Excerpt from Staggerford: A Novel

...Today he skipped lunch altogether, so pleasant was the autumn sunshine and so compelling was the call of a crow from across the river. Coach Gibbon, running off the field behind his hungry students, called to him, but Miles did not move from the bleachers. He sat up. He regarded his briefcase. It was full of student papers—114 essays entitled “What I Wish.” He had been putting off reading them for over a week. He opened the briefcase, then paused, reluctant to look inside. How many student papers had he read in these twelve years? How many strokes of his red pen had he made? How many times had he underlined it’s and written its. Was there ever a student who didn’t make a mischievous younger brother the subject of an essay? Was there ever a student who didn’t make four syllables out of “mischievous”? This was the twelfth in a series of senior classes that Miles was trying to raise to an acceptable level of English usage, and like the previous eleven, this class would graduate in the spring to make room for another class in the fall, and he would read the same errors over again. This annual renewal of ignorance, together with the sad fact that most of his students had been drilled in what he taught since they were in the fifth grade, left him with a vague sense of futility that made it hard for him to read student writing. But while he had lost his urge to read student papers, he had not lost his guilt about not reading them, so he carried around with him, like a conscience, this bulging briefcase...

...He put his hand into the briefcase and drew out Roxie Booth’s paper. He shook his head. Before he met Roxie Booth, Miles had come to believe that there was no scribble he could not read and no tangle of clauses he could not untie, but Roxie Booth this year was challenging his reading skill as it had never been challenged before. Her writing was a riddle, which, when he solved it, said this:

What I Wish

Living free with nature in my mind of how it is like dad says no mother always agrees. But if my mind is the one I know no matter whatever rules or whatever. Then why not. Or I’ll lose my mind. Isn’t it me to say just to get away from this hassle in a cabin? Before I lose my mind.

Losing. That was the melancholy strain running through dozens of papers every year. Parents lost in death and divorce, fingers lost in corn pickers, innocence lost behind barns and in back seats, brothers and uncles lost in Vietnam, friends lost in drug-induced hallucinations, and football games lost to Owl Brook and Berrington.

He turned Roxie’s paper over and spent twenty minutes writing in understandable English what he believed she was trying to say. Then he climbed down from the bleachers, and he walked down the sloping bank to the Badbattle River. He crossed the river on stones without getting his shoes wet, for the Badbattle wasn’t much more than a trickle in late October, and he walked along the far bank, under oak and birch. He saw four ducks and a flock of red-winged blackbirds. He saw a garter snake, a goldfinch, and a crow. He saw a bittersweet vine strangling a small maple tree. When the bell rang, calling him back to the classroom, he was ditching a channel in the mud and freeing a swarm of minnows that the receding water had left in a landlocked pool.

~Jon Hassler (from Staggerford: A Novel)