Alone in the Classroom (2 page)

What happened that August Tuesday in 1937 lived on in my mother’s mind, not that she ever mentioned it to me until long after I left home. Nor did she temper any of my own youthful wanderings with a warning. I went out into the world as free of apprehension as was Ethel Weir on the day she went to pick chokecherries, wearing a blue dress of synthetic silk and a green slip underneath it.

Birds compete for the berries. Robins peck the guts out of strawberries. Finches, robins, blue jays, kingbirds, cedar waxwings - all of them go after the chokecherries that favour fencerows and roadsides and the edges of open woods. Crows fancy the metallic glints of the kettles and pails children carry as they wander into the open centre of wild-plum thickets, or into the grassy meadow next to a little-used airfield, or into an abandoned orchard on a southern slope, or along the railway’s right-of-way, or down a path skirting a grain field towards the straggly, ragged chokecherry bushes above the creek, or into the woods for shade and rest.

Murdered in the morning, it was thought, for by the time they found her body, it was stiff. Dead eight to ten hours, the coroner said. They carried the body on a blanket out of the woods and transported it by car to the funeral parlour on Argyle Street. Three days later, several hundred people, mostly women and children (though not my mother and grandmother, they were at the lake), gathered at the Presbyterian Church for the morning funeral. A closed white casket. And afterwards, interment in the Angusville Cemetery.

Another funeral took place in the afternoon, another instance of sudden and perplexing death. A doctor had died on the operating table. On Tuesday evening (as the search was on for Ethel), Dr. Thomas entered the hospital and on Wednesday morning his heart gave out, an apparently rugged man with a heavy practice and a long history in the town.

Some who went to the first funeral attended the
second, among them a reporter for the
Ottawa Journal
and the source of much of what I know. Connie Flood stayed on in the cemetery, notepad against her propped-up knees and her back against a tree, a young woman who made a desk for herself wherever she went. The cemetery was on a grassy hill half a mile from town. A white fence separated it from the road, and the large swing gates were open.

The second funeral came through the gates, a sombre parade led by a firing party of the Lanark and Argyle Scottish Regiment with arms reversed. From a curious distance, Connie noted the contrast with the earlier scene of mothers holding their children by the hand, the bereaved family bent-shouldered and willowy, the sisters bare armed in summer dresses and flat, flowered straw hats, purchased for Easter probably, the mother in black, the father in black, the ceremony at the graveside drenched in tears and formality beside the point. Afterwards, the mourners left the baked cemetery for more of the noonday sun, some walking, some in cars.

In the second case, all the motions mattered. The regiment fired three volleys over the grave, then the pipe major played the customary lament and a comrade sounded the last post. A prominent citizen was being buried and prominent citizens were in attendance. Connie lingered on the edges. The dead man apparently had no children, no wife. It was hard to say. Two women seemed front and centre, aunts perhaps or sisters. And men in dark suits and hats, older men, established men, and suddenly the air went funny and the ground shifted. She drew near to make sure.

He was still impeccable, immaculate. Still given to wearing the shade of grey that matched his iron-grey hair. She had known him seven years ago in a town thousands of miles from here - far enough away and a long enough interval that it took a moment - but then she was back in that appalled place he had created and fled from.

She waited until people started to file away, drew closer and said his name.

He turned and stared, then smiled a smile that finally made sense: he bared his teeth and clicked upper teeth against lower in an extended grimace expressly made for this cornered occasion. “Miss Flood.”

The sun beat down. The grass under their feet was dry. The same weather that was withering the blueberries.

Her voice came out higher than normal. “I’ve been to France since the last time I saw you, Mr. Burns.”

They were facing each other like a bride and groom on a funeral cake, wrong for each other, but too late to escape.

“I take it you know the deceased,” he said.

“No. I work for a newspaper now.”

He looked over at the grave. “That gentleman was a school trustee. I knew him reasonably well.”

“Then you’re still teaching.”

“Less than I would like.” He was the principal of the local high school, he said. Administration took up much of his time. It was always the way.

“Did you ever teach her?” She pointed to the other fresh grave two hundred yards away.

“Her sisters.”

She was silent. Then, “I always wondered.”

There was more silence. He had looked away in irritation. A weak word choice,
wondered
. “Finish your sentence. Wondered what?”

“If I’d see you again,” she said, and left it at that.

An hour later, and on the other side of town, she walked from the road to the site of the murder, that spot in the near woods on the other side of a fence, and why on the other side of the fence unless enticed by someone she knew? Then down the wild slope to a lazy brown creek with ferns and cedars and sumac all around. Paths trodden out by children and animals. The deep summer smell of childhood, a tangy, fermented, woody smell fragrant with wildflowers and water.

The bank of the creek looked open and wide and mowed. A breeze stirred all the smells in the hot air - flies buzzed - cattails and marshiness off to the right - a little dock at the water, and lower than the dock, just above the water, a wide flat black rock offered a perfect place for entering the tea-coloured creek.

Connie turned and saw a deer in a haze of brightness. Liquid movement. Dainty spots of light. The heat.

The deer was joined by another, they drank and blended back into the shade. She noticed the low tree on her right. A few chokecherries hung by a thread, disembowelled, red around the pit. Nature wastes. Birds don’t finish their plates. Neither do slugs, mice, raccoons, deer. They semi-devour berries, tomatoes, corn. Thoughtless and prodigal and against the Scottish grain.

In France the tapestries she had seen of unicorns and knights and ladies and spears and birds and flowers had pulled her back into a muffled, faded past. Then in Italy she had come upon a small oil on a wooden panel of a man being scourged. She looked straight through the dark centuries into bright sunlight, into the colour and line of punishment, and it moved her to tears, a painting small enough for a child to carry around.

He had inspired her to go abroad, she had to give him that, the man who smiled like a fox.

The next day, wanting a quiet place to assemble her notes, she went into the Argyle Public Library and took a seat at a long table occupied by a few other readers. She saw the copy of
Nicholas Nickleby
lying there and picked it up. Across the table a bony, pale, well-dressed woman leafed through a magazine. “I couldn’t read it,” the woman said. “I couldn’t stomach the cruelty.” The woman continued to flick from photograph to photograph. “School isn’t like that,” she said.

The elderly librarian chimed in. “And you should know, Mrs. Burns.”

So this was his wife, a woman older than he was, which made a kind of sense, who couldn’t bear to read a book about children abused by a Yorkshire schoolmaster. Whom did she think she was married to? And how did Dickens bear it, except by making his characters colourful and comical in their cruelty, and by pounding them with his indignation.

“Mrs. Burns, I used to work with your husband. I taught under him.”

“In Niagara Falls?”

“Saskatchewan.”

“He talks about Niagara Falls.”

But not about Saskatchewan. He wouldn’t talk about Saskatchewan. “I lost track of him after he moved away,” Connie said.

A girl of seventeen was at the far end of the table, half reading, half listening. She had a wonderful head of curly brown hair. The girl’s name was Hannah Soper. Her mother, Anne, was the one who had washed her bloody underwear in the creek, uncertain what else to do. I was named after Anne, my grandmother.

On that day in the library my mother was reading Stefansson’s account of his life among the Eskimos. The library was warm and dusty with light pouring in through high windows. She borrowed Stefansson’s book and bicycled the six miles back to the lake, thinking less about Ethel, perhaps, than the famous explorer - tall, handsome, imposing - who had come as part of the summer chau-tauqua of music and lectures and marionettes and shown his slides of arctic flowers in twenty-four-hour daylight that were never to leave her painterly mind.
“Ex
-quisite,” my mother would say of them, stressing the first syllable as she had been taught to do by her very good Latin teacher. “I loathe ex
-quis
-ite.” Her loathings, like her loves, were emphatic.

How tender it is sometimes to know the future. To know, for instance, that when my mother became very old, she turned up the heat, finally, and even then, in that over-warm house, she could not get warm. She lay in bed with her cherished hot water bottle filled to near-scalding perfection and carefully positioned on her lower belly, while in her mind she painted and painted.

You touch a place and thousands of miles away another place quivers. You touch a person and down the line the ghosts of relatives move in the wind. In the library that day, hearing Connie in her stylish brown dress ask about renting a room, my mother lifted her head, offered up her mother’s boarding house, and in this way opened the door to meeting my father, who was Connie’s youngest brother. So interwoven are the strands of human life and so rich is the loam in which we lie that the same cemetery holds my grandmother and Ethel Weir and the man accused of her murder and the principal who knew them all, the bane of Connie’s existence and therefore an abiding interest of mine.

He had entered her life on the last day of September in 1929. Tweedy, sophisticated, perverse; an excellent teacher who doubled as principal. He arrived three weeks late, an otherwise punctual man. Jewel was the name of the town in the southwest corner of Saskatchewan.

Before he arrived, and desperate, she had written
la fenetre
on a piece of paper and taped it to the window,
la chaise
to the back of a chair,
la porte
to the door. But how could she teach French when she didn’t speak a word?

The Ontario High School French Reader
, edited in 1921 by Ferguson & McKellar, those two fine Frenchmen, and reprinted nearly every year thereafter, was the only text she had. It included a long passage about Jeanne d’Arc’s great victory at Orleans. The story carried her into the France of 1429, exactly five hundred years ago, an easy sum, where
word by word she deciphered how Joan was wounded and fell off her horse and taken for dead, how her followers fled until she pulled the arrow out of
la plaie
- wound, feminine - got back on her horse, inflamed her soldiers, and drove the English out.

Connie made the story as hair-raising as possible. Her success as a teacher would rely on these basics. She could throw a ball, catch a ball, smack a ball with a bat. She knew some blood-curdling poems more or less by heart and recited them out of the blue when restlessness overcame her.
Sennacherib came down like a wolf on the fold / And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold
.

Left hand on her hip, “Tell me three things about Lord Byron. All right, tell me one thing.”

A hand went up.

“Tula?”

Big brown eyes in a small, fine-boned face. She slipped out of her desk and stood beside it. “Miss, who was Sennarib?”

Connie went to the blackboard and wrote,
Sennacherib. King of Assyria. 681 BC
. “How many years ago was that? Work it out for me. Take your time.”

She dropped to her knees beside floundering students and head to head they solved the problem; flicked sleepy skulls into pained consciousness with her lethal middle finger; twisted your ear if she lost her temper and never felt bad about it.

One morning he was there, a bachelor of thirty-five with dark hair turning grey at the sides and eyes that undressed a woman, clinical, dry, chafing, light-brown eyes that plumbed the depths of female inadequacy. He came
into her classroom and sat at the back and observed. No chalk on his clothes, no ink stains. A marbled fountain pen, purply mother-of-pearl, jutted out of his breast pocket.

And one day he took over her class and talked about
Tess of the D’Urbervilles -
the French influence, the Gallic strand through everything we say and feel.

“You’re standing on French soil,” he said. “Remember that.” Prairie, from the French for meadow.

A door swung open for her then and it opened in that small town in the West, thanks to Ian Burns. Ian “Parley” Burns.