A Jest of God

by Margaret Laurence

  THE AUTHOR

  MARGARET LAURENCE was born in Neepawa, Manitoba, in 1926. Upon graduation from Winnipeg’s United College in 1947, she took a job as a reporter for the Winnipeg Citizen.

  From 1950 until 1957 Laurence lived in Africa, the first two years in Somalia, the next five in Ghana, where her husband, a civil engineer, was working. She translated Somali poetry and prose during this time, and began her career as a fiction writer with stories set in Africa.

  When Laurence returned to Canada in 1957, she settled in Vancouver, where she devoted herself to fiction with a Ghanaian setting: in her first novel, This Side Jordan, and in her first collection of short fiction, The Tomorrow-Tamer. Her two years in Somalia were the subject of her memoir, The Prophet’s Camel Bell.

  Separating from her husband in 1962, Laurence moved to England, which became her home for a decade, the time she devoted to the creation of five books about the fictional town of Manawaka, patterned after her birthplace, and its people: The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners.

  Laurence settled in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1974. She complemented her fiction with essays, book reviews, and four children’s books. Her many honours include two Governor General’s Awards for Fiction and more than a dozen honorary degrees.

  Margaret Laurence died in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1987.

  THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY

  General Editor: David Staines

  ADVISORY BOARD

  Alice Munro

  W.H. New

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  If I should pass the tomb of Jonah

  I would stop there and sit for awhile;

  Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark

  And came out alive after all.

  – Carl Sandburg, Losers

  ONE

  The wind blows low, the wind blows high

  The snow comes falling from the sky,

  Rachel Cameron says she’ll die

  For the want of the golden city.

  She is handsome, she is pretty,

  She is the queen of the golden city –

  They are not actually chanting my name, of course. I only hear it that way from where I am watching at the classroom window, because I remember myself skipping rope to that song when I was about the age of the little girls out there now. Twenty-seven years ago, which seems impossible, and myself seven, but the same brown brick building, only a new wing added and the place smartened up. It would certainly have surprised me then to know I’d end up here, in this room, no longer the one who was scared of not pleasing, but the thin giant She behind the desk at the front, the one with the power of picking any coloured chalk out of the box and writing anything at all on the blackboard. It seemed a power worth possessing, then.

  Spanish dancers, turn around,

  Spanish dancers, get out of this town.

  People forget the songs, later on, but the knowledge of them must be passed like a secret language from child to child – how far back? They seem like a different race, a separate species, all those generations of children. As though they must still exist somewhere, even after their bodies have grown grotesque, and they have forgotten the words and tunes, and learned disappointment, and finally died, the last dried shell of them painted and prettified for decent burial by mortal men like Niall Cameron, my father. Stupid thought. Morbid. I mustn’t give houseroom in my skull to that sort of thing. It’s dangerous to let yourself. I know that.

  Nebuchadnezzar, King of the Jews,

  Sold his wife for a pair of shoes.

  I can imagine that one going back and back, through time and languages. Chanted in Latin, maybe, the same high sing-song voices, smug little Roman girls safe inside some villa in Gaul or Britain, skipping rope on a mosaic courtyard, not knowing the blue-painted dogmen were snarling outside the walls, stealthily learning. There. I am doing it again. This must stop. It isn’t good for me. Whenever I find myself thinking in a brooding way, I must simply turn it off and think of something else. God forbid that I should turn into an eccentric. This isn’t just imagination. I’ve seen it happen. Not only teachers, of course, and not only women who haven’t married. Widows can become extremely odd as well, but at least they have the excuse of grief.

  I don’t have to concern myself yet for a while, surely. Thirty-four is still quite young. But now is the time to watch out for it.

  The bell rings for end of recess. Quickly, I have to gather my children in. I must stop referring to them as my children, even to myself. It won’t do. We all say it, of course. Even Calla says of the Grade Fives, “Want to see the poster my kids painted today?” But the words are no threat to her. She feels only a rough amused affection and irritation towards any or all of them, equally.

  “Come along, Grade Twos. Line up quietly now.”

  Am I beginning to talk in that simper tone, the one so many grade school teachers pick up without realizing? At first they only talk to the children like that, but it takes root and soon they can’t speak any other way to anyone. Sapphire Travis does it all the time. Rachel, dear, would you be a very very good girl and pour me a weeny cup of tea? Poor Grade Ones. How do they endure it? Children have built-in radar to detect falseness.

  “Come along, now. We haven’t got all day. James, for goodness’ sake, stop dawdling.”

  Now I’ve spoken more sharply than necessary. I have to watch this, too. It’s hard to strike a balance. It’s so often James I speak to like this, fearing to be too much the other way with him.

  Why didn’t I put my coat on, to come out? The spring wind is making me shiver. My arms, wrapped around myself for warmth, seem so long and skinny. The days are fine and mild lately, but the wind is still northern and knifing. I’m susceptible to colds, and when I get one it hangs on and on, and really pulls me down.

  James is the very last inside, as usual. That boy is the slowest thing on two feet when he’s going into the room. Leaving, he always seems about to take off like a sparrow and miraculously fly. Looking at his wiry slightness, his ruffian sorrel hair, I feel an exasperated tenderness. I wonder why I should feel differently towards him? Because he’s unique, that’s why. I oughtn’t to feel that way. They are all unique. What a pious sentiment, one which Willard Siddley would endorse. Certainly they’re all unique, but like the animals’ equality, some are more unique than others.

  Calla Mackie is in the hall as I go in. I shouldn’t try to avoid her eyes. She’s kind and well-meaning. If only she looked a little more usual, and didn’t trot off twice a week to that fantastic Tabernacle. She bears down, through the noisy shoal of youngsters pushing upstairs like fish compelled upstream. Calla is stockily built, not fat at all but solid and broad. She says she ought to have been Ukrainian, and in fact she has that Slavic squareness and strong heavy bones. Her hair is greying and straight, and she cuts it herself with nail scissors. I’ll bet she’s never even set foot inside a hairdresser’s. She combs it back behind her ears but chops it into a fringe like a Shetland pony’s over her forehead. She wears long-sleeved smocks for school, not for neatness but so she can wear the same brown tweed skirt and that dull-green bulky-knit sweater of hers, day after day without anyone noticing. Maybe she washes the sweater in the evenings from time to time, and dries it on the radiator in her flat. I wouldn’t know. She drenches herself with Lemon Verbena cologne. Her smock today is the fawn chintz that looks like the kitchen curtains. Well, poor Calla – it isn’t her fault that she has no dress sense. I look quite smart in comparison.

  Oh God. I don’t mean to be condescending. How can it happen, still, this echo of my mother’s voice? My navy wool dress is three years old and much longer than they’re being worn now. I haven’t had the energy to take up the hem. Now it seems
like sackcloth, flapping around my knees. And the ashes, where are they? I dramatize myself. I always did. No one would ever know it from the outside, where I’m too quiet.

  “Rachel – oh Rachel – come here a sec, will you?”

  “What is it?”

  “Wait for me after school,” Calla hisses. “I’ve got something for you.”

  “Yes. All right.”

  She is a generous person. I know that, and shouldn’t have to keep reminding myself. But it’s embarrassing. I never know what to say. Once she gave me a necklace of hers. It was horrible, made out of polished peach stones. I’d only admired it out of politeness. And then I had to wear it.

  Late afternoon, and the children are drawing pictures. Free choice – they can draw anything they like. A number of them cannot think what to draw. I have to make suggestions – their own houses, what they did last weekend.

  “Did any of you go out for a walk, beyond town? Did anyone find any pussywillows?”

  My own voice sounds false to my ears, a Peter-Rabbitish voice, and I find I am standing beside my desk, holding a new piece of orange chalk so tightly that it snaps in my fingers. But the children do not seem to have noticed. A small chorus of response goes up – from the girls, of course.

  “Me! I did, Miss Cameron.”

  “My brother and me, we found about a million pussywillows.”

  Interesting creatures, very young girls, often so anxious to please that they will tell lies without really knowing they’re doing it. I don’t suppose more than a few of them were actually out in the country at all. They only think I’d like to hear it. And yet I feel at ease with them in a way I don’t with the boys, who have begun to mock automatically even at this age.

  Except James Doherty. He is too preoccupied with his own concerns to bother with anything else. He goes his own way as though he endures the outside world but does not really believe in it. His schoolwork is, generally speaking, poor. Yet he knows a staggering amount about how cars work, and electricity, and jet planes. The car part of it I can understand. He’s picked it up from his father at the Manawaka Garage. But where has he got the rest from? They aren’t a reading family. He’s had no encouragement at home. Those parents of his have likely never opened a book. It seems cruel that he should have had to make his appearance there, with them. Grace Doherty is all but moronic. She doesn’t know what kind of child James is. All she cares about is that he should get a good report card, not because this would show he was learning something, but only so he wouldn’t do worse than her sister-in-law’s boy.

  “Let’s see what you’ve done, James. May I?”

  He hands over the page. Tentatively, because he cares about it. No houses or feeble pussywillows for him. The spaceship is marvellously complex, with many detailed parts – knobs, props, instrument panels, oxygen tanks, hydroponic containers for growing vegetables in mid-space, weird protuberances which have some absolute necessity, stark fins, pear-shaped windows, and small bulbous men muffled in space suits, ascending to the ship on swaying ropes, thickly pencilled, like angels climbing Jacob’s ladder.

  “That’s good, James. What’s this bit here?”

  And he explains, the words torrenting out to make the thing known.

  I tell him – splendid. He takes the page back in silence, pleased. But when I move on to the next child, I find myself forced to say splendid once more, this time over Francine MacVey’s drawing, a lady of appalling unoriginality. The stilted glamour and the pursed lips and curling eyelashes have been copied straight from some ten-cent colouring book of Snow White or a movie doll-queen. How unfair this is to James, to demean praise in this manner. But if I don’t – what might happen, if ever he or any of them discovered how I value him? They would torment me, certainly, but this is nothing to the way they would torment him. The old words for it, the child’s phrase – it’s so cheap, so cold and full of loathing. It frightens me so that I can’t even form the words to myself. But James would be cruel, too, if he knew. He’d find some means of being scathing. He’d have to, out of some need to protect himself against me. That’s what stings the most.

  After school I sit at my desk, waiting for Calla to appear. But when the knock sounds and the door opens, it is Willard Siddley. He’s always very nice to me. I can’t claim he isn’t. There is no real reason why I should dislike him, none at all. It’s that pompous manner of his, I think, the way he has of seeming to insist that his slightest word has significant meaning, and if you aren’t able to see it, the lack is yours. He is a good principal, though. I don’t question that. Everyone says so.

  “That’s an enigmatic smile, Rachel. Is it the Sphinx or the Mona Lisa?”

  His humour. I didn’t know I was smiling. If I was, it was only out of nervousness. Which is ridiculous. I’ve nothing to be afraid of, with him. He has never given a bad report to the School Board on my teaching, as far as I know. I don’t know why I should even think he might have. I can feel my face paling to the peculiar putty colour it takes on when I’m thrown a little off balance.

  “I didn’t know I was smiling.” I have to explain my presence. “I was just going now. I’ve been sorting out the mimeographed pages for the –”

  “Yes,” Willard says. “Well, I won’t keep you a moment.”

  I know I must not stand up now, not until he’s gone. I am exceptionally tall for a woman, and Willard is shorter than I. He arranges it whenever possible so that when we are talking either he is seated or I am, and there is no comparison. He hates to be considered a short man. He makes up for what may seem to him his stunted stature by being six hundred times more brisk than anyone needs to be. He calls this efficiency. He reads books on Time-Motion Study and draws charts on how to make your head save your heels.

  He strides across to my desk now, places his hands on the edge of it, leans down and looks at me earnestly from behind his glasses. His eyes are pallid, like the blue dead eyes of the frozen whitefish we used to get in the winter when I was a child, and I always choked on that fish, recalling the eyes.

  At morning recess today James tripped Gil Maitland and made him go down on his knees in the gravel. I saw. I was standing near by and had my back half turned, so there was no necessity to let on I’d seen. Willard saw, too, did he? That’s what he wants now. “Just a word, Rachel – I’m not an old-fashioned disciplinarian, as I am sure you know, but – must restrain the child against his or her own violence – we must not hesitate, must we, Rachel, when it is in the child’s own best –”. I know he’ll say it. What he doesn’t know is that Gil jumped off the teeter-totter yesterday, purposely, when James was at the top end, way up in the air, and the plank crashed down. I didn’t go to James, although I knew he was hurt. I never do with any of them, because I know I mustn’t, unless they’re crying. He didn’t cry, of course. I should have told him off today, though, I guess. Tripping is forbidden. Willard likes using the strap on boys. He claims he only does it as a last resort. But he’s always looking for occasions.

  “What is it?” An hour seems to have passed since he spoke, but it’s only a second. I can’t keep this stupid edge of anxiety out of my voice. “Anything the matter?”

  “Oh no,” Willard says, looking surprised. “Angela and I wondered if you’d come over for dinner tonight, that’s all.”

  That’s all he had to say. An invitation for dinner. Angela, his petulant do-gooding wife, forever proffering kindness to the single teachers. I don’t want to go. I can’t, I really can’t anyway.

  “Oh – thanks – that’s awfully nice of you, but I’m afraid I can’t. Tonight is Mother’s bridge night. I always do the coffee and sandwiches. She gets too fussed if she has to do everything herself.”

  Willard nods. There’s something reptilian about the look of him. Not snakelike – more a lizard, sleek, dry-skinned, dapper, and his eyes now dartingly quick and sly, glinting at me, thinking he knows all about me. The skin on his hands is speckled, sun-spotted, and small hairs sprout even from his knuckles.<
br />
  “Well, I’m sorry you can’t make it,” he says. “An old friend of yours is going to be there.”

  Then he is off, at the door already, with that scurrying walk of his.

  “Who?”

  He turns and shakes a finger at me.

  “Uh-uh. Too late now. Unless you’ll change your mind?”

  “I’m sorry. I told you – I can’t go.”

  He’s gone. My own hands, spread out on the desk, are too large. Large and too thin, like empty gloves.

  Why did I have to ask him who? Like that. So eagerly. Was that how it sounded? As though I couldn’t wait to be told. And he, so malicious, replying like that. Once Calla said to him, “Don’t be mean, Willard,” over something he’d said to me, and he replied, “Oh come on, now, can’t you take a joke?”

  It is only now, concentrating on my hands, the nails nicely manicured and coated with colourless polish, that I realize something else. When Willard Siddley’s spotted furry hands were on my desk, I wanted to touch them. To see what the hairs felt like. Yet he repulses me.

  I didn’t. I won’t. I didn’t feel that way. I’m only imagining things again.

  “Hallo, child.”

  Calla. I wish she wouldn’t call me child. It sounds ridiculous. I’ve asked her not to, but she doesn’t stop. She’s carrying, I see now, a potted plant. A hyacinth, bulbously in bud and just about to give birth to the blue-purple blossom.

  “Here you are. For your desk. So you’ll be convinced spring is upon us.”

  “Calla – it’s lovely. How kind of you.” It really is, and I’m not thanking her sufficiently. She may guess how awkward I feel about her generosity. “Thanks ever so much. You shouldn’t have.”

  “Bosh,” she says, waving a brawny chintz-encased arm. “I was getting some for the Tabernacle. It’s my week to do the flowers. So I thought I might as well get two extra, one for you and one for me. It’s rather a nice one, isn’t it? I got them at Zimmer’s. They had some gorgeous lilies as well, but I have a mean prejudice against those, as you know.”