Marya was questioned in particular: not because she’d been among the worst of his persecutors—those were boys, naturally—but because she was said to be his favorite student, the one for whom Schwilk had had the most hope. (“The most hope”—this was an expression, oddly sobering when Marya first heard it, Schwilk had used in speaking of her to his fellow teachers.) But Marya had no answer. She said evasively, almost sullenly, “Things happened to Schwilk because—he couldn’t stop them from happening.”

MR. SCHWILK, THE newly hired English teacher at the Innisfail Consolidated School, was observed, back in September, walking slowly along the canal towpath, his head bowed, his chin creased against his chest. His gait was irregular, there was a slight drag to his left foot as if he knew of his doom—but it was only the third week of classes and everything lay ahead.

Schwilk, his observers whispered, crouched some twenty feet above him. There’s Schwilk, why’s he walking home so far out of his way?

They were hiding behind the enormous scarred boulders marked, over the years, with initials and names and “forbidden” words; it was an accident, or almost an accident, that they had sighted their English teacher along this stretch of the canal. But now, suddenly, they were seized with an unaccountable hilarity that threatened to burst into jeering laughter. Even Marya felt the need to clap her hand over her mouth.

It was a mystery, that Schwilk nearly always provoked these responses. Except in the classroom—he taught seventh, eighth, and ninth grades—where he communicated a certain capricious authority, Schwilk, observed on Innisfail’s Main Street, or glimpsed walking alone in the hilly residential neighborhood—the “good” northwestern edge of Innisfail now “going to seed”—in which he’d recently come to live, often struck an odd clownish note. Marya couldn’t have said why, exactly: it might have had something to do with the way he held his shoulders, or with his purse-lipped brooding manner, or his clothes—or with the erratic pace at which he moved (sometimes self-consciously brisk, sometimes inordinately slow)—or with the prim set of his head, the way his silky chestnut hair flared out from his forehead, the way light struck his glasses with an element of surprise. (When Marya envisioned Schwilk she saw him in the act of turning—his head, his narrow shoulders—and light striking the lenses of his glasses as if, in that instant, he was blinded by a sudden thought: Ah yes! I see! But, no, I don’t see—I seem to have gone blind!)