Alone in the Classroom (17 page)

She was a great walker in those days. Long strolls in Beechwood Cemetery, longer walks on the country trail through the woods in Manor Park, and a considerable trek one weekend to Wakefield on the other side of the river, in Quebec. Inspired by the city editor who had hiked the twenty miles there and back over the course of two days, Connie rose early one Saturday morning,
packed a knapsack with sandwiches, apples, a Thermos of coffee, and nightclothes, and set out. She crossed the Ottawa River on Mr. Seguin’s ferryboat and continued by foot from Gatineau Point, intending to stay the night in the Wakefield Hotel and walk back the next day. It was late September of 1938, six months after Johnny Coyle’s acquittal.

She had only just written up a retrospective on the case in which she allowed herself to speculate about the people involved and the mood of the town. She dwelled on Johnny, a visible yet isolated young man, who had managed to place himself at the centre of the drama, first by boasting that he had warned Ethel against picking berries alone, and then by joining the search for her and discovering her body. In playing the hero, he had drawn himself into a tissue of contradictory statements, and the town, with some few exceptions, had believed the worst of him. Reading the piece, I can’t tell if Connie’s sympathies lay at all with Johnny, but it’s obvious they lay with Ethel, with the young girl who had a quiet, independent spirit, “a bright child familiar with that part of the country. She had walked up and down that road so often with her father and mother.” The Ontario Court of Appeal, wrote Connie, had found so many irregularities in the trial and such “shockingly confused” testimony about the hairs in the dead girl’s hand that, rather than call for a new trial, they acquitted Johnny altogether; in their view, the evidence pointed as much to his innocence as to his guilt. A few months later, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld their verdict, and in June of 1938 Johnny became a free
and exonerated man, she wrote, while the guilty party roamed free, possibly in the town itself.

Connie told me later something she didn’t include in the article, that Johnny then moved to Niagara Falls, having in hand a character reference given by Parley Burns, and took up his life again under an assumed name.

On her walk to Wakefield, the leaves were more advanced than she had expected and than everyone said they ought to be. The first remarkable ripeness of colour, shimmering and intense. Sometimes a flash of pink set back in the woods amid the other colours, actual pink. Deep oranges, burgundies. And at one point a grotesquerie of black: six turkey vultures feasting on a dead deer.

She carried the map the editor had sketched for her, but no flashlight, and the weather, promising at dawn, became troublesome by late afternoon, with a cool wind bringing rain. She was following a route a few countrywomen walked when they brought butter from their farms to the market in Ottawa. Under a winter moon, she would have found her way in the candlelight of snowshine and moonshine, but in the rain it became very dark. She lost the trail. The rain picked up and she took refuge in a thicket of trees, where soft thumps recalled the strange thuds that mystified Tess. In the book it was pheasants (scattered onto far branches by a shooting party and weakened by loss of blood), falling with a sound that revealed its source only in daylight. Then Tess, still months away from her own hangman, went out and wrung their twitching necks. Connie
would discover apples falling, and there was someone she knew gathering the bruised fruit.

“You’re soaked to the skin,” he said.

He took her hand and led her across the field to his farmhouse, hidden by trees. A young man with little education would carve out security in other ways - any work that offered itself, and mostly it was land work, field work, bush work. He was frugal, and intent upon making a solid perch for himself in a quiet place with room enough for a workshop and a vegetable garden and a woodlot.

He led her into his kitchen, and it was large and perfect. A wood stove crackled out heat, the air quivered with light and warmth. Oil lamps made yellow pools of light. On the table, a spray of black twigs and scarlet leaves poked out of a glass jar. Next to two low windows was a sofa, and over the back of the sofa a hand-knit child’s sweater, and in the far corner of the sofa, his mother.

“Mrs. Graves,” Connie said.

His mother stretched out her hand and Connie took it. “I’m Connie Flood. I taught in Jewel.”

“Jewel.” The sad, thinned face drew back as if slapped.

Connie turned awkwardly towards the coat rack. Among all the surprises was another. His brown leather school bag hung from a hook.

“You didn’t get rid of it,” she said to him.

Michael took her sopping coat and gave her a big sweater to put on and drew her to a chair next to the wood stove. Her hand still tingled from the warm pressure of his
fingers. She sat there dazed by the long hours outside and the sudden turn of events and the marvellous warmth. She was remembering that Mrs. Graves had a sister, or was it a brother, in this part of the world. Was it the brother who had been backward in school? Some relative, some connection. Michael was twenty-three, she calculated. Solid, muscular, handsome, eager, intent.

“I’m so lucky,” she said, turning to look at him.

“I couldn’t believe it was you.”

He held her gaze and she saw that his eyes had grown up too.

“Pardon me,” his mother said to her finally. “You’re the first person I’ve seen from that place since we left it.”

The table was set for supper. Michael added another plate and more utensils. She noticed that his hands were black on the knuckles from attending to the stove. He had large palms and smallish fingers, scratched and worked over. Not a reader’s hands, or an office worker’s hands, or a teacher’s hands. He gave her a glass of gin, and she sipped it, glancing around at the large wall calendar of luscious fruits and berries, at the birds’ nests on the windowsill, the wood stacked neatly behind the stove. Rain beat on the roof and poured down the windows. She told him about the dead deer on the side of the road, the haunch torn open and feasted upon by turkey vultures. He would have butchered it, he said, taken the haunches for steak. “The rump down to the back of the knee. If the roadkill is fresh, and it would have been.”

They sat together for the meal, his mother weak and without appetite. Nevertheless, she said in a proud, proprietary voice, “These are our carrots and our beets.”

“Miss Flood was my best teacher. She had it over the others like snow.”

“Connie,” Connie said.

It was the most delicious meal of her life. After the long, wet, lost walk, to be rescued by Michael, of all people, and taken into this welcoming farm kitchen and fed cheesed eggs (cooked in a fry pan, slices of cheddar melted on top) and gin.

That night she lay in the bed he had made up for her on the kitchen sofa, clean sheets tucked carefully around the cushions, blankets folded and carefully tucked. She stayed awake for a long time, dazzled and bemused, then slept a little, woke up, slept a little more. In the morning she dressed in her dry clothes, still slightly warm from the stove, and went outside. She found the path to the privy. Then she walked around for a while, looking at the house in the early-morning mist, its side veranda and deep windowsills, this place where Michael Graves lived with his mother.

They were three miles from Wakefield, he had told her, so she had almost made it. He knew the route she had taken. In the early days, he said, geese were walked through tar and then sand to toughen their feet in preparation for the same long walk to market.

She headed back to the side kitchen door, and down the far path he came. She waited for him, taking in his small, knowing smile and easy-moving body. He came right up to her and took hold of her elbow with a firm, relaxed grip. Was she ready for breakfast?

She turned towards the house, aware of him right behind her, every inch of him inches away.

The far path down which he had come led to a log workshop a hundred yards from the house. After breakfast he took her into its dusty, aromatic interior of workbench, tables, wood stove, three north-facing windows. From one of the tables he picked up a drawing, a map of early Canada illustrated in the margins with flora and fauna.

“I’m going to be in a book,” he said, cocky, self-mocking.

He was boyish, still, through and through. He will be a boyish old man, she thought, if, despite everything that’s happened to him, he is boyish now. She had a sudden vision of the old man he would become, and it was very much what I saw myself the night he came to talk about her fifty years later. That evening, in the fading summer light on my back porch, his face grew more and more youthful and handsome. Then the shadows lengthened, they hollowed out his features and he was old. It took fifteen minutes.

Connie looked up at the sound of the car that drew Michael to the open doorway. He waved to a man he called Ralph. A talkative customer, who wanted snowshoes and looked at paddles and admired them, but he had several already, he said, including one made from a single piece of cedar by a native Indian. Michael took the man outside to inspect a half-finished canoe on sawhorses, and Connie sank into an ancient armchair in the corner of the shop. What is it, she wondered, that unlocks the mind
and frees it to go deeper, unfreezes the mind and allows it to learn? In Michael’s case, the out-of-doors and doing things by hand and being left alone.

He found her asleep in the chair. He said her name. Then he leaned over her, his hands on the arms of the chair, and she opened her eyes. His face was right above hers.

She went up in a flame of shyness and laughter.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Already?”

“It’s getting on. It’s eleven o’clock.”

“Is it really? Time flew.” His genuine surprise flattered, pleased her. “You haven’t seen the woodlot or the pond.”

He took her across the mowed field and they entered a large woodlot, and no, he didn’t own the farm, not at all, he paid rent and looked after it, a caretaker, if you like. They were here through his aunt, his mother’s older sister, who lived not far away and knew the owner. Connie nodded. That was the connection.

The woodlot had a good deal of ash, he pointed out, which was the correct wood for snowshoes, as it was for paddles; a cedar paddle might look nice, but it couldn’t take the punishment a paddle had to take; ash was hard as a hammer. She was wearing a blouse patterned white and blue. An open collar. The thick grey cardigan he had lent her the night before. They heard a bird deep in the woods, a blue jay’s stabbing cry, and he startled her by saying that almost every day he heard or saw something so beautiful it was like tapping into all the sorrows of the world. It struck her that he felt things more deeply than she did, and expressed them better.

The pond, usually muddied by horses, he explained, was like clear spring water, and the field mowed to the edge of it. A summer so rainy the horses had drunk out of the trough instead of going down to the pond, and the turbulent skies were dramatic and fresh as they were out West. He told her that otters followed the streams this time of year, they followed the water channels to the beaver ponds and scooted along the bottom and went after the frogs curled up in the mud. He wouldn’t mind coming back as an otter, he said. “What about you? You’d want to be something svelte. A mink. Or a marten. Minks can be nasty, though. Martens are gentler. Or an otter, too, why not?”

“What are otters like?” she said, smiling back at him.

“Vain and snazzy.”

Her smile widened. “You’re not a wolf?”

“I’m not a predator, Connie.”

“But you’re vain.”

“Predators play it close to the vest. Sneaky, cunning, weighing things out, panting. Hiding away, but being in charge.”

And she almost told him then about having seen Parley Burns.

They sat on his veranda in summer chairs and he continued to speak in that communing way, not wanting her to go. A huge clutch of rose mallow, tied to the railing to keep it from falling over, took his eye. “Look how the pink floats without stress,” he said.

“You should have gone on to study science.”

“In school?”

“Yes”

” ‘Sound it out, Michael!’ “
And he was on the verge of tears, they came that quickly. “You would not believe what recalling that brings back.” The immensity of the memory had turned his face red.

She touched his arm and he recovered himself. A moment passed.

“You said you were going to be in a book.”

“Text
book.” He wrinkled his nose. “Remember Syd Goodwin?”

“I thought I saw him on Queen Street.”

“You probably did. His office is near there. Gilmour and O’Connor.”

“No, it wasn’t him.”

“He works for the public school board. He writes books too. That’s what I’m illustrating, one of his books. And he wants me to teach woodworking classes in the schools.”

“That’s amazing,” she said.

“He came out here to buy a canoe. I knew him right away.”

“He was my favourite teacher.” She smiled. “He had it over the others like snow.”

Then something she had been too hesitant to broach came out quite naturally. She asked if the child’s sweater on the sofa belonged to his sister, the little girl who held on to the pump as the house burned down. It did. And without prompting, he told her that Evie was living with his father. His father had family in Toronto. As far as he knew, they were in Toronto.

He looked off into the distance as he said these things, at the fields that rolled towards wooded hills in the north.

“I saw Parley Burns again,” she said. His eyes swung back and fixed her with such a savage look that she had to glance away. “He’s the principal in Argyle. Up the valley.”

“Hasn’t he been horsewhipped yet?”