Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (21 page)

Nobody said a word this time, they all bent and stripped themselves. Eva, naked first, started running across the field, and then all the others ran, all five of them running bare through the knee-high hot grass, running towards the river. Not caring now about being caught but in fact leaping and yelling to call attention to themselves, if there was anybody to hear or see. They felt as if they were going to jump off a cliff and fly. They felt that something was happening to them different from anything that had happened before, and it had to do with the boat, the water, the sunlight, the dark ruined station, and each other. They thought of each other now hardly as names or people, but as echoing shrieks, reflections, all bold and white and loud and scandalous, and as fast as arrows. They went running without a break into the cold water and when it came almost to the tops of their legs they fell on it and swam. It stopped their noise. Silence, amazement, came over them in a rush. They dipped and floated and separated, sleek as mink.

Eva stood up in the water her hair dripping, water running down her face. She was waist deep. She stood on smooth stones, her feet fairly wide apart, water flowing between
her legs. About a yard away from her Clayton also stood up, and they were blinking the water out of their eyes, looking at each other. Eva did not turn or try to hide; she was quivering from the cold of the water, but also with pride, shame, boldness, and exhilaration.

Clayton shook his head violently, as if he wanted to bang something out of it, then bent over and took a mouthful of river water. He stood up with his cheeks full and made a tight hole of his mouth and shot the water at her as if it was coming out of a hose, hitting her exactly, first one breast and then the other. Water from his mouth ran down her body. He hooted to see it, a loud self-conscious sound that nobody would have expected, from him. The others looked up from wherever they were in the water and closed in to see.

Eva crouched down and slid into the water, letting her head go right under. She swam, and when she let her head out, downstream, Carol was coming after her and the boys were already on the bank, already running into the grass, showing their skinny backs, their white, flat buttocks. They were laughing and saying things to each other but she couldn't hear, for the water in her ears.

“What did he do?” said Carol.

“Nothing.”

They crept in to shore. “Let's stay in the bushes till they go,” said Eva. “I hate them anyway. I really do. Don't you hate them?”

“Sure,” said Carol, and they waited, not very long, until they heard the boys still noisy and excited coming down to the place a bit upriver where they had left the boat. They heard them jump in and start rowing.

“They've got all the hard part, going back,” said Eva, hugging herself and shivering violently. “Who cares? Anyway. It never was our boat.”

“What if they tell?” said Carol.

“We'll say it's all a lie.”

Eva hadn't thought of this solution until she said it,
but as soon as she did she felt almost light-hearted again. The ease and scornfulness of it did make them both giggle, and slapping themselves and splashing out of the water they set about developing one of those fits of laughter in which, as soon as one showed signs of exhaustion, the other would snort and start up again, and they would make helpless—soon genuinely helpless—faces at each other and bend over and grab themselves as if they had the worst pain.

Executioners
 

What was that to cry about? I don't know if I cried, I don't remember. I became familiar with sidewalks, and the ground under trees, neutral things that I could look down at, meaning no offense. I did marvel at the way some people managed, not being pulled down by anything—not by having crossed eyes, or a little brother who was an idiot, or living in a dirty house beside the tracks. I was the opposite, thin-skinned as Robina said. I expected blame.

Good-bye Helena

Good-bye Helena

Good-bye Helena

Good-bye Helena

They used to bunch behind me walking down the school hill. Sweet voices they had, just on the edge of sincerity, deadly innocence. If I had known what to do, if I had known how to turn around. That can't be taught. It's a gift, like being able to carry a tune.

My clothes were strange, that was one thing. A navy blue tunic, resembling the uniforms worn at private schools. (Where my mother would have sent me, certainly, if she had had the money.) Long white stockings, winter and summer, never mind the mud on our road. In the winter they showed the lumpy folds of the long underwear I was compelled to wear underneath. On top of my head a large bow, sticking
up in ironed points. My hair in ringlets, put in with a comb dipped in water, not a style favored by anybody else. But what could I have worn that would have been right? Once I got a new winter coat, which I thought lovely. It had a squirrel collar.
Rat fur, rat fur, skinned a rat and wore the fur!
they called after me. After that I didn't like the fur, didn't like the touch of it; something too soft about it, private, humiliating.

I used to look for places to hide. In buildings, in big public buildings I looked for little high windows, dark places. The old Bank of Commerce building had a tower I was fond of. I imagined myself hiding there, or in any small high-up room, safe in the middle of town, disregarded, forgotten. Except that somebody could come at night and bring me food.

It was true about my father. But he was usually away, taking a cure, resting in a sanatorium, traveling. Before I was born he had been a Member of Parliament. He suffered a great defeat in 1911, the year Laurier went out. Much later, when I learned about Reciprocity, I discovered that this defeat had been only a corner of a national calamity (if indeed you were inclined to see it as a calamity), but when I was a child I always believed that my father had been personally, tauntingly, shamefully rejected. My mother likened the event to the Crucifixion. He had come out on the balcony of the Queen's Hotel, to speak, to concede his defeat, and was prevented, jeered down, by Tories carrying brooms on fire. I had no idea, hearing this, that such were the scenes politicians sometimes have to face. My mother dated his downfall from this time. Though she did not specify what form the downfall took. Alcoholic was not a word spoken in our house; I don't believe it was spoken much anywhere, at that time. Drunk was the word used, but that was in the town.

My mother would no longer shop in this town, except for groceries, which she had Robina order by phone. She would not speak to various ladies, wives of taunters and Tories.

I will never darken their door
.

That was what she would say about a church, a store, somebody's house.

“He was too
fine
for them.”

She had nobody but Robina to say these things to. But Robina was satisfactory, in a way. She was a person with her own list of people not to be spoken to, stores not to be entered.

“They're all ignorant around here. It's them ought to be swept out with a broom.”

And she would start telling about some injustice done to her brothers Jimmy and Duval, accused of stealing when they were only trying to see how a flashlight worked.

Past the buildings in town I had to walk a mile on a straight country road. Our house was at the end of it, a big brick house with bay windows upstairs and down. They always looked unpleasant to me, swollen out like insects' eyes. I was glad when they tore that house down, years later; they turned our land into the Municipal Airport. Along the road there were only two or three other houses. One of them was Stump Troy's.

Stump Troy was a bootlegger, who had lost his legs in an accident at Ryan's Mill. It was said that the Ryan family supported his bootlegging and kept him out of trouble, so that he would not bring a lawsuit against them. Certainly he flourished as a bootlegger and was never interfered with by anybody. He had a son Howard, who came to school now and then—no knowing by whose whim—and was put in whatever class had room for him, seated at the
back with empty seats around him if possible so that no mother could complain. No truant officer, if there was such a thing as a truant officer then, can have bothered with this case. In those days it was expected, even necessary, that people should stay as they were and not be improved or changed. Teachers would make jokes about Howard Troy in his presence and absence, and it was never thought odd or cruel. Beyond that they let him alone.

During one of his sessions at school he was in our class, sitting diagonally behind me, and I did him a favor, which afterwards and even at the time I knew to be a mistake. We were copying from the board. Howard Troy was not copying. He was sitting without a pencil or a paper, doing nothing at all. He came to school without any equipment. Carrying pencils, paper, erasers, crayons, would have been as unlikely for him as growing feathers. He was looking straight ahead, maybe looking at the board trying to read or make sense of what was written there, maybe not looking at anything. What was he thinking? It bothered me to wonder. I didn't like to think of him being still there, underneath, looking out, through all the things, the stupidity and ugliness, that had been put onto him and accepted by him and were so firmly believed in it would not matter now if they were really there at all. I did not think that he was like me, I did not go that far, I was just afraid of him in a way it had not occurred to me to be afraid before.

His eyes were the color of a cat's. They were round, clear, close together.

I opened my scribbler in the middle, so that I could detach a page without tearing anything, and I passed this back to him along with a sharpened pencil. He did not reach to take them. I laid them on his desk. He did not thank me or take any notice, but I saw later that he was at least using the pencil on the paper—whether to copy from the board or draw pictures or just make wire-rolls of O's, I have no idea.

That was the mistake, the thing that brought me to his attention, as well as the accident—no accident, it seemed to me!—of our living on the same road. I needed to be taught a lesson. He may have thought that. For presumption. For condescension. Or he may have seen the glimmer of a novel, interesting, surprising weakness.