Foul Ball

His name was John, and his hair was a bright red flag waving in the West Texas wind. They pointed him out to me as he chased his football-carrying brother on the paved recess playground.

“There they are, those two brothers. Pray that you don’t get them in your class.”

“Why not?” I asked, in all of my first year innocence, looking around at the other teachers in our private staff dining room off the cafeteria.

“They’re real trouble, I hear."

"Last week they were sent to the office for bringing beer to school in their lunches.”

“James was in a fight last week, and John’s a flat-out mess!”

"James and John--Sons of Thunder", I thought, and I knew they’d probably be in my class when they entered seventh grade the next year. As the new teacher, I taught two “basic” English classes, and kids in trouble were usually there.

Sure enough, the next year when I saw my class lists I recognized a name. It was John's. They had put his brother in another class at least, but in keeping with my last year’s resolve to get a firm handle on the class from the first, I determined to let this John kid know that his English teacher was formidable. On the first day of classes, I put the students in a predetermined seating order. John was "front and center", right in front of my desk. When I went over rules I spoke to him. When I checked to see if the students were doing the assignment right, his was the first I looked at. I watched him closely and I waited for trouble.

It never came. He smiled sometimes, a secretive little plotting smile, but nothing ever came of it. Other students got sent to the office for digging fresh glue out of the newly replaced window panes and trying to sniff it, for refusing to sit when the bell rang, for hopping around the room with their white gym shorts on their heads shouting, “I’m Chef Boy Ardee!”, but John was as good as a teacher-loving, apple-bearing, curled and perfumed, straight-A-making, little girl—except he was none of those things. He just never gave me any trouble.

So I softened. I smiled at him. He stayed good.

All year. It amazed me, and I would have thought that I had misunderstood the teachers’ dire warnings the year before, but for the fact that every now and then I heard grumblings about the boys at recess, and those “brothers were raising Cain again.”

In the spring, I took my two-year-old daughter to the park, and we played in the early sunshine and the first warm wind. It was while I was watching her pink-ribboned ponytails fly back in the swing that I caught sight of John.

He was running down the grassy hill, out of class, celebrating the freedom of Saturday, or so I thought. Then I saw the man behind him. Huge, rugged and unkept. They ran right by me, and I smelled alcohol, or sour vomit from it. Between breaths he was cursing and panting, and would probably have never caught John, but for that little slip on the new grass as the boy turned to see me watching. For a brief moment I though he would help the boy to his feet, but he didn’t. He kicked him, and cursed again. My “sons of Thunder” appellation had been strangely appropriate for those two.

If I hadn’t been holding my baby, I would have run down there and confronted the storming man—despite all my training to the contrary. This was just wrong. There was a bright red flag down on the field.

I stood there frozen, holding my child tightly, her little brown pony-tails flapping against my face. And the angry man turned and lumbered off, climbing into an old rusted car at the curb and driving away.

John, jumped up, flashed me a grin, and ran off in the other direction.

The next day at school, he was quieter than ever. I helped him with his English.

“Are you ok? Is everything alright”

He nodded, smiled, and said, ever so quietly, “My dad, well, he’s… I’ll be fine”.

Nobody else heard him. They were all talking about the football game that evening.

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