Pottage - Zenna Henderson

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POTTAGE
by
Zenna Henderson
What was the secret that held the children of Bendo in quietness and
fear? One of many stories about The People.
You get tired of teaching after a while. Well, maybe not of teaching
itself, because it's insidious and remains a tug in the blood for all of your
life, but there comes a day when you look down at the paper you're
grading or listen to an answer you're giving a child and you get a boinnng!
feeling. And each reverberation of the boing is a year in your life, another
set of children through your hands, another beat in monotony, and it's
frightening. The value of the work you're doing doesn't enter into it at that
moment and the monotony is bitter on your tongue.
Sometimes you can assuage that feeling by consciously savoring those
precious days of pseudo freedom between the time you receive your
contract for the next year and the moment you sign it. Because you can
escape at that moment, but somehow—you don't.
But I did one spring. I quit teaching. I didn't sign up again. I went
chasing after—after what? Maybe excitement—maybe a dream of
wonder—maybe a new bright wonderful world that just must be
somewhere else because it isn't here-and-now. Maybe a place to begin
again so I'd never end up at the same frightening emotional dead end. So I
quit.
But by late August the emptiness inside me was bigger than boredom,
bigger than monotony, bigger than lusting after freedom. It was almost
terror to be next door to September and not care that in a few weeks
school starts— tomorrow school starts—first day of school. So, almost at
the last minute, I went to the placement bureau. Of course it was too late
to try to return to my other school, and besides, the mold of the years
there still chafed in too many places.
"Well," the placement director said as he shuffled his end-of-the-season
cards, past Algebra and Home EC and PE and High-School English,
"there's always Bendo." He thumbed out a battered-looking three-by-five.
 "There's always Bendo."
And I took his emphasis and look for what they were intended and
sighed.
"Bendo?"
"Small school. One room. Mining town, or used to be. Ghost town now."
He sighed wearily and let down his professional hair. "Ghost people, too.
Can't keep a teacher there more than a year. Low pay—fair housing—at
someone's home. No community activities—no social life. No city within
fifty or so miles. No movies. No nothing but children to be taught. Ten of
them this year. All grades."
"Sounds like the town I grew up in," I said. "Except we had two rooms
and lots of community activities."
"I've been to Bendo." The director leaned back in his chair, hands
behind his head. "Sick community. Unhappy people. No interest in
anything. Only reason they have a school is because it's the law.
Law-abiding anyway. Not enough interest in anything to break a law, I
guess."
"I'll take it," I said quickly before I could think beyond the feeling that
this sounded about as far back as I could go to get a good running start at
things again.
He glanced at me quizzically. "If you're thinking of lighting a torch of
high reform to set Bendo afire with enthusiasm, forget it. I've seen plenty
of king-sized torches fizzle out there."
"I have no torch," I said. "Frankly I'm fed to the teeth with bouncing
bright enthusiasm and hugs PTA's and activities until they come out your
ears. They usually turn out to be the most monotonous kind of monotony.
Bendo will be a rest."
"It will that," the director said, leaning over his cards again. "Saul
Diemus is the president of the board. If you don't have a car the only way
to get to Bendo is by bus—it runs once a week."
I stepped out into the August sunshine after the interview and sagged a
little under its savage pressure, almost hearing a hiss as the refrigerated
coolness of the placement bureau evaporated from my skin.
I walked over to the quad and sat down on one of the stone benches I'd
never had time to use, those years ago when I had been a student here. I
looked up at my old dorm window and, for a moment, felt a wild
homesickness—not only for years that were gone and hopes that had died
and dreams that had had grim awakenings, but for a special magic I had
 found in that room. It was a magic—a true magic—that opened such vistas
to me that for a while anything seemed possible, anything feasible—if not
for me right now, then for others, someday. Even now, after the dilution of
time, I couldn't quite believe that magic, and even now, as then, I wanted
fiercely to believe it. If only it could be so! If only it could be so!
I sighed and stood up. I suppose everyone has a magic moment
somewhere in his life and, like me, can't believe that anyone else could
have the same—but mine was different! No one else could have had the
same experience! I laughed at myself. Enough of the past and of dreaming.
Bendo waited. I had things to do.
I watched the rolling clouds of red-yellow dust billow away from the
jolting bus, and cupped my hands over my face to get a breath of clean air.
The grit between my teeth and the smothering sift of dust across my
clothes was familiar enough to me, but I hoped by the time we reached
Bendo we would have left this dust plain behind and come into a little
more vegetation. I shifted wearily on the angular seat, wondering if it had
ever been designed for anyone's comfort, and caught myself as a sudden
braking of the bus flung me forward.
We sat and waited for the dust of our going to catch up with us, while
the last-but-me passenger, a withered old Indian, slowly gathered up his
gunny-sack bundles and his battered saddle and edged his Levied
velveteen-bloused self up the aisle and out to the bleak roadside.
We roared away, leaving him a desolate figure in a wide desolation. I
wondered where he was headed. How many weary miles to his hogan in
what hidden wash or miniature greenness in all this wilderness.
Then we headed straight as a die for the towering redness of the bare
mountains that lined the horizon. Peering ahead I could see the road, ruler
straight, disappearing into the distance. I sighed and shifted again and let
the roar of the motor and the weariness of my bones lull me into a stupor
on the border between sleep and waking.
A change in the motor roar brought me back to the jouncing bus. We
jerked to a stop again. I looked out the window through the settling clouds
of dust and wondered who we could be picking up out here in the middle
of nowhere. Then a clot of dust dissolved and I saw
BENDO POST OFFICE
GENERAL STORE
Garage & Service Station
 Dry Goods & Hardware
Magazines
In descending size on the front of the leaning, weather-beaten building
propped between two crumbling smoke-blackened stone ruins. After so
much flatness it was almost a shock to see the bare tumbled boulders
crowding down to the roadside and humping their lichen-stained
shoulders against the sky.
"Bendo," the bus driver said, unfolding his lanky legs and hunching out
of the bus. "End of the line—end of civilization—end of everything!" He
grinned and the dusty mask of his face broke into engaging smile patterns.
"Small, isn't it?" I grinned back.
"Usta be bigger. Not that it helps now. Roaring mining town years ago."
As he spoke I could pick out disintegrating buildings dotting the rocky
hillsides and tumbling into the steep washes. "My dad can remember it
when he was a kid. That was long enough ago that there was still a river
for the town to be in the bend o'."
"Is that where it got its name?"
"Some say yes, some say no. Might have been a feller named Bendo."
The driver grunted as he unlashed my luggage from the bus roof and
swung it to the ground.
"Oh, hi!" said the driver.
I swung around to see who was there. The man was tall, well built,
good-looking—and old. Older than his face— older than years could have
made him because he was really young, not much older than I. His face
was a stern unhappy stillness, his hands stiff on the brim of his Stetson as
he he'd it waist high.
In that brief pause before his "Miss Amerson?" I felt the same feeling
coming from him that you can feel around some highly religious person
who knows God only as a stern implacable vengeful deity, impatient of
worthless man, waiting only for an unguarded moment to strike him down
in his sin. I wondered who or what his God was that prisoned him so
cruelly. Then I was answering, "Yes, how do you do?" And ' e touched my
hand briefly with a "Saul Diemus" and turned to the problem of my two
large suitcases and my record player.
I followed Mr. Diemus' shuffling feet silently, since he seemed to have
slight inclination for talk. I hadn't expected a reception committee, but
 kids must have changed a lot since I was one, otherwise curiosity about
teacher would have lured out at least a couple of them for a preview look.
But the silent two of us walked on for a half block or so from the highway
and the post office and rounded the rocky corner of a hill. I looked across
the dry creek bed and up the one winding street that was residential
Bendo. I paused on the splintery old bridge and took a good look. I'd never
see Bendo like this again. Familiarity would blur some outlines and
sharpen others, and I'd never again see it, free from the knowledge of who
lived behind which blank front door.
The houses were scattered haphazardly over the hillsides, and erratic
flights of rough stone steps led down from each to the road that paralleled
the bone-dry creek bed. The houses were not shacks but they were
unpainted and weathered until they blended into the background almost
perfectly. Each front yard had things growing in it, but such subdued
blossomings and unobtrusive planting that they could easily have been
only accidental massings of natural vegetation.
Such a passion for anonymity…
"The school—" I had missed the swift thrust of his hand.
"Where?" Nothing I could see spoke school to me.
"Around the bend." This time I followed his indication and suddenly,
out of the featurelessness of the place, I saw a bell tower barely topping the
hill beyond the town, with the fine pencil stroke of a flagpole to one side.
Mr. Diemus pulled himself together to make the effort.
"The school's in the prettiest place around here. There's a spring and
trees, and—" He ran out of words and looked at me as though trying to
conjure up something else I'd like to hear. "I'm board president," he said
abruptly. "You'll have ten children from first grade to second-year high
school. You're the boss in your school. Whatever you do is your business.
Any discipline you find desirable—use. We don't pamper our children.
Teach them what you have to. Don't bother the parents with reasons and
explanations. The school is yours."
"And you'd just as soon do away with it and me, too," I smiled at him.
He looked startled. "The law says school them." He started across the
bridge. "So school them."
I followed meekly, wondering wryly what would happen if I asked Mr.
Diemus why he hated himself and the world he was in and even—oh,
breathe it softly—the children I was to "school."
"You'll stay at my place," he said. "We have an extra room."
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