City Kid

Partly, perhaps. Or was it his environment that didn’t give him a chance? It seemed as if people didn’t listen to him. Did Luke realize this and so didn’t bother to talk? Maybe his resistance grew into refusal to do work and he escaped into the fantasy of his drawings. I would have to get into the office and read his records carefully.

I arrived at ten to one, and the yard at the west side of the school that served as parking lot and playground was jammed with kids. A heavy woman, with a plastic kerchief tied over her gray hair and black galoshes on her feet, stood in the center of the yard blowing short shrill blasts on a whistle. The children cheerfully ignored her, pushing, shoving, moving like a tidal wave from one side of the yard to the other, back and forth, swirling around the teacher almost without noticing her.

Occasionally something would distract them. A fight would break out between two boys, and a small group of ten or twelve children would form a protective circle around the combatants, their cheers drowning out the agitated whistle blasts.

A long loud bell rang inside the school and the wave of children rearranged itself.

“Line up. Line up. We’re not going in till I see straight lines.”

The children separated themselves into a dozen or so groups.

“Straighten up those lines” – a few more whistle blasts. The children didn’t move at all, except to dart from their clusters to pick up a forgotten glove or book.

“All right. Kindergarten first.” No one seemed to expect to have to form lines as they had been instructed to do, and one group after another tramped through the side door. Once again, words were meaningless.

Lisa Eckhardt was mixing paint when I walked into her second grade.

“Hi,” she said cheerfully. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon. Come on in.”

“I know,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be here so soon. I think we’re only supposed to come twice a week in the beginning.”

“Well, feel free. Come whenever you like. You know, Luke actually said something to me yesterday. Didn’t do any work, of course, but he did say good-bye when he left. And that’s something. I wasn’t sure he even knew I existed.”

The door burst open and the kids poured in. Lisa yelled, “Put your boots in the closets or else wipe off your feet. The floor’s getting too wet to paint on.”

“Okay, Miss Eckhardt.”

“We gonna paint. All right!”

In between pokes and yells and boots tossed across the classroom, the children managed to find a pile of men’s shirts and help one another button them up.

I watched, liking what I saw. Obviously they had all done this before and knew what to do. It was noisy and chaotic, but there was a sense of unity, almost of a family. The bickering was part of their communication.

Remembering Luke’s pictures, I knew this was not the time to take him out of class. During art, at least, he could be doing the same thing as the rest of the class.

Luke came in last. No boots. No gloves. His hands rough and red, nails black with dirt. I stood beside him as he hung his jacket on a hook in the closet.

“I’m going to come back for you in about a half hour,” I said. “I have to go down to the office right now. Okay?”

Luke nodded without expression. He stood by the coat closet, alone and silent. I wanted to get him a shirt, help him button it, find a paintbrush. Instead, I walked to the door. It would not help to treat Luke like a baby in front of the other children.

Mrs. Karras was nowhere in sight when I walked into the office, but the secretary willingly gave me the key to the file and in a minute I had lifted out Brauer, Lucas. The file was thick and the folder smudged and bent. It had obviously been in and out of the drawer many times. I took the file to the music room and sorted the contents on the long metal table.

There were four piles of pink absence slips signed by the truant officer. Twenty-five slips in three piles, twenty-eight in the fourth. One hundred and three altogether. Luke had been enrolled in school for two years. One hundred and eighty days to a school year. Two years and half of this one. Four hundred and fifty days altogether and Luke had missed over a hundred of them – over half a year. Had he been out more days this year than last? I tried to read the dates, but the carbon print was smudged and illegible. I sighed and put the pink slips back in the folder.

There was another large pile of white typewritten pages. I began to leaf through these and realized they were descriptions of Luke’s arrests. Twenty-four pages, a separate sheet for each arrest. Last November he had stolen over ten dollars’ worth of toy guns and army men from the five-and-ten. The previous April, a woman’s purse and gold earrings from the local department store, and before that, a cigarette lighter and aspirin and cough medicine from the drugstore.

The accounts of fires were more numerous. Luke had set both small and large street fires, and there was one major episode on the hills on the edge of the city during a dry spell. The fire had gotten out of control and it had taken the entire Fire Department two days to put it out.

My stomach felt queasy. The reality of the folder hit me harder than the report Mrs. Karras had given us the day before. But the mismatch between this file and Luke of yesterday was the hardest to understand. How had all this started? Why? I searched the folder for a social history or background information, but there was none. Only a signed permission slip from Luke’s mother, agreeing to his being part of the program, and the intelligence test Mrs. Karras had mentioned.

I studied the test form closely, trying to decipher the psychologist’s handwriting and remember what Jerry had explained about the WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). He had felt that there was some bias against culturally deprived children on all verbal sections of intelligence tests, but that the performance sections, made up of puzzles, pictures, and mazes, were more accurate. I could see that there was a great deal of difference in Luke’s subtest scores. He had given mainly one-word answers or no answer at all to verbal questions, but on the performance part of the test, where he had to arrange pictures sequentially or build block designs from patterns, his score was far above the mean of ten. I made a mental note to discuss all this with Jerry at our next meeting.

I glanced at my watch. I’d spent over twenty minutes going through Luke’s file. No more time to think about the past. Now I needed to think about today.

I took the file back to the office and hung my jacket and scarf in the closet in the music room and then stood looking around the room. We were not going to have much in the way of books, or any kind of equipment; at least I wanted to keep my coat in our room. It was going to be difficult to work in a room that wasn’t mine. For the past six years I had tried to build a room for children where they could feel physically and emotionally safe. I was convinced that all children needed a safe place somewhere in their lives in order to grow. A place where they knew they were listened to, accepted, and cared for.

I had filled my room at school with books, records, pictures, and plants, with scraps of bright carpet sewn together for mats, old pillows covered with soft prints, fish tanks, and homemade games. There would be none of this in the bare, drab music room of School 23, only cold metal furniture and an old piano.

Yet somehow I was sure Luke could grow. The pink truant slips and typed arrest sheets faded from my mind. That was last week, last month, last year. Now the image of yesterday’s Luke hunched over his lion picture filled my mind. Suddenly I knew what to do. I took Luke’s lion picture from the file cabinet where we were to keep our records, data sheets, and tests on the children and wrote down his story as nearly as I could remember it; then I went back to the office and typed it on a white unlined piece of paper. I wrote the title in capitals.

THE LIONS

There were four lions. A mother lion with fur around her face and three baby lions. They lived in Africa. A zoo keeper caught them and put them in a big field with a big, BIG fence around them. They lived happily ever after.

by Luke Brauer

As I typed, I thought of Luke’s picture. Was there any relationship between the baby lions and Luke and the large space between the lions and their mother?

Careful, I warned myself, don’t read in too much.

In the music room, I cut a file folder in half to make front and back covers, punched the picture, the story, and the covers with a three-hole punch, I put Luke’s story and lion picture between the two halves of the folder and laced them all together with some red yarn from the materials drawer. With Magic Markers, red, yellow, and blue, I wrote LUKE’S BOOK on the front cover.

Painting was over by the time I got back to Lisa’s room. They were cleaning up, to use the word euphemistically, accompanied by Lisa’s shouts. “… Dump the water in the sink, for Pete’s sake. Not on the floor. Pick up the papers!”

Lisa looked up at me. “I swear I don’t know why I do it. It’s not worth the mess.” Then she smiled. “Well, maybe it is. Look at this.” She pointed to what was obviously a picture of School 23, grimy red bricks outlined in black, gray stone steps, even a lady with a whistle in the yard beside the school.

We smiled together. “It’s worth it,” I said. “How about Luke? What did he do?”

“God! You know, I don’t know. He’s so quiet. The other twenty-nine are so noisy, it’s like he’s not there. But I know he did something – I would have noticed that at least.”

Lisa wiped her hands with paper towels at the sink.

“Luke,” she called. “Come here.”

Luke’s body crouched lower over his desk.

“Luke Brauer. Do you hear me? Come over here.”

Lisa’s voice was not mean. Just loud.

Reluctantly, Luke stood up as the class watched with interest.

“Come on over here. Now what did you paint?”

Oh, Lord, I thought. Why had I asked? I never wanted him to be singled out like this.

Luke stood in front of Lisa. Paint was smeared on his shirt, his face, his hair.