Real Life (9 page)

When she stepped outside carrying her bag of groceries, she saw that it had begun to snow again, as if the town were not virtually buried in snow already. In mid-February the previous winter a newly arrived teacher had simply packed up and left in the middle of the night. It was the snow, old Mrs. Warkentine, Astrid’s neighbour who’d been boarding him, told her when Astrid was out shovelling the sidewalk in front of her small frame house. She told Astrid that he’d said he felt like he was suffocating, like they’d all be buried alive.

“Shouldn’t of come up here in the first place,” the old lady told her. “Everybody knows we get six-eight feet of snow winters.”

Putting her two pork chops in the fridge and the wilted head of pale lettuce in the sink to be washed and, hopefully, crisped, she thought of the trouble this new proclamation would cause.
Since she’d been here, the two churches had banded together to have all the Harry Potter books taken out of the school library and then they had gone through all the school’s board games and library shelves to weed out every game or book that had anything in it they thought might fall under the rubric of “occult.” Even the C. S. Lewis books had gone. Earlier, they had tried but failed to stop the teaching about dinosaurs and the big bang theory of creation. The provincial Department of Education had gotten involved in that one. Everybody not a member of either church was contemptuous of them, but in this very isolated community there were enough of them to wield considerable power. Troubled, she decided to call Warren to see how he thought the teachers ought to handle the decree.

“Oh, yes, I heard it a couple of weeks ago,” he told her. “But as there’s nothing we can do about it, I put it in my report to the director of ed, and I haven’t heard a word since.”

“I’m afraid that the children, the young ones anyway, will be upset by it,” she said. She could read his lack of reaction only as indifference, and added stiffly, “I feel I need some way of approaching this with my class. Something that won’t offend the families involved, but that will calm at least those children who go to a different church.” Before he could reply, she threw in, “I seem to be the last to hear.”

“No, no,” he said quickly, ever the diplomat, so that she knew the other teachers had indeed been talking about it. Her fault, she knew, because she avoided going into the staff room. “Word just started leaking out the last few days.” There was another silence. She suggested, “The local school board?”

“Half of them are members of that church,” he said. “They’d just tell us to shut down the school and go home and pray.” He laughed, and in the sound, careless and distant, she thought she heard annoyance at her and, surprising herself, she
felt exasperation, where up until now, no matter what she’d seen happen, or been told about events in the community, she’d felt nothing, was barely interested. And there’d been some stunning events: a proven case of incest, and last winter, a murder-suicide on an isolated farm. Does this mean I’m getting better? she wondered, and wondered too at her own odd choice of language, as if she’d been ill, although she hadn’t. Warren said, “I’ll think about it, and let you know on Monday what I’ve come up with.”

As she was turning her pork chop in the frying pan she saw through her frosted kitchen window that the snow was still coming down, if anything, thicker than it had been earlier. Everybody was saying it had been years since there’d been so much snow, something to do with global warming, they said. She sighed, thinking of her sidewalk that this winter required cleaning almost every day. But when she rose early to shovel away the snow, she was sometimes rewarded by seeing a moose on the street. Even bears were said to occasionally wander out of the forest into the village, and unseen wolves howled eerily at sundown most days.

She was sitting down to her meal when the phone rang. It seldom rang, she’d had it connected only to be available for school business, and for a moment she thought she wouldn’t answer it. But it might be Warren calling back with some new information—maybe the pastor had called off his proclamation—and she rose and lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

After a moment a distant voice said, “Yes?” Astrid could barely hear this through the heavy, monotonous humming on the line, nor could she tell if the voice was male or female. She thought that it must be long distance, but she’d cut all her ties to the south by going away without telling anyone she. was leaving. She’d pointed the car west, having a vague desire for
the mountains, but she passed through them without finding the courage to let the car sail out over a canyon, or to crash it into a rock wall. Once through them, she’d turned north and kept driving until she’d reached the road’s end at this village of tumbling-down frame shacks, mostly deserted except for those lived in by widows too old to manage any more on their tiny farms, and with the massive, dark spruce forest pushing at its borders. Here she’d rented her little house from a local farmer and moved in, telling no one where she was. All the other teachers, in love with the north as they said, lived on acreages out in the forest or in log houses on the edge of the nearby lake.

Only Lucy Gonnick knew where she was and that was a coincidence: Lucy’s husband and a friend on a fishing trip at the lake a hundred miles from here where Astrid had happened to be in the lodge, treating herself to a fresh fish dinner after one of her solitary tramps. But this didn’t sound like Lucy. Or did it?

“Hello?” she repeated. There was a long, crackling silence. The voice asked, ‘Are … all right?”

“Who is this?”

“… worry …” was all she could extract from the static of the reply. Then the line went dead. Frowning, Astrid hung up the phone and went back to her dinner.

“Astrid? Is it you? So this is where you are!” Tom Gonnick had blurted. Then he’d blushed, as if it had just dawned on him that she wasn’t glad to see him.

“How is everybody?” she’d asked, struggling to keep her voice even, meaning Lucy and the Woodwards, the two couples she and Donald had been friends with.

“Everybody’s fine,” he said. “Darcy starts college this fall …” Lucy and Astrid were the same age, thirty-eight, but Lucy and Tom had three children, while Donald and Astrid, meeting and
marrying late, had put off having children. Their joy in each other felt complete, they told each other, children could wait. And now, she had left only her memory of him. Tom had fallen silent, brushing one hand over his thinning hair, puzzled and uncomfortable. She didn’t ask him to sit down. “You should write,” he said. “I mean—Donald—” She’d gazed steadily at him. His voice trailed away.

“It’s better this way, Tom,” she said. He’d stared down at her for a moment more, then gone away.

At Donald’s funeral, small, blonde Lucy had wept so hard, her face smeared with tears she couldn’t seem to stop, that Tom had to take her home. Astrid remembered Lucy’s blue eyes peering questioningly into hers, but little else about the funeral. Only that she was angry with Lucy for her excessive, even histrionic display, when Astrid herself had been unable to weep a tear, had felt that tears were for the merely brokenhearted, while she was beyond sadness, beyond even despair; she was dead too, like Donald.

But Tom would ask the lodge owner where she’d come from, and would get the answer since she’d rented a cabin from him for the two-month hiatus from school. All through that short northern summer she’d hiked the woods around the lake. The old Indian who worked there had warned her about bears. He’d told her to sing or whistle when she was walking. “Don’t think of him when you walk,” he told her. “And never call him by name. Call him the Big One, so he won’t know you are thinking of him.”

At noon on Monday she went in search of Warren and found him in the gym refereeing a junior boys’ basketball game. When he saw her in the wide doorway, he gave his whistle to a boy and came to her. She knew she baffled him. He wanted his
staff to behave as if they were a family and she kept an unbending distance that he could find no way to breach. She saw him as shallow—doubtless he knew that too—although, she felt, amiable and probably decent-hearted enough.

Before long, nine teachers were crowded into his office, the six women seated on worn wooden stacking chairs, the three men leaning against the fake-pine walls. Dwayne Johansen, perhaps guessing what this emergency meeting was about, was the last to enter, bringing their number to ten. He was tall and very fair, and in the office’s unshaded overhead lights, Astrid wondered if he were paler than usual.

“Dwayne,” the principal said, “we’re going to need your help here.” Dwayne said nothing, folding his arms across his chest and staring down past the sharp press of his grey slacks to his polished black oxfords. The other men were wearing scuffed sneakers and shabby corduroy or denim pants. “As we all know, Pastor Vernon has told his parishioners that the world will end on Saturday night at 2:37 a.m.” The teachers glanced at each other, holding their faces straight. Somebody snickered. Dwayne nodded once, briskly, without taking his eyes off his shoes. “Mrs. Park, here,” Warren went on—oh, of course, he would lay responsibility at her door—”is concerned that this may upset the younger children and that we should have a strategy”— he looked at her when he said this—”to deal with it.”

“The school is unusually quiet today, I thought,” Raymond Carpentier, the exchange teacher from Quebec, remarked into the silence. He was a slight young man with a thin blond moustache, someone Astrid saw as like herself, although she didn’t define this. When they met on the street, they nodded once, then looked away without speaking.

“Yeah, it is,” Maisie Rolland said loudly. “I’m going to tell them that the world isn’t going to end and they should relax,
forget about it.” Dwayne Johansen suddenly lifted his head, the light striking his glasses so that his eyes appeared as two eerily shining shields in his face.

“You would be wrong,” he said. He lowered his head to let his gaze rest on each of their faces, his eyes sliding past Astrid as if she were beneath his notice. “I ask you to join us in the church Saturday night. We will spend what time is left in prayer there. In fact, we will spend each evening from now on in prayer at the church. You should all join us, for when the Lord sends his fire or his flood or his earthquake to rend this world from end to end, it will not go well with those of you who are unprepared.” There was a shocked silence. “Tell the children to come too. That’s what I intend to tell my class.” He sounded almost cheerful at this last comment.

When still nobody said anything, their eyes riveted on him, he turned and went out, shutting the door quietly behind him. They stirred then and turned back to Warren.

“Good thing he has grade twelves,” he said with an easy laugh. “They never listen to anything we tell them.”

Appalled, Astrid said, “He has no right to speak to them about his private beliefs! He must be stopped!” She’d been too vehement, she could feel the others carefully not looking at her.

Raymond Carpentier said gently, “Why don’t we tell them that different people have different beliefs, and that we—their teachers—don’t believe this.”

“It’s spreading, you know,” shy Joyce Rapchuck interjected. “The Dickensons told me they’d be there Saturday night. They said a lot of people were starting to think maybe they should be there too. Just in case, I guess.” She laughed in an embarrassed way, clasping her hands tightly and setting them on her lap.

Warren said, “Tell them that people are free to believe what they want, but that doesn’t mean they have to believe it. Tell
them most people don’t believe it, and they should just go on with things the way they always do. I’m sure most of them have already been told that at home.”

The teachers began to move out of the office. Astrid said quickly, “And how do we calm the little ones who are bound to be very frightened?”

“Uh, I’ll leave that up to you,” Warren said. He was rummaging in his desk, beginning to pile books he needed for his next class.

At 3:25, Astrid told her pupils to put away their notebooks and sit quietly because she wanted to talk to them. The ensuing clatter was brief, as if even these young children knew what was coming and were eager to hear it.

“You know that—” she began, when suddenly Erin Molloy raised her hand, her small face drained of colour. Astrid saw that she was ill, and said, “You run to the bathroom. Alice, go with her. I’ll be right there.” For an instant she’d thought this more urgent, but then, seeing the alarm on several of their faces, she hesitated. “Children,” she began, but her carefully prepared words had deserted her. She paused, then said softly, “Don’t be afraid. No one else in all of Canada thinks the world is going to end on Saturday.”

“The pastor said—” Jody Akinson began.

“I know that, Jody. But perhaps the pastor is wrong.” Jody shook her head slowly from side to side in denial, her stiff brown braids scraping each shoulder, her lips clamped tightly in imitation of someone, probably her mother.

“We’ll talk some more tomorrow,” Astrid told them. “Now sit quietly until the bell rings and then you may go.”

In the elementary girls’ bathroom Erin was kneeling at a toilet, still retching. Astrid dismissed Alice, soaked a handful of paper towels, and brought them to Erin, helping the child to sit
upright on the cold cement floor and wiping her face gently with the wet paper. “There, now,” she said. “You’re fine now. The Church of Holy Brethren is wrong, you know.” Astrid knew Erin’s family were Catholics. “Don’t listen to Jody,” she said. Deafeningly, the last bell of the day rang. Erin said, “I’m going to miss my bus.” She got slowly to her feet.

“Maybe I should get someone to drive you home?”

“I have to take the bus,” Erin said, twisting her hands, then moving to the door. She seemed steady enough, and colour was returning to her cheeks and lips. While she ran for her backpack, parka, and boots, Astrid hurried to the exit where a row of frosted and snow-covered yellow school buses sat idling, clouds of exhaust billowing up, partially obscuring them. Over the heads of jostling, running children she called through the opened doors to one of the drivers that Erin Molloy had just been ill.