Alone in the Classroom (9 page)

She had been aware of him all night - of his dapper head and shoulders moving slightly above the crowd. Sometimes she lost sight of him, whenever the dancing spilled out into the hallway. But more often than not, he was near Susan or Susan was near him, and her young face was back to its keyed-up look of being Tess, but pinker, wilder.

Connie herself was an inspired gift-giver. When my father was twelve, he became the envy of every boy he knew, thanks to Connie, who had given him a full archery set, a real bow and real arrows. “I had a very good older sister,” he would say many years later.

She opened Parley’s gift and found herself holding something from Paris in the palm of her hand. A souvenir he had picked up during his time in France, a miniature Eiffel Tower four inches tall. She didn’t know if she was more thrilled or alarmed.

The drama club continued. It met every Wednesday at four. Wednesdays, then, were the one weekday when Connie was sure to be free of Parley’s company after school. On a Wednesday in January, to her surprise, Susan materialized beside her as she headed down the school steps.

“No drama club today?”

“My father needs me at the store.”

Instead of slipping ahead, however, Susan stayed close. Once before, she had sought out Connie’s company. While
rehearsing
Tess
, she had approached after school with a quiet question. “When Tess comes home pregnant, would her back have ached?”

The girl struck Connie as inspired, over-aware of herself, and alone.

“What play are you working on now, Susan?”

“It’s not a play. It’s a story by Tolstoy.”

“Ah, which one?”

Susan pushed her knitted hat back off her forehead. Her face was tight, tense, reddened by the wind and the cold. ” ‘Master and the Man.’ “

Looking across stubbled fields covered in thin snow, Connie said, “Do you like the drama club?”

“Not anymore.”

“Not anymore?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t have to go.”

Susan raised her eyes to Connie’s.

“It’s just a club, Susan. You can go or not. If you’ve lost interest, that’s allowed.”

“But what would I say?”

“Maybe your father needs you every Wednesday at the store?”

She shook her head. That would mean talking to her father. She had never talked to her father in her life. She did as she was told, that’s all.

They kept walking, the wind at their backs, snow underfoot.

“He’s not God,” Connie said. “You’re the one with something special.”

Susan dipped her head, unconvinced on both counts. And when is it ever convincing, the belief others have in your abilities? You know perfectly well they can’t see the mess inside you.

They came to Graves Hardware, and before they parted Connie said, “
Why
don’t you like it anymore?”

“I can’t do anything right. I don’t know why.”

The next day, Parley buttonholed her as soon as she entered the school. “Susan.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We waited for you. I sent everyone home. Next week we’ll have to work extra hard to make up for lost time.”

Then she knew she couldn’t miss it, any more than she could miss church.

In early February, Parley warned his staff that the school inspector would be coming one day soon. Have your attendance registers in order, have your classes prepared.

But the days went by and the inspector didn’t come. On the last day of February, not one but two storms were building up in the sky. They were in for it, Parley said to Connie as they walked home. “La
nuit de l’ame,”
he said.

She wouldn’t ask. She refused to indulge him.

“The night of the soul,” he said finally.

He was one of those English people who wished he wasn’t, and it stirred her sympathy that he didn’t like himself any more than she liked him. He was a troubled man who wanted to be
un homme trouble
.

“What happened to the inspector?” she said.

“He’ll come when you least expect it.”

But then he soothed her fears. She was doing a good job, she needn’t worry. He would give him a favourable report. “You have potential,” he said.

“Susan is the one with potential.”

“Susan.”

For a moment she thought he was going to disagree, but no.

“She could be famous one day. She could be great,” he said. “She would make an excellent Miss Havisham, an excellent Ophelia. In a year or so, when she’s sixteen, she should leave this godforsaken hole and move to a city. New York or Toronto or Boston.”

Connie looked at him curiously. In a year Susan would be fourteen.

“You should think of doing the same,” he said.

“Miss Havisham,” she said thoughtfully, struck by the image of Susan as the jilted, desiccated bride; she had the right sort of intensity, the right sort of precarious sense of herself. “I love
Great Expectations.”

“Dickens.” He gave the name weight. “Hardy pales in comparison.”

“I love Hardy.”

“Of course, neither of them is equal to Melville at his best.”

“And who is better than Melville?” What a ranking, comparing, depressing mind he had. “I know the answer. Shakespeare.”

“I was going to say Tolstoy.”

“Tolstoy. Does Susan still come to your drama club?”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“I hope you
tell
her how good she is.”

He misunderstood. He thought she wanted praise for herself, and once again he told her she was doing an admirable job.

The blizzard arrived and lasted three days, after which the weather cleared. In general, the winter of 1930 was mild, with little snow. Connie was at the back of the classroom, in a pool of sunshine, when there came a knock on the door. Parley never knocked. She made her way to the front of the room as the door opened and a compact, energetic man stepped through.

“Snakebite,” he said.

That short, quick step of his and he was shaking her hand and all the children saw Miss Flood’s face glow with happiness. He turned to address them - they were standing beside their desks - and told them their teacher was a former pupil of his.

And to Connie, “I wondered what became of you.”

Syd Goodwin was one of those men who at first glance looks ugly, then increasingly and amazingly attractive thereafter. He had a squarish forehead and deep-set eyes, a thick neck, and a wide smile.

He moved around the room, running his eyes over the parsing and math on the blackboard that stretched across the front and down one side of the class, nodding his approval, and then he leaned against Connie’s desk and proceeded to talk. He told them about seeing a wolf devour a doe, a big wolf, bigger than your average German shepherd and musty brown, the same colour as old goldenrod. This was north of Saskatoon. He had been about a hundred feet away, partly concealed by a tree, watching the wolf yank and pull and look up periodically. Then an eagle arrived, a mature bald eagle. “My gracious. Now that was a sight. And the ravens. Ten of them like pairs of gloves, bobbing and swaying in the branches, scolding away.”

A conversation ensued in which he wanted to know what they had seen of note recently, and Michael talked more than anyone else about birds, burrows, tracks in the snow, oncoming storms, huge moons. After that, Syd shifted the topic to current events. “We’re in the midst of an economic collapse,” he told them. “Let’s see how long it lasts. Let’s pay attention” And he quoted H.G. Wells to the effect that history was a race between education and catastrophe.

Connie said from the side of the room, “What if education is the catastrophe?”

He took in her thoughtful face. He would tell her later that he remembered where she had sat in his classroom, second row, two desks back. The slope of her shoulders, the part in her hair. She was always curious, sometimes vehement, an attentive presence, taller than her schoolmates, a good runner, her hair in a ponytail
then too. He remembered the change when her mother died, the protracted absence from school and his visit to the farmhouse a few miles out of town to make sure she wasn’t giving up her education. The father had been at a loss and there were two small brothers. At fifteen, she was running the household. But then the father quickly remarried, and Connie returned to school. A year later, he himself left for Regina.

She said, “I don’t mean learning the wrong things, but the wrong way.”

He saw her face aching for answers, and the children were all eyes, all ears. “That’s schooling,” he said, “not education. There’s a real difference.”

Of course. She nodded, appreciating his point. “Yes.”

She was a better student than a teacher, she would confess to him when they shared their sandwiches in the empty classroom at noon. “The boy who knew about birds,” she said. “When he feels capable, you saw, he’s entirely single-minded.”

“A bright boy.”

“Michael.” Gladdened and reassured to hear him say it. “But it’s such a struggle for him. I wish I knew more about teaching.”

“I remember you were a great reader.”

“I believe in reading.”

Her claim to fame, the thing that earned her a reputation for eccentricity, was her policy that she would not disturb her pupils to do lessons so long as they were immersed in a book. The girl with the reading face, Elsa Franks, spent entire days, excluding lunch and recess, absorbed in page
after page of Dickens until the light failed in the afternoon, and then she raised her head and turned her mind to the lessons at hand.

Connie had set up large projects next to the western windows, one of them a contour map made of salt and flour and water, and coloured appropriately, of the town and the area around it, the Cypress Hills to the west and wheat fields to the east, Frenchman River running through. It was like a fairy tale, their personal kingdom. The school windows were without screens, and in the fall bees and butterflies and grasshoppers found their way inside, where they remained in jars. They joined rocks, bones, plants, and ongoing efforts at identification. Connie liked to tell them about summer nights in eastern Ontario, the incredible moths, pale green luna and huge, decorative cecropia, that beat against the screen door and got grabbed and eaten by vivid birds, indigo buntings, orioles, blue jays the size of yachts. And about one night in March when the snow was deep and someone tapped on the front door, but no one was there, and another tap came, but no one was at the back door either. It turned out the sounds were coming from the kitchen - from the big jar on top of the icebox in which the massive caterpillar she had found in September had spun its brown cocoon and hung suspended like a mouse from a cherry twig, month after month, until now it was piercing and tapping its way out of its dull self into a splendid cecropia moth, six inches across, wings speckled grey brown and rusty, with eyespots on the lilac tips.

Her old teacher stayed for another forty-five minutes after the children came back from dinner (shortchanging Miss Fluelling’s class, but Miss Fluelling was an old hand). He stood at the front and talked about thrilling books,
Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Treasure Island
. ” ‘Keep your weather eye open for a seafaring man with one leg.’ ” He recited the lines about illiterate Jo in
Bleak House
. ” ‘It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and the corner of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postman deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language - to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! It must be very puzzling.’ “

How impressive he was, reciting from memory. The air in the room became charged and still. He went on to recite the graveyard scene so skilfully, putting the proper emotion in the proper place, that you understood how clueless Lady Dedlock was about being poor and how admirably matter-of-fact Little Jo was about life and death “and the berryin ground. I wants to go there and be berried.”

Connie said, “Where I grew up they pronounced berries ‘burries.’ ‘We’re going burrying,’ they say in the Ottawa Valley.”