Somewhere I Belong (16 page)

“Hold on now.” Uncle Jim's eyes lit up. “There's something else here.”
He reached under the front seat and found six shiny, new, wooden
hockey sticks with black lettering along their shafts, and passed one
each to Larry, Helen, me, Thomas, and Pat Jr. The last one was for
Alfred. “We'll likely have to cut this one down to size.”

Pat Jr. held his stick in both hands and turned it. “Wow, an honest to gosh Victoriaville.”

Thomas stared at his stick in disbelief. “I never even seen one of
these.” He looked up at Uncle Jim. “Thanks.” I thought he was going to cry.

“Don't be givin' me too much credit,” Uncle Jim said. “This was your Aunt Martha's idea.”

I looked up at him sceptically. “Ma?”

“Well,” Uncle Jim said. “Your grandmother had somethin' to do with it too.”

The next week was Holy Week, the week before Easter. On Holy Wednes
day afternoon, Old Dunphy stood in front of his desk, gripping his
pointer in both hands. “Report cards go home tomorrow. I would advise you all to be here to collect them yourselves.” He paused, slapped the pointer onto a palm, and forced a smile. “If you choose to stay home, I'm sure your parents wouldn't mind making a special trip in to see me. It would be a grand opportunity to discuss your progress. Or your lack thereof.”

On the way home, Pat Jr. told us Old Dunphy always handed out
report cards on Holy Thursday so he could ruin Easter weekend. Pat Jr. also told us he and his brother, Percy, always held a hockey tournament on the pond behind his house, so they could get Easter weekend back. The Thursday afternoon of it, anyhow, and the Saturday—Good Friday and Easter Sunday we had to go to church.

On Thursday morning, we fidgeted through arithmetic and penmanship, itching to burst out the back door and into the long weekend. My mind wandered from the egg hunt on Easter morning to the huge ham dinner after Easter Mass and the hockey tournament on the Giddingses' pond. Old Dunphy marched up and down the aisles, slapping his pointer on a palm and ordering us to quiet down and get to work. He had the same eye-piercing look of concentration Uncle Jim did when he was reining in the horses.

We ate lunch huddled around the pot-bellied stove, then rushed outdoors. When Old Dunphy leaned out the doorway and rang the
bell, we reluctantly filed in, wishing for the day to end. He grabbed his pointer from the blackboard ledge, moved to the edge of the platform, and watched us strip off our jackets and fling them over their hooks in the cloakroom.

“I'll wait 'til you settle down,” he said. His glasses were perched on his forehead. A stack of large, brown envelopes lay strewn across his desk. “It doesn't matter to me how long it takes; I've got no particular place to go.”

You could always tell Old Dunphy's mood by the way he handled his pointer. If he trod lightly around the room, so his brace didn't rattle so much, and held it straight up his back, he was in a good mood and you could count on staying out of trouble as long as you did your work.
If he stomped his heavy black shoes over the floorboards, making his brace rattle like the bells on Uncle Jim's sleigh, and stabbed his
pointer into the floor, chances were that somebody was going to get it. If he stood at the edge of the platform with his glasses perched on his forehead, slapping his pointer onto a palm, he was winding up to a full-out lecture.

“I'm looking at a real bunch of slackers here.” He slapped that stupid pointer. “I'm sick of the absenteeism.”
Slap.
“I'm sick of the homework that doesn't get done,”
slap
, “of the sorry excuses,”
slap, slap,
“of the sloppy work you do when you're here,”
slap
. “And I'm sick and tired of the disrespect.” When he slammed the pointy end into the floor, the little kids along the front row gasped. The rest of us sat upright, hands folded on top of our desks, barely daring to breathe.

His eyes narrowed as he settled his gaze on the back row. I wondered if he was singling out Patrick Daley; surely it wasn't Larry. “If you don't come to school with your homework done and do your schoolwork to the best of your ability when you're here, you're showing disrespect to me, you're lying to your parents, and you're sabotaging your future.” He aimed his pointer across the room. “But if that's what you're fixed on doing, there isn't a thing I can do for you. Except, I suppose, to invite you to repeat the year all over again, starting in September.”

He stepped back and grabbed a stack of envelopes off his desk,
then returned to the edge of the platform. “Every one of you needs to shape up.” He held up the envelopes in his fleshy hands. “From what I've seen here, a number of you might just as well get a pick and shovel and dig ditches along the Hillsborough Bridge.” He was talking about the government project in Charlottetown, the one Uncle Ed and most
of the other men along Northbridge Road had worked on over the
winter. I glanced back and saw Johnnie Condon and Matthias Creed leaning over their desks, scowling back at him. “I want a backside in every seat until the end of June. No excuses.”

Old Dunphy waited a moment, then nodded a half-nod as we silently stared up at him. Nobody flinched. He glanced down at the little kids sitting bolt upright along the front row and grunted. He adjusted his glasses to the end of his nose and smiled a fake smile. Then he held up the first envelope and called up a girl in first grade.

“Kathleen Bambrick.”

Kathleen eased from her seat and waited at the bottom stair of the platform, eyes to the floor.

Old Dunphy looked down over the rims of his glasses. “I won't bite.”

By the way Kathleen stepped up the stairs and inched toward him, it was clear she wasn't so sure. When he bent down and held out her card, she took it then scrambled back to her seat like a mouse fleeing a mangy cat. Old Dunphy waited for her to be seated, then flipped through the envelopes and read them out in alphabetical order. The first to third grades formed a line in the centre aisle and inched toward the platform. Their arms were ramrod straight, their fingers were curled into tight fists. It was a ceremony of sorts—like Holy Communion at Sunday Mass. Old Dunphy reached out to shake each hand, his meaty fingers swallowing them up. He spoke in a low voice, passed out the envelopes, and watched them troop away from the platform. Our teacher always went easy on the little kids, no doubt fearing they'd pee their pants and run home wet in the freezing cold. Afraid he'd catch it from one of the moms. Or maybe it was like Uncle Jim said, that he didn't bother picking on kids until they reached grade six.

Mr. Dunphy waited for the last little kid to return to his seat, secure his envelope in his desk, and fold his hands on top of it. Then he returned to his own desk and collected the remaining report cards.

“This is unacceptable.” He nodded at the stack of envelopes clutched in his hands. “Keep this up and a good number of you will be repeating the year.”
As if we hadn't heard the first time.

I sat and stared at him in nervous anticipation. Beside me, Maggie MacIntyre shifted in her seat. Across the room, Helen held a hand over her mouth, her eyes riveted on our teacher. A pair of heavy boots tapped loudly at the back of the room. A spark crackled in the stovepipe.

Old Dunphy paused for a moment, before reading out the first name. “Maggie MacIntyre—second place.” He hardly ever smiled a real smile. When he did, it pushed his fat cheeks up so they almost shut his squinty
eyes. This time he beamed like he did at Granny's after draining a
tumbler of Uncle Jim's special homemade cider.

Maggie looked around the room, surprised, then slid from her seat and moved toward the centre aisle. The tension in Old Dunphy's shoulders seemed to slip away as he watched her mount the platform. He stepped toward her and held out her envelope. “How is your mother feeling these days? Good, I hope.”

Maggie's voice was barely audible. “All right.”

Old Dunphy leaned down to her and smiled. “Tell her I'm pleased with your progress this term; tell her I said hello.”

Maggie mumbled out a “thank you,” and hurried back to her seat.

For the rest of us, Old Dunphy just barked out our names in descending order of achievement. He didn't even wait for one pupil to accept their envelope before calling out the next. The line lengthened and the aisle packed as he distributed our report cards—flinging them, almost. He treated it like a chore he had to get through. Like drying the dishes after supper or bringing in the firewood. He glanced up, once, to match the pupil to the name on the envelope. Somewhere through it all, he said, “You're not to open these; they're for your parents. And I want them signed and returned Monday morning.” So we were to take them home and face the consequences for what our parents found inside.

I watched all of this from my desk by the window, feeling the cool March air seep through a crack in a pane. I waited for him to call out my name. The stack of envelopes grew thinner and the line lengthened. The longer I waited, the more I thought about the long hours
I'd spent over homework under the dim kerosene light in Granny's
kitchen—about how carefully I had worked on each assignment before
passing it over to Uncle Jim to check. Helen placed fifth and Pat Jr.
seventh—this I could accept. But when Johnnie Condon and Matthias Creed were called ahead of me, I felt as if I was being judged for who I was and where I was from, rather than for how hard I had worked.

“Pius James Kavanaugh.”

Finally.

I slid from my seat and made my way to the back of the line. Patrick Daley leaned across Larry. “Yankee Doodle dummy.”

If Old Dunphy heard, he didn't say a word.

When everybody was seated, Old Dunphy held up the last envelope and waited for the room to go quiet. “Only one of you has met all of my expectations this time, and he hasn't even been here the full term.”

Eyes searched the room as he opened the envelope, pulled out the report card and raised it up to read. There was a 90 in science—we'd missed an important assignment before we arrived—and perfect scores in history and composition.

He waved the report card in the air. “Wouldn't it be grand if we could have a few more like this.” When he called out my brother's name, I turned to see Larry perched at the edge of his seat, leaning away from Patrick Daley.

“Big-feeling Yankee,” Patrick scoffed as Larry trod awkwardly up
the centre aisle. I could feel his scorn from across the room.

“What was that, Mr. Daley?” Old Dunphy said. Finally, he'd noticed.

“Nuttin',” Patrick replied. He sat with his arms stretched across his desktop, his grubby fingers curled over the edge.

“If you did more than
nuttin
', Mr. Daley, you would have a report
card worth looking at too.” Old Dunphy handed Larry his card and
shook his hand.

When Larry returned to his seat, Patrick swung a hand out and
tried to grab his envelope. My brother calmly swept it out of reach, slid into his seat, deposited his envelope, and let his desktop fall onto Patrick Daley's hand.

“Cripes, Kavanaugh,” Patrick hollered.

“Once more, Mr. Daley, and you'll be staying in,” Old Dunphy said. “I don't care what day it is.”

“Sorry, sir,” Patrick huffed. But the look on his face said he really wasn't.Patrick Daley started in on Larry slowly. At dismissal, he slouched into his jacket, pulled his hat over his forehead and followed Larry out the back door. He shoved his bare hands into his trouser pockets and swaggered across the schoolyard behind my brother. His woollen-socks-over-shoes-for-boots sank into the snow. Johnnie Condon and Matthias Creed moved up on either side of him. They
were a threesome, marching shoulder to shoulder after my brother, jackets wide open to the winter air, dark woollen trousers bagging at the knees. They reminded me of some of the tough guys back home in Everett, the ones who lived near the oil-refining plant where my dad worked. These were guys Ma told us to “stay clear of,” because they were “no end of trouble.” But those Everett boys knew better than to mess with Larry.

Like most of the older boys at Northbridge Road School, Patrick
Daley, Johnnie Condon, and Matthias Creed had missed the previous
week to mend ploughs and harrowers for spring tilling. They must
have thought Larry had it easy for someone his size; they must have thought his success was due more to his daily presence in school than to his intelligence and hard work. But they didn't see him in the barn every morning with Uncle Jim or helping him mend equipment in the shed every afternoon after school.

Larry sensed the three boys approaching him. He pulled his shoulders
back, which added to his height, and picked up his pace as he moved across the yard toward the gate. If there was going to be a fight, he would take it out onto the road where there was plenty of room to manoeuvre and where no one would get hurt. Except for the instigators, that is, and only if they asked for it; Larry never threw the first punch.