Alone in the Classroom Read Free

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