Read Online Teacher by Mark Edmundson - Free Book Online Page B

that matters. I can no longer bear the shame of being simply myself. I am raging so much internally that I’m surprised my body doesn’t lift off the ground and rise, corkscrewing into the air.
    But though I may be a nothing on the football field, at least so far, I am coming to feel very much at home here. In particular, I love my uniform. In the beginning, when I first started to play, I didn’t understand how anyone could sustain all this gear for hour after hour. I was alternately frantic, like someone locked in a dark closet, and despondent, like a horse that has never felt a saddle until one very rough and heavy one is applied. But now things are different. I feel that when I pull on my helmet, I am completely transformed; the great cage, three bars horizontal, one down the middle—designed, come to think of it, much in line with the helmets that they wore at Troy—confers a new identity. I’m wearing a mask. It’s a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing. Now the animal can get into play.
    I love the feel of the shoulder pads and the thigh and knee protectors and the smell of the harsh shirt—like rotting leather, really, but appealing to me. Suddenly, within the armor, I—who am usually a human incoherence, ready to fly off in every adolescent direction—pull almost completely together. I am now all of a piece, unified, self-contained. And I am also blissfully, beautifully, isolated: No one can get in; no one can get at me. A lovely place to hide.
    But mainly it’s the sense of power that I love; every piece of armor ensures some protection, but most of them are weapons as well. The shoulder pads are bludgeons; the helmet is a battering rock.
    We always go on the second “hut,” our offensive line. Knowing this, the defender has an advantage. Tom and I move at about the same time. He leads with his helmet, getting a good push out of his stance. I know what is coming. Never cock your forearm—he’ll be on you before you get it thrown. It’s like a short punch, a jab, but I know how to sink every fiber into it. I do. Sully simply flies to the ground in a thrown-rag-doll heap. He rolls over and groans a little, more in humiliation than pain.
    This leaves Frank Ball unprotected. He appears, for all his size, terrified. Which adds, if possible, urgency to my rage. I feel at that moment like a wolf bearing down on some large, injured thing that is not dangerous at all, despite its tusks and girth. I spear him just above the waist with my helmet, and all the air goes out of him. There’s not even time to wrap him with my arms. He’s on the ground—gone—just like that. He grunts twice, on the first hit and then as he smashes down.
    “Frank, get outta here,” says Rourke. Ball is a disgrace to alpha maledom. He has all the biological sine qua nons, but he won’t activate them. Rourke presumably wants him chloroformed. Then he spits. “Sull, you all right?”
    You are always all right, whatever has happened to you on a football field. If you have your limbs scattered at random across the grass, like the Scarecrow in the Oz movie, you are nonetheless all right. Sully shakes his head in assent. Rourke asks how he could have let Edmundson do that to him. This sends me into a million furies.
    Sully lines up again. No runner now. He comes fast off the line, jumping the count by a fraction. No problem, because I’m jumping it by a little more. This time I rap him with both forearms and send his helmet up on his head; his chin strap goes over his mouth, his cage lifts up; he reels back. Then, foolishly, he bends at the waist and takes a step forward. He wants to make one more stab. This time my right forearm knocks his helmet off his head and into the dust. His nose is bleeding wildly. Now I can really destroy him, bash his brains right in (you let Edmundson do that?), and it is—I say to my shame—all I can do not to throw a stone fist at his down-tumbling innocent head. It’s all I can do not to jump on him and throttle