The May Walk
AN ATLANTIC STORY
by GEORGE H. FREITAG
WE WERE all at school that morning with our faces washed clean and our hair combed and we wore our best clothes, because Miss Haverman’s Third Grade pupils were going to take a May walk out of the city and into the woods. Miss Haverman herself wore a Sunday skirt and a Sunday blouse with ruffles and lace, and on the left side of her breast she wore a gold watch that was fastened with a clasp like a fluttering wing of a bird, and her hair was dark black and fixed on the top of her head. She smelled like a flower growing by the side of a road, and her voice was merry and clear and her eyes sharp and happy.
“This is the day for us,” she said.
All of us had brought baskets with food in them, packed carefully and smelling like a market house on Saturday morning, and we put our baskets in the cloak room beside our hats and coats, and each basket was named, so that when it came time to go we wouldn’t get confused and be carrying someone else’s lunch. The room smelled of clean chalk. The room rocked with our laughter. The windows were open and the fresh smell of spring came in and moved around among us, and the birds sang in the trees and an ice wagon went by, the first ice wagon of the season.
On the blackboard Miss Haverman drew a map with chalk. “Now, children,” she said, “now watch me carefully.” Her voice was like the sound of running bubbling water in a brook released by thaw, and when she raised her arm to the board her blouse crackled with starch. “Now here is our route for the walk.” She began to draw a line on the board. “Impress the map firmly in your minds, children,” she said, “so that if one of you gets lost you will remember the map.”
We all sat in our seats with our excited hands folded upon our desks; we watched the growth of the map. We watched the straight chalk line branching out. The line went as quickly as possible to the end of the city; it passed through a wide park and across a stream of water where a wooden bridge had been built, and through a field and another road to the clean woods. On the board we watched ourselves going like a flock of little chickens following Miss Haverman. The map was like a series of scratches on the board, but we all looked because this was the way to remember not to get lost. I shivered in my seat and tried hard to hold fast to the memory of the map. I closed my eyes and saw it under the darkness of the lids. It was stamped beautifully and like a sharp picture upon the landscape of my mind
We all soaked in the drawing on the board.
Mr. Davidson, our principal, stuck his head in the door, and his red face gleamed. He looked kindly upon Miss Haverman and then at her pupils and then at Miss Haverman, and then he took a big inhale and smiled, saying, “I am very hungry. How about eating the lunches now!”
And all of us kids screamed with delight because we knew that Mr. Davidson was kidding with us, and then he went away and we heard his feet upon the floor of the main hall. We feigned relief, and Miss Haverman laughed at us.
We watched the clock; the hands sometimes stood still, as if they ached. They seemed to be tired hands, and old.
We stood beside our seats and sang a song. Our voices scampered like mice through the room, but Miss Haverman’s voice was high above them. Through the open windows went the voices and out into the spring weather, touching the rooftops of houses, touching the roofs warmed by the sun.
After we sang the song and sat down, Miss Haverman walked to the front of the room. All through the singing she had stood by a window and now she came to the front and faced us. She smiled. She allowed her long white hands to fold in front of her like a bundle of dead twigs. It grew so quiet in the room now that if we listened closely we heard the breast-watch tick beneath the fluttering wing of the bird. A butterfly came in through one of the windows and made a quick shadow across the floor.
“Children,” Miss Haverman said, “I want you to know that this May walk is to be my last. I am leaving the school.”
While she stood there her black hair seemed suddenly to turn a silver gray and the wrinkles on her face showed through the talcum, and the clock on the wall pounded now, ticking. We all sat waiting for her to continue talking.
“I am growing tired,” she said. “I have been teaching school for forty-four years. And now it is spring again.” She raised her face. It was as if she drank something from the air about her. She opened her mouth to speak again but there was nothing that came out, nothing but a breathing in the room.
“And now we shall start out,” she finally said. “Go get your lunches and your coats and hats and be sure you button your coats; it is only spring. It isn’t yet summer.”
We filed past her and smiled into her face. We touched the folds of her skirt and smelled the perfume she wore. In Miss Haverman’s patent-leather shoes we saw our reflections as we passed before her.
“Take one last look at the route we shall take, children,” she said. “One last quick look.”
Her voice sounded alive now, but filled with caution. “Remember the map,” she said. “I want you all to stay close to me. If you do, I won’t get lost.” We all laughed with kindness upon her and then we got our hats and coats and lunches. We buttoned our coats and marched down the wide school steps following Miss Haverman. Other teachers came to the windows and, surrounded by their own pupils, waved to us as we came to the street. Windows were flung open so that we could hear their goodbyes and their laughter.
2
THE sun was like a warm lullaby upon our faces. We walked into it and through it, and for a long time nobody spoke. All that could be heard was the hurrying fall of our feet upon the pavement. Once in a while we passed an old man standing by the side of a house, standing in the warmth of the sun, gathering strength, and we waved to him. Quite often a dog followed us awhile, smelling the lunches, but soon grew tired.
Every two or three blocks, Miss Haverman stopped to count us. She went up and down the line of us and counted aloud, naming us one by one, touching our heads, our shoulders, our lunches. We came to the park that had been marked on the board, but there were only fifteen trees in it, and houses of the town had crept in until it was not at all the kind of park Miss Haverman expected. But she had grown tired from the walk and we all stood by while she sat on the little blue jacket she carried, and rested.
When we came to the stream that ran through the park, we found it had been piped and now ran under the ground, but Miss Haverman told us to put our ears to the ground and listen to the water gurgling through it, and we all took turns placing our ears down close to the warmed grass, and listened to the water somewhere below.
It seemed, finally, that we had been walking all day. The sun was high in the sky, and we had not yet come to the edge of the town. Miss Haverman was stopping more often to rest and she began to appear, now, like a tired bird after a night of flight, that searched for a shelter in the trees.
“I think the woods will show now when we get over the next hill,” Miss Haverman said, but when we went over the hill there were no trees, no woods, only the yellow and white houses and the garages, and the little brown coal sheds. Sometimes people looked at us from the doors and windows of houses as we walked along, but the street stretched far ahead like the straight line drawn on the blackboard that morning.
“Let’s all sing a little song as we go walking along,” Miss Haverman said, already out of breath and weary. So we twisted our mouths and squinted our eyes and sang a song. It was a song we had learned in school that year. But we were too filled with the anticipation of fun in the woods, and we snickered at our singing and laughed so hard we fell out of line.
We tagged behind a little now; we were growing tired. The little girls with their hair tied up in blue and pink ribbons began to whimper and ask to be taken home. Their shoes were coming untied and Miss Haverman stopped to tie them, and by the time the sun was halfway down the western side of the sky we were too hungry to go on. Miss Haverman carried a large brown sack of sandwiches and other good things, and now she reached into the sack and gave us celery and cookies and halves of sandwiches to sustain us until we got to the woods. She walked about among us like a mother hen. “Over the next little hill now, children,” she said. But when we walked over the hill there was an expanse of houses, and beyond the houses were tall black stacks of factories.
There were no woods in sight and no end to the city; it went on and on.
We came at last to a place where Miss Haverman believed the woods had once been, but a filling station was there now in the middle of a wellkept yard, a neat, trim little house standing refreshingly in the long shadows of the afternoon. She stood a moment and looked about her. “It was close by that I once carved my name in a tree,” she told us. But we were impatient, irritable, and tired and we paid her no heed. We ran about pretending to catch one another. Our new suits were soiled and our stockings were coming down.
“Where are the woods, the woods?” we yelled, shouting at Miss Haverman, who had sat down in a grassy place near a white flagpole, fanning herself with the empty sack which she continued to hold fast to.
“I don’t know, children, I don’t know,” she said. “I thought I knew the way to the woods. I thought I knew!”
The man at the filling station came out with a sun visor over his eyes and walked over to Miss Haverman. They talked in low voices and we were too busy to know what was said, but he went in and talked over the phone and in a little while the Board of Education truck came to pick us up. We all climbed into the back of it and returned the way we had come. We finished eating our lunches and sang several songs, but Miss Haverman sat beside the driver with her face straight ahead and never turned back. She looked straight into the road. It was only when the truck stopped in front of my house that I turned to look into her face. “Good-bye, Miss Haverman,” I said. “Goodbye, and thank you, Miss Haverman.” But she continued to stare ahead of her as if now she knew where she was going.