Abide With Me Read online

  “Katie,” said Mrs. Ingersoll tiredly, bending to wipe a boy’s nose, “don’t start. Please.”

  And now her father was squatted down in front of her asking if something important had happened at school, and the important thing—the amazement of those beautiful mismatched dresses and shoes—rose as big as a mountain and her words were little ants that couldn’t make the climb; not even a scream could make the climb. She leaned against her father’s arm.

  “Mrs. Ingersoll called and told me you don’t play with other children.” He said this nicely, putting his big hand around her elbow.

  Katherine moved her mouth, collecting spit in a warm pool next to her tongue.

  “Do you have a favorite friend in class?” her father asked.

  Katherine didn’t answer.

  “Would you like to go to Martha Watson’s house after school someday? Have her come here? I can call her mother and ask.”

  Katherine shook her head, hard.

  A sudden gust of wind sent dried leaves fluttering around them. The minister looked up, gazed at the maple next to the barn. “Gosh,” he said. “Already the top is bare.”

  But Katherine was watching her father’s shoe; the gob of spit landing slowly on the side of a shoe that was so big and dark it could have belonged to a giant.

  “I’m going to be gone for a little while,” her father said, standing up. “Mrs. Hatch will be watching you.”

  ALWAYS THINK of the other man first.

  If Tyler, once again in his red Rambler, on the narrow, tree-lined road, wasn’t exactly thinking of Mrs. Ingersoll first, he was, by habit, imagining what it must feel like to be her right now. Did she dread this conference? Possibly she did. She and her husband, after all, were C-and-E’rs, members who came to church only on Christmas and Easter, although this was the least of Tyler’s worries. He had a lower rate of C-and-E’rs than many parishes, and he had never (good Lord) castigated such members, as he knew other ministers sometimes did. In any case, Tyler thought, as he got out of the car and walked across the school parking lot, he would do what he could to make this young woman feel comfortable.

  Mrs. Ingersoll was seated at her desk. “Come in,” she said, standing up. She wore a red knit dress with lint on it.

  Tyler extended his hand. “Good afternoon.” Her hand was so small it surprised him—as though instead of her own, she had slipped him the hand of a schoolchild. “Nice to see you, Mrs. Ingersoll.”

  “Thank you for coming in,” she said.

  They sat in little wooden chairs, and right away there was something in the woman’s manner, a closed-off confidence, that Tyler found unsettling. When she said in her high, clear voice, “Why don’t you tell me what Katherine is like at home,” she looked at Tyler with such a steady gaze, he had to look away. The room, with its brightly colored letters pinned to a corkboard, its smell of children’s paint, held a tension that took him by surprise, as though, without any memory of this at all, he had been miserable as a child that age.

  “Does she sleep well? Cry a lot? Does she tell you what her day is like?”

  “Well,” the minister said, “let’s see.” Mrs. Ingersoll glanced at her sleeve, picked off a piece of gray lint, and turned her eyes back to Tyler, who said, “You know, she doesn’t talk about what her day was like, I’m afraid. But I ask.” He thought she might nod at that, but she didn’t, so he added, “I try not to be aggressive about asking—you know, just encourage her to tell me on her own.”

  “Can you give me an example?” said Mrs. Ingersoll. “Of the kind of conversation you two might have?”

  He thought there was, in her confidence, something hard, impermeable. He said, “I ask what she did at school. Who she played with at recess. Who her best friend in the class might be.”

  “And what does she say?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid.”

  “We have a problem, Mr. Caskey.”

  The stinging pain arrived below his collarbone. “Well, then,” he answered agreeably, “let’s solve it.”

  “If we only could, just like that,” the woman said. “But children aren’t math problems to be solved with one right answer.”

  With a meditative motion, he rubbed the spot below his collarbone.

  “Katherine wants my attention every minute, and when she doesn’t get it, she has a screaming fit until she’s tuckered out.” Mrs. Ingersoll rearranged her hips, smoothed a hand over her lap. “She doesn’t play with anyone; no one plays with her. And it’s startling how she doesn’t know one letter of the alphabet.” Mrs. Ingersoll nodded toward the corkboard. “Doesn’t seem the least bit interested in learning them, either. Last week she took a black crayon and scribbled over the pages in a picture book.”

  “Screaming fits?”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am surprised,” Tyler said.

  “Are you saying she doesn’t scream at home?”

  “She doesn’t scream at home. I am saying that, yes.”

  Mrs. Ingersoll tilted her head in what seemed to him an exaggerated pose of puzzlement. “Well, that’s interesting. She screams here. And you have to understand—I have a room of other children to look after.”

  Tyler squinted. The stinging pain seemed to be affecting his vision.

  “So, Reverend Caskey, you can see we need to do something.”

  The minister straightened his shoulders, crossed his arms.

  “Who gives Katherine her baths?” Mrs. Ingersoll said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Her baths,” the woman said. “Who is it that bathes Kath-erine?”

  The minister’s eyebrows drew together. “The housekeeper, usually,” he said.

  “Does she like her?” Mrs. Ingersoll pulled a tiny chain out from beneath the neckline of her red dress, running it back and forth with a finger.

  He said, “Oh, well. With Katherine it’s sometimes hard to tell.”

  “I meant, does the housekeeper like Katherine?”

  He saw that the chain held a small silver cross. “Oh. Of course. Connie Hatch is a fine woman. Solid. Solid citizen.”

  “Reverend Caskey, I’m asking the question because Katherine sometimes has the appearance of not being—well, not entirely groomed.”

  For a long time the minister said nothing. He placed his thumb beneath his chin and sat back. “I’ll give it my attention,” he finally said. The back of his head had grown warm.

  Mrs. Ingersoll said: “I’ve talked to the principal a few times, and if Katie doesn’t improve, we think it might be a good idea to have her tested. I’m not sure you’re aware, but Rhonda Skillings—you know her, right?”

  Tyler nodded.

  “Rhonda’s getting her doctorate at the university in psychology, on the effect of trauma on children. It’s awfully interesting—now the studies are out on children who were displaced during the war. Rhonda’s writing her dissertation, and she works with us as a counselor. Volunteer. She’s got an office downstairs and when a child’s having a—well, you know—a disruptive time in the classroom, it works out for everybody to have that pupil spend some time with her.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Tyler said. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me here.”

  “I’m saying there’s a problem, Mr. Caskey.”

  “Yes. That much I understand.”

  “And that having her scream in my classroom prevents me from getting my job done.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that we’re lucky to have Rhonda Skillings, who can work with her on the days Katherine isn’t doing well.”

  The minister looked at the blackboard, he looked at the little tables and chairs, looked at the small sink in the corner of the room. When he looked back at Mrs. Ingersoll, it was as though she had gone behind a pane of glass, the red shoulders of her dress, the brown hair that curled at her collarbone. He said, “Why didn’t you let me know sooner?”

  The woman stopped playing with her small neck chain. “We were hop
ing the problem would straighten itself out. But it’s gotten worse.”

  The minister uncrossed his long legs, rearranged himself in the ridiculous chair, crossed his legs the other way. “Katherine’s not a refugee child displaced during the war,” he said. “And she’s not a guinea pig.”

  “But she is a problem in the classroom.” The woman’s voice took on a strident tone. “You asked why we didn’t notify you sooner, and quite frankly, Mr. Caskey, we’ve been surprised you’ve never inquired about her. We have parents asking all the time how their child is making the adjustment to kindergarten. And of course Katherine’s situation is—”

  Tyler had lost the logic of the conversation; he knew only that something had gone wrong and he was being chastised. But he couldn’t trace it back. He looked at the bright colors of the alphabet pinned to the corkboard, the basket of crayons on a table nearby, the red dress of Mrs. Ingersoll that had on its sleeve one long brown hair.

  “Please,” the woman was saying. “We have lots of sympathy for your loss. We really do. But I guess I’m surprised to hear that you’re surprised to hear there’s a problem.”

  He almost said, I’m a little rattled these days, but then he thought: It’s nobody’s business if I’m rattled these days. So he just gazed about the room, wondering if Rhonda Skillings had already been told about this.

  “We understand you may not want to recognize there’s a problem. That’s not unusual.” Mrs. Ingersoll was enunciating slowly, as though he might be a five-year-old with a crayon in his hand. “I’m sure it’s been easier to believe Katherine’s all right. But she’s not. She’s troubled.”

  Again, he squinted. Glancing at the young woman, he saw her watching him with her eyebrows raised, as though expecting something from him. He stood up and walked over toward the window. He saw how evening was on its way; in a few more weeks, it would be dark by this time in the day. The red glow of the sun sat above the horizon, right above the trees that were out past the playground, where the swing set stood gray and still.

  “She hasn’t been sent out of the classroom yet,” Mrs. Ingersoll was saying. “We just wanted to keep you abreast. She painted a very nice picture the other day.” He heard her chair scrape over the floor, the officious sound of her low-heeled pumps as she walked across the room. He turned to watch while she unscrolled a large sheet of paper. “But”—Mrs. Ingersoll held it out toward him—“you can see she covered it all with black.”

  Tyler said quietly, “You’re not going to do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Send Katherine off to a room to be psychoanalyzed three days a week. No one’s going to write a case study on my child.”

  Outside in the hallway, a janitor’s pail clunked against the floor.

  Mrs. Ingersoll rolled the picture back up, touching the masking tape that kept it in place. She said quietly, dropping her eyelids, “No one is going to psychoanalyze Katherine. But whether we decide to remove her from the classroom a few hours a week is not really your decision to make. This is a public school, Mr. Caskey. If the school decides she needs special help, then we do what we can to help her.”

  He had no idea if what she said was true.

  “We’ll keep you posted, Mr. Caskey.”

  “Thank you,” he said. He walked across the room and shook her small hand.

  THE BLUE OF the sky was deepening as the sun lowered over the towns along the river. Straight above, if you put your head back, was a blue so deep and rich that a person might have stopped and gazed at its wondrousness, except it was not the time of day people tended to look up. Leaving office buildings or grocery stores, walking across parking lots, people tended to tuck their chins down this time of day, to clutch at their coats, as though the darkening brought with it some inner shrinking.

  And this was too bad, for it was quite a display spread out there, changing even from the time it took to open a car door, settle in, and close the door. By the time the key had turned, the engine started, the heavens had become a deeper, deeper, darker blue. And what a shame for Tyler Caskey, who, in different circumstances, taking a moment to glance at the sky, might have thought, Yes, the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

  Instead, the man drove slowly, a hand raised against the final glaring sun that seemed only a thing to blind him as it hung brilliantly and massively above the horizon. He drove slowly past the fields and farms and pumpkin stands. As he pulled onto Stepping Stone Road, then turned in to the gravel of his driveway, he thought of his wife’s final words, more than a year before. “Tyler,” she had said, “you’re such a coward, you know.”

  The farmhouse stood, white and plain, with its set of red shutters at each window. In the gathering dusk, its simple lines seemed to Tyler to contain some quietness of apology, to express a weariness from maintaining the understated dignity that had been its burden for a hundred years. But it was just a house. Only sticks and stones, and the porch railing was broken. As he parked near the barn, he felt the persistent pain beneath his collarbone, which over the months he had come to think of as the presence of a small rodent who lived inside him, clinging with tiny-needled claws. Tyler picked up his felt hat from the seat beside him and left the car slowly.

  When he stepped through the back door, he heard nothing, and moved through the empty kitchen to the living room. Connie Hatch hurried down the stairs. “She’s fallen asleep,” Connie said. “I didn’t know if I should let her, if you wanted—”

  “It’s fine, Mrs. Hatch.” The minister stood in his long coat, his big shoulders slightly hunched. He dropped the car keys on the coffee table.

  “How did it go?”

  The minister didn’t answer. But when he met the eyes of his housekeeper, he had one of those surprising moments that occur sometimes, when there’s a fleeting sense of recognition, when, in less than half a second, there’s the sense of having glimpsed the other’s soul, some shred of real agreement being shared. This is what happened to the minister on that autumn evening, the walls of the living room now a dull, flat pink. It’s a sad world, the housekeeper’s eyes seemed to say. And I’m sorry.

  The minister’s eyes said, It is a sad world, isn’t it. I’m sorry, too.

  TWO

  Mary Ingersoll had worn the red knit dress because of the way it showed off her figure, and, washing it the night before, she’d been annoyed to discover her husband had not removed the Kleenex from his shirt pocket, as she’d told him many times to do, so that in the washing machine all those gunky little pieces of wet tissue were stuck, and then on her red dress, too. In the past, Mary had found Tyler Caskey attractive, and while she told people she’d been dreading the conference, she had, in fact, looked forward to it, rehearsing in front of the mirror, trying on expressions of kind-hearted, authoritative patience. She’d remembered to wear the little silver cross around her neck, so the man could see she was religious; she’d even thought she could apologize for not getting to church more often. “I’m simply wrung out from working all week,” she would say, and he’d say he understood—working so hard to take care of problems like his little girl.

  What a painful disappointment! The minister, in some odd way, didn’t seem to notice her. Half the time he didn’t even seem to be listening. He was tired—she could see this in his eyes—but his sudden coldness at the end had stung her. She went to the principal, Mr. Waterbury, in tears. “It wasn’t called for,” she told him, as he listened with his dark eyebrows drawn together.

  “No, certainly not,” he agreed.

  That night Mary exaggerated in telling her husband—“The man sneered at me. He had a childish stare-down with me!”—and before she got ready for bed, she’d telephoned Rhonda Skillings and two friends, telling each of them the story, exaggerating a bit more, and when she fell asleep, she slept peacefully. The point is, she had the benefit of sympathetic listeners.

  Tyler did not have this benefit, and he lay awake most of the night on his couch in the s
tudy. He was aware of something hard and dark inside him, like a small stone, and he had a sense This is mine, though he couldn’t have said what; no words formed around it, just a quiet, growing fierceness of pleasant possession—and then it was gone—and the image of Katherine standing alone on the playground became the only thing in his mind. He sat up, looked around the darkened study, opened his hands, closed them. He thought of the teacher’s high-pitched voice—“No one plays with her”—and was assaulted by a memory: his sister, Belle, standing on the playground in Shirley Falls, alone. He, two years younger, would see her and turn away, back to the group of boys who went on to remain his friends through high school. Belle, with an expression that feigned indifference, would watch a game of hopscotch, then wander away. It hurt Tyler to recall this. “You’re a horse of a different color,” his mother had said to him when he became president of his class, captain of the football team.

  Slowly, he lay back down, and all sorts of nighttime worries bloomed. He hadn’t finished his sermon; in a few weeks it would be Stewardship Sunday, then pledges came in, the annual budget would be shaped and presented for a vote in January; and Doris Austin (friendly with Rhonda) ought to be stopped sooner, rather than later, from manipulating the board members over the huge expense of a new organ. Only by recalling the kindness of Connie Hatch’s green eyes was he able finally to doze. Even then, he woke and watched the windowpanes grow white. It is a sin to rise up early, and eat the bread of sorrows.

  When he woke again, Katherine was standing near his face, watching him. “Pumpkin pie,” he said. “Hello.” He reached to put an arm around her. She had wet the bed, her pajama top soaked halfway up the back. Tyler sat up awkwardly. “Bath time for Katherine Estelle,” he said. “But first.” He rubbed his face. “This screaming at school,” he finally said, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. “It has to stop.” The child turned away. “You can’t do it anymore, Katherine. It’s rude, and it drives the teacher nuts. Look at me.”

  She turned back, her face darkened with a blush. “That’s all,” he said. “Let’s go.”