Present, Fifteen (4)

Sheriff T. H. Bowman got there at twelve twenty and the lot had
nine cars in it that did not belong to the school.

Joyce watched him from the office window. He parked at the end of
the row and got out and put his hat on, and then he stood by the
door of his car for the better part of a minute looking at the
building, at the north wall, at the people standing in the grass
along the walk.

Then he came in.

He was a heavy man in his fifties and he had been sheriff since
1966 and Joyce had voted for him twice without ever having spoken
to him.

He took the hat off inside.

"Who's got the most of it?"

Mrs. Daughtry looked at Joyce.

---

They went down the hall and Joyce gave it to him the way she had
given it to Ledwell, and Bowman listened without interrupting and
then he tried the door himself.

He tried it three times.

He put his ear to it for a long time and Joyce stood behind him
and watched his shoulders and did not say anything, and when he
came away from the door his face had not changed at all.

"Anybody call a doctor?"

"No, sir."

"Get Kesler out here. Tell him bring whatever he'd bring to a
wreck." He was looking down the hall toward the corner. "Who's in
the gym?"

"Everybody."

"Anybody gone home?"

"Not yet."

"Don't send them home." He put the hat back on and took it off
again. "You send a bus out of here right now, every one of those
people in the lot is going to think we're clearing the building
for a reason."

---

The meeting was in the cafeteria at ten to one, with the tables
folded up against the wall and six people standing in the middle
of the floor.

Bowman. Ledwell. Pickard. Mrs. Daughtry. Joyce. A man named
Crotts from the county maintenance shop who had come out with a
truck and had not been told why.

Talley was still in Lexington. Mrs. Daughtry had called twice and
left word.

Bowman laid it out.

They could take the hinges. Hour or better, and the door falls
inward onto whatever is behind it.

They could go through a window. Crotts had a bar in the truck and
the glass was the old wire glass and would come out in pieces, and
behind the glass there was a flat obstruction of unknown
composition at unknown distance.

They could cut through from Room 5, which shared a wall, and that
was a day's work and a saw and no.

Or they could stand in the hall and wait for somebody in that room
to open the door.

"That's four," Bowman said. "There's not a fifth one."

Crotts said the window was the way to do it. He said you take out
the bottom light on the left, you get a bar in behind whatever
that board is, and you are in the room in four minutes.

Ledwell said there were fifteen children in the room and nobody
knew where they were standing.

Crotts said that was why you took the bottom light and not the
top.

Pickard said the second layer behind the board was at eight or ten
inches and he had looked at it himself and he could not tell what
it was, and if it was desks stacked then a bar behind it brought
them down, and if it was desks stacked with children behind them
then a bar behind it brought them down on the children.

Crotts said you would hear them.

Pickard said you would hear them now if you were going to.

Then nobody said anything for a while. Joyce could hear the gym
through two walls, which was a sound like weather.

"Miz Setzer," Bowman said.

Joyce had her hands at her sides.

"I'd ask you to wait," she said.

"Wait for what."

She had spent from eleven o'clock until a quarter of noon in her
office with the door shut and her coat on and the county kit on the
floor where she had put it that morning, going through a stack of xeroxed chapters
from a summer course, and she had found the thing she was looking
for and read it twice and then sat with it in her lap.

She had rehearsed this in there. It had gone better in there.

"There's a thing in the literature," Joyce said. "It's called mass
hysteria. It happens in groups that are closed in together. Mills.
Convents. Schools, mostly schools. One person starts something and
it moves through the rest of them and none of them is putting it
on."

Bowman waited.

"In sixty-two there was a mill down in one of the Carolinas where
sixty-some women came down sick over a few days. Fainting, nausea.
They said it was an insect that had come in on a shipment of
cloth. Entomologists went through the whole plant. There wasn't
any insect. Those women were sick. It wasn't pretend. But there
wasn't any insect."

"Sixty-some women in a mill," Bowman said.

"Yes, sir."

"And you're telling me fifteen second graders barred a door."

"I'm telling you there are things that go through a group of
people that don't have a cause you can go and find," Joyce said.
"And that when you come at them hard from the outside, they get
worse."

Crotts made a sound.

Bowman did not look at him.

"Say I wait," Bowman said. "Say I stand in that hall and wait.
What am I waiting on?"

"I don't know."

"That's not an answer, ma'am."

"No, sir, it isn't," Joyce said. "But there's nobody in that room
making a demand. There's nobody threatening anybody. There's no
sound of a child in distress. I've stood at that door since twenty
of nine. If a child in there were frightened, we would know it. A
frightened seven-year-old is the loudest thing in a building."

She heard her own voice do something on the last part and stopped
and let it go quiet.

Bowman turned his hat over once.

"Doctor's coming," he said. "Nobody touches that door or that
glass till Kesler's looked at it and told me what he thinks is
wrong with them."

Crotts said, "And if he don't know?"

"Then we're where we are now," Bowman said, "and I'll decide it
then."

He put the hat on.

"Miz Setzer. That's twice today somebody's asked you what to do
and you've told them. I want you where I can find you."

Joyce said yes sir.

When he had gone out, Ledwell was still standing there, and he
looked at her for a second and then went out after him, and Joyce
stood in the middle of the cafeteria floor with the tables up
against the wall and her hands at her sides, and she understood
what she had just bought and what it had cost, and she had asked
for it out loud in front of five people.

---

Anne Prevette found her at half past one, at the end of the
corridor where the window looked out on the lot.

"Somebody said you had my note."

"I had it. I put it down outside her room."

Anne looked out the window. There were twenty-some cars now and
people standing along the walk in coats, and two of the men had
come up as far as the flagpole and Ledwell was at the flagpole
with them.

"Is he all right? Carl?"

"I don't know."

"I want to tell you about that note," Anne said. "Because I've
been thinking about it all morning and getting it crossways in my
head."

"Tell me."

"Sissy Whitener's been crying because her daddy's gone up to
Portsmouth to work and hasn't come back when he said. That's all
it is. Her mama told me Friday at the ballgame." Anne had her arms
folded. "I wrote that note Monday afternoon and I didn't know that
yet, and now the whole school's out here and I keep thinking I
started something."

"You didn't start anything."

"I know it."

"Anne."

"I know it," Anne said.

They stood at the window.

Out in the lot a man was walking down the row of cars looking in
at the windshields, checking which ones he knew.

"What time do they let out," Joyce said.

"Three."

"Buses come at three?"

"Buses come at three."

Anne looked at her.

"They won't run them today."

"No," Joyce said.

She looked at the clock at the end of the corridor.

It was one thirty-four.

 

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