Duet for Three by Joan Barfoot Read Free Book Online Page B

than his other students: the man himself.
    â€œNow,” he would say, finished reading, “what do you think the poet is trying to say?” A teacher’s dream, she must have been, someone bright he could train from scratch.
    â€œIt’s important to speak properly,” he told her, correcting mistakes in her grammar. “Language, if it’s used precisely, provides precise communication. Proper use of words enables us to know exactly what another person means.” Could that really be true? If so, it would certainly prevent a lot of misunderstanding.
    One thing it did mean was that she now spotted mistakes of speech other members of her family made. It seemed to open a space.
    Her fantasies shifted. Now she saw the two of them, in some other house. He would be reading and working at the kitchen table, and she would be sewing, cooking, and preserving. He would talk to her about a poem while upstairs, chubby, rosy, dark-haired children would be asleep. It was a warm picture, although it didn’t raise much heat.
    Looking at him, so different from the man she had envisioned, she began to consider bones instead of flesh.
    But then there was also what she taught him. Sometimes after a lesson they went for walks out into the snowy fields where cold air bit at their throats. Out there, that was where she knew things. They went through the stable, where cows’ breath made steam in the air and the bull stood stamping, held to a post by a rope through a nose ring. Above, in the barn, she showed him the hay mows and the trapdoors through which the feed was shovelled into troughs below. He walked behind her cautiously, unfamiliar with the smells and the spots where the floor might disappear beneath his feet, and the huge animals he seemed timid of, although she told him they were gentle, with the exception of the bull.
    When spring came, they walked in the fields, along the lane and by the creek, watching the water flood the banks as the snow melted. “It feels dangerous to me,” he confided. “There’s so much space and emptiness.”
    She listened carefully. He didn’t often speak about what he saw or how he felt, except to do with poems.
    â€œWe had such a little garden at home, compared with this.”
    Obviously he did not understand the rules of space, and people’s own tight ways of dealing with it, the stone fences and the small farms methods of containment.
    But she didn’t know how to explain that sort of thing. “Yes, I see,” she said, but she didn’t. She thought she must be, after all, only an ignorant farm girl, unable to understand the menace in what he saw, or tell him what she saw. She might know how to make a perfect pastry, and feed a dozen hungry men at threshing time, but she would never be able to properly express what a poet meant to say.
    She was flattered by his attention, but terrified he would discern the scope of her ignorance.
    What did he see? It was possible he only viewed her as a pupil, a pretty dark-haired girl who would bend obligingly over his lessons, until it was time for him to leave.
    Around the house, she was a little absent-minded. “Mooning about the teacher,” her brothers laughed.
    â€œYou shush,” said her mother. “Leave your sister alone. It wouldn’t do you two any harm to pay more attention to what Mr. Hendricks has to say. It’s a chance to learn, having a teacher in the house. He won’t be here forever, you know.”
    â€œBoy, that’s good,” said her smallest brother.
    â€œDo you like him, then?” her mother asked later. She meant a good deal more, including, “Do you like him enough?” and “Does he like you, and is anything going to come of this?”
    â€œYes, I think so, he’s very nice,” Aggie told her, meaning that she liked him enough and had some hopes.
    The cows were released into the fields. Aggie’s father and the boys were