Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  From Mr. Plant I learned about method acting, after the person chosen to play Sherman Greene did get suspended from school by the principal for fighting in the hallways. It was three days before opening night, and we were without a Sherman Greene.

  “Apparently the principal places the importance of discipline above the importance of a high-school play,” sniffed Ms. Griffin when poor Mr. Plant announced the fate of our former Sherman Greene. Things had got so bad even she was being snotty to him now.

  “No matter,” cried Mr. Plant. “The show will go on! Who wants to play the garment factory hero?”

  For once, everyone in the gymnasium was still and quiet. For once, no one said a word.

  “Come on,” said Mr. Plant. “It’s a great role. A piece of this town’s history. An important part!”

  Still no takers. Everyone was tired of the play. Everyone just wanted it to be over.

  “No one wants to play Sherman Greene, esquire?”

  “Jesus,” said Ted, still lounging against the proscenium. “What a disaster!”

  “It’s not a hard part,” Mr. Plant said. “There are hardly any lines. You just run around and save women from the fire.”

  Even with such heroism-made-easy, no one raised their hand. Mr. Plant finally stood in the centre of the stage and put his hands on his hips. “If no one volunteers we’ll just have to appoint someone. Theatre is not a democracy! The director is king!”

  Faces tensed. Some people actually slid further down in their seats. The little Indians stood on stage, terrified as usual, and stared out at the actor audience. Mr. Plant looked out over the sea of young faces. He was not inspired. Finally he turned back to Ms. Griffin.

  “Well, what do we do?”

  “Don’t ask me,” she said. “I’m not the director!”

  “Well,” said Mr. Plant, “we’ll just have to ...”

  His eye fell on me. As usual I was on the outer edge of the group, exposed but trying to get back to the warm centre. Mr. Plant knew who I was. Everyone had heard about what happened to my mother, and every day I was pointed out in the hallway to someone new, even to some of the teachers. Mr. Plant also knew something of my relationship to the late, great Sherman Greene. Perhaps my mother had talked to him about it before she died.

  “Perfect,” he said, pointing at me. “Verisimilitude!”

  “Versimilawhat?” said Ted.

  “Progeny!” cried Mr. Plant.

  “Surely you’re not suggesting ...” began Ms. Griffin.

  “And why not?” said Mr. Plant. “It would be perfect. A great-grandson playing his famous great-grandfather.”

  “But what he’s just been through! Surely you know what he’s just been through?”

  Mr. Plant waved this away. “It will help him take his mind off it. He can use his grief to make the part more convincing.”

  Ted finally clued in. “You’re not gonna get that half-pint Greene to play Old Sherman! He’s a little pipsqueak. He could-n’t save a mouse from a fire, let alone three old fat broads!”

  Ted’s audience, his teammates, and all the girls in love with him, giggled and guffawed, whichever was appropriate to their sex. Ted then suggested that Mr. Plant get Big, Bigger, and Oh My Jesus to play the three broads the pipsqueak rescues. “Let’s just make it a fucking fantasy!” he said.

  Mr. Plant ignored Ted.

  “Maybe we should get Greene’s retarded sister to play one of the fat broads. Keep it all in the family!”

  More laughter from the gymnasium floor, as if the play had already begun. As if the Three Rivers Garment Factory scene was a comedy.

  “Shut up, Ted,” Mr. Plant said finally.

  “Don’t tell me to shut up,” Ted warned.

  “Don’t any of you know what this boy has been through?” said Ms. Griffin. “Don’t you think you should be a bit nicer to someone who’s had such a terrible thing happen?”

  “Fuck Greene,” Ted said to Ms. Griffin. “And fuck you too!”

  For once, there was no laughter from Ted’s fans and admirers. The entire gym fell silent, while they waited to see what the teachers would do. It was strange. In all the years I was in elementary and high school, that word was used outside on and off school grounds so much no one thought about it anymore. But use it inside, in front of a teacher or two, and you immediately had everyone’s full and undivided attention. All the little Indians moved closer to Ms. Griffin. I had managed to fight my way back to the middle of the group and away from Mr. Plant’s pointing finger. Ms. Griffin, who even us elementary students could tell was a little scared of Ted, had insinuated herself in our exact centre. She clutched a couple of Indians to her legs as if she thought, in a pinch, we could protect her.

  “This time,” she said quietly to Mr. Plant, “I hope you’re going to do something. I hope you aren’t going to let this student get away —”

  Mr. Plant held up his hand. He was no longer looking at me, or at Ms. Griffin; he had turned to consider his star actor. Ted was no longer leaning against the arch, but kept looking back and forth between Mr. Plant and the students on the floor. None of us were sure later if Mr. Plant had seen it, or Ms. Griffin. But most of the Indians, even the ones who were too young to know what it meant, had seen a few of Ted’s jock friends on the gymnasium floor give him a nod when he looked at them. This was all the support Ted needed.

  “Apologize to Darrel Greene and Ms. Griffin,” said Mr. Plant, “or you are no longer in this play.”

  “I told you,” said Ted. “Fuck Greene and Griffin. And fuck you too, Petunia.”

  “I want you to apologize,” said Mr. Plant, as if he hadn’t heard. “I have some give and take, Ted, when it comes to student behavior. But you have taken more than I have to give.”

  “Blow me,” Ted said calmly. “I hear you want to, you cock-sucker. I hear you want to suck off all the guys. You fucking faggot!”

  A couple of the guys on the floor laughed, and one girl gasped, but no one else said anything. Ted just stood before the older man, his legs trembling a little, but defiant. Of course Mr. Plant knew all along that this was coming. Similar scenes had probably transpired at the other places he had taught too. Perhaps he had only been hoping he could rein Ted in until the play was over. No such luck.

  “So,” Ted said, when the teacher didn’t answer. “Are you or aren’t ya?

  “Am I or am I not what?”

  “A faggot!” said Ted. “I think we have a right to know, Petunia.”

  Everyone waited breathlessly for Petunia’s answer. We all guessed at what he would do — start screaming about insubordination and threaten to get Ted expelled. We would most certainly lose the Narrator in our play. But Mr. Plant surprised us. He surprised Ms. Griffin too, who wouldn’t stop talking about it to the faculty members for a month.

  “Yes,” answered Mr. Plant. “I am, as you say, a faggot. So what?”

  That took the wind out of Ted’s sails. He just stood there and stared, unsure of what to do. Even his friends of the floor just gawked up at them, without a nod or a laugh or any sign that they had heard at all. But they had heard. None of them would stop talking about it for a month either, or for a year. Ted, reduced by his teacher’s bravery to a sarcastic teenager still leaning in spirit against the proscenium arch, shook his head in mock disbelief and said, “Shit! I ain’t working for no queer. I quit.”

  He walked off the stage and out of the gym. Perhaps Mr. Plant would have stood in the centre of the stage again, his hands on his hips, and asked who wanted to play the Narrator, but he didn’t have a chance. One by one the students stood up from their seats, where they had been watching all the action, said “I quit,” and left the gymnasium behind their hero. There would be a big stink about it later — how Mr. Plant had ousted Ted from the play and all the students had ousted themselves from the gym. Most would be satisfied when the principal ousted Mr. Plant the following summer. My retarded sister and I would still be dealing with the fact that our mother had ouste
d herself from everything, for good.

  We little Indians were ousted from our costumes and sent back to the elementary school to wait for the three o’clock bell and the buses. Ms. Griffin would also tell the staff and some of the parents she thought what happened was good, even though the play was cancelled for that year. Homosexuals, while she personally had nothing against them, shouldn’t be teaching young boys. That afternoon would be held up as the strongest example of student protest in the history of Three Rivers, though they would never include it in the town play, because they could never figure out what the protest was about, exactly. Still, Ted would remain a hero until he graduated. And I would eventually get caught off school grounds by Ted and his cronies, who would hold me down and carve up my arm with a rusty screw for revenge. Mr. Plant’s last words to the principal after he was fired would become a matter of public record and speculation. He said he could see why the school put on plays about the Three Rivers Garment Factory year after year in the school gymnasium.

  Heroes, said Mr. Plant, even minor ones like Sherman Greene and senseless ones like Ted Williams, are damn hard to come by in this town.

  CLXXVII

  “It’s good,” said Julie. “Really good, Cameron.” “Thanks,” I said. “I got most of it from June and Darrel’s files.

  Some from my own life. You want me to keep reading?” “Do you want to?” “I guess.” Suddenly I felt the first real feeling of warmth toward the

  Black Widow. Maybe it was just because she liked my story. But for a minute there, I thought we could even be friends. And as with anybody I grow to like, I felt a bit sorry for her too. From what I gathered, other than Dean, she didn’t have a lot of people in her life either. Julie was just as alone as the rest of us.

  The only thing I could think of to say to express this was to say, “I’m sorry I brought you all the way down here. You probably think it’s stupid.”

  “Not really,” said Julie. “I guess, hearing your story, I can see your point. It is interesting.”

  “I’m doing it for June.”

  “Really?” said Julie. “I kind of got the impression you were doing it for Darrel.”

  “Darrel’s dead. What’s the point in that?”

  “I would have liked to meet him.”

  “No you wouldn’t. He was an all-time loser, really.”

  “Yet you come all the way down here to learn the story of an all-time loser’s life?”

  “Like I said, I’m doing it for June now.”

  “What in the world can June possibly get out of it? Like you said. She doesn’t even remember.”

  “Maybe she does. Maybe she remembers what happened to her mother and her brother and her father.”

  “God,” said Julie, barely suppressing a shudder. “I certainly hope not.”

  CLXXVIII

  The contents of the town of Three Rivers are as follows:

  1. Four churches: Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, and a modern wood, steel and glass architectural abortion belonging to the Pentecostals; a whack of restaurants, including that culinary giant, Denny’s, and of course strip malls galore, each one including a BIG BAD GROCERY, BIG BAD VIDEO, BIG BAD HARDWARE, and BIG BAD FURNITURE. Middle-class North America after the death of the concept of evenly distributed market share. I belabour the point.

  2. Industry: Shoe factory; paper mill; Michelin Tire; the occasional high-tech company that creates software drivers for Command and Conquer I, II, and III, or something like that. Mom and Pop shops and the barely breathing cottage industry, etc, etc, etc. Ad infinitum.

  3. Layout: Three small rivers, of course — the Medway, the Mersey, and the Lahave — all converging under one long, green iron bridge. On one side lay the town centre, a Cartesian collection of streets and avenues lined with quaint nineteenth century-style false frontage. You could shop for crafts here, or eat club sandwiches and drink burnt coffee at a diner, see a barrister or solicitor if you needed one, or an accountant after you had. You could even see a psychologist and a chiropractor. For a real shrink or a doctor you had to visit the Mersey Hospital on the other side of town. There was a playhouse theatre that doubled as a cinema, if you didn’t want to drive all the way out to the mini-malls for the BIG BAD five-screen bonanza. This month, the local theatre troupe was putting on a drama called Blah, Blah, Blah by Somebody-or-Other. They hadn’t made it into a movie or a cartoon, so none of us had ever heard of it. On the other side of the bridge sat the subdivisions and prefabricated neighbourhoods and an old abandoned match mill down by the water. Beyond this sat the old part of town — long, wide streets lined with rows of tall cultivated oak trees and great white Victorian-style houses set back on neatly trimmed but generous lawns. Beyond that were the outskirts — some dirt roads with the not-so-nice houses and trailer parks, the high school and elementary schools, the race-car track, the town dump, recycling plant and rifle range, municipal buildings, power station and electrical subdivisions, the golf and country club, and a few smaller outlying villages.

  CLXXIX

  The only gestalt was the big sign as you drove into town from the highway, an attempt to tie it all together:

  WELCOME TO THREE RIVERS

  HEARTLAND OF THE LONG VALLEY

  Julie said, “Somebody better check to see if this heart is still beating.”

  CLXXX

  We couldn’t find a place to park on Main Street, so we parked on the far side of the rivers, across the bridge in front of a dive motel called the Glooscap Inn. Rooms with satellite TV for $38.50 a night. When we were getting our things out of the car I noticed that Julie had brought a book with her. Chinese Poems and the Dance of the Blue Heron, short stories by Dagnia Daley. Julie seemed a bit ashamed when she saw I had found it in the trunk.

  “It’s recent,” she said. “I thought I might as well finish it. So. What do you have planned?”

  I had nothing planned exactly, and was feeling the pressure of that. There were certain things I wanted to do for myself, things I wanted to look into for the sake of “research.” Some of them I wanted to do alone, others I wanted June along, and Julie, if she wanted to come. We only had the afternoon.

  “Well,” I said. “Why don’t you guys go have lunch somewhere, and I’ll explore a little bit. We’ll meet later.”

  “Okay.”

  It took us a little while to get June out of the car. She was looking at a book about the Smurfs and she didn’t want to put it down. “Smurfs are my favorite, Bubby,” she said.

  June lived so much in the present that everything was her favourite at the time she was looking at it. I asked June if she didn’t think the blue Smurfs looked a lot like bugs. I was, in truth, envisioning little Papa Smurf reduced to a crushed blue mess underneath the heel of one of my shoes.

  “Smurfs aren’t bugs,” June argued. “Bugs are bugs! Smurfs are Smurfs!”

  Although it was hard to argue with such immutable logic, we finally managed to get her up and at ’em. We decided to walk across the bridge into downtown and find June and Julie a restaurant to eat in.

  “As long as it’s not BIG BAD HAMBURGERS, I have no problem,” I said. “We still have to drive home with June tonight.”

  A raw wind gusted off the three rivers. June had left her mittens in the car, and complained that her hands were cold. Julie and I each took a hand to warm them up while we walked. June was afraid that while walking across the high bridge she would get blown off into the rivers.

  “Don’t let me go, Bubby,” she kept saying. “Don’t let me go.”

  On the way across the bridge I explained a little of the town’s history to Julie.

  “This entire area was kind of a spiritual watershed for the Indians three hundred years ago. Just as it was a literal watershed for the logging operations when they floated cut trees to be sawed up at the lumber and match mills in the early nineteenth century.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Julie. “Spiritual watershed?”

  “The tribes — Micmac, Mohawk, A
lgonquin — used to hold gatherings here. They were both political and spiritual. If war was to be declared it was decided here. Disputes were settled. Ceremonies — sweat lodges and smudges and coming-of-age rituals — were held here. The Indians of all the local tribes considered this a place of great spiritual conductivity, because of the way these three small rivers meet and flow on as a single body. Along the banks of all three rivers there are still sacred burial grounds and ceremonial lands, those that haven’t been developed.”

  “How do you know all this?’ asked Julie.

  I shrugged. “I looked it up. I studied it. It’s very interesting. There was a great meeting here between the British and the native tribes in the 1763. Even then the settlers wanted to develop this river valley. They knew what the land was worth, but the Indians weren’t so obliging. This was sacred land. No one lived here, not even members of the tribes. The British settlers, guarded by troops, came and made encampments on one side of the rivers and the Indians gathered on the other, while a famous Dutch arbitrator spoke to the chiefs.”

  “The Dutch arbitrator in your story,” Julie said, nodding.

  I pointed to a flat dry area nestled between the Medway and the Lahave. “The arbitrator and the three chiefs met there. There are records of what was said published on the Internet. I’ve read them. Long conversations about European encroachment on native lands, about the so-called peaceful settlement of the East. It is said that one of the chiefs called the British “red-coated horn blowers with bad medicine who brought evil winds wherever they went.” He was surly but right. The British brought disease, whiskey, and the irrefutable laws of ownership. The white man’s famous triumvirate.”