The Sounding of the Call

Illustrator: L.K. Sukany

This story, especially for those who wish to teach, is pure goodness like a perfect sentence. And what is a perfect sentence? Not one that plods along toward explanation, nor stands philosophically alone but instead fills the fabric of a reader’s cold days and falls full-of-life between two sentences that do not stand-out in any way but to be.

Silas Henry, 11, lives in Henrytown—a town less than a town: a gas station, tumble-down houses on its outskirts, a nursing home, the NEW GENL., the Main Street Church, an elementary school.

Silas’ father, Mr. Henry, Henrytown Elementary’s janitor— a nicer man one couldn’t meet, but somedays he turns sour, into a harpy, who inhabits a cell he cannot escape.

Mr. Henry appears and disappears at will. Children report seeing him come out of various rooms (the janitor’s closet, the teacher’s supply room, the Principal’s Office) but never enter them; they say, it’s as if he’s escaping his shadow.

Jimmy Brez, usually caught up in causing chaos says that Mr. Henry can walk though closed doors—says he doesn’t need any of the keys on his deer-buckle belt. The only two things Jimmy can reliably make up are snowballs and stories: Jimmy says one early morning he saw Mr. Henry find his way right through the school’s front double-doors—says he’ll swear on a crack to break his mother’s back, but Jimmy doesn’t like his mother much. Patricia Means says, “It takes one to know one.”

Even Silas doesn’t spend as much time with his father as Jimmy Brez does, who we’d bet a dozen to doughnuts is apprenticing for Mr. Henry’s job. In fact, Silas Henry rarely talks. He hasn’t been held back and should have been pushed forward; he is what we consider back-ass-wards smart; neither defends his father nor helps us put together logical reasons for his strange movements—exiting from too empty classrooms, yet never seen entering them, never found, but suddenly appearing. Silas is forever quiet, forever kind, never calling attention to himself like we all do in our small gestures of unkindness.

After recess, we often find things we cast off and perhaps subconsciously try to get rid of lying on the tops of our desks: eyeglasses, pens, pencils, baseball caps, even our shoes. When we return to class, we find our books, our homework assignments, our coats, our keys and even our characters—all of which we have found ways to misplace.

When the world has gone tilted, Silas Henry discovers it, roots it from its hiding place, attempts to restore it to its rightful owner. He retrieves from the lost and found boxes of our lives: stays after class; cleans up chalkboards; pounds erasers; carries books to Miss Rambo’s car; picks up wrappers from windowsills; waters the plants; always says “please” and “thank you,” “yes ma’am,” and “yes sir.” He even writes Found you Notes and pins them to our errant papers. As we make our way home from school, our papers that so often flap around in the wind appear in our coat pockets.

In our hearts, we know Silas is terribly lonely, and sadly we do little to help. Because he does so many things to help us, we figure he’s okay, as Jimmy Brez often says, “Good to go,” as Patricia Means notes, “We leave him to be with himself.”

Perhaps we can’t understand his beneficence; perhaps his purely good acts make us feel equally bad about ourselves. Although we strive to be good, Silas is good, and we can’t compare ourselves to him without turning envy-green. And, in this, we know our own actions are not any way to conduct our lives. Out of fear of seeing ourselves reflected in his eyes, we prefer the easiest route and mostly ignore him or worse, leave him to his own devices: he is seen picking up his own books when they fall to the floor, carrying his lunch pail to the cafeteria and eating his white-bread sandwiches alone. His cheery responses we almost expect. Had he not replied, we would, perhaps, ask him what’s wrong, but he never does so we never do either.

Patricia Means, whose aphorisms account for the obvious, says that “in his kindness, we see the weaknesses in ourselves.” Jimmy Brez, who is smarter than he looks, says, “we are being just plain ugly.” One thing is certain—we can’t figure Silas or his father out, and we are not sure that we want to exactly. Instead, we prefer silence to oral judgement, artifice to articulation; we prefer ignoring the book in front of us to reading it, thinking about our homework to doing it; we know we can’t change anything but our own responses, and some dark force—deep-seated and deep-down—makes us unwilling to.

Less you think us cruel and uncaring and Silas and Mr. Henry completely alone, left to isolated worlds they disappear into, you might find solace that Silas does have one friend—his springer spaniel, Lore. Lore follows Silas everywhere, is as faithful and loyal as Buck the sled dog from London’s The Call of the Wild—a story we are presently reading by an author we come to call Jack, who we know is not from London, at least that is the joke our teacher Miss Rambo makes.

Miss Rambo graduated from Shaker High School, went away to college, even taught in New Jersey for a year in the Blackboard Jungle but has come back to Henrytown Elementary, she says, “out of a sense of literacy.” As a teacher she excels in teaching all subjects, but she particularly excels in teaching people. While standing at her portable chalkboard, which she wheels around the room in an effort to “bridge the distance between our learning and our understanding,” Miss Rambo says she “isn’t really teaching any one subject but instead is teaching all of us.” Patricia Means writes that down in pencil on the top of her desk so the words will forever be in front of her. Patricia even makes a greeting card from the saying, adorning it with paper snowflakes cut from jagged paper and sprinkled with too many sparkles, which find their way onto our hands and later our clothes and will not, even with a good shake or handwashing, go away. Jimmy Brez starts calling Patricia Means “Pollyanny”—after the little girl in another story Miss Rambo reads—that is, until Patricia kicks Jimmy who, on doctor’s orders, can’t play football with us for a month.

Lore goes everywhere with Silas: follows him down to the grassy fields behind the school, trots with him as he walks the two-full miles rain or shine to and from school, follows Silas up to the double-front doors each morning but stops short, unable, because of school regulations, to enter as Mr. Henry has hours before.

Lore lays down on the front steps of Henrytown Elementary. From our classroom window above, we can see him waiting for Silas. Then, together at recess, Lore and Silas explore the small things in the school yard while the rest of us are running around in what must look like unending circles; they examine this plant or that weed while we squirt our ink pens at each other; they map the clouds, test the stones, consult a book on soil erosion. The school bell clangs, recess ends, and Lore assumes his position on the front steps next to the water bowl Silas has left for him.

More than once, Miss Rambo suggests we might take stock in Lore’s loyalty and his patience. This gets us to thinking. The room becomes silent as we try to wrap our minds around how it is that a dog is more virtuous than we—more patient, certainly more silent. One would imagine a dog in the schoolyard would bring “ooos” from the girls and a spirit of adventure to the boys, and although we like Lore, we leave him alone, too.

As you might have surmised, Miss Rambo has a soft spot for Silas (and Lore); their behaviors she wishes we would all emulate although she knows well enough not to call any more attention than is obvious to this desire. Somewhere beyond his years, Silas Henry has mastered the art of consistency. He stays after school and helps Miss Rambo tidy her room; he is invariably the first to greet her in the mornings; and he is forever prepared. Even his handwriting lessons are perfect—each letter the same size. (And he is a boy!) His homework is not only correct but symmetrical. And we add this to the tally of things to be disappointed in ourselves for.

Miss Rambo spend much time gazing out the window while she teaches us, and we surmise she is searching for New Jersey. Yet, we know that through each predictable season of the school year, Miss Rambo is watching Lore—his expressive eyes magically turning into her own.

One day late last November when the desperate cold found its way into our bones and forced us to change into our clothes underneath our covers, when we felt its constant surge and believed we might never be warm again, when even the closets that held our coats were too cold and on cold days everything felt more lonely, we sat still bundled and brave in our chairs. Miss Rambo looked out the window for Lore, who she said had probably dug himself under the snow like Buck the sled dog in an attempt to stay warm. She mused that for all she knew Lore was both smarter and indeed warmer that we all were, her comments punctuated by Mr. Henry’s shovel slamming coal into the basement furnace, barely keeping the temperature above itself. We listened and waited for Mr. Henry to fall behind his shovel, for Lore’s whimpering call to stop, for the cold to ultimately take over.

This day was so short we didn’t remember the sun at all—perpetual darkness ran through the clocks of our lives. And this cold was of the sort that could not be hastened or imagined away—its force overwhelmed the way our feet moved and our hands worked. We sat in class bundled in layers, with scarfs around our necks trying to listen as Miss Rambo read the end of The Call of the Wild to us through frosted eyes. Even Patricia Means, whose powers of concentration superseded us all, was lost in the steam of her own breath. There we sat miserable, unmoving, terrifically unhappy, except for Silas, who moved about the room through the warmth of his personality straightening books, placing dictionaries in codified rows, sharpening pencil after pencil, even adding tape to the dispensers and staples to the staplers. We all wondered how he had found his way into the teacher’s supply closet—perhaps he could walk through closed doors like his father. We thought at some point Miss Rambo would tell Silas to sit down, but she didn’t. Instead, we all watched as he moved dutifully about the room. We were too caught up in our own misery to realize that Silas was actually devolving into a ball of nervous energy.

Obviously, he was worried about Lore, who had gone silent and who he could no longer see. Had we been able to attend to Silas’ needs like he did ours’ we would have known he needed some reassurance that Lore was okay—that his only real friend was still among the living.

Even Miss Rambo was, at first, not sure what to make of Silas’ continual activity. She was as cold and cloudy-minded as the rest of us. As the snow continued to fall, the flakes thicker and thicker, Silas stood at the window. Suddenly his hands began to flutter as if they were trying to summon words. And then the lights in the room went out. We could only make out the shadows of each other, and the shadows of our desks, and the shadow of Miss Rambo’s desk that seemed unreachable. As the distance among us grew, we all, at the same moment, gasped and realized what Silas’ unfocused hands were trying to tell us. That Mr. Henry was way down in the basement, lit only by the furnace’s diminishing fire—that Lore, outside, was missing, perhaps freezing to death—in that moment of darkness, we recognized quite suddenly that Silas united us; that we needed him; that we hadn’t been what we could have been. We were paralyzed momentarily in not knowing what to do about it—how to make it right.

Miss Rambo walked to the window and stood beside Silas, who had nearly dissolved into a puddle. She clapped her hands together once, and we all stood up. She clapped a second time and Mr. Henry appeared without opening the door, holding a coal shovel. She clapped a third time, and we all sprang into motion—our sudden movements heating the hearth of the room.

Together, we found ourselves in increments in the hallway, then on the stairwell and then through the front doors; each of us would have sworn that neither Miss Rambo nor Mr. Henry had opened them—we carefully made our way down the front steps—the shadow of Henrytown Elementary darkening each of our forms.

Mr. Henry leaned on the shovel as we searched the yard, which sounded like silence. And we too, were silent in our search. We wandered about, looking for paw prints, poking at snow mounds.

 It was Jimmy Brez who found Lore—because, in part, he was the most adventurous of us all. Jimmy circled the yard, treading carefully, when suddenly his legs sank down, felt wriggling underneath and he jumped back, fearful he would be forever lost in eternity’s snow hole. Before Mr. Henry put hands to shovel, Lore’s body popped up from the beneath the snow in a springing burst, landed on his feet and in a shower of blinding white side-eyed us. Patricia Means composed a poem on the spot.

Lore is great and safe and good

we Thank the Lord, as we know we should.

He has shaken off a cloud of snow

bounding up from below.

To greet the bright unerring day,

which once had gone astray.

And now we’re safe, warm, and dry

except for tears in all our eyes.

Mr. Henry dropped the shovel and gathered Lore up who was shivering in his arms. The big double doors were shut tight against the cold, yet somehow Mr. Henry made his way through, as did we all. And there we were on the stairs, and in the hallway, and then back in Miss Rambo’s room, now lighted by candles scattered about the room.

Mr. Henry carried Lore to Silas’ desk and set him down in the chair. Lore sat there like a dutiful student with London’s book in front of him, waiting, it seemed, for Miss Rambo to disperse the remainder of story. And there was Silas, who, stood at window. Candle in hand, he waited for us to gather around his desk, and once we had, we called him over to join us.

After this day, Lore became an everyday fixture in the classroom, not laying at Silas’ feet but given his own desk, where he sits patiently day-after-day absorbing Miss Rambo’s reading lessons. And with the help of Patricia Means, Miss Rambo fashions a report card for Lore and sends it home with Silas and Mr. Henry: perfect scores across the board for attendance, behavior, caring, disposition, and decorum.

-For Mary D. Minnick 

The Sounding of the Call¹

¹  Taken from The Call of the Wild by Jack London