by Kyp Harness
At first we said “No,” since we thought we’d cleaned it up so good, and he repeated in a low, gravelly, animal voice without any joking niceness you could sometimes get even from his angriest words when he was in another mood or state, and then he said the dreaded words: “Alright,” he said, his hand moving to his belt and beginning to unbuckle it, “who wants it first?” doubly mad now since we’d lied to him, and this time I didn’t even bother to fling myself at his feet and beg for mercy because the anger and the immediacy was too big. It wasn’t a question of if the lickin’ was going to happen but when, and the answer to that was right now, the belt was practically whistling through the air already, and we were in our parents’ room, and without even knowing how it happened, my brother volunteered himself.
The pants came down and he laid across the corner of my parents’ bed as my mother stood in the doorway, and if the downside of being the second in line for a lickin’ was that you had to endure the painful yelps of the sufferer before you, it was of no consequence here as my brother just laid and took the lickin’ without making a sound, the belt slapping across his bum cheeks, and then just as soundlessly when the lickin’ was done, getting up, pulling his pants up and running from the room, and then it was my turn and I cried and yelped as I was spanked and found out later that one of the upsides of being second in line, the idea that the spanker would wear out some of his energy and passion and anger on the first lickin’, was proven true when after a few days my mom said to my dad that my brother still had black streaks across his backside from where the black had come off his belt.
During this time my dad more often than not came home in the mood of having his right eye squinted up, and he would argue with Mom and she would shout back about his drinking which I never understood since everybody drank, we all had to drink in order to live, then later recognized it was drinking a particular thing that made him act differently, that gave him a particular smell, that I tried to identify so I could be aware of how he changed and how I should act so I wouldn’t get in trouble with him. On the Sunday afternoons after he went to golf early in the morning we’d wait for him to come home and the hours slowly floated by till most of the day was gone, and then his car would drive unnaturally slowly down the driveway, and another identifying characteristic was he would smoke a different brand of cigarette than he would on every other day. One time he came home and sat under a tree in the front yard smoking his weird brand of cigarettes, and another time he went around hammering nails into the trees in the front yard, and later in the week he started giving hell to my brother, thinking he was the one who hammered nails into the trees. My brother said, “I didn’t put those nails there Dad, you did!” and then I overheard him telling a bunch of his friends in the barbershop, “And I thought, by Jesus, maybe I did, all pissed up out there on a Sunday afternoon!”
The way he’d act when he was drunk was so far different from the way he’d act other times that they were like two different planets that had nothing to do with each other, no common language or even a knowledge that the other existed. One day he’d look at you with hatred, his voice and words stabbing out from an understanding that all is hell and that you are to blame for all being hell, yet the next day he’d come home from work and greet you with a broad smile, like the way he greets his customers in his barbershop, and say, “How y’doin’, partner?” Yet sometimes his behaviour was good for me when he’d been drinking, when he would come home with a friend and then shuffle down the hall to my room and ask to have some of my drawings to show to his friend because I’d been getting some attention at school for my drawings, and my dad would take the pictures out and show his friend in the living room.
“Look at that! In grade two and he’s in the newsletter for the whole damn school,” and from my room I’d peek down the hall and see him leaning from his Laz-Z-Boy to his friend, showing him a drawing, pointing at it and saying, “Look at the detail there—now the average person might not see that, that kinda detail there, and he put that in,” and he was praising and appreciative as he was at no other time with my brother or me, and I would pull my head back in from the hall, feeling the warmth of his praise, feeling it pull at the muscles in my face, and my mother would notice and say, “Now you know he’s just saying that because he’s been drinkin’. You know he’s not going to be talking that way tomorrow,” which made me feel weird because if I felt scared and disturbed, panicked by the way he acted when he was drinking and mean, why couldn’t I feel warm and happy when he was drinking and complimentary?
Was the good untrue in a way the bad was not? Or did they both mean nothing, happening in a dream that you were powerless to change or affect but which settled all around you and comprised your reality totally, for the entire time he was in your presence or in the house, and not a moment more or a moment less, no matter what you thought or felt, or what you did or didn’t say or do? So to feel warm at being praised was wrong in such a circumstance, like being comforted by lies, or eating poisoned fruit, yet being panicked or disturbed or hurt by his meanness wasn’t wrong or right, but simply was, in a way you couldn’t help, so thoroughly did it infiltrate your heart and stomach, you had no choice but to adjust your animal instincts to the temperature of his moods.
Yet my drawings drew genuine admiration from my classmates as they sometimes gathered around my desk, and one of the students even said out loud to the teacher, “Why can’t I draw like Tim does?” and the teacher said, “Well, Tim can’t play soccer like you do,” and the kid said, “That’s right, we get out on the field and he won’t even take the ball—he lets the other team have it!”
“You see?” said the teacher. “We all have our strengths—it all evens out.” Still the older kids would pick on me, and I would take a hit rather than run away, trying to make the kids laugh so they wouldn’t bother me anymore. But with some kids that would piss them off even more. When he started school that fall, Jason saw the kids picking on me and me letting them push me around. He ran in to defend me and got a punch in the nose that made it bleed, and the teacher on recess duty had to take him to the school nurse.
Recesses were problems for me because of the kids picking on me so the alternative to that was to hang out with Kim Hoswell, the short, squat girl who the other kids would say was my girlfriend, or else sometimes I would hang with my friend Carl Plympton who shared my interest in cartooning, but he also was interested in playing sports like all the rest of the boys so often he wanted to do that instead of hang with me, or to talk about sports, or to trade hockey cards in the endless ritual of the winter months, which I didn’t do, so my task was to convince him to be with me and do what I called walk-and-talk, which consisted of walking around the fence of the schoolyard and talking for the whole recess, which is what I wanted to do, but which he only wanted to do, or could be convinced to do, sometimes.
Mostly I was stuck back with Kim Hoswell, as she was another kid that most other kids didn’t want to hang with. She wasn’t as fat as Gabby Ferguson who literally was as wide as she was tall, and whom teachers nonetheless made do the kilometre run with the rest of the class even though she couldn’t run in any real sense, her ball-like rotundity causing her to rotate her body one side at a time to put her short, stumpy legs one ahead of the other, her shoulders likewise taking turns swinging ahead and her long straight hair swinging side to side like a cantering horse’s tail, all while she wore an inexplicable, eager-to-please smile. She persevered far, far behind the rest of the class till you could barely see her behind us as we ran the circumference of the field and the teacher called back to her across the chasm, “Come on now, Gabby, pick up some speed. You can do it!” and later when everyone came in panting back to the classroom, there would always be a ten-minute interval before Gabby came in, panting and sweating, slipping behind her desk, still smiling her eager-to-please smile.
Kim wasn’t as heavy as her or as separated from everybody else like Gabby was, just as I wasn’t separated from everyone els
e the way that some other boys were. But whenever Kim asked for an indoor recess because she said she wasn’t feeling well, I asked for one too. That was the kind of recess I preferred anyway, the empty silent classroom and the other kids visible out the window, laughing and running and playing in the field, and me glad to see them out there and doubly glad I wasn’t with them, maybe in my heart feeling superior to their childhood outdoor raucousness as I sat at my desk and drew pictures.
In addition to Kim Hoswell during one indoor recess there was Mary Hiemstra, a girl who I thought really was sick and sat doing her homework at her desk in her dress, for she was of that religion where the girls had to wear dresses and keep their hair long down their backs all the time, and the boys had to wear real shirts with collars all the time, and pants that weren’t jeans, and had to keep their hair really short all the time. Sometime toward the end of the recess Mary came by to look at my drawings and asked why I drew all the time, and as a joke she took one of my drawings and ran through the room, and I chased her laughing and Kim came too, and somehow we ended up on the floor in the cubby beneath our teacher’s desk and Mary asked me to show her mine, and I was nervous, looking over at the door when she offered to show me hers, and she pulled up her dress and I began to see her underwear, and Kim, laughing, undid her jeans, so I decided it must be alright, so I pulled down my pants, and from the front of my underwear I let out my penis, and both the girls giggled nervously, but also in their eyes was something still and interested and serious, and shaking myself I made my penis jump around a bit, and then in a jarring blast somehow there was a figure standing at the side of the desk, a figure that was a shadow that then resolved itself into Mr. Goodearle who’d been walking down the hall and heard us, then came into the classroom to the side of the desk, and called out, “Tim!”
And then hastily fumbling my penis back into my underwear, and then the horror-filled instant when we were all marched by Mr. Goodearle out of the classroom and down the hall to the principal’s office, me feeling sick as we approached, thinking of how everyone would now know that I pulled out my penis, thinking of my dad and how he was so mad that I pulled down my pants at the barbershop, and the huge door of the principal’s office loomed before me, the principal’s office where the lickin’s took place, where we’d heard there was a wooden case of various leather straps increasing in length and size and thickness in order to fit the appropriate punishment to the crime, and this principal in particular, it was said, had the unique habit of pulling a hair from your head before the administering of a punishment, of laying it across the palm of your hand, then lifting the leather strap and bringing it whipping down upon the hair on the palm of your hand so that there was a precise slit-like bleeding cut across your palm exactly where the hair had been, and we came into the office ushered by Mr. Goodearle to where the principal sat behind his desk, looking up impossibly placidly as we shivered and Mr. Goodearle told him what we’d done.
The principal’s face frowned with severity as he looked at us, then looked at me in particular and said, “Tim, why did you take your privates out of your pants?” I pointed at Mary Hiemstra and said, “Because she told me to,” and Mary Hiemstra looked at me and said, “If I told you to jump off the Bluewater Bridge would you do that, too?” because the Bluewater Bridge was the nearby bridge over the river to the US and one of the highest bridges in the world. The principal looked at me with what I thought was the smallest hint of a smile and at the same time with the smallest flicker of his eyes over to Mr. Goodearle said, “Well, Tim, if anyone ever tells you to do that again, you come and tell me, alright?” the tiny smile of which panicked me for I thought its ridicule was directed at my lame and cowardly attempt to blame Mary Hiemstra.
“But try not to do it again,” the principal said, and dismissed us and we went down the hall and back to our classroom, Mary acting mad since I said she told me to do it, but she did tell me to do it, and in my relief, and in all our relief at not being given the strap, I felt the gathering dread that the principal was going to phone our parents, that in particular my dad would find out about me showing my penis and he would be enraged as he was at my pulling my pants down on the street, or at my diddling, or at me not wanting to play with the ball mitt Fred Scott gave him when I was born, or at me for acting stupid and playing the clown and making myself someone who people laughed at rather than with, and it would be another thing where I wasn’t normal enough—like Andrew—and I wasn’t boy-like enough and he would be embarrassed by me being his son.
But when I got home, let off by Mrs. Harrison to tread up the laneway, and my mom came home from work a short time later, she gave no sign of knowing about that moment in the cubby. She was only tired and asking the same questions she asked every night as she sat in the La-Z-Boy smoking her cigarette and my brother and I watched Three Stooges and The Flintstones and The Brady Bunch in the living room, then she went to start to make supper, and later my dad came home and drank the beer he drank before supper, and then one with supper because he didn’t have to drink milk like we had to, because he said, “Only women and children need to drink milk.” The same way I’d search the expressions of his face to see if he was drinking and how I should act, I searched him every minute for any indication he’d heard from the principal, and even after supper, when he went out to lie on the couch in front of the TV and fall asleep the way he did every night, I waited in that interval because that’s when sometimes he’d talk to us about serious stuff like when he told us not to say cocksucker, but still he acted in his usual calm, tired, kind of grumpy way, and I was a little relieved, but when I got in bed I thought he could still find out, that once something happened, anything happened, anyone could find out at any time, if not now, next week, or a year, or twenty years from now, and the only way for someone never to find out something happened is for it never to have happened in the first place, I thought in the darkness of my room as I heard the trains rumble and crash in the yard across the field across from my house.
It was still on my mind a couple weeks from then when Parents Night would be happening at the school, and as the day grew closer I got uneasy because surely Mrs. Robbins, my teacher, had been told by the principal and Mr. Goodearle what had happened, and maybe she’d be obligated to share it with my parents, and though my dread had lessened the further we got away from it, I was still hyper-aware as we strode to my class in the impossibly bright lights that shine in classrooms at night, and we went up to the very desk I’d shown my penis under, and Mrs. Robbins gave a rundown on my progress that year to date, and my brother stood looking wide-eyed at the classroom since he was only used to the different-looking classroom of kindergarten, and Mrs. Robbins suggested some exercises we could do at home to help me to learn to tie my shoes—like letting me practise on a larger, adult-sized shoe—since I was still lagging behind the other students in that regard, and then she said at different moments when the class has quiet time she notices that Tim sits at his desk and moves his fingers in a strange manner in front of his face, and she accompanied her observation with an acting out of the movement, her hands rising to wriggle her fingers in front of her eyes, and did he do such a thing at home, she asked them, was it something they too had noticed?
Mom said that was something they’d noticed, yes, and Dad looked over at me with an angry look because I’d failed to stop this habit—that I continued on with it purposely, it seemed, to embarrass him and to make myself abnormal, making myself into what would never be a man, and his eyes shamed me and I’d embarrassed him, embarrassed them, again, though Mrs. Robbins said that in every other respect I was doing very well, particularly with my drawing, I just needed to focus on neatness and tying my shoes, and concluding the meeting, we went down the aisle and there was Paul Roughton without his parents for some reason, standing in his plaid shirt with his hands in his pockets, and a cowlick of jet black hair darting down over his forehead and shadowing his freckled nose.
He looked up at my parents as
they approached and he said, “So you’re Tim’s mom and dad, huh?” in his hoarse voice that seemed more like a teenager’s or an adult’s than a little boy’s. I had always avoided him because he was derisive toward me. He wasn’t the kind to physically bully but would sneer sentences that seemed to have unpleasant meanings. I never knew just what was supposed to be meant—I only knew that it was negative, insulting and mean. He always wore a contemptuously amused smile that caused his eyelids to half-drop over his eyes and it was with these eyes and that smile that Paul Roughton looked up at my mother and father and volunteered in a strangely weary and dry, croaking voice, “Yeah, Tim’s doin’ pretty good, havin’ a pretty good year,” he rasped, with a cock of his head that silently added, all things considered. “Only thing, though,” he continued, “is that sometimes we notice him sittin’ at his desk, doin’ this.” He raised his hands to his face and flapped them around grotesquely. “Dunno why he does that,” Paul Roughton shrugged. “Other than that, he’s doin’ fine.”
“I’ll bet you do real good in school too, don’t ya?” my dad asked him.
“I’m doin’ alright…” Paul Roughton began, his odd, adult-like confidence in his small body preparing to continue—
“Yeah, I’ll bet you’re the type who really keeps outta trouble—a real genius student,” my dad blurted, his dismissive bitterness vanquishing that of the comparatively inexperienced young boy’s as he brushed past him and led us out of the room.