The Communist's Daughter (7 page)

*

This has got me to thinking of a number of failures in my life. By which I mean my own failures that have affected people I've known.

The need to make good use of myself in the world first came under fire when I was eighteen years old. That may still be young enough to appeal to the inexperience of youth as some sort of defence for my actions, but I know that's no excuse and will therefore show you due respect and not use it here.

It was the winter I was taken on as a schoolteacher in northern Ontario, and through this posting I met someone I will do my best to tell you about. Through him you will see why I might fairly characterize this entire episode as a failure, one that started small, in that schoolhouse north of Toronto, and ended in tragedy on a dark battlefield in Belgium. You will see why it keeps coming back to me, and why it's something I need to tell you. It is something a man does not forget.

This happened in the small town of Edgely, during the bitter January of 1908 or 1909. The youthful minds I found waiting for me there seemed as harsh and ignorant as that cruel weather. From the very beginning I was thwarted, vexed, deceived, chuckled at, abused, ignored, tried, hounded, belittled and tested. Until one morning I awoke from my slumber. I remember the day with particular clarity. I'd just begun a class on prime numbers when I was greeted with a series of spitballs. I turned quickly. A buckle of laughter rose from the back row. These were restless children, I knew, but here a line had been crossed. I felt the laughter spread forward until the whole room—that is to say the entire schoolhouse—was wetting itself with laughter (pardon the expression). I stood stricken, dumbfounded and burning with anger. When I asked who was responsible there was, of course, no response. I asked a second time. The laughter retreated like an ocean tide to the back rows and there it stalled. “Hands on desks now,” I ordered, then slowly walked down the aisle examining each boy, his hands and funereal smirk. As I approached the back of the class, where the laughter had both started and ended, a foot caught me. Up and over I went, tumbling to the boards. Another howl of laughter rained down over me. Cursing now, I rose to my feet and with great eagerness pulled up the guilty boy, or who I thought was the most likely culprit, by the collar. I very nearly lifted him out of his shoes as I held him against the back wall of the classroom. His eyes suggested that I had gained his undivided attention. Three times his head hit the wall and three times his yellowy eyes rolled over like broken egg yolks. I would surely have continued, for my anger felt quite intoxicating, but something came over me—common sense, most likely.

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 talents, 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.”