Principals and Other Schoolyard Bullies

by Nick Fonda

  I think it was Michael who drove the rest of the way to Sept-Îles, where Dad met us. Dad had been in Montrouge for the better part of the previous year. In the spring Mom had left Michael and me with Nan to make the trip north to help Dad choose a house. I think that had been one of the conditions that Mom had set, that and a five-year limit. Looking back, I can understand, as I didn’t then, how hard a decision it was for both of them. Nan, although I didn’t know it, was already not well, and Mom must have felt bad about leaving. For Dad, it was an opportunity he felt he couldn’t afford to ignore; a last chance, as he put it, to make real money. I had caught bits and pieces of their conversations in the weeks before Dad went north, conversations that grew loud and then soft, that were sometimes interrupted by a sound I had never really heard, that of Mom crying.

  Dad met us in Sept-Îles and the next day we boarded a train that took us through forests and up river valleys, and through unexpected tunnels and, a couple of times, made us feel as though we were in mid-air because we’d look out the window and look down on tree tops. It was scary, and yet, I loved that train ride. I ended up taking it several times over the next five years and it never ceased to impress me and move me. I think I liked Montrouge from the moment we got there just because the ride up had been so spectacular.

  We spent our first night in the hotel and the next day Dad drove us around. First, he drove by what was going to be our home and then he drove through the rest of the town. He showed us the men’s quarters where he had been staying until now, the English school, which Michael and I would be attending, the much bigger French school, the arena, the pool, the strip mall which, Dad told us, was built to act as a windbreak for the town. Dad drove down the road that led to the open pit mine and the hangar where he worked on the giant Terex trucks that hauled the iron ore out of the mine. By the time we got back to Montrouge, the moving van had arrived at our house and was already half unloaded.

  Thinking back on it, Montrouge was an almost unreal place. It was a modern suburb in the middle of wilderness, surrounded by mountains and forests and ice-cold lakes. Today, of course, it’s even more unreal. I saw photos of it on the Internet a while ago and there is nothing left. After the mine closed, all the buildings were bulldozed to rubble and buried. All that’s left is a surreal network of streets and sidewalks slowly being reclaimed by vegetation.

  But for the five years we spent there, it was a fabulous place. I remember, even before we got unpacked, neighbours came over with coffee cakes and casseroles to welcome us. I met Annie and Marion the first day there and we remained best friends right through high school.

  It was late August when we got to Montrouge, but in those ten or twelve days before school started, I became an old-timer. With Annie and Marion and three or four others, I explored the town from end to end. And we went far beyond the town. We’d go to the lake and stand on the white beach and skip stones, or roll up our pant legs and stand shin-deep in water until our feet turned blue with cold to see who could suffer the longest. We’d haul our fathers’ tools and scavenged lumber into the woods and try to build tree forts. We’d walk out to the dump and throw small rocks at the black bears and sometimes do as the bears did and go through the dump ourselves and marvel at some of the treasures we found.

  When school started, it was as much of a wondrous revelation as the town itself had been. I was starting my first year of high school. Back in Montreal, I would have been packed like a sardine with thirty-five other kids into a cramped and dusty old classroom. Not so in Montrouge! It was a small school but, like the rest of the town, it was new. There might have been a hundred kids in all, from kindergarten to Grade 11. Besides Annie and me (Marion was a year ahead of us), there were only four others in my class: Rebecca, Chris, Andrew and Stephen. I was one of those kids who, until I’d arrived at Montrouge and discovered the joys of being a tomboy, had always been a bookworm. I had always liked school, and I had always done well. It was the same at Montrouge, but more so. It was so much more relaxed, almost as if we were attending some posh private school, or as if we were being educated by private tutors.

  I remember some wonderful teachers. My favourite, or at least one of my favourites, my first favourite, was Mrs. Williams who taught us English and History the first three years. I adored her. For one thing, at that time I was convinced that I was going to become a writer and illustrator of children’s books. I remember sharing my first book with her. It was the story of a toad named Terrance who lived under a bush near a pond. I struggled desperately to illustrate the story and the more I worked at it, the worse my drawings became. But she encouraged me, with the illustrating as well as with the writing.

  Mrs. Williams was a kindred spirit. I didn’t learn it until just before she left at the end of Grade 9, but she too was working at becoming a writer. She wrote poetry and it was only at the very end of that last school year that she told us. She read us a few of her poems the last day of school and we listened, or at least, I listened, mesmerized by her voice, because she had a lovely voice, but puzzled and confused by the words. Perhaps it showed on our faces.

  Mrs. Williams moved back south and I know I kept waiting to hear that she’d become a famous author, but I never heard anything more about her. I googled her name several years ago and learned that she too had given up on writing, unless perhaps she was pseudonymously self-publishing some of her work. But she did get involved in writing; she had become an editor, with McClelland and Stewart.

  It was because Mrs. Williams left that we got Sugden the next year, in Grade 10. I remember that when I walked into the classroom and saw him, I had a sudden visceral reaction to him that I’d never before experienced, and never have since. I literally took a step back, as if I’d come against a grisly sight or been hit by a foul odour. He looked like a slug. He was of medium height, I think, but he seemed to have a shapeless body, as if he were all flesh with no bones. He was balding and he was one of those men who try to hide it by wearing a very low part and combing the hair against the grain and over the bald top. I remember him as grey, a nondescript, washed-out colour. He always wore the same rumpled grey suit and his shirt collar always looked as if it needed washing and his tie always looked tattered and stained. I knew he lived in the men’s quarters so I supposed he had no one to care for his clothes and he had never learned himself.

  Perhaps because of Mrs. Williams or perhaps because of my childhood aspirations, until then English had been my favourite subject. I had always loved to read and language had started to intrigue me, fascinate me. And of course, I wanted to write.

  Within a month, I dreaded both English and History. Sugden would hand out a new book—I can’t even remember a single title from Grade 10, although I could probably name every single book I did with Mrs. Williams—and open it up and start reading to us. What killed it was that he was a poor reader. He would stumble over words or mispronounce them. He would get half way through a sentence and realize that he’d misread it and go back and start it over and get it wrong the second time as well. And he had a slightly nasal voice that grated on my nerves. He was one of those teachers who gave dull assignments—How I Spent My Summer Vacation—and returned your paper with a mark at the end, but not a single comment, as if he had done no more than write an arbitrary number in red ink.

  When I got back my first assignment with him, I couldn’t believe he’d given me 73 out of 100, because for the last three years with Mrs. Williams my marks were always in the high eighties and low nineties.

  “Go and see him,” Annie told me. Unlike me, Annie was a fighter. She was small and slim with dark hair and freckles. She looked angelic but she was one of the toughest people I have ever met. I never saw her back down from anyone.

  “Sir, I don’t understand this mark.”

  “That’s 73 percent.”

  “Yes, but I don’t understand how I got it.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, there were things about your paper that were good. Parts of it were probably quite
good, but it wasn’t consistent. The writing sometimes was a little weak. I think you might have worked on it a little more.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Then I felt Annie’s fist smash into the small of my back.

  “It’s just that I usually get better marks.”

  “Well,” Sugden gave a false laugh, “maybe sometimes I mark a little hard. But it’s for your own good. It’s important to go over your work. Revise it. Re-read it. You can always improve on it.”

  “Mikaela always gets the highest marks in the class.” It was Annie who had decided to step in. After three years with her, I knew a lot of things about Annie and I recognized the tone in her voice. It had an edge. It was a warning.

  “Yes, well, this is Grade 10 and…” Sugden began.

  “That’s not a very good mark.”

  I turned towards Annie. I was now afraid of what she might say, or what she might do. Her face was set and her eyes were brimming with defiance. Sugden must have seen what I did because he backed down.

  “Why don’t you leave your paper with me,” he said, “and I’ll take a second look at it tonight.”

  The next day he gave it back to me without a word. The 73 % had been crossed out and underneath it he had written, in smaller script, 90 %. For the rest of the year, regardless of what I handed in, whether I slaved over an assignment or tossed it off without a thought, I always got 90.

  We were a small group, as I said—even smaller because Rachel had moved back south—and we had been together for the last three years. By the time we got back our fourth assignment, we were aware that we were always getting the same mark, and that mark was exactly the same as our Grade 9 year’s average.

  Except for Chris. Chris’s marks in English had jumped twenty percent and he was suddenly scoring as high as I was. We had teased him about it the first few times, but we saw that it bothered him, much more than it might have bothered us. And we realized that there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

  Chris was one of us, but perhaps the one who was the closest to being an outsider. He was a very good-looking boy, and my first crush. It was in Grade 9 that I had first started noticing boys and Chris was the first boy I noticed. For two months I had gone to bed with images of Chris in my head: his longish blonde hair that half fell over the left side of his face, his blue eyes, and his mouth; Chris had a soft, sensuous mouth with lips that were slightly puffy and pink, almost as if he were wearing a very faint lipstick. I’d fall asleep wondering what it would be like to kiss his lips. He was tall and I think he was self conscious about it because he was always a little stooped. I think his height appealed to me because that had been the summer that I had suddenly shot up so that I was almost as tall as Michael when he came back from his first year at University.

  Chris was perhaps a little quieter than the rest of us. He didn’t go in much for sports, and in Montrouge sports was the biggest thing in town. While all the boys played hockey, Chris, for a short while, had tried to take up figure skating. He was razzed for it, of course, and perhaps that’s what had made him give it up. Or perhaps he didn’t have the skill. He would have been very tall for a figure skater. And he was artsy. He drew amazingly well and in Grade 8, when Mrs. Williams had introduced us to water colours, she had ended up framing four of his paintings and they had hung for a month in the foyer of the town library as part of an exhibition. I was more than a little jealous of his talent but I never had the courage to ask him to make a drawing to go with one of my stories.

  It didn’t take us long to see that Chris was Sugden’s pet. Kids are sensitive to that sort of thing. The unusually high marks that Chris got were part of it, but there were all the other things that, taken individually, meant nothing, but when you added them all up, they left you with an inescapable conclusion. Maybe I was the most conscious of it, and, if I hadn’t found Sugden such a disgusting creature, maybe it would have upset me, or left me jealous. I felt a tinge of that anyway, just because, for the last three years, and even though she showed it much less than Sugden, I had been the favourite in English class, I had been Mrs. Williams’s pet.

  At first, Chris had seemed ok with being the teacher’s pet, had perhaps even relished his new position at the head of the class, as it were. Nobody, including Chris, could explain it, but we had lots of other things to think about and with each passing week, for me at least, English and History classes grew less and less important. Then, something happened. I don’t know what, but something definitely happened. We walked into English class one morning and it was all different. Where Chris had been friendly and co-operative with Sugden, he suddenly became curt, surly, hostile. And, unusual for him, because he was a caring and sensitive person by nature and would suffer himself rather than hurt someone’s feelings, he started openly showing his dislike, his disdain for Sugden. We all hated Sugden, but Chris was the only one who didn’t bother to hide it.

  What was strange was that Sugden didn’t react in any way to Chris’s sudden change. He continued treating Chris like his pet, continued giving him high marks. It was strange. But then, everything about Sugden was strange. His English classes, like I said, were deadly dull. If he didn’t spend the class putting us to sleep with his stumbling monotone, he would give us what he called “work time” during which we were supposed to work on whatever it was that we wanted to work on, and I’d spend the period doodling or chatting with Annie. His History class, if anything, was worse. Regardless of what we were supposed to be reading or studying, he always ended up talking about death and torture. He’d tell us how a thumbscrew worked, or take a whole period to describe what drawing and quartering was, or explain how someone who was burned at the stake would die of smoke inhalation before the fire could really burn him.

  As it turned out, Sugden’s bland equanimity in the face of Chris’s insolence was just a front, and Sugden was a lot sicker than any of us ever guessed.

  Because he was the English teacher, Sugden was in charge of the school play, just as Mrs. Williams had been previously. Looking back, it made perfect sense that Sugden would have picked the play he did, a murder mystery entitled I’ll Be Back Before Midnight, which, among other things, called for one of the characters to appear very briefly on the stage hanging like a dead man on the end of a noose.

  The annual school play was a big deal, almost as big as basketball and soccer. All the high school kids got involved and the play was always put on at the community center which had an auditorium with a really well-equipped theatre. And it wasn’t just the kids who got involved; it was the parents as well. The mothers sewed costumes and the fathers showed off their carpentry skills. My dad, because he was now in charge of the garage at the mine and had to look after hydraulic systems on the trucks and all the other machinery, was in particular demand. The year before, Mrs. Williams had mounted A Man for All Seasons and Dad had designed and built a platform that not only rose three feet off the stage, but rotated a hundred and eighty degrees as well.

  On this play, it had fallen to Dad to come up with a way to make sure that the student left hanging at the end of a noose would be alive and well and back in class on Monday morning. What Dad came up with was a marvel of simplicity: a body harness which the actor would wear under his costume and which would be attached by a length of black electrical cord to a pulley mechanism back stage. The actor would have to let his body relax and his head fall to one side to simulate a hanged man. Throughout the scene, which would last just long enough to make the audience gasp in shock and horror, his weight would be supported by the harness and the electrical cord.

  I remember at supper one night telling Dad that we could probably do the scene even without the harness. “A man who is hung doesn’t choke to death,” I said, brimming with Sugden’s macabre store of knowledge. “It’s a slip knot and all, but when you get sentenced to hang to death, it’s really that your neck gets broken when you go through the trap door. It’s the fall that breaks your neck and kills you.”

  “Maybe,
” Dad replied, “but why take chances?”

  It didn’t come as much of a surprise to any of us that Chris was cast in the part of the character who gets hung, although one of the boys in Grade 11 was pretty upset about it. It was something of an unwritten rule that the kids in Grade 11 had seniority when it came to auditioning for parts. After all, they were graduating and this would be their last chance to go on stage. The role of the dead man was the choicest part in the play. As kids, we’d grown up playing cops and robbers, and each of us would have loved to do a death scene on a real stage.

  The school play was always put on toward the end of March and the two weeks before were always very intense. Twice-weekly rehearsals which had been going on since January became daily and they shifted from the school to the auditorium. Normally, the kids who were acting in the play would go home after school, grab a quick supper, rest for a short while and then get to the community center for rehearsals which ran from six till nine. The tech crew ran a different schedule; they would go to the auditorium after school and work on the lighting and sets until we arrived, at which point they would head off.

  Sometimes a couple of the mothers would come by and ask to see what a costume looked like under the lights and so we’d rehearse a scene with one or two people in costume. Other times one or two of the fathers might also be there for a while to finish up some prop or part of the set. Normally, though, by the end of the evening, it was just the actors and prompters who were still around, and of course the director, who was Sugden.