A Quality of Light (5 page)

I
’ll never forget Alvin Giles. Alvin Giles was principal of Mildmay-Carrick Public School all through the years I went there. Born and raised in Bruce County, he’d come as close to home as his job would get him once he’d finished teacher’s college and a brief stint in the city system. He was one of the Paisley Gileses, and although his family weren’t farmers, they were fourth-generation townies whose lives had so intertwined through marriage and friendship with our own that they might as well have been. Farming communities are like that. The land just reaches out past the concrete and grabs you. There’s plenty of towners who are as capable a hand around threshing time as any farm people and you never see them grimace over the suck and pull of manure on their rubbers or complain about blisters on their hands from forking stooks.

Alvin Giles was one of those people. He was a local hockey hero in Paisley and was known, even then, for his hard work and fair play. When he came back as a teacher and a principal, it was like having an old friend back for most folks around Mildmay. Alvin was one of those teachers who fires your imagination and takes you into the heart of whatever they’re teaching. His classes were like one long show-and-tell. And he cared. No one was considered stupid, slow or incapable around him. He knew farmers and he knew their children, and things were always couched in terms we could identify with. He was the kind of teacher you remember all your life. The kind who lives forever in certain words, concepts and activities you carry with you into the adult world. He made us all
better students, more curious, creative and independent. But it was his teaching of life that makes him memorable for me. He had that peculiar kind of psychic sense that told him where his kids were at.

There were one hundred and forty-five students or thereabouts in that school all those years and Alvin Giles knew every one of them. Not just knew as a name on a roll call or a face in the hallway but
knew
like a brother would know. When there was sadness, sickness or worry in someone’s family, he knew and would take the time to comfort us. He encouraged the poets, artists and athletes we showed ourselves to be as much as he encouraged the studious like me, the wallflowers and the indolent. Teaching wasn’t a job for him, it was a way of life. Stern when he had to be, laughing and jovial most of the time, and always present those times when you needed him most. And I will never forget him for bringing John Gebhardt and me together.

When John arrived at Mildmay Public School, Alvin Giles was there to greet him. By the time he escorted him into Mrs. Thompson’s Grade Five class just after the national anthem and the Lord’s Prayer, John’s fists had uncurled at his sides and his shoulders were up and confident.

“Class,” Alvin said with a smile and a hand on John’s shoulder. “I want you to welcome John Gebhardt. He and his family are here from Toronto and I know you’ll all help him feel comfortable and welcome.”

He introduced John to Mrs. Thompson, who shook his hand lightly and gazed at him intently over the top of her rhinestoned cat’s-eye glasses, which she kept on a cord around her neck.

“Joshua Kane?” Alvin asked, searching for my face along the rows of desks. “Ah, there you are. Joshua, I would like you to be in charge of helping John get to know his way around. Is that okay with you?”

“Yeah. Sure. Hey, John, remember me?” I asked.

He looked at me with those big blue eyes and half grinned my way in recognition, nodded, looking up at Alvin Giles for direction.

“Good. You two will get along fine. Well, carry on then, Sarah,”
he said to Mrs. Thompson. “I’ll see you children outside at recess. First day for baseball!”

Mrs. Thompson indicated an empty seat behind mine and John made his way down the row. Faces were turned towards him all over the classroom and he reddened deeply. As he passed he gave me that pure open stare and I felt opened up, known, recognized. It scared me just a little. I noticed Sue Crawford and Connie Shaus whispering and giggling to each other and arching their eyebrows. Ralphie, Gus and Lenny were staring hard at him and his strange appearance. He wore army fatigue pants, black high-top sneakers and a black T-shirt. Compared to the crewcuts, jeans and sneakers the rest of the boys wore, he was as much an anomaly as me.

My parents believed in clothes that were functional as opposed to fashionable, and I’d always appeared at school in chinos and white long-sleeved shirts for as long as I can remember. It was hard sometimes. Once when I’d come home in tears over the teasing, my mother had explained to me the virtue inherent in simple dress. She’d showed me pictures in the Bible of Jesus and the disciples in their simple robes. Food, shelter, family and tithes to the church were far more important ways to spend money than on material things like clothes, she’d said. My dad, of course, put it far more simply.

“Worldly things are fine, Joshua, they’re really fine, and one of these days, if you want them, you can have all you want. But, son, no one ever pulled up to heaven with a U-Haul!”

So I sympathized with John Gebhardt.

Once the morning’s lessons were under way I disappeared into them and recess arrived before I knew it. There was generally a big race for the schoolyard, but that morning there was even more hurry. Alvin Giles believed that young bodies shouldn’t be exposed to activities beyond their capabilities, and so up to Grade Five we’d had to content ourselves with soccer, tag, red rover and assorted schoolyard games. We’d watched the older grades playing baseball and football and hungered for the day when we’d no longer be little kids. By the time I reached the tarmac, Ralphie Wendt had commandeered the equipment bag and was rapidly tossing gloves and
balls around to his pals. John lingered behind with me and we watched as Ralphie and his cronies ran down the shallow hill to the playing field and began tossing balls around the smallest diamond of the three in the yard. Finally, Alvin Giles appeared with his coach’s whistle and we followed him to the field along with a throng of girls.

Soon, to Ralphie’s disgruntlement, we were arranged in two equal teams of boys and girls and our first attempt at the game of baseball was under way.

Sports and I had been only casual acquaintances until then. Living on a farm meant there wasn’t a whole lot of free time for games. I’d gotten used to the idea of helping my dad with chores, and even though he would have allowed me to run around and be the child that I was, we both appreciated the time together keeping the farm going. I played in the hay mow whenever kids came around, building forts or leaping from the upper beams into big piles of loose hay, and I ran along beside the tractor lots, just for the joy of it, but organized games weren’t part of my life. I was missing the excitement of this new event and I could tell that John was less than keen on the activity.

“Fun, eh?” I said, trying to open conversation while we were leaning on the backstop watching our team at bat.

“Fun? What’s fun about this? I’d rather play lacrosse.”

“Lacrosse?” I asked, my face screwed up in wonder.

“Yeah. Lacrosse. Indians played it all the time. Thought you’d know about it.”

“No, never heard of it. What’s it like?”

“Like hockey, only better.”

“Well, I don’t play hockey either. Here goes nothing!” I said and left to try my hand at batting.

Ralphie Wendt had been chosen for the team in the field and I heard him as soon as I stepped to the plate with the bat held awkwardly in my hands. I was used to Ralphie’s snide manner in class but he’d always bothered me in the schoolyard. He was one of those kids who seem to always be a year or two ahead of his classmates physically and he was better at games than I was. He knew it too.
He also knew that he lived on the opposite side of the learning curve from me, so his schoolyard ribbings were his compensation.

“Hey, Kane,” he yelled from his shortstop position. “Is Kane your name or what you need to help you run?”

Alvin Giles was pitching for both teams. He turned his head and advised Ralphie to keep it down. Then he explained to me what it was that I was supposed to do.

“You just swing at the ball, Joshua. Try to hit it. Don’t worry about how hard. Just try to hit it. When you do you run to that first base over there.” He pointed.

Sue Crawford was standing on that base after having connected fairly well, and I was sure I could do the same. I missed completely with my first swing and nearly spun completely around with the effort. Ralphie laughed. I settled in and swung again. This time I fell and the laughter came from everywhere. Even Alvin Giles had his glove in front of his face to conceal the smile. The third time I just tried to punch at the ball with the bat and the snap of the motion tore it out of my hands and it sailed away to land beside the startled principal.

“Strike three, strike three!” Ralphie was screaming. “You’re out! You’re out, Kane! You hit even worse than the girls!”

“Fun, eh?” John Gebhardt said to me as he passed me on his way to take his turn. He fared no better. His pale, thin arms looked no thicker than the bat, and although he never fell, he failed to make contact. Ralphie was in heaven.

“Hey, Kane,” he screeched. “Looks like you guys can form your own team. You can call yourself … the Spazzes!”

“Yeah. Real fun,” John said as we headed out to our turn in the field. “Real fun.”

After completely botching the catching process, I was hit in the chest with a ball and John waved weakly at any that came his way. Ralphie, of course, was loving every minute of it and by this time Lenny Weber, Victor Ringle and Teddy Hohnstein had joined his catcalling chorus. Fortunately, recess was only twenty minutes long. We could hear them snickering away behind us on our way up the hill.

“Hey, guys,” Ralphie crowed. “We can even have more laughs at lunch hour. The Spazzes get to play for forty-five minutes!”

John’s face was drawn into a tight-lipped glare. The rest of the morning passed in that slow, inexorable weight of childhood, when dread is the mood of the moment. We sailed through reading and science like a ship through the doldrums and when the lunch bell rang, John and I looked at each other with the resigned look of kenneled pets. Even town kids brought their lunches and we ate as a class with desks pulled together in small groups for cards, games and conversation. John and I sat together. Ralphie and the boys were wolfing down their sandwiches in gleeful anticipation, while Sue Crawford, Connie Shaus and Lorraine Deiter sat across from us gazing intently at John and giggling and whispering to each other. We looked at each other now and again and slowly chewed the sandwiches that, at least for me, had taken on the consistency of sawdust.

Sides were chosen, with Ralphie and Lenny as captains. John and I were picked last, more out of obligation than any keen desire for our presence on their rosters. We were both dispatched to the last rung of the batting order and to the deepest part of right field when our turns came. Alvin Giles patrolled the edge of the diamond, and even his proximity to things was small comfort to me that day.

For the first while it was smooth sailing. No balls came my way for the first two innings. John had the same good fortune. We simply shrugged at each other as we traded gloves at the end of each turn at bat. The slow trots into right field were filled with the desire for any and all balls to avoid my area. Looking away across the sweep of country over Otter Creek behind the school, I could see the new lush green of pastureland, edged in ragged browns of tree-line, the silvery pencil nubs of silos and the gabled edges of barns and outbuildings. Right then I knew I would feel far more comfortable and capable among them than on that playing field.

But Victor Ringle laid into a pitch and the smack of contact woke me from my reverie. The ball landed twenty feet in front of me and began rolling speedily towards me. I ran in awkwardly and
bent to pick it up. Somehow it missed my outstretched glove and rolled between my legs to the shrill cheer of Victor’s teammates and the dirge-like moan of my own. I pumped my legs crazily to catch up with that rolling ball, which stopped, finally, against the fence at the edge of the Kuntzes’ forty acres of alfalfa. I turned to throw but the ball landed fifteen feet in front of an exasperated Lenny Weber at centerfield. “Way to go, Spaz!” he snarled and heaved a hard rope of a throw into Gerhard Metzger at second base. I saw him shrug and shake his head sadly in Ralphie’s direction. “Spaz!” was Ralphie’s echoing cry.

When Allie Conroy dribbled out to the pitcher, John stepped up to the plate. From where I stood he looked as frail as wheat in a windstorm. The bat, an inconsistent thing, lay limply on his right shoulder. On three consecutive pitches he swung mightily, twisting his back into it and missing by miles. I could hear the hooting and the hollering from my teammates and see the frown of displeasure on Ralphie’s face on the sidelines. “Spaz,” I saw him mouth slowly, silently, right into John’s face. For an instant, John paused with the bat in his hands and half turned towards the smirking bulk of Ralphie. But the moment passed and he moved away.

“Thought you were gonna hit him,” I said as I gave him my glove.

“Mighta,” he said curtly and jogged away.

I might have too after my debacle. Determined to avoid falling down or throwing the bat, I swung timidly at three pitches. Each time Ralphie hooted away from shortstop, alluding to my girlish demeanor, my rubber arms and how my mother could probably do a better job of baseball, army boots and all. I hated baseball.

“Jocks!” John said to me on our way into the school when the bell rang. “Can’t stand ’em.”

“Jocks?” I said.

He looked at me with his head cocked. “Yeah. Jocks. As in
jock
-strap? Athletes? Big dopey meat-head morons with muscles? Like
him!”
he said, hooking a thumb towards Ralphie, who was carrying the equipment bag over his shoulder like a hunter slinging a carcass. “They don’t use that word around here?”

“Not that I ever heard. At least until now. But you’re right. He
is a big dopey meat-head moron with muscles!” I said villainously, enjoying my shared venture into spitefulness. We laughed.