Fill the Unforgiving Minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run

Author’s Note: This is a chapter excerpt, a character sketch, of the main character in my novel GAME, an American novel. Here’s a little context: Leotis McKinley is a black kid who grew up on city streets virtually abandoned by his young widowed mother. In addition to his mammoth size and strength as a teen, he is a menacing sociopath. Rather than go to juvenile detention for assault charges, he is recruited to play football by an enterprising small town high school coach. Leotis trusts few. He doesn’t like chaos and confusion, rather finds comfort in his limited world from order and clarity mostly imposing those on offenders through his own intimidation and power. Here he encounters someone who gives him a glimpse of strength from another avenue.

Chapter 20

Leotis liked Maude Grote. That is, he liked her as much as he would allow himself to like anybody. She wasn’t as weird as Crazy Lois, but she was every bit as blunt and to the point. He liked that. Plus, Miss Grote was organized and orderly. Every day she had a plan on what they would do in class right down to the last minute. She kept everybody too busy for him or her to get out of line and disrupt things. Some of her students may have been bored, but none were unruly. Of course, having Leotis in her English class at that hour helped things. Early on he let his silent displeasure be known when his classmates got out of line. It didn’t take much; his glare usually did the trick. But from what he could see, Miss Grote didn’t need a lot of help keeping things under control.

She was a small woman, only a little over five feet tall and didn’t look to weigh more than a hundred ten pounds or so. She would have stood much taller if her spine wasn’t curved so severely with… what had she called it? Leotis looked it up — scoliosis. And she walked with a slight limp. Leotis was amazed at the respect this little crumpled-up white woman commanded from her students. She had fire in her eyes and didn’t tolerate much nonsense, but that fire also burned with the passion she had for her work. Imparting to these teenagers what Milton and Whitman and Poe wrote was as important to her as making sure they all understood the proper meaning and arrangement of the eight parts of speech in the English language. You would have thought it was the most important thing in the world. But Leotis liked that. It was order and neatness and purpose.

He also liked and respected her because, like Crazy Lois, she didn’t cower in his presence. He liked it better when people around him looked nervous, but he respected those who didn’t. Now he knew three such people: Crazy Lois, Miss Grote, and Coach Doyle.

“We had one perfect score on this quiz,” Miss Grote announced as she passed the graded exams back to the class. Not only did each of the students find their essay questions thoroughly read, commented on and graded, but also three holes had been neatly punched down the left sides of the test papers ready for them to be inserted into each student’s English 4 notebooks she made them keep. She used green ink to mark the papers; all comments written in a compact and precise script.

“Overall, everyone did quite well,” she said. “Once again, you should place these in your notebooks for later referral as some of the essay questions will be on the mid-term examination.”

Leotis’s paper had very few green marks on it. A circled comma here, an inserted semi-colon there, corrected tense on some “to be” and other verbs. At the top was a one-word comment — “Excellent” with a number above it — “94.”

Everyone in class knew who got the perfect score: Mildred Gregory. Mildred rarely got anything less. Everyone fought to sit next to Mildred on test day, although she seemed quite hostile about letting others copy from her paper.

Leotis didn’t sit next to Mildred, or even close. He sat at the back of the room over by the window. That’s why Miss Grote was so surprised that he did well. Like most people she had some pre-conceptions about these three newcomers to their school. Almost everybody in the school–students, faculty, administrators–feared these boys, especially Leotis. But not Miss Grote. The first day of class she looked at him slouched and glowering in the back of her classroom and knew her work would be cut out for her. Her first words to him were, “Young man, it’s difficult to learn lying down in your seat like that. Please sit up.”

There followed a collective sucking in of breath from the other students in the class. One girl giggled nervously. Leotis looked back at Miss Grote without much change in his surly expression for a good ten seconds. She returned his stare sternly, hands on her hips, until he sniffed and then slid upright.

After the first test, it seemed obvious to her he cheated, because he’d written the phrasing on his essay question answers almost word for word from the commentary in the literature textbooks. Apparently, he had written them down before the test and copied them from a concealed location on his immense person. But she had no proof. She would watch him carefully during the next week’s quiz and report her findings to the principal and Coach Doyle. This sort of surprised her, though, because she didn’t think he cared enough about what was going on in class to cheat.

She didn’t take her eyes off Leotis at the next test, much to the eager delight of those sitting around Mildred Gregory. To her astonishment, he didn’t appear to pull out anything for cheating purposes. He only looked at his paper and wrote out the essay in his slow, deliberate, orderly handwriting. She even moved down the aisle and stood slightly behind him, watching him write. Leotis glanced back at her momentarily, but went back to his writing, ignoring her. He did nothing, to her trained eye, to indict him for cheating. She thought of a possible explanation, but she would have to conduct an experiment to be sure.

“Leotis, please stay after class. I would like to speak to you,” she said to him near the end of that Thursday’s session. Leotis didn’t acknowledge; he just looked at her.

When all the others had cleared the room, she handed him a college literature textbook she brought from home.

“Please open this book to page four seventy-five,” she commanded. Leotis did so without a word.

“Read the poem on that page to yourself.”

Leotis looked at her somewhat baffled but did as he was asked. When he was through, he looked up at her and said, “Okay.” He closed the book and handed it to her.

“What was the name of that poem you just read?” she asked.

“The Poet,” he answered.

“Who wrote it?”

“I unt know,” Leotis said with some irritation.

“What name was at the top of the page?”

“Alfred Lord Ten-ni-son,” he said.

“Can you recite the poem?”

Leotis sighed, then nodded.

“Do so, please,” Miss Grote ordered and opened the book to page four seventy-five, holding it so Leotis couldn’t see the page.

Leotis started with the commentary paragraph below the title and before the first stanza reciting it word for word. He continued with the poem through the fifth stanza before Miss Grote stopped him. She looked at him in wonder, a gentle smile on her face, and stared into his eyes this way for some time until Leotis became uncomfortable and looked away, shifting his feet.

“I’m sorry, Leotis,” she said once she realized her impoliteness. “This is just… extraordinary. I’ve seen someone with your kind of recall only once before in my life. I was in college, and this fellow… well, it doesn’t matter. You have a special gift, Leotis. I hope you use it wisely. You may go now.”

With that she turned to her desk and sat down. She pulled some un-graded themes out of the right bottom drawer and started reading the top one. Leotis shrugged and left the room. Miss Grote watched him leave and stared at the open doorway for some time.

A week or so later Miss Grote took Leotis’s class on a reading tour through several of the late 19th and early 20th Century British poets–Tennyson, Kipling, Owen, Housman. “We will be studying these poets through the next three weeks,” she told them as she hobbled up and down the aisles of desks handing out mimeographed pages of selected poems. “You would do well to read these I’m giving you along with those by these poets in your literature text. On the test at the end of this unit, you will be expected to know who wrote which and possibly why.”

Leotis took the proffered sheets and leafed through them. At the top of one page was a handwritten note to him in green ink. “There is great wisdom in these verses. I thought it might intrigue you,” it read.

Leotis looked at the poem and read it, committing it totally to memory.

If Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream — and not make dreams your master; If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!

Leotis folded the sheets and put them inside the textbook on his desk. He looked out the wet-paned window at the autumn leafed hickory tree across the street whose pieces of gold fluttered to the ground, shining wet from the cool October rain. From the picture in his mind he read the poem over again… then once again.

© 2011 by Phil Truman. All rights reserved

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

PTI Press Broken Arrow, OK 74012

Thanks for taking time to read this chapter.

Can I give you something?

Click the image below to go to my website. If you join my readers network, I’ll send you a free copy of my short story collection, Skins Game.