A blank landscape.
My hand, holding a Laurentien coloured pencil in Emerald Green, pauses at the lower right-hand corner of the page. What should I draw? All around me, kids are hunched over their desks. Grumbling, furtively farting, whispering to each other, humming softly as they work at their own pieces of art.
It’s hard to concentrate because the teacher is somewhere in the back of the room. This is Sister George Mary’s Grade 6 class, and there’s no tomfoolery permitted. When Kenny Richard catches my eye from across the aisle, pulls a booger from his nose, and pretends to flick it in my direction, Sister George launches towards him.
Sister George wears a hooded head cowling and floor-length black skirt, and glides up the aisle like a condor. Bending over, she hisses in Kenny’s ear and writes his name on her clipboard. He’s earned another five points in The Minute Club. Ha ha. He gives me that look, like he’s gagging. Every time one of us gets caught communicating with a classmate, Sister George fines us five minutes. Every two weeks, you have to stay after school and work off the fine. After four detentions, you get the strap. When someone takes the long walk down to the principal’s office, accompanied by the teacher, the entire school gets as quiet as Sing Sing prison during an electrocution. Everyone sits there, exchanging anticipatory monkey grimaces, waiting for the sound of the leather belt to come echoing up the waxed hallway.
St. Ignatius School is in the south end of Winnipeg, at the corner of Stafford Street and Corydon Avenue. Just a few blocks north of the school is the genteel, wooded neighbourhood of River Heights, where the large century-old homes are occupied by lawyers, doctors, and judges, many of whom are Anglican or United Church and are unfortunately going to Hell. South of the school is the poorer, working-class neighbourhood of Fort Rouge, where the crooked old wood-frame houses are filled with large Italian immigrant families, many of whom are rosary-clutching church-goers going to Heaven. Or at least the women are.
When it’s my turn to serve 6:45 mass I walk to church in the bitter cold, sharing that desolate time of morning with the frozen elms, a million stars, and perhaps a furtive wild creature or two – a cottontail rabbit darting through the fresh snow, pausing to perk its ears and look back at me – and when I get to church those Italian mothers are always there in their black veils, kneeling. They’re praying, no doubt, for their wayward sons, my enemies. Their sons tend to be thin sulky boys who smoke cigarettes and fight with their feet, dancing around like fighting cocks. One of the worst is Raymond Cantafio, who weighs about eighty pounds, stands about four foot ten, and has hair like a matinee idol. Many times I’ve seen Raymond Cantafio slap the faces of boys twice his size, slap their faces back and forth, trying to goad them to fight. And once, while walking home, I had the grave misfortune of running into Raymond Cantafio in a back lane. For an entire city block I edged along backwards, walleyed with terror, while Raymond hissed and feinted at me like a ferret.
Boys like Raymond and his friends make certain streets into no-go zones. But like the cagey citizen of some bombed-out European city, I know safe routes through the various enclaves. Some of my friends are rich, from Yale Avenue, and some are poor, from Garwood. Some are feeble and some are tough. Some are good in school and some are so dumb that you have to wonder if they’re retarded. (Danny Barton, for example, shot himself in the leg with a .22 pistol to impress a girl.) I’m sort of in-between. I’m not the most uncoordinated boy in the school yard, nor am I an athlete who gets picked first for baseball teams. My father is a senior bureaucrat with the city, so he makes a good salary. But my parents are raising a family of seven kids, so we’re kind of poor anyway. We live in a tract-house neighbourhood seven blocks west of the school. The post-war economy is humming, and my street, Mulvey Avenue, is sort of a suburban battery farm – long rows of temperature-regulated boxes churning out small human beings like me.
It’s Sister George’s task to whip us into shape, but art class is not high on her list of educational priorities. Art class can only encourage us to screw open the lids of our fetid little minds, and what good can come of that? She’d rather have us do something useful, like long division. Or, if she’s in a good mood, she’ll permit a spelling bee. Today, she’s definitely not in a good mood. I have a bruised lip to attest to that. At lunch hour, when we were all stampeding back to class, I stopped for a drink at the water fountain. Sister George glided up and whacked me in the back of the head, driving my upper lip into the chromium steel of the spigot. “Woe betide,” she exclaimed, “if you’re not back to class in one second.” I should have known better, trying to drink water after the bell had rung. But Sister George’s bloody willingness to always ratchet up the tension one more notch fills most of us with a fearful respect. This is a woman who, without too much provocation, would probably drive spikes through our heads and cook us for dinner.
On Sister George’s desk at the front of the room, a plastic desk radio issues the rackety piano music of the CBC’s weekly Manitoba School Broadcasts. The announcer has the sweet maternal voice of Miss Roma Harpell, the hostess of a television show called Romper Room. I don’t think it’s actually Miss Roma, but it sounds like her. She sounds like the sort of woman who thinks that children are bunnies, full of bright ideas and sweet affections. As Kenny would have it, she’s fucked in the head. But I’d rather spend the next hour listening to Miss Roma than Sister George. So I cooperate with all of Miss Roma’s instructions. As the piano murmurs gently in the background, her cooing voice issues our marching orders. Now children, put your heads down on your desks and close your eyes. That’s right, nice and tight! Now just be very quiet…and dream that we’re drifting in the vast darkness of space. Look at that lovely blue planet over there! How pretty it is! Look at the many green continents, so magical and different! What faraway lands will you visit today?
Somewhere behind me a yardstick whacks a desk. “Close your eyes!” bellows Sister George.
It’s the same battle in every art class. The girls close their eyes. The boys refuse. We cooperate to the extent of laying our heads on our arms, but closing your eyes is for sissies. If Sister George prowls past, I scrunch my eyes shut, but open them again as soon as she’s past. Sneakily, with my head down, I peer out the window and try to decide what faraway land I’m going to visit today. Outside, the snow is falling, a grey winter afternoon somewhere in the long march from Christmas to Easter. As long as Sister George doesn’t catch me, I can spend long minutes thinking up my magical land, lulled into a dream by the hypnotic motion of the falling snow.
You’re allowed to sit up straight when you’re ready to start drawing. Having selected my destination, I draw a green wavy line across my blank sheet of paper. Using the sides of the pencil, I fill in the contours with olive greens and smoky blues, creating a prospect of distant hills. Above the hills, a hazy sky. With a check mark I create a cruising eagle. I’m fairly serious about art class. If I had my choice, this is what I would do all day. All my textbooks are disfigured with little sketches. With the money that my aunt gave me for Christmas, I sent away for a book called Learn to Draw with Jon Gnagy. I’ve learned some tricks from Jon Gnagy. For example, he’s got this trick where you can draw any animal with a series of interlocking circles. But constructing animals from circles is not as interesting as dreaming up a picture – staring at a blank page, then scrawling a horizon line, a pale sky, a drifting eagle. You feel as if a new world is coming to life under your fingertips. It’s like being God.
Actually, it’s not like being God. You can burn in Purgatory for thinking like that. In my desk I have a comic book called Chuck White, Catholic Boy. Each issue tells a story about a dilemma in Chuck’s life and how he solved it. The latest issue talks about Purgatory, and all the good works Chuck performs whenever he catches himself thinking sinful thoughts, like comparing himself to God. As every Catholic knows, there are two types of punishments awaiting sinners in the afterlife. Purgatory is the penalty for venial sins, like coveting your neighbour’s bicycle or thinking impure thoughts. If you act on your thoughts – steal your neighbour’s bicycle, for example, or feel up a girl – you commit a different class of offence, a mortal sin, and get sent to Hell, which is a maximum security institution from which there is no escape. Chuck White, Catholic Boy doesn’t talk much about Hell, because what’s to say? Hell is like a big penitentiary, full of screaming people who are on fire. Hell is a conversation-stopper. The only insurance against going there, after committing a mortal, is to get yourself immediately to Confession. But that doesn’t always work. Chuck had a friend who French-necked with a girl, and on their way to church they were run over by a cement truck.
Chuck reduces his earned time in Purgatory by performing good works, which earn rewards, called indulgences. Indulgences can be applied to one’s own Purgatory sentence or transferred to someone else’s. They’re like Old Dutch points. The black-veiled Italian ladies who attend 6:4 5 mass every morning are earning major indulgences, which they transfer to their no-good sons. The biggest indulgence of all is called a Plenary Indulgence, and it pretty much buys you a permanent licence to commit mortals. Whenever Chuck feels a gnawing worry that he’s building up a lot of Purgatory time, he performs good works and keeps track of his indulgences with an easy-to-use reward schedule at the back of his Holy Catechism book. Let’s say he attends first Friday mass for a year. Right away, he can look it up on the chart – One Year of Attending Mass on First Friday – 412 years off.
Still, it’s probably easier to avoid blaspheming God in the first place by comparing your art-class drawings to His mighty works. Choosing a pencil of Mediterranean Blue, I grind the tip in my little pencil sharpener and set to work creating a lake in the foreground, and a red canoe. Two people are paddling the canoe across the lake, a boy and a girl. They’re not thinking impure thoughts; they’re just paddling a canoe. Choosing my trusty green pencil again I create a foreshore, and a yellow cottage. From force of habit I draw a ribbon of white smoke slanting up from the chimney. The CBC lady has conducted her invocation well. Scribbling madly with the coloured pencil, I’m no longer sitting in Sister George’s class. It’s not winter any more. It’s a warm summer afternoon, and I’m walking through the meadow to our cottage. I can feel the prickly grass under my bare feet, and I can smell the lake.