Death of a Teacher

Arthur McShain

Description

This teacher walks into a school...
Public school, unfiltered, and the gloves come off...

Raw neophyte teacher Dale Barrow embarks on a Gatsby-ish romp into the purgatory of the burlesque – deep south's Decadia Heights High School in the 1980's, where he deciphers matted policies, navigates an emerging and mysterious "intercommunication" technology, and befriends eccentric colleagues and Gulmer, a handicapped cohort. Gradually, Barrow finds himself adrift in a fragile liaison with a beautiful senior student, Angelea, and caught in the orb of a sinister scheme to eliminate another teacher.

He must defuse it all or lose his fortunes, but not before he finds himself being censured by authorities for his use of dancing and music in his classroom and being told "Your kids aren't learning anything". Barrow, on the cusp of an abrupt exit, is convinced by Angelea to stay at the Heights. He progresses forward, delicately tethered to a childhood friendship and sustained by visits with his demented mother, a doting Aunt, and immersion in the hijinks and pratfalls of colleagues.

He can't take it anymore...

He has been crippled by a gang attack on his class, and had a collapsing episode with Angelea. Now, on the last day, he and Gullmer break through a classroom door to foil a murder attempt on an unpopular teacher. The deep void in his life and the pressures of a trial prompt him to execute his final escape north to live with his sister in Boston.

Boston is the perfect revolutionary oasis. Family, friends, and reconnects with his past help him find the solace and direction to reconstruct his heart, unite with his one true love, and return to teaching. It was "all about her"....

As if on a skiff on gentle waters, out of bay we go, where we were made for, Mozartian, a song, a wraith banished, a moment in eternity compressed...

Death of a Teacher narrative

Sujets

• Christian
• Romance
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 26 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456633288
• Langue: English

Extrait

Death of a Teacher
 
by
Arthur McShain
 
 
 
 
Copyright 2019 Arthur McShain,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-3325-7
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Contents
 
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
 
“The devil got his dirty hand in things, when the Lord made kids. The devil went to the Lord and asked could he use certain ones of them, please, to test teachers, and make their lives miserable and the Lord said ‘Yes’. And the kids said can we use our parents to help make the teachers’ lives miserable and the Lord said yes again. In fact, the devil did meet with the parents and said: ‘stay out of your kids’ academic lives. Leave all the learning up to the school’. And the devil took those kids and their parents and scattered them out to all schools, teachers, and yes, us administrators too…”
 
- From Death of a Teacher
 
“I go on over the escarpment, a-careening, out of my mind, and league.” – Dale Barrow
 
 
ONE
It’s not all about her , I swear it. Don’t start with me.
Or is she the story and teaching is the sideshow?
I’m dead now, but it’s not what everyone thinks, or what it’s cracked up to be. It’s getting late and the sun is setting. But more on that later. As long as I can hold out, this will be a paean to the living, to a particular vocation.
That of a teacher.
I was a recent college grad, wielding, for sale, vials and pouches of cosmetics - an ocean removed from my liberal arts degree, which was no rare trend, I suppose.
Whad’aya know, enter Dad.
I poke my head through his office door in the old Plant and Animal building at Calhoun College. There, around him, are the strewn mounds and teetering piles of papers, books, and artifacts that evidence his twenty-three year teaching career at the college. Holy Gads, Dad, whatever happened to shelving? Burrowed in one corner is an authentic nineteenth century bear trap, homage to the woods he loves and his field of expertise, forestry.
This is a hardscrabble major, Dr. Barrow’s anvil, on which he beats and hammers the fates of young college students. Serious suitors find themselves on a labyrinthine descent into the soul as they pass through his summer camp, Forestry’s Parris Island - six weeks of hot, grueling, sweaty work lugging ice buckets, bag lunches, and Gatorade in upstate South Carolina forests. Under barrage from Doc Barrow’s forest adages, mandates and strictures, and yet maintaining a certain required joy de vivre, they must battle Boeing bugs, irregular terrain, fickle rains, snakes and other fauna. Their pure love of the forest adventure is tested by maneuvers of chainsaws, ropes and other accoutrements, and their handling of metrics, numbers, grids, algorithms, and charts. It’s the trek to toughness incarnate, the expedition to truth, what really lies inside oneself, when he is introduced to himself. That is what they all said.
I only heard of the summer camps, but I followed my father on a few hunting expeditions, and can recall that on one hunt (of which I did not participate) he fell out of a tree, broke his back, and crawled one mile to his road vehicle.
I’ve carried this plastic case of contents to his office door here. Cosmetic sales should be a categorical embarrassment to my father, but if it is, he doesn’t let on about it.
“You might want to check with Darla Carroll, the secretary down the hall there,” he says. “She may want to buy something from you.”
His hands are folded on the desk, his expression thoughtful.
OK, Dad, thanks.
 
I’m off to Darla Carroll’s. I give her a shiny-paged sales brochure to peruse, and she makes an order. I mark it down, go home, and put the order through.
After two scar-knuckled weeks on doorsteps, it is the last cosmetic sale I ever make.
I return a day or two later, up to Dad’s office. The tough one never comments on my defunct sales profession - no jokes or ridicule, or regaling others with stories of my failed effort. And even sent me to his secretary for a sale. She probably gave him a whiff of my visit, but he doesn’t let on.
He knows of my failed tenure in graduate school in animal husbandry a year ago, and of other complications, but not much has been said about it. I’m just coming off a failed courtship.
It started in Stat class. The professor had a facial twitch that made his delivery more comical than instructive. I couldn’t bear it, and turned my attentions elsewhere in the class. Sitting behind me, crashing my ramparts, was a warm-blooded, shifting sculpture out of Michelangelo’s back studio. She unveiled her beauty effortlessly. She had marble, milky skin, a hemline enticingly far north of knees like the shores of Ceylon; silk-spun hair remindful of the looms of Louis Sixteenth, which she’d flick now and then, in a kind of signaling way, like that blonde singer Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary.
I turned to advice from Hamer Figby, a childhood friend and savant-in-the-making. He was three years younger than me. While I was off at Eckford College, he dated the local preacher’s daughter through high school.
During this period, he took a miscreant and I should say groovy turn born of vinyl - Pink Floyd themed “Brick in the Wall”, the album of the day, using drugs and engaging in other delinquent endeavors, to the chagrin of his mother. Figby was a sage boy, facile in speech, winsome in demeanor, headed places, if he could outgrow his wanderlust.
Figby is lit: She flicks her hair!? Are you kidding? She’s sending a message. Get with her somehow and ask where’s she’s from. Whatever you have to do, smell her hair. (What for?) It’s sort of like reading tea leaves, but with women. And listen to her talk. If possible, make fun of somethings she says. And find out her birthday, because there’s a one in ten chance it’s not far away.
Byrde announces a lab activity for next week called “The statistical probability of sensations”, and somehow by miracle I get in her lab group.
“What sensations?” Figby asks, at report.
“On the body.”
“You’re making this up.”
It’s true, I’m in her lab group. We’re going to place little pins on each other’s skins in different places to see if we can discern whether we feel two pins or one. We will record the data, map out the body, and send punch cards through a computer to assess the percentage of the body’s two-pin sensitivity areas.
Figby glows like an emperor who acquired lands.
You won the lottery, he says. You better not blow it this time or you will pay for it the rest of your life. Or you are just hardwired for priesthood and might as well start training.
I won’t do this, so I become the deviant, the substandard of the mean.
On lab day, she has a big sloshing cup of latte and a breakfast bag and sets it down, and the group has a lot of fun with the pins. She has an accent that I recognize.
“What’cha eating there?” I ask her, and she tells me.
Comes time to test the lips, a tactile delicacy. My heart pounds in my chest like an oil drum. I place two short pins, one centimeter apart, on her diaphanous upper lip. My fingers brush her lips, briefly, and she seems to lift off the ground, as if receiving a rapturous shock.
“I feel two,” she says.
“Let’s try the lower lip.”
Her teeth are perfectly aligned, creamy white polished stones.
“Two again,” she says.
“There are other tests for this,” I say.
“What?” She flicks her hair.
“I can’t say right now.”
“Tell me, I want to know.”
“After I do your back.”
She bares just a few inches on the lower back. Plains of Mesopotamia there. I set the two pins down. She only feels one. But I gather assessments of her long tresses, and report back to Figby later.
Oh, man, goddess’s hair.
What’s it smell like?
A little odd, kinda’ smoky, but shampoo-ish.
She’s got a few problems, Figby assesses. Probably has a nicotine habit and is nervous. She’s strong, independent. Here’s the deal: don’t ask her out, command her. We’re going out. Got it?
Back at lab, I say to her:
“You’re going to the Calhoun home football game with me.”
“I am?”
“Yes. So I can talk to you more about this lab result. I know nothing about these computer punch cards and I heard you explaining them to Carly. And you don’t know football because you probably got a lot of indoctrination in rugby. You are Australian, right?”
She affirms it, and how’d you figure it?
“Say M-a-i-n.”
She says it.
“You Aussies can’t say an ‘a’ sound at all. It’s not ‘mine’, it’s ‘m-ayne’. And only an Aussie would say ‘bikkie’ for ‘biscuit’.”
“When? – ”, she starts.
“Remember? I asked you about it earlier.”
She hitches up, eyes caved, throwing out code. That… she is fallow, barren of something she needs, aware of my hot pursuit, that I have probed her. She bails, but only in reluctance. “Leave it to Yanks, to have so many unnecessary words.”
“Nece- sarry . What are you sorry for ?”
Touche, the chase is on.
“Stuff it,” she says.
I fall off the bottom line of the Stat class ledger.
 
Shelley, as she turns out to be called, is the master of coquetry and therefore the master of me. In a voice garnished with scallion, she dispenses the alluring array of Aussie patois: “avie”, “sickie”, “sook”, “winge”, and “tea” – the last meaning supper. I learn I’m not the first to have been drawn to her beauty.
I’m at Figby’s house. He’s on to something, from hitches in how I’m talking, and wants m