A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [11]
I can’t see the connection. Willard’s wife marches regularly down into the valley beyond town, carrying a portable easel, looking most peculiar, and returning with little sketches labelled Banks of the Wachakwa.
“… and this is the third time,” Willard is saying, “that she’s encountered the Doherty boy. Not encountered him, exactly, but seen him in the distance, running into the bushes. On school days. Unmistakably him. You could spot that red hair a mile away.”
Does James hate school that much? He loves to draw pictures. I always thought that even though he found arithmetic difficult, he enjoyed some subjects. I always thought he responded when I spoke to him about his drawings. I thought he liked me, at least some.
“His mother,” Willard says, “is partly to blame, for giving him notes to excuse his absence. I think you’d be well advised to have a talk with her, before we notify the truant officer. It’s possible that a little straight speaking, coming from the school, might be sufficient.”
I’m angry enough at Grace Doherty to be able to speak my mind. What does she think she’s doing? How can a child’s mother be so irresponsible, as though it didn’t amount to anything, as though he didn’t amount to anything? I could say it to her this instant. But it won’t be until tomorrow or next week, and that I dread.
Willard is a good principal. All at once I’m grateful to him for not having gone directly to the truant officer, who has been old so long that he’d no longer comprehend how a boy might be drawn to the valley at this time of year, after the shut-in winter, without its necessarily meaning a thing. But Grace – how could she? She ought to know better. The ignorance of some people is too much. She doesn’t deserve to have him.
“In the meantime,” Willard says, turning to go, “I think you’d better send the young man in question into my office. Around ten o’clock will do nicely.”
“You’re not going to – you won’t strap him?”
“I don’t see,” Willard blandly says, “that I have any alternative.”
He is smiling as thinly as a skull. His eyes seem covered with a film of respectable responsibility, grave concern, the sadness of duty’s necessity, all to conceal the shame-burning of pleasure.
“It won’t do him any good.” This is true. I don’t feel certain of much, but I feel certain of this.
“We don’t know that, Rachel, do we?” Willard says. “I would venture to put forth the opinion that under the circumstances it is decidedly worth a try. We must not let our emotions get the better of us, mustn’t we?”
What of his emotions, Willard’s, the ones he would not admit to having? Yet now I can’t argue. I don’t know whether I only feel the way I do because I care about James, and wouldn’t willingly see him hurt. Is there a better reason for not wanting him hurt? Now I no longer know whether I have the right to feel as I do. How could I be wrong about this, when I feel it so? Or can a person be mistaken about everything? Willard’s a good principal. I said so to myself not a moment ago.
“I’ll send him in, then.” There’s a dullness in my voice. Willard has won. Maybe he is even right. He has two of his own. Could I be expected to know what is best?
“Good girl,” Willard says.
But when I’ve sent James in, and he has returned, his face like bone, his eyes staring my betrayal at me, then I want only to go to Willard and tell him to listen, just to listen. I am not neutral – I am not detached – I know it. But neither are you, and you do not know it.
I won’t go, though. The day seems to have ended, and yet I still sit at my desk, thinking quite calmly how much I would like to leave this school. How is it I can still be afraid of losing my job?
“Hello, child.”
Calla is standing in the doorway looking like a wind-dishevelled owl, a great horned owl, her fringed hair like grey-brown feathers every which way, her eyes ringed with the round brown frames of the glasses she wears only rarely so that they never stop seeming unusual on her. She looks so comically earnest that I feel badly, and wonder why I haven’t asked her over to our place more