Read Online Ghost Story by Peter Straub - Free Book Online

the lunch hour in the schoolhouse— "offering extra help and giving punishments."

    Because up there they believed in the birch. I'd taught my first day when I found out about that. I say, taught, but really all I'd managed to do was keep them quiet for a few hours and write down their names and ask a few questions. It was astonishing. Only two of the older girls could read, simple addition and subtraction was as far as their math went, and not only had a few of them not heard of foreign countries, one of them didn't even believe they existed. "Aw, there's nothin' like that," one scrawny ten-year-old told me. "A place where people ain't even American? Where they don't even talk American?" But he couldn't go further, he was laughing too hard at the absurdity of the idea, and I saw a mouthful of appalling, blackened teeth. "So what about the war, dopey?" another boy said. "Never heard tell of the Germans?" Before I could react, the first boy flew over the desk and started beating the second boy. It looked as though he was literally set on murdering him. I tried to separate the two boys—the girls were all shrieking—and I grabbed the assailant's arm. "He's right," I said. "He shouldn't have called you a name, but he is right. Germans are the people who live in Germany, and the world war ..." I stopped short because the boy was growling at me. He was like a savage dog, and for the first time I realized that he was mentally disturbed, perhaps retarded. He was ready to bite me. "Now apologize to your friend," I said.

    "Ain't no friend of mine."

    "Apologize."

    "He's queer, sir," the other boy said. His face was pale, and his eyes were frightened, and he had the beginnings of a black eye. "I shouldn't never of said that to him."

    I asked the first boy what his name was. "Fenny Bate," he managed to drool out. He was calming down. I sent the second boy back to his desk. "Fenny," I said, "the trouble is that you were wrong. America isn't the whole world, just as New York isn't the whole United States." This was too complicated, and I had lost him. So I brought him up to the front and made him sit down while I drew maps on the board. "Now this is the United States of America, and this is Mexico, and this is the Atlantic Ocean ..."

    Fenny was shaking his head darkly. "Lies," he said. "All that's lies. That stuff ain't there. It AIN'T!" When he shouted he pushed at his desk and it went crashing over.

    I asked him to pick up his desk, and when he just shook his head, starting to slobber again, I picked it up myself. Some of the children gasped. "So you've seen or heard of maps and other countries?" I asked.

    He nodded. "But they're lies."

    "Who told you that?"

    He shook his head and refused to say. If he had shown any signs of embarrassment, I would have thought that he'd learned this misinformation from his parents; but he did not—he was just angry and sullen.

    At noon all the children took their paper bags outside and ate their sandwiches in the lot around the school. It would be window-dressing to call it a playground, though there was a rickety set of swings in back of the school. I kept my eye on Fenny Bate. He was left alone by most of the other children. When he roused himself from his stupor and tried to join a group, the others pointedly walked away and left him standing alone, his hands in his pockets. From time to time a skinny girl with lank blond hair came up and spoke to him—she rather resembled him, and I imagined that she must have been his sister. I checked my lists: Constance Bate, in the fifth grade. She had been one of the quiet ones.

    Then, when I looked back at Fenny, I saw an odd-looking man standing on the road outside the building, looking across the school grounds at him, just as I was doing. Fenny Bate was sitting unaware between us. For some reason, this man gave me a shock. It was not just that he was odd in appearance, though he was that, dressed in old disreputable working clothes, with wild