“Never mind.” She walked away.
“I’ll be in class,” he said.
And he was in class, and he was there after school every afternoon for the next two weeks, never saying a word, quietly washing the boards and cleaning the erasers and rolling up the maps while she worked at her papers. Between them there was that clock silence of four o’clock, the silence of the sun going down, the silence with the catlike sound of erasers patted together, the rustle and turn of papers and the scratch of a pen, and perhaps the buzz of a fly banging with a tiny high anger against the tallest window in the room. Sometimes the silence would go on this way until almost five, when Miss Taylor would find Bob Markham in the last seat of the room, sitting and looking at her silently.
“Well, it’s time to go home,” Miss Taylor would say, getting up.
“Yes’m.”
And he would run to fetch her hat and coat. He would also lock the schoolroom door for her unless the janitor was coming in later. Then they would walk out of the school and across the empty yard. They talked of all sorts of things.
“And what are you going to be, Bob, when you grow up?”
“A writer,” he said.
“Oh, that’s a big ambition. It takes a lot of work.”
“I know, but I’m going to try,” he said. “I’ve read a lot.”
“Bob, haven’t you anything to do after school? I mean, I hate to see you indoors so much, washing the boards.”
“I like it,” he said. “I never do what I don’t like.”
“Nevertheless—”
“No. I’ve got to do that,” he said. He thought for a while and said, “Do me a favor, Miss Taylor?”
“It all depends.”
“I walk every Saturday from out around Buetrick Street along the creek to Lake Michigan. There’s a lot of butterflies and crayfish and birds. Maybe you’d like to walk too.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Then you’ll come?”
“I’m afraid I’m going to be busy.”
He started to ask doing what, but stopped.
“I take along sandwiches,” he said. “Ham and pickle ones. And orange pop. I get down to the lake about noon and walk back about three. I wish you’d come. Do you collect butterflies? I have a big collection. We could start one for you.”
“Thanks, Bob, but no. Perhaps some other time.”
He looked at her and said, “I shouldn’t have asked you, should I?”
“You have every right to ask anything you want to,” she said.
A FEW DAYS later she found an old copy of Great Expectations which she didn’t want, and gave it to Bob. He stayed up that night and read it through and talked about it the next morning. Each day now he met her just beyond sight of her boarding-house, and many days she would start to say, “Bob—” and tell him not to come to meet her any more, but she never finished saying it.
She found a butterfly on her desk on Friday morning. She almost waved it away before she found that it was dead and had been placed there while she was out of the room. She glanced at Bob over the heads of her other students, but he was looking at his book—not reading, just looking at it.
It was about this time that she found it impossible to call on Bob to recite in class. Her pencil would hover over his name and then she would call the next person up or down the list. Nor would she look at him while they were walking to or from school. But on several late afternoons as he moved his arm high on the blackboard, sponging away the arithmetic symbols, she found herself glancing over at him for seconds at a time.
And then one Saturday morning when he was standing in the middle of the creek with his overalls rolled up to his knees, he looked up and there on the edge of the running stream was Miss Ann Taylor.
“Well, here I am,” she said, laughing.
“And do you know,” he said, “I’m not surprised.”