Grasshopper Bridge, Chapter 8: Ida Mae Koppel

As the afternoon sun sifts through the yellow shades of Miss Wilmington’s third-grade classroom windows, everything turns into gold. The worn-out wooden desks, the cracked plaster walls, and Miss Wilmington’s lily-white skin–everything and everyone except John Hendricks, freshly arrived in the middle of the term from a place most have never heard of. When Miss Wilmington asks John to “Please stand up and introduce yourself,” his response is nervous, immediate, and automatic.

He feels like an elephant. An elephant standing nervously in the center ring of a rather strange circus. The transformation is personal and immediate. John’s somewhat crooked nose becomes a wrinkled trunk. His ears, a little larger than he always wanted, stick out like fans. His skin feels heavy and wrinkled and his tail is hanging over the edge of his chair.

He looks away from Miss Wilmington and the staring crowd, and tries to hide invisibly in a memory. There is a summer lake dancing in front of him, rimmed with green willows and a scattering of wildflowers, some of which are a brilliant purple, or scarlet, and they too are burning in the yellow light. John sees his red cork fishing bobber twitch as it’s pulled beneath the surface. He has a bite. Five minutes later, a silver fish with a worm and hook in its mouth is peering up at him from the mesh of John’s landing net.

As Miss Wilmington and the rest of the class stare at him, John unhooks the fish and returns it to the water and then stands up, only to knock his workbook and pencils off the desk with his landing net.

Someone giggles, then two more, then three, until a chorus resonates in John’s flapping ears. “Now, children,” Miss Wilmington coos, puckering her overdone, very bright red California lips. “Now children, you must be nice!” John doesn’t know what else to do, so he just looks down at his desk and the random calligraphy of erratic and chipped varnish.

It seems a stalemate, and Miss Wilmington seems unsure of what should come next. Then it hits her. “Well, then children,” she says. “Maybe one of you would like to come up here and welcome John to our class. Wouldn’t that be nice?” she asks carefully. Silence.

Then somewhere in the distance, John hears something different. A kind of scraping sound. God, now what? he asks himself.

“Why Ida Mae,” Miss Wilmington squeaks. “How nice of you, Ida Mae.” It’s instantaneous. With absolutely perfect timing and impeccable choreography, the entire class rotates as a single entity. It turns to look at Ida Mae Kopple as she stands up where she always stands up–timidly in the last row–and begins the long and tortured march up the aisle. She knows what’s going on, and she knows her status and the definition given to her by her classmates. She looks neither right or left, just straight ahead, as she comes toward John.

One of the boys leans to the guy sitting next to him, and points to Ida Mae’s old and repaired dress and a pair of socks that do not match. “Look at her,” he whispers, “Pigface has mud on her shoes and look at how scared she is.”

Another named Leon Wohrmer, already warped at eight years of age with pale eyes and red hair, says nothing but hopes she will have an accident and pee in her pants. He’s heard that she does that sometimes when she gets scared and this could be one of those times. What a ripper that must be, he thinks as he smiles and watches carefully. Maybe we’ll get lucky.

Ida Mae keeps walking. John can see her slightly wrong and slanted mouth, her slow and awkward steps, her worn and faded dress. Her eyes are wet from holding back the tears she will not shed as she looks at John Hendricks, the elephant boy. The new kid from Missouri. And in that moment something moves inside John, some kind of feeling he doesn’t understand, springing from a place he cannot name.

Ida Mae continues with great courage, somehow rooted in whatever faith she has been able to assemble after being alone and abused for her entire life. All eight years of it. Her mother never interfered. She simply left one day and that was it. So her father “took over”–as they say–and not much later on her seventh birthday, a deal was made and Ida Mae had no choice. The beatings would stop, traded for the groping hand under her dress and the sight of him waiting for her in her bedroom with a can of beer in his hand as she returned from school.

As Ida Mae approaches John’s desk, the memories end as suddenly and unexpectedly as they had arrived. Ida Mae looks at John with grace, kindness, and impeccable innocence. John can see it and hear it in her breathing. “Go ahead Ida Mae,” Miss Willington urges. “Go ahead.”

She extends her hand to John. “Welcome to our school,” she whispers in a quiet and careful voice. She smiles a perfect smile. And John watches as she reaches toward him with closed fingers.

As John looks, she opens her hand and suddenly it doesn’t matter where he is–in a circus, a small town in Missouri, or the bottom of the ocean because there it is. There is no denying it, the penultimate token, the most omnipotent treasure of all third-grade treasures, a genuine agate marble shooter, sitting there in the palm of Ida Mae Koppel’s right hand.

My God! he thinks. Where did she get that? He can’t believe it. No one in their right mind ever gives an agate shooter away. So why is she doing this? John looks at her, then back it to her gift. It is indeed the real thing. As he looks carefully at the polished surface, a galaxy of amber moons illuminate in the stone, the perfectly round marks of the percussion made when the polished stone shooter struck each of its targets with perfectly synchronized solid hits.

The effect of Ida Mae’s gift is transforming. John forgets the staring audience, his elephant ears, his crooked nose, and big ears, even his plaid flannel shirt, farm boy overalls, and self-consciousness. All of these are gone as he thinks of all the games he could win with a shooter like that. It won’t miss. It can’t miss, he thinks. He knows it.

Ida Mae knows too as if she could read his mind. “These are the best,” she says softly. “They never miss.

The class leans forward and draws their collective breath as John takes the agate. They, too, know it will never miss. They also know what it will bring on the open market of the schoolyard store, the magic tops with rhinestones in them, the paper kites with long and knotted tails, the hopscotch tokens, the nickels, dimes, and quarters, and even Stanley Tyson’s four-bladed pocket knife with the genuine stag-horn handle.

That was, as they say, “the beginning.” Ida Mae and John became friends and the union was one of those odd discoveries that sometimes comes to rest in a place in the heart, which is hard to describe. “We’re different, John,” she said one day, not long after their meeting. “That’s why they don’t like us. I think we have to be careful.”

Miss Wilmington could see that too, so she moved John and Ida Mae next to one another and things began to change. Ida Mae seemed more confident. She walked differently. She spoke openly with a deliberate clarity that Miss Wilmington had never seen before. And John changed as well. His ears shrunk a little and his tail completely disappeared. Even his nose seemed okay and he didn’t mind looking in the mirror anymore.

Some of their classmates asked Ida Mae about the marble shooter and why she gave it to John instead of one of them, their questions were angry and jealous, sometimes delivered as threats and ultimatums. But she never answered–just walked away.

And it kept getting worse. Then one afternoon, in the dusky light of a stormy autumn day, John came around the corner of the school building on his way home after baseball practice. Something was going on. He could see the backs of four or five of them hunched over in a circle and someone was lying on the ground in front of them crying. It was Ida Mae. Two of the largest boys were holding her hands down on the ground as others watched. “Look at her now, Billy,” Leon Wohrmer was shouting. “Look at her. I told you that she’d do it! I knew she would if you pulled her pants all the way off. Just look at that. She peed all over herself.”

Most of it seemed a blur. For a moment all John could see were the brown leaves and the way they were curling and tumbling as they blew across the windy playground. They looked alive, like spiders, scattered across a dark and swirling ocean. Then he could see Ida Mae on her side on the cold asphalt playground as white as chalk and trembling as some of them were holding her arms and legs and watching as Leon Wohrmer kept pushing on her stomach. “Maybe there’s more,” he shouted. “Maybe there’s more!”

Then, at last, at long last, after what felt like five lifetimes, the deliberate arc of John’s baseball bat struck Leon’s shoulder with a cracking sound, then a second and third blow delivered to the others. There was a lot of yelling and screaming as John stood there with his bat held high in the air. He chose each target carefully and with the blink of an eye. There was no guessing, no hesitation. The baseball bat moved in his hands with ruthless expertise. His targets were specific and carefully chosen. As the boys tried to hide and cover their faces, John simply broke their arms and wrists. He shattered their shoulders and even their legs were fractured horribly. Two of them suffered ruptured kidneys. The playground where they laid was covered with the red splatter of human blood impossible to ignore.

When it was over, two of them laid quietly unconscious on the bloody playground. Three of them were moaning and begging for mercy as the rest scattered, screaming for help as John’s bat finally fell to the asphalt. When he looked down at Ida Mae, they were both crying and in some ways it seemed like they weren’t even there and all of it was just a dream, but they both knew better. The truth was something of them died in those incredible moments. And something new was born.

Ida Mae hardened inside and her faith and optimism in life and the essential goodness of most men disappeared. They were no longer automatically accepted or trusted. Their faces turned into masks and their eyes seemed different, as if they were gleaming from a dimension in perspective she no longer believed in. Even in their breathing, their physical expressions and postures, their words were carefully examined. Her male friends were chosen carefully and only after enough time had passed for her to see them for who they really were.

As far as the asphalt was concerned that terrible day, several witnesses testified to the truth of what Leon and the others had done. So a deal was made between the parents and the school principal and John was not arrested. But everyone agreed that Ida Mae should be left alone from now on because of what John did to Leon and the others.

“He almost killed them,” someone said. “I saw it. He almost killed them.”

So John and Ida Mae went their own way and stayed together as much as they could, day after day, week after week, month by month, starting with the ringing clamor of the morning bell, through the lunch volleyball games, the spelling bees, then the labyrinth of introductory long division, the muck of diagramming sentences and Miss Wilmington’s impassioned reading of Huckleberry Finn.

One year later, just before summer vacation, John asked Ida Mae if she would like to go fishing with him on his family’s annual summer fishing trip. When she replied, “Yes,” and touched his arm, John’s eyes widened. He had never fished with a girl before, but for some reason that didn’t matter anymore.

After a long drive north, the four of them arrived at the lake just before dark, and as they pulled into the campground, John could see an old wooden dock–half-rotted and mostly submerged on the lakeshore where his father said they would camp for the next five days. As John looked, he smiled to himself because he knew that fish usually gather around the sunken wooden columns of a dock or pier. Even in a place called California.

Nothing more about this kind of thing crossed his mind as he and Ida Mae helped unpack the car trunk and the trailer. Ida Mae looked puzzled as John’s father unrolled the olive-colored canvas tent. She had never seen a tent set up before and John held the iron steaks carefully with both hands as his father drove each of them into the dark earth. Ida Mae looked at him as he held the stakes as steady as he could, and the ringing of the iron hammer echoed through the trees. John wondered what he would do if his father missed the steak with his hammer and struck one of his wrists. That will break it, he said to himself as he looked into Ida Mae’s eyes. But if it does, I won’t cry. I will die first. I swear I will.

After dinner, sometime around ten o’clock, everything was finished and John’s father said it was time to “hit the sack.” Ida Mae thought that this was an odd way to say “going to bed” and when John’s mother pointed, Ida Mae simply hit the sack on one side of John’s parents and John did the same thing on the other side.

Later that night, around midnight, as the rest of them slept and the small campfire still burned in an earthen pit just beyond the front entrance of the tent, Ida Mae watched a group of shadows dancing on the faded walls of the canvas tent. Some looked like animals with two heads and long arms but no legs. Others were like clouds or ships with billowing sails riding on the waves of some mysterious and far away ocean. She looked at them, smiled, then turned over in her sleeping bag, and went to sleep.

The next morning she looked carefully at John and offered a question. “When can we go fishing, and what will we catch?” She smiled. John shrugged as he began unpacking the rod and reel, wire clip stringer, to hold any fish they might catch, some hooks and a small jar of bright pink sugar-cured salmon eggs.

“Maybe a trout if we’re lucky,” he answered. “I don’t know.”

The truth was, John had never caught a trout of any kind, but he didn’t want Ida Mae to know. To him, all trout seemed far away somewhere swimming back and forth between his imagination and the photographs and stories he read in his father’s fishing magazines. They were unassailable and occupied by well-traveled, well-equipped and well-dressed people far beyond his social class, his experience, and his 50-cent-per-week allowance.

As it turned out, it didn’t matter. There were indeed no trout around the dock, only small bluegills. The only fish Ida Mae had ever seen alive and the first she had ever caught. Her excitement was obvious, uninhibited, and contagious. John liked them too, and the colors they had when the sun hit their golden sides. I’ll bet that’s why people call them sunfish, he said to himself. That has to be it, he thought as he looked at Ida Mae lifting another one out of the water.

“People call them sunfish because of the way they look in the sun. Just look at those colors, Ida Mae,” he added. “They look like gold, don’t they?” Ida Mae nodded with certainty and a focused smile and understanding, and to John’s surprise, it wasn’t long before he realized that he was becoming the student and Ida Mae was becoming the teacher.

After watching John’s bait fall off the hook when he cast into the water and the way he complained about it, Ida Mae asked if she could bait the hook and make a cast for herself. “I think it’s a little like sewing,” she said. “Just pretend the hook is a needle and you are sewing the egg on, but don’t let the point of the hook stick out of the egg, John. Keep it inside. It will stay on better that way.” She didn’t stop there. “I think you should also swing your arm around a little slower when you begin your cast. I’ve noticed that the bait always falls off if you jerk the rod around too quickly.”

John didn’t like the advice but politely smiled, tried it, and for some reason it worked. He was surprised and intimidated, but he didn’t tell Ida Mae. He just hid it carefully in the secret chamber even boys use when they consider the possibility that they may be overmatched by a female and don’t know what to do about it.

By the third day, the fishing had slowed and John wasn’t sure why. Ida Mae, however, was hitting her stride and suggested that they might have better luck if they changed their location and moved to another part of the dock. “Maybe by this time, the ones in this spot know we are here,” she said. “Maybe they’re onto us. Maybe they can talk to each other. Maybe they took a vote and decided to move.”

“That’s a good idea, Ida Mae,” John answered as he looked at her. He put his right hand in his pocket, crossed his fingers, and added, “You know, I was just thinking about that very same thing myself.”

Ida Mae looked at him carefully for longer than John thought she should and her eyes were piercing. “OK... and I think we should try over there,” she said, pointing with her right hand and exhaling quietly. “Beneath the shadow of that big tree.” John looked carefully at her and nodded.

Forty-five minutes later, sitting in the shadow of that same tree–the one John hadn’t noticed–they set a new record. “You were right, John,” she whispered. “This is really fun.” And John had to agree. He looked down into the water at the steel stringer. There they were. Twelve bluegills in 12 straight casts. Ida Mae had caught eight and he had caught four.

As he looked at the stringer descending down into the water and the most bluegill he had ever seen at one time, he wondered how she accomplished that and how she understood the things she had shown him over the past two years. Maybe she’s just lucky, he thought.

As he sat there and looked at her, he could feel the agate shooter in his right front pocket. He always had it with him for good luck and he wondered again about the gift. Girls never have those. Where did she get it? Maybe she found it, he thought, but he wasn’t about to bring that up again because Ida Mae didn’t like to talk about it.

“The shooter is yours, John,” she always said. “That’s all you have to know and that’s all that matters. But I didn’t steal it if that’s what you’re thinking.”

He blinked and looked up from the stringer of fish and back into her eyes. She was looking directly at him. Her gaze never wavered, and for some reason, he had to look away. It was time to go. As he stood up and reached for her hand to help her, he saw the scars and marks again on her arms and each leg. They will never go away, he thought. How did she endure such things? he wondered. As she looked back at him, he could see not only her scars but the edges and lines of her mouth, the edges of her life, her unyielding gaze. He said nothing more and picked up the stringer full of bluegills as they walked hand-in-hand back to camp in silence.

He never saw Ida Mae after that trip. She simply disappeared and left no clues to where she was.

Years later, in the winter of 1987, John returned from a business trip to New Zealand and found a package with no note or explanation, just a book of poems in his mailbox. One of them, the one which appeared on the last page, described an agate marble shooter that never missed, hopscotch, volleyball, a boy she once loved and went fishing with for bluegill on a wooden dock a long time ago on the edge of a lake which had no name.

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