Somewhere I Belong Page 5

  “You’re kidding, right? That’s what the Lost Boys did in that Peter Pan story.” I laughed. “You just made that up.”

  “Nope,” Pat Jr. said. “Mom says we should feel sorry for ’em ’cause they hardly get nothin’ to eat. But their dad’s away workin’ with our dad, so she wonders what happens to all the money.”

  “It’s pretty hard to feel sorry for Patrick Daley when he gives you a good poundin’,” Thomas said.

  “He’s never pounded you, Thomas. What’re you talkin’ about?” Pat Jr. said.

  “I’m just sayin’,” Thomas said. “He pounds lots of guys.”

  The Daleys’ drive curved to the top of a snow-covered slope. A house, a barn, and a shed sat around a small yard strewn with rusted farm equipment. The house had a single front window below a peaked roof. Patches of peeled paint exposed bare wood on all the buildings. The shed’s roof sagged under a heavy load of snow. Frozen wheat stalks in the adjacent field looked to be a neglected late harvest. A single trail of footprints led from a door at the side of the house and down the drive.

  We followed the Daleys at a distance. Soon we saw the crossroads of Northbridge and Peters roads. A white picket fence surrounded a yard on three sides. Separate gates opened onto each road. Behind the fence stood a white, single-storey, peak-roofed building with a row of windows on two sides. It reminded me of the old carriage houses that sit behind some of the larger homes in Everett. This was where rich people kept their horses and carriages in the olden days and where they now keep their motorcars. I noticed a sign nailed to the side of the building, but the letters were so faded I couldn’t read it. Beyond it, at the edge of the woods, stood a small white building that looked to be a four-hole outhouse. The only thing that told us this was a school was the little kids playing on a single set of swings in a corner of the yard. If we hadn’t been with Thomas and Pat Jr., we would have walked straight past it.

  The Daleys disappeared through a single door at the front of the building. We followed Pat Jr. and Thomas across the yard and entered behind them. Pat Jr. and Thomas hung their jackets on hooks along the back wall, slung their lunch tins up onto the wooden shelf above them, and proceeded to their seats. Larry, Helen, and I waited at the back of the room. Patrick Daley slouched in a desk in the back row, directly in front of us. His mass of black hair stuck out in all directions, and his clothes smelled musty and stale. At the front of the room, Mr. Dunphy was standing on a platform, writing on the blackboard. Across the blackboard, MacLean’s penmanship was written in large letters. There was a line down the middle, with four sentences carefully printed on one side and six sentences written in neat, cursive writing on the other.

  A large pot-bellied stove roared at full blast in the centre of the room, its pipe rising past the rafters and through the roof. Sixteen double wooden desks arranged in four neat rows faced a low platform at the front. Kids slid into their seats and dug into their desks. No one was saying a word. An oak teacher’s desk sat in the middle of the platform, facing the classroom. To the right of it and several feet away, a single vacant student desk faced the blackboard. Mr. Dunphy finished the last sentence, dropped his chalk onto the ledge, then turned and faced the room.

  “We’re a little late today, aren’t we, boys?” He pushed his glasses to the end of his bulbous nose and watched as Thomas and Pat Jr. slid into their seats. The clock behind him read five minutes to nine. Then he noticed us. “Well, now, the Kavanaugh imports from the Boston States.” The room went silent as everyone turned and stared in our direction.

  Patrick Daley stretched a leg across his seat, leaned over the backrest and checked us over. “Yankee Doodle,” he scoffed.

  If Mr. Dunphy noticed, he didn’t say a word.

  Mr. Dunphy stepped down from the platform and directed us to our seats. He placed Helen in the fourth row from the front, in a seat next to Pat Giddings Jr., with the seventh and eighth graders. He placed me in the same row on the opposite side of the room, in a desk by the window, next to a pale, skinny girl with blond pigtails. The only empty seat in the back row with the ninth graders was beside Patrick Daley. So Mr. Dunphy told Larry to sit there. The minute my older brother settled in, Patrick shouldered him hard. But Mr. Dunphy didn’t seem to notice.

  We stood and prayed the “Our Father,” then sang “God Save the King.” I listened to the girl standing next to me and mouthed the words to the anthem, hoping I would get it right the next time. When we finished, we sat, folded our hands on top of our desks, and waited.

  Mr. Dunphy grabbed a pointer from the top of his desk and smacked it over the blackboard. “Get out your scribblers. Grades one to four, you are to do your printing from the blackboard. Grades five and six, you’re to do the same, but in cursive. Grades seven to nine, get out your readers and copy ten lines from it, also in cursive. And make it neat and legible—I want to be able to read it.”

  We leaned over our desks, gripped our pens, and wrote. Mr. Dunphy marched up and down the aisles, pounding his pointer into the floor. His brace rattled with every step. When he reached Michael Daley, he stopped and jabbed a finger onto his page. “What does this say, young Michael? I can’t read it.”

  Michael Daley shrank from him and didn’t answer.

  “Write it over again, neatly this time,” Mr. Dunphy said.

  After twenty minutes, Mr. Dunphy retrieved an armload of readers from a set of bookshelves on the platform to the left of the blackboard. He passed them out to the little kids along the first and second rows. “Grades six and seven,” he said, “you know the routine.” I looked around to see what it was.

  The blond-haired girl slid from her seat and floated up the aisle, her pigtails swaying down her back. She looked swallowed up in her thick woollen sweater. Her thin cotton dress hung loosely below it. She found an empty seat beside a small boy and slid into it. She opened his reader and ran a finger over the first line, whispering something. The boy stared down at the book and shifted nervously in his seat.

  Most of the grades six and seven soon picked a partner. I looked around, desperate to find one. By some stroke of luck, I noticed Thomas sitting alone at the far end of the front row. He was hunched over his reader, absently flipping its pages. I eased out of my desk and hurried across the classroom, hoping no one would get there first. I slid in beside him and opened his book to the first story.

  I wasn’t a strong reader and I wondered what good I could possibly be. I thought about the evenings at the kitchen table, back home, when Dad sat with me as I struggled through first and second grades. “Look for the words you already know, Pius James. Look at the pictures, they’ll give you some clues.” He would work with me as I struggled through the lessons. Then he would pull a piece of rock candy from his pocket, unwrap it, and share it with me.

  There was a picture of a girl with a dog and a ball. Beneath it, a simple four-word sentence was printed in large, black letters. Trying to sound confident, I placed my finger under the first word. “Give it a go, Thomas.”

  Thomas slumped in his seat and stared at the page.

  I ran my finger under the first line, the way I had seen the blond-haired girl do it. “What’s it say? Sound it out.”

  Thomas shrugged his shoulders, then stared harder at the picture and searched for a clue. “Dog,” he said. “Dog, girl, ball.”

  “Not quite.” I pointed to the first word. “Sound out the first letter.”

  He stared at the page and then up at me.

  “Do you know your alphabet, Thomas?”

  “My what?”

  “Your letters—your ABCs?”

  “Some of them.” He looked up at me, eagerly, but I knew he wasn’t sure.

  “If you don’t know your letters,” I said, “how are you ever going to read?”

  Thomas had sat in a desk, in the front row, listening to Mr. Dunphy for nearly six months. And it seemed he hadn’t learne
d a thing. I grabbed his scribbler, opened it to a clean page, and carefully wrote down the alphabet. I spaced the letters evenly across two neat rows, sounding them out as I printed. Then I slid his scribbler in front of him.

  “Give it a go, Thomas.”

  “A,” Thomas said, “B, C.”

  Just as Thomas picked up speed, a shadow fell over us, and a large, meaty hand reached down and clasped my shoulder.

  “What’s this we’re doing, Mr. Kavanaugh?” Mr. Dunphy barked.

  “The alphabet, sir,” I stammered up at him. “We were sounding it out.”

  “And what are we supposed to be doing?” He circled in front of us, grabbed the desk, and stared down hard. His eyes bulged, their whites a roadmap of thin red veins.

  “Our reader, sir.” I shrunk back from him. “But—”

  He raised a hand up, cutting me off. “Young Thomas, perhaps you can tell Peter James, here, what it is we do first thing every morning.”

  “Our readers, sir,” Thomas said, his eyes wide with fear.

  “And what are we doing now?” Mr. Dunphy’s voice sounded like a growl.

  “Our letters, sir.” The colour drained from Thomas’s face. He slumped so low in his seat, his bum threatened to slide off the edge.

  Mr. Dunphy shifted a foot and leaned over me. “So you think you’re smarter than we are, do you, Mr. Kavanaugh?” His deep voice filled the now silent room. “You think we’re, perhaps, a little behind up here, do you?” Before I could answer, he stood back and pounded his pointer into the floor. “So you’ve brought your new-fangled Yankee ideas with you to show up your ignorant northern cousins, have you?”

  “No, sir!” I said. I sat paralyzed, wondering at Mr. Dunphy’s accusing stare. Thinking how I had only been trying to help Thomas. This wasn’t the Charlie Dunphy who had helped himself to Uncle Jim’s cider and joked in Granny’s parlour. I looked up at his angry face and conjured an image of him pie-eyed, pestering Aunt Gert in the kitchen, and Uncle Ed practically throwing him out the back door.

  I put my hand over my face and suppressed a smirk.

  “So, now you think you’re funny?” Mr. Dunphy said.

  “No, sir, I don’t.” I wasn’t thinking about the drunk Mr. Dunphy now. The angry Mr. Dunphy leaned down and spewed his stale oatmeal breath all over my face.

  He moved away, a hand swinging out, limped up the steps, then stopped in the middle of the platform. He pointed a finger to a space beside him. “Up here, young man. And be quick about it.”

  I slid from my seat and mounted the steps. My legs shook and my heart pounded. My face burned despite the cool air. My new teacher took me by the shoulders and turned me to face the room. I stood, conscious of my baggy trousers and their rolled-up cuffs, of the too-big shirt with a pocket that drooped to the waist. Of the thirty silent faces staring at me. And I was the only one in the room, besides Mr. Dunphy, wearing a bow tie.

  “Show us how smart you are, Peter James.” His lips rolled into a grin. “Let’s hear it again.”

  In his drunkenness at Granny’s he had called me “Peter James.” I thought it was a joke. Now he repeated it, stone-cold sober. Surely he must have had all the other names in the classroom committed to memory and only had to tackle another three.

  “Hear what, sir?” I asked.

  “Your alphabet—your letters, boy.” He clasped his hands behind his back and waited. “Your version of them, in any case.”

  I scanned the back row and searched for Larry. I found him sitting at the edge of his seat, leaning away from Patrick Daley. He nodded in encouragement. I took a deep breath and raced through it, all the way to Z, pronouncing each letter the way I always did. I stared down at the floor and waited.

  “Zee?” Mr. Dunphy said, echoing my own pronunciation. “What’s all this about Zee?” He stepped toward me and smacked his pointer onto an open palm. “In the King’s English, my boy, it is Zed. Now start again. Louder, so we can all hear it. And properly this time.”

  I started over, mumbling it out. My throat went dry. My nose filled with snot and I snuffed it up as I fought back tears. Part of me tried to figure out what I had done wrong. The rest of me wanted to race out the back door and down Northbridge Road to Granny’s.

  “You’ll get it eventually, Peter James.” He folded his arms. His stomach protruded below them. “Off you go, then.”

  I wanted to blurt out my real name to that horrible man, but I was too afraid. Instead, I bolted from the platform and slumped into the seat beside Thomas. I stared at the desktop, the floor, the Union Jack that hung limply beside the blackboard. I caught a glimpse of the blond-haired girl looking over at me in sympathy from the other side of the classroom and I burned in humiliation.

  “Peter James!” Patrick Daley hollered from the back row.

  Mr. Dunphy scowled across the room, then rang the bell for recess.

  I followed Thomas to the back of the room, jostled for my jacket and boots, and bounded out the back door. I scanned the schoolyard looking for Larry. A bunch of little kids moved across the yard and gathered in a tight little group. Helen wandered toward a number of girls who huddled under a tall, bare tree close to the fence at Peters Road. The blond-haired girl stood alone, several feet away from them. Helen approached her and struck up a conversation. Larry, Thomas, and Pat Jr. were standing close to the corner by the crossroads. Just as I moved toward them, Patrick Daley and two older boys blocked my way.

  “Peter James,” Patrick Daley sneered.

  The other two just stood there and stared.

  I moved back from them, preparing to make a run for it. Mr. Dunphy stepped out onto the stoop, and the three boys sauntered away. I skirted around them and turned toward Larry. “It’s P.J.,” I hissed over my shoulder. The word “knucklehead” sat at the end of my tongue. But I kept it there and I ran for it.

  Pat Jr. glanced across the yard, making sure our teacher was out of range. “That was some bit of business with Ol’ Dunphy.”

  “What did he do that for?” I asked. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “When it comes to Ol’ Dunphy, you got to follow orders,” Pat Jr. said. “You don’t and you’re in for it.”

  “It’s my fault,” Thomas said. “We was supposed to be readin’.”

  “No it wasn’t, Thomas,” I said. “If you don’t know your letters, how are you supposed to read?”

  Thomas hung his head and brushed away tears. Looking back on it now, I might as well have called him a dummy.

  In the afternoon, Mr. Dunphy instructed the fifth to ninth graders to get a dictionary from the bookshelf at the front of the room. Then he wrote a single sentence across the top of the blackboard: Confederation is good for Prince Edward Island. He drew a line down the middle, and wrote Yes on the top right hand side of the line, and No on the top left.

  “There are two sides to this issue. Grades five to seven, you are to argue for Confederation; grades eight and nine, you are to take the opposing view. And watch your spelling—I want to see you using those dictionaries.”

  He handed out worksheets to the first to fourth graders. Then he grabbed his pointer and circulated through the back half of the room.

  I opened my desktop and pulled out a brand new Hilroy scribbler, a pen and nib, and a bottle of Penman Blue Ink. I placed the ink bottle in the holder in the top right-hand corner of my desk. I opened my scribbler, dipped the nib in the ink, touched it to my blotter, and copied the sentence along the top of the first page. I did this all with my left hand. Then stopped.

  What’s Confederation, anyhow? I wondered. I held my pen over the page. Ink dripped off its nib and gathered in a small pool below it. Writing had always come easily to me, but now I was stuck. How do you argue for something you know nothing about? Beside me, the blond-haired girl’s words flowed like water.

  Mr. Dunphy’s brace rattled as he
circled along the back of the classroom and stepped into my aisle. From the sound of him, he was three desks away and taking his time. Even so, I knew I had to scramble and write something down. I leaned over my desk and thought hard on the subject. Hoped he would keep right on going. But the rattling stopped.

  “What’s this left-handed business, Peter James?” Mr. Dunphy reached down and grabbed my pen. “You’ll never learn if you insist on it this way. And get out a pencil. I specifically instructed your grandmother you were to have a pencil. And I want to see it in your right hand.”

  He turned toward the girl sitting next to me, rested a hand on top of my desk, and spoke in a near whisper. “Maggie MacIntyre, whatever are you writing on?” His pilled woollen vest brushed my face. And I could smell the corned beef and cabbage he had eaten for lunch.

  “My notebook’s full, sir.” Maggie MacIntyre had filled the inside cover of her scribbler and had started to write on the back. And she had the same pale-white expression of fear I had seen on Thomas that morning.

  “You wouldn’t have a couple of pages you could lend Miss MacIntyre, would you, Peter James?” Mr. Dunphy sounded as kind and mannerly as he had been at Granny’s, before the cider. But he was asking me to rip pages from my brand new Hilroy scribbler.

  I looked up at him and hesitated.

  He stood back and waited, his pointer jabbed into the floor.

  “Yes, sir.” I fumbled for the centre page, loosened the staples, and eased off several pages. I was eager to avoid a repeat of the morning’s event and for Mr. Dunphy to hobble on up the aisle. But he reached down, grabbed my scribbler, and ran a finger down the blank front page.

  “What’s this?” he said. “You’ve done nothing. For a young man who prides himself on his letters, surely you must have something say.”

  I shrank back in my seat and stared at up him, feeling as scared and stupid as I had that morning.

  Mr. Dunphy waited. “Oh, yes, of course.” Without a second glance, he turned up the aisle and past the front row toward the bookshelf. “You Americans are none too interested in what goes on outside of your own borders. We study a lot about your country up here. But you don’t know a thing about ours.” He retrieved three textbooks and passed one each to Helen, Larry, and me. “You’re to write your names in these. Helen and Peter James, you’re to start reading chapter six this afternoon and write an essay at home on what you learned about Confederation. Larry, you can start by reading chapters six to eight, and do likewise. You’re to pass your good copies in next Monday. We’ll catch you Kavanaughs up. We’ll make true Islanders out of you in no time.”