1962, North Dakota

By Merle Kessler

My 7th grade civics teacher, Mr. Thorson, was a gangly man with lank greasy hair. He had only one suit, brown, accessorized with ugly ties of various umber hues. His thick black glasses were so heavy they’d slide down his thin nose to perch precariously on its tip. If, when he had finally pushed them back, he had done so one-fingered, with an air of scholarly distraction, it might have been endearing.

Instead his technique was to butt the palm of his hand against the bridge of his glasses and shove them up his dorsum until they rammed his eyebrows. Along with this abrupt gesture, he’d squinch his face up like a prairie dog sniffing for danger, as he gave us memorization assignments in an adenoidal voice.

Everybody in the class hated him.

Even super smart Peggy Delgaard, in her neck brace and crinolines, who normally bestowed her winning smile on teachers exclusively, gave him as much loathing as she thought could be tolerated. I do believe, however, that I - unsmart, spiteful, and sullen - hated him the most.

His job was to teach us the history and geography of our state. I know now that Floyd City had been named for a George Floyd, foreman of the workers who’d driven the final spike into the plate joining tie to rail, linking what was to become Floyd City with Capital City and Rully, our county seat.

I now know that George Floyd had packed up his hammers and moved on, to die in a brawl on the Rockies’ eastern slopes, leaving only his name behind.

The state was littered with towns named for railroad functionaries. Floyd’s boss, Charles “Big Jim” Wheeler, left both Wheeler County and Charleston behind him when he died in Boston, two years before his wife, Anna, whose maiden name (Rully) lived on as our county seat.

There were also Indian names: Minnewaukee, Crowfoot, Hole-in-the-Night, Nakonda; towns named for their topography: Wolf Bluff, Little Muddy, Dead Butte, The Sisters. Towns named for the places immigrants had left behind in the old country: New Leipzig, Salzstadt, Noylahn, Zahn, New Malmo….

Every wide spot in the road had the name of a ghost. Once the tracks were laid, the movers and shakers moved on. The Indians were dead or drunk or disappeared, any stray pioneers had just been passing through. The steel rails were rusted, the old tongues no longer spoken. That’s what I know now.

Why was I there? My ancestors were dropouts from the western migration, refugees from European wars who had staggered to Floyd City, and fell exhausted in their tracks.

They knew that pennies did not, in fact, rain from heaven. On the manna-less prairie they were forced to eke out a living farming a cold, godforsaken country in which one had to move glacier-dropped boulders big as Caddies just to plant wheat. That’s where the money came from - also from oil and soybeans and sunflower seeds and national defense. Many Cold War missiles were, and are still, embedded near Floyd City.

Why there?

There were too few people there to object.

Not that they would. My kin’s worldview best summed up: We’ll be dead soon. Nuclear war? We probably deserve it. The only other people in Floyd City were either what remained of the Indians, kept well hidden, or migrant oil workers, bitter drunken men with tattoos who liked to throw each other through plate glass windows on Saturday nights. There was a support community, as well - lawyers, doctors, dentists, carpet-layers, bartenders - all of whom wished they were somewhere else.

Floyd City also lay about an hour away from Fort Wilf, where, less than a hundred years before, a Sioux chief had been shot by two drunk army sentries - all to make the countryside safe for white people who, given the opportunity, would have dropped the countryside like a bad habit.

This nasty town was just a phase, a lower rung on the ladder of progress. Sooner or later, we would see the lights of Floyd City receding in a rear view mirror.

This was our history. That’s what I’d learned.

But I wouldn’t be tested on that.

By and large, our junior high teachers were typical bitter Floyd Citizens, and sadistic as well. Mr. Aakre, the shop teacher, would stand grinning in the middle of the marble stairway between classes, so he could smack kids on the head with a ruler. “Keep moving,” he’d yell. “Keep moving.”

And there was principal S.Q. Dufella, who once called a school assembly to read the body a note one 9th grade girl had written to another, describing the lengthy kiss she’d shared with a boy the night before. He didn’t reveal the girl’s name, but her involuntary shriek from the crowd as soon as he started reading the note effectively dismantled her anonymity.

As he read, Mr. Dufella’s face turned red as an apple; he had to stop frequently because he was laughing so hard. “After about a half hour,” he read, “I was chewing his gum!” At this point he dissolved into giggles, and the long-suffering vice-principal had to step up to the podium and dismiss the assembly.

Mr. Thorson was a little different. He was smart enough to hate his job, but not smart enough to cut us some slack. He wanted us to memorize not only every governor and lieutenant governor from statehood to present, but every member of the state legislature.

If he had demanded that we memorize the villains of James Bond novels, in order, and whether they were operatives for SPECTRE or SMERSH, I would have aced the class, no problem. As things stood, though, I was just another clueless 12-year-old. I could not figure out why he made us work so hard. After all, didn’t he have to know this stuff too?

For our final examination, he had us make a map of the state on a sheet of typing paper. Then we glued this to a piece of cardboard. We were issued scissors, and told to cut carefully along the county lines. Once we had a pile of counties on the desk in front of us, we were told to reassemble the state. We had 20 minutes.

I had contact with several of my teachers beyond the confines of the school halls.
I’d often drop off Mr. Akre’s paper and see him in his backyard, drunk and roaring with laughter over his burning coals, mocking his own children, whacking them on the back of the head with a spatula as they ran by.

Mr. Thorson, while not on my route, lived upstairs from the Schissens, who were. They were a retired alcoholic couple on a fixed income, who frequently stiffed me during the collection process. Often, while ringing the bell of the Schissens, I would see Mr. Thorson descend from his converted attic. He never greeted me, and I certainly avoided interaction with him, but I noted once as he passed, below the short sleeve of his white nylon short-sleeved shirt, a heart-shaped tattoo, with a name scratched out. He drove a ‘57 Ford, robin’s egg blue.

As I sat at my desk, looking with depression at my little chunks of paper clotted with glue, making a pile thick as a rug, I contemplated the difference between professional and private lives. Mr. Thorson did, in fact, have a private life, a lonely and bitter one, I surmised. Clearly, he’d been in love with whomever it was whose name had been
erased from his flesh. What effect did this have on his life as a teacher? Could it have any causal relation to my staring glumly at lumpy chunks of paper? What about my Peggy, who’d already completed assembling her state, and was sitting with her hands folded, stifling yawns? Did she know about Mr. Thorson’s empty tattoo? Did it matter?

“Having trouble?” Mr. Thorson asked me, as he jammed his glasses into his forehead.

I shook my head and gave him a sickly little smile, the same smile I’d use on my parents when I wanted to get out of shoveling the sidewalk.

I fixed my eyes on the back of his neck as he walked away. If I’d had a gun I could’ve bushwhacked him. I suddenly thought of Rory Calhoun, squatting behind a movie rock, swapping shots with Apaches as he huddled in that perfect shadowless ’50s movie light. Audie Murphy would ride into town, or Randolph Scott, or Joel McCrea, to clean things up, to make things right.

As I sat at my desk, my puzzle before me, I realized that it was always the same goddam town, every cowboy movie, the same goddam back lot town. I had one piece, one county, New Earth, Rully, Floyd City: I knew where they were, that was my world. That was all I knew.

“Time’s up,” said Mr. Thorson.

I looked up at Mr. Thorson and my dim future. I would become Mr. Thorson, or someone like him. In 20 years, I would be looking down at hateful faces, through heavy lenses, the erased names of former lovers burning numberless on the pale flesh hidden by my bad suit. Paper boys would avert their eyes, and grip their arms where their own tattoos would one day appear.

I flunked the test. But I wound up passing the class by doing a project for extra credit - a model of Fort Wilf made of pipe cleaners and toothpicks. I had it strewn with little plastic cowboys and Indians, red nail polish thick as ketchup on their tiny still bodies. My mother kept it for years until it crumbled at the edges and fell apart.

Merle Kessler lives in San Francisco, but grew up in North Dakota. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications. Under his nom de plume, Ian Shoales, he is a frequent commentator on the radio and in print. He is also a performer, and his new theater piece, SLOUCHING TOWARDS DISNEYLAND, debuts in San Francisco in late 2007. The names in this story have all been changed.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, November 17th, 2006 | Email This Post

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