What's Bred in the Bone Page 9

  Aunt knew all about souls. A neglected soul was an invitation for the Evil One to take it over, and, once in, he was almost impossible to banish. Francis knew a prayer—Now I lay me down to sleep—and of course he knew who Jesus was, because that picture of A Certain Person had been in the nursery for as long as he could remember. But just why Jesus was important, and that He was always present, watching you, and that although He had died long ago, He was still lurking, unseen, he did not know. As for the Holy Mother, friend and guardian of children, Francis had never heard of her. Such neglect of a child filled Aunt with pity; she could not understand how dear Mary-Jim had been so utterly consumed by her Protestant husband as to permit such a thing. What was she to do?

  Little use to seek advice from Marie-Louise, whose comfortable, practical mind, when it could be said to be active at all, was now devoted to bridge. Bridge parties and vast Progressive Euchre parties at the church, devoted to raising money for war charities, possessed her. Not easy work, for so many of the Blairlogie Catholics were also French Canadians, and their zeal for a war against the enemies of England was wavering at best. But Marie-Louise had eaten the splendid cuisine of the English King, and was an ardent royalist. Madame Thibodeau was even less useful in the campaign to rescue Francis; the child had been baptized a Protestant, and was damned, and what was all the fuss about? The Senator was more helpful, but he was a man of honour and he had signed the Wooden Soldier’s hateful paper guaranteeing that Francis should be a Protestant, and he would not go back on his word; but neither would he interfere if Mary-Ben moved on her own authority. She had better talk to Dr. J.A., who had a long head on him. Don’t go to the priests till you’ve had a word with Dr. J.A.

  Excellent advice! Dr. J.A. Jerome knew just what to do. “Frank’s a clever lad,” he said; “reads a great deal for a boy of his years. Lead him gently, Mary-Ben. Have you ever talked to him about his patron saint, for instance?”

  Because he was born on September 12, Francis’s only possible patron was the grubby Guy of Anderlecht, a Belgian who had lost all his money in a bad speculation and turned to God in his bankruptcy. Nothing there to light the flame of devotion in a boy of nine. But it was also the day devoted to the Holy Name of Mary, a feast not much heeded, having lost out to the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, but it would do for a beginning. So one day Francis found a large oleograph of Mary hanging in his room; it was a reproduction of a Murillo, and, contrary to what might have been expected, he liked it very much. Its soft beauty reminded him of his own mother, whom he saw so rarely, and he listened with interest as Aunt explained how tender and kind the Mother of God was, and how watchful of the fate of little boys. Dr. J.A. was right, as always.

  “Not that I approve of what you’re doing, Mary-Ben,” said he. “But I have to give a lot of advice that I wouldn’t think of taking myself. Far better the Blessed Mother than that Son of hers. I never knew a boy yet that I’d trust who really took to that searching, seeking fella.”

  “Oh, Joe, you just say that to make me shudder.”

  “Maybe I do; maybe I don’t. Half the time I don’t know what I mean. But you seem to be on the right track.”

  Francis had never heard of anybody’s mother at St. Alban’s, when he went there with his parents. But he was open to stories about someone who pitied those who were in distress, and increasingly he was in distress.

  This was because he had been summarily moved from the Central School, which was not far from St. Kilda, to Carlyle Rural School, which was almost two miles distant, but which included St. Kilda in the outermost reaches of its domain. His transfer was an act of covert spite directed at the Senator by the local school board; the secretary of that board, checking the lists, had discovered that Francis Cornish, by moving a hundred yards from his father’s house to his grandfather’s, had moved into the Carlyle school district, and one September morning when he was in the third grade he and two other children were told at ten o’clock to bundle up their books and report to Miss Helen McGladdery at their new school. Within an hour Francis, for all purposes sufficient to his age and stage of life, descended into Hell, and stayed there for what seemed to him an eternity.

  Carlyle Rural School was not, at that time, particularly rural, for it was on the outskirts of Blairlogie in an area inhabited by workers in the Senator’s various mills and factories; it was with their children, and the children of farmers who worked the stony, wretched soil just outside the town, that Francis pursued his academic education and his vastly more significant social, ethical, and economic education.

  Having now gained some measure of craftiness, he told Miss McGladdery that his name was Francis Cornish, but she had foreknowledge of his coming, and demanded to know what the C. on the secretary’s message stood for, and the misery of Chicken began all over again with new and ingenious tormentors.

  At the first recess a large boy approached him, hit him hard in the face, and said, “Come on, Chicken, let’s see if you can fight.” They fought, and Francis was beaten disastrously.

  After that he had to fight twice a day for three weeks, and he was beaten every time. Small boys are not skilled fighters, and though he was hurt and shaken, he suffered no serious damage. But after recess he sat at his desk, wretched and aching, and Miss McGladdery was angry with him because he was inattentive. Miss McGladdery was fifty-nine, and she was soldiering through her teaching career until, at sixty-five, she would be able to retire and, with God’s help, never see any of her former pupils again.

  A strong Scots background, and thirty years at Carlyle Rural, had made her an expert disciplinarian. A short, fat, implacable woman, she ruled her three groups—for Carlyle Rural had only two rooms and she took the most advanced classes—not with a rod of iron, but with the leather strap that was issued by the school board as the ultimate instrument of justice. She did not use it often; she had only to take it from a drawer and lay it across her desk to quell any ordinary disobedience. When she did use it, she displayed a strength that even the biggest, most loutish boy dreaded, for not only did she flail his hands until they swelled to red, aching paws, but she tongue-lashed him with a virtuosity that threw her classes into an ecstasy of silent delight.

  “Gordon McNab, you’re a true chip off the McNab block. (Slash!) I’ve given the strap to your father (Slash!), and both your uncles (Slash!), and I once gave it to your mother (Slash!), and I’m here to tell the world that you are the stupidest, most ignorant, no-account ruffian of the whole caboodle. (Slash!) And that’s saying something. (Slash!) Now go to your seat, and if I hear a peep out of you except in answer to a question, you’ll get it again and get it worse, because I’ve got it right here in my desk, all ready for you. Do you hear me?”

  “Bluh.”

  “What? Speak up. What do you say?”

  “Yes, Miss McGladdery.”

  McNab would slink to his seat, as boys held hands in front of their mouths, and girls, greatly daring, sharpened their fingers at him in disdain. It was useless for McNab to snarl in the schoolyard that Miss McGladdery was a dirty old bitch and her pants stank. He had lost face. Miss McGladdery had the total authority of the captain of a pirate ship.

  She knew what happened in the schoolyard, but she did not interfere. Young Cornish’s grandfather was the leading Grit—the hated Liberal Party—and Miss McGladdery was an unwavering Conservative, or Tory. If the boy had so much grit in him, let him show it; she would do nothing until he complained, in which case she would take steps, but she would despise him as a complainer.

  He did not complain, but one day a boy hit him in the eye hard enough to blacken it, and he went home knowing that there would be trouble.

  It was not the kind of trouble he expected.

  Aunt Mary-Ben, horrified, took him at once to Dr. J.A. Jerome. A black eye was nothing, said the doctor; no great harm at all. But then—

  “They’re giving you a rough time, Frank? You don’t have to tell me. I know. I know everything that goes on in this town. D
id you know that? They’re a rough lot at Carlyle Rural. Do you know the Queensberry Rules?”

  Francis had heard something of this code from his father. You didn’t hit below the belt.

  “Do you not? Well, Frank, the Queensberry Rules are all very fine in the ring but they’ve never heard of them at Carlyle Rural, or anywhere in Blairlogie, so far as I know. Did you never see the lumbermen fighting on a Saturday night? No, I don’t suppose you have. Those French boys know something about rough fighting. Now look here: you have two fists, and they wouldn’t dent a pound of butter. But you’ve two feet and good strong boots. So the trick is to let your man get close, then you rear back and let him have your right boot slap in his wind. Don’t kick him in the groin; that’s for later. But get his wind. He’ll probably fall down, if you do it right. Then jump on him and beat the stuffing out of him. Give it all you’ve got. He’ll be too busy trying to get his breath to do much. Don’t kill him, but get as near it as you dare. Get him by the ears and bang his head on the ground; you can’t hurt their heads.”

  “Oh, Joe, you’ll make a tough of the boy,” said Mary-Ben, in distress.

  “Just so, my dear. That’s the whole idea. If you’ve got any brains at Carlyle Rural you have to be a tough in order to keep them for yourself. In fact, Frank, it’s a good principle of life to let people understand that you’re really a terrible tough; then they’ll let you alone and you can be as delicate as you please, so long as they don’t find you out. Now, here’s some arnica to paint on the eye. Twice a day is enough. And keep him at home for the rest of the week, Mary-Ben, just to give Miss McGladdery a fright. Let her think she’s gone too far.”

  And it all came to pass very much as Dr. J.A. expected. When Frank did not appear at school, Miss McGladdery was worried, and when she was worried her haemorrhoids tormented her. Of course she would not dream of consulting a Catholic doctor, but when Dr. J.A. buttonholed her on the steps of the Post Office on Saturday she could not escape.

  “I hear Carlyle Rural is just as rough as it’s always been. Did you ever think you might have an ugly situation there one of these days, Miss McGladdery? It’d be a sad thing if anybody was seriously injured.”

  A nod was as good as a wink to Miss McGladdery, and on Monday morning she announced that there had been too much fighting in the schoolyard, and if there were any more of it, she would strap the fighters.

  Of course Frank was blamed; he had squealed. But obviously he wielded some power, and he had no more trouble with fighting. He was no better liked, and when the great spring game began, he watched from the sidelines.

  Most of the boys were watchers, but unlike Frank they enjoyed what they saw. It fed something deep in them.

  There was a pond in a field across the road from Carlyle Rural, and in spring it was full of frogs. The game was to catch a frog, stick a straw up its cloaca, and blow it up to enormous size. As the frog swelled, there was a delightful apprehension that it might burst. There was an even more splendid hope that the boy who was blowing might, if enough funny things were said to him, stop blowing for a moment and suck and then—why, he might even die, which would richly crown the fun.

  Frank’s eyes were upon the frog, whose contortions and wildly waving legs pierced his heart with a vivid sense of the sufferings of Jesus, which Aunt had begun to describe to him. When His Name was used as an oath, Jesus suffered, and when boys were naughty Jesus’ wounds were opened and bled afresh. How Jesus must have been agonized by the tortures of the frogs! And—horror!—what must Jesus have felt the day some boys caught a tomcat and cut off its testicles, and let it loose to rush away, howling and bleeding! Francis was dimly becoming aware of his own testicles, which were somehow associated with something Awful about which he could not get any exact information.

  Animals did it, as you hurried past with blushes and shame. But surely the boys could not be right who said that people did it, too? That your own parents—but that did not bear thinking of; it was horrible and wholly incredible. Frank’s mind was becoming a horror of sick speculation. And, young as he was, his body seemed to be in the conspiracy against him.

  Aunt was not his only source of information about the mysteries of life. He found great solace in the company of Victoria Cameron, his grandfather’s cook. Aunt did not like him to talk too much to Victoria, who was not simply a Protestant but a Presbyterian of the darkest hue. She knew what was going on in the Senator’s house, and she knew it was wrong. Miss McRory was trying to suck that poor boy into the abyss of Catholicism and, although Victoria, as a great artist of the kitchen, was glad enough of the high wages—a resounding thirty-seven dollars a month, and board!—that the Senator paid her, she called her soul her own, and resisted Rome as stoutly as she could without provoking a row. She knew enough about the McRorys to hang them, she told herself, but she held her tongue. Judge not that ye be not judged. Of course, you can’t be a Calvinist without judging, but as a Calvinist you know what God’s ordinances are, so it isn’t really judging. It is just knowing right from wrong.

  As is so often the case with people who hold their tongues, Victoria had a vast accretion of bottled-up disapproval, and it could be sensed from the darkness of her gaze, and spells of breathing deeply through her nose that could be heard at a considerable distance.

  All she could properly do, as a loyal servant, eating the Senator’s bread, was to befriend that boy, and befriend him she did, in her own stern fashion.

  He asked her outright about the great mystery: did people do what animals did? Her reply was that there was an awful lot of Bad in the world, and the less you knew about it the luckier you were, and he was not to ask that question again.

  Aunt Mary-Ben, dimly aware but not well informed about the opposition in the kitchen, told Frank many a wondrous story about the mercy of God’s Mother, as she had seen it evinced in the visible world. Oh, you could always go to Her, Frankie, when you were troubled. Aunt kept her promise, and during the trouble of the black eye she gave him a pretty little rosary, which she told him had been blessed by the Bishop in Ottawa; he was to keep it under his pillow, and soon she would teach him the poetry that went with it.

  Frank was deeply troubled, but it would never do to ask her the question he had put to Victoria. She wouldn’t know about such things, or if she did she would be sorrowful because he knew about them. And there was always the risk of opening the wounds of Jesus afresh.

  The question plagued and puzzled. There was the time that a travelling company came to the theatre his grandfather owned—the McRory Opera House and Blairlogie’s principal centre of culture—offering a play tantalizingly called The Unwanted Child. There were special matinees for Women Only, at which a Well-Known Authority would lecture on the theme of the play, which was of concern to everyone. Francis knew that Victoria had attended one of these matinees, and he pestered her without mercy to know what the play had been about.

  At last she yielded. “Frankie,” she said with great solemnity, “it was about a girl who Went The Limit.” No more would she say.

  The Limit? Oh, what was the Limit?

  POOR WRETCH, said the Lesser Zadkiel, breaking off in his narrative; don’t you pity him?

  —No, no, no, said the Daimon Maimas. Pity is a human feeling, and I have nothing whatever to do with it. Your work is so much taken up with human creatures, brother, that you are infected by their weaknesses. Those children at Carlyle Rural, for instance; they were simply what they were. But you tell the tale of Francis as if to condemn them. I never condemn. My job was to make something of Francis with the materials I had at hand. If those materials were rough, they were good enough to grind his spirit down to a surface that showed up several veins of gold. Fine polishing will come later.

  —But it made the boy thin and pale and sad.

  —Now, now—that’s another of your pitying judgements. Put aside pity, Zadkiel. But I forget—you can’t; it’s not in your welkin. But I can, and indeed I must, if I am to be the grinder, the sha
per, the refiner. We work like the classical Greek sculptors, you and I. I must hew the creature out of my own intractable piece of rock and put a fine surface on it. Then you apply the rich colours, of which Pity and Charity are very popular pigments. They seem to give my creation a life that human beings understand and love, but when the colours are washed away by time, the reality is revealed, and I know that the reality has been there since the beginning.

  —But this struggle for the boy’s soul, as they call it. Pull Devil, pull Baker.

  —I hope you use the phrase metaphorically. It would be unjust to call Aunt Mary-Ben a devil; she was about as honest and wellintentioned as human beings generally are, and she wanted her own way because she thought it was the best way. You may call Victoria Cameron a baker, if you choose. There is some justice in that.

  JUSTICE, INDEED, for Victoria sprang from a long line of bakers, and her father and her brothers Hugh and Dougal ran the best bakery in Blairlogie. One Friday night Victoria got permission from Aunt to rouse Francis at two o’clock in the morning and take him to the bakery to see the Cameron men knead their dough.

  The dough was an immense mass in a large round wooden trough that was built with a huge pole at its centre to which were attached three long bands of linen. The three Camerons were sitting with their trouser legs rolled up to the knee, scrubbing their feet in a low sink. Scrub, scrub, scrub till you might think the skin would come off. Then they dried their feet on fresh towels, powdered their feet with flour, leapt from the sink into the dough-trough, seized a linen band each, and began what looked like a wild dance in the dough. Round and round, until the linen bands were as close to the pole as they could be; then they turned and danced the other way, as the bands unfolded, shouting Heigh, heigh, heigh, as they danced.

  “D’ye want to scrub up, young master, and dance with us?” shouted Old Cameron. And, quick as a wink, Victoria had his shoes and stockings off, washed his feet and floured them, and popped him into the trough with the men, where he danced as well as he could, for the dough was resistant, like treading on some sort of flesh; but that added to the fun. Francis never forgot that night, or the heat of the ovens, into which had been thrown many bundles of fern, which burned down to a fine white ash. After the dancing, the dough was cut with paddles into what would be pound loaves, and set out to rise again, before they went into the fiercely hot, sweet-smelling brick ovens.