The Children are Tender

The Children Are Tender

This is a fictional work. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

© 2013 by Linda A. Born

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-62020-133-6

eISBN: 978-1-62020-185-5

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated,are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Holy Bible. Public Domain.

Cover design and typesetting: Matthew Mulder

E-book conversion: Anna Riebe

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Acknowledgements

Contact Information

Dedication

To my students, with love

And he said unto him, My lord knoweth that the children are tender, and the flocks and herds with young are with me: and if men should overdrive them one day, all the flock will die.

Genesis 33:13, KJV

Lydia’s paraphrase: The children are tenderhearted and easily hurt. I will lead them gently, at their own pace.

Introduction

AS I BEGAN TO RECORD vignettes from my years as an educator, I made the decision to create characters, timelines, and settings that conveyed the heart of my teaching experience if not the strict facts. Karola, Kansas, was conceived as an imaginary town through which I intended to honor my husband’s German heritage while capturing some of the idiosyncrasies of rural communities in the Midwest.

However, something unanticipated occurred; without my permission or conscious decision, Karola was transformed from the rural Utopia I’d imagined. Instead, it became an imperfect little community of people who struggle valiantly to follow a standard of tolerance established by their town’s charter long ago. The people of Karola are mostly well intentioned and have a strong tradition of extending the Golden Rule to all, but there are difficulties to overcome. Troubles? Yes, Lord! old Mrs. Springer would say.

There is a point at which a painting, sculpture, or story takes on a life of its own so that the artist becomes more a recorder of something that already exists rather than a creator of something new. As I wrote about Karola, I very much felt my job was merely to record as accurately as I could the terrain and characters that unfolded before me. It is a portrait of a place that has not yet existed but offers hope for a future in which such determined efforts to focus on unity among God’s people may be the norm.

When Abby appeared and smiled her dimpled smile, I at first said, I’m sorry, I can’t see how to make you work in this story. It seemed too complicated to introduce a brave black woman into a small Kansas town of the 1970s, a community whose history and traditions were proudly descended from its German founders. But Abby just stood there patiently, like a beloved child who waits to be born, or a friend whose knock one has chosen not to answer because of inconvenience, and I finally made the decision to open the door for her. Abby’s determination to remain free from bitterness stirs my heart, as does her courage in the face of prejudice that attacks at unexpected moments and with unreasonable venom.

A community that treasures what is precious and unique in each individual human being is a good setting for a story that focuses on the importance of paying close attention to the needs of children. As Abby’s colleague, Ruth, says, Emotional injury changes the direction of growth in the same way pressure placed on a slender tree trunk will cause it to grow crooked. Yes, children heal, but they heal misshapen. There is a terrible need for children to be protected so they can grow straight.

This is a story about my first year of teaching school, but because nearly all material facts have been changed, it is a work of fiction. However, please accept as absolute fact my love for my family, the children I’ve taught, and the Lord. These have not been fictionalized at all.

CHAPTER 1

Jeffrey’s Shocking Experience

MITCHELL HAD BEEN GONE FROM the first grade classroom for thirteen minutes. I was a first year teacher, but even I knew the average six-year-old could accomplish a restroom break in approximately ninety seconds. I had become familiar with a variety of strategies for lengthening a trip to the bathroom into a mini-vacation, but Mitchell was especially gifted.

Brow furrowed, I stepped into the hallway and spied Mitchell gazing through the open door of the kindergarten room. Jaw slack and eyes glazed, he was mesmerized by the younger students’ chirruping rendition of Baa Baa Black Sheep. On impulse, I propped open the door to our classroom and tiptoed up behind the child, my feet noiseless on the industrial gray carpet. I stood there quietly, and as the kindergarten’s song came to an end, Mitchell turned without seeing me and meandered toward our classroom.

He strolled along, dragging his hand against the wall, and then began to touch every burnt orange brick twice while tapping the white ones three times each. With growing annoyance, I watched as, one by one, he flipped the stories posted by the third grade class, leaving them fluttering as though rippled by an errant breeze. Finally arriving at our classroom doorway, he came to a dead stop and perused each of his classmates’ paintings of fall leaves in minute detail from a distance of one inch. Eyes scrunched, he moved his head closer and then farther away; it was an experiment in focusing the eye. He squinted his left eye shut and tried his right eye at close range. I had grown weary, and when he decided to attempt a handstand using the concrete block wall as a prop for his feet, I said in a severe voice, Mitchell!

His reaction was startling but somehow gratifying. He jerked himself out of his handstand into a modified round-off and came to a rest clutching his chest and leaning with his back against the wall. He slumped forward and gasped, Teacher! You scared me!

I had attended four years of college and emerged with a diploma stating I was qualified to teach kindergarten through eighth grade, but an area not covered by my education was how to orchestrate restroom breaks for twenty-eight first grade students throughout a seven-hour school day. The dilemma was whether to allow the children to make the trip on an as-needed basis or line them up and visit the facilities en masse at regularly scheduled intervals throughout the day. Each technique had its pros and cons; Mitchell’s performance highlighted the negative aspects of allowing students unsupervised time in the hallway as they strolled to and fro. But I was prejudiced in favor of the one-at-a-time visits because I cringed at the thought of insisting anyone use the restroom on someone else’s schedule, and at the same time as a lot of other people, at that. An incident such as the one with Mitchell would, however, encourage me to try the group plan once again.

Group bathroom breaks took a minimum of fifteen minutes. I got the students quiet, lined them up, and we marched down the hallway in procession. As we approached our destination, I stood back while the line split by sexes to the boys’ and girls’ rooms. Ten or fifteen students would burst through the respective doorways in a mad dash for the three available stalls in the girls’ room and two stalls and two urinals in the boys’. Within seconds would come loud cries of such comments as these: Jenny is peeking at me under the stalls, or Mitchell is swinging from the doors!

The basement restrooms frequented by my students had hot and cold water pipes suspended beneath the ceiling, and ancient radiators provided handy steps for any student wishing to prove his or her acrobatic skills. I worried when the children would report to me that a child had been swinging from the bars, as they called the pipes, because I envisioned the plumbing pulling loose and showering them with hot water. I could enter the girls’ area and take matters into hand, but the boys’ room was off limits for me, and the little scalawags knew it.

I tried various techniques to control the behavior of little boys based solely on the use of warnings shouted through a partially opened door. One day I decided that, after all, they were only six years old, and my trepidation about entering their restroom was foolish. The ruckus inside was even louder than usual with an ominous clanging of metal against metal accompanied by shouts of glee. I took a deep breath for courage and actually stepped inside the door. Boys, I hollered, I’m coming in, so you’d better straighten up right now.

My intentions to intervene wilted when a very deep voice that obviously did not belong to a first grade student answered me from deep within the recesses of male territory. I’d really rather you waited just a moment or two, Mrs. Birn.

I backed up hastily, tripped over the threshold (partly because my eyes were clenched shut) and was still staggering around as though looking for a place to hide when the high school boys’ gym teacher emerged and, looking amused at my discomfort, sauntered off down the hallway.

I was so unnerved by this incident that I never again actually entered the boys’ restroom. I would take up my position just outside the door and occasionally push it open a couple of inches to give instructions on manners and behavior that went mostly ignored.

Occasionally, I was truly horrified when a child would emerge with a tattle such as Larry peed on me. Equally upsetting was the day I understood that the reason the floor in the boys’ bathroom was wet had nothing to do with the water faucets being used inappropriately. This truth was made clear to me when Ricky exited with yellow stains on the seat of his white jeans. Ricky was running and sliding in the puddles and fell down was the tattle. It seemed not such a bad idea after all to implement the plan jokingly put forth by our principal, Mr. Stukey, to paint targets on the urinals. Whether faulty aim or boredom with the same old location for depositing bodily wastes was to blame, there was indeed pee on the floor.

Incidents such as the one with Ricky seemed to need true authority to stop, and when my threats had no effect, I would sometimes ask Mr. Stukey to intervene. Being male, he could legitimately navigate the forbidden terrain. But sending for him on a regular basis didn’t speak well of my abilities as a disciplinarian, so going to a higher authority was not a method I used often.

One management technique that worked fairly well was to limit the number of boys allowed in the restroom at one time. I would allow five boys in, and no more could enter until the first five began to exit. It required the skills of a juggler to monitor the girls’ room, the behavior of the children waiting in line, and to simultaneously stay aware of how many boys were going in and out, but it could be done. This ended up being the method I used most often when we visited the restrooms as a class.

I have suffered a number of harrowing experiences in my career as a teacher, but the time Jeffrey Bauer was nearly electrocuted stands out in my memory. I was at my customary station, standing at the entrance to the boys’ room with the door propped open an inch or so, when there was a loud popping noise and the lights went out. Immediately, screams came from the black and windowless depths of both restrooms, but even more disturbing was the horrible smell of scorched urine that filled the air. I groped in the dark, colliding with several little bodies as they rushed out of the respective doorways. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light coming from the exit at the end of the hall, I shouted to the students to gather around me and quickly took a head count. All children were present, so we made our way to the office to report the blackout. As I pieced it together later, the story was that Jeffrey had decided to aim a jet of urine toward the electrical outlet on the wall opposite the urinals. The outlet had exploded in an arc of electricity, blowing the fuse and plunging us into darkness.

When placed into proper perspective, restroom breaks are just one part of a school day, and after awhile, they become routine. Most of my difficulties with managing bathroom etiquette occurred during that tumultuous first year of my teaching career, and I eventually learned to handle these transition times with a bit more grace than when I was a brand new teacher. Through the years, however, one thought has continued to return periodically to horrify me. Urine is a liquid, and liquids conduct electricity. Jeffrey was lucky to have escaped a truly shocking experience.

CHAPTER 2

Mayor Burke Shares His Opinion

I HADN’T PLANNED TO BECOME a teacher. When I was seven, I wanted to study rocks and was enthralled when my first grade teacher described the science of geology. At age ten, I received a telescope for Christmas and decided to be an astronomer. But by age fifteen, with complete disregard for the budding feminist movement of the 1960s, I was convinced it was my destiny to become a homemaker. Unlike many of my classmates, I did not find the requisite husband while still in high school and so, while waiting for him to appear, I went to Kansas State University and majored in home economics.

At K-State, I fell in love with a handsome young man who was majoring in agricultural business. I saw it as an affirming sign of divine approval that his family’s farm was located just outside the town I called home: Karola, Kansas. My path toward becoming an educator actually began when I dropped out of college and returned to Karola to prepare for our wedding, because the only job I could find during this time was as a secretary at Karola School. This gave me daily contact with elementary students and eventually brought forth the idea of working with children as a career. However, at the time of my marriage, the decision to give up higher education for love caused consternation on the part of most of the older and wiser individuals in my life, a sentiment summed up nicely by a chance encounter I had with Mayor Birk Tobias Burke at our small community’s post office.

The outer room of the Karola post office was lined on two walls with cubbies, each with its own ornately embossed brass door. I had bent low to reach the bottom tier and was struggling with the combination lock on my box when I saw Mayor Burke enter the post office. I didn’t take time to greet him because I knew his box was just above mine and I was in his way, but as I hurriedly worked the combination lock for the third time, a part of my mind wandered to the conundrum of a mayor whose first and last names were the same.

As descendents of the first settlers of Karola, Birk’s parents were proud of their surname. However, they felt conflicted because, through the generations, different branches of the family had chosen different spellings; some kept the more commonly used Burke, but others chose to spell it Birk. It seemed to the elder Burkes a brilliant and unifying compromise to gift their infant son with the first name Birk, giving double phonetic emphasis to the proud family name. So far as I knew, no one had ever teased Birk about the redundancy of his first and last names or even thought it odd; community pride was, at least in part, bred through familiarity. Longtime residents didn’t give it a second thought, but I hadn’t grown up in Karola. My father’s job had transferred him to a nearby city the year I was a junior in high school, and my parents had chosen to buy a home in Karola after falling in love with its rural charm while on a Sunday afternoon drive. Thus, I had arrived as a new girl in town just a few years previously, and although I’d been welcomed politely and treated kindly, I hadn’t attained full status as a hometown girl. Little incongruities such as a mayor whose first and last names were the same still caused me to struggle to suppress a smile. Another odd thing was that no one seemed bothered by the inconsistency between the mayor’s name and his heritage; no matter the spelling, Burke is a good Irish name. However, Mayor Burke’s lineage was not questioned since the town had been named for his great-great grandmother, Karola Burke, who with her husband, Friedrich, was listed among the Siebenmorgens, Schmidts, and Hoffmans on the roll of German families who had settled the town.

Karola had been incorporated as a town in 1880 by a group of mostly German settlers from a variety of religious backgrounds. It was said that Mrs. Friedrich Burke had interrupted the founding fathers’ volatile debate on religion by bursting into the room and slamming her Bible down upon her husband’s burl walnut desk. She had then delivered a stirring speech on the need for spiritual, moral, and political unity, taxing the skills of the meeting’s scribe, one John Reed Jacobs, who nevertheless managed to capture her words for posterity. After lambasting the group of men for quarrelling, Mrs. Burke challenged them to focus on unifying truths that would bring harmony. She said, Let us strive for the tolerance that enables acceptance of that which is different from ourselves; forgiveness, because there can be no tolerance without it; and love, because there is no true forgiveness that is not motivated by God’s love.

Mrs. Burke must have been a persuasive speaker, because at the end of that meeting, the document that established the community’s church was amended to reflect her influence. The new wording stated that while church doctrine would be based on the Christian faith, the place of worship itself would be nondenominational, open to all, regardless of race or creed. A few days later at a meeting called for the purpose of signing the town charter, it was decided to name the new community Karola, in honor of the woman whose impassioned speech had championed unity.

A copy of the speech was affixed as an appendix to the charter to serve, as the first mayor of the community said, as a guiding light for future generations. Thus, when the town’s City Hall was built at the turn of the century, three words from Karola Burke’s speech were inscribed over the doorway of the mayor’s office: tolerance, forgiveness, and love.

I didn’t know Mayor Burke well, but I’d seen him at church smiling benignly as his grandchildren sang in the youth choir and his son, Leon, led the responsive readings as a lay leader. I knew he was retired from his position as president of the Farmer’s Bank of Karola but still sat on the board of directors. He had been mayor for thirty years, and this gave him a feeling of responsibility to set to rights anything that was amiss in Karola.

I was feeling self-congratulatory because I had finally managed to open the temperamental combination lock of my post office box when, without prelude, Mayor Burke boomed out, I absolutely cannot believe that your young man plans to quit college!

His voice was better suited to speeches from the grandstand at Karola’s Fourth of July celebration than to a small, enclosed space. I gasped and drew back, thoroughly startled. Contrasting vividly with his perfectly groomed white hair, Mayor Burke’s face was red, and he seemed quite indignant. I glanced nervously around the Karola post office. Was anyone else taking this scene in? Mayor Burke’s younger and less imposing cousin, Ed Burke, was the postmaster, and there he was, elbows propped on the window of his cubicle. He looked very interested indeed, as his distinguished relative prepared to set me straight.

How many years has John been at the university? Mayor Burke demanded. John Birn was my twenty-one year old fiancé.

Th-three, I stammered, But he really just wants to be a farmer . . . My voice trailed to a whisper as I saw Hattie Meeker tugging at the heavy post office door. Hattie was the town librarian. She spent her time overseeing the coming and going of the few hundred books that comprised the Karola City Library, and so her days were spent mostly in hushed solitude. As she gained entrance to the post office, she saw me cowering before the irascible Mayor Burke and obviously found the scenario unfolding before her a welcome change of pace. She stopped in her tracks and gave us her full attention.

Just a farmer? Mayor Burke was too well bred to shout, but he was becoming very forceful. And what does he think he’ll do if being ‘just a farmer’ doesn’t work out for him?

He’s a very talented person, I said, regaining a bit of my dignity. And so, no matter what happens, I’m certain we’ll get by very well. I turned toward the exit as I said this, but Mayor Burke was not to be put off so easily. He quickly picked up my use of the word we.

Ah, so that’s it, he said in disgust. He’s quitting so you two can get married. You are too young to get married! You both ought to finish your educations.

No, no, actually, that was not the reason. I encouraged him to stay in school, but when his heart was set on returning to the farm, I came home too.

I finally realized what an older and wiser person would have concluded much earlier in the conversation: none of this was Mayor Burke’s business. It also occurred to me to remind him of his great grandmother’s stand on tolerance for those with whom one disagrees, but I decided against it.

I smiled and said brightly, Have a nice day, and began to back toward the door, keeping myself oriented toward the mayor in the same way I would have been reluctant to turn my back on a growling dog.

Mayor Burke, who was really a kind man at heart, softened somewhat and muttered, Well, I wish the two of you the best. But he didn’t sound very hopeful. I fled.

As I drove home, I felt some uneasiness, because although he had been rude, I could see the mayor’s point. In fact, his words corresponded almost exactly to the ones I’d used when John had announced to me his intention of returning home to the farm just one year short of graduating from Kansas State University with his degree. I had reacted with shock, then anger, and finally had used my best—albeit under-practiced—skills of gentle words and logical argument. Unfortunately, my plan to woo him to my way of thinking backfired rather badly.

I’d invited him to a romantic supper and was gently trying to make him see reason, when he leaned forward and placed two fingers over my lips to silence me. He had said firmly, I want to be a farmer. I can’t begin to establish my own farming operation from a college campus ninety miles away from home. I’m tired of spending the money I earn hauling hay each summer on college tuition instead of using it to buy cattle, farm equipment, and land. Staring deeply into his hazel eyes and admiring his blonde hair and Robert Redford mustache at close range, I’d weakly agreed with everything he said.

At nineteen years of age, I felt myself to be totally innocent of any negative influence upon this young man; after all, I was the one who had encouraged, begged, and cajoled on the side of finishing his education. In retrospect, however, I see that our plans for the future and his recent purchase of an engagement ring for me undoubtedly gave him the feeling it was time to stop messing around with something that was of no value at all to him—college—and to get down to the real business of life. It was time to begin his career, and he was ready.

On that spring morning so many years ago, I felt myself to be ready also. Birk T. Burke had obviously had a bad experience, perhaps with a woman who had caused him to keep from achieving what he felt he could have otherwise. I had read several books on marriage and was certain I would always be a supportive wife who would help her