Alone in the Classroom (13 page)

“He didn’t keep her in the dark.”

“No.”

Oil lamps, matches. Wooden houses, wood stoves, winds, proximity. Nearly everything went up in flames at one time or another.

“Burns is a peculiar man,” Mrs. Kowalchuk said. “An educated man. But we don’t know his past.”

“I know a little.”

“How he ended up here.”

“I don’t know that.”

“And we don’t really know what happened.”

“But what do you think?”

“I think he must have meddled with her.”

“Raped her, you mean.”

“I don’t know. All I really know is that Harold Graves couldn’t look people in the face he was so ashamed.”

“Poor Susan.”

They eased their feelings by condemning the father and pitying the mother, by calling the father a tyrant and then by pitying him too.

The drag of the story was like a child pulling on her arm until it ached. The day after it happened, she had walked around the edges of the charred and toppled house, the air still oppressive, headachy, and the stench indescribable. Then she had caught a whiff of sweet plums, overcooked preserves. The pantry, it must have been, or the root cellar.

One evening that week Connie walked over to Oscar Jacobs’s for a French lesson that seemed not just beside the point but a gross impossibility. She would not be able to concentrate on French for one second. But she wanted his company.

She knocked and entered. He came towards her and led her into the room with the standing mirror.

“I can think of only one thing,” Connie said. “I’m sorry.”

“Le feu,”
he said.
“L’incendie.”

Connie repeated the words and searched for others. The house burned to the ground,
la jeune fille dedans
.

“A
l’interieur.”

They sat at the round table, which was covered with patterned fabric, not your usual tablecloth but a length of pale-yellow cotton with a delicate blue design that was actually dress material, he told her when she admired it and rested her eyes on it. The exercise of saying in French what had happened, no matter how stilted and halting and mixed with English, lifted the horror a little. They were back on the night in question, the house was burning, the girl inside. And afterwards, Connie said, the next day,
la prochaine journee
, it was so odd. I caught a whiff of something pleasant, not burnt to a crisp, but hot juices from preserves and melted paraffin. I don’t suppose a man would have experienced the smell as I did; only women make preserves.
La confiture, les conserves
. The glass had melted,
le verre fondu
, and I picked up a piece. It was still warm. It too had that agreeable smell.
L’odeur agreable et sucre
.

Finding new words for things drew her into another world. Oscar Jacobs put a beret on her head.

Even when everything had fallen apart, how lovely it was to learn.

Parley was never investigated, arrested, charged, impugned, or punished. He dressed with even more care; dishevelment, shabbiness did not set in; he never lost his appearance of authority. But Connie noticed a tremor in his right hand. He reached for a glass of water and had to retrieve his shaking hand. Arrogance rescued him. He spilled something? He pretended he hadn’t. Someone else would clean it up. Mary Miller would clean it up.

He had his shoes resoled and the shoemaker did the work without a word. The new soles were so slippery that Parley walked on ice thereafter, in danger of spreading his length on the floor.

Life went on around the burned house. Black as ink, or prunes, or the blood weal on Parley’s lip. Connie would find herself staring at the ruins from her classroom windows. (“Come in from the window, Michael,” she remembered saying to him whenever his attention drifted.) Eventually, she would give her head a shake and try, without much success, to concentrate. She still stayed late to help any pupils who needed it. And then she walked home alone. Parley avoided her now and she returned the favour.

The only official change was that on the last day of May, which was the last day of school, they had no end-of-the-year picnic, no old-shoe races, egg-and-spoon races, three-legged races.

Parley disappeared the next day.

It would be a hot, dry summer, one in a long string of such summers. The following year, dust would begin to stir in April, and by the middle of May, full-blown dust storms would be whipping across the prairies.

Connie told me she never had any difficulty understanding what was soon to happen - a world in which selected victims, mainly Jews, were put into ovens and people did nothing.

Chokecherries don’t get picked anymore, not really. In the past, those who did the picking were Depression children who loved Fred Astaire and grew up when movies were utterly fabulous. Children knew all about the effort that conceals effort. They also aspired to the casual and tossed-off and natural. Fewer pickers and fewer chokecherries, too. An edge plant, drawn to disturbed or abandoned ground, especially where two habitats meet, like field and bush. This last being the kind of place where you’re most likely to see a fox, and where a lone girl is such easy prey it makes you shiver.

Children used to pick as the sound of crickets rose up around them. They stripped the trusses of mahogany-red and almost-black cherries off the twigs and into the pails at their feet, and whatever fell by the wayside lay soft and rotting on the ground.

A murder opens up the landscape. It becomes known in every one of its intimate parts, trod upon, inspected, combed over, revisited. A bad surgeon has been operating and afterwards the anaesthetic lifts, and you discover you will be gasping in pain for the rest of your life.

When I visited the hill, seventy years later, five deer wandered into the sunlight from the thicket of brambles and haws and undergrowth that sloped down to the creek. The water was very low, a narrow and slow-moving stream. The chokecherries along its edge with their black and bitter fruit were unpicked. The tall grasses had gone blond. It was October, the month of memory, when the earth gives up its colours and every bruised leaf and bent grass and autumn flower turns into a sunset in the evening of the year. A town I had seen in passing only once or twice before felt very familiar, my mother’s hometown in the valley.

The older you get, the closer your loves are to the surface, my mother said a year and a half ago. She was thinking then about the paintings she wanted to finish. Nothing else really mattered to her, except my father. Her children were doing well, they didn’t need her. Other preoccupations and worries no longer had much hold on her.
The older you get, the closer your loves are to the surface
. She was breathing rarefied air, the ether you come upon at high altitudes. I understood finally how long-held grievances and petty smallnesses might get burned off, and pure creativity and humour remain.

I learned to understand the word
realpolitik
from Connie. Salman Rushdie, she said, was getting a lesson in
realpolitik
.

“That’s why I went to Europe,” she said. “I wanted to understand the real world. Anyway, that’s what I told myself.”

She was the adored and distant relative, living in the States, visiting seldom. The commanding aunt who dressed in black, the fine teacher, the elegant woman who arrived one day holding a silver onion as a gift.

I remember a heated disagreement she had with my father, heated on his side, not hers, about human nature. Connie said it polluted the finest and elevated the lowest, it was the vast, deep well from which we all drew. My father rejected the very notion, saying there was no such thing as human nature. Never sure of himself, he came across as too sure, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. He meant there was no one human nature, each of us is different.

Connie held the more catholic view that we carry the past forward, not as original sin, though she understood the concept well enough, but as personal history. She took great interest in my birthmarks - the saucer-sized one on my left knee, brown and raised, and other, smaller ones on my arms and chest, some brown, some red, so many I could be a speckled trout. It was her theory that I received them as burns in a former life. How else to account for my memories of a place I had never seen, a love of grasses and wind, a nostalgia for the prairie, unless some hidden and very old connection was doing its work. Certainly
moments of deja vu peppered my childhood to the extent that Connie once took out her notebook and began to jot them down.

I liked being picked out in this way, by her, by the past. I recalled a set of back stairs that led to a bedroom, and the sensation of waiting there and my despair as footsteps climbed towards me. I had an inordinate fear of fire as a child and couldn’t be left alone near a campfire or a fireplace. But I have a lot of my father in me, too, and never entirely fell for what Connie implied, that a girl who died in a fire in Jewel, Saskatchewan, might have come back as me. I didn’t care to share myself in quite that way. I took my father’s vigorous view and turned it: there is so much
more
than human nature. In December, I look out the upstairs window and see reddish berries on the sprawling vine on the garden fence, and respond from head to toe. Simple berries on a bare branch in late fall, early winter. Why do they move me so?

A few days after Parley disappeared from Jewel, Connie went home to her father’s farm outside Weyburn on the other side of Saskatchewan. My father has told me what her visits were like, the anticipation beforehand and the pleasure during. She was eight years older than he was and he worshipped her; my dad would always have a great appreciation for capable women. Connie took over the kitchen and made recipes passed on by her mother’s aunt Charlotte, clootie pudding and berry-and-apple crumble
among them. At the kitchen table she and her brothers ate the results, after which my father lay his head against her shoulder in contentment.

She didn’t get on with her stepmother, however, not a bit. Zoe’s cold and baleful look - like something out of Grimm - followed by the gush of insincere praise. Connie escaped the fickleness of jealousy by moving to Regina. She enrolled in a business course, not having the heart for teaching anymore, then got a job as a secretary for the
Leader Post
, and soon, Connie being Connie, she was doing reporting and writing a column. Like all reporters, she haunted the train station to interview travellers passing through. Syd Goodwin was never among them, and neither was the Graves family. As the drought intensified and dust storms thickened, she wrote about cars passing each other in the road unawares and travellers so coated with dust they were unrecognizable, except by the gold in their teeth.

Connie’s pay at the
Leader Post
was ninety dollars a month in 1931, increased after a year to a hundred dollars, then cut back in 1933 to ninety dollars, and cut back again in 1934 to eighty dollars a month. She saved her money, amassing five hundred dollars by 1935. Then she made an arrangement with the Sifton newspaper chain to receive a stipend of ten dollars a week for freelance articles from overseas. In early August of 1935, she took the train north to Fort Churchill, and in return for writing about shipping grain to Europe via the new route of Hudson Bay, she got free passage to England on a cargo ship and saw icebergs the size of mountains.