More Stories to Remember II. [antikvár]

GOOD MORNING, MISS DOVE frances gray patton Liberty hill was a small freshwater town—not a hill, really, but just a modest rise in the land—where the streets were named for trees J and heroes, and a sense of life's continuity ran in the air. It was like a hundred American towns, smug and C02y, and it put its special stamp upon its own. People born and raised there—high and low, rich and poor-were neighbors in an irrevocable way, because their imaginations had been nursed on the same sights and sounds and legends and early ordeals. They had played in the same sunny fields and cooled off after the heat of their games in the same shade. They had grown up hearing the same courthouse clock tell the hours and the quarters in a tone as timeless as time itself. They had all, for the space of a whole generation, been exposed at a tender and malleable age to the impartial justice, the adamantine regulations, and the gray, calm, neutral eyes of the same teacher—the terrible Miss Dove. TTiis community of experience was absorbed, of course, into the stream of consciousness. It was so settled, so accustomed, that it seemed a manifestation of natural law. Like the dew on the grass or the return of morning light (that recurrent miracle that passes for a commonplace) it excited no wonder. But if the light had failed to return, if the voice of the clock had fallen silent—even in the night when its sound was muffled by dreams—then people would have heard the silence and noticed the darkness. So when, without warning, the tenor of Miss Dove's existence was interrupted, and she was seen, at an hour when she should have graced the geography room at Cedar Grove School, being borne down the sidewalks in the direction of the hospital-then Liberty Hill caught its breath, and looked beneath the surface of its life and fastened its hand upon its heart. The Wednesday upon which Miss Dove took sick began in an ordinary way. It was mid-April. The weather was mild. The sun rose at five-twenty-five, two minutes earlier than it had risen on Tuesday—which was precisely what Miss Dove had predicted the afternoon before when, shining a flashlight on a plaster-of-Paris globe, she had demonstrated to the sixth grade the reason for the lengthening of the vernal days. During the night a flock of Copyright © 1954 by Frances Gray Patton. Copyright © 1946, 1952, 1954 by the Curtis Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of Dodd, Mead & Co.