Miss Miller, my sixth grade teacher, was well known for her paddling abilities. She always gave you an option, however. If you did not want to be paddled, you could stay in the classroom during recess and practice your spelling--"th" words mostly, the, this, those, them, then, threw, through, thorough, thesaurus. Miss Miller was bound and determined to eradicate the mispronunciation and misspelling of "th" words--the bane of all Cajun children. However, most boys took the paddle rather than miss the half-hour recess.
The paddling was done in front of the class. Miss Miller called out your name. You walked up to the front of the room and faced the students. Miss Miller stood before you and asked for your hand. You extended it toward her. The ruler, a three-inch wide and quarter-inch thick slat, always seemed to appear miraculously from the folds of her dress. Miss Miller took careful aim, raised the paddle high over her head and slammed it against your opened hand. At any point after the first whack you could apologize and she would stop, but no self respecting eleven year old boy would stop after just one blow. As a matter of fact, just the opposite occurred. You stood and took and took and took and hoped that Miss Miller, white-haired, wrinkled, old, would collapse dead on the floor.
Cole, a small, dark-haired Cajun boy with calloused work-toughened hands, once took fifteen whacks from Miss Miller's paddle, more than anybody in the history of the school. The class let out a collective "ah" of admiration. Miss Miller broke her paddle on the sixteenth whack. Cole still refused to apologize and was sent to the principal for the rest of his punishment--Mr. Manuel had a leather strap which did not break. The class erupted in a hubbub of talk, mostly praise and wonder, over Cole's accomplishment. Miss Miller could not regain control until she produced a new paddle from the folds of her dress.
Sensing that she might be weakening several boys volunteered for a paddling. But none lasted beyond five whacks. Miss Miller, face red, veins popping, sweat forming on her forehead never wavered. Her whacks were just as hard as ever. In fact they seemed harder.
2. Eyeland
My first experience with Miss Miller's paddle came over my mispronunciation of island.
"It is pronounced island, silent s, stressed i," she said.
"But it's spelled is-land," I argued. "Why isn't it pronounced like it's spelled?"
"Those are the rules of grammar," she said as if that explained it all. Later, during vocabulary, I had to go to the board and Miss Miller told me to spell island for the class. In bold letters I wrote: EYELAND. A few students in the class snickered. Miss Miller stared them down. Then she turned to me.
"Do you want the paddle, or would you like to stay behind during lunch recess to practice your vocabulary?"
"The paddle," I said in a very timid voice.
"Very well," she said and invited me to stand before her and extend my hand.
I took a respectable four whacks and apologized.
I was no martyr.
3. Living by the Rules
I brought the problem home with me.
Daddy and Momma stared at each other over me, an isthmus between them. Daddy took my side. Momma sided with Miss Miller. She had made it all the way to the seventh grade and knew the rules of grammar. Daddy agreed with me; that if the word was spelled one way, it should be pronounced that way.
"What do you know about it?" Momma snapped. "You can't even spell your own name." I read the hurt in Daddy's face as he felt the sting of Momma's words. It was true. Daddy was illiterate. He couldn't even read his own name. But Daddy was always the practical one. He often understood things not found in books.
"The rules are plain," Momma said. "We have to live by the rules."
I hated that Momma sided with Miss Miller, but I knew they were right--they had the education.
Daddy knew it, too.
4. Islands
Whenever we studied geography in Miss Miller's classroom, she unrolled the giant map above the blackboard and pointed to the small islands of color--pink was England, blue was Germany, purple was France, and Spain was yellow.
"Memorize them," she told us. "There will be a test."
That year Chataignier flooded. The banks of Bayou des Cannes overflowed and covered the countryside for miles. Mr. Sam's pasture formed islands--small masses of green poking out of the muddy brown water like beached whales. Carl and I waded from mound to mound, proclaiming them ours.
"By the power vested in me by God almighty, I proclaim Lawrence Roy Jr. the sovereign ruler and protector of this island, which shall be called England from this day forward. Who-so-ever inhabits this land will abide by and obey the rules and laws of the sovereign ruler."
Then I would shove a stick, a red rag tied to the end of it, into the ground--symbol of my rule. Carl did the same with his acquisitions--his sovereign flag a white rag.
We played this game as long as the flood waters lasted. Each day we watched our islands grow and grow, like a cancer, until they merged with each other and all we were left with was a pasture, again, dotted with red and white rags hanging from sticks stuck in the brown mud like small tombstones marking their passage.
5. History
Daddy passed out while working at the cotton gin– Couldn't get air into his lungs. Head went blank. Legs quit working. As if his body forgot the rules of functioning. My Uncle Tee drove him to the charity hospital in Lafayette and they told him he had lung cancer; that he needed to go to the charity hospital in New Orleans to be operated on. Daddy told us the news in a shaky voice laced with fear and hope.
We were studying history in Miss Miller's class around that time. She produced a series of pictures, mounted on cardboard of the dead and dying Jews of World War II. She gave us strange new words to learn to spell: Auschwitz, genocide, holocaust, Nuremberg. She told us that Hitler changed the rules of mass killing forever. I remember being frightened by the death camp prisoners' vacant stares; by their emaciated bodies; by the hopelessness they exhibited through the fence wires, the years, the grainy black and white photos. In one photograph a Nazi guard leaned against an opened doorway. He stared directly into the camera, unashamed of who he was and what he did. He had cold stern eyes like Miss Miller's.
After the operation the New Orleans doctors told my mother that Daddy had very little chance of survival. I overheard Momma tell Miss Kathleen in an emotionless tone that he had six months or less to live. Her hopelessness frightened me.
We watched Daddy's skin slowly shrink against his skeleton until he looked like the dead and dying in Nazi death camps. Sometimes the rules for living do not work. Momma moved my bed to a corner of the living room and formed a sort of island for my sick father. I slept with Momma after that. Daddy smiled sadly--taut skin over bone--and called me the little man of the house.
"There are responsibilities that come with the job," he said, in a strange and unfamiliar voice. "The little man has inherited big responsibilities." Though I wasn't sure what he meant, I felt the sting of his words.
Momma placed a protective hand upon my head.
"Hush," she hissed at Daddy.
6. Rules for Dying
Miss Miller gave me new problems and new words to learn and pronounce, but none of that mattered much to me. Even Momma, the educated one, didn't seem to take much interest in my school work anymore--she was too busy with Daddy. My younger sister and I attended school only half a day--I went in the morning, she in the afternoon--to help Momma deal with Daddy.
"You must follow the rules," Miss Miller lectured me over and over. "You are not alone. You cannot ignore the rules." Then she would whack me with the paddle. I took fourteen whacks one day--Miss Miller wisely stopped and sent me to Mr. Manuel. She had learned her lesson.
"You will have to learn," she told me on another day, "that you can't break the rules willy nilly and expect to succeed in life. There are too many rules: rules to learn by; rules to succeed by; rules to live by; even rules to die by. And you are only one."
When I told Momma what Miss Miller said, she didn't look up from her chore--washing Daddy's dried up, cancer-ridden body.
"Fuck the rules," she said softly, not to wake him. "Fuck the damn rules."
She handed me the washrag and ran out of the room.
The next day Daddy died. While I studied his emaciated face, his eyes opened suddenly, revealing the cold uncomprehending stare of death. In them I saw the reflection of the island of my bed and it grew and grew like his cancer until it merged with our house and all the other houses in Chataignier, and all I was left with was a town dotted with shacks like tombs in a graveyard filled with dead fathers.
It didn't make sense.
7. Passing on Condition
Miss Miller didn't fail me--she passed me to the seventh grade on condition.
"On condition of what?" Momma asked.
"On condition I do well in the seventh grade," I answered. "That's the rule."
Momma laughed--a hard, bitter laugh that she wrapped around herself like protective waters.