Old Thoughts Render Revenge

Written By Dustin Murphy

Do old thoughts sometimes come back to haunt you?  Twenty, thirty years after a certain incident, suddenly the greatest comeback flashes into your mind.  If only you’d have thought of it then, somehow the course of your life would be different… fulfillment would generate your soul more than the angst felt by it now.  How could you have let it come this far?  Your indifference needs revenge.

It was revenge that motivated Clyde Homer.  Somewhere in his past he had been wronged.  The transgressions too extreme for a mere “I’m sorry” to suffice.  But he didn’t even get an “I’m sorry”.  He got nothing, not even a cold toss out the door of his rural 5th grade school house; a cold toss out into the rain.  Was this the reason that he never graduated the fifth grade, let alone the rest of his school years?  Was this the reason that he was now divorced and one step above of the old Matt Foley anecdote of “livin’ in a van down by the river”?  Was this the reason that he got a job at the local mill before his peers were even considering work and has never left since and never would?

Clyde Homer knew he could never go back to that abominable schoolhouse, the building that taught him nothing more than the true facts of life, not after what had happened to him.  He knew that his old teacher, Miss Hunter, the schoolmarm who had no familiarity with lover’s passion or with any sort of simple affection held between two people, had not taken the teacher’s unconscious oath to never harm their students, their whole entire reason for existing.  Then she was a bitter young lady; now the only thing that had changed was that the prefix to lady was now old instead of young.

Now that it was 1963 and Clyde was well into his thirties, he still had never returned to that school house, he had no reason to because he never had any children of his own to take there.  So when he put the gasoline can into the back of his pickup truck (in the fashion of every other born and raised rural farm boy) with the intent to do nothing else than burn that abominable school house to the ground that summer, the summer of ‘63, he didn’t really know who he would hurt until it would all be over with.  He thought that somehow it might pierce the heart of his educational transgressor to see the sight of her life’s work go up in flames.

___________________________

Johnny was a good boy, or at least that’s what everyone who knew him said, even Miss Hunter.  Sure Johnny new his arithmetic and could spell most words by sounding them out, at least those that sounded the same as they looked.  He was an excellent pupil and his teacher loved him, but there are many stories of pupils challenging their masters, so many students noticed that Miss Hunter, in her typical fashion, would always try to keep him at an arms length.  Johnny was the best in his class and with such an all American name as Johnny who wouldn’t be?  There was nothing Johnny couldn’t do, so why should his parents fret?  To discipline him would be counterproductive they thought.

You see it wasn’t that Johnny didn’t need discipline; it was just that he didn’t get it.  He was a good student technically when you consider his grades, but when you looked at his record of misbehaving he was probably the worst of them all.  Yet he continued to be tolerated because he just so happened to be smarter than all the other kids, that was until one day in 1963.  This time Johnny had gone too far.

__________________________

Clyde Homer was driving his pickup down the road that led to the school, a road he could never get out of his mind.  After the teacher had embarrassed him in front of the whole class and he had run out of that schoolhouse he kept flashing back to that hideous incident, just like he was flashing back now.

“Clyde, will you please come up to the board”, Miss Hunter said.  She really did seem like a true hunter, only her African safari was between the pages of a textbook and her prey was the innocent undeveloped minds of those humans who have not yet reached puberty.

Clyde did as his teacher said, as least her first instruction.

“Now write this word on the board,” said the predator.  “Inferno.”

The young pupil, Clyde, looked at her for a moment with his big childlike eyes.  He had never enjoyed reading assignments and wasn’t too good of a speller either, but he could read into people, almost like reading their hearts.  Clyde could see her malicious intent although he could never label it that because he was not good with words.  It was almost as if his teacher was receiving some joy in trying to offend him rather then to stimulate and challenge his mind.

“E-N-F-U-R-N-O”, Clyde wrote his version of the word on the black board in painful screeches of chalk.

The teacher laughed at his attempt and this caused an outburst throughout the entire classroom.  Tears started to well up in Clyde’s eyes as he did not understand the reason for such cruelty.  He could only think of one possible reason for this, it was because he was stupid.  As stupid as stupid can be and there was no more to it.

Clyde tried to return to his seat, but as he stepped down the voice of the predator ordered him back. 

“Write the word, Intelligent.”

Of course Clyde didn’t ever want to raise another piece of chalk up to any another blackboard for the rest of his life, but he had to, it took him a moment, but he had to.

“I-N-T-E-L-L-A-J-E-N-T”, he wasn’t too far off, but that didn’t matter.  When he found out how to actually spell intelligent he thought to himself, “What’s two small letters out of eleven, especially for a fifth grader?”  That didn’t matter; two small letters out of eleven weren’t just two small letters to Miss Hunter, they were two big letters.

Miss Hunter pointed at the board.  “Do you see that word Clyde?  Do you?”

Clyde nodded.

“Do you know what it means Clyde?”

Clyde nodded again.

“What does it mean Clyde?”

Clyde couldn’t bring himself to say it even though he knew.  He knew it meant “smart”.

“It means smart Clyde, that’s the baby word for it.  I know you know what smart means.”

Clyde nodded again; that was all he was able to do.

“That’s what you’re not”, said Miss Hunter to the impressionable young boy in a way that would crush whatever small ambition a poor farm boy might have.

Clyde erupted with hatred toward his teacher.  He started grabbing objects off her desk and throwing them at her.  A mug in her stomach, a ruler across her jaw, even the stereotypical apple on the teacher’s desk.  Clyde threw it directly at her left flat-chested breast until the hand of the predator fell upon his ear and grasped it as if it was the only thing preventing her from falling off a cliff.  She flung his small weak body across the front of the desk and began to pull his pants down in front of the entire class, as if Clyde wasn’t mortified enough already.  She reached for the ruler that had assaulted her jaw and began beating Clyde’s bare butt red.  It wasn’t punishment, it wasn’t just hitting.  This was a brutal beating and anyone could see that.

When it was over Clyde couldn’t stand one more minute of that classroom.  The teacher. The students who had seen him exposed. The big words that he couldn’t spell correctly.  He ran out of there as fast as anyone could and no one cared.  There was no one coming after him to tell him how sorry they were.  No voice beckoning him back, not even the wretched voice of the antagonist, Miss Hunter, trying to fulfill her teacher’s duties.

Now that Clyde was older and sitting in his truck on the way to his old schoolhouse, passing by all the places he stopped to cry that afternoon over what had happened to him, he was wondering why some one like that… someone like Miss Hunter…  why she would ever have wanted to be a teacher?  Why are the people who are in the most petty of powerful positions, like the employee of the DMV, or the usher at the movie theater, or educator of small children… why are they the most likely to abuse their power?

“Inferno”, Clyde Homer thought.  “I know what Inferno means now, and I’ll show them I know.”

He drove up to that schoolhouse, which in his mind might as well have been a prison; his Alcatraz.

___________________

This time Johnny had gone too far.  Everyone has heard of tacks on teacher’s chairs, or snakes and frogs in teacher’s desks, but no one had thought of this until it came out the sick mind of a so called good boy.

Johnny was late turning in his essay.  It was a fifth grade essay so it couldn’t have been that difficult, especially for him, but some stubborn side of that boy made him refuse to do what everyone else thought was reasonable.  Johnny thought he was the teacher’s pet, so why should he be treated like everyone else when he was the top of his class?  He finally wrote the words to his essay, but rather then it being about the assigned subject, he instead wrote “I am the teacher’s pet” over a hundred times and signed it with the real decapitated head of Miss Hunter’s fourteen year old cat.  This was the display on Miss Hunter’s desk that summer day of ‘63, two weeks after school had started again, and the good boy Johnny was nowhere to be found.

_____________________

Clyde Homer drove up to that schoolhouse, which in his mind might as well have been a prison; his Alcatraz.  He sat and watched for a little while as he smoked his cigarette to the butt, the bare butt, just like his own so many years before.  Beside him in the passenger seat was a brown paper bag, but this wasn’t his lunch.  Clyde dumped it out and looked at its contents, his friends, a black spray paint can and a box of matches.

The schoolhouse backed up to a forest that wasn’t heavily wooded and one where you could see into it.  It wasn’t a foreboding forest at all, but a pleasant one.  Hanging from a tree just past the edge of the forest Clyde noticed a young boy on a swing and thought to himself that it wouldn’t matter if the kid saw him, after all he wanted to be caught so Miss Hunter would know it was her fault. 

Walking up to the schoolhouse, Clyde noticed that the young boy who was swinging away a few moments ago was gone and no sound was coming from the schoolhouse just like he expected.  He thought that school was out for summer.  The spray can rattled as he shook it and then in big black letters looking very childishly drawn, Clyde wrote the word Inferno on the side of the schoolhouse.  He spelled it E-N-F-U-R-N-O, just like he had so many years before.

Clyde bent down to light a match, but it was at that moment that a young boy stepped around the back side of the schoolhouse.  The match blew out in Clyde’s hand as he stared at the child who had some dark manner about him.

“Hey Mister, what-cha doing.”  It was Johnny.

“Go away kid”, Clyde yelled to Johnny.  “I’m busy!”

“Can I help you”, Johnny asked eagerly.

This set Clyde aback quite a bit.  Did this child understand what he was doing?  Did the good boy, little Johnny, understand the torment that lived in his heart?

Suddenly Clyde’s train of thought broke as heard from inside the classroom the voice of that old hag of a teacher saying, “Alright children, you can stop reading now.”

Children were inside this building.  Clyde thought it was still summer break, he couldn’t be wrong, could he?  He dropped the box of matches and ran to the front door of the old school house.  As he looked in he felt remorse for he was planning to do.  How could he have even thought of such a thing?  How could he have let his life been so controlled by one foul incident in his past?  He knew he was no murderer, he never wanted to be the one responsible for baking fifteen or twenty kids in a schoolhouse, but that’s what he would have done if revenge would have controlled his life.

“May I help you?”  The voice was coming from the far wall of the classroom.  It was familiar.  It was that woman, that predator he hadn’t seen since the day of his humiliation.

“No, I was…,” Clyde trailed off into his thoughts unable to speak, only able to think of what he was trying to say.  Seeing her again hadn’t filled him with the hate he thought it would.  Although Miss Hunter had never given him an apology he felt that he no longer needed one.  “Was this a grown up feeling,” he thought.

A tug came at Clyde’s arm as he stared off into the fog of his mind.  Looking down, he saw that it was a little girl staring up at him with bright blue eyes, the innocent eyes of a child.  Clyde turned in horror and ran back to his truck, his mind filled with thoughts of what could have happened, what he could have done.  He never wanted to become a murderer, especially of children.  He never wanted to commit the crime that was committed upon him at the tender age of 10.

In his pickup truck, Clyde buried his head into the steering wheel, grieving for the loss of life that almost was.  Then he looked up.

Clyde saw the young good boy standing at the side of the school house with his back to him.  He saw Johnny slowly bend down and pick up the box of matches Clyde had left there.  It was like a vision of a kid finding his fathers gun.  It was like giving power freely to one who can’t be trusted.  Johnny opened the matchbox and attempted to light one unsuccessfully.  Clyde could now see that the good boy, Johnny, had taken his place. Johnny struck another match and a few seconds later the view had changed.  He was now holding the box of matches above a small fire at the side of the schoolhouse.  Johnny had started the fire just like the good boy that he was.  Why?  Was Johnny’s trust betrayed by the same teacher that Clyde’s was?  No, only the pride of an egotistical good little boy who got straight A’s and who knew how to spell every letter of what he was doing.  I-N-F-E-R-N-O

Clyde put his truck in gear.

_______________________

It was over.  The left side of the schoolhouse was a little black and would need to be replaced, but it was over.  E-N-F-U-R-N-O was still readable and the cops could tell whose handwriting it was.  It was the same as that of the man in the pickup truck, the one who had chased the poor innocent little student, the good boy, across the field in an attempt to pin him between the front grill of the pickup and a tree with a crudely hung swing.  The man who was identified as one, Clyde J. Homer, had driven his pickup truck straight into a ditch without his seatbelt on.  The windshield was shattered by his head causing his neck to be broken and he died within minutes.  But that man was dead now, killed in a failed attempt to murder an innocent child, killed in the collision.

The good boy Johnny was sitting on the front steps of the schoolhouse loving the attention he was getting by his classmates, his teacher, and the police.

“I came around the corner and saw him lighting a match.  I asked him what he was doing, but he just told me to go away.  So I did and I tried to run into the classroom and tell Miss Hunter, but he grabbed me and forced me into his pickup truck.  I opened the door and got out.  Then he started chasing me with his truck.  I ran for the trees ‘cuz I thought it was safe and I guess I made it just in time.”

The crowd sighed after the embellished telling of the heroic young boy’s story.  It all lined up, what was left to question?  The police were satisfied and even more surprisingly the skeptical Miss Hunter was satisfied.  She completely disregarded her pupil’s rebellion of his rather graphic essay.

When the police had all gone and the rest of the class was dismissed only Miss Hunter and Johnny were left.

Johnny came up to his admiring teacher’s desk and asked, “Who was he Miss Hunter?”

She pulled out an old photograph of a fifth grade boy in period 1940’s clothes, handed it to Johnny, and said, “Just one of my students who needed to be taught a lesson that he almost learned many years ago.”

The old Miss Hunter then threw her arms around her good little boy and hugged him with the deepest affection anyone had ever seen out of her, but no one was around to see it.  Miss Hunter had never married and everyone new it, so they naturally assumed she was alone in the world except for her students.  Certainly, and without question, she was an old schoolmarm who knew the meaning of every word in the dictionary except for the true meaning of one word, love.  Love seemed to evade her for her entire life.

“Grandma”, good boy Johnny said, “When I grow up I want to be a teacher just like you.”

“Professor John Hunter,” the schoolmarm said, “That had such a lovely ring to it.”

In her entire life there was one secret the schoolmarm had seemed to keep from everyone.  No she wasn’t married, but if you’re going to spend your life around children why shouldn’t you have some of your own?

Johnny hugged his grandma again with much love and affection.  He was proud to be the accomplice to whatever school yard grudge might have been birthed in the past, proving that although the pupil sometimes rebels against the teacher, sometimes a more accurate statement would be: like teacher, like pupil.