Alone in the Classroom Read Free Page A

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.

2
Jewel
    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, whereword 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 cameinto 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.
    He liked to enter her classroom without warning. A curt nod in her direction, and her hand went to her throat and the students rose in a single swoosh, a covey of grouse flushed by a gunshot, but no escape, no sky, for there was the peeling
plafond
above their heads. He swept the class with his pale eyes, then proceeded to a straight-backed chair in the corner in the back. He sat down and the children followed suit.
    A school with a classroom on either side of the hallway on the first floor, then a flight of stairs to a landing that functioned as a library of two bookcases, then the rest of the stairs to the second floor of two connected classrooms and the principal’s office. On the first floor were the lower grades taught by ancient Miss Margaret Fluelling and the middle grades under young Miss Connie Flood. On the second floor were the upper grades shared by Miss Mary Miller and Mr. Ian