Alone in the Classroom Read Online Free

paintings, bridges, parks, long walks in the rain. He had worked his way over to France on a freighter and worked while he was there on a farm, and the labour came easily, because he was one of six children raised on a rough and stony farm in Quebec near a village where everyone spoke French. “All six of us,” he said, “were raised to ask what we could contribute to the world. And so two of us are doctors and two are ministers and two are schoolteachers.” When he spoke about Paris, the stiffening went out of him, and when he spoke about contributing to the world, the stiffening went back in.
    They were Mr. Burns and Miss Flood to each other - again with the echo of Darcy. Not that Connie had ever been convinced. Oh yes, the wealth. But Darcy had no sense of humour. How could Lizzie be happy married to a prig? In her opinion, Lizzie was by no means wrong inher first impression and by no means entirely right in her second. Would Mr. Darcy really make her happy? And by “happy” Connie meant in bed.

    October. With Indian summer came the last gasp of sundresses and bare legs. A girl brushed her hair at recess - a few long black loose hairs collected on the back of her yellow dress, looping lines, like a butterfly. Susan Graves. The brush twice the size of her hand. Her yellow back, and the long hairs shedding as she stroked, until six of them drifted in uneasy decoration. The power of hair to unsettle. Her legs with their soft nap of fine hairs, her arms.
    In the hall, as she passed under his eye, Parley Burns touched the strap of her sundress - an intelligent man.
Strap
, he said, and the word in translation,
la bretelle
.
    Susan was not the prettiest girl in school, but there was something about her that struck him. Nervousness, willowiness, shyness, apartness.
    Beige walls and chalk dust. Enclosed air, the quiet of students writing, and suddenly, in passing, the sound of crows.
    The final class of the day. He lingered after Connie dismissed her pupils - they were gathering up their things when he came forward, not to speak to her, Miss Flood, but to Susan. He asked the girl to stay behind at her desk. The pupils left. Connie took her papers and left too. Susan was alone with Parley Burns.

3
Michael
    Susan Graves had a brother, the good-looking boy who liked baseball. Michael was a year older, but three grades behind her. The physical resemblance was strong, the same dark hair and blue eyes and high colour in their cheeks. Outside, Michael’s glance was full of amusement, mischief, secret ambition. His voice was loud and undiminished: hear me roar. In a classroom, he was pitiful.
    After Parley Burns took over the school, he released Connie from her valiant efforts on behalf of
la belle langue
and she concentrated on English grammar, on assertive, interrogative, imperative sentences. Example of the latter? The house is on fire! Run! Run! Parley moved Susan into his own class and deposited fourteen-year-old Michael with “capable Miss Flood, who will take you in hand.”
    Parley was not the only one who claimed the boy was unteachable. None too bright, said Miss Fluelling, who had watched his lack of progress from the age of seven. A boy who read and wrote laboriously, grindingly, though memory work was no problem. Poems and songs he recited without effort and numbers in his head were a snap. But they all did a strange soft-shoe when he wrote them down. He survived because so many others were behind too - children who arrived not knowing English and were removed at regular, arbitrary intervals to help with the seeding and harvesting. He survived because at recess he ran and ran and shook off the hounds of learning. His father was a man of standing from Ontario. Owner of the hardware store in the centre of town and the big white frame house across the road from the school.
    Michael interested Connie from the first moment. She was intrigued by his cockiness in the schoolyard and by his affection for his sister: he