On a normal day our teacher in Room 212 of Denver’s South High School was a professor who loved grammar more than he loved football. Pacing back and forth in front of his chalk board covered with diagramed sentences, he would explain the dangers in dangling verbal phrases (The Macmillan Handbook of English, third edition page 469, 44a.). He grasped the spine of his open grammar book in one hand and, gesticulating with the other, revealed its secrets, as excited as if this were a murder mystery and we were about to discover the identity of the killer. He meticulously corrected every piece of student writing with codes to direct us to the appropriate usage in the grammar book. His enthusiasm for sentences polished like silver remains with me today. On Saturday afternoons he could be spotted in the bleachers of the football field marking student papers in red while he cheered for the team. At sporting events, like every day in class, he wore his suit, white shirt and tie.
But on this April day, hands shaking, tears in his eyes, a middle aged, balding man with his striped tie hanging loose stood in front of the chalkboard clutching a student’s paper, a story written for the class assignment we had been given before spring break. I sat at the front desk in the row nearest the wall. Though I did not know why, I sensed this was an important reading. I pulled my skirt down attempting to cover knobby knees, a habit when nervous. In photos from my 1963 yearbook I look younger than seventeen, eyes hidden by glasses I detested, lips drawn straight in a serious line over my father’s square chin. I was an innocent. Until that moment I believed death would not touch me.
Our teacher leaned against the board, one shoe on the floor, the other shoe on the wall below the board, as if he needed extra support. As he read the words on the page, he stuck one hand in his suit coat pocket where he collected a hoard of broken chalk pieces; he handled them as he spoke, his fingers making fists against the inside of the fabric. The story was about a teenage boy who got lost in the Rocky Mountains in a snow storm while hiking and died of exposure. Lying on the frozen ground, looking up at the night sky, the boy’s last sight was a falling star.
The student’s desk was behind mine. In September, on the first day of class, I noticed him immediately. He was pleasantly tall, had outstanding ears, puppy eyes and thin lips. A boy who belonged out of doors, confined in the classroom he overflowed with repressed energy. Long legs folded under his desk top, he constantly kicked the air with his right foot, frequently landing on the chair legs of my desk. I hear his whisper: Sorry. Oh, sorry. A polite, gentle boy, he apologized at least ten times during any class period.
In October the boy invited me to the home-coming dance. His kiss goodnight at my door was what my girlfriends called a grab and smash. He liked me and he was nervous. If we had been in the mountains, he would have been more at home. His passion for the night sky might have inspired him.
This April day his desk was empty.
We all knew, from the newspapers on Sunday, our classmate fell and broke his neck while hiking with a friend near Estes Park.
His loss was more than the loss of a friend, the loss of shared memories, the loss of a life of promise, though it was all those things. Like a falling star, a foreboding, at seventeen, his passing was my first evidence of cosmic unrest.
When the teacher finished the boy’s story, there was not a sound in the room. No one could believe the strange coincidence that the student wrote the mountain story so near his death. No one could believe he was dead. I tried to imagine the long legs that had kicked my desk lying on the ground, flung askew, forever stilled.
Our teacher turned his bent head to the wall and fumbled with his glasses. On his lower back, the nap of his suit coat was imprinted with the white chalk from a diagramed sentence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Flash fiction, creative nonfiction and longer stories by Jeanne Althouse have appeared in numerous literary journals. She was a finalist in the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction contest. Her story, “Goran Holds his Breath” was nominated by Shenandoah for the Pushcart Prize. A collection of her flash fiction, Boys in the Bank, was published this year by Red Bird Chapbooks. She lives in California and loves reading Lydia Davis.