Fever Season (3 page)

“I want it so I can be the iceman.”

“A boy your size?” His father laughed. “You need muscles to be an iceman.”

“But I was … it was only …” He wanted to say it was merely a game, that he was just pretending, but the words wouldn't come out.

“Maybe you can't be the iceman,” his mother said quietly, “but you could do something to help me.” She put her hands on her stomach, which seemed to be growing bigger with the baby every day. “It's getting harder and harder for me to empty the water pan under the icebox. Do you think you could do it?”

David wasn't sure, but the doubtful look his father gave his mother made him want to succeed. But carrying water in a wide, flat pan was harder than it appeared. It was pretty heavy, but what was most difficult was trying to keep the pan evenly balanced. If David couldn't keep it flat, the water would start to slosh around, and once it started, it was hard to stop. The water could pour over the sides before he knew it.

“Be careful!” his father barked.

David made it safely to the sink, though, and poured the water down the drain. He hadn't spilled a drop. His mother smiled proudly, but his father hadn't even bothered to watch.

In the fall of 1911, David became a big brother. His baby sister was born late in October, but before that, in early September, David started school. He liked learning to read and write, and he seemed to have a good head for doing his sums in arithmetic, but other things about school weren't so great. For one thing, the teachers at Gilford Street Public School were very strict. David had kept quiet at the hat factory, so he'd rarely gotten into trouble for talking. But because he hadn't been around many children before, he had a hard time making friends. After school David usually had to make the long walk home by himself.

When the school day ended at 3:30, David walked home along Papineau Avenue. As the main street in the area, Papineau had a lot of things for him to see and do. First, there was the fire station. When the firemen weren't busy, they would let people see the horses that pulled their fire truck. David had been nervous around the horses initially, but he soon got used to being so close to them. Sometimes he would even save the apple his mother put in his lunch to feed to Buster, his favourite horse.

David was always careful to hold his hand out flat. “They have big teeth,” one of the firemen had told him, “and believe me it hurts if they nip one of your fingers.” Buster always ate the entire apple. Stem. Seeds. Everything.

After the fire station, David would stop at the dairy. There were no deliveries at this time of day, so all the horses were in their stalls. Here he wasn't interested in horses, but in ice, which was used in the back of the delivery wagons to keep the milk cold. A chunk of ice to chew on made a good treat.

With all the horses in the city, there had to be a lot of blacksmith shops, and there was one right on Papineau Avenue. No matter what the weather — hot or cold, rain or snow — the door to the blacksmith's shop was always open. That was because of the heat from the fire the blacksmith needed to shape the horseshoes.

David liked to watch as the blacksmith put a horseshoe into the coal fire until it glowed red. The blacksmith pulled the horseshoe out of the fire with a pair of tongs and laid it on his anvil. Still holding the horseshoe by the tongs in one hand, he picked up a hammer with the other and began pounding. The piercing sound of metal on metal always made David wince and pull up his shoulders toward his ears. After a few minutes of pounding, the horseshoe was finally the right shape and thickness, so the blacksmith plunged it into a pail of water. A cloud of steam rose up, and the hot metal hissed as it cooled and hardened. Now the shoe was ready for the horse.

The blacksmith lifted the horse's front left foot and held it in place between his knees. Then he used a scraping tool to carve away some of the hoof.

“Doesn't it hurt?” David asked.

“Haven't heard a horse complain yet,” the smithy said. David didn't seem convinced, so the blacksmith provided a better explanation. “A horse's hoof is really more like his toenail than his foot. It doesn't have any feeling along the edges. Scraping a horse's hoof isn't much different than a person clipping his nails. It has to be flat and even for the shoe to fit properly.”

Once the hoof was ready, the blacksmith used a smaller hammer to attach the shoe with nails — real nails. They had to be long and thin, otherwise they wouldn't hold the shoe properly and could damage the horse's foot. Any nails that were bent, the blacksmith gave away.

“They're good luck,” the smithy told David, who kept them in his pocket. Eventually, though, the nails wore a hole through the fabric. David's mother always seemed so busy with the baby that he began to fix the holes himself. Even though his father had a better job, money was still tight after the baby arrived, so it was important for the family to make everything last. That was why he had taken up sewing again.

By the time he started grade three, making simple mends to the family's clothes with a needle and thread was added to emptying the icebox tray as David's job. Although he still said he didn't like sewing — and he didn't want to do it when his father got home from work — he knew he had to do his part to help out.

“But when Alice gets old enough,” he told his mother, “sewing will be her job.”

Despite his complaints, David was fond of sewing. He enjoyed the satisfaction that came from fixing something that would otherwise have to be thrown away. A stitch here, a stitch there, and a torn shirt was just like new. Better, really, because an old shirt was soft and comfortable. But if David hadn't appreciated the way the women at the hat factory teased him about sewing, it was worse when some of the older boys at school found out.

“Just don't let them bother you,” his mother told him. “When they see they can't upset you, they'll lose interest.”

“But what if they don't? What if I keep ignoring them and they don't lose interest? What if they never stop?”

“They will,” his mother said. “Eventually.”

But David believed the teasing would never stop. Finally, it all came to a head in January just after David's ninth birthday. It was the type of cold, clear winter morning that made noses run and cheeks redden.

David was walking to school when he ran into Sammy, a boy from his class who was his friend. The hard-packed snow squeaked beneath their feet, and their breath formed puffy white clouds as they spoke.

“What's in the box?” Sammy asked. Like David, he was small for his age and an easy target for the older boys. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that he was always pushing back up his nose.

“Cupcakes.”

“Cupcakes?”

“My mother baked them. It was my birthday yesterday.”

“Oh, yeah,” Sammy said. “January 12.”

No one ever made a fuss about birthdays, so David didn't mind that Sammy hadn't remembered. Only rich people had birthday parties. Still, David seemed glum and Sammy knew why. The reason was coming around the corner as they neared the schoolyard.

“Oh, no,” Sammy groaned. “It's Kevin Bull.”

The name fitted the boy perfectly, and hearing it made David's stomach lurch.

“Just keep walking,” Sammy whispered. “Maybe he won't see us until we get inside the fence.”

But the bully did.

“Hey, Momma's Boy. Whatcha got in the box?”

David didn't answer. He just kept walking. If he could get through the gate, Kevin wouldn't risk making trouble on school property.

“Hey!” Kevin hollered, more angrily this time.

“Dincha hear me, Momma's Boy?” He caught up to David and shoved him from behind. “I said, what's in the box?”

Fear flashed inside David, but he tried not to show it. He turned away, intending to continue walking, but some of Kevin's friends blocked his path. David and Sammy were surrounded. Now there was no choice but to tell them what he was carrying.

“Cupcakes, huh?” Kevin Bull snatched the box from David's arm. “You bake 'em yourself, Momma's Boy?”

The bully's friends laughed.

“His mother made them,” Sammy said, sticking up for David.

Kevin glared at Sammy. “No one's talkin' to you, Jew Boy.” Then he smirked at David and the cupcakes. He took some of the small cakes out of the box and passed them to his cronies. They stuffed them in their mouths greedily. It seemed as many crumbs fell to the ground as were swallowed, but Kevin's friends didn't care.

David stared at the bits of cupcake in the snow. “They were for my class,” he murmured.

“Tell 'em they were good,” Kevin said with a laugh as he and his friends ran off with the box.

Sammy and David finished walking to school in silence, but David was angry. He was tired of being bullied, sick of waiting for the other boys to stop. But they were bigger and older. What could he do?

David was still angry when he saw Kevin outside after school. At first Kevin seemed apologetic.

“Here,” he said, holding up a cupcake. “I saved the last one for you.”

When David reached for it, Kevin squeezed it in his hand. The cupcake crumbled. Then Kevin ground the pieces into the snow with his boots. The bully's friends laughed. David stared at the crushed remains of his mother's treats. When he glanced up and saw Kevin laughing at him, his face flushed.

“Whatsa matter, Momma's Boy?” Kevin taunted. “You gonna cry?”

But David didn't cry. Instead he charged at Kevin, crashing into him so hard that he sent the older boy sprawling. Then he jumped on him and started punching. It was almost as if he couldn't control himself, as if each of his arms had a mind of its own, swinging and swinging, sometimes connecting and sometimes not. Other kids gathered from all over the schoolyard, forming a circle around the boys and yelling, “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!”

David barely heard them. He hardly noticed anything at all. Even after Kevin managed to land a punch that made his nose bleed, David still felt as if he were moving in a dream. It was as if he were watching someone else … until he felt something pulling at his ear.

“Get off that boy! Get up right now!”

David barely heard the voice, but he did feel his ear being twisted and pulled. The pain snapped him out of his daze, and as soon as he was yanked to his feet, he recognized Miss Graham, the toughest teacher in the school. She wasn't much taller than the sixth-grade boys she taught, but she was wide and sturdy like a bulldog. No one ever talked back to Miss Graham, not even Kevin Bull.

Miss Graham had David's right ear in her left hand and Kevin's left ear in her right, and she continued to twist as she led the two boys into the school. She didn't let go until the boys were seated in the principal's office. By then the blood had almost stopped dripping from David's nose, which was now hurting. Kevin had some puffiness around one of his eyes, but he'd been in plenty of fights before and didn't seem to be in much pain.

“What have we here?” the principal asked, as if he couldn't tell.

“Fighting!” Miss Graham barked. “On school grounds.”

Although David had never been in trouble before, he knew what the punishment was for fighting on school property. Everyone knew the principal kept a thick black strap in his office, and just the thought of it was enough to scare most kids into obeying the rules.

The principal spoke to Kevin first. “You know the drill, Mr. Bull.”

Kevin got up and held out his right hand, a defiant expression on his face. The principal picked up the strap. It looked like a fat black belt, but it was much stiffer than any belt David had seen. When the principal brought the strap down hard on the palm of Kevin's hand, David saw Kevin's ears turn bright red, but he didn't cry. Not even when the principal strapped him a second time. No matter how much it hurt when it was his turn, David was determined not to let Kevin see him cry, either.

“All right, Mr. Saifert, hold out your hand.”

David stood and did as he was told.

“And just let me say how disappointed I am to see a bright boy like you in my office. But if you're going to act like an animal, you're going to be treated like one.” The principal brought down the strap across David's palm.