Present, Fifteen (5)

Dr. Kesler came at ten past two with his bag and a topcoat over
his suit and he was in the hall for nineteen minutes.

Ledwell stood at the corner and watched him do it.

Kesler listened at the gap along the jamb. Then he got a
stethoscope out of the bag and put the bell of it flat against the
door about chest height and moved it four times, and then lower,
and then near the floor.

He was down on one knee at the floor for a long while.

When he got up he stood with the stethoscope around his neck and
looked at the door the way a man looks at a piece of equipment he
has been asked about and does not own.

Bowman came down and Kesler talked to him quietly and Ledwell
heard about a third of it.

Slow. Regular. No coughing. No crying.

He heard Kesler say he could not put a number on how many.

He heard Bowman say the word gas and Kesler said something back
about that and about color, that you could not tell anything about
color through a door, and that if it was fumes they would not be
breathing regular, they would be breathing bad, and that he had
been at two of those and it did not sound like that.

Pickard went and checked the flue anyway and came back and said
the boiler was drafting fine and always had.

Kesler said the only thing he could tell the sheriff for certain
was that there were people alive in the room and that they were
not working hard to breathe.

Bowman asked him what he would do.

Kesler said he would not break glass into a dark room with
children in it on the strength of what he had just heard through a
door, and that the sheriff should understand he was saying that as
a man and not as a doctor, because as a doctor he had nothing.

Then he asked whether there was somewhere he could wait, and they
put him in the teachers' lounge, and he sat in there from half
past two with his coat on.

---

The lot filled between one and three the way a lot fills at a
funeral.

Nobody was told anything and everybody came.

Ledwell worked out the shape of it standing at the flagpole. A
woman at the school had called two mothers at eleven. Those two
had called four. By noon it was going by telephone through the
whole south end of the county, and the ones who did not have
telephones got it from the ones who did, and the ones who worked
shift got it when somebody came onto the floor at Klopman and told
the line.

At half past one there were twenty-some cars.

At half past two Ledwell stopped counting at fifty-one and there
were cars along the shoulder of the road in both directions and a
truck pulled into the ditch with its hazards going.

They stood in the grass along the walk and they stood at the fence
by the ball field and they stood in the lot between the cars. They
were quiet for the most part. Men who had come off shift still had
their shirts on with their names over the pocket. Some of them had
brought their wives and some of them had brought the ones from
their own house who had already got out of school somewhere else,
and there were teenagers standing around the edges of it not
knowing what to do with their hands.

Twice somebody started for the doors and twice Ledwell got in
front of them.

The second time it was a man named Younts, who had a boy in Room
7, and it went further than the first time.

Younts came up the walk and Ledwell stepped into it and Younts put
a hand on him, flat, on the chest, to move him, and Ledwell did
not move and did not put a hand back.

They stood like that.

Ledwell's arms were down at his sides and he was aware of where
his right hand was and where it was not.

"You've got my boy in there."

"Yes, sir."

"Then go get him."

"Mr. Younts, I can't get him."

"Then let me."

Ledwell did not say anything to that because there was not
anything to say to it, and after a while Younts took his hand off
Ledwell's chest and stood there breathing, and then he turned
around and walked back down the walk and stood with the others and
looked at the building.

Ledwell's hands did not steady off for a few minutes.

---

At twenty of three he went through the building to the gym to
check the doors on that end.

The gym had two hundred and some children in it and it was the
loudest thing in the county. Lunsford had a ball game going at one
end with the fifth grade and the little ones were sitting in
groups on the floor along the wall.

Setzer was down on the floor with the first grade.

She had a puppet on her hand.

It was a dolphin, gray, with a felt mouth, and she was working it
badly, and the children were sitting around her in a half circle
watching it and one of them was talking to it about a dog.

The Ledwell girl was in the second row of them with her knees up
under her chin.

Setzer looked over the top of the children's heads and saw him and
did not stop what she was doing.

Ledwell checked the doors.

On his way back out he came past the group again and heard the
dolphin ask the child what the dog's name was.

---

At ten of three Talley got back from Lexington.

He came up the walk through fifty-some people who all knew him and
he did not stop for any of them, and he got inside and looked at
the hall and looked at the lot and said, twice, that he had not
been told.

Bowman took him into the office and shut the door.

Ledwell stood in the corridor outside it.

He could hear Talley's voice going and he could not hear Bowman's
at all, and after four or five minutes Talley came out of there
without his overcoat, which he had come in wearing, and went down
the second-grade hall and stood in front of Room 7 and put his
hand on the door.

He stayed there about a minute.

Then he came back up the hall past Ledwell and did not look at
him, and went into his office, and sat down behind the desk with
the door open and the light off.

---

At two fifty-eight Bowman had every man he had inside the
building.

There were four of them. Bowman, Ledwell, Carraway who had come
from Bethel at one, and a reserve named Frank Hodge who worked at
the Ford place and had a uniform in his trunk.

Bowman put Carraway and Hodge at the front doors and told them
nobody comes through.

He put Ledwell at the corner of the second-grade hall.

He stood himself about fifteen feet from the door of Room 7 with
his hat in his hand.

Nobody had said what they were doing. There was nothing to do at
three o'clock. The buses were not running and the children were in
the gym and the men in the lot were in the lot. Three o'clock was
only the time it was going to be next.

But every one of them was in the building for it.

Ledwell had his back against the cinderblock at the corner and
from there he could see the length of the hall, the closed door,
the number card with the blue line drawn around it, and Bowman
standing in the middle of the floor.

At two fifty-nine and some seconds the bell rang.

It rang because it was on a clock in the office closet and it had
rung at that time every school day for eleven years and nobody in
that building had thought about it once all day.

It rang for four seconds.

Ledwell came off the wall.

Down the hall, Bowman had not moved.

The bell stopped.

In the quiet after it there was a sound from inside Room 7.

It was not loud. It was a wooden sound, and then a long scrape of
something heavy being walked across tile a few inches at a time,
and then a knock as it came up against something else and was set
down.

It went on for a while.

Nobody in that hall said anything or moved while it was going on.

There was another scrape, and a metal sound, and then a series of
smaller ones, and Ledwell stood at the corner and listened to
whatever was on the other side of that door being taken apart in
order, the way it had been put together in order, by people who
were not hurrying.

It took four minutes.

Then it stopped.

Then the knob turned.

And the door came open into the hall.

 

To Be Continued...