Far From Home (15 page)
Clarissa leaned on the veranda rail and tossed a piece of hard bread from her gimp pocket. As she listened to the rolling echo of a robin's song, a line from her
Royal Reader
hopscotched into her mind:
“Popping o'er the carpet, picking
up the crumbs ...”
A robin dropped to the ground and looked around, hopping and dipping; it poked a hole in the soil and ferked up a worm. Then the robin flew away with its supper in its beak. Soon the robin would be sitting on a nest full of bright blue eggs holding the promise of baby robins. Clarissa thought of the eggs tucked away inside her body. She hoped all of them wouldn't crack and drop out of her before she could start a baby.
She hadn't seen the Christmas baby since he had been under the tree. He was likely adopted now and shortened. She had heard the young helpers chattering among themselves that Baby Nunatik wasn't going home to his native family because the doctors at the hospital didn't agree with his parents' way of treating his sickness. The father had scratched the baby's body with needles and cut his scalp to the bone with a knife, letting the blood spurt; then his mother poured salt into the wound to clean his blood. The parents believed the baby's screams would help stretch his lungs.
Clarissa heard sounds of banging as she pushed open the basement door. She followed the sounds to the cobbler's shop. The older boys were busy fitting a shoe at a time over an iron last. Using a sharp knife from the cobbling box on the floor, they took a piece of tap from a larger, worn-out shoe, and sized it to fit the sole of a smaller one. Then they hammered it on with brass tacks. The patched and remade shoes would have to do the children until the
Prospero
squeezed its way through ice far out in the bay and sailed into the harbour. The children waited all spring for shoes to arrive from Canada and the United States, hoping to get a pair not patched. All of them except Clarissa. She got extra taps on a pair of gaiters, or a change of gaiters if she had outgrown her old ones.
Clarissa eyed the children from the doorway of the playroom. She swallowed in longing as they discarded their winter skin boots and were fitted with brown or black shoes. Treffie's eyes brightened at the sight of her pair. She stared at her name printed on a piece of paper which would be placed in her shoes when they were in the locker she shared with two other girls. Clarissa thought about the time she had been given a pair of shoes. Someone else had worn them out, scuffing along roads, over hills, hippity-hopping through summer.
Clarissa watched Treffie, in her new shoes, join the girls in the schoolyard for a game of hopscotch. The little girl helped draw hopscotch blocks. Afterwards, she got to toss the penny into the air. It fell closest to Cora. She began the game, hopping on one leg, while kicking a flat rock. She kicked the rock from the parlour pudge square through the centre block, called the boiler, and through the next set of blocks to the parlour pudge at the end, and back again without getting her rock on the line. Treffie was so concerned about scuffing her new shoes, she went out on her first try.
Whenever Clarissa sat watching the other children running, skipping and playing hopscotch, she felt as if she were behind a glass wall. She wanted her own laughs and shouts to shatter the wall and mingle with the voices of the other children. But she sat silently, wishing, hoping â
knowing
that one day she would walk and run like everyone else.
Clarissa made her way to the sundeck out from the first floor of the orphanage. From there she often watched full-sailed schooners plowing through the heavy Atlantic seas to the shelter of the harbour. Today she caught a glimpse of the year's first icebergs. It was as if a winter wind had carved them with a wild hand, and set the magnificent sculptures adrift. Far out in the bay, they towered above the sea, translucent blue lights arcing off them.
Clarissa imagined herself a mermaid, sitting with her merman on a crystal ledge of their iceberg castle as it sailed diamond-flecked waters. She stayed on the sundeck until the world took a deep breath and held it in, and the sun slid like a gold coin into the sea.
“T
omorrow,” Miss Ellis announced, “Mr. Spence Hayward, the school inspector, is coming. He would visit every year if he could, but circumstances sometimes get in his way. When he knocks and I open the door, you shall stand and give this greeting: âGood morning, Sir.'”
Peter's hand shot up, his fingers spread wide. “Miss, do we have to salute?” he asked boldly.
The school ma'am pursed her lips. “You do not.”
“Bow?”
“No. Inspector Hayward is not King George of England.”
Jude, a harbour boy, nicknamed Lumpy because he had a big lump of a head on a short neck, asked in a timid voice, “King Cole then?”
“I declare,” said Miss Ellis, with an impatient jerk of her head that almost sent her brimmed hat flying, “some of you will go down in history in one certain way. Just do as I tell you, then sit in your seats with your backs straight, your hands on the desk and your feet flat on the floor. And mind the inspector. He has long hands and a stick to lengthen them.”
Cora raised her hand, and when Miss Ellis nodded, “Yes, Cora, what is your question?” she asked, almost in a whisper, her face reddening, “Miss, what's a school inspector?”
“You will find out soon enough,” the school ma'am replied in a crisp voice. “I caution you all to tidy yourself before you come to school tomorrow. Make sure your fingernails are clean and your hair combed. Try to appear civilized, and interested in what the inspector says.”
Once the pupils were dismissed, most of them scattered outside. Some of them hung around to talk about the school inspector. Clarissa overheard an older pupil complain that he had been put in the corner once by a school inspector for not addressing him correctly. After the inspector left, the school ma'am put him in the corner again. “You made me appear unfit for my position,” she said.
Clarissa was almost afraid to sleep that night for fear the inspector would ask her a question she didn't know. She didn't want to have the dunce cap placed on her head, and be put in the corner in front of a school inspector. She finally slipped into sleep and awoke long before the sound of the morning bell clanged through the dormitory.
At school, the pupils who had never seen an inspector sat fidgeting in their seats and biting their lips.
Miss Ellis raised a dark eyebrow and said pointedly, “It is not just you who are being tested. I am also being judged on how well I manage a collection of orphans, heathens and poor ragamuffins.”
The children looked at Miss Ellis and then at each other, as if they were trying to put each other in the right breed.
When the dreaded knock came, all eyes turned towards the door, including Rory's. He was known for crossing his eyes and turning his upper eyelids inside out when Miss Ellis wasn't looking. Today he spat quickly on his fingers and ran them through his hair, trying to batten down his red curls.
“Face the front of the schoolroom,” the school ma'am hissed as she hurried down the aisle to open the door and let in a little man whose stomach was so big he looked like an egg on legs.
Inspector Hayward's presence filled the room. It pressed in on Clarissa, frightening her. The other children jumped up from their seats, stood at attention and said: “Good morning, Sir,” before Clarissa could get to her feet. The inspector's eyes flickered over her.
“Hang the inspector's coat in the cloakroom, Rory,” said Miss Ellis in a level voice.
Rory made jerky movements as he rushed to take the stranger's coat and scarf. He looked dumbfounded as he disappeared into the cloakroom. He hurried out and back into a standing position beside his desk.
Looking at the children standing at attention, Miss Ellis reached out her hands, her fingers dipping as if to press the children back down into their places. They dropped like stones.
The inspector stood in front of the pupils, his stomach stretching his suspenders to the limit. “I assume you all know your times tables.” His voice was stern.
A hand shot up. “I do, Sir. Me farder wants me to learn me sums so no merchant can cheat me.” That was Simon, who often had to listen to chants of “Simon says” as he went up the road after school.
“I'm sure it would not make a sum of difference if he did,” the inspector drawled. “You won't need to know how many zeros are in a nonillion, since you will likely go no farther than a fisherman's boat and a poor man's lot.”
“A nonillion has 30 zeros â in Britain, 54 zeros, Sir,” Simon answered quickly.
“I suppose,” the inspector said, “you all know what a cato'-nine-tails is.”
“I do, Sir,” Peter said promptly. His hand shot up. He sat waiting, with an imprudent look, until the inspector nodded for him to go ahead. “It's a cat with nine tails, Sir, something no one has ever seen here.”
“I'll thank you not to be so saucy,” was the inspector's gruff reply.
Rory's fist reached into the air. Before the inspector could give him a nod, Jakot said, “No cat could live in this harbour with nine tails, Sir. Peter and his like would bob them. Sometimes cats lose the one tail they have. Around here cats don't even have nine lives. What with all the dogs.”
“'Tis bad English, idn't it, Sir, to say cat o' nine tails?” Rory offered.
The inspector's face turned as red as a rose fish. “Where is your grammar?”
“She's dead, Sir.”
“Are you making fun, using a joke here?” the inspector asked, his face puffing up like a doughboy.
“No Sir, I can't make fun. I tries to âave it when I can, but wit' all der work ter do in dis âarbour, 'tis 'ard to 'ave it.”
“Pronounce your
h
's,” the inspector said sternly. “It is obvious that you have not been going to school long enough to have
h
tacked on where it belongs in your speech. Up with you in the corner to think about the word
elisions.”
“Yes, Sir. I don't mind, Sir.” The boy jumped up.
“Did you know,” the inspector asked with a glance in the direction of Rory's back, “that in the Middle Ages, the fat of a dead redhead was used in poison?” He looked around the classroom with a dark countenance. When no one answered him, he lifted his voice and his toes at the same time. “You came from lowly Irish and English fishermen who crossed the sea because they were starving in their own countries. They didn't care about expanding their language or their minds. You must learn to mind your manners after coming from uncouth ancestors.”
Clarissa knew that the orphan children tried to use “the King's English” in front of the mistresses. Inside the orphanage, they called to each other, “Where are you going?” Outside the orphanage, she often heard them ask, in relaxed voices, “Where's yers off to?”
There were times when Clarissa wished she knew the beautiful French language in which some of her forebears had expressed themselves. The English nurses had taught her to speak “good” English. They disdained what they deemed to be Newfoundland's corruption of Irish and English speech. Some English workers and visitors sounded as if their tongues were fastened to the roofs of their mouths. If the orphans didn't understand them immediately, they got annoyed.
The English and Americans think they are better than us,
Clarissa thought angrily. On impulse, she said, “I read that there were no forks in England until 1620. Commoners ate with their fingers, but so did kings and queens â and they went easy on bathing, too.”
Inspector Hayward looked at her as if he was wondering where she was coming from. Then he shrugged and turned back to the class, his right elbow in his left hand, his right thumb under his chin. “I shall teach you how to say
three
instead of
tree
when you are counting. Your teacher can help correct some of your elisions later. Everyone with me now.”