Alone in the Classroom (14 page)

In England she spent several months writing about unemployment and unrest, then travelled to Paris to get warm and to feel less grim, and stayed near the Seine, climbing six floors to her room with its little wood stove and sofa bed and table, and its window in the roof that opened on hinges, allowing her to see, if she stood on a chair, all the rooftops of Paris. She learned to smoke and to speak French, to dress with style and economy, to recognize prejudice, and never to minimize a gathering menace. She stayed almost two years and would have stayed longer had she married the young doctor who proposed to her. But in the spring of 1937, having broken up with him, she left a Europe more and more at war and came back to Canada. On a windy day in late March, she entered the offices of the
Ottawa Journal
and talked herself into a job.

Several months later, she heard about the murder of a schoolgirl up the valley in Argyle. Moved by more than natural curiosity, she persuaded her editor to let her handle the story. After all, she said, she came from the area, knew the town, knew its history, and could pick up stories and recipes for the women’s page while she was at it.

The town of Argyle lay in the heart of a long valley formed by the waters of the Ottawa River, a very old valley and therefore so broad that you didn’t perceive it as one unless you were close to the river. Parts of the valley were pastoral and parts were deep woods. The towns were small and filled with Scots (if you were a Scot - otherwise,
Scots, Irish, French, Poles, Germans). To be from a town that identified itself with a valley, and from a valley that resembled a plain, and a plain that felt like an island - this was being from Argyle. My mother said to me recently, “No place seemed farther away.”

After Connie came upon Parley Burns in the cemetery, she inquired about him. But she did not go to see him until there was a good reason to do so. The reason came when twenty-year-old John Coyle was arrested for the murder. The next afternoon, Connie went to Parley’s high school. It was a large collegiate, three storeys tall, red brick, a block from Argyle Street. Inside, down a wide corridor, past a drinking fountain and several cabinets of trophies and photographs, was the large outer office run by a secretary, who was efficient, unmarried, and in love with the principal, so everyone thought. Miss Wood had Connie wait at the counter while she checked with Mr. Burns in his small inner office -
Principal Ian Burns, M.A
. on a metal plate below the frosted glass - and then she waved Connie over.

He half rose as she entered, older than he had seemed in the cemetery, his hair completely grey. He wore glasses now, horn-rimmed with round lenses. He had lost or mastered his tic. Now he had a moustache exactly like Hitler’s.

She took the first of two empty chairs, remembering all too well the last time she had been in an office of his. He sat down and leaned forward on his elbows. He pressed his fingertips together and regarded her over them with no pretense of pleasure. It was late August, about three weeks after Ethel’s murder. A timetabling sheet was spread
in front of him. He had been toiling away with pencil and eraser. His hands trembled noticeably, both hands.

Connie did not refer to the one thing they were thinking about, but it was everywhere, that horror of seven years ago, in every particle of air. She asked him if he had taught John Coyle. The answer was yes. He had taught him French, for which he showed the aptitude of a flea. “Not like yourself,” he said. “If you remember.”

The windows were open. A breeze came in and ruffled his papers. It was uncanny, creepy to be facing him again across a principal’s desk, he in control and she asking him questions he didn’t care for. She persisted and began to get more out of him. He said that Johnny had been a member of his drama club, but too inhibited to perform. “Until we did
King Lear
, that is.”

“He didn’t play Lear.” She was trying to get a fix on the young man as well as on Parley.

“He played Gloucester after he was blinded. He could do it because he could close his eyes.”

It was a detail she would always remember for what it said about getting through life, the tricks we use to persuade ourselves not to be afraid. It was typical of Parley that he would immediately understand what was going on with the boy.

“And you like him.”

“He’s a normal, decent lad.”

“The hair in the girl’s hand,” she said.

“Yes.”

“The hair she grabbed in the struggle. It’s the same colour as his hair.”

“Blond.”

“Yes.” Had it been grey - but it wasn’t grey. The instant she had seen Parley in the cemetery, she had suspected him; but the hair was blond, which would seem to rule him out. “And pointed,” she said. Which indicated something altogether strange. “What’s your understanding of ‘pointed’?”

“What’s yours?”

“Hair that’s never been cut, never barbered.”

“Johnny’s almost a fixture in the barbershop. I often see him there when I walk by.”

“Then how.” She spread her hands, looking for an explanation.

“It might be pubic hair,” he said.

They regarded each other. She had had the same thought. “But wouldn’t they know that? Wouldn’t it be identified as such?”

“They don’t know much. They’re pinning the murder on a boy who couldn’t possibly have done it.”

He didn’t go on. He was waiting to be asked. Making her work, she thought.

But then he said what he meant. “He’s a cripple.”

“Well, he uses a cane. He can walk.”

“The girl was running away. They found spilled cherries along the path. You don’t need to run away from a cripple.”

The moment lengthened. In the years since Susan’s death, she had once or twice found herself telling the story. How a principal kept a thirteen-year-old girl after school, how she had stumbled home sobbing and in disarray, how her father was so ashamed, so worried about appearances that he locked her in her room. How a week later, their
house caught fire, and because there was no fire department everyone formed a brigade and fought the burning house with buckets of water. They could see the girl screaming in the upstairs window. But no one could get to her.

And what anyone who heard the story wanted to know was what had become of the principal.

“You told me in the cemetery that you taught the dead girl’s sisters.”

“Strong students. Isabel, particularly. She played Cordelia.”

“I don’t know how you have the heart for it,” she said, saying what she had been thinking. “Heading up another drama club.”

She saw the tic jump at the corner of his eye. She was baiting him. It was beneath her. Again, he pressed his fingertips together, then leaned his chin against the scaffolding of his fingers and studied her. He was behind his desk and his face was behind the desk he had made with his hands. His exhausted eyes looked almost drugged from lack of sleep and overwork. He was waiting for her to leave, that was obvious.

She said, “I always wondered if I’d see the Graves family again too.”

Her mouth was dry. She wasn’t afraid of him, but her mouth was dry.

She said, “I think about them.”

He held her gaze, but his expression changed. “So do I,” he said.

In the outer office, she stopped and spoke for a moment to Miss Wood. “Soon you’ll be very busy. The start of school. A busy time.”

“We will. But he has everything under control. He works so hard.”

“Then so do you, I imagine.”

“He’s not a vigorous man either. I wouldn’t let him give blood last year. He was working so hard he had nothing to spare.”

“I met his wife in the library.”

Miss Wood made no response, a studied neutrality.

“I didn’t learn if they have children.”

“She
does. From her first marriage. We expect great things of Doris. She’s the top scholar in the school.”

“Doris Burns.”

“Mr. Burns is adopting her officially, so yes, soon she’ll be Doris Burns.”

Ethel’s body had been discovered in a sort of alcove, bordered by a fence and heavy shrubbery, a hundred yards from the road and three-quarters of a mile southwest of the centre of town but within town limits. She was lying flat on her back, her head turned sideways and her left arm raised over part of her face. The entire left side of her head was crushed and her jaw was broken. An abrasion on her left arm near her shoulder was thought to have come from trying to shield herself from blows. Her dress and slip were raised around her waist, and her panties were missing.

The body was removed to the undertaking parlours of M.M. Macswain. Macswain had become the town’s undertaker after my grandfather, undertaker and furniture maker, died when my mother was a child.

The search party had been led by Chief of Police Moses Reed, on whose doorstep a baby in a basket had been laid seventeen years before with a note saying that since the baby was his, he could raise it; and Mrs. Reed did. The baby grew up to be Olive Reed, a fast friend of my mother’s for a time, a fast friend and a fast girl, what in those days was called “easy,” “an open door”; eventually, my mother told me, she ran off with the circus.

After the murder, Argyle shifted into a darker register not entirely out of keeping with a town where it wasn’t uncommon for so-called nieces to live with so-called aunts (who were really daughters and mothers, or grandmothers) and with male relatives, what kind of relative never being clear. My mother’s friendship with Olive relied on two things: their mutual fascination with movies, which they discussed endlessly, and my mother’s singular fascination with Olive’s boils. Olive always notified her when one of her boils was ready to pop, since the look of pus worming its way out of a hole in the skin was something my mother never tired of watching. She was not squeamish, and neither am I.

During the inquest, and again during the trial, Connie roomed with my grandmother. The big brick house with its front veranda is still there. Some of the furniture eventually got passed on to me - a matching oversized rocker and armchair, reupholstered in light-green velvet by my
mother, and the most uncomfortable furniture imaginable, the seats so deep your spine has to go on a journey and arrives sorry it ever got there.

Ethel had left her home in the apartment block on Argyle Street around nine-thirty in the morning. She followed Opeongo Street (within town limits Opeongo Road was a street) as it turned and ran southerly down to a bridge across Smith’s Creek, beyond which rose the gentle hill owned by the Iveys but almost communal in nature, where pickers helped themselves not just to chokecherries but to wild apples and plums. This part of town, blending as it did into countryside, was an open world with pathways, wagon lanes, creek, and bush, even a well from which strangers helped themselves.

After the murder, Ethel’s movements and Johnny’s became everyone else’s, routes as well worn as the one in Seamus Heaney’s poem about the trail of tears an old friend followed on his way to boarding school, the streams he passed being the same streams an earlier traveller had passed and described in 1608 as he pondered the travels of Aeneas; and so the boy was accompanied, more than he knew, on the lonely road to school at the end of summer.

Old histories and geographies accompanied Ethel too. She was walking on a settlement road that overlay a lumberman’s tote-road that followed an Indian trail ninety-nine miles long. It commenced at the Ottawa River and crossed the Bonnechere River at Argyle, and then took a northwesterly course between the Bonnechere and the
Madawaska Rivers, both tributaries of the Ottawa, on to Lake Opeongo in Algonquin Park. The road penetrated vast timberlands and opened them up to small farmers whose land was not under water but “under rock,” as one blunt speaker put it. Scruffy, rugged, a pleasure for the eyes, this scenic variety of hillside, bush, and swamp. The road’s glory days, when it bustled with horses, wagons, hotels, and mills, went from 1860 to 1890. Then the lumber tycoon J.R. Booth put through his private railway. Everything went by rail after that, and the Opeongo died. Settlements became ghost towns. Blueberries grew in the crevices of rocks, and straggly chokecherries sprang up along split-rail fences, where they attracted birds in quantity.