Wyatt and Sylvia

 

Toole County, Montana

     In the last year before school consolidation, before the farm kids were jerked out of the soil and sent to city packing sheds, I taught nine students in one room, way out on the hard red winter wheatfields of northern Montana.
      In August I received a list of unfilled positions from Helena and applied by letter from California to School District 19, Toole County. “It’s a dead-end deal,” said Sam Black, the chairman of the school board, when we shook hands on the phone. “One year, then we fold the school and you are dismissed. I won’t lie to you. You are the only one who has called about this. We’ll take the chance if you will. Five thousand dollars and a place to stay for the school year. Plenty of opportunity for weekend work if you can handle equipment.”
      There was no school bus. The children were delivered to the white frame building by wind-wrinkled mothers smelling of diesel, clabbered milk and manure, driving stub-nosed grain trucks and Pontiacs with singing shock absorbers. Through the slumping panes of the teacherage’s kitchen window, I could forecast the day’s attendance by counting the dust plumes that boiled out of the Sweetgrass Hills and converged on the section-line roads.
     I wore my hair long and had come from the world beyond Great Falls, so I was a bug in a mayonnaise jar to the kids, to be viewed through a shell of flat, cautious politeness until it was determined whether I raised welts or spat stinky fluids. The younger ones softened first, handing me their friendship in big wads of giggles. 

      By Columbus Day we were claiming a corner of Rasmussen’s wheatfield for our school by planting an art-project flag in the dusty stubble.  Shortly afterward I was J. D., one of the gang to most of my students. But not to Wyatt, who, at age eleven had read most of Louis Lamour and believed it possible to live, and to die, as a gunfighter. Hormones were gathering behind his dinnerplate-sized belt buckle. His entire being focused on fair Sylvia’s scant breasts during history class. To Wyatt I was an effete outlander, an agent of change, someone bent on jamming mathematics between him and his bull-riding future.
       In with the puncture weeds at the perimeter of the pea-gravel parking lot were several ant mounds. Wyatt’s courtship of Sylvia consisted of carefully working his freckled hand and lower arm into a hill of black ants, until it was swarming with a scurry, then chasing her around the schoolyard yelling “Ant Arm Man is going to get you! Ant Arm Man is going to get you!.”
     During one such episode of cowpoke foreplay, Sylvia went down hard on both knees against the lip of the concrete pad that anchored the flagpole. Restrained tears fogged her glasses. “Darn you, Wyatt. I’ll get you.” Those were strong words from a whispy farm girl who dressed as her grandmother had.
     Wyatt booted rocks down the road ahead of us. I was pissed. I told him to cut the crap, to try a little tenderness, that Sylvia was in pain because he had worked an old joke one too many times and that I didn’t like any pain, intentional or accidental. He’d better come around, settle down, before I called in the big dogs, his folks and Sylvia’s, to put the clamps on this foolishness. Wyatt tipped back the bill of his tractor hat, checked the clouds, flashed a coyote grin, and said “Yes Sir, Mister Smith, Sir.” That night a cold front seeped over the Canadian border and covered the ant hills with a foot of snow.
      For Christmas I bought each student a harmonica. By Valentine’s Day, with Sylvia sitting first chair, we were a one-song band, playing “The Streets of Laredo” to an audience of aquarium guppies. March afternoons were spent in model rocketry, firing chunks of balsawood and cardboard way, way up into the huge crystal skies. For physical education we trudged a mile downwind for the retrieval. A breeze that smelled of crawdads whistled up from the Missouri River breaks in early April. Overnight the snow was gone.
      One sunny morning after the yellow clay schoolyard had dried enough to permit play, Sylvia and Janet asked if they could take the new canvas bases outside and design a softball diamond. Sure.......but mind the windows and the wind.
     Each team had a pitcher, a first baseman, and a couple of roving fielders in the stubble. I was to be both teams’ catcher. Wyatt captained one group and chose Sylvia, Janet, and the two third graders for his helpers. Sylvia was unusually aggressive in demanding that her team bat first.
     Of course, Wyatt was the leadoff hitter. He punched the first pitch through a hole where the shortstop would’ve been, a clean single, but the girls knew Wyatt, so as he was scampering up the baseline toward first Sylvia and Janet yelled “Take two, Wyatt! Take two!“ When he made the turn, going for the double, they changed their chant to “Slide, Wyatt! Slide, Wyatt.! Slide Wyatt!,” and he slid................ headfirst into a busy community of red ants that had recently been covered by second base.
     He came up swatting, spitting and slapping. He was a tough little hombre, but I could see that he was in trouble with this situation, so I hustled him into the four-seater outhouse. Sylvia sat smiling in the swing.
        A month later the job ended. On the last day of school, while I was boxing the artifacts of my teaching career and pointing my truck toward Alaska, I looked out into the schoolyard and there by the flagpole sat Sylvia and Wyatt, holding hands while they waited for their rides back into the Sweetgrass Hills.