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The Pomegranate Lesson

Wm. Samuel Bradford

    “Mr. Boyleson, until you learn to substantiate your claims with evidence from the text, I do not give a rat’s ass about your opinion.”
    Mr. Boyleson sat back down.
    I took my feet off of my desk, abandoning my reclined position and another attempt at discussing Emerson’s “transparent eyeball.” One kid thought it meant he had a glass eye.
    “Just forget it. Now, you’re all probably wondering why the desks have been turned so that you are facing a blank wall. Let’s be real: you don’t know transcendentalism – you know how to repeat me in an essay. I’m sick of it. If you really want to understand it, you’ve got to try it.”
    I took the bulging sack out from my desk. It was burlap – I wanted burlap for the drama. I walked up to each desk and pulled out a ripe pomegranate from the bag. I placed each pomegranate on the center of each desk, leaning over the students more than I needed to. Smell me, I thought. Smell the one you hate. There was no sound except my shoes echoing on the linoleum, but in that room they carry the portent of chariot wheels. I went around the perimeter and I sat back at my desk. They looked at me.
    “If Thoreau is right, the pomegranate on your desk possesses the mystery of the universe. Find it. There are forty-five minutes left in class. When you achieve transcendence, you are excused.”
    With his overbite, Boyleson had almost no chin. His mouth was agape and I wondered how he could have such large teeth on top and such tiny ones below. Then he came to.
    “But, Mr. Brooks —”
    “Remember Zen: work three years, and then you can ask a question. It’s time to break free, lemmings.”
    I watched the eight of them watch the pomegranates. Three looked down at the desk, backs rigid and necks straight down. It looked like they had no heads. Four took turns looking at each other, opting to justify their bewilderment with a comrade.
    “Take your eyes off that pomegranate again and I will fail you. Do not try me.”
    They looked at the pomegranate again. A fresh shiver rippled through the headless ones. Only Boyleson was unfazed. He held the pomegranate up to his face. His nose was touching it. He looked directly at it, unblinking. I could see his profile, and his ruddy cheek, plump with baby fat, was level with the ripe pomegranate. He held that pose for a while, and then he set it on his desk and sighed, deflating his cheek. The four eye-talkers snuck glances at each other. One stabbed his fruit with a pencil and a stream of pomegranate juice sprayed the wall in front of him. A girl sat back in her chair, twisting her black hair in her fingers. One leg crossed over the other, and she traced circles in the air with her foot as her finger went through her hair.
    The hair-twirler began carving a peace sign in the skin of the pomegranate. Under the deep red and purple, the skin of a pomegranate is very white. She worked with a pencil and the circle was flat on one side, more like the letter D. She came up to me and said that she saw world peace.
    “No one fights against the pomegranate and the pomegranate doesn’t fight against anyone. Nonviolent protest – like Gandhi and Martin Luther Ki—”
    “Sit down.”

    Everyone opened their pomegranate except for Boyleson. A girl lined up each aril on her desk like rows from a melting abacus. Her fingers were stained. One boy had eaten all of the arils in five minutes and spent the rest of the time picking seeds out of his teeth. Another took out a ruler and started a list of various measurements of the split pomegranate. Occasionally I saw a flicker – the florescent light glinting off the surface of Boyleson’s pomegranate as he picked it back up and resumed pressing his nose into it. He kept setting it back down on the desk, always back to the center, very gently. His cheek was redder.
    I rejected several answers. It was not the Jewish symbol of one seed for each mitzvah. It was not the rejuvenation of nature. It was not a microcosm of the human skull that we were cracking open, though I did like that one. They stood up; I sat them back down. No one was allowed to use the bathroom.
    Two eye-talkers slept. Then I heard Boyleson sniffling. The pomegranate was back on his desk; his head was lowered and his shoulders trembled. A tear made a zig-zag path down the tender zits on his face. He was keeping it in and no one else noticed. I saw his older brother cry once when he broke his arm pitching a baseball – they didn’t look alike, one with an overbite and one with an underbite. But they looked so similar when they cried. I had a travel packet of tissues in my desk, but I couldn’t give him one; he’d lose it if anyone saw. I looked away so that he wouldn’t feel my eyes on him. He sobbed. His mouth and eyes twisted up. Tears dripped onto the pomegranate and down the side of it. Somehow he did it without making a noise. I was trying to think how to sneak a tissue to him when suddenly the kid next to him whispered “fuck” and slowly stood up.
    He had been one of the headless ones, and he had emptied the arils from his pomegranate and put them all into one hand and slowly squeezed them. The juice ran down his arm and onto the floor.
    “Fuck!” The word smacked me in the face. “Oh Goddam!” He looked at the pomegranate in his hand like it was his own heart. I had never heard him talk above a grumble. He was bigger than me.
    The other students looked at him. The sleepers woke up. They covered their mouths and looked over at me.
    “Mr. Golding?” I said. I had sworn too when I first really understood Thoreau.
    He had a sweating shaved head. He started rocking back and forth, holding the pulverized arils in both hands. The kids all started laughing. Boyleson had lost it and was really bawling, still looking at that wall.
    “God.” His voice came from the floor. The kid still rocked back and forth. His head looked like a toad on a stick. “The Uni-verse!” His eyes gaped and wrinkles rippled all the way up his head. I had never realized that his eyes were blue until then. The tooth-picker was on his knees, laughing so hard that he was sucking in air like he had been punched in the stomach.
    “What the hell?” whispered the hair-twirler. She didn’t realize she was talking that loud.
    “I understand! I understaaaaaannnd!” My throat tightened as I felt the desks shake. The boy closed his eyes and raised his hands above his head. He sprinkled the pomegranate bits onto his head. Some stuck in the sweat and others rolled down in droplets and stuck on his temples. He looked very serene. Then he took what was left and started rubbing the pomegranate over his face.
    “Golding, you need to take a seat, buddy. It’s alright.” He opened his eyes and looked at me like he could see my atoms spinning around. His baggy jowls looked bloody from the pomegranate. He opened his mouth and I could see the tonsils in the back of his throat expand.
    “Holy – holy... I’m free!”
    The other students stopped laughing. There was only the sound of Boyleson, still weeping, choking on his mucous.
    Golding held out his arms like an airplane and made circles around the room. One by one, he knocked the pomegranates on the floor and stomped them into a pulp. He grunted with each one. I felt paralyzed. The boy stopped at Boyleson’s virgin pomegranate. Boyleson had stopped crying and was slumped down in his chair, quivering before Golding. Somehow, with some knowledge beyond what I knew, Boyleson gave his pomegranate to Golding. We all watched. Golding took the pomegranate in his hand. He brought it up to his face, like Boyleson did, nosing it.
    Nobody moved for a long time. “Tell us!” the former hair-twirler cried to Golding. Her eyes were wide and black. We were all below him. I was sitting back down.
    Golding took in a breath very slowly. His eyes widened like he wanted the pomegranate to fall inside. He held up the pomegranate in the air. All the heads in the room traveled up with it. Dear God, I thought. Then he slammed it on the floor. It exploded and red juice shot out in all directions. Then Golding yelled “I’ve got to kill myself!” and ran out of my classroom.

    The school police officer, who served in Korea, stopped Golding down by the highway. They sent all the kids home early. Golding’s parents came and picked him up, and they had checked him in to some clinic that night. I had to meet with the assistant principal in my room with the pomegranate waste still all over the place.
    “What the hell happened in here?” The assistant principal normally had a southern accent, but it went away when she was mad. I always wondered which one was fake. She used to be a math teacher.
    “And what’s with all the papayas?” Her bulbous hair shook at me.
    “Well, uh — we were talking about all the mysteries of nature, and I wanted to introduce some hands-on, kinesthetic learning opportunities – I wanted them to see the connection between Thoreau and the Jewish symbolism of each seed representing a Jewish mitzvah in the Torah ... It’s nonviolent protest, you know, like Gandhi and Martin Luth—”
    “Well you just stay after and help the custodian clean up.”
    “Yes ma’am.”
    “It’s a strange world we’re livin’ in,” she said later. She was talking in her southern accent again. “Drug addicts are an unfortunate reality.”
    “What?”
    “The child confessed to taking pills right before your class.”
    “Oh.”
    “Mr. Brooks,” she and her hair said. “Everything alright?”
    “Yeah – I just thought for a minute that – never mind.”

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