The Sacrificial Daughter (38 page)

"But you have always told me it's intellect that rules emotions," Jesse shot back. "Those kids down there are only getting one side of the argument. They're getting worked up based on fear alone. I bet if they hear the other side—our side, they'll come around."

James nodded. "Then I should go. I'm not saying you're not smart; it's just that I have all the facts. Budgets aren't easy things to delve into."

This almost made Jesse laugh. "If you talk to them about the budget, you'll just put them to sleep. No offence, Dad, but whenever you go on and on about monetary policies and bonds and debt financing my eyes glaze over."

This actually made James laugh. "What can I say? I find it fun."

"And that's why you can't go," Jesse said. "You can't speak to that crowd, because you're not one of them. You won't connect. I can. I just need to know fully what's going on before I go down there."

"I'm afraid it's nothing you don't already know," James said with a rueful shake of his head. He spoke to her then, and as he did the adults below kept up their inflaming speeches. Her father was right, nothing much had changed from the last town, or the town before that.

When Jesse had heard enough about the budget issues from her father, she went down to the front of the building and waited there with sweaty palms and what felt like snakes curling and uncurling in her belly. From where she stood, just inside the doorway, she could see that Ky wasn't as effective as she had hoped. The students had formed an arc around him, so that the way into the building was essentially blocked.

Just beyond the arc and looking terribly uncomfortable, stood a group of men and women in business attire. Most of the council was there and with them were gathered many of the business leaders of the town. Jesse recognized a few: Mr. Chu, who owned the Dim Sum and both Dr Becketts.

Teachers formed another group behind the students; they were the most vocal supporters of the man in the suit, who had not tired in his tirade against her father. Scattered among them was the remainder of the council members.

Jesse wondered if she could do this. Public speaking had never really frightened her, however a class of twenty-two students had been the largest number of people she had ever spoken to before. Her greatest fear was that all the facts and numbers her father had given her would simply vanish from her mind the second she opened her mouth.

"You can do this...you can do this...you can do this..." she repeated in a whisper as she waited. Finally the man ended his speech and a chant began. This would be her time. She knew the chant would go on for only a minute or so and when it died from draining enthusiasm, Jesse walked out of the building and into the dark brooding day.

Immediately the crowd went to whispering to each other. To Jesse they sounded like a thousand snakes which did nothing to calm her frayed nerves. As she walked past Ky, she whispered to herself, "Be strong, they won't hurt you." This was likely true, but all the same, Jesse stopped only feet in front of the boy who had saved her time and again. She wanted Ky near.

"Jesse, I'm so glad you came," Ms Weldon said in a loud carrying voice. "Are you going to join our protest against greed and tyranny?"

The students, who had been losing their formation and gathering around the front of the building, quieted, waiting on her reply. Everyone waited for her reply and they seemed to lean in towards her. She shivered beneath her coat.

This was it. Jesse took in a long quaking breath. "I am here to protest," she said in the strongest voice she could manage. "But it is your greed and tyranny that I stand against."

Some of the council members rolled their eyes and scoffed her, while quite a few of the teachers laughed. The man in the dark suit stepped forward. "You don't know what you're talking about, these are public servants! Where is their greed? You don't get rich as a school teacher."

The crowd nodded in agreement and began murmuring. Jesse yelled over them, "Rich and poor are relative! A teacher may not be rich compared to Donald Trump, but they are rich compared to the workers of Ashton." She paused and looked through the crowd. For some reason the few people that she considered friendly seemed to have disappeared and oddly enough only one face jumped out at her. "John Osterman, what kind of car does your father drive?"

The boy seemed shocked that she would call on him, but still answered in a hesitant manner. "He's got a rusted out Buick LeSabre and if it lasts the winter it'll be a miracle." The truth of this was greeted with good-natured laughter.

"And you Mrs. Castaneda?" Jesse asked, holding her hands tight together so that no one would see how badly they shook. "What do you drive?"

The man in the suit spoke before Mrs. Castaneda had a chance to draw a breath. "This is dumbest thing I ever heard! Don't try to make teachers the villains here. It's your father that's the true villain."

The man's bile transformed Jesse's anxiety to anger. "You've had your chance to speak. If these kids are going to protest they should at least hear both sides. This whole protest, when you take away all the rhetoric is strictly about the budget. This is about money, nothing more. All I'm trying to do is give them perspective. Mrs. Castaneda?"

The school librarian stood a little apart from the teachers, holding the hand of a small boy with thick wavy brown hair. She raised her voice, "I have a 2009 Volvo XC90...we paid about forty-two thousand for it."

"There!" Jesse exclaimed. "What is rich and what is poor? If we stretch our imaginations and pretend the Osterman's Buick is worth a thousand dollars, it means Mrs. Castaneda drives a car that is forty-two times more expensive. Would you say that she was rich compared to you, John?"

"Hell yeah!" John exclaimed to the delight of the students around him who laughed and slapped his hand. Jesse's eyes met John's for only a second or two before he turned away. In that brief time she saw shame in them. What did it mean? Was he was sorry for his actions? And if so, did that really matter a hill of beans to her?

In uncertainty, Jesse turned away. "Like I said, there are no Donald Trumps in Ashton..."

"This has gone far enough!" the man in the suit yelled. "You aren't going to lay this on the teachers. They are doing their part despite the anti-teacher rhetoric people like you and your father keep spewing. Public servants aren't the issue here."

"Yes they are," Jesse said. "And it's not just teachers that are causing the problem. It's the whole stinking bloated bureaucracy. People keep using those words, public servants, but these aren't servants. These are your masters!" Jesse cried to the throng of people. "The average school teacher in Ashton makes fifty-four thousand dollars a year! With free health insurance that goes to over sixty thousand a year. That doesn't sound like a servant's pay to me. In fact that's double what the average worker makes. Since when do servants make more than the master?"

"They don't!" someone shouted. The crowd began buzzing over this.

"That's enough," the spokesman for the teachers said, waving his arms to quiet the crowd.

"It's not!" Jesse said, feeling a growing sense of anger. She had no problem with teachers, but she had a problem with people making this much money crying poormouth. "I haven't even gotten to their retirement benefits yet. A retired teacher gets paid to the day she dies. On average Ashton will pay out over a million dollars in retirement pay per teacher. That's a guaranteed retirement fund. How many of your parents have a million dollars in retirement savings?"

"None that I know!" John yelled out. Again their eyes met and again he couldn't hold her gaze.

Evil knows no shame,
her voice of reason said
. What John did to you was evil, but the boy isn't evil. He knows shame, he knows regret. You see the apology in his eyes.

Not now! Jesse couldn't deal with idea of forgiving the boy who had so hurt her...so humiliated her. Not just then with the fate of the town riding on her words, and perhaps not ever.

Ms. Weldon, who had been scowling at Jesse, put on a sad face. "What's with the hate? Why do you insist on hating teachers? It's an important job and unsung, unheralded job."

"I don't hate, Ms Weldon. I just can't stand aside while the truth is so abused. Teaching is an important job, but it's no more important than that of a ditch digger or a waiter." This brought out harsh remarks and boos from the crowd of adults just in front of her.

"Really? You think that low of us? What has your father done to you, to make you so nasty?" Ms Weldon demanded.

"It's not that I think low of teachers, it's that I think highly of
every
job. They are all important," Jesse said and then turned to the crowd. Again, only the face of the boy who had tried to kill her caught her eye. "John, what was your father's job before he was laid off?"

"He was a machinist, over at Carlyle's."

"And was his job important to him? Was it important to you and to your family?"

"Yeah," John said. This time he was very quiet, yet so silent had the crowd gone that the word carried.

"Every job is important, Ms Weldon," Jesse called out, not to the teacher, but to the crowd. "They are important to the individual and to the town. This is why I'm protesting you, Ms Weldon. You represent the status quo that has to change. You know this is true. Everyone here knows. There are too many government workers, making too much money. Why does the receptionist for the town manager make forty-nine thousand a year while the secretary for Mr. Adams over at Carlyle's makes only twenty-eight thousand a year? They do the same job yet one is a government worker and the other is a private worker."

Jesse began walking along the front of the mass of students. "How do we justify paying the fire chief almost one-hundred and fifty thousand a year? He doesn't even fight fires anymore, yet a quarter of the firehouse budget goes to pay him. How do we pay the head librarian ninety thousand and then say we don't have enough money for new books? Why do we pay Principal Peterson over a hundred thousand dollars when tests scores have dropped every year since he arrived? How can Ashton afford all of this?"

Pointing at the protesting adults, Jesse said, "Their initial answer to our budget problem was to tax the rich." This was greeted with cheering from the students. Jesse shook her head. "Why do you cheer? Because you think you got some sort of revenge on them? If you think so you're wrong. They're still rich and you're still poor...in fact this town is more poor than it was. All the rich people moved away, didn't they? And they took their money with them. How did that help you?"

This quieted the crowd. Jesse again pointed at the adults. "Their next brilliant idea was to raise taxes on businesses and we all know how that turned out." The crowd knew and they buzzed angrily in response. Jesse raised her voice over them, "Salaries were cut, hours were scaled back, and people were fired. Who didn't see that coming? And now...here today, what is their new big plan to save Ashton? What is it? Anyone?"

Jesse paused only an instant and then shouted, "They don't have one! That's right. They want to keep things just the way they are. All of you here are protesting to keep Ashton just the way it is. But really, is this how you want to live?"

From the crowd came many shouts of 'no' and 'hell no'. Jesse paused to let the question sink in, this time she paused a second too long. "Liar! Liar! Liar!" the teachers began chanting. It became loud and raucous. She could do nothing but raise her hands in an exaggerated shrug.

Finally, when the chant started to peter out, Jesse went up and down the front of the crowd crying out, "How am I lying? What's your plan?"

Mr. Irving stepped forward. "Our plan is to keep the situation from getting worse. You say jobs are important, but how many people have been fired by your father?"

"None," Jesse shouted. "He has only cut budgets. He has given every department in town the leeway to restructure salaries and operating procedures in order to keep anyone from being fired. Take the library for instance. The library let three part-time employees go, but the head librarian still makes ninety thousand and the other four librarians have an average salary of sixty-two thousand. None were willing to take a pay cut in order to keep the part-time employees on."

"Why should they have to?" someone from the crowd of kids asked.

"Because the town is bankrupt!" Jesse thundered. "You are out of money because of these ridiculous salaries and excessive benefits..."

"Liar! Liar! Liar!" the chant began again. Three minutes passed before they tired. Jesse waited patiently.

"Why are they so afraid of my words?" she called out as soon it was quiet enough. "They call me a liar but they don't refute my words. It's because they can't. The truth is Ashton is bankrupt. We simply can't go on the way we have. And we don't have to; my father has a plan. In order to draw businesses to our town, he's cutting taxes, he reducing fees and cutting red tape. He's putting more money back into your pockets and at the same time he's making it easier for businesses to flourish in Ashton. And when businesses flourish, jobs become plentiful."

Jesse strode back and forth as she spoke and the students watched her and heard. She could see her logic triumphing over the emotion stirred by the man in the suit. It put a grim smile on her face.

"You can either side with them and watch your lives go from bad to worse," Jesse declared. "Or you can side with me and save this town!"

The students looked back and forth from one another, seemingly afraid to commit to the girl who had been so hated only the day before. Then Sandra pushed her way through the crowd and came to stand by Jesse.

"Thank you," Jesse said. Out of the blue she felt tears coming to her eyes and quickly she wiped them away. When she looked up again John Osterman stood in front of her with his head bowed, the sight of him so close caused her to gasp. He said nothing. What could he say? More kids came across to her: Amanda hugged her, Ronny and Tina came with eyes averted. Gordon, as well as a dozen boys whom Jesse had danced with the night before. Most of her economics class came as well and a hundred kids she'd never said a word to.

This seemed to spark a flood to her side when Carla Castaneda stepped up. "Wait!" she yelled. For a little woman her voice was big and it stopped the kids in their tracks. "Jesse, you're right I think we can do more...I think many of us should do more, but I can't join you if your father plans on cutting back the police force. Not with the killer still out there."