Read Alone in the Classroom for Free Online

hand while her mother dealt with the new baby. They were still on their farm in eastern Ontario then, on the flat and fertile plain between Argyle and the Ottawa River. Connie sat on an overturned wash-tub in the kitchen and Charlotte’s big knuckles full of arthritis moved along the lines, helping her sound out words. Connie was working on
mouse
when an actual mouse ran over her bare toes and she climbed her aunt like a tree.
    Old Charlotte, full of admiration for the creature so smart it knew its own name, called after it, ” ‘O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!’ “
    Parley would be the second Burns in Connie’s experience, a name bundled up in childish, lasting, skin-tingling drama.
    Charlotte was her mother’s rich aunt, one of her few relatives: Charlotte Constance Douglas, married to Charles Hayes, a dissipated Aberdeen banker. Connie’s own name was Agnes Constance Flood, but her mother was Agnes and so she was Connie. Since Aunt Charlotte took no prisoners when it came to reading, her small niece ingested early a sense of evil lurking in the fog and scratching its bad pen. Tulkinghorne grubbed about in her dreams, and
Bleak House
was the rustly black of Charlotte’s lap. Later on, in the period of her asthma, when she wasn’t well enough to go to school, Connie went through every book in the house, including a big, heavy copy of
Canterbury Tales
. Michael’s spellings would remind her of Chaucer’s, and it occurred to her during that teaching-fall of 1929 that commas hadn’t always ruled the waves. The ancient, original spellings and punctuations were changeable, restless, like the boy himself.
To finilise my dicion on wether I should where my scarf or not I lookt outside and I noticed that the street was scilent. All I heard was the thundering wind of the bleek midwinter
.
    At his desk he twisted his legs, sighed, bit his tongue, chewed his fingers, muttered to himself. “Oh, no, that’s not right.” “Uh-oh, I failed on this one last time.” “How do you expect me to do this?” And once he said to Connie, “My sister has all the brains.”
    His sister was a natural student, but Michael was the beauty. Susan missed by a fraction of an inch his stunning face.
    “Don’t grumble,” Connie said, convinced he was a boy with deep ability. “You have one kind of brains, your sister has another.”
    But already he was prey to the thought that would plague him for the rest of his days. What would my life have been like if I had been good at school?
    “Anyway,” she added, “maybe it’s not you. Maybe it’s your teachers.”
    They digested this radical notion. To Connie it was less radical than obvious, since she was a teacher with exactly three months of training.
    Nearly every day she worked with him after school, never pretending he was anything but a hard case, which relieved her feelings and his, too. “This is a desecration,” she said, seeing
haws
for
house
. And they both laughed.
    Teaching ran in her family on her mother’s side. Her brothers would become teachers, too, and so would I. But most of Connie’s methods came from a beloved and irascible man who had taught her in the upper grades. “Don’t be afraid to ask a stupid question,” Syd Goodwin would say, and to himself he would mutter, “Ask a stupid question, and the answer goes on and on.” Snakebite, he had taken to calling her, and it had the same soothing-exciting effect as snow stuffed down the back of her neck, or her hat snatched off at recess: she knew she was liked and it made her happy.
    She began to call Michael Slim. “Slim, my unteachable pupil,” she would say, her face full of energy and amusement, and he responded with his remarkable smile. It seemed never to occur to her to give up on him or on anyone else in her classroom. There wasn’t a single childwho didn’t wish to please her. Michael was her biggest challenge, and they had an understanding, a rapport.
    She had a name for me, too. She called me