Stone Lake: part 41

A Star Tribune serialized novel by Richard Horberg

Chapter 14 continues

The story so far: Allen's sophomore class stumps him.

Old C.P. Arndt nodded. "Used to feel the same way myself. Started my career — back in '08 — as an English teacher. Taught it for a long time."

"Really?" He wondered who had told the old man that he liked teaching English.

"Taught in Crookston, Morristown, Copenhagen and Benson. Always said I liked Stone Lake the best. Always said I liked English best."

Allen hesitated. He wondered if he was being set up. "Did you ever have any problems finding material for your classes?"

"How?"

The solution, the old man said, lay in words and sentences. When he was an English teacher, every day when he came to class he would put four words on the board, useful words — words that often appeared in print, but that most students didn't know. Words like avuncular, narcissism, prosaic, insipid. The class would spend 20 minutes or so talking about the words, defining them, looking for prefixes and roots from Latin or Greek, discussing ways in which they could or could not be used, whether or not there were regional pronunciations. "Try it," he said. "Get them interested in words. You can kill 20 minutes that way easy."

Allen thought it sounded like a good idea.

"The rest of the hour," the old man said, "examine sentences. I used to have about three or four dozen sentences, good sentences by well-known writers like Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy and Samuel Johnson. I would put a sentence on the board, exactly the way the writer had written it. One sentence per class hour. Then we'd talk about the ways in which different words in the sentence were used, suggest changes sometimes, comment on any stylistic devices the author employed, identify the clauses and phrases. Afterwards — and this was most important, most fun — we would talk about the significance of the sentence, what it really meant. I remember one from Henry David Thoreau."

He looked at the ceiling for a moment, pondering, then quoted: "'I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?' What a sentence. We could talk about the implications of a sentence like that for an hour — or at least until the bell rang."

The old man said he had a box full of old material at home. "If I can find my notes, I'll see that you get them."

Allen thanked him profusely.

The next morning, he found a folder in his box. In it were long lists of words and several pages of sentences, all handwritten, all annotated. Among the sentences he saw was one from Dr. Johnson that he immediately liked: "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life has to offer." Marvelous, he thought.

The next day, Allen announced to his sophomores that they were going to put aside their text for a while — cheers erupted — and examine words and sentences. On the board he wrote "capricious," "odious," "inimical" and "cryptic."

They spent, to Allen's surprise, exactly 20 minutes on the four words. Then he wrote Dr. Johnson's sentence on the board, which filled up the rest of the hour.

He couldn't wait to put the sentence from Thoreau on the board.

***

One day, as they stood chatting between classes, Dave Meyers invited Allen to dinner. His wife had finally finished decorating their apartment and was eager to have him over. He accepted, of course.

The Meyers' apartment was reached by outdoor stairs behind the hardware store. It contained a kitchen, a living room overlooking Main Street, a bath and two bedrooms, one of which Dave used as a study. The walls were freshly painted and wallpapered. A new rug lay on the living room floor. The apartment had windows on three sides with curtains Allen assumed were made by Dave's wife, Jean. He expressed his admiration.

"Of course, the furniture is a bit worn," she said. "The apartment was already furnished, you know. We intend to replace it gradually. There's a good furniture store over in Crookston. Dave and I have been there a couple of times."

"Oh, no," she said. "I majored in history, like Dave. That's how we met."

"Jean has a natural talent for color and arrangement," Dave insisted. "You should have seen our apartment in Minneapolis. It was like Arabian Nights."

Jean laughed. "We're going for Scandinavian Afternoons here," she said.

Dinner, to Allen's delight, was fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, peas, and freshly baked biscuits, followed by apple pie a la mode. Jean knew how to cook, he thought, wondering how Mary Zane or Helen Vorgt or Helen Jacobson would fare in the kitchen. Once, before his wife arrived, Dave had warned him not to marry for sex — that if he did, he would be disappointed. Allen wondered to what extent food could be a substitute for sex.

"I gather that you intend to stay in Stone Lake for a while," he said.

He asked her if she was interested in teaching history.

"Oh, no. I'd be no good as a teacher. Except, maybe, as a substitute for Dave once in a while. What I'd really like to do is collect. Historical pieces, I mean. I'm interested in late 19th and early 20th century American, as well as Shaker. This is a perfect place to look."

"She's made me promise to take her to the house I used to live in," Dave said. "You remember Hector and Calvin Skoglund? Those two old guys would be surprised to find that anyone had the slightest interest in their things."

She laughed. "From what Dave's told me, I doubt that they'd be surprised at anything short of dynamite."

"Par for the town," Allen said.

Allen thought that the fried chicken was the best he'd tasted in a long time. "We could form a little society," he said. "Historical, cultural and literary. Maybe we could even get them to read a few books."

"They don't?" Jean asked.

"They don't."

"Well, books aren't everything."