said, “That will be four dollars and eighty cents.” Jeff laid a five spot on Miles’s desk and told him to keep the change. Today Jeff’s girl friend Annie Bird knocked on the door and said that Jeff was wanted in the office for an emergency phone call. It was a ruse, and Miles knew it, but he let him go. It was a better class—though only slightly better—without him.
 
Third hour, Miles toiled.
 
His third-hour seniors were unresponsive, almost secretive, and when he was not speaking, the room was filled with a kind of strained silence. It was not the lazy silence of first hour; it was the intense, alert silence of students who absorb everything and express nothing. They read their assignments; they kept their notebooks up to date. They never nodded or shook their heads. Their eyes told Miles nothing. He knew that he would never lose his way in this class. His students wouldn’t allow it. He would never digress into that humorous banter which, like a dose of oxygen, could often stir a silent class to life. He would be all business. He would stick to the subject at all times. He would toil. In order to discover what these students knew, he would have to devise businesslike essay tests (the sort of thing first hour could never handle) and he would no doubt discover that they knew quite a lot.
 
William Mulholland was in this class. In the Staggerford Public Library every book having to do with physics, chemistry, statistics, or any other sort of coldblooded calculation contained on its check-out card the name William Mulholland, written in letters sharp and slanted, like a sketch of leaning spears. He was the largest student in high school—a husky six-feet-four—but to the dismay of Coach Gibbon, athletics did not interest him. What did interest him was computation. Today, finishing his assignment before the bell rang, he drew from his pocket a small computer and set to work calculating the cubic footage of the classroom. Only once had he spoken in this class. On the opening day of school Miles, taking roll, had said, “Bill Mulholland.”
 
“My name is William,” he replied.