Torey Hayden - Just Another Kid - Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all

“Quite enough kids, thank you.”

“No, I mean it. Not enough to make a group of. You’ve always had bigger classes before, haven’t you?”

I nodded. “But not much. I had only four when I was teaching at the state hospital, and we made a hell of a group there.” I smiled in what I hoped was a very disarming way. “What I need , Frank, is an aide.”

“Wish I could afford one for you.”

I knew I couldn’t have one, even before I’d said it, but it felt good to put it in words, to say it to someone in charge. “Any volunteers that you know of?”

He shook his head. “Not that I’m aware of. You should ask Carolyn. She seems to keep a secret supply.”

“I’ve tried Carolyn already. No luck.”

We continued to talk. Frank slowly diverted the conversation away from my aide business and on to other things. When a natural pause came into the conversation, he leaned forward. I sensed a change of topic. Clasping his hands together, Frank pressed them pensively against his lips a moment and stared at the orderly stacks of papers on his desk. His eyes rose to meet mine.

“That earlier conversation …” He paused, looked away, looked back. “It’s going to make what I have to say now a little harder.”

I wondered suddenly if I had done something wrong.

Frank smiled. “It’s nothing major. It’s just that … well, how can I say it? You’re getting two more children next week.”

“Two?”

“Yes. Sisters. Five and eight. They’re from Northern Ireland.”

“Oh.”

“Their family’s been embroiled in the trouble going on over there, and now the girls have come to live with relatives to get them out of all that, to give them a new start, that sort of thing. They’ve been up at Washington Elementary since school started, but it isn’t working out. They’re not integrating.”

“I see.”

“The younger one isn’t talking at all, so I thought of you immediately. With your experience in elective mutism, your room seemed the ideal place for them.”

I think I was too stunned to talk. Here I’d come in to complain about being unable to cope with the children I had, and I was ending up with two more.

If Frank sensed my benumbed state, he was ignoring it. “Like I said earlier, I think you need more kids to get organized. Three’s not a group. At least those three aren’t. Besides, it’ll be better for Mariana Gilchrist.” He smiled cheerfully. “This way, you can get the momentum going.”

I didn’t doubt that.

I remember, as a girl, hearing a newscast about the Troubles in Northern Ireland and asking my grandfather to explain the issue to me. When he had, it offended my child’s sensibilities. A war between the Catholics and the Protestants? How could that be? I’d asked him. They wouldn’t even be able to tell themselves apart.

They would and they could and they did. My few years in Wales, another Celtic country still chafing hundreds of years after English conquest, had given me more insight into the issue, into its remarkable complexity, into its lack of resolution. But more than anything, my time there had made me well aware that I still had no understanding of the matter. I remained an American, born and raised in a young country created from immigrant diversity. I had no resources upon which to call when it came to comprehending four-hundred-year-old memories of invaders and usurpers. I had no eye for seeing the differences that they saw among themselves and even less for appreciating their need to see them. As a result, I came back from Wales with nothing more than the knowledge that I didn’t know. The only thing I did have a strong conviction about was the violence—too prevalent and too senseless. It destroyed my sympathies for both causes.

As a consequence, perhaps I was a particularly inappropriate choice of teacher for these two girls. Our community had a strong Irish connection and was openly pro-IRA. The story of the girls preceded them. Long before I ever met them, I heard about them in the grocery store and the gas station, their history being passed on word-of-mouth, like an epic saga. I came to recognize the sad expression and the sorrowful tone of voice that accompanied the telling; the children were made minor celebrities by their suffering.

According to the stories, the girls’ father had been an active IRA man. About eighteen months previously, he was arrested by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in a big sweep-up operation and accused of participating in some very serious acts, including murder. However, he was released shortly afterward. Rumor sprang up that he was, in fact, an informer, although no concrete evidence was presented to substantiate this. Soon, he and his family were being harassed, although no one yet seemed to know who was doing what. Was it the IRA getting back at their own? One of the splinter groups? Or was it the paramilitary wing of one of the Protestant groups exploiting the advantage of having an IRA man identified? Whatever, one night a petrol bomb was thrown through the letter slot in the front door. The house caught fire, and while the father managed to rescue his two daughters, his wife and young son died in the blaze. Within three weeks of the fire, the man was found hanged in his brother’s garage, a suicide. The girls were shunted back and forth among relatives in the large, extended family until finally, in midsummer, they were granted American visas to come and live here with their father’s sister and her husband.

After all this presage, actually meeting Geraldine and Shemona McCulley the Monday morning they arrived in my class was a bit of a disappointment. They were something out of a myth by that time, and I think I was expecting them to look the part. They didn’t. They were two very ordinary little girls with moon-shaped, freckled faces and blue-gray eyes. Shemona, poignantly named after what her mother had believed to be a peace settlement in Israel, but which turned out to be a town victimized by the same kind of terrorism as Belfast, was the younger child. She had longish, rumpled-looking blond hair and grubby knees. Geraldine wore glasses with ghastly pink plastic frames that gave her the look of a fifties housewife. Her dark hair was cut in a short, blunt style that we used to call a Dutch bob when I was little.

Frank and the girls’ aunt brought them in early, before the other children had arrived. The sisters entered meekly, the younger one clutching a well-worn stuffed monkey in one hand and her aunt’s coattail in the other. Mrs. Lonrho indicated the chairs at the table, and both girls sat down grimly, still in their coats, hands folded in their laps. Mrs. Lonrho knelt beside Shemona. She pushed the child’s hair back from her eyes in a gentle gesture. “You be good here, okay? You do as the lady says. She’s here to help you.” Then she rose. She turned to me. “They’re good girls.”

Alone with them, I suggested they take off their coats and then showed them where their hooks were, and their cubbies. Back at the table, they sat side by side. I took out a chair opposite them. I’d made up folders for them to work from. Geraldine reached over and took first her own folder and examined it, and then Shemona’s. The younger girl just sat, the stuffed monkey clutched against her, and did nothing.

“We work a little differently in here than in most classes,” I said. “Everyone is in a different place, so each person has to be responsible for doing the work in her own folder. I come around and help you with it throughout the day, but sometimes I need to be with another child, and then you have to work on your own. Sometimes you’ll get stuck when I’m with someone else, and I won’t be able to come right away to help you. If that happens, you need to skip that part and go on to do something else until I’m free.”