The Wanton Troopers (3 page)

Thirty children, ranging in age from six to fifteen, were seated at three rows of desks. The desks and seats in each row, made of scarred wood and rusting metal, were linked together so that they reminded Kevin of the cars in a train. Frayed canvas maps, rolled up like scrolls, hung over each of the three blackboards. The air was heavy with the smell of chalk, soap, sweat, and the stale crumbs of yesterday's sandwiches.

Miss Roache, the teacher, sat facing the children from behind her desk at the front of the room. Kevin slid into the seat that he shared with Alton Stacey.

“Good morning, class,” Miss Roache enunciated.

“Good morning, Miss Roache,” they chanted.

Kevin never joined in such chants. He thought the meaningless singsong sounded idiotic. The children used a peculiar tone when they spoke in school, an undulating croon with the emphasis falling in unexpected places. It was as if they were reading words in a language they could not understand.

“Class, stand,” said Miss Roache.

With a clatter, the children got to their feet. They all of them derived a bit of sly excitement from this business of getting up and sitting down. The boys rattled the metal parts of their desks, the cotton dresses of the girls rustled like a windswept grain field.

O Canada

Our home and native land,

True patriot love,

In all thy sons command!

With glowing hearts, we see thee rise,

The true north, strong and free,

And stand on guard, O Canada!

We stand on guard for thee!

The older girls did most of the singing. Their voices, a little spiteful with self-conscious assurance, rang out above the drone of the younger children. The older boys grinned and were silent.

“We will bow our heads in prayer.”

Again the mindless, undulating croon:

Our Father, which art in heaven,

hallowed be Thy name,

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,

on earth, as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread

and forgive us our trespasses

as we forgive those who trespass against us,

and lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil,

for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory,

forever and ever. Amen.

“Class, be seated.”

There was another clatter and rustle, another little thrill of excitement and derision, as they resumed their seats.

“Now we shall take our Testaments and have our morning Bible reading.”

Kevin took the small black book from the niche in his desk.

His paralysis was lifting now. He was settling into the inertia of the school day.

Sunlight poured through the eastern windows, changing the crayon animals on the glass into grotesque abstractions. Miss Roache read aloud while the children stared with unfocussed eyes at the books that lay open before them.

Follow after charity and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that
ye may prophesy. For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue
speaketh not unto man, but unto God, for no man under-standth
him; howbeit in the spirit, he speaketh mysteries . . .

The voice droned on. Kevin's body became a vegetable. The children might have been so many carrots and turnips, propped up in their seats.

Therefore, if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be
unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh
shall be a barbarian unto me. Therefore, let him that speaketh
in an unknown tongue pray that he may interpret . . .

He stared at Miss Roache, observing that she nodded as she read, her head bobbing up and down. She reminded him of a dog eating: the little, furtive sideways glances she cast when she raised her head. He remembered how she had wept the previous winter when some of the big boys, led by Harold and Riff, threw snowballs through the open door and onto the stove. The steam had swirled up like fog, and Miss Roache had wept and sent the children home. That day, Kevin had wanted to weep with her. He had wanted to go to her and say that it didn't matter, that Riff and Harold were fools, that she should not let them hurt her. But, of course, he had done nothing of the kind. And the next day, she had beaten little Normie Fenton, the smallest and shyest boy in the school, until his hands were red with blood . . .

Brethren, be not children in understanding; howbeit in
malice ye be children, but in understanding be men . . . But
if there be no interpreter let him keep silence in the church;
and let him speak to himself and to God . . .

She shut the book with a gesture of relief and finality. A little ripple of movement swept from child to child, like a ripple on the surface of water.

“Current events,” Miss Roache said, as she dropped the book in the drawer of her desk.

Every morning, Miss Roache talked for fifteen minutes on world affairs. To most of the children, these events were less real than the incidents in radio serials and comic books. Often, when asked to provide some news item for this period, the younger children related something that had transpired in
Buck Rogers
,
Superman
, or
Mandrake the Magician.
But, in listening to Miss Roache tell of the horrors taking place in the great world beyond the creek and the cedared hills, the world beyond Larchmont, beyond even Halifax, Kevin decided that this world, for all of its superficial foreignness, was in most ways only an extension of the world of his father and the mill.

Today, Miss Roache talked about Hitler, about his imminent capture and about the punishment that should be meted out to him. Kevin shuddered when she said it had been proposed that Hitler should be killed slowly with knives, a bit of his flesh being cut away each day. During the Bible reading, Miss Roache's voice had been a dull monotone; now it became shrill and emphatic. She said that she considered the death with knives too merciful. Hitler should be locked up in a cage and carried all over the world, so that persons everywhere could come and spit on him. He should be fed pig feed, but only enough to keep him alive, because if he were allowed to die, he would be no longer capable of suffering. In the cage, he might survive for years, and, in time, he could be brought to the little hamlets on the back roads, to places like Lockhartville . . . And every night he could be burnt with hot irons and beaten with whips, and the greatest doctors in the world would be on hand to see that he did not die.

Having heard Miss Roache deliver such monologues every morning for more than a year, Kevin had long ago decided that he sympathized with Hitler. In his pictures and especially in the caricatures that Miss Roache tore out of the Halifax newspapers and showed to the children, the tousle-haired, toothbrush-moustached man looked funny and pitiful. He made Kevin think of Wallie, the half-witted hired man at the Mosher farm. When Kevin saw Wallie he did not know whether to laugh or to cry. He felt the same indecision when he saw Miss Roache's cartoons of Hitler.

If they ever bring him to Lockhartville, I'll help him get away from them, Kevin vowed silently. For a little while each morning, Kevin was a dedicated Nazi. He wished he dare leap into the aisle, throw up his arm in a salute, and shout, Heil Hitler!

Three

Kevin decided that when he grew up he would be king of Nicaragua. For months, he had been fascinated by the idea of becoming a king. From the little glassed-in bookcase that composed the school library, he had taken a book entitled
A Boy's
Life of Napoleon.
The book fired his imagination. He decided that when he became a man, he too would make himself a master of men and empires. Searching through an atlas for a likely country, he regretfully abandoned France, Spain, Germany, and Italy as too large and powerful. He doubted his ability to enlist sufficient volunteers to overthrow their governments. Finally, he chose Nicaragua, a tiny, purple blotch on the map. Yes, he would make himself ruler of Nicaragua. In his exercise books, he drew up time schedules and plans of campaign, fording rivers with a movement of his pencil, eliminating frontiers with a swipe of an eraser. In 1953, when he was twenty, he would raise an army of freebooters — perhaps one hundred men. They would seize a ship and sail to the Caribbean. In 1954, he would be crowned king. His Majesty Kevin I, by the Grace of God and the Constitution of the Kingdom, Commander-in-Chief and King of Nicaragua. Then, perhaps in 1955, he would invade Honduras and annex it to his domain. In 1957, he would plant his flag in El Salvador. In 1958, he would lead his troops into the capital city of Guatemala. By 1960, he would be Emperor of Central America.

With wax crayons, he made designs for flags, settling finally on a golden cross with a golden circle on a field of white. And he invented names for ships and regiments, pages of them. He would christen his first battleship
El Gringo
, and his personal bodyguards, whose uniform, which he spent an entire evening designing, bore a strong resemblance to the garb of a guardsman as depicted in
A Boy's Life of Napoleon
, would be known as King Kevin's Royal Hussars.

He supposed he would have to marry. Kings needed sons to continue their dynasties. And Princess Margaret Rose was only a little older than he . . . Then he remembered that Napoleon had divorced Josephine because she could not provide him with an heir. This puzzled him. He asked his mother: “Why couldn't Josephine have any children, Mummy?”

“Josephine who, sweetikins?”

“You know, Josephine, the one that married Napoleon.”

Laughing, Mary threw her arms around him. She slid her hand inside the back of his shirt and ran her fingers up and down the little bumps in his spine. This was one of her favourite ways of caressing him.

“Oh, Scampi darling, you ask the craziest questions!”

He drew away sulkily. “I don't see nothin' crazy about that.”

“No, it isn't really crazy. Just funny, sort of. But I don't know, lamb. I really don't know why Josephine couldn't have children. I suppose someday you'll find out all about it. When Mummy's little sugar baby gets to be a man, he's going to know all sorts of wonderful things.”

Grandmother O'Brien spoke from her rocker, beneath the clock shelf. “Yer spoilin' the boy, Mary. Yer spoilin' the boy with yer foolishness.”

Mary stroked Kevin under the chin and winked at him.

“We're poor people,” Grandmother O'Brien said. “It ain't fittin' fer people like us tuh put on airs.”

Mary winked at Kevin again.

Grandmother O'Brien said this often, to rebuke what she called the false pride of Kevin and his mother. “People like us should be willin' tuh take what's handed out tuh us. We're poor as dirt and allus will be. Puttin' on high and mighty airs ain't gonna change things none.”

To ease the perpetual pain in her stomach, Martha O'Brien held a brick, heated on top of the stove and wrapped in an old wool sock, against her waist. She lived on crackers soaked in milk until they'd become an oozing pulp, but her soul was nourished on the flesh offered in sacrifice to the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob.

“The O'Briens has allus been poor, boy. But they allus knew their place. And they was allus willin' tuh work. The same with my people, the Havelocks; when a man hired a Havelock he knowed he was a-gonna git a day's work outta him. Yuh never caught a Havelock givin' hisself no stud-horse airs. They knew what they was and they never pretended tuh be nothin' else. I don't like that false pride I see in yuh, boy.”

“Oh, my goodness, Grammie! Scampi just asked a simple little question!” Mary's voice rose in irritation.

Martha adjusted the pin in her black, bowl-shaped hairdo. “Mark my words, Mary, yer a-spoilin' that boy. Children should be seen and not heard, I allus say, children should be seen and not heard.” Rocking complacently, she looked at Kevin with undisguised disapproval. “If that was my boy I'd Josephine him! I'd Josephine him out in the garden with a hoe. There's work tuh be done here. Ain't no earthly use of Judd workin' his heart out every night after he comes home from the mill. Put that boy out in the garden. Put him tuh work around the barn. He's big enough tuh work if he's ever gonna be!”

“Oh, Grammie, Scampi is only a baby. Things were different when you were young. You don't realize that, Grammie.”

“I realize a long-legged cockalorum like that one should be doin' his share of work around the place instead of askin' questions about women havin' children.”

Mary drew Kevin's face against her breast. “When Scampi grows up, he's going to work with his brain. His hands are going to be soft as a girl's — like the hands of the men who work in offices and stores in Larchmont. When he's a man, my baby is going to have nice, soft, pink hands just like he has now. You wait and see.”

“Eh!” This sound, half snort and half grunt, was Martha's way of dismissing them as hopeless. She rocked vigorously, hugging her brick.

There was nothing that Kevin found more frustrating than his grandmother's sermons on the certainty of poverty and the duty of humility before one's betters. He writhed in vexation when she told him, as she often did, that within four years he would be working in the mill. He hated her for the grim satisfaction he detected in her voice. And his hate was made more vicious by the thought that she was probably right in her prediction.

Martha did not undress at night. She lay fully clothed on her bed, and when the pain became unbearable she came downstairs and heated bricks. Then, in the darkness, with the brick clutched to her belly, she rocked and sang hymns. Often, Kevin awoke and heard her voice rise like the cry of a ghost in the darkness at the other end of the house.

This was the hymn that she most often sang:

There is a fountain filled with blood,