One Child Part 3

She screeched in rage, her sudden change in volume causing everyone to pause. But she remained beside the chair.

"I said sit down, Sheila. You may not get up until you're ready to do math."

For an eternal moment she stormed with so much loudness I felt my head pulse. Then suddenly, startlingly, everything was quiet and she glowered at me. Such obvious hate withered what little self-confidence I had about what I was doing.

"Sit down in that chair, Sheila."

She sat. She turned the chair around so she could watch me, but she sat. Then she resumed screaming. I sighed a deep, private sigh of relief.

Peter looked at me. "You know, Torey, I think we ought to get two marks for good behavior on this one. She's pretty hard to ignore."

I grinned. "Yeah, Peter, I think you're right. This is worth two."

Sheila screamed and yelled all through playtime. The ruckus had been going over an hour and a half by then. She stomped her feet and bounced and rocked the chair. She pulled at her clothes and shook her fists. But she remained in the chair.

By snacktime she was hoa.r.s.e and all that came from the corner was little strangled croaks. But her rage had not diminished and the croaks continued furiously. I stayed inside while Anton took the others out for recess. This increased Sheila's agitation for a few moments and she gasped out a few more shouts and rattled the chair around. But she was tiring. By the end of recess there were no sounds at all coming from the corner. My head was throbbing.

I did not restate the conditions for leaving the corner. I believed she was bright enough to know by that time and I did not want to give her added attention. The other children came in, frosty and red-cheeked from recess, full of tales about playing fox-and-geese in the snow with Anton, who got caught every time. Reading period started without event, all of us settling down to our tasks as if the little lump on the chair in the corner did not exist.

Toward the close of the period I felt a feather-light touch on my shoulder as I worked with Max. I turned to see Sheila standing behind me, her skin mottled with her anxiety, her face puckered with that cautious expression so frequently reflected in her eyes.

"You ready to do math?"

She pursed her lips a moment and then nodded slowly.

"Okay. Let me get Sarah to help Max. You go over and pick up the blocks you threw and get the others out of the cupboard by the sink." I spoke in a casual, offhanded manner as if it were normal to expect her to comply, my tight chest belying the degree of the con. She looked at me carefully but then went and did as I had asked.

Together we sat down on the floor and I spilled out the blocks. "Show me three blocks."

Cautiously she picked out three.

"Show me ten." Again, ten cubes were lined up on the rug before me. "Good girl. You know your numbers well, don't you?"

She looked up anxiously.

"I'm going to make it harder. Count me out twenty-seven." Within seconds twenty-seven blocks appeared.

"Can you add?"

She did not respond.

"Show me how many blocks are two plus two." Four blocks appeared without hesitation. I studied her a moment. "How about three plus five?" She laid out eight cubes.

I could not tell if she actually knew the answers or was solving them as she went along. Yet she clearly understood the mechanics behind adding. I was reluctant to get out pencil and paper, knowing her tendency to destroy paper. I did not want to ruin our fragile, newly won relationship. But I did want to know how she was working the problems. So I decided to switch to subtraction, which would tell me more. "Show me three take away one."

Sheila flipped two blocks out. I smiled. That problem she obviously knew without having to place three blocks out and remove one.

"Do six take away four."

Again two cubes.

"Hey, you're pretty smart. But I've got one for you. I'll get you this time. Show me twelve take away seven."

She looked up at me and the very smallest hint of a smile colored her eyes although it did not touch her lips. She stacked one, two, three, four, five blocks on top of one another. She did it without even looking down at the cubes. The little devil, I thought. Wherever she had been these past few years and whatever she had been doing, she was also learning. Her abilities were better than the average child her age. She gave no indication of even hesitating before laying the blocks out. My heart leaped at the possibility of having a bright child under all that protest and grime.

She did a few more problems for me before I said enough and she could put the blocks away. It was reading period now and I had told her in the morning that she did not have to partic.i.p.ate in this activity. I rose to check on the other kids and Sheila rose with me. Still clutching the box of blocks she wandered after me.

"Honey," I said turning to her, "you can put those away, if you want. You don't have to carry them around."

Sheila had other ideas. The next time I looked up, she was in her favorite chair at the other end of the table with the blocks spilled before her. Busily she was manipulating them, doing something, but I could not tell what.

Lunch subdued her again and she retreated to hunching up in the chair. But when it came time to cook, I coaxed her off quite easily with a banana on a Popsicle stick.

Every Wednesday we made something to eat. I had done it for a variety of reasons. For the more controlled kids, it was a good exercise in math and reading. For everyone it encouraged social activity, sharing, conversation and mutual work. Moreover, cooking was fun. Once a month we repeated a favorite recipe that the kids had chosen and this afternoon it was chocolate bananas, a messy affair involving a banana stuck on a stick that was dipped into chocolate and rolled in topping and then frozen. I had decided not to tackle a new recipe on Sheila's first day out to simplify things, and chocolate bananas were a popular standby. Almost all the kids could manage all the parts by themselves. Even Susannah could do most of it, leaving only Max and Freddie to supervise carefully. Naturally, there was chocolate everywhere and a good share of the toppings were eaten before they found a banana to adhere to, but we all had a marvelous time.

Sheila hesitated to join in, clutching her banana tightly and watching from the sidelines as the others babbled gaily. Yet, she was not resistant and Whitney lured her over to the chocolate sauce when everyone else had finished. Once Sheila started, she became fully absorbed and began trying to roll all four different toppings onto her sticky banana. I watched from the far side of the table. She never spoke but it became apparent she had some definite ideas about how to get the toppings to stick by redipping the banana in the chocolate after each roll in a topping. One by one the other children began pausing to watch her as she experimented with her idea. Voices became hushed as curiosity got the better of them. Rolling the huge, sticky ma.s.s in the last dish of topping, she lifted it up carefully. Her eyes rose to meet mine and slowly a smile spread across her face until it was broad and open, showing the gaps where her bottom teeth were missing.

At the end of each day we had closing exercises which, like morning topic were designed to unite us and prepare us for our time apart. One of the activities was the KolBold's Box. I loved to make up stories to tell the children and had once told them back, at the beginning of the year that kobolds were like fairies, but that they lived in people's houses and watched over them to keep things safe while people slept. Peter had suggested that there might be a kobold in our room who took care of all our things and kept Benny, Charles and Onions, the bad-tempered rabbit, company during the night. This sp.a.w.ned a number of tales about our kobold. So one day I brought a large wooden box and told the kids that this was where the kobold was going to leave messages. I said he had watched all of us at work and had been extremely pleased with how kind and thoughtful everyone in the room was becoming. Therefore, every time he saw a kind deed done, he would leave a message in the box. So during closing exercises each day, I read the notes from the Kobold's Box. After a few days I told them the kobold was getting writer's cramp and needed a helping hand because so many people were being kind. I asked the children to be on the lookout for others doing kind things and to write a note and put it in the box, or if they could not write, to come to me and I would write it for them. Thus, one of our most popular and effective exercises occurred. Every night there were about thirty notes from the kids to each other over perceived kindnesses. This not only encouraged the children to observe positive behaviors in others, but they also knocked each other over being kind in hopes that their names would appear in the box at the end of the day. Some notes were traditional but others showed particular insight praising a child for small but significant steps, sometimes for things I myself had missed. For instance, Sarah was complimented for not using a particularly favorite vulgar phrase during an argument one day, and Freddie was praised for finding a Kleenex instead of blowing his nose on his shirt. I loved opening that box every night because I seldom contributed to it myself except to make sure everybody had at least one note. The thrill of seeing what the children had perceived was so exciting to me. And admittedly, I also enjoyed finding a note for myself in there.

So closing exercises after cooking on Wednesday were particularly fun because for the first time Sheila's name appeared in handwriting other than my own. Sheila who still sat apart from us kept her head down when the kids clapped over her notes. But she accepted the notes readily when I gave them to her.

Anton walked the other children out to their buses after school ended. I settled down at the table to grade papers and to bring some behavioral charts I was keeping on a couple of the kids up to date. Sheila had gone into the bathroom to clean the final dregs of the chocolate banana from her face. She had been in there some time and I had become involved in my work. I heard the toilet flush and she came out. I did not look up because I was completing a graph with marking pen and did not want to make an error. Sheila came over to the table and watched me a moment. Then she came closer, putting her elbows on the table and leaning way over so that we were only inches apart. I raised my eyes to look at her. She examined my face thoughtfully.

"How come them other kids don't go to the bathroom in the toilet?"

"Huh?" I sat back in surprise.

"I say, how come them other kids, them big kids, go in their pants and not in the toilet?"

"Well, that's something they haven't learned yet."

"How come? They do be big kids. Bigger than me."

"Well, they just haven't learned it yet. But we're working on it. Everyone's trying."

She looked down at the graph I was drawing. "They oughta know that by now. My Pa, he'd whip me fierce bad if I do that."

"Everybody's different and n.o.body gets a whipping in here."

She was pensive a long moment. She traced a little circle on the table with her finger. "This here be a crazy cla.s.s, don't it?"

"Not really, Sheila."

"My Pa, he say so. He say I be crazy and they put me in a cla.s.s for crazy kids. He says this here be a crazy kidses cla.s.s."

"Not really."

She frowned a moment. "I don't care much. This here do be as good as that other place I be before. It be as good as anyplace. I don't care if it be a crazy cla.s.s."

I was at a loss for words, not knowing how to deny the obvious. I had not expected to be involved with one of my children in this sort of discussion. Most were either not coherent enough to be that perceptive or not brash enough to say it.

Sheila scratched her head and regarded me thoughtfully. "Do you be crazy?"

I laughed. "I hope not."

"How come you do this?"

"What? Work here? Because I like boys and girls a lot and I think that teaching is fun."

"How come you be with crazy kids?"

"I like it. Being crazy isn't bad. It's just different, that's all."

She shook her head without smiling and straightened up. "I think you do be a crazy person too."

CHAPTER 6.

"SHEILA, COME OVER HERE, PLEASE," I motioned to a chair near where I was sitting. "I have something for you to do." Sheila sat across the room in her favorite chair. Thus far, the morning had gone smoothly. Like the previous two days, I had used the time before school to tell her what would happen that day. She had been cooperative, joining us for morning discussion without being reminded, and then for math. Although she still did not speak, she appeared considerably more relaxed in the cla.s.sroom. Now she watched me from her chair.

"Come here, hon. I want you to do something with me." I beckoned to her. She unfolded from her post hesitantly. I had borrowed a test from the school psychologist called a Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test or more affectionately the PPVT. Although I never cared much for the test, it gave a general idea of a child's functioning verbal IQ quickly and without the child needing to talk. After the previous day's encounter with the math cubes, I was intensely interested to know the level at which the girl was functioning. With such a severe disturbance as Sheila displayed, it was typical for her to be academically behind. Most seriously disturbed children simply do not have the extra energy available to learn. So when she evidenced normal math skill, I became alive with curiosity. I was also excited to think she might have above-average intelligence. I was already beginning to mellow about her placement in my room and wondering about keeping her out of the state hospital. Of all the things she needed right now, I realized that was not one of them.

"You and I are going to do something together." I had had to get up and bring her over to my table. "Here, sit down. Now, I'm going to show you some pictures and say a word. Then I want you to point to the picture that best shows what that word means, okay? Do you understand that?"

She nodded. I showed the first set of four pictures and asked her to point to "whip." What a picture to have to start with, I thought ruefully. She studied the four line drawings, looked up at me, then cautiously pointed to one.

"Good girl," I smiled at her. "That's just exactly right. Point to 'net.' "

As I read each word, Sheila would point to a picture, hesitantly at first, studying each of the four choices carefully, then more freely. After six or seven plates a small smile slipped across her face and she raised her eyes. "This be easy," she whispered hoa.r.s.ely so the others could not hear.

She missed one, "thermos," a word she had probably not encountered in her short, dest.i.tute life. But the next one she did correctly. A child had to miss six out of eight to stop the test, and she gave no indication of reaching that level. We continued. The words were beginning to get harder and she was taking more time to consider the pictures. Occasionally she would miss one, sometimes two. I could see the concern in her eyes; she knew when she missed them, even if I made no comments.

I had stopped making comments some time back, I had suspected she was above average in intelligence, maybe even bright, but she had long since pa.s.sed my expectations. We were moving into a part of the test I had never given before because none of my kids had ever gone that high. We were working with words like "illumination" and "concentric." Sheila was missing words regularly, but never six out of eight. Tension mounted around us. She was obviously trying very hard not to make mistakes and I was touched by her concentration. But we were up into the adolescent end of the test; there were words no normal six-year-old would know. Biting her lips between her teeth, she kept trying. In her lap, I could see her wringing her hands.

"Sweetheart, you're doing a nice job," I said. I hadn't expected her to take the test so seriously and become so involved, to try so hard and to last so long. I really could not believe she knew these words.

She looked up at me. Her eyes were dilated, the soft skin at her throat mottled with nervousness. "I ain't getting them all right."

"Oh, that's okay, honey. You aren't supposed to get them all right. These are words for great big kids and you're not expected to know them all. This is just to see which ones you do know. But it doesn't matter if you get some wrong. I'm proud of you for trying so hard."

Her face puckered and she looked on the verge of tears. "These be fierce hard words now." She looked down at her hands. "Fust they be easy, but these do be terrible hard for me. I don't know them all."

Her tiny voice, her slipping hold on her composure, her small shoulders hunched up under the worn shirt all combined to rip at my heart. Such innocence, even in the worst of these kids. They were all simply little children.

I reached an arm out. "Come here, Sheila." She looked up at me and I leaned over and pulled her up into my lap. Under my hands her little body was tense, the omnipresent odor of old urine floating around us. "Kitten, I know you're trying your best. That's all that counts. I don't really care which ones you get right or wrong, that doesn't matter. Why, these are really hard words. I bet there isn't another boy or girl in here who could do better."

I held her, smoothing back the tangled hair from her face. Waiting for her to relax I looked over the test score sheet, mentally subtracting out the errors. I suspected she was very close to reaching the ceiling of her ability on the test. She was missing three and four at a time. But even so, she had surpa.s.sed any other child I had ever tested.

"How do you know all these words?" I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me.

She shrugged. "I dunno."

"Some of these are big kids' words. I just wondered where you heard them."

"My other teacher, she let me have magazines. Sometimes I read the words in there."

I looked down at her. Her body was still rigid against mine and light as that of a little bird. "Can you read, Sheila?"

She nodded.

"Where'd you learn to do that?"

"I dunno. I always read."

I shook my head in amazement. What sort of changeling did we have here? At first I had been t.i.tillated by the thought of a bright child, because as dear as the others were, most were slow learners and it was always hard to know where the disturbance left off and the r.e.t.a.r.dation began. Some, like Sarah and Peter, were average, but I had seldom had an above-average child. At first, the thought had excited me. But clearly Sheila was not simply above average. She was way beyond the comfortableness that came with easy learning and mastery. Instead, she had been catapulted into that little-known realm of true giftedness. I feared that fact would not ease my job at all.

There was no scale to measure Sheila's score on the PPVT. For her age group the scale stopped at 99, which translated into a 170 IQ. Sheila had a score of 102. I stared at the test sheet. We don't have a concept for that kind of brilliance. Statistics tell us that less than 1 in 10,000 has that high a level of functioning. But what does it mean? It is a deviant score, an abnormality in a society that worships sameness. It would set her apart as surely as her disturbance could.

I looked across the room to where Sheila sat. It was playtime now and Sheila had resumed her favorite chair. I looked at her as she sat, thumb in mouth, limbs wrapped around herself protectively. She was watching Tyler and Sarah, who were playing with dolls in the housekeeping corner. I wondered. Under that long matted hair, behind those wary eyes, what kind of child was there? I now felt more concerned than ever before, because if anything, the situation had become more complicated.

After lunch I showed Anton the test. He shook his head in disbelief. "That can't be right," he muttered. "Where would she learn those words? She just had to guess lucky, Torey. No kid in the migrant camp is going to know those kinds of words."

I could not believe it myself. So I put in a call to Allan, our school psychologist. He was out of the office but I left a message with his secretary saying I had a child that I wanted tested.

One thing from the testing situation puzzled me. As Sheila spoke to me more, it became increasingly apparent that she used a highly idiosyncratic dialect. I hadn't heard her enough to pick out the unusual features precisely, but the grammar was bizarre. Most of the migrant camp children came from Spanish-speaking homes and often their command of English vocabulary was below age-level but within normal limits grammatically. There was no other major speech variation in the locality. Sheila was not from a Spanish-speaking home; the IQ test substantiated that there was nothing wrong at all with her vocabulary. I could not fathom why she spoke so oddly. To me her dialect almost sounded like the inner-city blacks I had worked with in Cleveland. But Sheila was not black and our small Iowa farming community was far from inner-city Cleveland. Perhaps it was a family speech pattern. I decided I would have to investigate because the phenomenon left me so perplexed.

The remainder of the day went uneventfully. I still made minimal requirements of Sheila. I wanted to give her ample time to adjust to us without taxing the other kids too much. After the first tumultuous days, this was a welcome relief. She moved willingly with us, but partic.i.p.ated infrequently and only when coaxed. She would not talk to the other children or to Whitney. In most instances she would not speak to Anton or me unless we were quite isolated. Yet, she was peaceful, sitting in her chair when given the opportunity and watching us with guarded interest.

The next major step that had to be taken with Sheila concerned her hygiene. Every day she arrived in the same denim overalls and boy's T-shirt. Apparently, the clothes had never been washed from the first day she wore them and she reeked of urine. I suspected she wet the bed and dressed each morning without washing. Consequently, she was extremely unpleasant to be near for any length of time. Both Anton and I were used to the strong odors of unchanged pants, since Max, Freddie, and Susannah were all not reliably toilet trained. But Sheila was even stronger than we were accustomed to. Moreover, the plain everyday grime was crusted over her face and arms. When I had sent her in to wash off the chocolate from cooking the day before, there were lines on her forearms indicating how high she had washed. Those same lines were visible today. She had long hair that went halfway down her back in tangled strands. I had checked the first day for lice or mites. We had struggled twice with lice already and I was not game for another encounter. The second time I had ended up catching them myself and had been furious. Sheila did not appear to have any, although she did have impetigo around her mouth, which I hoped none of the other children would catch.

A school nurse came once a week for an afternoon. I had tried to send my children down. Most of them had had impetigo or rat bites or other evils of poverty. But I ended up getting the salve and Kwell shampoo from the nurse and taking care of the kids myself, simply because once a week on Thursday afternoons was not often enough to tend to all the problems.

I waited until all the children had left at the end of the day to tackle Sheila's hygienic needs. She had remained sitting in her chair while the others had gotten ready to go home. She was still sitting when I went to the cupboard and got out the combs and brushes I kept there. The night before I had stopped at the drugstore and bought a little package of hair clips.

"Sheila, come here," I said. "I got something for you."

She rose and came over. Her brow was furrowed with wary interest. I handed her the sack. For a moment she just held it, looking at me quizzically. But I urged her to open it and she did. Taking the clips out she looked at them and then at me. Her forehead was still wrinkled in puzzlement.

"They're for you, sweetheart. I thought we could comb your hair out nice and put clips in it. Like I've got in mine." I showed her my hair.

She fingered the clips carefully through the plastic wrapping. With a frown she regarded me. "How come you do this?"

"Do what?"