The Wanton Troopers (18 page)

And it was in winter that the rodents became most numerous and bold. Often, in the evening while Judd lay on the cot and Kevin and Mary read or played checkers at the table, a mouse, attracted by the heat, crawled from behind the woodbox and scuttled across the room. Bellowing curses, Judd sprang to his feet, swooped on the broom and bounded after it. Kevin wanted to laugh at the incongruity of the spluttering, red-faced man stalking the timorous little animal, but the peeling, orange strap in the barn had taught it was dangerous to express amusement during his father's rages. The broom cracked against the floor with a report like a pistol shot, and the mouse darted into hiding beneath the cot. Judd sank to his knees and swung the broom handle under the cot like a boom. Worn-out shoes and unmatched rubbers were swept into the centre of the floor. Almost incoherent with fury Judd kicked the cot away . . . The mouse had disappeared. Tremulous and livid with anger and frustration, Judd replaced broom, shoes, rubbers, and cot and lay down, still muttering profanities. Within half an hour, the same mouse, or another, dashed from beneath the sink — and Judd again sprang for the broom.

He set traps and kept the orange cat in the house. There was rarely a morning on which the trap did not contain the broken, obscenely greasy corpse of a mouse. And, many times, the cat sprang on Judd's chest in the night and caterwauled until he awoke and examined his trophy. In winter, Kevin slept on a cot in the living room, to be nearer the fire, and he was sometimes wakened by the sound of his father's voice, crooning to the cat. “Nice old kitty,” Judd murmured in a stroking tone. “You is jist the best little old mouser in the world, ain't you, kitty?” He spoke to him in the throaty, slurring croak in which some women address babies, and, Kevin knew, he would have been appalled had he known that anyone other than the cat was listening . . .

But, despite brooms, cots, and traps, the mice waxed fat and multiplied, until they reminded Kevin of one of the plagues with which God had chastened the hardened heart of Pharaoh. They played havoc with the vegetables in the cellar, polluting a bushel for every pound they ate; they gnawed their way into the pantry and left hideous, disgusting messes in flour bag and bread box; they shredded mail-order catalogues, love story magazines, and school books; and, to her tearful despair, they tunnelled into Mary's closet and chewed unpatchable holes in her best dress.

Rats were few, and for this Kevin praised God, for they filled him with abject terror. Running across the floor of the kitchen attic, a rat made as much racket as a full-grown man. Hearing the animals, one would have imagined them to be as big as dogs. Their feet shook the slats in the ceiling.

This sound nettled Judd to frenzy, also. He would pound the ceiling with a broom handle until the rat fell silent. Staring at the ceiling with wild eyes, his lips white and quivering, nausea gripping his stomach, Kevin sensed the ghoulish intensity of the rat waiting, with ears erect, in the darkness above him. Five minutes after Judd put aside the broom and lay down, the beast's Frankenstein-tread was heard again . . .

And there was the school house, heated by a pot-bellied iron stove to which the boys lugged maple and birch. The stove panted like a live thing and the children seated nearest were scorched by its heat. Their mouths and nostrils were parched by the moistureless air and their bodies, enveloped in flannel and wool, were parboiled in their own sweat. At the same time, the children farthest from the stove, those near the draughty door or the rattling windows, shivered until their teeth chattered, and acquired chilblains that itched their legs until they raked themselves raw with haywire in search of relief. The only seats in which it was possible to escape the extremes of heat and cold were those in the front row, facing Miss Roache's desk, and there she placed her favourites: the dainty, pertly aloof daughter of Hod Rankine, the mill owner; the plump, fawn-eyed son of Jeremy Upshaw, the township's representative on the County Council; and four others whose fathers, so Riff Wingate sneered, were members of Lockhartville's Board of School Trustees.

Kevin and his seatmate, Alton Stacey, huddled like frost-numbed sparrows in one of the bleakest and most aguish seats. They both of them knew better than to complain. Miss Roache punished such imprudence by transferring the offender to a desk fourteen inches from the stove. There stockings, breeches, skirts, and, sometimes, flesh were burned by the hot cinders that burst like shooting stars from the open grates.

Like many of the boys, Alton treated Kevin as an equal when the two of them were alone or in the presence of adults. These boys became mockers and bullies only when they gathered in groups and egged one another on with jeer and snigger. Taken singly, they were all of them rather passive and bashful.

And one afternoon in late November, Kevin and Alton showed their resentment by an act that, for a little while, gained Kevin admission to the school's aristocracy of scapegraces and daredevils.

Miss Roache was telling Grade VI about the Spanish Armada. Riff Wingate, who was loafing through his third year in the grade, had affixed a pin to a ruler and, while feigning an almost morbid interest in Miss Roache's words, was attempting to prick Isabel Dubois's leg. Pretending to work arithmetic exercises, which he detested, Kevin listened to Miss Roache. It was a habit of his to neglect his own lessons, if they bored him, and concentrate on the history and English lessons being given to Grades VI, VII, and VIII. “And we count our blessings that Queen Elizabeth did not enter into matrimony with King Philip of Spain,” Miss Roache was saying. “Philip, when all is said and done, was a Catholic and —” Kevin's mind drifted away. Miss Roache, had she noticed him, would have said that he was woolgathering. He wondered what was wrong with being a Catholic. His mother's people, the Dunbars, were Catholics, although it had been years since any of them had gone to church. He wondered —

“My God, I'm cold,” Alton whispered.

“Yeah.”

“Yer fingers stiff?”

“A little.”

“Mine are jist like —” Here Alton used an obscene smile that made Kevin blush. “Well, leastways, they're ready to break off most any time, they're so goddamn cold.”

Kevin wished Alton would shut up. This talk made him colder. And, moreover, Miss Roache had a hardwood pointer which she used on whisperers —

“Look, yuh want some excitement?”

“Huh? What kinda excitement?”

Keeping his hands hidden under the desk, Alton drew a small red box from his pocket.

“.22 rifle shells,” the choirboy-faced lad explained, trying to leer but succeeding in attaining only a rather girlish grin.

Automatically, Kevin glanced at Miss Roache, but she had turned her back to them and was standing over Harold Winthrop's desk.

“What yuh gonna do with 'em?”

“Well, now, I thought I jist might shoot myself with 'em.”

“I don't care, anyway,” Kevin retorted resentfully, piqued by Alton's sarcasm.

“Can't yuh take a joke? We're gonna throw 'em right smack intuh that goddamn stove!”

Illogically, Kevin looked at the stove. The heat had tinted its sides scarlet, but in his corner of the room it was still Siberia.

“Who's gonna do it?”

“You and me — that's who!”

“Uh-ah! Not me! I ain't gonna have nothin' tuh do with it!”

SMACK!

Suddenly — from out of nowhere — Miss Roache's hardwood pointer swished through the air. Pain as adhesive as hot wax scalded Kevin's neck and shoulders.

“Now you just let me catch you whispering again and I'll
really
lick you!” Miss Roache snapped. With a tight-lipped little grin, she watched Kevin massage his shoulder. “You hear me?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Well, make sure you remember!”

She stalked back to her desk. Av Farmer stuck out his tongue at Kevin and smirked. Jessica Rankine wriggled her nose in disdain. Jeremy Upshaw curled his lips with the ironic detachment of a man of the world. And the other boys and girls grimaced, half-flinching in fright and half-squirming in avidity.

“The old bitch,” Kevin whispered. “The old bitch!”

“She'll hear yuh,” Alton whispered warningly.

Not for worlds would Kevin have uttered such an epithet had he felt there was the remotest chance of Miss Roache hearing. But he was pleased that Alton thought him a bold and reckless fellow. He clenched his fists and drew fierce breaths, the frosted vapour curling from his mouth like smoke. Ah, he was a fire-eater and a swashbuckler indeed! Had Miss Roache been a firing squad, he, Kevin the Dauntless, would have growled, “To hell with the blindfold!” and then —

Alton nudged him.

“We gonna do it?”

Kevin had forgotten the plot.

“Do what?”

“Put them shells in that there stove.”

“Oh.”

Alton gave him a searching, faintly contemptuous look.

“You yeller?”

Was he yellow? Yes, he was yellow. No! He was the boy who had dared call Miss Roache an old bitch to her face. Well, anyhow, almost to her face. He was the —

“Tuhday is our day tuh bring in the wood, yuh know that?”

“Yeah.”

“And there's too damn many of them things fer me tuh handle all by myself. Sooooo —”

“Yeah.”

“Jess Allen is gonna git old Cock Roache tuh turn her back, and while she's got her back turned me and you is gonna git them shells intuh that there stove.”

“What will they do?” Kevin quavered.

He envisioned an explosion, a smoking wreckage-strewn pit where there had once been a school.

“How the hell should I know what it'll do? Yuh scared or somethin'? Av Farmer said yuh would be too scared tuh do it.”

Kevin drew a deep breath.

“No,” he growled in what he imagined to be the accents of a buccaneer. “I ain't scared a nothin'!”

“Okay, then. Boy, I can't wait tuh see the look on old Cock Roache's mug when them shells start goin' off. Holy Jesus!”

Oh, Lord, I don't know how I got myself into this. But, please
God, just get me out of this, and I' ll never ask for anything else. Never. Never. Never. I promise I won't, God.

“We'll git licked,” he stated flatly.

“Well, what the hell if we do? Yuh been licked a-fore, ain't yuh?”

“Yeah.”

“And, anyway, how the hell is she gonna know who did it? Why, God, man, she'll be so goddamn scared she won't have time tuh worry about who done it. She'll think old Hitler is a-comin' down the chimney like Santa Claus!”

Thirty minutes later, Kevin and Alton were sent for firewood. They lay new birch logs on the coals, their wrists smarting with a sudden suffusion of heat. Then, as Alton had instructed him, Kevin spread his handful of cartridges atop the logs. In this way, the heat would not ignite them until the boys were back in their seats . . .

Though he had known it was coming, the first explosion made Kevin throw himself back in surprise.
Oh, please God
, he thought despairingly,
oh, please God.
He knew, with spine-chilling certainty, that in a few seconds he, and all of his classmates, would die. The stove bucked like a machine gun as the caps of the cartridges responded to the heat. With a shriek, Miss Roache sprang from her chair and sprinted like a deer to the door. “Oh, my God!” she wailed. “Oh, my
God!”
Helter skelter, the children followed her, the smaller boys sobbing as they were thrust aside by the bigger.
Oh, God what have I done?
Kevin moaned silently.
Oh dear Lord what have I done?
Surely, he would be tried for murder. And he would be hanged. They would put a black hood over his head and tie a knot under his left ear and —

“Let's git the hell outta here, Kev!”

This was the voice of Alton Stacey.

“We're gonna git killed!”

“Like hell! Don't be such a goddamn fool! Yuh think them shells is gonna git through an inch a iron? But it's gonna look damn funny if we're the only sons-a-bitches that stay in the goddamn school house!”

They jumped to their feet and ran out through the porch. The cold air slashed their faces like a whip.

Miss Roache stood amid a bevy of older girls. The wind swept dry snow from the ground and hurled it into their eyes; they squinted and hugged themselves against the cold. Kevin felt a quick little tremor of brutal joy as he observed that Jessica Rankine was blubbering, her face hidden in the folds of Miss Roache's skirt.
Go ahead and bawl, you stuck-up little
— But she looked so fragile and vulnerable, and she was so pretty in her little blue frock! Suddenly, he realized that he had done a mean and stupid thing.

The barrage ended, and there was silence inside the school. Miss Roache wiped her eyes with one hand and patted the back of Jessica Rankine's head with the other.

“School is dismissed. Go get your coats,” she said in an absurd choked voice.

Then, chiselling each syllable out of rock, “Tomorrow, I'm going to find out which of you did this.
And when I do!
When I do I'm going to give you something you'll remember for the rest of your life!”

The bigger boys winked at one another. The smaller children sobbed harder.

Her face like chalk, Miss Roache marched into the porch and came out wearing her hat and coat. Jessica Rankine walked beside her, gripping her hand.

“Are you people deaf? I said that school was dismissed!”

The children hastened back into the school house and wriggled into their caps and mackinaws.
Tomorrow, she' ll find
out and she' ll beat me to death. She' ll kill me, and that's what I
deserve. I'm a coward, and a fool and I could have been a murderer
and
—

Then suddenly Riff Wingate was slapping his back. Kevin swung around to face him. The taller boy grinned, showing the stumps of a dozen moist, decaying teeth.