Sorry about cramming these all in together like this, but things are really crazy here with Thanksgiving and ML having an accident and totaling her car. :-(
Two chapters, VERY FIRST DRAFTY!
Chapter 6: A Child in
the Forest
Rune
was glad that Dr. McHaggerty had prepared her for the film. He’d taken her to see two other films
at Manlius during her senior year.
They had been foreign films with subtitles, but very well made. This one was imperfect. But for Rune, it was riveting. For some reason that she couldn’t
understand, she identified with each the three main characters. The movie began with a close-up of the
child’s face. He was a boy about
ten years old, with blond hair, blue eyes, apple round-rosy red cheeks. He was mildly autistic, but not a
head-banger. He spoke only rarely.
He was in a special education class with a teacher who looked like she
was a young student herself. The boy’s name was Adam.
The teacher’s name was Eva. Miss Willoughby. There were only six children in the
class. There were scenes in the
classroom of Miss Willoughby reading Little
House on the Prairie to the children and asking them questions. Adam seemed unable to understand,
comprehend, or answer. He stared
out the window at the water. The
camera zoomed to the window and out, showing a line of posts in the water, each
with a cormorant at the top, wings spread, drying its feathers. Adam’s eyes were riveted on the
cormorants, except when another bird flew by.
The
other children attended Miss Willoughby and her reading and questions. They
obviously had various difficulties understanding and answering, but they were
engaged and interested. Adam continued to stare out the window, his expressing
unchanging even when Miss Willoughby directly spoke to him or asked him a
question. Even if she cupped his
face gently in her hands, Adam started out the window past her face.
A
scene showed the school psychologist speaking with Miss Willoughby, saying not
to expect much from Adam, that he may be brain damaged in addition to being
autistic. Her face was serious and
sympathetic.
Dr.
McHaggerty slipped his arm over the back of Rune’s chair. He had done this the other times he had
taken her to the movies, and Rune ignored it. The scene had shifted in the movie to the six kids
disembarking from a miniature school bus under the careful guidance of Miss
Willoughby.
The camera followed the six children and their teacher into the nature center
where they were told a naturalist would join them soon. They paraded into
the nature store and were looking around when a naturalist, dressed all in
green, came into the store.
"Where is the teacher?" she asked. The students laughed and
pointed at Miss Willoughby, who was barely taller than they were, a small
slight woman with a young face.
Dr. McHaggerty's arm dropped from the back of the chair to rest lightly on
Rune's shoulders. It distracted her from the movie, and she missed what
the naturalist was saying to the teacher. She decided to ignore the arm,
but it made her uncomfortable. McHaggerty was such an incredibly kind and
interesting man, and she thought so highly of him, but he was making her
nervous.
In the next scene, the naturalist had the children feeling the bark of a beech
tree. The camera zoomed in on Adam's face. He was engaged. Rune
thought of her experiences with school groups as a naturalist. She did a
six-week project at Beaver Lake Nature Center, in Baldwinsville under Dr. Anson
Weston. After training for three weeks, she'd led school groups for three
weeks. She'd have loved to have gotten a job there, at Beaver Lake.
But all the jobs were taken and there were so many other well-trained adults,
to say nothing of students, who wanted the nonexistent job.
The naturalist, whose name Rune had missed, spoke to Adam, telling him the name
of the tree and that it had edible nuts. Miss Willoughby whispered to the
Naturalist that Adam wasn't very bright. The naturalist searched the
ground for beechnuts, and collected several. She gave each of the kids a
prickly little nut, and showed them how to open it. Adam got his open
first. The naturalist then showed him how to open the little pyramid-shaped
nut husks inside, and told him he could eat the tiny nut meats.
She told the group that squirrels, bears, deer and other animals depended on beechnut
and other nuts, called "mast," for food and that the number of babies
the animals had depended on the size of the nut harvest. She watched the
faces of the children, and when a few of them lost interest in what she was
telling them, she moved on.
"Miss Moore, Miss Moore," one of the girls in the class said, tugging
on the naturalist's green skirt. Okay, Rune thought, the Naturalist is
Miss Moore. She was tall and slender with long brown braids and looked
like a stumpy, like one of them. Except for that doofy uniform, of
course, that was really out there.
As the movie progressed, Adam became more and more engaged in things Miss Moore
was showing them. Miss Willoughby was entranced too. She began
asking more questions, and so did Adam. His questions were intelligent
and articulate, and one couldn't help but remember what Miss Willoughby had
said about him. Harumph!
thought Rune.
At that moment, McHaggerty's hand curled around Rune's shoulder and
squeezed. That was okay, sort of, but it lingered there. After a
few minutes of wondering what to do, Rune sat forward. When the arm
followed her forward, she got up and went off as if to go the bathroom. But rather
than going to the bathroom, since she didn’t' have to go and didn't want to
miss the movie, she sat a few rows farther back for what seemed like a
reasonable bathroom time and returned to her seat.
McHaggerty had his hands in his lap and kept them there for a while, and then,
making a big show of stretching, he gently put his arm on the back of her seat
again. She moved forward on the seat so that the arm could not
"accidentally" "fall" onto her shoulder. She was
worrying about what he was doing. He had done similar stuff two years
ago, but somehow it had seemed more innocent then. For some reason, he was
skeeving her out tonight.
Rune had just started enjoying the movie again, with Adam behaving less and
less like an autistic child, and more and more like a little genius, when
McHaggerty laid a hand on her knee. Rune got up and moved two seats
away. The theater was NOT crowded.
In the movie, Nicole Moore takes the kids and Miss Willoughby camping on the
nature Center grounds. They write and illustrate their own field guides
and books. The same kids labeled special ed. were blossoming into lively
joyous children.
McHaggerty moved over next to Rune. He kept his hands and arms in his
lap, but now just his presence was giving her the creeps.
The movie showed the kids exploring sculptures of animals made of metal,
growing wildcats and cougars, deer and caribou and moose. Then it showed
the kids making their own animals out of clay. They were inside an
open-sided pavilion and it was raining outside. Adam was using a field guide
and some other references to design a cormorant with its wings outstretched to
dry. He used sticks to hold the heavy wet clay feather, which he shaped
one by one with a butter knife and a pencil. The finished bird looked
amazingly real for the work of a ten-year-old boy.
The movie showed a scene in the old classroom. It was winter and Adam was
staring out the window watching the snow fall. Miss Willowby showed a
side of their tents pitched on a hill in the woods with the bay below.
She called Adam's name, and he turned from the window and smiled. "I
like nature," he said, "I like the beech trees and the cabbage butterflies.
And I like herons and cormorants. He took his drawings from his desk and
held them up, one by one." Wonderful drawings of plants and animals.
There was a flashback to Miss Willoughby talking to the psychiatrist, who was
telling her not to get her hopes up about Adam, and to Miss Willoughby telling
Miss Moore that Adam was a hopeless cae. Then a scene of Adam skipping
through the forest with binoculars, stopping to look at woodpeckers and nut
hatches, a scene of him leading a group of children up over snowy hills with
his rosy cheeks all aglow and the movie ended.
Rune and Dr. McHaggerty sat and watched the credits. They were interested
in knowing more about the movie, its makers and shakers.
Then they went back to the Library for an after movie snack of sushi and Saki,
and talked about the movie. Rune was excited about it, just as McHaggerty
expected, and he smiled indulgently as she talked about the high points and low
points, about the filming, about the nature center, the teacher and the
naturalist.
"I wish I could help people like that. Nicole Moore didn't teach
Adam to love nature: he already loved nature. But she brought out the
best in him and helped him find what he wanted and become more himself. I
think she also really helped Eva Willoughby learn to love nature and become a
better teacher. And of course, she helped the other kids learn to love
nature too.
"It was a great movie, thanks for taking me to see it. I hope I'll
be like Nicole Moore some time, when I grow up."
"You're already a lot like Nicole Moore," Dr. McHaggerty said, taking
her hand, squeezing it, and releasing it.
When they got to her house, Rune thanked Dr. McHaggerty again and he leaned to
give her a kiss. Rune turned her head away and the kiss landed on the
side of he mouth and on her cheek. She ran inside and watched out the
window as he drove away. Then she wiped her mouth and cheek with her hand
and wiped her hand on her pants.
Chapter 7: Two
visits from Jody
Rune
sat in her office working on her homework for Dr. () on her computer. She
had the word program up and was writing a project proposal. On another
screen, which she flipped out of sight whenever she heard footsteps, was her
research on the Cornell poisoning incident 13 years ago. Whenever she
needed a break from her ()-research, instead of checking her email or facebook,
she looked at her growing list of links to and information about the incident.
She also had collected links to poisonous mushrooms and therapies for
mushroom poisoning. While she was at it, she added links to Psilocybin
mushrooms, thinking of a projects course related to her research with Dr. Ned
Tedeschki. She could still add this as a projects course and get credit
for all this good research she was doing, and surely she could find a way to
link it all to her overall objectives.
On
her desk, she had a cup of mint tea, which she sipped from time to time, and
whenever it got low, she warmed it up in the Entomology microwave.
At
one point, feeling the need to stretch her legs, Rune got up and took the top
off the terrarium of giant Malagasi hissing cockroaches, took out one of the
largest specimens, and stroked it gently, listening to it hiss and feeling the
little sharp spikes of its feet pinch her fingers. The graduate student
who had this office before her was an entomology student, which was
appropriate, since this was the entomology floor, and had raised hissing
cockroaches as pets. He hadn't taken them with him when he left.
Dr. McHaggerty, when he installed her in the entomology floor office, had
said she could turn the cockroaches in to Dr. Simeone if she didn't want them
in there, but Rune liked them and kind of enjoyed the horror of most of her
friends when they came to visit and she took out one of huge cockroaches and
petted it lovingly. She tossed in some monkey chow and got to back to
work.
Later,
she checked the message-board on her door. Several people had left her
notes, and there were also a few folded ones in the basket she left for longer
notes. (Save this for when a real novel-related message needs to be
left.)
Rune
was researching ways of presenting nature to children. Her current paper
was on the topic of teaching children about trees. Much of the research
was about setting goals, meeting syllabus requirements, imparting information
and testing knowledge gained. Rune wanted to see more about awakening a
sense of wonder, of love for nature, the earth and the outdoors.
She
was feeling annoyed at the whole attitude of the teaching community and
wondered if she was going into the right field. She got up and stomped
angrily around the room thinking bad thoughts about the education system and
finally noticed that her Vibram soles were leaving clops of dirt on her
recently mopped floor. The janitor was a paragon of patience, but Rune
didn't want to be the one to try him, so she went into Larry's office looking
for a broom and dustpan. Larry was sitting at one of his computer screens
and got up to greet her. She gave him a hug, and over his shoulder
noticed a screen that looked like her list of links to events surrounding the
poisoning of the four Cornell professors thirteen years ago.
Rune
tightened her hug and gave Larry a kiss on the cheek. For a moment, she
laughed to herself, wondering if he found her kiss as upsetting as she found
McHaggerty's. "Ahem!" she said, loudly, in his left ear, which
was next to her mouth. He jumped, and then twitched as he seemed to
realize what she was looking at.
"Yes,
that is your computer screen up on mine. I was doing some routine maintenance
and, as you know or should know, I have access to everyone's computers. I
download new programs, install anti-virus software, clean out people's deleted
mail, and perform other routine tasks. I don't normally make a
habit of spying on people, I just now happened upon this, and I must say, I'm a
little . . . um . . . disappointed and um . . . worried."
Rune
still had her arms around him. She hugged him, and without letting go
entirely, holding him now by the shoulders, she leaned back to look into his
face.
"Larry,
you told me to stop asking questions. I'm not asking questions any
more," Except a few to Dr.
McHaggerty, she thought to herself.
"I
told you, Rune," Larry said, "to drop it. Leave it. Forget
it." And saying that, he leaned back toward her and planted an
unexpected but prim and sober kiss right on her lips. Rune kissed him
back. She felt utterly safe kissing him.
"Larry,
I love you," she said.
"I
love you, too," he said, and they both laughed, an easy relaxed laugh.
Rune thought of McHaggerty and wished she felt that way with him.
She took the broom and dustpan into her office and cleaned the floor,
brought back the broom and went back to work. Larry went by a few minutes
later pushing a cart of equipment. Rune didn't bother looking to see what
equipment it was. She was reading an article about (that guy who has kids
grokking nature--Campbell?) and for the first time since she started work that
morning, she smiled.
No
one had stopped by to invite her to the early lunch the TA's had to eat in
order to be ready for the ride to the field trip on the green bus. She
got out a can of sardines and an apple from her emergency food stash drawers,
scarfed down a quick lunch, and returned to reading about Joseph Bharat Cornell.
She downloaded his book, Sharing Nature with Children, and plunged into reading
it, with an occasional eye on the clock.
Sometime
later, she heard footsteps and looked up to see Dr. McHaggerty amble in with
Jody on his arm. Jody looked half-crocked. She was smiling stupidly
with her eyes slitted, reeling around, and leaning leaning on McHaggerty.
McHaggerty seemed slightly tipsy himself, which seemed strange, since the
field trip was due to collect at the buses in about twenty minutes.
"We
thought we'd stop in and see you," McHaggerty said, his voice slightly
slurred. "We've been having such a good time, and we thought it was
a real shame you were so straight-laced. "Too bad you probably
wouldn't want to join us," he said, smiling crookedly. Then, taking
Jody firmly by the arm, he steered her back out of the room.
Rune
returned to her reading, feeling discomfited. Then she got up, washed her
hands, and sat back down again. She read for ten more minutes, without
seeing anything she was reading, and got up and went down to the waiting buses.
McHaggerty was not there. He'd sent word to go ahead without him,
he's be along. Rune wanted to wash her hands again.
Rune
sat with Bart, and after they'd been riding about ten minutes, talking about
essentially nothing, she blurted out what she had just seen.
"Those
two are getting it on," Bart said. "They were last year, too,
while you were gone."
"Jody
was with me."
"Only
during the summer; she was here all school year."
"Oh
yeah. That's right, the Mexico thing was during the summer, I forgot. I
wasn't thinking."
"It's
a little bit icky," Rune said with disgust. "My Dad was nine
years older than my Mom. But McHaggerty's married and Elizabeth's really
nice and he's . . . what, twenty three years older than she is? It's
gross, I'm sorry."
"I
know," Bart said, "We all thought so last year."
"Everyone
knew?"
"They
weren't very discreet about it--it's almost as if they were each showing the
other off like some prize."
"Gross,"
Rune repeated. "I can't believe that Jody would want to screw
someone that much older than she is--she's so pretty--she could have
anyone."
"McHaggerty
has status. Everyone knows that. Girls like that."
"I
don't," Rune said, with disgust.
Then,
lowering her voice even farther, she told Bart about her research about the
mushroom poisonings of the Cornell professors and about how Larry Thompson had
it up on his screen in his workroom. "He said it was an accident,
that he wasn't spying on me, but I'm not sure if I believe him."
"You
like Larry."
"I
like him a lot. I also like Dr McHaggerty. This is all so confusing
and upsetting. I don't know what to think." She paused a long
moment, and then added, "Bart, he made a pass at me last night. I'm
sort of afraid of him now."
"What
do you mean, he made a pass at you?"
Run
told him about dinner and the movies and the arm and the kiss.
"I
wonder if you should tell someone," Bart said.
"I'm
telling you."
"No,
I mean, like a Dean of students or a counselor or something."
"I
don't want to get him in trouble."
"Maybe
he needs to be gotten in trouble."
After
the field trip, Rune was sitting in her office with her head in her hands
feeling a little depressed, when she heard footsteps and looked up. It was Jody, alone, looking both more
alert and somewhat sheepish.
“You
probably think I am a complete loser!” She exclaimed.
“What do you mean?”
“Because
I’m screwing McHaggerty. He
seduced me, but I admit, I sort of allowed it it—it seemed exciting at the
time, last year. Now it’s just—well—gross. I feel ashamed and embarrassed, but I
don’t know how to get out of it.”
“Jody,
he’s been coming on to me.”
“I
know, he old me.”
“He
told you?”
“He
wants to do a ménage a trios.”
“And
do you want to?”
“I
don’t want to do anything with him, but I don’t know how to extricate myself. He got me my job, for one thing.”
“I
do not envy you. I have no
answers. I’d say, just say no, but
that’s very hard for me, and I can’t give you advice that I can’t follow
myself.”
