Sylvia and Wyatt

In the last year before school consolidation, before the farm kids were jerked out of the soil and sent to city packing sheds, I taught nine students in a one-roomer, way out on the hard red winter wheatfields of northern Montana.
In August I received a list of unfilled positions from Helena, and applied by letter from California to School District 19, Toole County. “It’s a dead-end deal,” said Sam Black, the chairman of the school board, when we shook hands on the phone. “One year, then we fold the school and you are dismissed. I won’t lie to you. You are the only one who has called about this. We’ll take the chance if you will. Five thousand dollars and a place to stay for the school year. Plenty of opportunity for weekend work if you can handle equipment.”
There was no school bus. The children were delivered to the white frame building by wind-wrinkled mothers smelling of diesel, clabbered milk and manure, driving stubnosed grain trucks and Pontiacs with singing shock absorbers. Through the slumping panes of the teacherage’s kitchen window, I could forecast the day’s attendance by counting the dust plumes that boiled out of the Sweetgrass Hills and converged on the section-line roads.
For the first weeks, because I wore my hair long and had witnessed the world beyond Great Falls, I was a bug in a mayonnaise jar to the kids, to be viewed through a shell of flat, cautious politeness until it was determined whether I raised welts or spat stinky fluids. The younger ones softened first, handing me their friendship in big wads of giggles. By Columbus Day we were claiming a corner of Rasmussen’s wheatfield for our school by planting an art-project flag in the dusty stubble. Shortly afterward I was J. D., one of the gang, to most of my students.
But not to Wyatt, who, at age eleven, had read all of Louis Lamour and believed it possible to live, and to die, as a gunfighter. Hormones were beginning to gather behind his dinnerplate-sized belt buckle. His entire being focused on fair Sylvia’s scant breasts during history class. To Wyatt I was an effete outlander, an agent of change, someone bent on jamming mathematics between him and his bull-riding future.
In the puncture weeds at the perimeter of the pea-gravel parking lot were several ant mounds. Wyatt’s courtship of Sylvia consisted of carefully working his freckled hand and lower arm into an ant hill, until it was swarming with a black scurry, then chasing her around the schoolyard yelling “Ant Arm Man is going to get you! Ant Arm Man is going to get you!.”
During one such episode of cowpoke foreplay, Sylvia went down hard on both knees against the lip of the concrete pad that anchored the flag pole. Restrained tears fogged her glasses. “Damn you, Wyatt. I’ll get you.” These were strong words from a whispy farm girl who dressed as her grandmother had.
Wyatt booted rocks down the road ahead of us. I was pissed. I told him to cut the crap, to try a little tenderness, that Sylvia was in pain because he had worked an old joke one too many times, and that I didn’t like any pain, intentional or accidental. He’d better come around, settle down, before I called in the big dogs, his folks and Sylvia’s, to put the clamps on this foolishness. Wyatt tipped back the bill of his tractor hat, checked the clouds, flashed a coyote grin, and said “Yes Sir, Mister Smith, Sir.” That night a cold front seeped over the Canadian border and covered the ant hills with a foot of snow.
For Christmas I bought each student a harmonica. By Saint Valentine’s Day, with Sylvia sitting first chair,we were a one-song band, playing “The Streets of Loredo” to an audience of aquarium guppies. March afternoons were spent in model rocketry, firing chunks of balsawood and cardboard way, way up into the huge crystal skies. Then we trudged a mile downwind for the retrieval. A wind that smelled of crawdads whistled up from the Missouri River breaks in early April. Overnight the snow was gone.
One sunny spring morning after the yellow clay schoolyard had dried enough to permit play, Sylvia and Janet asked if they could take the new canvas bases outside and design a softball diamond. Sure.......but mind the windows and the wind.
Each team had a pitcher, a first baseman, and a couple of roving stubblefielders. I was to be both teams’ catcher. Wyatt captained one group and chose Sylvia, Janet, and the two first graders for his helpers. Sylvia was unusually aggressive in demanding that her team bat first.
Of course, Wyatt was the leadoff hitter. He punched the first pitch through a hole where the shortstop would’ve been, a clean single, but the girls knew Wyatt, so, as he was scampering up the baseline toward first, Sylvia and Janet yelled “Take two, Wyatt! Take two!.“ When he made the turn, going for the double, they changed their chant to “Slide, Wyatt! Slide, Wyatt.! Slide Wyatt!,” and he slid................ headfirst into a busy community of red ants which had recently been covered by second base.
He came up swatting, spitting and slapping. He was a tough little hombre, but I could see that he was in trouble with this situation, so I hustled him into the four-seater outhouse, jerked off his boots while he tore at the snaps on his shirt, and helped him brush the cooties off his back and out of his hair. I left as he fought with his belt buckle. Sylvia sat smiling in the swing.
A month later the job ended. On the last day of school, as I was boxing the artifacts of my teaching career and packing my truck to head toward Alaska, I looked out into the schoolyard and there by the flagpole sat Sylvia and Wyatt, holding hands while they waited for their rides back into the Sweetgrass Hills.