The Schoolteacher’s Barbecue

y father was a teacher who dreamed of being famous, like Milton and Hardy and Tolstoy.  Born in Mexico, he grew up in Texas, where Mexicans were valued less than dogs.  After WWII he moved to Pennsylvania.  Perhaps life would be better where the air was cool and the land a ribbon of hills and valleys.
Although he had degrees in English and in History, he was offered a position teaching Spanish in the little country high school where we lived. The other teachers laughed.  Who would hire a Mexican to teach his children English or the history of a world that wasn’t his?  The Teacher took the job so he could spend his summers writing books.  Getting published would make up for everything.
This was in the sixties, a time we thought of as very modern and freethinking.  Men quit wearing hats and women worked outside the home, though neither thing had happened in my family.  When the Teacher started writing I was just a child—maybe two or three—and my siblings’ ages clustered thereabouts.  We were my mother’s job while he concentrated on the children entrusted to his care and chased fame with an Underwood typewriter. 
One day at a train station the Teacher saw a little negro boy run to the white man’s water fountain.  His father gently pulled him back to the colored side, head bent down, apologetically.  The boy didn’t understand. Wasn’t water the same everywhere?  He was too young to know that it wasn’t what you drink but where you drink and who drinks after you.
This saddened the Teacher as he watched silently.  He took out his handkerchief, slowly wiped his brow.  Why make a fuss?  That was the way it was, the way it had always been.  Probably the way it had to be.
His students disagreed.  They defined freedom as the right to make their own mistakes, never considering that life is consequence.  The Teacher looked around at what was happening and it broke his heart that children didn’t want the life their parents offered, with the benefit of their experience. 

          But he loved his students and each day he’d come home with funny stories about them that he’d tell at supper.  We sat around the table and listened eagerly, scooping loose ground meat with fresh tortillas.  
At night the Teacher often returned to school for basketball and Talent Show, activities for which he disdained pay.  “One doesn’t grasp at money for every blessed thing!  A person has to care about his work.”  Mother never argued though we could have used the money.  She just kept on making tortillas.
And the Teacher kept on teaching.  More and more students signed up for Spanish class.  He ran out of desks but still in they crammed, perching on windowsills, squatting in the aisles.          
He ran a tight classroom.  Everyone obeyed his rules and when they didn’t, he let them choose their fate:  a spanking with his special paddle (the one with a slit cut down the middle to provide extra pain) or an F, accompanied by a note home to the parents. They always chose the paddle and he’d tell us this as well, as though he secretly admired their courage.   
The other teachers didn’t like it.  He made them look bad.  They said paddling was illegal and the Teacher should be paid for his extra work.  And although he fought against it, in the end they won, so in time, his work became drudgery like theirs.
I think he tried to find respite in the books he wrote, the world he created in his head.  All summer long he sat hammering at that old Underwood.  We could hear him bang the keys if we played near the house, though usually we were banished to the woods. 
He sent off bulky packages, reams of books, novels and memoirs, our hopes and dreams wrapped in Manila paper. The publishers were not impressed, so the writing slowly slowed; rejections dwindled with the manuscripts.
And then came Vietnam. 
Lots of former students enlisted. Their younger siblings came to school, sullen and rebellious.  They wore torn blue jeans and smoked Camel cigarettes.  No one hid his indiscretions anymore.   In this frightening violent world, the Teacher enforced his rules.  Anyone caught smoking had to eat his cigarettes.  Most of them threw up and promptly quit.
But as the sixties became the seventies, attitudes hardened.  Students lost their eagerness, their innocence.  They no longer sat on windowsills just to hear the Teacher talk.  They let vulgarity define their speech.
The Teacher became disillusioned.  Didn’t anybody care?  The other teachers gave a sigh; they had their chance!  They shook their heads, commiserated with him over shots at the local bar.  They welcomed him into their misery.  He was invited to barbecues, to Steeler football games and they gave him a nickname.  They called him Doctor.
He called them Doctor back.  It was like a secret code, a password into the teachers’ world.  He spent time with them regularly; now all the barriers were down--and then he got the brilliant idea to invite them to a party in our yard. 
For days he talked about how he would roast a whole cow’s head, in a pit in the ground, very old style.  The party would be outdoors behind the barn.  Mother made potato salad, big hunks of potatoes in a thin mayonnaise, boiled corn and green beans with mushroom soup. 
But all the teachers started drinking long before the head was cooked.  They couldn’t wait to dig it up-- it was still raw.  So they tried to rebury it, several times I think, until the poor molested thing was revolting.
I never saw a look of horror like the one my mother wore, the day a bunch of high school teachers mangled a poor cow’s head in our back yard.   I stared at it lying there as the teachers slapped each other’s backs, staggered to their cars, secretly pleased. 
Their tires made little clouds of dust down our long dirt driveway and as I watched them go I knew the times had changed, but people had not.