After Sylvia (3 page)

“My name is Miss Glendon,” she said. “And you are the very first class of my teaching career!” A scarlet blush took over her face.

“Oh, brother!” Martha Henbrock muttered.

Owen heard the dogs snuffling, slobbering form getting closer and closer. He closed his eyes and wished himself miles away. But when he opened them he was still in line and the dog was kneeling in front of him, snorting and whining in gleam-eyed excitement over the muddy rock.

“Shh!” Owen said under his breath, and he kicked the rock a few feet away. The dog pounced on it instantly and returned it to Owen's foot.

“Is this your dog?” Miss Glendon asked him. A teacher's brand of broken glass had entered her voice.

“No!” Owen said.

“He seems to know you,” Miss Glendon pressed. “Do you have something of his?”

“Just his goobery rock full of dog germs!” Martha Henbrock snorted.

The boys' and girls' lines dissolved, and Owen found himself at the center of everyone's gaze. He quickly picked up the rock again and threw it as far as he could over the roof of the portable. The dog dashed after it immediately.

“We should go in right away!” Owen said, wiping his sticky hand on his trouser leg.

Miss Glendon hesitated a moment, then stood aside and let the children in. Owen, who was at the end of the line, was just able to duck in as the dog rounded the corner of the portable, the rock dripping from his mouth once more.

“Get out of here! Go away!” Owen yelled before shutting the door.

He hung up his jacket and chose a desk near the window. The dog was running around and around the portable now, looking to see where Owen had gone.

Owen hid his face in his hands.

If Sylvia were here this would be funny, he thought. She would pick a seat next to the window so she could watch the dog, and maybe for once in his life he would get to sit beside her.

Instead, at this very moment, she was choosing her seat in a brand-new school far away, in Elgin, where there was no drooling dog, and no Owen.

Owen turned to see, sadly, who was occupying the seat next to him. It was... Martha Henbrock. Without saying a word she passed him a note.

“Get a load of her!” it said.

Miss Glendon was standing in front of them.

“Children!” she said. “Education Board regulations require that I draw your attention to the fire exits.” And she pointed to the closet. Already the armpits of her blouse were soaked with dark stains.

“You can smell her, she's so nervous,” Martha whispered.

Miss Glendon broke her chalk and misplaced her notes, and sweat formed on her forehead when so many of the children squeaked their chairs against the floor and dropped their pencils one after another.

“I think she's going to cry!!!” Martha Henbrock wrote later in one of her notes. Miss Glendon's eyes were puny, and she seemed unsure what to do when Dan Ruck's ruler whirled across the room like a boomerang and bounced off the shoulder of Amanda Little, whose notebook spontaneously exploded, with blank pages fluttering everywhere.

And for most of that first hour the dog continued to run around and around the portable, the huge rock still dripping in his mouth. Finally he put down the rock, then sat and whined at it just beneath the window where Owen sat.

At recess time Owen decided to stay in to towel down the blackboard and avoid the dog, and perhaps catch a glimpse of the multiplication code if Miss Glendon had left it out on her desk. She was so inexperienced she might make that mistake on the first day of school, Owen thought.

Miss Glendon was sitting very still, her thin fingers clutching her face.

“I tried to cook my own egg this morning,” Owen said.

She didn't move, didn't say anything.

“There were eggs everywhere!” he said. “Every time I turned around I broke another egg!”

She didn't even seem to be breathing. Owen saw text books open and sheets of paper with small, scratchy notes. One page, which he could only see partially, did have a strange collection of numbers. Owen tried to keep them straight in his head. Seventeen and nineteen and twenty-three and a string of others that disappeared under a grammar book.

Did they have something to do with this year's multiplication code?

“Last night I was trying to listen on the crystal radio just in case,” he said. “Sometimes there are aliens in the area.”

“Are there?” she asked finally in a tight little voice.

“Sometimes. Are you not from around here?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He thought maybe she would explain where she was from, but she clammed up again.

She seemed too young to be a teacher, like someone who suddenly had to be grown up and act like she knew it all when she didn't.

“Sometimes there are aliens,” he said. “But we had a fire instead, and I got caught out on the drainpipe. I almost broke my neck. But it was all right in the end.”

“Yes?” she said. Owen thought she sounded a little more hopeful.

So he said, “Uncle Lorne was on the radio, so that just goes to show that anything can happen.”
“Can it?” Miss Glendon said uncertainly. She had raised her head by then and Owen got a better look at her. Her face did seem quite pretty, behind all that hair, and she had green eyes that glistened, but her lower lip was raw from where she'd been biting it.

There were a few minutes left in recess, so Owen excused himself and ran outside. Other kids were playing with the dog now, throwing his rock for him. A huge crowd had gathered. Kids were yelling and cheering.

Then the principal, Mr. Schneider, came out. He looked like he had aged during the summer, and was now over a hundred. Perhaps he had grown an inch or two as well. He strode into the crowd without saying a word, and all the children fell away.

Owen watched as the dog placed the sodden rock at the principal's feet and then backed up, squirming and begging.

“Whose dog is this?” Mr. Schneider asked darkly.

No one spoke up. Owen had the feeling that if he opened his mouth the asphalt on the playground might buckle and swallow him whole.

“So, you're nobody's dog,” Mr. Schneider said. He bent down slowly and picked up the rock and looked off in the distance, as if trying to find the point farthest from the school to aim for.

“Get away! Get. off the property!” Mr. Schneider growled, and the dog backed away. Then Mr. Schneider wound up — his arm was as long as a major leaguer's — and the dog crouched, ready to explode and give chase.

But instead of throwing the rock far into the distance, Mr. Schneider hurled it straight at the dog.

Owen watched in stunned silence. The dog rose to nab it, but somehow managed to turn at the last instant, catching the full impact on his chest and foreleg. He yelped pitifully and hobbled a step or two while the old principal lurched after him.

Some of the older boys laughed and jeered. Then they went after the dog, picking up stones to hurl at him and whacking his back legs with sticks. The bell rang but it didn't seem to matter. The principal went on yelling at the dog, and the boys kept chasing, while the dog ran and hopped with his ears flattened, his foreleg bleeding.

“You leave him! Let him be!” Owen called, but no one paid any attention.

In just a few moments the dog was chased off the school property. Many of the boys would have gone after him if the principal hadn't reminded them that the bell had rung. Recess was now over.

Back in class Owen stared out the window. He didn't know if he wanted to see the dog back again or not. He somehow felt as if it really were his fault that the dog had got into such trouble and was now injured. He couldn't stop wondering how a principal could throw a rock at a dog, a friendly one at that.

On his way home after school Owen saw the dog lying low in the weeds by the side of the road. He had the same rock, but he was shivering, and the wound on his foreleg was black with dried blood. Owen squatted beside him and scratched his ears, smoothed back the silky fur between his eyes
and along his strong neck.

“What's your name, boy?” Owen whispered. The dog closed his eyes and licked at his sore leg.

They walked home together. The dog limped and carried the rock for a time and then dropped it, so Owen picked it up.

When they got to the house Owen gazed at where the upper portion of the drainpipe had been and at the wreck of it now on the ground. It seemed impossibly high, where he had been dangling just the night before.

“You stay here,” Owen said, dropping the rock by the steps.

In the kitchen Margaret had put a large bowl and some eggs on the table. Owen cracked them one by one. He got used to the feeling of egg on his fingers, and how much pressure to use in the cracking and the splitting. Many of the first eggs had broken yolks by the time they squirmed into the bowl, but toward the end the new yolks were firm and round and whole. Owen could imagine them sizzling in the pan just like his fathers.

“So how was your first day?” Margaret asked him. “Was there anybody new or just the same old crowd?”

“I brought a friend home,” Owen said.

“Where is he?” Margaret asked.

“I left him outside.”

“Owen!” Margaret said. Owen followed her down the hall. “When you bring somebody home you don't just —”

She went out the door.

“Oh, no. Owen! No.” But then she saw that the dog was shaking, that his leg was hurt.

“Wherever did you find him? What's his name?” she asked.

Owen concentrated on the second and more important question. He didn't say the first name that occurred to him. This dog was a boy and it simply wouldn't do to call him Sylvia.

“Sylvester,” he said. “Sylvester the dog.”

There were all kinds of things that Owen wanted to say to convince his mother to keep him. But he said the strongest thing he could think of right at the beginning.

“He chose us. I think we
have
to keep him,” he said.

“I don't know,” Margaret said doubtfully, but she was stroking his bad leg. “Dogs take a lot of work. You have to walk them and feed them and —”

“So are broken eggs,” Owen said.

“What?”

“A lot of work,” he said.

Owen felt his mother looking at him, as if she might be wondering, almost for the first time, what sorts of carnivals and circuses might be going on in his mind. They both scratched and stroked Sylvester's ragged fur, and the dog sighed and crooned.

“Broken eggs
are
a lot of work,” she said finally, with just enough light in her voice to fill Owen with hope.

“DAD
will never let us keep him,” Andy said. The three boys were sitting on the front steps soothing Sylvester's black hair with Leonard's brush, which had the softest bristles. The dog trembled and rested in the shade on a bright white bath towel that Owen had found in the guest cupboard along with a matching facecloth that he wet and used to wipe off the last bits of dried blood.

Now Margaret was in the kitchen fixing supper, and the boys were left to greet Horace with the news.

“He might like Sylvester,” Owen said hopefully.

“He doesn't like anything these days,” Andy said. “It's because of his work.”

“What is his work?” Leonard asked.

Andy snorted.

Owen didn't know either and he was glad that Leonard had asked.

“Selling insurance,” Andy said. “It means you tell people about all the horrible things that might happen to them, and then they pay you money.”

“So the horrible things won't happen?” Leonard asked.

“So when they do happen you'll be protected,” Andy said.

“Protected from what?”

“From people asking too many questions!” Andy said, and he glared at Leonard.

Just then Horace's car pulled up, the tires sending gravel sputtering ahead. It was an old car but new to the Skyes, a real station wagon with wood on the doors like a stagecoach in the movies. Horace had bought it for less than a hundred dollars from a friend who owed Horace for a load of lumber that Horace had given him after he'd decided not to build a new front porch.

Owen watched his father get out of the cat. His blue jacket was wrinkled from the drive, and he had opened his tie so that it hung loose around his neck like a rope.

As soon as he saw the dog, his face clouded.

“What's this?” he asked. Owen pleaded as hard as he could silently. But Horace said, “No, no, I'm afraid not. There's no way —”

But Sylvester whimpered and moved his paw pitifully, so Horace knelt down to feel the dog's leg. Owen was amazed at how gentle Horace's fingers became, how intently his eyes
narrowed. Sylvester flattened his ears and Horace smoothed them down to the tips until the dog sighed.

“How did this happen?” Horace asked.

Owen told him the whole story. When he got to the part about Principal Schneider hurling the rock at Sylvester from just a few feet away, Horace became nearly as angry as he was the time the boys had flipped Popsicle sticks at cars on the highway and almost caused an accident.

“How could they let somebody like that be in charge of children?” he fumed. “What a disgrace!” And he stormed into the house.

Leonard and Andy followed to see what he was going to do. Owen stayed with Sylvester, but he could hear it all from the steps anyway. There was the angry whirl of Horace dialing the phone, then a pause while Owen held his breath.

“He's not answering!” Horace said finally, his voice shaking the house.

“Dear, calm down!” Margaret said. “I'm sure he's gone home after work.”

“He just injured a poor, defenceless dog! What kind of man —”

There was the sound of more dialing, and finally Margaret said, “No, darling, please — “

“I will!” Horace insisted.

“You should calm down!” Margaret said. “You shouldn't be calling him at home.”

But it was too late.

“Hello!” Horace yelled into the phone. “Is this Principal Schneider? What kind of jackass do you think you are?”

Owen couldn't believe his ears. He'd never heard his father say that word before.

“You want to know who
I
am?” his father said. “I'm Horace Skye, and I've got, three sons in your school.” He proceeded to name them all, starting with Owen, so that Principal Schneider could make no mistake about who they were.

Owen gasped in horror.

“That's right!” Horace yelled. “And the dog you injured this afternoon that was my dog. And I can tell you, sir —”

Instead of telling him, however, Horace fell

quiet for a time. Then he said, “Well, I don't care about...”

But he did care enough to listen a while longer.

“Yes, I understand there are by-laws,” he said then, in a more subdued voice. “But I have to tell you that my dog wouldn't — “

He fell quiet again.

“Certainly,” he said at last, in such a quiet voice that Owen had trouble hearing. “I can see that opening the school grounds to dogs would pose a safety risk. And you're absolutely right, sir, that you do hold your policy through the company I work for. I'll have to check the fine print, but you could well be correct in saying that allowing animals on the property might undermine your coverage...”

A slight gust of wind came up and Horace's voice became wispy and impossible to follow.

A little while later Horace came back out on the steps and sat beside Owen and Sylvester. He looked like a kite come too hard to ground. He felt up and down Sylvester's leg again.

“Nothing's broken,” he said finally. “He'll be fine in a day or two.”

“So we can keep him?” Owen asked.

“We'll see,” Horace said in a tired voice.

They fed Sylvester scraps of leftover sausages. Margaret wouldn't let the dog share the boys' bed in the attic, so he slept on the steps on an old blanket they found in the garage underneath the rusted remains of an ancient push-mower.

In the morning the leg was still sore. Horace lingered on the steps before going off to work, nuzzling the dog's long nose, scratching up and down his furry body.

“We're going to have to get him a brush and some proper food,” Horace said. “And a collar with tags. I can register him in town. If you boys get in any trouble with that principal — “

When he stood up he had dog hair all over his suit.

“I think you've done enough, dear,” Margaret said.

Owen was worried that Sylvester might try to follow him to school again, but the dog remained on the steps, licking his leg and guarding his rock.

At school the kids in Owen's class were even wilder than the day before. Miss Glendon was soft and trusting and had trouble seeing several different directions at once. And so spit balls flew like hail while she wrote on the board with her back turned. Owen was struck twice by shots from Dan Ruck, who often was so bored in school that he could barely get his head off his desk. Owen didn't dare fire back in case Miss Glendon caught him and sent him on to Principal Schneider.

Finally Miss Glendon lost her temper and called a snap multiplication quiz. In a quiet fury she handed out blank sheets of paper.

“Just write the answers. I'll give you ten seconds per question. Ready?”

She started firing off questions. Owen gripped his pencil tighter and tighter, and the numbers swam in his mind. What was twelve times six? He thought about seventy-two but wasn't sure. What if you now subtracted nine? Then it would be sixty-three. Or if you added four and divided by two it would be thirty-eight. What if you were supposed to switch the digits for even numbers and multiply by three for odd?

He fell two and three and four questions behind, erasing and scratching out and thinking some more.

He wasn't the only one having problems. Martha Henbrock held her hair in her fist in frustration, and others said, “Wait!” and shot their hands up and held them there with their other hands when they became tired. But that, too, was a mistake.

“No questions during the quiz,” Miss Glendon announced. “Only answers!”

Owen scored zero out of forty, the very worst in the class. But almost everyone had done badly. Only Michael Baylor had passed — and he scored thirty-nine, so he must have known the code and not told anyone. It was just like him to keep it all to himself.

Miss Glendon handed back the test sheets in furious silence.

“There's no room in the curriculum for us to review the times tables!” she said. Her voice was strained and the cords of her neck stuck out. “We're going to have a test like this every day!” she said. “What are fractions going to mean when you can't even handle multiplication?”

Exactly! What would they mean? Owen wanted to explain to her that she needed to tell them the code for that year. It might be against some teacher's union rule but it made the most sense to him. If she told them straight out then they'd all do better on the tests and she wouldn't get so upset as a new teacher and look bad.

It was the kind of thing that Leonard might have asked if he had been there. But Owen was frightened. Miss Glendon might think that he was stupid. Or that he was trying to cheat, to get the teacher to just tell them straight out what they were supposed to solve for themselves.

She was on to social studies now. Owen watched her draw a large map of the Pacific Ocean on the blackboard. She had acres of blue chalk for the water and white for the
whitecaps and green blobs for the Hawaiian Islands.

Owen couldn't help himself. His hand shot up.

But she didn't turn around. She was engrossed in outlining the coasts of North and South America. Owen's arm turned numb and he felt the hot surge of embarrassment climb his face as others in the class stared at him. Martha Henbrock passed a note to Joanne Blexton and they both looked at Owen and snorted. Dan Ruck was getting ready to fire another spitball.

Then Michael Baylor and two others on the far side of the room dropped their social studies textbooks at precisely the same time. Miss Glendon whirled and glared at them. She turned to Owen.

“What is it?” she said in a murderous voice.

Perhaps now, he realized suddenly, was not the best time.

“Ask your question, Owen,” she pressed.

“I, uh,” Owen stammered.

“Don't waste our time!” Miss Glendon snapped. “What is it?”

One more second of confusion and Owen was sure he would be on his way to the dog-hating Mr. Schneider.

“Nothing,” Owen said meekly.

“Stand up!” she said.

Owen rose but his knees started to shake.

“It's about math, Miss Glendon,” he said.

“Are we doing math now, Owen?” she asked cuttingly. Martha Henbrock snorted again and snickers ran through the room.

Owen said, “No, miss,” and his legs folded, letting him miserably back down into his seat. Dan Ruck's spitball hit him on the right eyebrow and he wiped saliva off his face.

“Stand up, Owen,” Miss Glendon ordered again. He did as he was told. “I want you to feel free to ask questions in this room,” she said. Her eyes looked fierce. “There is no such thing as a stupid question. Now, what did you want to ask?”

Owen cleared his throat. “I was wondering,” he said, “if you could give us the code for this year. I think it would help all of us in the quizzes.”

“What code?” she asked.

“The multiplication code,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

Now Owen was stumped. It was hard to imagine how to be any clearer than this.

“The right answers,” he said slowly, “for this year. For the times tables,” he added.

“Sit down!” she said curdy. “Stop wasting my time!”

“But the answers change!” he blurted. “And you need to tell us or else —”

“Owen, the times tables don't change from year to year.”

“Yes, they do,” he said quickly. “Every summer the teachers meet and decide what code —”

A great gulping crash of laughter shook the room, drowning out Miss Glendon's puzzled expression and driving Owen back into his seat, his heart pounding.

Had Miss Glendon missed the meeting because she was new? Maybe the other teachers had failed to tell her about the new code?

“The multiplication tables,” Miss Glendon said loudly, in an effort to calm down the rest of the students, “are exactly the same this year as last, and always will be the same, now and forever. I promise you, Owen.”

The awful truth dawned on him.

Owen walked home after school in a fury. As he approached the house Sylvester ran out joyously to greet him, hardly favoring his bad leg at all. He dropped his rock at Owens feet and backed up imploringly in his familiar way. But Owen ignored him and slammed the door on his way into the house.

At dinner that evening, Margaret asked Owen if anything was wrong.

“No.”

“How was your day at school?” Horace asked. “Everything all right?”

“Fine,” Owen said in a tight voice. He didn't want to give Horace something else to laugh about.

“Owen's sad because of Sylvia Tull,” Leonard piped up. They were having spaghetti, and three long noodles were sticking out of his mouth. He'd made a volcano of meatballs on his plate and some of the lava sauce was spilling onto the place mat.

“Who's Sylvia Tull?” Horace asked. A note of delight had entered his voice — the same one, Owen recognized, that had been there when he was telling Owen about the multiplication codes.

“She's Owen's girlfriend,'' Leonard announced.

“What? Do you have a sweetheart?” Margaret asked.

Owen couldn't stand it anymore. He threw his napkin on the table and bolted from the kitchen.

He thought of going to the bedroom, but he knew Andy and Leonard would be up there in minutes, bugging him about Sylvia.

So he ran outside and went around to the old coal chute and slid down into the basement where Uncle Lorne used to sleep. It was dark there but nowhere near as scary as it used to be before Lorne fixed it up. In the old days the Bog Man would sometimes leave the nearby fields and slide and gurgle in the slimy, cobwebbed shadows of that basement.

But now it was a refuge. Owen found Uncle Lorne's cot in the gloom and he lay there staring at the ceiling beams. He heard his brothers roaring around the house looking for him. It was only a matter of time before they rooted him out, but for now it was good to be alone, to be still.