Alone in the Classroom (5 page)

Michael was as intrigued as she was. They were intrigued by the worms, and the snake, and each other.

“Worms,” she added, skimming the last few lines, “are surpassed only by the even lowlier corals - also animals - that have constructed innumerable reefs and islands in great tropical oceans.”

She touched the orange-red beads at her throat. A coral necklace recently startled into nervous life by Parley Burns.

On Friday they had left the school together - this was after he murdered the snake. They walked to the road and she realized he was walking her home; her lodgings were on the same street as his. They didn’t speak as they moved from road to wooden sidewalk. Lilac bushes grew beside several front doors, hedges of caragana separated one wide lot from another. Nine hundred and twenty people lived in Jewel. Off the main street ran side streets of smallish houses built from cement blocks and wood, most with chickens, or pigs, or horses, with crabapple trees and box elder trees and currant bushes and patches of grass.

She held herself away from him, but rigidity gets you no further than disgust. Her discomfort seemed to please him; to be familiar, perhaps.

When she turned to go up the beaten path to the Kowalchuks’ unpainted frame house, she finally looked him in the face, and his eyes went to her necklace. He said, ” ‘Of his bones are coral made, Those are pearls that were his eyes.’ “

Poetry and punishment. In the 1920s children knew the difference between Shakespeare and Tennyson and Keats just as they knew the difference between a thump on the head, a pointer across the knuckles, a strap on the open palm, a belt on the backside.

From that day forward, Parley Burns escorted her home more often than not.

She had learned to read when she was four. Great-aunt Charlotte was with them that year and it was her way of helping out, to take Connie in hand while her mother dealt with the new baby. They were still on their farm in eastern Ontario then, on the flat and fertile plain between Argyle and the Ottawa River. Connie sat on an overturned wash-tub in the kitchen and Charlotte’s big knuckles full of arthritis moved along the lines, helping her sound out words. Connie was working on
mouse
when an actual mouse ran over her bare toes and she climbed her aunt like a tree.

Old Charlotte, full of admiration for the creature so smart it knew its own name, called after it, ” ‘O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!’ “

Parley would be the second Burns in Connie’s experience, a name bundled up in childish, lasting, skin-tingling drama.

Charlotte was her mother’s rich aunt, one of her few relatives: Charlotte Constance Douglas, married to Charles Hayes, a dissipated Aberdeen banker. Connie’s own name was Agnes Constance Flood, but her mother was Agnes and so she was Connie. Since Aunt Charlotte took no prisoners when it came to reading, her small niece ingested early a sense of evil lurking in the fog and scratching its bad pen. Tulkinghorne grubbed about in her dreams, and
Bleak House
was the rustly black of Charlotte’s lap. Later on, in the period of her asthma, when she wasn’t well enough to go to school, Connie went through every book in the house, including a big, heavy copy of
Canterbury Tales
. Michael’s spellings would remind her of Chaucer’s, and it occurred to her during that teaching-fall of 1929 that commas hadn’t always ruled the waves. The ancient, original spellings and punctuations were changeable, restless, like the boy himself.
To finilise my dicion on wether I should where my scarf or not I lookt outside and I noticed that the street was scilent. All I heard was the thundering wind of the bleek midwinter
.

At his desk he twisted his legs, sighed, bit his tongue, chewed his fingers, muttered to himself. “Oh, no, that’s not right.” “Uh-oh, I failed on this one last time.” “How do you expect me to do this?” And once he said to Connie, “My sister has all the brains.”

His sister was a natural student, but Michael was the beauty. Susan missed by a fraction of an inch his stunning face.

“Don’t grumble,” Connie said, convinced he was a boy with deep ability. “You have one kind of brains, your sister has another.”

But already he was prey to the thought that would plague him for the rest of his days. What would my life have been like if I had been good at school?

“Anyway,” she added, “maybe it’s not you. Maybe it’s your teachers.”

They digested this radical notion. To Connie it was less radical than obvious, since she was a teacher with exactly three months of training.

Nearly every day she worked with him after school, never pretending he was anything but a hard case, which relieved her feelings and his, too. “This is a desecration,” she said, seeing
haws
for
house
. And they both laughed.

Teaching ran in her family on her mother’s side. Her brothers would become teachers, too, and so would I. But most of Connie’s methods came from a beloved and irascible man who had taught her in the upper grades. “Don’t be afraid to ask a stupid question,” Syd Goodwin would say, and to himself he would mutter, “Ask a stupid question, and the answer goes on and on.” Snakebite, he had taken to calling her, and it had the same soothing-exciting effect as snow stuffed down the back of her neck, or her hat snatched off at recess: she knew she was liked and it made her happy.

She began to call Michael Slim. “Slim, my unteachable pupil,” she would say, her face full of energy and amusement, and he responded with his remarkable smile. It seemed never to occur to her to give up on him or on anyone else in her classroom. There wasn’t a single child
who didn’t wish to please her. Michael was her biggest challenge, and they had an understanding, a rapport.

She had a name for me, too. She called me Curly after my mother lamented my bone-straight hair. She believed her role as a teacher was to lead children through an anxious passage into a mental clearing, and her role as an aunt was to send me books and recordings and on her rare visits to soothe me by loving me and loving my parents. It is the most relaxing thing in the world for the child of reliable, solitary parents to see them befriended. And the most surprising, the most eye opening, to discover that they have lives and interests and loves of their own.

I remember the utter change in atmosphere whenever Connie came to visit. She was full of stories and laughs, she was risque, unzipped, fun. My parents were liberated for a moment, reconnected to their lives before they had children. They relaxed and came out of themselves, allowing me a glimpse of a past as promising as my own future seemed to be whenever I was in my aunt’s company.

What for Connie was slipping outside on a summer’s day was endless winter for Michael - he had to don a mountain of clothing and struggle through the drifts.

“Put down your pencil for a minute, shake out your hands. Relax your jaw. Get up and touch your toes.”

Movement always helps. A world of thoughts occurred
to her whenever she rode a train, and a lesser world whenever she went for a walk. She began to compile a working vocabulary for a junior naturalist.
Earth, lair, burrow, den, stream, brook, mountain, cloud, thunder, lightning
. Influenced by Parley, she looked up derivations and learned that almost none of these words, so close to life, came from French. The exception was
mountain
, from the Old French
montaigne
. The simple, earthy words were Old English. And so she found herself taking sides as she read the dictionary, arguing with Parley about the merits of English versus French as she used to argue with her father about the merits of Robert Service. “A campfire poet isn’t a real poet? You might as well say a campfire isn’t a real fire.” And she had stomped upstairs and slammed her door, even though she knew perfectly well what her father meant, and agreed.

Michael liked to be in her wake as she strode around the schoolyard. He liked her tallness and her moods.

A teacher’s sudden shift in temper - that’s what children watched out for. The snarl and snap. The crazy whirlwind of Attila bearing down in her mustard suit and thick legs and pencilled scalp. Hairs in her snorting nostrils.

Miss Fluelling, moist and over-warm in her suit, suffered erratic surges in temperature, each one preceded by an oncoming train of dread that rocked through her and left her drenched. If a child happened to be standing on the tracks, the train overwhelmed them both, mutton and lamb.

A few years earlier she had gone too far. It happens to every teacher. She had brought her pointer down on Michael Graves’s arm, raising a blood weal the length of half a ruler. The next day she received a visit from Harold Graves of Graves Hardware, a man known to have a fiery temper of his own, and soon after that she slipped on the school steps and came down so hard on her wrist, it broke. In her place arrived the wispy, ineffectual wife of a local farmer, and the children learned what heaven was. It was immense relief, then boredom.

They studied their teachers for changes in temper, vagaries of mood, variations in wardrobe, indications of having shaved or bathed or washed their hair. Every release was temporary. Recess, dinner break, recess, the end of the day - all were followed by more school. The maiming of Miss Fluelling was temporary, too. She returned in September, a splotch of unmistakable colour in the doorway of the school.

Children cannot believe that adults have forgotten what it’s like to be a child. What a sad chasm that is. The dumbfounded child on one side, the forgetful adult on the other - the perfect pink taste buds of youth, and the scalded, swollen, scummy-white tongues of age. Every so often there’s a truce, like the performance of
Tess
in that prairie school, when all the teachers and all the students were conscripted to play one role or another.

Parley wrote his own version of
Tess
, based on the play he had seen three years earlier in London, England. Yes, he announced, he had seen this very play performed at the Barnes Theatre on a rainy April afternoon with Thomas Hardy himself in the audience, looking very small and old.

Parley Burns reminded Connie of a rarity her father had spoken about, the single white pine that stood in a patch of aspens near the confluence of the Saskatchewan and Bow Rivers. One Pine, it was called, for no other pines grew within sixty miles of it. Parley, too, stood alone and inspired superstitious respect and awe.

She watched him turn the school into a theatre and it started on his blackboard. He brought everyone into his classroom on the second floor and there they stood knee deep, all grades crowded together, while he wrote
D’Urberville
at the top of one column and
Durbeyfield
at the top of another, then listed below the former numerous French words and place names, and below the latter, English bastardizations. He spoke this last word,
bastardization
, with the precise enunciation of a trained actor, and stared down the sniggerers. A lesson in language and history, the drama of both, and how they played into the drama at hand of Tess, the beautiful maid who murders the rogue who seduced her; “who deflowered her,” he said deliberately, and again he stared them down. The only sound was the gurgle of Miss Miller’s stomach followed by the noisy hush of her crimson face.

“Our version will be short and basic,” he went on, “and consist of nine scenes with narration in between.” He listed them on the board: Knighthood, Strawberries, Dance, Lost Letter, Wedding, Separation, Eviction, Murder, Stonehenge. “We will need to manufacture blood,” he added, a glint in his eye.

Connie’s classroom had the school’s battle-scarred piano, scorched around the edges of its varnished top by hundreds of cigarette butts balanced there over the years. Loose keys, but a lively sound familiar to anyone who attended school concerts and dances. Hers was the biggest classroom, the one normally used for school productions of any kind. Parley, measuring tape in hand, scouted out the space as she was having Michael do extra work after school.

“Is he making any progress?” he said.

“He is. He has an excellent memory.”