expect anything more out of life than to head up to Bowden Technical College for a year to study plumbing or electrical maintenance before returning to Lone Mountain. His class was hell on teachers, and they came to Clara during her fifth period, right after lunch, a riot of noise and distraction. Her first day they continued talking after the bell while she paced in front of the room, deeply regretting wearing heels because she wasn’t used to being on her feet all day long.
The boys sprawled in their desks while the girls gaggled. Clara went over to the doorway and switched the lights off and on to get their attention, but this just made them ooh and aah. They were going to make an example of her to set the tone. Clara’s blood pressure spiked when she realized she had lost control of them before she even got started. A young teacher who didn’t know what she was doing. A mistake to take this job. Logan had argued against the long-term-substitute position when it was offered, reminding her that she was supposed to be finishing her dissertation, an investigation of the remaining Old English texts that described the massacre of St. Brice’s Day under the reign of King Aethelred the Unready. Clara raised her voice again to tell them about Beowulf, which they had just started reading before their last teacher, Mr. Gleason, had a stroke.
Then Seth rose from his place at the back of the room, holding one of the heavy English literature textbooks. In a single, smooth gesture he let it drop from chin height to the floor. The book whipcracked the linoleum. The entire room hushed and turned in his direction, the quiet kids up front tensing and hunkering down in their seats. “Shut the hell up,” Seth told them, “and let the lady talk.”
Clara didn’t say anything right away. Her mouth felt coated with paste, and her eyes watered because her feet were killing her. In the new silence, she took off her heels and tossed them into a corner and let her swollen feet kiss the cold floor. She sipped from her water, drew in her breath, and shut her eyes. Then she began to sing them the story in Anglo-Saxon as it was meant to be told, her voice starting low and then rising in pitch, a lilting soprano that drew in all the cadences of Old English alliteration and bound it together in a weave of sound. Clara, a music minor at the U, had sung in the choir but never soloed before this. She felt all their eyes on her. She hadn’t done this for the earlier class, the smart kids who bent to their reading and the questions at the end of the section without giving her trouble.
“Do you know what language that was?” she asked the silent room. “What story I was telling?” A few mouths gaped; she had their attention. She walked the room and began to speak of it, a kingdom under siege, the nightly terror in the mead-hall. The class went on and they opened their books and dived into the text itself, but it was the stories and songs and legends they wanted. The words and mysteries and how inside the words they spoke every day they carried the memory of this lost world. How it was said that Hitler’s troops fought so hard at the end of World War II because deep in their icy German hearts they remembered Ragnarok, and the end of the world. The gods at war with frost giants, men at war with the gods, even the women as Valkyries riding in on shrieking clouds to pick out the heroic dead. And after class that first day, Seth paused at the door and showed his teeth when he smiled. “Neat trick,” he said before ducking under the door into the churn of bodies in the hallway.
He was the key to the class, the one they feared. Hold his attention and the rest would follow. Clara had the feeling she had been tested in some crucial way, and she had passed. The moment gave her a strange confidence, and the students responded to this confidence, even if it was all bluff and bravado.
Fifth period became her favorite time of the day. She made the room dark for them by drawing the heavy felt curtains along one wall of windows and then lighting a couple of candles along the lip of the