Rook & Tooth and Claw Read Free

in public,” added Ricky.
    “That’s right. And no farting at table. That’s what my dad says: ‘Did you just fart?’ That’s what he says, and I say, ‘I hope so. ’Cause if it’s the dinner that smells like this, then I ain’t eating it.’”
    Jim looked down at Tee Jay – looked him steadily in the eye. “How about you, Tee Jay? You tell us all about respect.”
    Tee Jay lowered his head and shuffled his feet.
    “Come on, Tee Jay. I thought you were the class expert.” He waited, smiling a little, waiting for Tee Jay to say something, but when he didn’t, he backed off, and returned to his desk. Beattie had been right, in her own way. Respect is when people give other people their own space, and Tee Jay needed his.
    He continued on a different tack. “There was a Frenchwriter in the 18th century called Voltaire. And he said, ‘One owes respect to the living; but to the dead one owes nothing but the truth.’ Well, I don’t agree with that at all. Because the dead – they’ve done all that they’re ever going to do. We can respect their achievements, but there’s no point in criticising what they failed to do, because they’ll never have the chance to say sorry, or to put it right.
    “But the living – they have the chance to put things right, and that’s why we owe them the truth, rather than respect. If one of your friends acts mean, or bad. If one of your friends starts badmouthing their parents, or beating up on younger kids and stealing their lunch money, or smoking crack, and you say to them, ‘You’re an idiot. You’re absurd. You’re wasting your life,’ then that’s the truth. And they don’t deserve any respect until they change their ways because respect has to be earned.”
    Tee Jay slowly turned his head and looked across the classroom at Elvin and there was sheer malevolence in his eyes.
    “Tee Jay,” Jim warned him, and Tee Jay turned back. “Tee Jay, I want you to open your book at page 37 and read the second paragraph.”
    Tee Jay opened his English Primer and sat for a moment in silence.
    “Well?” Jim asked.
    “I just read it. All the way through.”
    “I meant
out loud,
Tee Jay. Out loud, so that we can
all
hear it.”
    Haltingly, Tee Jay read the paragraph, his fingertip crawling from one word to the next. His left eye was completely closed now so he had to cock his head to one side. “The season – demands – that America learn – to better duh-wuh – duh-wuh—”
    “Dwell. To better dwell,” Jim prompted him.
    “To better dwell on her – choice – choicest possession—”
    Jim picked up Tee Jay’s book and finished it for him. “The legacy of her good and faithful men that she well preserve their fame, or, if need be, that she fail not to dissipate what clouds have intruded on that fame, and burnish it newer, truer and brighter, continually.”
    He put the book down. “That was Walt Whitman, talking about Thomas Paine; and if ever a man deserved respect, it was Thomas Paine. Like he
deserved
respect, because he risked his life fighting for equality and justice and what he believed to be right.”
    He paused, and then he added, looking straight at Tee Jay, “The day you do that, that’s the day that you’ll start earning
your
respect.”
    Jim spent the rest of the time until recess going over yesterday’s homework, which had been to write a 300-word appreciation of
Rip Van Winkle.
He never set his class essays longer than 300 words; some of them had to struggle for an hour to write twenty: ‘Rip van Winkles old lady was always giving him a hard time so he went to the wood and drank some stuff and woke up twenty years later and she was dead by then so that was cool.’
    Others wrote 600 words of incomprehensible nonsense: ‘People said that thunderstorms were thunderstorms but they werent they were all these real miserable goblin-type guys playing ninepins and Rip van Winkles knees were smoting.’
    And Beattie McCordic, of course, turned Rip