by Dennis Bock
Before I was able to release the boy from my grip I felt a punch on the side of my head. Another boy was on me. I turned to face a big farm lad named Jimmy, a sullen and angry boy I’d never much liked to begin with. Without a word I laid him out with a single punch. He fell like a sack of potatoes, and silence descended over his classmates. Stepping over him, I returned to my desk and sat ramrod straight, staring down the young cretins like a regent awaiting signs of full-out rebellion. Soon the boy came to, whimpering somewhat. He moved his jaw with a hand, testing it as he returned to his seat. When the hour struck I rose silently and walked out the door, convinced that this was the end of my teaching career.
That evening I was restive. I lived with an old woman who had difficulty remembering my name, but her head for figures was fine and she never failed to remind me how much I owed her from week to week. I lay in my hard bed late into the night and wondered what the following day held in store. I had no fear of the law for I knew this community frowned upon its Constable Ryan. He was a sad drunk, they said, and kept his nose out of their business as best he could, as long as they didn’t come between him and his favourite taverns. It was not the law I was concerned about.
I shaved that morning, and though it was doubtful I needed to, that is what I did. I suppose I was shoring myself up, I probably made threatening faces in the mirror, but I remember staring at myself and wondering what my face would look like cut and smashed and what hints of regret it might bear should my body be laid out on a slab awaiting identification by my parents, and what their reaction would be beyond the sorrow felt by my mother and the pity and shame felt by my father. Would I be a good-looking cadaver? I wondered. A strange thought—though it has crossed my mind a number of times since.
My heart racing, I left my landlady sitting silently in her rocking chair and marched down the single street of that village, prepared to meet whatever awaited me. I unlocked the schoolhouse—being as much custodian as headmaster, principal and teacher—and arranged my textbooks, then began pacing nervously up and down the classroom.
To my surprise, the morning proceeded without incident. I sensed no rebellion whatsoever. The boys were well behaved, better than I had ever seen them. It seemed that yesterday’s confrontation was precisely what was needed to settle them down a good deal, so I thought we might make some genuine progress. We concentrated on the mathematics, then reading and history in the second and third hours, and when geography came we began with a lesson on western Europe. Only four of the twenty were able to locate that continent on the map for me. This ignorance suggested a sad state of affairs indeed. But the manner in which these boys wore their ignorance that morning was almost endearing, for they were humbled and by no means proud of their lack of knowledge. I could hardly blame them for their rowdy behaviour in a school that had managed to teach them so little.
I dismissed the boys for lunch on a positive note, liberating them a few minutes early as a reward for their co-operation. I worried that I’d misjudged their cruelty and thought badly of myself for doing so. They were a fine lot, I concluded, and the day was looking up. I returned to my lodging for a meal of barley and beet soup and three slices of dark rye and started back to my schoolhouse before half past noon.
The mood there was very much changed, with boys swarming and snickering in the schoolyard. I felt their energy from a hundred yards and slowed my pace, unable to construct a strategy to help the situation. As I stepped through the main gate the crowd of boys parted and before me stood a large man, much larger than any student and taller than me by half a head. I knew this man to look at from the village but did not know his name. He stepped forward to meet me. Too young to be the father of a student, he perhaps was a brother of the boy I’d knocked down.
“Bethune,” he said, “you need some of that thrashing you like to dole out to these helpless boys.”
“I give back only what’s given out.”
“Well then, I’ve come to return what’s yours.”
He hit me with a fair punch to the left side of my head. I saw it coming but was still too bewildered to react. It was not possible that I should find myself standing in a schoolyard on the point of entering into a fistfight; this was not what any teacher expects, though I believed it soon enough. My vision turned white and my ears rang for a quick moment with the force of another blow. I staggered but stayed upright. When the lights cleared and my ears stopped ringing I was able to hear whoops of joy coming from the crowd that had gathered around. My students were overjoyed by the promise of my defeat.
*
All this happened quickly. I should hope you never see such a fight, but imagine if you can a man—a boy barely yet a man—strong enough, back straight, fists forward. In a fight like that instinct counts, but experience means the difference between standing and falling. After that second punch I regained myself and the shouts of joy became calls of encouragement for my opponent. I soon learned his name was Robert. Kill him, Robert, the boys shouted, make him sorry he done that to poor Jimmy, and so on. We began in earnest then, weaving and bobbing in and out. One of us threw a good punch now and then. We were circling a fair bit, looking for the invitation of a dropped fist or a missed step. It was snowing lightly and a beautiful light was shining down, and a surprising calmness came over me—akin to the elation I’d felt the day I understood myself to be alone in a Godless world, that the world was mine to make. Within a minute or two it was snowing heavily, but I finished the matter so splendidly that the new-fallen snow had not yet made a noticeable accumulation on the snow already trampled in the yard or on the slate roof of the schoolhouse and the caps of the watching boys. Their cries of encouragement were silenced when it became clear in whose favour the fight was turning. He was a large lad but in the end that did not help him. I laid him out as I had laid out his brother the day before. Serves you right, I thought. There I stood, a trace of blood on my split lip, taunting him, “Get up, you, get up, you, I’ll finish you, you miserable s——t.”
He was finished but I wanted more: I am ashamed to say it but it’s true. I felt the surprise in the crowd’s silence when I finally stopped demanding he rise to his feet, and an overwhelming pleasure, a sort of delirium, at my victory. At the same time I was overcome with shame. Is this what my idealism had turned into, the desire to stomp a man? I was the one who had finally taught the thug a lesson, the oafish brother of the boy who’d tripped me up, and by the looks of it this was something new in this town. I was not a teacher standing there now but the town bully, an enforcer, warrior and constable all in one. I was drunk with satisfaction and I was red with shame. I knew his nose was broken, I’d heard the crack. The cold air had delivered the resounding snap for the whole school to hear. It was as if the frozen branch of the greatest tree in the county had buckled under the weight of wet snow.
*
Earlier this evening I had a free moment. I carried my chair outside and watched this village from the doorway of the old ramshackle hut they’ve put me in and sat there like some old man waiting for his time to come. There was a chill in the air, which has become sharper in the hours since. (Thank goodness the heat has broken!) I leaned my chair back against the door frame and breathed in the smells of China. A man enjoying his peace. But for the chaos around me, that’s what you might have thought, that the world had for a moment fallen still, and what a lovely thought that is. When all one has ever dreamed of accomplishing is set out before him, like a series of paintings or poems ready for cataloguing, there to speak for him once he is gone. Is that what a great artist would feel? I long to settle into the weary comfort of age. There I was, biding my time. For a moment I felt truly at ease.
*
I will tell you flat out that I myself was not a model student and so should not be so hard on those poor boys of Edgely. My dear mother, bless her heart, would take this opportunity to remind me that we are each granted our own particular skills and abilities and talent
s, some of us for book study, some for ploughing, some for healing the sick. When I gained entrance to the university the following year I was reminded of that fact once again. I have not forgotten it since, despite my failures by the cartload. I have always been a bit impatient, a bit impertinent, a bit hot-headed. The only crime would lie in the denial of this truth. In the lecture hall I was inattentive, openly rebellious, bored and short-tempered.
I left the university for a time, only to return again, and during the winter of my second year the Great War began. I was twenty-four years old. I recall that day with deep sorrow, though at the time I didn’t know enough to see through the smoke screen of patriotic pride and glory. Within a week of the announcement, the halls and classrooms at the university were abuzz with talk of driving the Kaiser back into his hole. Oh, it was heady stuff for a boy looking to make himself into a man. We all went in for it. It was not difficult to leave the university behind. I had not excelled, and the European war offered an excuse for all of us to abandon that cloistered world and begin the great adventure of life. I signed up and for the first weeks of my enlisting was proudly occupied with the task of saving humanity from itself. Soon my enthusiasm was replaced by tedium and a longing for the comforts of home. I had never seen so many uniforms and so many people thinking identical thoughts. The army is like that. It is sure to reveal your individuality, if you have any, and stamp it out as quickly as possible. What had begun, in the spirit of good fun and adventure, at the university and in the streets of Toronto and every other Canadian town and city—and continued at Valcartier, where I enlisted, and aboard the SS Cassandra to England, where we would endure months of training—became a grinding routine of drills and grub and close quarters. Already the romance of war was wearing thin.
Only fools and thugs enjoyed this life. You can probably imagine. Our patriotism was orchestrated and came in waves, soon competing with a nostalgic yearning for a good home-cooked meal. Unbelievable casualty numbers circulated among us, rumours purporting wildly unrealistic sums of the dead. Ten thousand in one day, thirty thousand the next. We were officially warned to disregard such slanders, you can imagine why. Propaganda was manufactured by the Hun and directed toward King and Country, we were told. But even still you began to fear that this was indeed a war and not an adventure, though we were insulated from it by razor wire and soapbox speeches and optimistic newspaper articles regarding the outcome.
While I was at Fort Pitt, in the south of England, thousands of Canadian boys came through. Only a mild feeling of curiosity and nostalgia grew within me when I saw the boy, now a man, I had beaten in the schoolyard four or five years earlier.
“Hello, Robert,” I said. He looked at me without a glimmer of recognition. I smiled and faked a left jab and still he had no idea.
“Bugger off,” he said.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Thirty-nine days,” he said.
“Maybe we were on the same ship over, the Cassandra?”
“That’s the one,” he said. “Stinking s——t bucket.”
“It’ll get worse, don’t worry about that,” I said.
“Maybe it will,” he said.
That evening at mess, I sat two men down from him and ate my supper without drawing attention to myself. I watched him. He ate with his head hanging over his plate, a horse feeding at a trough. He had no interest in the men around him. He ignored their taunts and rough jokes. But all around us were boys committed like him to their silence in the hope that it would speed their time there and maintain the peace of mind they’d brought over with them. He was determined, eating with fear and concentration. He would fill his belly and sleep and complete whatever duties he was assigned. He was a farmer allotted a single furrow and would not stray outside its narrow rut, I could tell. I was intrigued by this connection to home. I had no free time, not even for letters to my family. My concentration was fiercely set on the adventure ahead.
The presence of Robert Pearce was strangely comforting to me, though. He was a link back to something I knew, and though we’d fought, he was the one who had helped me establish myself in that town. It was through him that I had become the sheriff and the bully and the enforcer with a higher purpose. Something had happened that afternoon, something exceptional in my life, by equal measures shameful and ennobling, something beyond the bullying that I felt still. I wanted to know what that was. I studied him over the following days and weeks. But his sad eyes told me something had changed in him since we’d stood face to face.
I didn’t know if it was his being there that pulled him low, or if my knocking him down years before had reduced the bully he once had been to a meek and soft man, lonely for his people and his town and the simple tasks he’d grown used to over his short life. He was maybe twenty-four, my age. He caused no trouble. He marched in a straight line like the rest of us, performed his physical exercises and his rifle work proficiently and not a whit better than was expected. It was as though he was always thinking of something else, and for the weeks I watched him I believed it was the miserable town of Edgely he was dreaming about, caught up in his idyllic boyhood.
The early morning of the day we sailed for Belgium I told him who I was. He smiled softly and said, “It was a fair fight so I don’t hold nothing against you.” We sat for a moment in silence as the ferry pulled out from the docks. The rumble rattled our bones. The lumps of porridge gurgled in our guts. A low murmur of voices filled the hollows of the ship.
“What are you thinking?” I said.
“I’m thinking I’ll die over there.”
“We all might,” I said. “But there’s no knowing.”
“I know it,” he said.
I said, “Keep your head down, Robert. That’s all you can do.”
The Channel whipped up, and the crossing took close to two hours.
“This is a sign,” he said. “Turn back,’ it’s saying.”
“I don’t think so, Robert, it’s just weather.”
We went above deck and watched England recede through the hundreds of Jacob’s ladders that descended from above in gleaming columns. Though the farm lad Robert was full of dread, I felt a sense of history fill my heart and hold me in the good favour of my ancestors. I’d never been so close to war before but had heard all my father’s stories of links by blood to the noble past. I knew of the Highland Scot named Angus of Combust, the Jacobite who fell in the battle of Culloden in 1745 and then dragged his wounded body to safety and, through toil and the grace of God, was able to make his way to the Isle of Skye, where he met and married Christina Campbell of the Isle of Harris who bore him a son, my great-great-grandfather John. This man, John Bethune, arrived to North Carolina as a result of the Clearances. There, as a chaplain, he fought with the Royal Highland Immigrants to put down the American rebellion, and then, with the Royal 84th Regiment, he helped defend the Citadel of Quebec against the American invaders in the winter of 1775–76. From these histories and others, I took no small measure of pride and strength in knowing I was of fighting stock, and fight I would when the time came. You see how little I knew then? How flush with romantic dreams I was! This Bethune blood had on many occasions been spilled in earlier times, and if my blood were destined to stain the soil of France and Belgium this year or the next, so be it, I thought, it would run again in the veins of future generations of great-nephews and their sons. But I did not say this. I simply said, “Robert, it’s just weather.”
I knew what he meant to say, though, and wasn’t inclined to look down on him for his anxiety and sadness. He was a man connected to his fear. It was the simple truth. In some ways he was more truthful about the matter than I was. I would never call that cowardice, not then and especially not now. He had every right to fear the coming days. Europe was already a graveyard. He had no ancestry or lineage to warm his breast. He had only a plot in Ontario to look forward to,
nothing more than hay and beans and superstitious, nonsensical ideas of poetic weather.
I wished for his sake that suddenly a great fish would leap from the water or a sunny sign would break through the clouds, but the sea was chopped by winds alone and the sky grew only darker as the lovely columns of light streaming down were choked off by great fists of cloud. When we landed at Flanders we organized ourselves and then began filing down the gangplanks loaded down with our packs. The clouds at once disgorged sheets of rain over the Channel behind us and Belgium before us, nothing but rain and more rain. Poor Robert took no heart in what he saw waiting, and later I thought he somehow had known what was coming.
It was as cold as England, and maybe as cold as northern Ontario, where the trees were white with snow now, and suddenly we were much closer to the war.
If you had been unable to imagine the fighting thoroughly enough before coming over, you saw it in the country once you arrived. The landscape was a torn carcass stretched before us like nothing I’d ever seen. Limbs hung from tree branches. Barbed wire stitched across open wounds in the earth. An arm reached out from the mud like a pathetic shrub.