Alone in the Classroom (12 page)

“Where’s Susan?” he said.

His father replied without looking at him. “She’s going to stay in her room.”

After supper Michael slipped upstairs, but the door to her room was locked. He tapped on the door and called
to her softly. She didn’t answer. He pressed his ear to the door and heard nothing.

The next morning she wasn’t at the breakfast table. He watched his father put a bowl of porridge and a glass of milk on a tray and take it upstairs. He listened, and when his father was at the top of the stairs, he followed, and so he saw him take a key out of his pocket and unlock Susan’s door.

In town, there was silence bled into by whispered talk. Connie heard the rumour in the schoolyard that Parley Burns did something to Susan Graves on the cloakroom floor, and didn’t believe it.

“Michael? I haven’t seen Susan for a couple of days.”

He looked away. “She has the mumps.”

A sultry wind blew day after day. It chafed the air and made it pinkish, coarse. From her classroom window, Connie could see the house across the road and sometimes she thought she saw Susan standing in an upstairs window. Something half-buried came back, a memory of Parley Burns fairly smacking his lips on the word
deflowered
when speaking about Tess. Yet he behaved as if nothing had happened. He seemed no different.

She asked Michael a second time how Susan was and he snapped at her. “How am I supposed to know?”

He stopped coming for extra help.

On Thursday of this long, strange week, after school was over she walked across the road to the big white house and knocked on the side door, the kitchen door. Probably
Mr. Graves had seen her coming. Anyway, it was he who answered the door and he did not invite her in. She knew his reputation for being taciturn and headstrong, one of those over-decisive men who acts hastily, closing off options and possibilities, and then guards the bit of manly ground he has backed himself onto. The children took after their mother.

She said she had come to inquire after Susan.

“You’re her teacher, are you?”

It was just an aggressive way of saying no to her. He knew who her teacher was.

“I’m concerned about her. She’s missing quite a bit of school.”

“No reason to be concerned. She’s well enough.” The door was being closed. “Good night,” he said.

The next day Mary came back to school, puffier about the face, but otherwise the same: wispy eyes, soft skin, short brown hair. She resumed her teaching duties and at recess she told Connie that Susan had been spreading lies.

The story had flaked out, like skin off an old man’s pate, drifting through town: how the Kowalchuk girl had seen Susan stumble out of the school, seen her blazing, sobbing face and roughed-up dress - and so had Mrs. Peter. How there were marks on her arms where he had laid the pointer across them to prevent a struggle. How her father was so ashamed that he had locked her in her bedroom and would not let her out. How he was selling the house and business and moving the family away.

“Something happened,” Connie said to Mary. “He did something awful.”

“You don’t understand him. You don’t like him and you don’t understand him.”

“Then explain him to me, Mary.”

“I think he’s a lonely man.”

She had a loyal face. And her eyes weren’t colourless after all: they were hazel.

“A lonely man,” she went on, “with dreams and lots of bottled-up emotions. Maybe they got the better of him. But he wouldn’t mean to hurt her.”

“What about the bruises?” The rumoured bruises.

“As I say, his emotions might have got the better of him. But he’s a good man.”

“He likes to use the strap. He likes to use it on girls,” Connie said.

At the end of school that day, Friday, she went to her classroom windows and once again she thought she saw shape and movement in the upstairs window across the way. She stood there for a few minutes, pondering.

Then she went out into the hallway and climbed the stairs, up past the landing with the two sets of bookshelves and down the hall to Parley’s office.

The door was open and he was behind his desk, writing with his fountain pen. He raised his eyes as she entered and watched as she lowered herself onto the straight-backed chair facing his desk, a chair warmed by many nervous bottoms.

His face struck her as a combination of movie star and Blind Pew in
Treasure Island
. Darkness not just under his eyes, but all around them.

“I’m not a monster,” he said quietly, and she realized she was staring, and looked away.

His office was immaculate. He had told her he had been a field hand, a farm boy. He must have hated it. Nothing of the field was here. A dustless, airless room, hostile to children.

He lifted his hand and rubbed the side of his forehead with his fingertips, then ran his fingers out across his face, a delicate, fan-like, elderly movement.

“You’re tired,” she said.

“I’m always tired.”

Once again she could not take her eyes off him. His left eyelid fluttered. He touched it with one finger to arrest it.

“Susan,” she forced herself to say.

He looked at her, but said nothing.

She leaned forward. “She’s only thirteen.”

“Fifteen.”

“You really should learn how to count, Mr. Burns.”

“I understand,” he said, to forestall her, it seemed, and he began to move papers around his desk. Miss Fluelling had analyzed his handwriting, a hobby of hers, and she said it showed he had huge, unsatisfied ambitions and gout.

He cleared his throat. “You’re the only person in this place I’ve been able to converse with on anything like my level. There are three, maybe four readers in this town. I tried to get Susan to read books, but she misunderstood my intentions. I frightened her.”

“I think you did more than frighten her.”

“Well now, it would be her word against mine, wouldn’t it.” He leaned back and studied her. “You don’t know anything,” he said.

His eyes spilled contempt. He pushed his chair farther back. He crossed his legs. “How many years of university do you have? How much teacher training?”

The schoolteacher in him had reasserted itself. He was asking questions to which he knew the answers. Because he was afraid, she realized. He was afraid.

“I don’t want to spoil your fun,” he was saying, “but the Graves boy deliberately makes mistakes to have more of your time. He monopolizes you.”

There was some truth to that. She was silent.

“A good teacher would never let that happen,” he said.

“Let’s get back to Susan.”

He cleared his throat and cleared it again. “The trustees have my resignation. You’re the first to know.”

Then he
had
done something very wrong.

“I haven’t made up my mind about my next step,” he said.

She watched him dig his knuckles into his eyes, reaming them out like little glass jars. “Come with me,” he said, with his knuckles in his eyes.

“
With you?”

“Yes.” And his eyes sprang at her. “We could start a school. My experience. Your personality.” His eyes were burning holes in her. “A good private school with theatre as the focus. Shakespeare. Oscar Wilde. Euripides.”

“You need help,” she managed.

“Your
help.”

“What happened with Susan?”

He glared at her. And then in front of her eyes his face
had a little breakdown. He gripped the edge of his desk with both hands, fighting tears.

Her own eyes were suddenly wet with those sympathetic tears we get against our will. She watched him grip the edge of his desk harder. Then he banged the desk with his fist and she jumped.

“Sorry,” she said. She stood up.

“Wait.”

She sat down again. She watched him get control of himself, but he was still all mussed with emotion.

He said, “You could take the lower grades, I could take the upper.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“You need a doctor. You have no business teaching children. You’re unfit.”

That was the word she had been searching for.
Unfit
.

Having said it, she stood up again. This time she kept herself out of the punishment chair and got through the door and downstairs and outside, to the wind blowing about, and to her abiding conviction that he was mad and she was out of her depth.

Two days later, Wilda Graves was outside with the dog and her youngest child. It was Sunday evening. Her head was aching from argument and despair. Even here, in the part of the yard that was most out of the wind, breezes pulled at the pins in her hair. She pushed a strand behind her ear and resecured the pin. The big garden called out
for attention, but why start when Harold said they had no future here anymore. There was no future at all that she could see. She raised her eyes to the dark, fast-moving clouds on the horizon and for some reason she swivelled her head and looked back at the house. She stood transfixed, disbelieving. Smoke was pouring out of the eaves.

And then the roof burst into flames.

Now slow motion takes over and softly hobbles her. She is aware of her clumsiness reaching out to pick up Evie, her fumbling hands as she hoists the child and carries her to the water pump on its low platform thirty feet from the house, wraps those chubby arms around the pump and tells her not to let go, not to move an inch. Then half runs, half falls towards Susan, who is screaming in the upstairs window.

Others come running, among them Michael and his father, the one from a friend’s house, the other from his desk at the store. Connie at home hears the general pulse, the boots in the street, and she goes out and sees dark smoke billowing into the sky. Then she is running too - she thinks the school is on fire - everyone is carrying buckets, or grabbing them - a town without a fire department.

Buckets - hand over hand - and the heat is astounding. It sends things wheeling through the air, boards, pieces of metal, a black stocking, a shoe. The glare is unearthly and the roar of the flames and the groaning of wooden beams toppling, exploding.

Some have rushed into the burning house to grab what they can. They’ve come out with a clock, a chair, plates, a tray with six loaves of rising bread. But no one can get to the second floor. A few try, the mother, the father,
Michael. They try more than once, but the wall of flames and smoke beats them back. Smoke has replaced Susan in the window. Her screams have stopped.

Parley has joined the brigade. Connie sees the fire play on his face, and his hands are shaking.

Everyone knows Susan has perished. The girl with such talent and presence and imagination. Why wouldn’t she smash the window and jump? We would have caught her - we would have caught her in a blanket. And others give the same answers. Her hair was in flames. She was on fire. She succumbed to the smoke. She choked on the smoke. It was too late. Voices jostle each other, different accents, male and female.

And the stunned family stands a little apart. The mother has her arms around her son and daughter, hugging them close, watching the end of everything. The father is with them, but alone.

The loaves of bread, forgotten at the side of the house, baked to perfection. Connie picked up the tray, using burnt rags as oven mitts, and stood, uncertain what to do. Across the road, the school was bathed in light as if a miracle were taking place. The miracle was the direction of the wind, out towards the prairie and away from town. She saw the line of men making the fire trench that kept the flames from jumping and spreading. She turned in the other direction and took the tray of bread to Mrs. Peter’s house, two hundred yards down the road and the nearest house; it had become a base of operations of sorts.
Then she returned to the scene of the fire. She had caught glimpses of Michael, but then lost track of him.

The wind dropped, rain began to fall, and now the smoke really stank. She saw Parley standing by himself in his shirtsleeves. He raised his blackened hands and rubbed his forehead, then rolled his sleeves down and spent the longest time trying to put his cufflinks back in. No one went near him or spoke to him.

She felt a hand on her shoulder, Oscar Jacobs telling her it was time to go home, there was nothing left for them to do.

“Have you seen Michael?” she said.

He put his arm through hers and led the way to the Peters’ house, where Mrs. Peter was bandaging the boy’s hands. It wasn’t so very late, about ten o’clock, almost a normal bedtime. Michael was sitting on the top step with Mrs. Peter. He lifted his head as Connie approached and stopped on the lower step. She put out her hand and touched his singed hair, pushed it back off his forehead, stroked the side of his smeared face. Her touch went right into him and his shoulders began to shake. He brought his arm up to his eyes and twisted away.

She wanted to sit beside him and put her arm around him, but that would have undone him completely. And so she left him to kind and neutral Mrs. Peter and her bandages.

The next day they were gone. They had family north of Jewel, it was said, in Saskatoon. They had gone to be with family.

Parley stayed on, despite the talk. He taught his classes and no one interfered. A grim, bad, shattered man with a blood weal on his lower lip, still faultlessly dressed. It took Connie a while to understand that he believed he was being responsible by finishing out the last three weeks of the school year.

Mary Miller said to Connie, “You can tell he’s hurting inside.”

“How can you tell, Mary?”

“His eyes.”

Those pale-brown unreadable eyes.

“The life’s gone out of them,” Mary said. “He’s devastated.”

“I wonder if she set it herself,” Mrs. Kowalchuk said.

It was the middle of the night and she and Connie were in the kitchen, since neither of them could sleep. Connie in her nightgown gripped a glass of water. Mrs. Kowalchuk in housecoat and slippers sat down with a heavy sigh. The smell of smoke permeated everything. Connie smelled it on her nightgown. The following winter she would put on her winter coat and smell smoke on the fur collar.

“But her door was locked,” Connie said. “That’s what they say.”