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The School
from
Sixty Stories
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 the 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.
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