Peace Shall Destroy Many (31 page)

With a whirl they drew around the gate and into the schoolyard. By the number of sleighs, Thom could see that nearly everyone must be there. Despite muffling scarfs, Hal
was again explaining the marvel of the temporary stage. As he scrambled over the heavy robes, his voice rose, “See Mom! There’s the stairs we made so we can go in through the window and we don’ have to use the door at all when we’ve dressed in the teacherage. Nobody’ll see us till we’re on the stage. Miss Tan’amon’ figured it’d be a bigger surprise if—” and in his speech and unta
ngling of himself, Hal caught his toe on the edge of the cutter, tipped, and sprawled face-first in the snow.

“Boy, keep quiet and get out,” Wiens rapped in Low German, grasping him by the bottom of the parka and, as it appeared to Thom in the half-light that gleamed from curtained windows, tossing the rest of Hal’s body after his head.

Mrs. Wiens said, “Pa, be careful!” to which Wiens grunted, pulling himself up. Hal was already standing, wiping his face with a sweep of his hand. “And anyway, it’s lots better than last year when all us Brownies had to get dressed behind the stage—”

Thom said, “Get going—you’re late already.”

“Oh—” and he was off, dumpy in all the wrapping of his clothes, running towards the stairs that almost overshadowed the adventure of the Christmas program itself. After years of entering school the same old way, to be allowed to go in through the window!

Thom unhitched at the barn and walked slowly through the snow back to the school. He would as soon not have come, but how could Hal understand? His feet sinking with each step, he saw the lights of the teacherage beyond the school; the excitement of the carefree children dressing for their evening laughed distantly at him. You couldn’t tell a child’s skin colour from its laughter—just as you couldn’t tell the
difference between Jackie Labret and Johnny Lepp by the way Hal talked about them. Give him a few years. Thinking of Jackie, he knew the boy had been puzzled Sunday afternoon. As for himself, he could but count it a blessing that the afternoon had been
planned as program practice. What he would have taught them in a regular lesson he did not bother to consider. As the school-steps creaked under his weight he thought, Face it. Block, one way or another, has his way. He reached for the door-knob.

As he opened the door and edged in among the young men crowded there, he sensed, puzzled by his acute perception, an “atmosphere” in the school. He pushed back the frost-rimmed hood of his parka, eyes struggling with the invading light, and then the grey-blue back of a figure just before him emerged, and he knew why he felt the oddness. There was no murmur of conversation. Though the curtains were still unopened in the crammed hall, only one person was speaking in a voice that had pulled the attention of all present around him like a bunch of calves on a string. Hank Unger was really home on furlough from Overseas.

“—twenty-seven of the Huns. An’ I wasn’t scratched! Not once—though about roasted twice before I could land. Never lost a plane.” The voice stopped, as though half surprised that its loudness had hushed all other sounds in the room. Every face faced him. After the fire of the Luftwaffe, it was like balm. They had never before listened to him. He was only Hank Unger, son of obviously the poorest farmer in the district, just the younger of the boys who in winter carried sandwiches to school filled with rabbit meat of their own snaring, on whose doorstep on Christmas Eve they left bundles of old clothing that their family had outworn and glowed with
benevolence next day because they had done their Christian duty, while he out-stared the laughter of the brats who recognized him in their cast-offs. Let them squirm now in their non-resistance!

His hand reaching inside his jacket, he dropped his voice in the quietness. “As I told that
Record
reporter in Montreal—here—read it,” and he pulled out the dog-eared paper, folded at the page where his picture grinned, and held it up before the eager eyes of the young men about him. For an instant a smile curled his lips; not one person in the whole building had even known that the
Record
existed, or now knew that it was the largest weekly newspaper in the world. “When I shoot down a Nazi pig, it’s strictly fun for me. Only one question crosses my mind, watchin’ them make that slow loop down, as they blaze. ‘Will he blow or fry?’ ”

Without inflection, the five words dropped upon their consciences. Above Hank’s cropped head, on either side of the starred tip of the tree, Thom caught the angel
s’ message, in bold red: Peace on Earth, Goodwill towards Men.

The scuffling of children’s feet and hissing whispers behind the curtain were the only sounds in the schoolroom. Horror congealed on the faces of the Mennonites as they looked at the slim figure in the Air Force uniform, at his familiar blonde hair and eagle-cut features. Herb, standing beside Hank, his face agrin like a satyr—he should be the one telling atrocities about himself—not Hank, who had always been so carefully polite to his elders. It was the War. In a shudder that seemed to pass over them physically, the older people felt these two as the incarnation of sin among them. Though crowded beyond possible motion, in the silence some of the younger men seemed to draw closer to Hank, the world like
an aura about him, and then Thom noticed that the frosty air around his legs ebbed through the door he himself was still holding open. The door slammed as he jerked.

Hank, slightly awed by the effect he was having on the people who had seen him grow up, turned at the sound and all eyes shifted with him. Tall above them all against the door, Thom’s weathered face darkened as he pulled off his cap in their stare. Though only three feet away, Hank’s voice rolled at him like a circus barker. “Well, well, who have we here? Thomas Wiens! How’s the milkin’ goin’, big boy? Always told the Old Man that I wasn’t wastin’ my life doing what any calf could do better,” and the roar filled the room. Thom could not think, mumbling a “Hello Hank,” which no one heard. The picture on the glossy paper someone was holding before him and the row of ribbons on Hank’s chest gleamed dully at Thom as he fumbled through his mind for something to say, but Herb bellowed, “Oh Thom, he carries on the good traditions of the fathers. He’ll be milkin’ for quite a while yet.” Then Block’s loud tapping near the front of the room was heard and all turned from the baiting towards the curtained stage. Hank said, reaching, “The show’s on, I guess—let’s have that paper. You can see afterwards.” As he turned, Thom, opening his parka, slowly rammed his thoughts away, looking steadily at the legend crowning the tree.

The curtain twitched. At its motion, Hank whispered sideways at Herb, “You say this teacher’s called Razia Tantamont?” In the two hours the air ace had been home, Herb had barely muttered her name to his direct question. Since learning of Hank’s furlough, he had often considered the effect a uniform and blonde hair would have on the teacher. He grunted. “A real stunner?” Hank persisted. “I think
maybe she’s one of the little jobs I—ah—met—
ha ha—while training near the Hub—
everyone called her Razz—” and then the pupils stood revealed on the stage, in three rows, each child holding a lighted candle. At the far side poised Razia, in a smooth green dress. Hank suppressed an ejaculation. “Wheww—that’s her, all right. I didn’t dream of
that
, here in old Wapiti—” At his brother’s reaction, Herb’s hatred sank deep in his soul. He might have known!

A nod from the teacher and little Katie Martens, the smallest child in school, stepped timidly forward and, her candle-flame flickering against her best blue dress, spoke fearfully into the hush:

At the last line, each distinct in the tot’s recitation, the children lifted their candles and spoke the welcome in unison. A sigh of happiness swept the listeners as the intrusion of the world and the War vanished like a thought at the innocence of the children’s voices and little Katie’s low bow over her thickly stockinged bow-legs.

Thom stretched himself against the door, leaning heavily. There was no possibility of his finding a seat. About ten men were standing around the door with him, but he noticed that Pete had found a seat in the last row, sitting crammed into the desk. He appeared oblivious of all save the activities on stage.

The stage had been built against the windows on the left side of Wapiti School. Thom could look at it only at an angle,
but directly faced the black-boards and the festive tree at the front of the building. All the people of the district seemed pressed into the room, with Beaver families also present to compare this program with their own the following Thursday evening. Side by side, Mennonites and Métis sat or leaned where they could, eyes intent, listening. Thom looked about for an instant before turning back to the stage, the craggy faces known about him, and then his eyes caught the hope he had been looking for without having admitted the fact even to himself. Just over Pete’s head, at the far end of the room among some older girls, was the auburn sheen of Annamarie’s hair.

She was home for Christmas, sitting where, with a slight turn of her head, he would see her face to face. He had not imagined how her presence would fill all his mind as a light the empty darkness. He had no moment even to wonder at this, now. He could see her profile as she watched the stage, and the words of the nine smaller children paraded there caught his ear, the large green letters which they held before them hanging on the edge of his vision:

She looked just as she always had done, but far away, as if there was now little hope of his nearing her. She was inexpressibly beautiful. The gathering heat, with its vagrant smells from the crowding people, did not exist for him.

Looking at her in what he rigidly disciplined himself to believe were inconspicuous intervals, he smiled to remember how he had once, fleetingly, paused to ponder if Razia might
be almost as pretty. Even in that smooth green dress on the stage corner she—

Herb, turning slightly, saw Thom’s glance shift. Eyes glinting, he tilted backwards and hissed at Thom in his confidential undertone, “Easy on the heat, boy—only one apiece. Wanna start a whole stud?”

The eight children were marching, chanting.

Thom’s muscles knotted. Only the crowd and the occasion checked him.

Then ramrod-rigid against the door, forcibly breaking his thoughts, revulsion swept him. Repelled at Block’s dogmas that had hounded Elizabeth to death, he had existed five days in fearful vacuum. What difference did it all make anyway? Live as you could and die when you must. And he had the example before him. The brothers held to no law of the fathers: they were animals. Worse, for he could think of no animal that, at the mere sight of a female, could only slaver in anticipation; or killed for the pleasure of seeing the victim writhe in his last throes. But even Hank paled before Herb. The body, the body, the body. It was impossible to think of Annamarie in that way, but Razia
—abruptly he found that if he allowed his mind a corner of leeway he could think in unison with Herb. The realization staggered him. His mind,
Strange to such thoughts, went fumbling after the tantalizing figure in the tight green dress. Such wells of depravity yawned in his empty self that he could only shudder and pray for diversion.

The children sang, voices high and happy:

Lying on the straw tick, Hal limp in sleep beside him, Thom had thought of Annamarie, studying and working, far away. He glanced back at her profile. Away from her, he could never remember what she looked like exactly, for he thought of her as a person and not as a figure. She was to him beautiful, but beauty which had little to do with her shape. Her beauty reached beyond her appearance into her purity. For Herb to drag Annamarie and Razia together in one obscenity was—his mind could articulate no word; he felt rasped to his soul. But the question stood. Pete, sitting in the desk looking steadily at the stage; what helped him control his thoughts against a
woman who flaunted her body like a flag? He turned on his father’s principles. “We Mennonites teach,” and so on.

The curtain closed on its wires to the clapping of the audience. Thom clapped in imitation, hazily comprehending some of the people about him. To his right, Old Moosomin glared, noncommittal, at the stage, never turning his head. Herman and his wife were beyond him in one corner with their little bundle, talking to Margret in the pause. Mrs. Mackenzie, proud beside her sombre husband, caught Thom’s eye with a smile. He smiled and looked away. The Rempel twins were gazing about for something to laugh at, and Hank, stretching prodigiously, his short jacket puffing up to show the blue shirt, said, “That was a long flight out to ’Battleford. Could do with some sleep. Wonder what ‘dear old Santa’ will bring
me!”
and everyone laughed with the twins. Herb laughed too, forcedly.

The program went on smoothly, the children reciting and singing and marching as Razia directed. Whatever she thought as she announced, prompted, conducted, the teacher gave no outward indication. In training herself, Razia had been thorough. She could succeed in anything she wanted to, no matter what she thought of it, and pride welled in her at the way she had trained the children for this program without a single person knowing what she thought of the semi-religious doggerel Christmas concerts that, under Mennonite teachers, seemed tradition at Wapiti School.
Unknowing half-breeds and innocent Mennonites! In her power she had gone even a step further towards religion than was usually the case. There would be no usual “Santa and Brownies” affair. If they liked religion, she could dish it up.