School Children
Krista EastmanWe came into this world creatures of the yellow school bus, bouncing from seat to seat, screeching open windows one by one, letting loose the long blasts of our barn lowing. As creatures, we didn’t possess knowledge of history so much as knowledge of habitat, which we blithely extended all the way back to the bright dawn of time. Time began here, with us, the yellow bus quaking our small bones as we rumbled together down the same line. We took this bus to and from school, a sometimes cold, sometimes hot pocket of yelling, of disparate causes and declared allegiances, of different “home lives” roiling together in a peerless mix. And we took it on field trips, though these were a different affair, having the feel of momentous pursuit, the air of all of us, at long last, getting somewhere.
At the helm of the bus, making the wide turns, sat Bill or Bob, Marv or John, a man in late middle age who knew all the country roads, who each morning came in from the quiet and kept a practical distance. What did he do while we were away, while we trampled the capital city or gawked at the zoo animals gawking back at us? We located intrigue in the flattest of mysteries and comedy in the smallest irregularities and so found something of interest in his oily bald spot, his unmatched socks, his two-sausage sack lunch. He is dead now, I assume. In the long tradition of narrative recollection, it’s customary to acknowledge, however briefly, the way Time has come for people we remember, to create a nostalgic distance into which we plop the wry bottom of our
KRISTA EASTMANsomehow still being alive. Time came for Bill, Bob, Marv, & John, but he took away his secret life and buried it, the way reliable people once did, back in something like the good old days.
What remains is the memory of his driving, the ghost of his navigation, the surprising image of him once again climbing the stairs to start the bus. See how we careen from one side of the road to the other? See how we gun up the side of long-grass ridges, cutting across property lines, thumping through corn fields, sending cows in clumsy, clamoring flight, while we—children now 30 years on—hold tight to our loosening bodies, our falling faces, the fresh resignation of our unremarkable lives. See how we wait for the situation to straighten itself out? In life, no one drove this way, our small bodies still promising something, our lunches gently trembling together in a cardboard box, a smooth brown cornucopia of Ding Dongs and orange pop. But then everything happens in two times, then and now, and each of these times is simultaneous and scattered and waiting to be reined in, to curl in the soft mania of a single hand.
I move forward with these irregular ghosts so that I might ride for some time on interests in innocence and confusion, so we might see where things take us or find some purpose in remembering. There was a time when light could flicker inside a tire on the school playground and we the children would spend weeks recording hopeful observations in notebooks, threading each apparition of light with elaborate stories—alien sightings, communication from above or below, some creature in possession of the very urgent need for us to know. On the bus, I couldn’t see what unfurled beneath or what came up ahead but there too I was alive to the world’s hidden messages. I looked out the window but kept an eye on the grown-ups, watching for inadvertent signs of secrecy or discomfort, information I used in placing one like thing with another, in sifting and sorting, in amassing an impressive workload before falling each night into pulsating sleep.
On field trips, we crowded the doorway of our representative at the state capitol, where she stood in sensible blue imparting to us the surprising importance of our visit, the great democratic purpose of the boisterous echo our bodies produced in sober stone hallways. When we went to the Old Indian Agency House, the docent presented before the wrought iron tools of the kitchen’s hearth and underscored just how idle American lives had become, just how much we owed to the hardworking settlers who had come before. For years, we’d been watching “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” growing doughy and mute when we might have been out stacking wood, mugging for the camera, taking our silent, stoic place in the nation’s great story. We also went to the nearby water park several weeks before summer would begin and there we skittered down the frigid waters of the lazy river. Often, we ate our lunches on the ground near effigy mounds, terrestrial bears, panthers, birds, and other animals or spirits built into the land between 700 BC and 1,100 AD by ancestors of the Ho-Chunk. We wondered if there were human bones inside, but could not see cosmology or ideology, could not really wonder what worlds we lived in.
Enter now the Ding Dongs, borne to our laps on a wave of euphoric cheers. Enter now the fizzing cans of lukewarm pop. We’re sitting “Indian style” in what might have been a world heritage site—the center of the center of the most effigy mounds ever built anywhere by anyone. But we remain Pied Pipers of a jumbled past, joined by a growing crowd of poorly understood ghosts, animated as if in an old Disney movie, our shadows thick and dark and emerging from the story’s thinnest and most thrilling line, the music hinting at something sinister. We have brontosauruses and cowboys and Indians and dangerous animals of the forest. We have pioneers and cave men with clubs plus the first fish to grow legs and crawl without eyelids up on to the land’s
shore. We have Washington and Jefferson and Franklin just as we have Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. In the crowd, a French mouse scurries about in tiny, feathered hat, climbing atop shoulders, holding forth from on high, “The future, it’s a field trip, non?”
In the spring of 1990 our bus pulls up to Man Mound County Park, home to one of the few mounds found in human form and almost certainly the only one remaining. Bill or Bob, Marv or John puts the bus into park and turns languid eyes to us as we funnel down the aisle and spill out onto a wayside park surrounded by farmland, our innocence or its opposite rolling out of the bus in waves. We don’t know about the mounds’ widespread destruction or that the mounds we do see, in parks with plaques, are mere remnants of the 15,000 that once existed within the state. In our field trips focused on knowing and appreciating what had come before, in imagining the hard scrabble life of white settlers, we never once imagine the sacrilege of plow turning over mound after mound, or the human bones, once carefully placed, that now lay crushed among industrial rows of corn. It’s not that we don’t know the land was stolen, it’s that we know the past to be a movie, bittersweet, tinged with the gentlest of regrets, set to a heroically sweeping score. As for the future, it’s plotted out for us in TV ads, in the repeated image of Coca-Cola bringing down the Berlin Wall, in the way the world thirsts for our progress.
At the park, we scatter. But then the teacher instructs us to move around the mound, to decipher its shape. “It’s a person,” someone cries out, and altogether now we rush to discovery, rounding the body, each of us trying to be the first to delineate what the mound-building people have left for us to trace. This “man mound” built more than 1,000 years ago wears horns or a horned headdress. In the original, it stretched more than 200 feet long and gave the appearance of walking west. No one knows if
SCHOOL CHILDREN
the mound represents a specific Ho-Chunk clan, or tells a specific story, or marks the place of a particular ritual. The people who could tell us took that information with them a long time ago, when the last ancient woman left to lament the loss of an old way permanently faded into the earth, followed in short order by the grandchildren who could have recalled something of what she’d said.
Having rounded the head, we run around a shoulder and down the long stretch of arm and then start to pool at the bottom of the mound near the road, taking stock of the 150-some feet we’ve just covered. “What do you notice about the feet?” the teacher prompts, sly, almost winking. The children who reached the base first shout it out for the rest of us to hear. There aren’t any! They built the road right through his legs! Why, we ask, churning together in our grouping, the skin on our faces flushing with heat. We think we know what it is to build something and then to have someone else topple it. In our short lives, we have constructed things, whole marvelous worlds, and we know something about cruelty and indifference. We know what we cannot control, specifically the lumps that rise in our throats, unstoppable injury, swelling, operatic indignation. But what I remember then is the moment sort of pausing—the lesson timing out—interrupted, perhaps, by the call for lunch, all of us running to retrieve our bags and spread out on the ground, to trade our Little Debbie snacks and our bags of Combos, our tidy sheaths of roll-ups.
As we peel plastic from the food products of 1990, we are joined by more ghosts, but these we cannot see. Settlers arrive on foot looking the spry part of rugged explorers of the new Wisconsin wild, pale men without access to bug spray on a mission to survey and possess. What incredible race of Man, they wondered, could have left these mounds behind? Having determined that the Native inhabitants of the New World were far too primitive
to be responsible for such complex works, 19th-century settlers began with a faulty assumption and charted data points from there. As Robert Silverberg writes in his book, The Mound Builders, “The builders of the mounds were transformed into the Mound Builders, a diligent and gifted lost race. No one knew where they had gone, but the scope for theorizing was boundless.”
Were they Vikings, Egyptians, Israelites, or Greeks? Chinese, Polynesians, Norwegians, or Welsh? Belgians, Phoenicians, Tartars, Saxons, Carthaginian, or Hindus? A reverend by the name of Landon West suggested that a serpent-shaped mound in Ohio was the work of God’s hands, that it marked the original site of Eden, Christianity’s earthly paradise. Silverberg writes that “the myth of the mounds had caught the public fancy, and what delighted the public most keenly was the image of a great empire dragged down to destruction by hordes of barbarians.” Here then was a stimulating pastime for people engaged in campaigns of genocide and dispossession against Native people: the long tantalizing search for the original civilization the Indians had killed off, proof of the Indians’ status as momentary interlopers in what could have otherwise been Western time and space. The mound builder myth, Silverberg notes, was “comforting to the conquerors.”
In the 1850s, in an effort Silverberg calls “a crazy masterpiece of pseudoscience, a glib entangling of virtually every myth that has been told about the Mound Builders,” William Pidgeon published Traditions of De-coo-dah and Antiquarian Researches. In this text Pidgeon recounted the story of his encounter with a man by the name of De-coo-dah, the last living member of the Elk nation or Lost Race, mound builders whose ancestry ran to Denmark and/or (possibly) Mexico. Upon meeting Pidgeon for the first time, De-coo-dah mistakes him for one of the white men who were everywhere turning over mounds in search of treasure. Why, De-coo-dah asks, “does not the white man leave the record
on the earth where it belongs?”—“Most of white men,” Pidgeon replies, “care little about things that are not directly connected with their real or imaginary pecuniary interest; but there are some white men that delight in promoting the welfare of others.”—“A good man—a good white man!” De-coo-dah proclaims, swiftly accepting Pidgeon’s project as his own.
After taking up residence together in an island cabin on the Mississippi River, De-coo-dah explains how the Elk were weakened by warfare with the Indians and then finally extinguished by a flood so large it engulfed half the continent. In a cabin, presumably near the hot glow of the hearth, De-coo-dah tells Pidgeon everything, relinquishing the mound builder secrets that would definitively guide Pidgeon’s project of mapping and explaining the purpose of around 400 different mounds in Wisconsin and some in Ohio. “Though everything in it was pure nonsense,” Silverberg writes, “Pidgeon was audacious enough to offer his manuscript originally to the Smithsonian for publication in the Contributions to Knowledge series; it was indignantly rejected, whereupon Pidgeon gave it to a commercial publisher and made a fortune.” Pidgeon would meet an obscure death in Illinois. De-coo-dah would not die at all, remaining free as a phantom to receive good white men as guests for eternity, his simple island cabin growing over time to 4,000 square feet, six and a half baths, a prize of red jet skis bobbing on the dock.
Years after the mound builder myth had finally floundered, after early archeologists definitively concluded that yes of course the mounds were built by ancestors of the people who’d been living here all along, white settler society came along to preserve some of what it had not undone. In 1907, the Sauk County Historical Society and the Wisconsin Archeological Society bought the man mound to prevent its owner from tilling it and to launch an effort to preserve earthworks by turning them into educational parks.
In 1908, they gathered to dedicate a plaque on new parkland that would venerate the existence of this thousand-year-old mound. In their speeches, they would not mention the Ho-Chunk people to whom these sites were and remain sacred but would instead position themselves as the recipients of whatever tradition they thought they’d found here, finding a central place for their own story in yet one more remarkable thing. In this way the mound was saved for future viewing, its plaque a cipher for many things, including, perhaps, the superior judgment of those for whom the future was always being made.
What’s clear is that the people who gathered here in 1908 had already anticipated our arrival, we the simple children of future scholastic pilgrimages. With a plaque, with this parkland, we would arrive one day—our clothing perplexingly neon, our language broken and base—to learn about the past through the narrative of ourselves, to gaze upon something carefully made, something old and mysterious and deep, while learning how to mute the continuous roar of its feedback. From air and TV, from songs and silence and historical markers, we learned to live free in the hope that soars high above the settler enterprise, to place into an irretrievable past the death required to nurture this people, this place, this plot. Here we were learning a lesson: how to carry a story forward unchanged, with a loose and limp regret, how to cut the present clean and free from the living world of what might otherwise be done.
Beside the mound we probably made a fine scene, for the society ghosts, but also for De-coo-dah, who would have looked on that day from a rocky outcrop, his silhouette billowing in the wind, beside him a silver boombox the size of a small boulder blasting “Greatest Love of All” for all the New World to hear. I believe the children are our future Teach them well and let them lead the way. De-coo-dah, invention of inventions, surges then for one
flesh and blood second, his fantasy heart thrumming at the sight of so many pale-skinned children finding purpose in the park, at a youthful nation not yet lost, at so many good white men in the making.
The memory of this field trip, the half-drawn presence of the tagalong gang, is porous and full of long adulterating cracks. I’m a child but then so is my son, a kindergartner. He’s free to join us and our long trail of clues and characters, our flitting interest in apartheid. In the mayhem, he trades lunch items like everything depends on it or springs up to chase the mouse. Strapped into the back of our car, he tells me facts. “Cavemen did not have underwear. They had to kill mastodons and mammoths and saber tooth tigers and make underwear out of them.” I didn’t know that, I tell him. “They used rocks to cut their hair. That was almost 100 years ago. They were 20 feet tall and so their caves were also 20 feet tall. A man made the cavemen out of junk and fastened all the junk together and that made the caveman really, really powerful.”
“This is true,” he says. “I am honest.”
In Heaven, there’s a history channel. At least that’s what the ghost driver, who has escaped from the lean silence of his former life, is now yelling at us over the clunking of the ditches and creeks that pass beneath, his sudden confidence an abrasive stranger. His elbow swings in and out, in and out, his sunburned neck clenched as he presides over the swings of a top-heavy bus while we hang tight on a commitment to all of this arriving somewhere, eventually. Did you know, he calls back to us, that the mounds weren’t even made by the Indians? He waits as if he’s not in charge of the pause. No! They were built by descendants of the lost continent of Atlantis! A lost race. Murdered by Indians! In this way, the bus becomes a kind of monologue and we its captives, bodies caught in an endless and nauseating scroll down. People nowadays
are always going on about what we did to the Indians, he continues. ‘Oh, the poor Indians, what a bum deal they got!’ But what about what they did to the people who built the mounds? Controlled pause. That’s right. Nobody wants to talk about that.
I remember the confused band of tagalongs well Johnny Tremaine and Laura Ingalls and Caddie Woodlawn, how we all gathered together in the light of early spring mornings but I don’t remember this. We will ignore him, I assume, the way we ignore meticulously groomed men who yell in the street about Satan and the flames of hell, who make salvation seem like sexual harassment. But then the ghost bus is vibrating with sudden anger and the wheels have begun to wobble, the bus lurching more than before. I watch as classmates lean into this speech with the body language of certain discovery and superior reasoning. They’ve already begun standing guard, have declared themselves ready to defend Atlantis. Once, I had thought this field trip might culminate in redemptive nostalgia, that we would find a moment in which to shake our heads in a bemused way, to nod at the soft distance between what we thought things were and what they actually turned out to be, and for a moment, we would oblige, unanimous in our sense of self and group, past and present, in the bus still moving on with all of us.
A classmate stands. “What you saw at the capitol was a STAGED event,” he says, prompting the bus driver to beep in agreement. “The media used to give us facts, but now it’s all LIES.” Beep beep. “It’s human to be led astray by our emotions.” (Silence). “But for the sake of this country we’ve got to use our heads.” Beep beep beep. Where is our deep-voiced teacher now? In which grave under which tree? In corduroys, he taught us how to fold a map. He told us about the Holocaust. He provided guard rails for our existence each time we were about to descend the stairs of the bus: grab your lunch, the outhouse is there, here are
the parameters, here is the question, do not push in the aisle, do not go into the woods, you have thirty minutes. Tucked in at the edges, we were free to explore, to wind our bodies into the grass, to momentarily fashion our education into a moveable feast, to find the correct answer.
Question: Why did they build the highway that way?
Answer: Because they had to. Because people need to drive.
When the bus finally stops, we scatter, the hills around us kicking up the sound of sitcom laughter. I start the car and pretend not to notice, pretend to be a grown-up in this role I’ve studied forever. As children, we wanted to drive a car with something long and dangly hanging on the rearview mirror. We wanted to have serious worries and make definitive statements about Life, to cut coupons with weary importance, to make trips to the store where we would make decisions about what to buy and how much. On TV, we’d watched working dads return home to their families hundreds if not thousands of time. The front door would open and he would enter to greet the nerdy kid, the little sport, plus the princess who was the spitting image of her mother, a voluptuous voice of reform now living in the laundry. Later, he’d pause for the sound of so much disembodied laughter during each of his encounters with the neighbor, a hippie who hung about the recycling bins, the better to bust everyone’s chops. “Earth Day again, Flemington?” the dad would call out, laughter falling like foam bricks onto any of the other worlds we might have been living in.
On bus rides home, I remember heat and headaches, the perennial smell of vinyl. I remember the soft din of our returning, the weight of the things I could not sort out, a tangle of objects oblong and out of the way. We had different home lives and this difference remained a source of darkness. My own mom
had intimated that things were not equal. The bus dropped us in different spots and we disappeared from sight one by one, each of us moving closer to whatever or whoever waited. This was knowledge that proved impossible to categorize. Unfairness circled the bus undeterred, growing fat on the smallest sign of our indignation. Our job, as we understood it, was to side with this bully as best we could, to come to believe that our feather-light souls could not be affected by a classmate’s bruises, to assume that our teachers had good reasons for favoring the favored and punishing the punished, unlucky, and unlikable.
Even so, you had to wonder about the drug addicts. You had to think on the cigarette scent of Father’s thick vestments and about the different times of your ancestors, the pioneers stuck in their cold winter cabins, Noah facing that flood, cavemen emerging from the crevice of rock, grunting to each other under prominent foreheads and flicking fire on rocks. But there remained other mysteries too.
What of the pulsing crotch of David Bowie in the “Labyrinth”?
What of drunkenness and stumbling?
What of the impossibility of locating in advance every possible source of shame?
The bus window would rattle my brain and later that night I’d have nightmares of Medusa. Having hacked off the top of the neighbor’s house, she stood in the open air of the attic at night, her snakes hissing and writhing in abject communion with the impending storm, her presence a total devastation of the simple street I called home.
We remain on the bus or maybe we do not. We are its creatures or we are not. We are followed, or we are dragging things behind, producers of our own haunting. We are the children of the future, except that we’re not children anymore and what we possess is a
long line of things, microwaves tied to lamp shades, lamp shades tied to boots, which we try to toss ahead but which of course must be dragged like so much junk behind. When I can’t find my thermos, I can ask to borrow from a friend who keeps two tied to a bumper. God knows, she will say, handing it to me. God knows where all these things go.
What do we have left but the promise of some stupid arrival?
What do we have but the superior inventions of settler time?
The road will tell us our story. The road is good at that. We are on a journey to meet ourselves in a future that we will have, at long last, perfected. We’ve noticed that seeking arrival holds a delicate and unimaginable beauty, that the absence of our actually arriving marks the act of moving forward with some great promise of redemption, the finest grain of a feeling that we use to ennoble our faith and our funerals and our fabrications. We can’t arrive, not really.
What is left for us but to be ensnared in some final confusion, in the intricacy of narratives made possible by twisting bodies of time and fact?
I bet right now school children are somewhere busying themselves with the task of beaming bright messages down from some high place, sending their urgent signals to the earth’s ring of animals, creatures who dig as they were digging, eat as they were eating, their eyes not able to catch that light. We are here and we are powerful, the children will sign. We are honest and this is true.