get pushed by, strapped on handcarts. A wheel slips off the cypress planks that’ve been laid over the mud, and the lift handle snaps in two, sending a trunk and the worker sidewards. Something thumps inside the box, hollow like a melon. A whimper comes, low, soft.
The big white man steps forward, holds the trunk from falling on its side. “Best take care,” he says while the stevedore gets to his feet. “Bruise up Boss’s new dogs, he’d be mighty displeased. Watch them wheels.” He puts a knee and shoulder under the trunk to help get it upright on the planks again. Just as he does, something shiny gold falls through a crack along the trunk slats. It snakes down silent and lands in the mud next to the man’s foot. I know what it is, even before the workers and the man move on, and I set down one of my crates and scoop up what’s been left on the ground.
I open my hand and, there in my palm, glittering in the gas lamp’s flickery light, sits the little gold locket Missy Lavinia’s been wearing since she got it for Christmas Day when she was six years old.
She’d be dead in her grave before she’d give that up.
CHAPTER 8
BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987
The books keep me going. I dream of those books hidden away at Goswood Grove, of tall mahogany shelves with volumes upon volumes of literary treasures, and ladders reaching to the sky. For several days in a row, when I come home from school feeling discouraged by my lack of progress with the kids, I put on my duck shoes and make the trek down the farm levee lane, slip through the crape myrtles, and follow the moss-carpeted paths of the old garden. I stand on the porch like a kid before the Macy’s display window at Christmas, and fantasize about what might be possible if I could get my hands on those books.
Loren Eiseley, who was the subject of one of my favorite term papers, wrote, If there is magic in this world, it is contained in water, but I have always known that if there is magic in this world, it is contained in books.
I need magic. I need a miracle, a superpower. In almost two weeks, I have taught these kids nothing but how to bum cheap snack cakes and sleep in class…and that I will physically bar the door if they try to leave before the bell rings, so don’t try it. Now they skip my class altogether. I don’t know where they are, just that they’re not in my room. My unexcused absence reports sit unbothered on a massive stack of similar pink slips in the office. Principal Pevoto’s grand plan to turn this school around is in danger of falling victim to the way things have always been. He is like the overburdened character in Eiseley’s often printed story, throwing beached starfish back into the ocean one by one, while the tide continually deposits more along an endless and merciless shore.
With most of the classroom books now missing, I have resorted to reading aloud from Animal Farm daily. This, to high school kids who should be reading for themselves. They don’t mind. A few even listen, peeking surreptitiously from the battery of folded arms, drooped heads, and closed eyes.
LaJuna is not among my audience. After our hopeful encounter at the Cluck and Oink, she’s been absent Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and now Thursday. I’m disappointed in a soul-crushing sort of way.
Across the hall, a substitute teacher screams incessantly during my readings as she attempts to control science room chaos. The science teacher who started the year with me has already given up and claimed she had to move home because of a flare-up in her mother’s lupus. She’s gone. Just like that.
I keep telling myself I will not quit. Period. I will gain access to that library at Goswood Grove. Maybe I’m expecting too much, but I can’t help believing that, for kids who are given so few choices on a daily basis, just having some could be huge. Beyond that, I want them to see that there is no faster way to change your circumstance than to open a great book.