Alone in the Classroom (31 page)

“He wrote a play about Saskatchewan.”

The sun went behind the clouds. I had no trouble at all seeing her face.

“He didn’t finish it,” she said. “A lot of things he didn’t finish. He was a hugely frustrated man. I think that’s what drove him out of his head.”

I touched her arm. “But you read it as far as it went. This play about Saskatchewan.”

“It was among his papers. I kept them for a long time. I had to get rid of a lot of things when I moved in here.” She sighed. “It was such a grim play, unforgettably grim.”

“Tell me.”

“Oh, it was about a teacher who goes mad.”

“Parley was the teacher.” The words escaped me, but she didn’t react, a little deaf, I thought.

She said, “I think he heard the story when he lived there. I think it haunted him.”

Crows had set up a racket in the tall spruce on the other side of the driveway. I became aware of them as I waited for her to continue.

“The teacher was female,” she corrected me. (Not deaf at all, then.) “She falls in love with one of her students and the boy sets fire to the school. The boy is backward. He can’t read.”

Michael.

“He’s playing with matches at the side of the school. The grass catches and the wind takes it and the flames spread and leap to the house across the road.”

I was back with Michael showing my children how to light a fire, how to never let it run away with itself. I was seeing him on that sultry windy night in May somewhere in the vicinity of his big frame house, matches in hand, setting a fire in the grass, then thinking he had put it out and going off, only to return to a house in flames. But I knew the fire had started in Susan’s room. I knew that.

And yet how much did I really know, especially about the worries of a traumatized boy? Perhaps Parley, with his experience of schoolboys and with his own morose imaginings to draw on, had touched upon some kind of truth about Michael’s fears.

Doris Burns was repeating that she had held on to his papers for a long time. “But then they went into the recycling bin. Who would have been interested?”

“I would have been interested.”

She patted my knee. “He was a great diary writer for a time. That was sad reading, too, those diaries.”

“Because he was so …” And with my finger I made a circling motion at my temple.

“He was smitten and knew his feelings weren’t returned. He saw her every day because she taught in the same school.”

“Connie.”

“My names have gone,” she said.

We sat on without speaking, side by side on the bench, until I stirred and asked if there was nothing in the play about the boy’s sister dying in the fire.

“I don’t recall it.”

“You wouldn’t forget,” I said. “A girl screaming in an upstairs window and no one able to reach her.”

She didn’t recall anything like that.

“Not even in his diary?”

“No.”

It seemed to me the final injustice, even though I understood what it is not to be able to face something or find the words for it.

I thanked her and said how good it was to meet her,
assuring her, when she apologized for her memory, that I had learned a great deal.

Parley was revealed to me as a failed writer, a smitten and rejected man, haunted, as she had said, by what happened in Jewel. He worked with the material as every writer does, removing himself by submerging himself in others. And so he assigned his madness to Connie and his self-condemnation to Michael, and he couldn’t even begin to write about Susan. Whatever he invented was beggared by reality, and he couldn’t write about reality.

I didn’t think to ask Doris Burns what she remembered about Ethel Weir and John Coyle until I was halfway home. But the next time I saw her, I produced their names and she had no trouble. She told me that her stepfather and Johnny had kept in touch, and that Johnny was one of the pallbearers at his funeral.

It’s early September again, and in time with the first yellow school buses comes a new urgency, almost like pain, to the flashing, shrill cries of blue jays in the woods. For Michael it was the sound of the closing down of a better season, the rising of panic. He remembered being so much in tears, he told me once. He would sit and look out the classroom window. He was going to be scrutinized and judged. He was going to fail. And then Connie came along, he said, and saved him.

He died three years ago, ten years after Connie. It was Evie who phoned me to say he was in the hospital in Wakefield following a heart attack. The sister, it turned out, was looking after the big brother. We were in November and snow had fallen, but not in quantity. In the hospital, coming down the corridor, I heard his voice, flirting with the nurses, and thought he was bound to recover. I stopped to listen. His voice still worked on me. But then I entered his room and he was so shrunken and spent. He reached for my hand. He asked about me and my children and my mother, and when I told him my mother was still in her studio every day, he said that was good, he wasn’t ready to die either. “Are you in pain?” I said. He had been. But drugs had taken care of that. “Tell me your news, Annie. Talk to me.” I began to describe my trips to the archives and to Argyle, and as I talked his eyes closed and he slept.

I had forgotten to bring a book with me and there were no books, no reading materials in his room. Watching him sleep, I remembered him telling me how he learned to distinguish the letter
b
from
d
. Imagine a bed, the
b
is the foot of the bed and the
d
is the pillow. I remembered our conversation about the courage of schoolchildren. “Brave and trusting,” he said, “poor little suckers.”

His clothes were folded neatly on a chair. I lifted his sweater and smelled it. It was Michael, a combination of woodsmoke, outdoors, animals, and boy.

In the hallway Evie told me quietly that he wouldn’t be going home again, she was searching out a nursing home for him. But he died in the hospital four days later at about one in the morning, and alone.

I walk into my parents’ rooms in the late afternoon, the door unlocked, and my mother is sitting by herself in a chair beside my father’s desk, head down like a castigated schoolgirl.

I tell her so, and she looks up at me and laughs and agrees. She says she can’t put five words together. Her brains are gone.

Words escape her and the chronology of her life and the whereabouts of the elevator down the hall. Without my father she is lost.

A few weeks later, when we drive across the Ottawa River and into the Gatineau Hills, she comes alive. She reaches behind her for my father’s hand and they hold hands, she in the front of the car and he in the back. They say repeatedly what a splendid day it is, enchanted by the colours. We are in Quebec on the old River Road, flush with the Gatineau River, a low and bumpy way familiar to me from the many times I drove out to see Michael.

He filled my dreams one night recently, and in the morning I woke up refreshed and content. Then the dreams proceeded to wash across the day, surfacing and catching me off guard, until I thought something had actually happened - something significant was astir. What had ended by day had found a way to live on at night, the reverse of its earlier self, when it occupied every waking thought and disappeared at night, for in the actual living of it I never dreamt about him. It would seem our past lives have dyslexic minds of their own.

At Wakefield, beyond the covered bridge, we veer east for a bit, then leave the highway and head deeper into the countryside on a back road that turns and twists and takes my mother back in her mind to the six miles of road that led from Argyle to the lake. She is so much more lucid in the woods. Twice, she says how amazing it is to think that everything we are seeing was once under frozen water, miles of it. She means the last ice age, the two-mile-thick glacier that began to retreat twelve thousand years ago. She hasn’t forgotten that the earth is recent in this particular manifestation, its beauty a form of recovery from a great, cold weight.

My husband is driving. My father and I share the back seat. Rather late in the day, but not too late, I’ve come to appreciate the crusty humour and intelligence and melancholy thoughtfulness of this former principal, who at exam time would drive my brothers and me to his high school on Saturday morning and put each of us in a separate classroom to study until noon. Alone in the classroom, I felt undefended and my stomach hurt. Exams loomed, as did my father in his office down the hall, working away and expecting his children to do the same. Sometimes there would be a rap on the window from a brother on the loose savouring a moment of rebellious escape.

We are almost there. We roll down the windows to smell the trees and the breeze and the water coming close.

No excitement compares with arriving at a lake in the woods. You leave the highway behind in favour of a gravel road that eventually turns into a dirt road and
becomes so quiet, the dirt covered with pine needles, the smell of pine, the trees enclosing you, and then the sudden lake.

Down by the water, my mother talks about her father, how he would drive the horse-drawn buggy to the lake on Saturday nights after he closed the store, then return to Argyle very early Monday morning. They slept in two big tents behind the cabin, she says, which was just a converted, outsized boathouse. But no swimming on Sunday, no matter how hot, because her father was a strict Methodist. With him she used to drive to his plot of garden, eight acres, on Thompson Hill. He let her handle the reins once they got off the main road. She had no fear of horses and found it thrilling that if she pulled on the right rein old Maude went right, and if she pulled on the left rein the mare went left. “I really miss that man,” she says.

Her father’s garden was just down the road from the cemetery where he was soon to be buried, and where so many of the people I’ve been writing about lie buried too.

The day I went to the cemetery, about three years ago, I wasn’t even looking for Bess Macswain, my mother’s childhood friend who died in the Almonte train crash. I left the car at the side of the narrow road and entered through a wide swing gate and soon I was among the Sopers. Two long rows of ground markers, seven in each row, led up to a big Soper tombstone. My grandfather and grandmother were beside each other at the end of one row. It wasn’t hard to find Parley either. He was with
his wife’s family inside an enclosure marked off by a low wrought-iron fence, a shaded and darker spot, set apart.

After that, I wandered. I came down a grassy slope and discovered the large headstone for the Coyle family, father, mother, and two sons, including John, who died in 1989. Then I looked back up the slope and there was Bess Macswain’s headstone. I was seeing her full name for the first time: Anne Elizabeth. And it was my own name. I felt like Pip in
Great Expectations
, understanding who he is from the words on a tombstone. What I had known about collided with what I had never been told, and what I had never been told and had almost missed was crucial to my life. I was named as much for a beloved friend as for a behated mother, even if it was unconscious on my mother’s part. I could see that everything is accidental to some degree. The right hand isn’t aware of the left, the melody is picked out while the left hand is idle, then suddenly my two hands were together and playing the same tune, the right hand on the present and the left on the past. This music is something we gravitate towards, no matter how distant it is and how hard of hearing we are.

And then I stumbled over Ethel’s gravestone, and more stories flew up like birds.

On Parley Burns’s grave, growing in patches, was the pale bluish-green lichen that appears in my mother’s paintings. I scraped some of it free and have it in a little box on my desk where it sits like pale jade.

I would like to thank my family for sharing stories and knowledge, especially my brothers Stuart and Alex, my sister Jean, and my sister-in-law Christiane Morisset. Above all, my parents, the dear old flesh-and-blood, as P.G. Wodehouse would say.

My thanks to the many others who answered my questions, in particular, Anne Taylor, Philip Stiles, John Eaton, the late Gladys Arnold, Betty Flower, Norman Hillmer, Anne-Marie Demers, Robert Fox, Carl Christie, Stephen Harris, Bob Gidney, Wyn Millar, Sara Burke, Ann Beauregard, Nina and the late Tom Phillips, David and Nancy Currie, Lois Sweet, Bob Coltri, Bill Terry, Daphne Marlatt, and Sheila McCook.