Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

Samuel ran to the window, wriggling between taller boys to get a view. There were no sirens or flashing lights. The ambulance looked almost abandoned sitting in the empty gravel car park, its back doors hanging open, its headlights on though the sun had already peeked over the lip of the field.

“’Bout time,” some little second-former said. “He was bloody ancient.”

“Younger than your mother’s twat, Krishorn.”

Silence fell as two men dressed in navy blue jackets and trousers emerged from the portico with a stretcher held between them, on it a long mound of a shape covered over with a sheet, the body too wide for the conveyance, arms rolled out to the side, hands visible. Bennet’s weeping could be heard from the back of the room. The lead man stepped up into the van and the stretcher disappeared from sight.

“No deus ex machina for Jevins, hey? Plot over.” Giles stared at the ambulance with a wistful look, as if he were staring at his parents’ car pulling out of the drive. Samuel gripped the cool stone of the window frame, the sounds around him seeming to fade from his ears.

At breakfast, the headmaster stood up from the head table and said he had a sad bit of news. Mr. Jevins had died of a heart attack the previous evening. “He served this school for forty-two years and was the finest teacher of Latin I have ever known.” At this, a few snickers. With reproving emphasis, the headmaster went on, “And just so as there won’t be any idle talk on the subject, it was Mrs. Pebbly who found Mr. Jevins at rest in his rooms this morning. There will be a service in chapel Monday at four. Your parents are being notified. Out of respect for Mr. Jevins I think it fitting we eat the remainder of our breakfast in silence.” And with that he sat down.

THAT AFTERNOON, SAMUEL tried watching Giles and a few others play a game of French cricket out by the field house, but his gaze kept wandering up to the billowing white clouds. The sight of the stretcher, the clean white sheet, the open palms. It had stilled a part of Samuel’s mind he’d never realized had been moving. A tiny ball in the middle of his brain had spun to a halt. It scared him. He’d always thought fear would be something fast, a thing that pushed you forward. Up in the dorm that morning after breakfast, he’d still hoped for an explanation of his knowing, a conversation between masters he’d overheard without realizing, some comment made at supper. But when the headmaster had described what happened, the timing of it, all of a sudden Samuel saw the food on his plate and the boys opposite him and the whole dining hall as if through the wrong end of a telescope. It was as though the everyday world, all that was familiar to him, had been revealed as a tiny, crowded dwelling, full of noise and chatter. A house on an empty plain.

Beyond its walls a vast landscape.

The barely noticeable pace of the clouds’ approach across the sky seemed like evidence of this hidden enormity, his classmates’ frantic motions on the pitch nothing but the buzzing of insects against the window of an attic room.

Sitting there on the playing fields, he longed more ardently than he ever had to be with Trevor, hanging out in his room, watching him at his desk fiddling with his computer, talking on and on about computer things, the books he’d ordered by mail open beside him, his brother not listening to half of whatever Samuel said, but nodding. His brother who’d never seemed happy at his own school, who never seemed to make friends. In that room with Trevor, he might still be safe.

By the time his parents’ Peugeot turned into the car park at ten to four on the Monday, it seemed he hadn’t spoken to another person in years. He ran to the car. His mother in her black dress and handbag had barely risen from the passenger’s seat when he began, “Mum, I knew, I knew before everyone else, before they told us, I knew they’d have to get another teacher and it was right when it happened, just after seven, I knew he was dead before anyone.”

He burst into tears, pressing his face against his mother’s body, hugging her. Her hands came down to rub his back, arms cradling his head.

“All right, dear, it’s all right.”

“But I knew,” he mumbled into her dress. “Why? Why?”

Her hands came to a stop and she pressed him harder against her.

“It’s okay now, it’ll be all right… Of course you didn’t know, dear. He was a good teacher… you liked him. It’s hard, that’s all.”

Samuel looked up into her face. She had long black hair a bit ruffled now in the breeze. She never usually wore makeup but today she’d put on pale lipstick, the look in her eyes the look she had when he got sick. He wanted to comfort her, to explain.

“Mum, I knew on Friday. Mrs. Pebbly didn’t find him till Saturday morning.”

She smiled weakly, looking down at the gravel.

“You remember when Granny died,” his father said across the top of the car, his voice weirdly loud. He was staring intently at Samuel, his shirt and tie done tightly up against his throat. “You remember we were all sad then. You’re sad now.

You see? And sometimes you think things when you’re sad.

It’s natural.”

“But it was Friday. I was playing—”

His father turned his head away abruptly, glancing across the field. He closed his mouth and swallowed, his eyes squinting into the distance, lips turning down into a kind of grimace, as if he were forcing something nasty tasting down his throat.

“Come on,” he said to Samuel’s mother, turning around and heading across the lot. “We’ll be late.”

In the chapel, the headmaster recounted Mr. Jevins’s life, his days in the army, a military cross, teaching in Rhodesia, the years of service to Saint Gilbert’s. His elderly sister said a few words. The ceremony ended with a recorded playing of Jevins’s favorite church music, Allegri’s Miserere. The boarders all knew it, having heard the recording the third Sunday of every month, when the old man had doubled as minister. Each time he played the song, he reminded them that the Latin sung was Psalm Fifty-one, which he would recite to them afterward in English. Samuel remembered vividly him standing on the step of the altar in his gown, the only master left who wore one. He would pause in his reading before the last line of the penultimate verse, his voice dropping so low it seemed as if he were talking to himself: The sacrifice accept-able to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

No one translated for the audience after the singing ended.

Boys and their parents filed from the chapel into the courtyard. The women from the kitchen removed cling wrap from platters of sandwiches and began pouring the tea.

MR. JEVINS HAD died only a month into the school year.

The headmaster conducted the Latin classes until Christmas, doing a poor job of hiding his shock at how little the students had been taught. After the holiday, there was a new man, younger than Kinnet he looked, and not easily fooled.

By the time Samuel came home for the summer, his parents appeared to have forgotten his teacher’s death, as though it were just another term-time event, a cricket match won or lost. He spent a week lying around the house, then at last Trevor returned.

He was sixteen now, five years older than Samuel. He seemed taller and thinner than he had at Christmas, his acne a bit worse. Usually when they returned from school they would spend at least a few hours rigging traps for the cat, books pulled off tables by strings soaked in tuna water or obstacle courses of cosmetics items taken from their mother’s cupboard and arranged on the stairs. But each holiday Trevor seemed less interested and this time he didn’t want to do it at all.