Principals and Other Schoolyard Bullies Read online

  The first incident, which, initially, almost everyone took to be a freak accident, must have been the week before opening night. (The school play always ran for two nights, so we had opening night, which was always on a Friday, and closing night, on Saturday, and it wasn’t uncommon for a good part of the audience to come to both nights.)

  We had a rehearsal schedule and we worked on only certain scenes on any given evening until the last week. Then, the Tuesday before the play, we would have the dress rehearsal, which meant doing the entire play in costume. On Wednesday, we’d have the technical rehearsal followed by the full dress rehearsal on Thursday and then opening night on Friday.

  There weren’t many of us around and it was the end of the evening, almost time to finish up and go home. We’d gone over our scenes long enough that we were starting to forget lines that we knew, just because we were tired. Even though it wasn’t scheduled for that night, Sugden suddenly announced that, since we had a few minutes left, that we could try the hanging scene.

  We’d done it a few times already, always with my Dad there controlling the pulley. As Chris dug out the harness and put it on, the rest of us started getting our coats and hats and—the scene no longer being a novelty for us—a few of the kids headed out the door. I was still there, and I remember that two of the Grade 11 kids, Samantha and Richard, were still there. They had recently become an item and for them, more than anything, it was an excuse to engage in a bit of quick necking at the back of the auditorium. I stayed because, even though I no longer had a crush on Chris, I enjoyed his company and he lived three doors down from our place. Besides, it was always nicer to walk home with someone than all alone.

  Chris got himself all set and, from backstage, Sugden, called out, “Quiet on the set. Go.”

  Right away, I knew something was wrong. Chris’s head wasn’t lolling to one side and his body wasn’t hanging limp. His neck and head were stretched straight back. His legs were kicking and with his hands he was clutching at the noose around his neck. He was making gurgling sounds, which as a dead man, he wasn’t supposed to be making. He was all alone on stage—although that was the way the scene was supposed to be.

  I was seven or eight rows back from the stage, right in the middle. I jumped up and as quickly as I could, I rushed towards the aisle so I could get to the stage. All the time I kept yelling, “Mr. Sugden! Mr. Sugden!” Chris was still all alone and struggling like a fish at the end of a line. I couldn’t understand where Sugden was. As I ran down the aisle, I turned my head back to yell at Richard and Samantha and I could see that Richard was already scampering down the aisle. I got to the stage and scrambled up and, without knowing what I was doing, I grabbed Chris around the legs and lifted him as best I could. He was heavier than I expected and, with my head crushed against his knees, I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel that he wasn’t struggling any more. Then Richard was there, lifting him and Chris seemed suddenly to weigh nothing at all. Chris disentangled the noose from his neck and we lowered him to the floor.

  “Someone tampered with it,” was the first thing Dad said when, later that night, I told him what had happened.

  The next night, with everyone there—the stage crew, the actors, even some of the parents, the principal talked about the importance of safety and avoiding accidents. He praised Chris for his commitment to stay with the play, and he thanked Richard and me for acting quickly. He didn’t mention Sugden, and he didn’t speak for more than two minutes, but everybody knew that he was really talking to only one person.

  It was at home that the incident clearly changed from an accident to something else. Dad was angry about it. He had gone to look at the mechanism and, as he had first said, it had been tampered with. The electric cable—chosen because, being black, would be invisible to the audience, and because the wound copper wires would be able to support ten times Chris’s weight—had been loosened from the counterweight that acted as a safety. And, Dad kept asking me at the dinner table, where had Sugden been? Why had he not held the cable as he surely knew had to be done if Chris was hanging from the other end?

  I felt exactly the same way that Dad did, and we were far from alone.

  There were always lots of people around the next week. Dad got a chair and a flashlight and a book and he parked himself backstage next to his pulley mechanism. Chris was always backstage just before the hanging scene and he would cue dad for his few seconds of work and then Dad would go back to reading his book by flashlight. Dad was pretty big and just by sitting there he made it clear that nobody was going to touch anything. But he wasn’t the only parent who had assigned himself to guard duty. The three mothers who’d worked on costumes were also there, in the front row, every single evening. Chris’s dad, who’d helped out with the sets, was also there every night. He was tall, like his son, and he was one of those people who have a hard time sitting still. He kept wandering backstage, asking if he could help out with one thing or another. By that time, of course, the best thing he could do was stay out of the way. Finally, one of the mothers managed to tell him that. He would sit next to the three mothers in the front row, fidgety and inattentive.

  Given the number of adults who were constantly around, what happened on Thursday night is almost unbelievable. This was dress rehearsal and everybody was pretty wound up. The actors had clear instructions. We had to be at the theatre by five thirty and in costume and make-up by six forty-five. We could hang around the dressing room, or the green room, but every place else was strictly out of bounds, especially the stage. The kids who worked stage crew had similar instructions. They would do a sound and light check at six and then patiently wait till seven when one of them would open the curtain and we’d go through the play from top to bottom in front of an almost empty house. Although this year it wouldn’t be that empty at all.

  None of the actors saw what happened, but we all heard it. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes before curtain there was a tremendous crash on the stage. Rules and instructions notwithstanding, everybody rushed out to see what had happened. We poured onto the stage from the wings and the parents, sitting on the other side of the closed curtains, rushed up from their seats in the house.

  A fresnel, which is a big, heavy, stage light, had crashed down from the batten overhead. Nobody was hurt, but there was lots of shattered glass and an ugly gash on the stage floor where the metal frame had dug into the wood.

  Dad, who was a foreman and used to giving orders, got us all off the stage. The actors trooped back to the green room and the stage crew went back to their positions. Someone found a janitor who vacuumed up the glass and brought out the stage ladder. Dad got the lighting crew to climb up and check every single fresnel, spotlight and scoop on all three of the battens.

  The dress rehearsal was delayed by barely twenty minutes, which, under the circumstances, was pretty amazing. It went badly, which was good because this was the dress rehearsal and, true to form, on Friday and Saturday we brought the house down.

  On Sunday morning, Dad went back to being an armchair detective and on Monday morning, two policemen flew in from Quebec City.

  There were a couple of strange things about the fresnel which had crashed down. For one thing, there was a forty-foot long piece of nylon fishing line tied to it. Another thing was that the light hadn’t been connected to its plug in the batten. Even stranger was that the fresnel wasn’t part of the lighting design for the play. Neither Allan nor Teddy, the two kids who had done the lighting, had put the light up and neither remembered seeing it there on Wednesday when we’d done the technical rehearsal. As far as anyone could tell, the light came down when Teddy and Allan, who were goofing around, pulled on some of the teaser curtains which would have brushed against the batten the light was on.

  What brought the police was that where it crashed on the stage was the exact spot where Chris would have been standing about a minute into the play.

  The two policemen left Montrouge on Tuesday, the day after they arrived. They intervie
wed lots of people, including Teddy and Allan, and of course, Sugden, but they left without arresting anybody.

  As Dad explained it, all the evidence was circumstantial. A spool of nylon fishing line was found in Sugden’s desk at school, but there’s no law against having a spool of fishing line, even if a desk at school is a strange place to keep it and you’re not a fisherman.

  Annie’s mom, who sat on the school board, explained that the attempt to fire Sugden came to naught because the same day the policemen flew out of Montrouge, the president of the teacher’s union flew in. An attempt to fire him wouldn’t necessarily be successful, she explained, and, even if it were, it could take months and cost the school board loads of money. The school board would opt to go the bureaucratically safe route, which was to simply decline to renew his contract at the end of the year.

  As for us, we banded around Chris like security guards around a VIP. When we walked into Sugden’s classes we were a miniature phalanx, with Chris in the middle. In the classroom, we dragged our desks to the back wall and sat behind them like archers behind a battlement. Sugden, who had done precious little teaching anyway, did absolutely none after. He would tell us, “I’ll be right back,” and not return until the end of the class, just in time to dismiss us. Or, he’d assign us work time and he’d sit at the front pretending to be busy with something while we’d sit at the back and chat or read or catch up on our math homework.

  Sugden left Montrouge three days before the end of classes. “He used his sick leave,” Annie’s mom told us.

  Maybe he knew we had spent the last few weeks plotting some sort of good-bye for him. Not that we would ever have turned our plans into reality, and in truth, we hadn’t even actually settled on one plan.

  Strangely enough, I probably owe a small debt of gratitude to Sugden. He closed a door for me, and true to popular wisdom, another one opened. I gravitated not so much towards Math, but certainly towards Science. In Grade 11, the year after Sugden, I thrived on Physics and Chemistry. My childhood dream of illustrating children’s books sublimated like dry ice at room temperature. We left Montrouge three weeks after my graduation and the three of us returned to Montreal. I did a year at Concordia, transferred to Queen’s and eventually settled on dentistry, a profession which, all in all, has been remarkably good to me.

  I looked again at the photo in the book. The caption described the men as trappers who helped in the RCMP manhunt. Perhaps, somewhere in the text, their names may appear. And what if one of the names was Sugden? What would that tell me?

  I looked out at the swirling snow. In the last little while the wind had continued to pick up. I could see even less of the lake than before and its colour seemed to have changed as well. It was less dark now, somehow, as if it too sought to join the earth and sky in a grey-white oblivion.

  I had much to worry about. Like the view from my picture window, nothing about my future was very clear. The whirling snow was making me dizzy. I sat back and picked up the book and opened it to my bookmark. I might have the energy to read and, in that case, I might learn something from the death of Albert Johnson.

  The Thumb

  Gino was awake before his mother’s cushioned footsteps entered his room. Like a dark shadow in soft, shuffling slippers she seemed to glide rather than walk over the floor. Through the blankets, he felt her hand’s gentle pressure on his shoulder.

  “Gino. Gino. Sono le cinque venti. Svegliati.”

  “Mamma…”

  “Sei già sveglio? Beh, alzati, pigrone. Ha nevicato. C’è pane e marmelata e latte. Dai, alzati.”

  “Si, Mamma.”

  She removed her hand from his shoulder and slid soundlessly out of the room.

  Gino closed his eyes and let out a sigh of disappointment. He had hoped that she would stay. He had hoped that she would sit on the edge of his bed and talk to him for a few minutes. Those were the best mornings, when he could lie still under the covers, with his eyes closed, and listen to his mother’s voice pull him gently into wakefulness. It wasn’t his mother’s actual words that mattered. She might say anything at all. She might tell him what the temperature was that day, or if there was lots of wind, or if it was raining. She might tell him what she was going to make for supper, or that Mr. Bannerman, downstairs, was sick again. It was the sound, and knowing that the sound was just for him. His mother’s voice felt different when she spoke just to him, when he wasn’t sharing her words with Maria, the baby, or with his sixteen-year-old sister, Graziella. Gino opened his eyes and put his bare feet on the cold linoleum floor.

  It was cold enough that Gino could see his breath crystallize. If he exhaled as he passed under a street lamp, he created clouds of small, sharp, multicoloured crystals that momentarily hovered and glittered in mid-air.

  His red toque was pulled far down over his forehead and ears. A scarf was wrapped twice around his neck and chin. He wore both his sweaters under his coat and his two thickest pairs of wool socks. Despite all the clothing, when he first left the house, he felt the sharp, frigid needles of cold; his scalp tingled and his nostrils closed. When he inhaled, it felt in his throat like a sip of milk right out of the fridge. He was sure that his skin, under his long johns, was nothing but goose bumps. Now, five minutes later, as he got to the drop off point, he was comfortably warm and hardly aware of the cold.

  Three of the bundles had already been picked up and Gino took the smaller of the two that remained. His bundle was marked River Street even though only four of Gino’s thirty-eight papers were delivered to River Street. First with bare hands and then, more clumsily, with his mitts on, Gino counted the papers as he stowed them into his two bags. He then folded the heavy brown wrapping paper and tucked it into one of his bags and finally rolled the string into a ball and slipped that into his coat pocket. Today was Wednesday. Next to Saturday, Wednesday’s paper was the heaviest of the week. With a practiced motion he heaved the first bag over his left shoulder and then the second over his right shoulder. He shrugged once or twice to make the heavy bags as comfortable as possible before stepping out of the shelter of the loading dock and back onto the street.

  He looked west along Cumberland Street, just in case he saw Gary, then turned and began trudging east.

  It was going to be a good morning for the papers. There wasn’t a wisp of wind. The snow, which had been falling all night, was light and fluffy. It came up over his ankles, but it was easy to walk in. It wasn’t at all like the storm on Monday when the snow, more than knee high, had blown into hard drifts that made walking almost impossible. It had taken Gino almost twice as long to do the papers. When he finally got home, as frozen as an icicle, he had to leave again immediately because he was already late for school.

  The few minutes it had taken to pick up the papers had been long enough for the cold to make itself felt again. Gino, as much as the newspaper bags would allow, kept his head tucked between his shoulders, turtle-like. He kept his face down so that his red toque cut the cold air. Alone on the sidewalk, he took only occasional upward glances from below his eyebrows. Here, on Cumberland Street, there was hardly a sign of the over-night snowfall. The street and the sidewalk had both been scraped clean. The few cars that passed drove slowly as if still battling Monday’s storm. They passed by almost silently, followed by small clouds of exhaust fumes from their mufflers. As he walked, he could hear his footsteps, the brittle sound of boots crunching down on snow crystals.

  By the time Gino got to Villa Street, he was, if not warm, at least totally acclimatized and no longer conscious of the cold. Villa Street was where a residential area crossed the storefronts of Cumberland Street. The days he and Gary started their routes together, it was the place where they separated. Gary turned right on Nugent Street while Gino turned north to Court Street and Harrington Avenue to deliver his first seven papers.

  The first day Gino had started the paper route, Gary had walked with him as far as Harrington and told him all about delivering papers. Even if you’re only deliver
ing three dozen papers, carry them in two bags because it’s easier. Mrs. Evans, the dispatcher, is really grumpy but you have to stay on good terms with her because any problems you have, she’s the person you have to deal with. It sometimes happens that your bundle is a paper short. You have to call Mrs. Evans as soon as possible and let her know who didn’t get the paper. It’s always good to have a dime in your pocket. If you have an extra paper, you can throw it away, or keep it. If you’re really lucky, you can even sell it. Collection day is Saturday and you really have to keep track of who pays. It’s best on Saturday to deliver a little later so that you finish your route at 8:30 or so. Then, you can retrace your steps and collect from your customers. On Saturday you always make sure to start with some change in your pocket because there’s always someone too cheap to leave you a fifteen-cent tip. But you have to be nice, even to those people who don’t tip, because often they would give you a crisp two-dollar bill, or even a five-dollar bill at Christmas. If you do end up with lots of bills, it’s good to keep them in a different pocket, or even better, tucked into your socks. You have to look out for yourself sometimes.

  On Monday, he had had to clamber over shoulder-high snowbanks, but in the two days since the storm, many of the snowbanks had disappeared and some of the sidewalks had been cleared. On College Street too, the snowbanks were gone even though the sidewalk had not been cleared. The street was now silent and empty, but Gino could easily picture it with the snow removal crews. There were always a few men walking in front of, or behind, the key piece of machinery, a giant snowblower. It slowly but systematically chewed its way through any size snowbank, spewing a flurry of ice chunks and snow into the back of a truck to be dumped at the edge of the bay.