by Mary Lawson
There were plenty of girls in his class at school and he liked the look of many of them, but he didn’t know how to approach them. What were you supposed to say? Hello, my name’s Arthur? They already knew his name! He should have approached them back in grade nine, when some of them—the ones from the small communities out in the sticks—were still strangers. But back in grade nine he hadn’t been interested.
Sometime during his first year in grade ten that had changed almost overnight. One minute girls were irrelevant, and the next, he couldn’t stop looking at them. He and his friends would hang about during recess and lunch hour, watching the girls walk by in little gabbling groups. That was one of the problems—females didn’t come individually—they came in packs. You’d have to walk up to a whole pack, which was out of the question.
By the time he was sixteen (legally old enough to leave school, but of course his mother wouldn’t let him) most of the boys he knew had worked it out and were at least able to talk to girls, if nothing more. Some of the more advanced, more confident ones even professed to be fed up with “wimmen” already. “They ain’t worth the trouble, Art. Take it from me, they just ain’t worth the trouble.”
Arthur would have liked the chance to find that out for himself, but there was no way. His friend Carl urged him on. “Go on, Art, what you waitin’ for? Just go up and ask her.” But it was no use. He didn’t know how.
Jake, on the other hand, was born knowing. As with schoolwork, Jake had no trouble with girls at all.
When Arthur was seventeen and just entering grade eleven (having taken two years over grade ten), Jake started high school. He was twelve. Five years behind Arthur in age, two years behind him in school, ahead of him already in the matter of girls. Arthur would see him chatting to them in the schoolyard, easily, casually, as if they were friends instead of a different species. In fact, Jake had more friends who were female than male. Other boys were a bit suspicious, maybe even a little afraid of him. He had the ability to get people into trouble—anyone who had been through primary school with him knew that.
Arthur had forgotten how bad it was having Jake in the same school. When he started high school he’d had two glorious years without him, and now, looking back, he saw that he hadn’t appreciated those years enough. Jake took to high school as if it had been invented just for him—all those new subjects to excel in, all those new teachers to impress! He talked about the things he was learning at the supper table every night. “They don’t teach you arithmetic anymore, they teach you mathematics, and there are three different mathematics. There’s algebra, and geometry, and trigonometry. Geometry’s all about lines and stuff. And trigonometry’s about triangles and how to work out angles and stuff. And algebra’s where you use letters instead of numbers….”
Arthur was sure Jake’s enthusiasm was fake, put on to impress their parents, but still it stuck in his throat and made it difficult for him to swallow his supper.
“See, in Latin, nouns have different forms and they have different endings—loads of different endings—and we have to learn them all. So I wondered if someone could test me after supper?”
Jake kept slipping sideways looks at their father as he said all this. Their mother would be hanging on every word, her face pink with pleasure, but it was their father’s reaction he seemed interested in. But his father just chewed silently, pushing down the food.
“I want to quit school,” Arthur said.
He and his father were examining the boarding on the north side of the barn. Some of the planks were starting to rot and would have to be replaced. And it needed to be done soon. Winter was coming and a drafty barn could result in a whole herd of cattle coming down with pneumonia.
His father straightened up and looked at him.
“It’s a waste of time,” Arthur said. “I want to quit.”
His father dug around in his ear with a dirty finger. “Better speak to your mother,” he said at last.
“I already did.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
It had taken him weeks to work up the courage to approach her, and even more weeks to work out which words were the right ones, the ones that would convince her. How could he explain to her the pointlessness of carrying on? The futile years he had spent sitting at a desk. The endless exams, and his failure to pass them, and the fact that he didn’t care. In the end, all the reasons and all the words he could think of added up to just one sentence.
“It ain’t teachin’ me nothin’ I need to know,” he’d told her. He’d stood awkwardly in the kitchen, six foot two in his socks, two hundred and forty pounds, a man, not a boy, aching to do a man’s work. If one of the plow horses had dropped in its tracks, Arthur could have slung the great leather collar around his own neck and finished the job himself, no trouble at all. At school he could hardly squeeze his body into the space between the desk and the seat. He wanted to say, “Look at me, Mum! Look at me! I shouldn’t be sittin’ at those desks anymore.” But he knew that argument would cut no ice.
His mother was chopping onions, wiping the tears away with the back of her wrist. Her mouth was a straight white line. She said, “Arthur, you don’t know what you’re going to need to know in the future.”
Maybe she was right about that, but he was pretty sure he knew what he was not going to need to know, namely Latin, chemistry, physics, math, French, history, geography, and Charles Dickens. It was true that there was a machine shop at school that had some handy tools in it, but even there he hadn’t learned anything his father hadn’t taught him already.
“If they could teach you how to predict the weather,” he said, “that would be good. But they don’t teach stuff like that. Useful stuff. They don’t teach useful stuff.”
She looked at him uncertainly. “Don’t they?” She’d only been as far as grade eight herself.
“No.”
She hesitated for a moment and he held his breath. But then her mouth went tight again.
“They taught you to read and write,” she said. “You didn’t think that was useful at the time, but everyone needs to know how to read and write.”
“Yeah, but I can!” Arthur said. “I know all that stuff! And adding and subtracting and multiplying and that other one—dividing. I don’t need more than that, Mum. All the rest I need to know, Dad can teach me. And he needs me on the farm. He needs help. He’s got too much work to do on his own.”
He felt exhausted. He’d never strung so many sentences together in his life. Surely she must see that he was right.
But she pressed her lips together and shook her head. “Your father’s managed just fine all these years; he can manage a few more.” She sighed and turned to face him directly, holding the onion knife out to the side, and he knew that he had lost. “A man without an education is at a disadvantage, Arthur. Your father is at a disadvantage. He’s a good farmer, but he’s at a disadvantage with educated people.” She smiled at him. “You’ll thank me one day. I promise you. When you have your grade twelve, you’ll thank me.”
His father, still waggling his finger in his ear, looked at him helplessly. “What did she say?” he asked.
“She said I’d thank her one day.” Arthur’s voice was so dragged down by misery it was hardly audible, even to him.
“Oh,” his father said. “Yeah, well…” He took the nail he’d been using to test for rot and pressed the point of it into another plank of wood. It sank in ominously. “Gotta get at this quick,” he said. His voice was sad, apologetic. He’d have liked to help, but he couldn’t.
November. Arthur and Jake trudged to school each day in the dark and trudged home again in the dark, and one thing to be grateful for was at least, now that Jake was older, they didn’t have to go together. Most days Jake went in early to meet with his friends and Arthur went at the last possible moment, sliding in the door just as the bell rang. He and Jake were in separate classrooms—something else to be grateful for—they didn’t see each other during the da
y except at lunchtime. He sat at his too-small desk in an ill-lit classroom and looked out the window at the gray, snow-heavy sky, and endured. All his friends had left school now, to take jobs at the sawmill or in the silver mines or on their fathers’ farms. He got to see them only on Saturday nights. He and Carl Luntz, his best friend, would walk into town together with Carl’s older brothers, and meet up with Ted Hatchett and Jude Libovitz and the rest, and they’d go and hang about down by Ben’s Bar. They weren’t old enough to go inside, but the liquor generally found its way out, and every Saturday night without fail there would be a fight about something or other and someone would go home with a broken nose or a couple of black eyes. Arthur mostly didn’t take part in the fighting. He could never get that worked up about things and the only person he’d ever wanted to hit was Jake. But he was happy enough just standing on the sidelines, watching.
Carl and his brothers were on the peaceful side too, but Ted Hatchett and Jude Libovitz were both enthusiastic fighters. Especially Ted. Ted loved fighting—any excuse would do. He also loved liquor, so one way or another Arthur and Carl generally ended up carting him home between them, each with one of Ted’s arms across his shoulders, back to where he lived with his mother on Crow River Road. Ted worked in the silver mine. His father had been killed in an accident at the sawmill when Ted was small and his mother wouldn’t let him near the place. She insisted that he work in the mine instead, which involved two hours’ walk, morning and night. But Ted didn’t seem to mind. He had no brothers or sisters, so he and his mother were on their own and Arthur got the impression they were pretty close.
“I’m an only child,” Ted wailed mournfully one night as Arthur and Carl dragged him along through the darkness. “Half an orphan, and an owowownly child. So sad, so sad.”
“Sad for your mum, all right,” Carl muttered breathlessly. Ted was even bigger than Arthur, so he was quite a load. “If she could only have one she sure deserved better than you.”
“That’s unkind.” Ted was exhaling alcohol fumes powerful enough to melt the snow under their feet. “Isn’ he unkind, Art?”
“Dunno about that,” Arthur said, grinning to himself in the darkness. “Could be right.”
Ted’s mother would greet them grimly at the door on each occasion, survey Ted’s bloody nose or half-torn-off ear and say, “Take him upstairs. I don’t know why you bother with him. Just leave him in a ditch next time.” Though she would thank them both on their way out.
If it was raining or snowing too hard to go into town, Arthur usually went over to the Luntzes’ farm and sat on Carl’s bed and watched him whittle antlers out of driftwood. Carl’s parents, Otto and Gertie Luntz, had emigrated from Germany and still spoke with funny accents, but the boys had all been born in Canada. Their farm was bigger than the Dunns’, big enough that it would support all three boys and their families in due course, and the farmhouse was bigger too, so each boy had a good-sized room of his own. Walking into Carl’s room was like walking into a forest. He had antlers on his wall that any stag would have been proud to own. He’d pick up bits of driftwood on the beach and whittle them into prongs and then glue the prongs together at exactly the right angle and sand them down until you couldn’t find a join if your life depended on it. His walls were covered with antlers—moose, caribou, white-tailed deer—and every now and then he’d stick a real set up there in the midst of them and ask Arthur or whoever happened to be passing his bedroom door to pick it out, and nobody ever could.
“But vy doss he do it, Artur?” Mr. Luntz would whisper—loudly—his brow furrowed in mock perplexity. “Dat is wot I asks. Der is so many deers in dis country, der is so many, many antlers, so vy ’e makes more? You are a friend of him, so maybe you know?” Carl, without looking up from his whittling, would say mildly, “A friend of his, Dad, not a friend of him,” and Mr. Luntz would wink at Arthur and Arthur would grin shyly back.
He loved Saturday nights. The rest of the week had nothing going for it whatsoever. The kids he sat beside at school—those who had stayed on after they were sixteen—were mostly nice enough, but he didn’t belong with them. They were the brainy ones, most of them town-bred, like Steve Williams, whose father ran the Hudson’s Bay store, or John Adams, whose father was the minister at the Presbyterian church. All of them were younger than Arthur. They would nod at him when he came in to take his seat; he was a fixture, like one of the desks. The teacher would start talking and Arthur’s brain would shut down automatically—there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. He would stare out the window at the road and at the fields behind it, and the dark, silent trees behind the fields, and his brain would just sit there like a lump of cold pudding. Once, in the middle of a history lesson—it was Canadian history, which turned out, incredibly, considering how little of it there was, to be more boring than the history of any other country on earth—a timber wolf slid out of the shadows, head low, body crouched, yellow eyes fixed on the school. No one else noticed it. The teacher’s voice droned on. Arthur watched the wolf. The silver-gray of its coat against the silver-gray of the birches behind it. The stillness, as if time itself had paused for a moment. The pale, watchful eyes. You could see how it belonged where it was, how it was meant to be in that landscape. You could imagine that it and the shadowed trees behind it were waiting for humans to move on, or die out, so that they could reclaim the land. “Watch out for the traplines,” Arthur thought, though his father wouldn’t be pleased to see it so close to the farms. As if it had heard him, the wolf turned and melted back into the woods.
The moment the bell rang at the end of the day Arthur was off, stamping through the snow, back to the farm to help his father with whatever needed doing. And lots needed doing, even in winter—repairs they hadn’t had time for during the summer months, maintenance of the buildings, care of the livestock. The cattle were all in the barn now, the pigs in the shed tacked onto the side of the barn, the horses in their stable. All of them needed to be fed and watered and have the muck cleared out and fresh bedding put down. They needed their feet inspected and their ears looked into and the occasional pat on the nose to encourage them through the long dark winter days.
Jake was meant to go straight home too, to do his share, but it seemed there was always something that kept him at school late. Arthur didn’t care, but his father did.
“Where you bin?”
“At school.” Jake’s face shining with innocent enthusiasm. He was thirteen now, and sometime during the last year his looks had turned the corner from being sweet to being handsome: all planes and angles, and that wheat-colored hair.
“You come straight home after school. You got work to do.”
“But I can’t, Dad! We’re putting on a play—a real play, by Shakespeare. It’s called Romeo and Juliet, and I’m Romeo. He’s the hero. He commits suicide.”
Arthur paused in his task of cleaning a sore on a cow’s udder and considered the idea of Jake committing suicide. He turned it over in his mind a couple of times, resting his head against the cow’s warm belly. Jake dead and gone. The idea had appeal all right.
“We’re putting it on at Christmas, so we have to practice every night. It’s really good and everybody in town is going to be invited, and we’re going to make posters and send them to all the stores, and they’ll put them in their windows so everyone will know.”
“You come home straight after school. You got work to do.”
“But Dad…”
“You come home straight after school.”
And then in the evening, when supper was over and Jake was in his room doing his homework, and Arthur was in his room not doing his, Arthur would hear their mother’s voice, arguing gently for Romeo.
“It’s so nice that he enjoys school, Henry, and that he’s doing so well. They must think he’s very talented to ask him to be the hero. I think we should let him do it. I think it would be good for him.”
There was silence for a minute. Then Arthur’s father, sounding like a man
who knew he was going to lose the argument but had to make his point just the same, said, “They should know better. They should know better than to make farm kids do things after school.”
“It’s only until Christmas, Henry. I think it would be wrong to stop him. After Christmas he will be able to do his fair share of the work again. You and Arthur could manage up till then, couldn’t you?”
Arthur imagined his father’s big heavy face. Imagined him thinking that to say Jake would do his share of the work “again” implied that he had ever done it. But their mother had had a dose of flu a month ago from which she still hadn’t fully recovered, and Arthur knew that his father was worried about her and wanted to cause her as little anxiety as he could. And never could resist her anyway.
Arthur didn’t hate his brother, or not very often. Mostly he just didn’t understand him. How did they get to be in the same family? What did Jake want? Because Arthur definitely got the feeling Jake wanted something; you could see it sometimes: there was a fretfulness, a frustration—something indefinable behind the eyes.
Christmas came and went. Romeo died for love and was a triumph, according to his mother. Arthur had to take her word for it. He and his father missed the performance—they were supposed to go but they were in town buying supplies at the hardware store and lost track of the time. Worse still, they had the truck, so Jake and his mother had to hurry the two miles to the school through the snow with Jake’s fancy costume wrapped up in a paper bag. They arrived with only five minutes to spare and found Mrs. Castle, the English-teacher-turned-director, almost wringing her hands. When they got home, driven by Otto Luntz (it turned out the whole Luntz family had been there, as had practically every other soul in Struan), Jake went straight to his room without speaking.
“He so badly wanted you to come,” Arthur’s mother said to them, tight-lipped with disapproval. “It was so important to him, and he wanted you to see it. You most of all, Henry. You more than anybody.”