Staggerford Read online

  PRAISE FOR JON HASSLER’S

  STAGGERFORD

  “Very entertaining … The focus … is Miles Pruitt, Staggerford High School’s senior English teacher.… One of the most likable protagonists of modern fiction.”

  The Pittsburgh Press

  “Staggerford, Minnesota, is a town out of control. It is as weird and convoluted as any lover of comic fiction could wish, and every oddity of the town reaches into Miles Pruitt’s classroom.… Mr. Hassler has produced wonderful characters.… The book would make a wonderful movie.”

  Boston Herald American

  “Staggerford surprises the reader with its humor, its tension, and its unusual revelations of the uncommon aspects of commonplace life. The author immerses his audience in the excitements of his townspeople.… A remarkable first novel.”

  The Virginia Quarterly Review

  “A thoroughly convincing X-ray vision of small-town life … Jon Hassler has created a thoroughly satisfying piece of fiction, one that is simultaneously so sincere, so true, so honest with itself and so very, very funny that a reader often has to wipe the tears out of the corners of his eyes before he can—as he must—read on.”

  The Houston Post

  “Staggerford is one week in the life of Miles Pruitt and an absorbing week it is.… A delightfully humorous novel though the humor is laced with acid. Hassler writes with grace and knowledge of cafeteria lunches, student compositions and the everlasting entanglements of small-town life.… A small-town novel in the best American tradition. It explores not only life in such a town but the absurdity of human behavior.… A fine novel and decidedly worth reading.”

  Omaha Midlands Business Journal

  “Not only a very good storyteller, but also a compassionate man.”

  The Seattle Time Magazine

  “He writes as one who has tasted of life’s foibles and ironies and missed none of their meaning.… A memorable first novel … A neat blend of humor and pathos … Hassler has a keen ear for life’s phoniness and excesses, and for man’s inappropriate responses to life’s revelations.”

  Wilmington Sunday News Journal

  “Hassler enters that rare world of Cheever, Updike, de Vries and Salinger, wherein the ordinary becomes extraordinary.”

  Book and Authors

  “Wonderfully good … A gem of fiction … The portraits are written sharply, but with essential kindness. Hassler’s style is finished and perfect. He shows a wry perception of human foibles and failed expectations but he is never cruel or bitter.’ ”

  Buffalo Evening News

  “These ordinary people, who come alive and interesting through Hassler’s astute handling, provide what turns out to be a thrilling climax to a thoroughly good novel.”

  The Raleigh News and Observer

  “Extraordinarily good … The humor is alive and the dialogue outstanding in its accuracy.”

  Savannah News Press Sunday Magazine

  “The most winning ambiance of any novel I’ve seen in ages. It’s got other things too: good characters, plot that moves, a vision that carries the reader over the pain he faces.…But most of all it has a feeling that charms. Like a hazy fall day when there’s time to look around and things aren’t gouged by shadows or blaring with light. It’s warm and dry, and the even light gets into everything.”

  The Virginian-Pilot

  By Jon Hassler

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group:

  STAGGERFORD

  SIMON’S NIGHT

  THE LOVE HUNTER

  A GREEN JOURNEY

  GRAND OPENING

  NORTH OF HOPE

  DEAR JAMES

  Young Adult Novels

  FOUR MILES TO PINECONE

  JEMMY

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1974, 1977 by Jon Hassler

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. A portion of this nove! first appeared in the South Dakota Review and McCall’s.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-57757

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77960-1

  v3.1

  For my mother and father

  God love them

  Oh, why is it that life is for some an exquisite privilege and others must pay for their seats at the play with a ransom of cholers, infections and nightmares?

  JOHN CHEEVER

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Friday: October 30

  Saturday: October 31

  Sunday: November 1

  Monday: November 2

  Tuesday: November 3

  Wednesday: November 4

  Thursday: November 5

  Friday: November 6

  Saturday: November 7

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  FRIDAY

  OCTOBER 30

  FIRST HOUR, MILES YAWNED.

  It seemed to Miles that while the faces changed from year to year, the personality of a first-hour class never varied. It was a tractable class. Most of the thirty students hadn’t been out of bed for more than half an hour and they weren’t yet sharp or restless. Like Miles, they were sleepy. Moreover, they were slow-witted. The Staggerford High School band rehearsed during first hour, and the better students for some reason were inevitably drawn to band. Each morning as the band marched across the street to the football field, high-stepping and tooting in preparation for its halftime formations, these thirty students were left in the classroom to puzzle over the formations of the compound sentence or the working parts of the business letter. Love poems by Rod McKuen were beyond them. To say that all nonmusicians were dull would have been unwarranted, and Miles would not have said it. What he would have said, however, was that Staggerford’s nonmusicians were dull. But it was an agreeable, easygoing sort of dullness that would never lead to trouble; and since Miles himself was no ball of fire at eight in the morning, he and these thirty seniors moved comfortably through the weeks together, rubbing the sleep from their eyes.

  Miles thought of Lee Fremling, who sat facing him in the front row, as the emblem of first hour. Lee Fremling was heavy, good-natured, and lethargic. He was the son of Albert Fremling, editor of the Staggerford Weekly and the wildest father a boy could possibly have. But none of this wildness seemed to have been handed down to Lee. Albert Fremling was an alcoholic with a passion for driving on Friday nights as fast as he could go. One Friday last spring Albeit Fremling had swerved to miss a tree and smashed, doing eighty-five, into a small house at the edge of town. At the time, fortunately, the widow who lived in the house was in the hospital with a broken hip (she had fallen from the bottom rung of a stepladder while taking off storm windows) and so was spared being run over in bed, but the editor was left with a permanently crippled left arm and a scarred forehead. Mrs. Fremling could recall the names of at least seventy-five people who had tried over the years to cure her husband of his drinking and his suicidal driving—the names of highway patrolmen, psychiatrists, businessmen, neighbors, jailers, and the pastors of three Lutheran churches—all to no avail. By nightfall on Fridays the Staggerford Weekly was out on the street, and that was when its editor drank himself cockeyed and got into his red Pontiac and flew off down the highway to Berrington or crisscrossed the prairie south of the river, his headlights sailing over the dirt road
s and lighting up, when he doubled back, the clouds of his own dust. People sitting in their houses with their windows open could hear the squeal of the editor’s tires as he left town, and sometimes they could hear, shouted from his car, his pledge never to return; but he never traveled beyond the limits of Berrington County and he always came home before morning, sometimes on bail, often sick, and always profoundly depressed.

  How then (Miles wondered) could there have come from Albeit Fremling’s house such a son as Lee—slow and congenial and even-tempered? Lee must have been what his mother and grandmother had made him. Mrs. Fremling was a small, cool woman, and Mrs. Fremling’s mother who lived with them, was just like her. These two women—neat and efficient, smart and silent—kept the house and yard and newspaper office and Lee (all except the editor himself) orderly. But in sheltering Lee from the grossness of his father, it seemed to Miles that these two women had prolonged in him the illusions of childhood, and had delayed the coming on of worldly wisdom. Lee’s eyes were full of innocence. On the football field, despite his size, he was pushed around a good deal. He was large like his father, but this largeness was not, like his father’s, the bulk of self-indulgence. It was baby fat.

  Second hour, Miles was off balance.

  The issue hadn’t been settled yet, but he suspected that second-hour English was out of his control. It was a rowdy class—a mixture of athletes, flirts, musicians, and show-offs. The band was back indoors now, full of fresh air and smart remarks, and the sun was up over the administrative wing across the courtyard, filling Miles’s classroom with intense light and shadow. Unable to channel all this nine-o’clock pep where he wanted it to go, Miles had to spend most of second hour patrolling the aisles and twirling about on his toes to see the antics going on behind his back.

  Among the students who never sat still were Roxie Booth and Jeff Norquist. In the faculty lunchroom it was said that if something wasn’t done about Roxie Booth, she would be the death this year of old Ray Smith, who kept trying to teach history long past his time. At the end of the day Ray Smith’s suits were covered with chalk dust where Roxie had clapped erasers on him. Roxie was fat and slung with gold and silver chains from the dimestore. She wore rings on eight of her fingers. She could barely read, but she remembered in detail all the classic stories of world literature that had been made into movies. She was a predator, smiling, batting her eyes, and continually testing Miles’s tolerance for suggestive remarks. She exposed more of her skin than was modest. Her father, a career man in the army, had moved his children through seventeen schools in fifteen states, and there was nothing about school curriculum, army lore, or the dark side of human nature that Roxie did not know. She was also nervous and she sometimes broke out in a talking jag. The stories she told were mostly those gathered up in camps where her father had been stationed, and she dumped them now, like garbage, in the middle of Berrington County—five hundred square miles of farmland in the center of Minnesota, where people were unaccustomed to hearing about such things as the corporal who stood at a bar and ate, on a bet, a beer bottle.

  “The bartender said it couldn’t be done and he gave the corporal a hammer and the corporal pounded the beer bottle to dust on the bar,” said Roxie Booth, in relation to nothing that had gone before in English class. “He ate only a handful of it because ground glass is even harder to eat than sand, and he got terrible pains all over his guts and everything, and they took him to the base hospital, where he lived through the night bleeding from just about every opening it’s possible to bleed from on the human body, and then he died in the morning. It was about nine thirty in the morning that he died, the same time it is now, and that’s why I mention it.” Roxie was the youngest student in the senior class, having recently turned sixteen, but on mornings after dates her face looked puffly and forty.

  Jeff Norquist was the faculty’s worst affliction this year. Yesterday during second hour, Jeff had carried his literature text to the front of the room, torn it in two, and dropped it into the wastebasket. Miles, stifling his anger, had said, “That will be four dollars and eighty cents.” Jeff laid a five spot on Miles’s desk and told him to keep the change. Today Jeff’s girl friend Annie Bird knocked on the door and said that Jeff was wanted in the office for an emergency phone call. It was a ruse, and Miles knew it, but he let him go. It was a better class—though only slightly better—without him.

  Third hour, Miles toiled.

  His third-hour seniors were unresponsive, almost secretive, and when he was not speaking, the room was filled with a kind of strained silence. It was not the lazy silence of first hour; it was the intense, alert silence of students who absorb everything and express nothing. They read their assignments; they kept their notebooks up to date. They never nodded or shook their heads. Their eyes told Miles nothing. He knew that he would never lose his way in this class. His students wouldn’t allow it. He would never digress into that humorous banter which, like a dose of oxygen, could often stir a silent class to life. He would be all business. He would stick to the subject at all times. He would toil. In order to discover what these students knew, he would have to devise businesslike essay tests (the sort of thing first hour could never handle) and he would no doubt discover that they knew quite a lot.

  William Mulholland was in this class. In the Staggerford Public Library every book having to do with physics, chemistry, statistics, or any other sort of coldblooded calculation contained on its check-out card the name William Mulholland, written in letters sharp and slanted, like a sketch of leaning spears. He was the largest student in high school—a husky six-feet-four—but to the dismay of Coach Gibbon, athletics did not interest him. What did interest him was computation. Today, finishing his assignment before the bell rang, he drew from his pocket a small computer and set to work calculating the cubic footage of the classroom. Only once had he spoken in this class. On the opening day of school Miles, taking roll, had said, “Bill Mulholland.”

  “My name is William,” he replied.

  Fourth hour, Miles came up for air.

  Fourth hour was his free hour, and although it was not strictly free it allowed him the leisure to stretch. The Faculty Handbook forbade the teacher to step off school property during his free hour, lest the townspeople, seeing him loose, imagine him to be shirking his duty. The teachers of Staggerford took a constant, unhealthy interest in their public image, fancying general opinion to be more various and complicated than it really was. Actually, general opinion of teachers was simple and constant. The women of Staggerford tended to overestimate teachers’ intelligence while the men of Staggerford tended to underestimate their ambition.

  Miles took his briefcase across the street to the football field, climbed to the top row of the empty bleachers, and sat down. Behind him on the riverbank a breeze shook leaves out of the oak trees. Before him on the field a physical-education class cavorted in the end zone, waiting for their teacher. They wore red shorts and white T-shirts. The sun was warm. A plane droned overhead, its shadow crossing the field and just missing the goalposts. Presently Coach Gibbon appeared and blew his whistle and directed his students through their isometric exercises, for which, like beginners at ballet, they struck a series of laughable poses. Beyond the football field leaves and dust were raised off the highway by a grain truck speeding through town on its way to the port of Duluth. Across the highway a woman stood at her front door shaking out a mop. A few elderly men and women wearing suits and hats walked along the sidewalk from the direction of St. Isidore’s Church. Sunday clothes on a weekday was the sign of a funeral.

  Miles grew sleepy in the sun. He lay down on the top plank of the bleachers, resting his head on his briefcase and folding his hands on his chest. He held himself at the edge of sleep, conscious enough to keep from falling off his perch, yet unconscious of where the hour went.

  When the bell rang at noon, it was the custom of students and faculty to cascade into the basement lunchroom and devour whatever hot dish the cooks had stir
red together—macaroni-hamburger-tomato, tomato-rice-hamburger, hamburger-tomato-celery, celery-barley-hamburger. A hamburger was never served as a hamburger, nor was a tomato served as a tomato. Each component was mixed with at least two other components, and there was always as much as one wanted, which in Miles’s case was not very much. Not that he had a poor appetite. Indeed, at the age of thirty-five he was growing fat from eating more than was good for him, but he did most of his eating between four o’clock and midnight. Because he had grown up in Staggerford and attended Staggerford High School and was now in his twelfth year as Staggerford’s senior English teacher, nearly half the lunches of his lifetime had been eaten in the basement of this school, and they had lost, for him, their appeal.

  Today he skipped lunch altogether, so pleasant was the autumn sunshine and so compelling was the call of a crow from across the river. Coach Gibbon, running off the field behind his hungry students, called to him, but Miles did not move from the bleachers. He sat up. He regarded his briefcase. It was full of student papers—114 essays entitled “What I Wish.” He had been putting off reading them for over a week. He opened the briefcase, then paused, reluctant to look inside. How many student papers had he read in these twelve years? How many strokes of his red pen had he made? How many times had he underlined it’s and written its. Was there ever a student who didn’t make a mischievous younger brother the subject of an essay? Was there ever a student who didn’t make four syllables out of “mischievous”? This was the twelfth in a series of senior classes that Miles was trying to raise to an acceptable level of English usage, and like the previous eleven, this class would graduate in the spring to make room for another class in the fall, and he would read the same errors over again. This annual renewal of ignorance, together with the sad fact that most of his students had been drilled in what he taught since they were in the fifth grade, left him with a vague sense of futility that made it hard for him to read student writing. But while he had lost his urge to read student papers, he had not lost his guilt about not reading them, so he carried around with him, like a conscience, this bulging briefcase which his landlady, Miss McGee, had given him for Christmas during his first year of teaching. It was the last of the soft-sided briefcases. All his colleagues had switched to flat cases of chrome and plastic like the one his brother, Dale, had sent him from California and which now stood in Miles’s bedroom closet holding the three hundred or so typewritten pages that comprised his journal. For work, Miles preferred this briefcase because it was leather, not plastic, and it contributed to the hidebound appearance that for some perverse reason he enjoyed cultivating. Every few days he would dip into this briefcase and read a paper at random, but despite his resolution to read promptly and carefully, he left most of the papers for the last frantic days before grades were due.