I was just too paralyzed with pain. The worst I had ever experienced. It was a different kind of pain, though. Not like raking the skin off my hands when I fell from my bike onto the gravel road. Not like when I jumped on the rusty nail sticking out of a board during a game of hide-and-seek. Not like the burning needle-like pain I felt when Dennis shot me in the rear end with the B.B. gun.
This pain hurt like God had reached inside my body and grabbed my heart with both of His hands, squeezing it so tightly that it would surely burst any second. The same pain pumped through my entire body until I ached all over.
Nan was hurting, too. She hadn’t left her bed for three whole days. I heard Aunt Bud tell Mom that grief was a powerful thing. I didn’t know exactly what grief was, but I imagined it was like the squeezing in my heart. Mom and Aunt Bud had stayed home from work, not only for themselves, but also because they needed to take over for Nan and let her have time alone. Even the two of them together weren’t as good at daily chores as Nan was. Both of them forgot what day the milk was delivered. Pearl found our weekly supply by the front door with tubes of frozen milk sticking up out of the bottles, their caps still perched on top of each icy white column.
I overheard Aunt Bud explaining to Mom again how Gramp died. I knew she had already told the adults the evening it happened, but I guessed that Mom found it hard to listen carefully to something she didn’t really like hearing. I didn’t like hearing it either, but I needed to know.
Aunt Bud said they couldn’t fly Gramp to University Hospital because of the blizzard that night, and by the time they got an ambulance on the road, the storm was full blown. The driver could hardly see and had to crawl through the whiteout at a snail’s pace. They had only made it halfway to Saskatoon when Gramp passed away.
I hadn’t heard Aunt Bud’s story that first sad night because I was upstairs stretched out on Mom’s bed, crying. Nan was still trying to calm the girls down by quietly singing another song, You Are My Sunshine. Alone in the room, I must have cried a lifetime’s worth of tears, as many as God would probably allow any one person.
I wondered if He would be angry with me for using up my share of tears at such a young age. But, when I thought about it, it seemed only fair that He should be mad at me. He had to know how furious I was at Him for taking Gramp away.
I fell asleep that night in Mom’s arms. She had come upstairs to see if I was all right, and curled up on the bed with me when she found me crying. She held me and patted and rubbed my back until I conked out. Maisie and Pearl slept with Nan, as the wind and snow fought noisily outside.
No one asked me where I was going the next day, a couple of hours after lunch. I wasn’t sure that I knew where I was going anyway. I just bundled up and left the house.
The blizzard had blown itself out, and had left my world wrapped in gauze. It must have snowed over a foot, leaving dunes of snow everywhere. A blue sky was brilliant against the blinding white, but it didn’t lighten the heaviness in my heart.
I wandered past the school, where there were no kids hollering and no Miss Ruby to bawl me out. The swings were still. I figured out why they called Sunday a day of rest. I went on and cut through the auto court, which looked deserted, and found myself standing on Egg Hill, overlooking the river valley. The valley was now just a lumpy blanket of white, as white as any winter day. The whole prairie seemed at peace. Even the jackrabbit I scared up was silent as it bounded away. Nan’s You Are My Sunshine filled the silence by echoing in my mind. I searched again for a scent that I knew, and realized it somehow just smelled clean. Or maybe it was the smell of newness, of starting over.
I hadn’t been there all that long when his hand latched onto my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him coming, but it didn’t scare me. I knew Riel had found me.
“Hey,” was all he said.
“Hey,” I said back.
Riel and I had met each other when we were just little beggars, before either of us had started school. His being over a year older didn’t stop us from becoming friends. He was as close to being a brother as anyone could be.
We stood quietly for a few minutes, looking down at the river that was fast freezing over. He didn’t say he was sorry to hear that Gramp had died. I already knew he was. Without looking at him, I broke the silence.
“Do you believe in God, Riel?”
He shifted his weight, crunching the snow under his boots. “My mother’s the one who believes in Spirits.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, turning to face him.
Riel shrugged. “She’s Indian.”
“I know. But what’s that got to do with it?”
I could see him thinking things through. “Indians believe in the Creator. I guess that’s kind of the same as God.”
“So, you do believe in God?”
“I guess so,” he said.
I looked back to the river.
“I think I do, too. But I can’t figure out why he’d take Gramp away from me—away from all of us.”
Riel let out a long breath, and shifted his feet again. “I couldn’t tell ya.”
“I hope it wasn’t my fault,” I said.
“What’re ya talkin’ about?”
“If I hadn’t been so keen to go hunting,” I explained. “If we hadn’t gone, and he hadn’t got cold, maybe—”
Riel cut me off. “Naw, not a chance. He went hunting because he wanted to. You know that.”
“Ya, I guess so. I just miss him so much.” I felt like I was going to cry again, but I doubted I had a single tear left in me. A gulp of air jumped into my throat.
“Let’s walk. I’m gettin’ cold,” Riel offered. He was wearing his boots and his parka, but he didn’t have mitts on his hands.
We wandered along the top of the hill, staying quiet for quite a while. I could tell Riel liked walking more than talking, but I couldn’t help saying what was bouncing around inside my head.
“I think the thing that makes me saddest is that I didn’t get to say goodbye. I wanted to see him on Saturday, but I let stupid Hallowe’en be more important. I changed my visit to today. I’m never gonna have anything to do with that dumb holiday again. Heck, it’s not even a holiday!”
“You’re just mad now,” he said. “It wasn’t Hallowe’en’s fault either.”
“Then how come? How come he died and I didn’t even get to say goodbye? You should get to tell people one last time that you love them. God should give us at least that.”
“Probably right,” was all Riel had to offer.
We kept walking and kicking snow for a long time, and watched as the light on the snow turned kind of purple to match the darkening sky. No real sunset came. The whole world just dimmed, everything taking on a deep blue that I heard was called navy. For the first time I realized that snow wasn’t really white. It seemed to change colour with the light. Even on the brightest day, I remembered there was blue in it.
Figuring that out kind of surprised me, and I wondered if I would be able to figure out other things like that without Gramp’s help. He had taught me so much. I sure hoped I would.
“Let’s go home,” Riel said.
“You go ahead. I’ll just see you tomorrow.”
Riel shook his head. “You’re not coming to school, are you?”
“Probably not,” I said. “I don’t think Nan and Mom would let me, even if I wanted to. But anyway, the last person I want to see for a while is her.”
“I’ll see ya after school, then.”
I could tell Riel didn’t know what else to say or do. He put his bare hands in his coat pockets, and walked towards home.
I stayed and watched the last light disappear from the valley until it got almost completely dark. I was glad Riel had showed up. He never said much at the best of times, but I always felt he was listening to everything anyone said. Most people didn’t give him credit for being as smart as I knew he was, especially not Miss Ruby. She never bothered to ask him a question about anything in class. He was a good friend and I was glad for that. I needed a good friend more than ever.
I plodded on home. Whatever light had been trapped in the snow helped me find my way off the hill to the road, where the streetlamps gave me a path to follow. The moccasins I had dug out of storage that morning caused the hard-packed snow to squeak under them, in the tracks where only a few cars had driven.
Gramp’s funeral was near the end of the week, but I wasn’t allowed to go. The reason was a bit like the age rule for visiting at the hospital. Mom and Nan didn’t think I was old enough to handle it. I was ticked off, but at least the girls and my cousin Billy, who was dropped off by Uncle Bud and Aunt Toodie on their way, didn’t get to go either.
Nan had hired Diane Hobbs to baby-sit the four of us. Diane was a high school girl who lived down the street. The thought that I needed to be baby-sat annoyed me, and I said I would go out with Riel and Mokey instead of staying home. But, I was ordered by Nan and Mom to stay inside. They said it would be disrespectful to play on the day a family member was being buried. So, I hunkered down inside the house and did my best to be rude to Diane or torment the little kids enough to make them cry. Diane got back at me by sending me to Mom’s room for a couple of hours.
I spent the time trying to read comic books. But the thought of the adults sharing a last goodbye to Gramp without me made me really angry. Then I realized that being at the funeral also meant having to listen to a minister praying over the coffin while it was lowered into the cold, frozen ground. That was enough to change my anger to sadness.
Instead of crying, though, I tried to talk to God. The only prayer I knew was The Lord’s Prayer, so I recited it the way we had learned in first grade and still said every day after that, before starting class. The only other kind of prayer I knew was when we said Grace, and it didn’t seem to make sense to say a prayer about being thankful for food. Thinking of Grace made me think of the hymn, Amazing Grace, but I didn’t know the words. I tried humming it a few times and could tell I sounded lousy, so I gave that up, too. The best I could do was stumble through Jesus Loves Me a couple of times. I finally just fell asleep.
I woke up to the sound of people coming back, so I went downstairs. Friends of the family started pouring through the front door, letting cold air in and tracking snow all over the place. Mom saw me and told me to take the guests’ coats and lay them along the sides of the stairway leading upstairs. Soon there was a stack three feet deep from the bottom to the top, and the downstairs was chock-full of people. Many of them I knew, but others I had only seen once or twice before. Some I didn’t know at all. In the end, I figured that a lot of people liked my gramp.
Del was there. He came up to me and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me into him. Then he put his hand over the top of my head and mumbled that he was sorry and didn’t know what else to say. He walked away without looking at me.
I was surprised when right after that, Army appeared. He was just there all of a sudden, with his good eye looking down at me. I couldn’t think of any time I had seen him anywhere except at the school. Not downtown, not at a ball game, never in either of the theatres in town. But he was in my home at that moment, right in front of me.
“Having someone as special as your grandfather pass away on you is a very bitter pill to swallow, Buddy,” he said. “He was a really good man, and liked by everyone, as you can tell from the number of us who have shown up here to pay our respects.”
In one hand he had a glass of something I thought looked like ginger ale. He put his other hand on my shoulder, and said, “I understand you are going to need some time to get your head around such a loss, so I’ll look forward to having you back in school when you’re ready. Know that I’ll be thinking of you, okay?”
I just nodded, as he squeezed my shoulder, and then he disappeared into the crowd.
Everyone seemed to bring stuff, like food, liquor, and flowers. And with the food and flowers and all the people, there also came smells. Different kinds of perfume and shaving lotion floated around. I caught a whiff of Old Spice and it scared me a bit. Maybe it came from Army, but for a minute I thought Gramp’s ghost might be sneaking through the crowd. I smelled booze on the breath of a couple of the men who also squeezed my shoulder or patted my back and told me how sorry they were.
The stench of cigarette smoke from both men and women smoking in the living room was finally smothered by the food when it was served. At least a dozen different kinds of casseroles, each one of them looking delicious, had been baked and brought by the women. It was as though Gramp’s funeral was a chance for them to show off how good they were as cooks.
I realized I was hungry and thought I’d fill up a plate, but then I saw Maisie, Pearl and Billy scrunched into two chairs in front of the kitchen window by the stove. Our babysitter had gone home. They looked pretty scared, and so I herded them upstairs and set up Snake and Ladders for them to play.
“How come so many people are here?” Billy asked.
“They’re here to show their respect for Grampa,” answered Pearl.
“What’s that mean?” he asked.
“Ya, what’s that mean?” echoed Maisie.
Pearl looked stumped, so I tried to help her out. “When someone dies, their friends get together to tell the family how sorry they are, and they bring food to show how kind they can be,” I said.
“How come they drink beer, too?” Billy then asked.
“It’s tradition,” I answered. Like the tradition of hunting, I thought, which Gramp and I only really got to share once.
“What’s tradition?” Billy asked.
My five-year-old cousin had a new question for every answer. Before I could answer his latest one, Maisie had a question of her own.
“Is Gramp really dead?”
“Yes, Maisie, he is,” I said. I could see her little mind working to understand what that truly meant.
I decided to go back downstairs to eat before I started to cry again.
When I curled up on my couch that night to go to sleep, the smells of people and cigarette smoke were still part of the house. Aunt Bud and Maisie were asleep in their room, and Pearl was with Mom in their bed. Nan was alone in what had become only her bedroom.
For just a minute, I thought I should go upstairs and curl up with her, to make her not feel so alone or scared. Then I realized why I really thought about doing that. I was the one who was scared.
What were we going to do without him?
I would have to get stronger, I thought, and real quick if I was going to do all the man’s work that needed doing around the house. It was one thing to put on the storm windows and to shovel the coal into the basement, but there was also keeping the furnace stoked throughout the winter. And taking the clinkers from the furnace. Then there was all that wood to split for the cook-stove. In the spring I’d have to dig the garden by myself, and plant it. I was glad that at least Gramp and I had put it to bed that fall.
But, how were we going to pay the rent and buy food?
Would I have to quit school and get a job?
Norman Flood had quit school in eighth grade when he was just fourteen. His dad had been a brakeman and was killed when he got dragged by a freight train. Norman and his mom moved back East where he got a job in a mine.
If he could do it, maybe I could, too. But, he was a monster of a kid, twice my size and three years older. I felt so full of fear and hurt that I found myself tearing up, again. If only the hurt would go away, especially the hurt in my heart.
I cried myself to sleep.
After the funeral, the rest of the week snuck by pretty quickly. When the next Monday came along, and Nan woke me to go to school, I wasn’t up to it.
The thought of facing the Red Witch, who would for sure be all syrupy and gush all over me and tell me how sorry she felt for me, all the while still calling me Master Williams, made my stomach do flip-flops. It almost made me sick to imagine. She’d probably have the entire class write me notes or chime in with some kind of sympathy song that she had been teaching them while I was away.
“I really don’t want to go to school today, Nan. Can’t I stay home with you for a bit longer?”
That was all I had to say. She sent me up to Mom’s room, where I got to lounge around on Mom’s bed in my pyjamas and read comic books and the Hardy Boys’ Secret of Skull Mountain. I also dug out my diary and wrote a whole bunch of things and thoughts in it, so much that it was just about full.
The day floated by. It was nice being in the house pretty much by myself. All I heard was Nan downstairs going about her business with the radio on in the background. She seemed to be trying to keep busy. She didn’t cry as much when she was.
Nan let me stay home again the next day, and then the next. I knew that it was the middle of the week already, but I didn’t have any idea what the date was. As usual, I lounged on the bed in Mom’s room. I had moved there again after she left for work about an hour earlier. Pearl and Maisie had gone with her for some reason, much earlier than usual.
Later in the morning, while writing some more in my diary, I heard something different coming from the radio and sneaking up the stairs. I paid closer attention, and was surprised to hear Amazing Grace, the hymn I had tried to sing the week before on the day of Gramp’s funeral. I couldn’t figure out why that kind of music would be playing on that day and at that time.
Then, even a bigger surprise grabbed me and yanked me fully awake. It was Armistice Day, November 11th, the day our whole country remembered the sacrifice soldiers made while fighting in the two great wars. My dad had been killed in the Second World War, along with my uncle, and remembering him on that day had become special to me.
Armistice Day had also been special to Gramp. Having served in the First World War, and having been wounded and lost friends and family because of it, the day was even more important to him than me. Each year, he would get his old uniform out of the closet, make himself look as much like the soldier he once was, and take part in the ceremony at the Cenotaph in the centre of town. His tunic still fit him like a glove, and Nan would tell him he looked handsome as he kissed her before going out the door. He always went by himself. Later, he would join old friends at the Royal Canadian Legion for a drink.
I was overcome with a feeling like my whole body was going to be squashed to a pulp. I wanted to run downstairs into Nan’s arms and have us hold each other while we cried, but I couldn’t do that to her. It would be too unfair.
If I had been at school, I could be with my buddies and my classmates, taking in our own Armistice Day ceremony to honour the soldiers. I could join them in reading the poem, In Flanders Fields, from our Social Studies textbook.
But, then I remembered. Our ceremony was always before the real date. There was no school on Armistice Day. I wondered how I could forget. That must have been why Mom had taken Pearl and Maisie with her. Maybe she took them to work so Nan could still have the time to herself that she needed. But, why hadn’t Riel and Mokey dropped by? I thought about going to find them. Or should I have been getting dressed to go and take Gramp’s place at the Cenotaph instead? I just didn’t know. I was really out of sorts.
In the end, I curled up on Mom’s bed and did my best to recite what I could remember of In Flanders Fields. Then I felt that familiar wave of sadness wash over me again. I gave up and started sobbing, until I cried myself to sleep.
Somehow the rest of the week floated by. And then the week after that. And even the week after that. Pretty soon the whole month of November had slid past, and the first week of December was almost over.
There had been lots of arguments between Mom and Nan each night about my not having gone to school again that day. And these battles were followed by commands to me from Mom that I was to be up and dressed for school before she left for work the next morning. But because she left so early, she didn’t have the heart to wake me. So, I could still plead my case to Nan alone later on. She always allowed me one more day of grace—of freedom.
Nan argued with Army, too. Each and every day, starting the second week of November, he phoned the house around the middle of the morning. I knew who it was as soon as I heard the phone ring, so I would sneak part way down the stairs to listen in on their talks.
I started feeling sorry for her. She made up excuses—lies, actually—about how really sick I was. One day I’d have a toothache and the next few I’d have a sore throat. I worried she’d run out of reasons that made sense. Thankfully there wasn’t a truant officer for the school anymore.
As much as I felt sorry for Nan, it didn’t stop me from avoiding the Red Witch. It was a lot easier to stay on the bed upstairs than it would be to face her. At home my biggest problem was that I got tired of re-reading all my comic books. I had also made it through every Hardy Boy book I owned for a third time. Reading took me away from feeling lost by letting me get lost in someone else’s story. Writing in my diary also helped, and I wrote so much more that I not only filled up the second and third one I had started since the beginning of summer, but was well into a fourth fresh notebook, which one of the girls had left at home.
My sickness also took me away from my buddies, though. Riel and Mokey had given up dropping by and telephoning. Nan told them I was too sick to go outside or to have visitors. She wouldn’t let me outside, either, even on weekends. I realized after a couple of weeks that I had created my own kind of prison, a prison that could become very boring if I didn’t keep myself busy.
I tried carving a model airplane out of balsam wood with my hunting knife, but the big knife was too clumsy to work with, so I finished the job with my pocketknife. Then I put together a couple of plastic model airplanes. Although the smell of the glue would blur my eyes, causing my head to spin and giving me headaches, I enjoyed doing it. Too bad there were no more to work on. I played solitaire a few times instead.
I needed more things to do, so I dug out old gifts from past Christmases that were stored in a big steamer trunk in a corner of Mom’s bedroom. After emptying half of the trunk, I came across a big, old brown envelope with Mom’s full name on it that caught my attention. I spread the stuff from inside it onto Mom’s bed. Mixed in with a handful of photographs were my birth certificate and some other papers that I wasn’t really interested in. I put the papers to one side and looked at the pictures one by one.
It was fun to see pictures of my mother when she was younger. There were lots of snaps of her posing in bathing suits and nice clothes. Some were just of my dad, and I could see why people said I looked like him, especially in the hand-coloured picture of him in his army uniform. In most of the snapshots he looked like a teenager, which I supposed he was. Yet, in almost every one, he had either a cigarette or a beer, or both, in his hand.
After going over all of the photos, I pawed through the other papers. Some I read carefully, like my dad’s first military orders, the ones that told him he’d be going to war. I couldn’t imagine getting a letter like that. Next I found mom and dad’s marriage licence. It wasn’t all that interesting to look at. Until I saw the date on it.
Instantly, I dug for my birth certificate. Something wasn’t right. The dates on both of these important-looking, official things caused me to do some simple arithmetic. The answer shocked me so much that I did the calculations over two more times.
There was no other way to explain it. I was a bastard!
I had been born on July 11th, 1942. My mom and dad had only been married on Valentine’s Day of that same year. That meant Mom had already carried me for four months before they got married. And that meant that I was a bastard. A child made, as I had heard adults say, out of wedlock.
After my heart quit thumping from the shock, I quickly put everything back into the envelope so it looked the same as before I dumped it out, and then I buried it exactly where I had found it in the trunk. I had stumbled on a secret that I knew I wasn’t supposed to know about. Because, I thought, if I were supposed to know about it, then someone would have told me. And now it was a secret that I would also have to keep. I didn’t want anyone to find out I was a baby who wasn’t wanted.
The bombshell caused me to wonder about my life, about who I really was. I wondered, if I wasn’t wanted as a baby, if I should even be part of this family, especially now that Gramp was gone. Part of me thought everything that was spinning around in my brain was just too confusing. I felt like I needed to get away from the jumble in my head.
I also felt hurt. After all, I wasn’t wanted! Running away seemed like the only thing to do. But, then I thought of Nan. Running away was selfish. Nan needed me. There was too much work for an old lady like her to do. I had to take Gramp’s place. Wood needed chopping. The furnace needed tending. It had already snowed heavily again and again over the past few weeks, and the sidewalk and the path up to the front of the house needed shovelling off.
I slipped into my slippers right then and there, and, putting on my housecoat, went downstairs. I had one foot down the next set of stairs into the basement when Nan came out of the living room.
“Where are you going, Buddy?”
I was almost too worked up to speak. I was on a mission. “I thought I’d better go stoke the furnace. See if there’s a clinker that needs to be taken out,” I answered.
“No, Son,” she said. “If you’re too sick to go to school, you’re too sick to do chores. Just like you’re too sick to see Riel and Mokey.”
It was hard to argue with her. I pulled my foot back up from the basement stairs to the kitchen.
“You have to stay upstairs in bed until your mom gets home from work, just like you’ve been doing. And also just like you’ve been doing, you’ll get dressed when she gets home, so she won’t tear another strip off me for letting you stay away from school. After all, you’re home from school because you’re sick. Right?”
“I guess,” I answered.
“Well, sick people stay in bed, so get upstairs and get to bed.”
“But, I just wanted to help out.” I heard that familiar whine sneak into my voice.
“And you will help out. I’ll look forward to your help—when you’re better. Now upstairs you go.”
“But it’s like a prison up there,” I said.
“Then maybe you’re better, and you should get dressed and get to school. Army wants you back. Riel and Mokey want you back. It’s coming on lunchtime. You could be back to school in time for afternoon classes.”
She knew that wasn’t at all what I wanted, and so didn’t say a word when I went back upstairs and climbed into bed instead, quietly closing the bedroom door behind me.
I was sure the girls hadn’t been at school for more than an hour the next morning when I heard a knock on the front door. I had already flopped down on Mom’s bed, as usual still in my pyjamas, and was trying to decide between reading or doing some drawing.
I heard Nan open the door, and then heard the visitor speak.
“Good morning, Shorty.”
In just those three words I recognized the voice, and a zap of energy screamed through my body faster than any lightning bolt.
“Hello, Army,” answered Nan. “Thanks for coming. You know how much I need your help.”
Thanks for coming? She had invited him here? I didn’t know when she could have done that. I hadn’t heard her talking to him about it on the telephone.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” said Army. “So if it’s okay, I’ll get right to it.”
Get right to it? What did that mean? He had to be here because of me, I thought. But what was he planning to do to me?
“He’s upstairs, in the room to your right. Don’t bother taking off your things if you’re short on time,” Nan said.
The traitor had just given vital information to the enemy, allowing him to do a full frontal assault. I had to choose whether to defend my position or retreat. But, I had nothing to defend myself with. I was wearing pyjamas, and there wasn’t even a cap gun in the room.
So I retreated, to the only place I could think of. I scrambled off the bed and ducked under it!
Mom was great at looking after herself. She had always been a beautiful woman, and when she got all dolled-up, she was probably the most gorgeous woman in town. But, I realized why Nan and Aunt Bud complained about her housekeeping skills. Under the bed there must have been a half-a-foot of dust. Mixed with feathers from her down comforter and pillows, it was enough to make me immediately begin to sneeze.
Each sneeze caused my head to bob up and bounce into the wire thatching that made up the springs on which the mattress sat. The jagged edges of the springs kept poking into my scalp, like I was being pecked by a Bantam rooster.
Then I heard Army’s footsteps on the stairway. Actually, they were more like boot-steps. I knew that in the wintertime, he wore bombardier boots. They were the same kind that airmen had worn in the Second World War when they went on a bombing mission, and they were huge things, with rubber bottoms and leather uppers. Lined with sheepskin, you could wear your shoes inside them, or at least put on one or two pairs of heavy wool socks. Heavy-duty laces cinched up the front. Army always left his good shoes at school and changed from his boots into them when he arrived from his daily walk from across the tracks. The clump, clump reached the top of the stairs.
From under the bed I saw the door to the bedroom open, and two massive boot toes, with snow melting off them, looked in at me.
“He’s not here, Pearl,” Army called to Nan downstairs.
Another sneeze, followed by a bonk of the head on the mattress springs, gave me away.
“Never mind, I found him,” he added.
I rubbed my head where I had been poked.
“Okay, Buddy.” His voice bounced around the room. “I know you’re under the bed. Come on out.”
I didn’t move and tried not to sneeze.
“Buddy, you have officially become a problem,” he said. “I cannot look the other way any longer. You have missed far too much school. You simply cannot miss anymore. The powers-that-be will not tolerate it, and nor will I.”
I wondered who or what he meant by powers-that-be. Surely it wasn’t the Red Witch.
“Lucky for you, young man, I am a problem solver.”
Right away, I was worried what his solution to my being a problem would be. I sneezed again.
“Here’s how all of this is going to end,” he continued. “After you prove to me that there is a real body attached to that sneeze, I am going to leave and go back to work. Your grandmother will help you get ready, and then you will come to school on your own steam in time for classes after lunch.”
In other words, I thought, my punishment was going to be that I had to face the Red Witch.
“That is the way it is going to be. Do you understand?”
I stayed curled up in the farthest corner under the bed, and pinched my nose so I wouldn’t sneeze again. I felt like a coward.
The boots moved from the doorway, leaving a puddle behind them. They walked their way around to the side of the bed. I watched from the corner of my cave as what little water there was left on them slid onto the floor. Everything was now very, very quiet.
What happened next caused me to panic so badly I almost screamed. My bladder was ready to scream, too. Army got down on his hands and knees next to the bed. His suit trousers soaked up the water off his boots, but his pressed pants getting wet wasn’t what scared me.
It was as though some hairy beast was at the door to my cave and was going to reach in and scoop me out with huge claws. It might then start ripping my guts out and gnaw on my bones, even before I died.
I hadn’t seen Army wear his winter outfit since the last year, so I wasn’t ready for what looked in at me. His uncle had apparently been a Mountie stationed in the Arctic for a spell, and when he died, he left Army his RCMP buffalo coat. It was a massive thing, with the buffalo’s hump becoming the coat’s collar. When he stood, the rest of the animal would drape down to below Army’s knees. But, here on his hands and knees, almost the entire coat hung over him and spread onto the floor.
As if that needed anything added to it, my principal and arithmetic teacher was wearing a beaver hat on his head. It was the kind that had four flaps to it, ones that could be tied up so that the furry hat perched on his head. Or, the flaps could be dropped down to cover the ears, the back of the neck, and also the forehead—when it got really, really cold. All the flaps except the front one were down.
His whole outfit reminded me of a woolly mammoth, which we had learned in Science had gone extinct thousands or millions of years ago. Yet, somehow it was there, in Mom’s room, pawing beside her bed.
“Okay, Buddy,” the mammoth growled. “That’s enough of this. It’s getting silly. Come on out from there.”
I didn’t move. I could feel tears coming on.
“Talk to me. You know you have to come back to school, don’t you?”
Finally I had words. “I guess,” I said quietly. It was the best answer I could offer.
“So just come out and get dressed. I’ll walk with you to school. Okay?”
“But, I don’t want to go back,” I managed to spit out.
“Why, Buddy?”
It took me a while, but I finally I said it. “Because of her.”
“You mean Miss Ruby?”
“Yes.”
“Look, Buddy. I have talked to her. She knows you have had a hard time of it, what with losing your granddad. She is sorry about that, just like I am. I am sure you will find her easier to get along with when you come back.”
“She won’t change,” I said.
“Well, I will be there to help keep an eye on things for you. I promise I will look after you.”
I thought it was kind of a funny thing for him to say again, because even right then, one of his eyes was looking at me, while his googly eye was noticing the springs on the underside of Mom’s bed.
“So what do you say? Do we have a deal?” he asked.
“She still won’t call me by my name though, will she?”
“Maybe not, Buddy. But you are man enough to ignore that, aren’t you? I’m sure your granddad thought so.”
He had said the magic words that seemed to open my heart and my mind.
Gramp would think I was man enough to get by this, to grow up and ignore her, and take on any other problems that might come along. I had to go back to school for him more than anyone.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay what?” Army asked.
“I’ll come back to school.”
“Good. Now, I will go downstairs and get your grandmother to make me a cup of tea, while you hurry up and get ready.”
“No,” I said.
“No? What do you mean, ‘No’?”
I could see sweat starting to drip off the mammoth’s nose. He must have been awfully warm with all that stuff on.
“I don’t want to walk to school with you. The kids will think I’m under arrest or something.”
“Alright, but you promise me you will come back to school.”
“I promise,” I said. And I intended to keep it.
Gramp had told me that a promise meant that you kept your word, and that you never, ever went back on your word. I knew that saying what I had just said meant I would have to face the Red Witch again. There was no way of getting around that.
“Okay then. See, I told you I was a problem solver. Now let’s both you and me consider this problem solved—for good! Okay?”
“Okay,” I agreed.
The mammoth groaned as it stood. I could see the bottom of its coat sway a bit, and then the boots turned and the monstrous animal left the room.
Nan was not happy when I refused to go to school after lunch. I figured I could squeeze out one more afternoon of not having to face Miss Ruby, without breaking my promise to Army. I had promised him I would go back to school, but I didn’t say when.
She swore that she’d get Mom to stay home from work, and that she and Mom would march with me right down the road and up the school steps to the principal’s office if I tried to get out of going the next morning.
Mom joined with Nan, in no uncertain terms, when she got home from work. “You’ll damn well go tomorrow morning, Buddy Williams! You’ve missed far too much school. You’ve even missed the start of your new hockey season. It’s a wonder that your friends even remember your name. If your grandmother and I have to take you by an ear each, you will be in your desk at school before it starts tomorrow. Do you understand, young man?”
I did. I just hadn’t been ready to go that afternoon. I needed, as Gramp would holler to a pitcher that wasn’t doing well on the mound, to get my head in the game.
Part of what made it easier to think of going back was the idea of getting to fool around with Riel and Mokey. I had really missed my buddies. I also missed school. Truth be known, I missed learning.
In the blue-grey of a new day, not long after a winter’s dawn, with a cloud-plugged sky the colour of steel, I trudged towards Riverview Elementary School. My mood of feeling whipped held me back from skating on the snow-packed road the way I usually did in my moccasins, which were laced up tightly almost to my knees. The air was so cold that my breath became ice crystals as soon as it left my mouth. Even though I was wrapped in extra socks, long underwear, and corduroy pants, with my heavy parka overtop a sweater and my flannel shirt, and my mitts, a wool scarf and wool toque covering the rest of my parts, I was shivering inside. I hadn’t been outside for over a month. But, I knew that my feeling so cold could mostly be from fear.
I was both scared and a little bit excited, hoping I was ready for the good—and probably some bad—things that might happen to me at Riverview.
I watched giant snowflakes fall gently through the bitterly cold morning, and I tried catching the huge frozen feathers, each with its own wonderful design that only Nature could create, on my tongue. They were smothering my world. It was a world that I knew would never be the same.
It was only months earlier, yet another world away, that I had sat in the warm waters of my lake feeling that life couldn’t get any better. Now here I was, wondering if life could ever show me happiness again.
Things had been a mix of good and bad since school started. Writing about the Red Witch had filled up whole pages in a notebook, listing the bad things. Because of her, I didn’t like school anymore, a place I had always considered to be like a second home. I also blamed her for my clobbering Myron and getting suspended.
Then there was the huge loss of Gramp. He was gone and I didn’t know how I was going to get along without him. I felt like I had started to get past his just being my grandfather, a man responsible for guiding me through the rough spots. He had definitely become more like a father.
Maybe it was during our talk on the rock at Pelican Lake near the end of summer that a change had happened. I wasn’t sure. I just knew that ever since then, whether he was showing me how to clean my gun or teaching me shoot, or doing anything at all with me, I felt like he was as much a father as anything. Maybe it was because he was starting to treat me more like a grown up, showing me how to be a man.
I guessed that I would have to be a man from then on. After all, I was the only one of them living in the house now.
While I had mostly been getting along okay with my family, including Pearl, it was time spent with Gramp that would more than fill up another notebook of good things. Above all, there was that wonderful day of hunting with him and Del. That day when he could have shot the pheasant he had always wanted to shoot, and when I got to take my first Mallard duck. That day when Gramp finally met Joe Starblanket, and then unselfishly gave the young Indian his old shotgun. Nothing could have been more perfect.
It had all been snatched from me, faster than a strong wind could blow away fallen and dried leaves from the base of a poplar tree. He was gone. My Gramp and I would never again go hunting or fishing. He would never again watch me play baseball or hockey, or walk with me to the ballpark to watch my Beavers win. Never again.
For now, the best I could do was to make my way through a winter wonderland on the way back to school, a place I had used to love but wasn’t sure I could enjoy again. Down the middle of the road that stretched out ahead, I seemed to float through the silver frosted light. Behind me, falling snow filled my lonely footprints, and they disappeared from sight. The bone-chilling cold had an unfamiliar bite.
I needed to make things right.