2
Catherine Marbledale knew this was going to be a bad day, but she had had no idea just how bad before the students began piling out of the school busses at eight o’clock. The busses were late, too. She’d even considered calling a snow day, since there was a sleet storm to provide an excuse for it, but in the end she’d decided to let the day unfold. If you had too many snow days, they tacked on extra school days in June. None of the kids liked that, and she didn’t like it, either. It was bad enough trying to teach students who didn’t want to learn in the first place. It was worse trying to teach them when they felt that their sacred vacation time had been violated. Sometimes she wondered why she was still doing what she was doing. Back about ten years ago or so, she could have moved on to any private school in the country. She could have taught at Exeter and had nothing to worry about but academically gifted, intellectually ambitious kids. She should have done it. She was delusional to think that she was on a mission from God.
Marty Loudan had come out to the foyer as the number 6 bus began to unload, and he was the one who saw it first.
“Is that a meeting at the pole?” he asked. “In this weather?”
The weather was, indeed, very bad. It was much colder than it had been only yesterday, and there was precipitation on and off. Catherine went up to the big plate-glass windows and looked out. There was indeed a meeting at the flagpole, ten or so students standing in a circle holding hands, their heads bowed.
“They’ve got a right to meet at the pole,” she said. “We hashed all that out a couple of years ago.”
“I’m not questioning their rights, I’m questioning their sanity,” Marty said. “They’ve got to be freezing out there. They’re going to be sick.”
Catherine looked out again. Barbie McGuffie was there, with her knee in a cast and a pair of crutches. Most of the rest were what Catherine thought of as “quiet ones.” They came to class. They did their homework. They didn’t cause trouble. They didn’t perform in that spectacular, singular way that made a student stand out. Catherine didn’t think she had had a student with that kind of spark since Nick Frapp. She often wondered what would have happened to him if he’d been born to a different kind of family or in a different kind of place.
“They are going to get sick, if they keep that up,” Marty said. “I know we’re not supposed to break up the meeting until the bell rings, but maybe somebody could go out there and reason with them. You know what kind of trouble we’re going to be in if one of them comes down with pneumonia.”
“All right,” Catherine said.
She wasn’t wearing her coat—she’d already hung it up in her office—but she went outside anyway, pausing for a moment on the sidewalk in front of the front doors while the number 5 bus pulled in and unloaded. The number 5 bus came in from the development, and the children piling off were subdued. As far as Catherine knew, none of the students from the development participated in Meet Me At The Pole. It was yet another way the schools, and the town, had divided itself. Catherine bit her lip, and the bus pulled out, and she was looking at the circle again.
She crossed the drive to the circular grassy median where the flagpole was. The flag had not been raised, because it was not supposed to be raised in seriously bad weather, but the circle of students holding hands with their eyes closed did not seem to care one way or the other. As Catherine drew closer, she could hear the murmuring. They were still on the Lord’s Prayer, which was always the first prayer they did. That made her feel a little better. If they were still on the Lord’s Prayer, they couldn’t have been there long. There was no danger of pneumonia right this second.
She reached the grass and waited. When the murmuring stopped, she touched a student on the arm. It was Tom Radnor, the only kid in Snow Hill these days who was likely to end up an Eagle Scout. Catherine also thought he was probably also headed for the military, maybe with a start in ROTC somewhere small and not very prestigious. He was honest, honorable, likable and morally straight, but he was not—well, Catherine thought, he was not Nick Frapp.
“Tom,” she said. “Come inside. It’s freezing out here. And there’s sleet.”
“We can’t come inside,” Tom said. “We want to pray. School is a prayer-free zone.”
“Tom, you know that’s not true,” Catherine said. “You pray in school all the time. You get a whole table full of people praying at lunch in the cafeteria every day. I see you.”
“And we keep quiet,” Tom said. “Because that’s the deal. We have to keep quiet. We can’t be heard praying out loud. Our faith is something we have to hide. Only secular humanism gets to speak out loud in a public school.”