Principals and Other Schoolyard Bullies Page 11
There is a big crowd in the church basement. It seems to me that the entire village of Sainte-Éloge is there, even some of the English, even though they are Protestant. I wonder if they will be excommunicated for being here in the Catholic church, although this is only the basement so maybe they are safe.
I ask my cousin Bruce if he wants that we go and get some food and drink because if we wait too long perhaps there will be nothing left. He shrugs his shoulders which are all made of bone and looks at me with the eyes of a sad dog.
“Come,” I tell him, “be happy. After all, this is a wake. It is no time to be sad.”
As usual, he says nothing. But he follows me to the banquet table where all the food is set out. The line is already long, but Ma Tante Madeleine is half turned around talking to Mme Michaud who is behind her and she is so busy talking she does not see us and we slip in front of her and we fill our plates. Or at least I do. Bruce keeps asking me, what is this and what is that? He takes very little of the food and I understand why he is so thin like his mother.
We sit at a table where Laurier Renaud is sitting with Eugénie Larochelle, who, now that Grand-maman has gone to heaven, is the oldest person in all of Sainte-Éloge. I am very polite and ask if we may join them and I ask after their health but Eugénie Larochelle, it is well known, is deaf. Bruce eats very slowly so that I have a chance to go twice to get dessert before he has finished the few things on his plate.
After we have finished eating, and I am feeling quite full, I bring my cousin Bruce around the church basement to meet his cousins but Bruce only ever says hello. He never asks how do you do, and maybe the cousins do not know that this is the way it is on the other side of the lines and no one seems much interested in Bruce so that pretty soon I find the church basement is very noisy and crowded and I wonder if it might not be nicer outside. I think this too because I know Son Père and Théo will have to go home to do the chores and perhaps they will look for me to help because it will go faster if there are three and they will be able to come back sooner. It is not that I do not wish to help, but I have told Mon Oncle Robert that I will stay with my cousin Bruce and look after him and in his nice clothes he would not go well in our barn.
I do not want Mon Oncle Robert to worry, and especially not his wife, so I go halfway up the stairs and look until I can find Mon Oncle Robert and we go to him and tell him we will go outside for a short while. This is fine with him but his wife warns Bruce not to go far and to watch for cars and to not get dirty and so many other things that my head is almost dizzy and I wonder how Bruce can remember so much.
It is later than I thought and nowhere in the church yard do I see our car, which means Théo and Son Père have left to do chores. I see that Mon Oncle Reynald has the trunk of his car open and there are four or five men standing around, but after a minute they slowly start to make their way back to the church basement. Mon Oncle Reynald is the last of them and it seems to me that the trunk of his car is not all closed so after he has safely gone down to the church basement, I tell my cousin Bruce that he is in for a treat.
The car is parked in the back corner, next to the fields that belong to Napoléon Crèvecoeur. It takes us only a minute to cross the parking lot and I am curious to see if Mon Oncle’s trunk really is open. My eyes were not mistaken, the trunk is not completely closed and when I open it a little more I see a blanket but there are bumps under the blanket and I ask my cousin Bruce if he has ever tasted whiskey blanc. Bruce does not know what whiskey blanc is and since I am polite and since I do not think that Mon Oncle Reynald will notice too much, I lift the blanket and see that there are at least five bottles staying warm under it. Some are full but there is one which has only a little bit of liquid left and I think that it will be enough to give Bruce a taste, and me too.
If we were men we would stand by the car and pass the bottle back and forth, but I think it is safer if we find another place. Already we have seen one or two people leave for they are acquaintances and not true friends of Grand-maman, so it is better for me and Bruce to go elsewhere. The school playground is on the other side of the church but it is not a good idea to go there because there are children there and even some cousins. I think it is better to go through Napoléon’s field to his maple bush which is not very far.
This means we have to go through the barbed wire fence and even though I tell Bruce that I will hold up the top wire and he is to push down the middle wire and even though I show him how to climb through he is clumsy and catches his back on one barb and before he is through he catches his pant leg on another barb and I can see that his mother will not be pleased because the sharp metal has torn his nice clothing. But I say to myself, the damage is done and cannot be undone so I convince Bruce that there would be nothing gained by turning back now.
To my surprise, Napoléon Crèvecoeur has planted his field in oats and I know he would not want anyone tramping through his oats. But I have just convinced Bruce that there would be nothing gained by turning back so I tell myself that we are small and we will make such a small trail that no one will even notice. I tell Bruce to stay close behind me and to try to step in my footsteps. The oats are high and green and I can tell they will soon be ready to harvest. I am surprised at how big the field is and how far Napoléon’s sugar bush seems to be. When I stop for a minute and look behind me, the church and the village seem very far away and the sugar bush is no closer.
It is too far to see who it is, but there are people coming out of the church basement. I squat down and tell Bruce to do likewise. Bruce asks what’s wrong and because I don’t want to worry him, I tell him it is time to take a sip of whiskey blanc. We are far away and the oatfield floats above our heads. I am about to unscrew the cap when Bruce lets out a scream that startles me and I fall backwards. I see that Bruce too has fallen and I can see that we have knocked down a good number of Napoléon’s oat stalks. What has happened is that Bruce has seen a garden snake.
The damage to Napoléon’s oats has been done and I hope that maybe there will be a big rain storm with lots of wind and what we have done will appear to be the work of wind and rain. I unscrew the bottle and pass it to Bruce and tell him to drink first. He looks at the bottle in his hand and I encourage him. With his sleeve he wipes the rim of the bottle but I think that maybe he should not have done that because I can see that the elbow of his jacket is quite dirty and I think maybe the whole arm of his jacket is that way because of the way he fell backwards into the oats.
I do not know how much my cousin Bruce drinks with his first swig because he coughs and chokes and I am afraid that he will drop the bottle and spill what is left. I grab it from his hand before something happens to it and I watch as he loses his balance and falls on yet more of Napoléon Crèvecoeur’s oats. When he finally stops coughing and choking, I can see that his eyes are red with tears. He has made a lot of noise and I raise my head just above the sea of oats and look towards the church. There are men standing around Mon Oncle Reynald’s car but they are just standing and not looking towards us. I watch them for a minute and I realize that we are quite safe as long as we stay down.
“Watch how I drink,” I tell my cousin Bruce. I lift the bottle to my lips and take a small sip which tastes cool on my tongue before sliding like a flame down my throat. I have taken only a small sip and even though my throat is in flames I do not choke or cough.
“Try taking just a small sip,” I tell my cousin.
“I don’t like it,” he says to me.
My cousin, I am sad to admit, is not only clumsy, but he is also very slow. “That doesn’t matter,” I explain to him. “Just take a small sip.”
It takes a few minutes but eventually he does and even though he makes the face of a lemon in great pain, he does not choke this time and he hardly coughs at all.
“It tastes awful,” he says.
“Of course,” I tell him. “This is whiskey blanc, and it is made by our Oncle Reynald. It is the best in the entire village.”
There is another place we could more easily reach. It is no more than four or five furlongs from where we stand if we veer off to the east. It is an old barn that Napoléon has not used since before I was born. It is clearly a much better place than the sugar bush for us to sit quietly and finish our drink.
We arrive and just in time because when I look back towards the church I again see people among the cars. Bruce and I sit down in the tall grass and lean back against the weathered barn. There is not much left in our bottle and even though he complains, my cousin Bruce drinks his share.
“Should we leave the bottle here or bring it back?” I ask my cousin.
He looks at me and after a long while he replies, “I don’t know.”
It is very nice where we are. The sky is still bright even though it is evening. There are swallows and I point them out to my cousin who does not know that swallows are birds.
I start to explain that there are many different types of birds and he stops me and says, “What was that?”
I listen and my cousin is right. We are not alone here. I push the bottle into the grass at the edge of the barn where it grows tallest and I prepare myself to run.
“No. Listen,” says my cousin.
It is very strange and I cannot explain what I hear. I try to think what could be inside the barn, for that is where the noises are coming from. I think I hear someone cry, the way you cry when you are being hurt but then it is another sound, like a pig rooting in mud, and then we can almost hear what sounds like laughter and voices but I cannot make out the words. I am ready to leave but there is another cry and it is louder this time.
“We have to go help,” says Bruce.
I look at him and it seems to me he is no longer skinny and clumsy. In the sunlight he looks tall and strong and brave. But maybe I am wrong because my head feels just a little dizzy.
“Come!” he orders me and we start going around the barn to look for the door. The sounds from inside come and go and come and go, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, and we walk around the three sides of the barn before we find the door because we have guessed wrong.
When we reach the door, we find that it has been rolled partially open, open enough that, if we wanted to, we could walk in. It is dark inside, even though we see patches of light because there are holes in the roof, and missing planks in the walls. Bruce hesitates for a moment but then we hear another sharp cry. Bruce reaches for the door but he is unable to push it open any further. The rollers on which the door is suspended are no doubt full of rust. I move beside him and, with the two of us pushing, the door begins to roll open with the loud, harsh, grating sound of rusted metal.
The door makes noise but there is another noise, a cry, but this one is different. It is a cry of surprise. Then a voice, a voice that is loud and angry, is calling out, “C’est qui ça?”
And a fraction of a moment later there is something in the half-shadows of the barn and it is big and it is moving towards us and Bruce and I turn and run.
We have not run far it seems to me when Bruce trips and falls. I look back and see that we are no longer being chased. I catch a glimpse of someone with a flapping shirt going into the darkness of the barn.
It is perhaps good that Bruce has fallen, even though he is now much more dirty than if he had done chores in our barn, because we have been running the wrong way, not towards the church, but away from it. The two of us squat in the oats to catch our breath and then, quite suddenly, Bruce spills all his supper onto Napoléon Crèvecoeur’s oatfield. It is not too bad because he had only a small supper and there was only a little to spill onto his jacket. We have to stay put for several minutes because I can see that my cousin is now looking a strange colour between white and green. While we wait I peek over the oats to determine the best way to go around the barn and get back to the church, although as I think of it, I wonder if there is not someplace safer to go to clean Bruce up before I return him to his mother.
It is then that I see two people come out of the barn and I cannot be sure because they are moving quickly and are keeping themselves half hunched over but for a moment I wonder if it is not my sister Lucie that I have seen with Roméo Blanchette coming out of the barn.
When we get back to the edge of Napoléon’s oatfield dusk is falling. I am thinking of what I will say to Mon Oncle Robert and his thin wife because my cousin Bruce does not look at all as he looked a few hours ago.
We have just climbed through the barbed wire fence when Bruce’s mother appears in front of us. She looks at Bruce and puts her hand to her mouth and screams. She seizes him and pulls him into her arms with tears rolling down her face. Then Mon Oncle Robert is beside her, but before I can say a word, or before he can say a word, she yells at him.
“We’re leaving! This minute!”
And I watch as they cross the church yard and climb into the big Chrysler Imperial and pull out of the yard. And until I am much older, that is the last time I see my cousin Bruce who lives across the lines.
The Shortened Version
Darren had discovered his hidey-hole the same afternoon his mom had dropped him off. He had noticed something that, in all the times he had been at his grandparents’, he had never spotted before: a small door. There was a small door in the white-painted trellis that acted like a skirt to hide the empty space under the front veranda. The door looked just like the rest of the trellis and Darren would never have noticed it if it hadn’t been slightly ajar. It was on the far side of the house and half-hidden by the neatly trimmed cedar hedge.
He had pulled gently and it had grudgingly opened a little wider. He had bent his head and looked down the dark crawlspace which, like the veranda, ran the whole length of the front of the house. Little lozenges of sunlight speckled the part of the sandy, dirt floor closest to the trellis. Darren stayed crouched and took a small, tentative step into this newly discovered dark space. The air felt different in here. It smelled old and dusty. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, the first thing he was conscious of were the cobwebs. Dust-thickened, they seemed to droop gently from the underside of the veranda floor like miniature clouds.
Darren waddled a few steps forward, tentatively swinging his left hand just in front of his head to brush away the offensive webs. He half recoiled from their soft touch and felt himself off balance. From his squatting position he put his right knee to the ground and he was surprised how cool the soil felt on his bare skin. He stayed genuflecting for a minute and realized there was no point brushing the cobwebs away for those that drooped from the planks above his head were matched by others that hung along the cement foundation of the house and on the inside of the trellis.
Darren was about to waddle forward when the scurrying sound of some unknown thing startled him. He stopped and sensed rather than saw something that seemed large and dark; although, in the diamond-strewn darkness he almost thought he saw a flash of white.
He hadn’t gone any further under the veranda that day. Nor on any of the other times he had quietly slipped through the trellis door since then. After the second time his Grandma had scolded him and asked him where he’d been, his shorts and T-shirt were so full of dust and cobwebs. He hadn’t told her, not out of deceit or dishonesty, but because she was carried away in her scolding and gave him no time to answer. It was after that incident that Darren had taken the whisk and spent the better part of half an hour cleaning a small space for himself in the corner closest to the door. Since then he’d furnished his secret space with a cardboard box in which he kept two old issues of Owl Magazine which had been left in the house long ago. He also had a book, Muffet’s Adventure, which he’d brought from home and of which he’d only read only a page or two which he had opened at random. Recently, he had started to bring food her
e, cookies from the pantry that he put aside in a plastic container, the way a trapper in the far north might lay in a cache of dried caribou meat.
The corner under the veranda was where Darren had retreated when the dog arrived. The dog, which belonged to his Aunt Tiffany, was a Jack Russell terrier. That was the first thing she had told him when she came by to drop the dog off.
“He’s a Jack Russell terrier,” she had said. “A purebred Jack Russell terrier and he’s worth a lot of money. He’s not used to being here so if it’s you who takes him for a walk, you keep him on the leash at all times. Even if you go to the park, don’t let him off the leash to run around. He doesn’t know you and he might not come back to you. And keep him away from other dogs. He’s not that big and I don’t want him getting hurt. But, um… but it would be better if you didn’t walk him at all.”
She had put emphasis on the word “you,” and Darren had backed away a half step from his aunt. He didn’t know why she thought him incapable of walking her dog but all of a sudden, he felt that he really didn’t want to walk the dog, even if it was a purebred Jack Russell terrier.
Standing in the front hall, Darren looked up at his Aunt Tiffany. He knew she had been a teacher and now she was the principal of her school. Darren felt really glad that she wasn’t the principal of his school. He looked away from his aunt and down at the dog and saw that the dog’s dark eyes were looking up at him belligerently, as if to ask, “What are you doing here?”
His Grandma had come down the stairs at that point and Darren had taken the opportunity to quietly slip away. He hadn’t said goodbye to his Aunt Tiffany even though he knew she was leaving on a trip somewhere. He had gone through the kitchen and out the back door and then around the house and into his special space under the veranda.
That had been over a week ago. That first day it was his Grandpa who had walked the dog but when he came back from his evening walk he announced, “I’m not going to walk out there like an old fool with that yappy midget of a dog. And you won’t believe what happened when I got home!”