Revenge on the Fly

by Sylvia McNicoll

  Together we walked down a long, dark hall. Even though I was tall for my age, Mr. Morton towered over me. It was like walking with a giant through his castle. Finally, we stopped. “This will be your classroom.” He knocked on a door and a younger man with dark hair answered. “Mr. Samson, this is your new pupil, William Alton. Just landed from England.”

  Mr. Samson nodded, guided me in and shut the classroom door again. “Welcome, William.”

  Just as in London, the classroom had three walls of blackboard and one of windows. At the front, near the right-hand corner, a portrait photo of King George watched over us. Next to it, in the center, hung a large Union Jack. A map of the world lay unrolled over the board. Pink colored the parts of the British Empire, and I felt happy to see all of Canada in that bright happy color. No matter how far I was from Ireland, or London for that matter, I was still standing on British soil.

  Still, rows of unfamiliar faces watched me as I stood in the front and the teacher introduced me. “Class, this is our new student, William Alton, all the way from London. I know you will do your best to welcome him.” He turned to me. “You can share Fred Leckie’s desk, over there.”

  Mr. Samson showed me to a double bench attached to a desktop by black wrought iron. Just as in England it was bolted down, only in London I sat by myself. “Fred, you will be in charge of looking after William and showing him around.”

  Dressed in a fine linen suit with a wide square sailor collar and blue bow, the boy looked me up and down with hard eyes, a creamy smile across his face.

  My own brown shirt and britches suddenly felt coarse and itchy, and sweat trickled down from my armpits. Nevertheless, I grinned back at Fred.

  His eyes glittered with something fierce that certainly wasn’t welcome. He turned away.

  Had he made up his mind about me already? Did I not seem worthy of his time or friendship? I looked around and felt the atmosphere grow cold. The other students took their cue from Fred and stared hard or turned away.

  “Class, take out your readers and turn to page seventeen.” Mr. Samson pulled a book from the shelf behind his desk and brought it to me.

  I opened it up to the correct page.

  “Ginny.” He turned to a freckled girl with long sand-colored braids who sat in the next row. “Would you start us off by reading the poem?”

  Ginny stood up hesitantly. She placed a forefinger on the page. “The Lamb,” she read as she moved the finger along. She paused, flinging one braid behind her shoulder. “By William Blake.” She looked up and around as though waiting for someone to disagree with her. When no one did, she continued, her finger sliding beneath the words. “Little lamb who made thee…” Back in London, we had already read that one. It was about God and how he made lambs and children and provided for both.

  Beside me Fred sneered at her as he flung an imaginary braid of his own behind him. What did he not like about Ginny? She read well enough, if not with a lot of feeling. Perhaps, like me, she didn’t quite believe Blake’s words. God didn’t provide equally for all children. Fred did all right but Ginny certainly didn’t. Her dress looked old, patched in two places with a hem sagging. And hadn’t we had lamb chops on the passage over? Lambs fared even worse than children.

  Knowing the poem so well did make me feel ahead of the class. Maybe in Canada I would lead the others and earn even higher grades. That would make Mum happy. I sighed.

  The room grew hotter and the air felt heavy. A cluster of flies buzzed around the window. Finally, Ginny sat down and we turned the page to a story called “Lost at Sea.” Mr. Samson called on a boy named Harry to read. Harry sounded each word into separate syllables, slow and painful.

  It could have been an exciting story—the ship crashed into a rock in the fog. Instead I watched as a lone fly landed first on Fred’s arm, then Harry’s nose, and finally on Ginny’s desk, where she whacked it with her reader.

  Mr. Samson raised his eyebrow and, frowning, pulled a rag from his desk and handed it to her to wipe off the book.

  At least she had felled the creature. She handed the rag back when she was done. Finally, I could concentrate again. Did the captain in the story use a looking glass? Or were binoculars banned from that voyage too? Harry paused and stumbled, so I read ahead.

  I needed to know if the captain escaped—the one on the Titanic went down with his ship, after all—and if I waited for Harry, I might fall asleep before I ever found out. When Mr. Samson called on Fred, it was obvious that he had read ahead as well, because he had lost the class’s place in the story.

  “You know you should be following along,” Mr. Samson scolded. “Stand up, please.”

  Ever so slowly, Fred lifted himself from the chair. A smirk stretched across his face and his lips pulled down from one corner. The teacher didn’t seem to notice. He just turned his attention to the next reader, a girl named Rebecca. She wore large blue ribbons in her hair that exactly matched her eyes. Rebecca read smoothly and even dramatically. I quickly flipped back to find her place in the story and followed along.

  “Thank you, Rebecca.”

  She sat down.

  “Fred, do you feel you can concentrate on the task at hand now?” Mr. Samson raised an eyebrow.

  Same smirk, but Fred’s small nod satisfied the teacher.

  “You may sit down, then. Why don’t we hear from our new student next. William?”

  I stood quickly and took a breath. After Colleen died, Mum grew weaker and weaker, until she could no longer work. Finally, she took to her bed. I would read to her from a book the lady of the manor had given her as a parting gift—Jane Eyre. The words were difficult but I added expression as best I could to make the story come alive. It was one small thing that I could do to try to make her happy when there was no joy left in her. In those final weeks, the daily storytelling had turned me into a very good reader.

  As I began the passage where the lifeboats were lowered, I could sense that the class was watching me. The room grew silent. The first mate called to the captain to leave and even the flies at the window stopped their buzzing. When the ship slipped below the surface, I looked up to see my classmates staring wide-eyed. When the captain gave his place in the lifeboat to a child, I heard Rebecca sniffle. I finished—the captain and all hands were lost. I sighed. It made me glad to be off the Empress of Ireland.

  “Well done!” Mr. Samson clapped and the class joined in. “This is the way you all should be reading.”

  I smiled and looked around. Even though my clothing was shabby, perhaps now they would all know I was no slouch.

  Ginny eyed me like a cat does a bird. Rebecca smiled back warmly.

  Fred elbowed me hard as I sat down. “Show-off.”

  Fair enough. Perhaps I had been showing off just a little. The elbow in my ribs caused me to slump. Maybe that would make Fred happy.

  Next, Mr. Samson loaned me one of his pens so that I could copy out the week’s words with the rest of the class, ten times each, to practice penmanship and learn spelling. The pen was full of dark ink and I had to write quickly and evenly so as not to bleed heavy drops of blue on the page. As I finished copying the last word, Fred knocked into me. The page tore.

  I kicked him under the desk.

  When Mr. Samson walked around he suggested I stay in at recess to redo the page.

  I sighed but did not tell on Fred. The sun blazed outside, and without any friends at this new school, it was no great hardship to give up recess anyway.

  But then, later in drill class when we were lined up in rows, Mr. Samson demonstrated how to swing our Indian clubs up and over our shoulders. Somehow Fred managed to bash my arm with the wooden pin.

  “Ow!” I couldn’t help crying out this time. I gripped my throbbing arm.

  “Fred, what have you done?” Mr. Samson asked.

  “’Twas an accident, sir. I’m sorry,” Fred told me, extending a hand. But his smile showed me that it had been deliberate and he jabbed and jostled me enough during the rest
of the day to let me know that he considered me his enemy.

  Just before dismissal, Mr. Morton appeared at the door of the classroom again. When Mr. Samson stepped out to speak to him, the class became restless. Fred threw a crumpled bit of paper at Rebecca and Harry pulled at Ginny’s braid till she hammered him. Harry roared and the other boys laughed at him.

  “I have an announcement,” Mr. Samson said as he returned to the class. He held up his hands till there was complete silence. “We have an important guest coming to visit tomorrow and he will bring news of an exciting opportunity for all of you. You can be a hero to your city, vanquish disease, and win great prizes too. Be sure to wash well, clean your nails, and dress in your best. Class dismissed.”

  Vanquish disease? I forgot all about Fred’s torment. I had felt so helpless watching Mum and Colleen fall ill and die. Hadn’t I wondered a thousand times over whether there was anything I could have done—anything anyone could have done—to have prevented them from getting sick, to stop them from dying? I’d felt the same way on the boat, when we’d said goodbye to Mrs. Gale.

  Would tomorrow bring the answer I had been looking for all this time? Would I finally learn how to defeat disease? It might be too late for Mum and Colleen, but there were surely others who could be helped. The thought brought a smile to my face, and as I filed out of the class—my first day over and done—I remembered the rest of Mr. Samson’s words. Prizes. What exactly might they be?

  Chapter 4

  Eagerly, I rushed down the hall and out the door, ready to run back to Madame Depieu’s rooming house to tell Father what little I knew about the exciting opportunity. Outside the school building I paused for just a moment to get my bearings. Just then I heard Father’s voice, calling from the other direction.

  “Will, over here. Across the street. Look this way!”

  The church stood directly across from the front of Central School. But his voice seemed to be coming from the castle-like manor next to it, which faced the back of the school. Could it be?

  Were my ears playing tricks? Or maybe he had found Uncle Charlie, and that was his manor. Oh, to live in that castle! I crossed at the corner and headed down the street.

  “In the back at the stable.” Father stood, waving, by a small building behind the manor.

  I ran across the lot, then over the street and through the yard to throw my arms around him. “Where’s Uncle Charlie?” I asked as I pulled away. “Did you find him?”

  “Not yet. I found work instead,” Father explained. “Just now I am seeing to the owner’s horses, Beauty and Blue. Come and have a look.”

  “Can you be a blacksmith here?” I asked, confused. The post Uncle Charlie had for him was supposed to give him a trade, a future.

  “No. For now, I took the position of servant and stable hand.” We walked into the stable, where an empty carriage stood. “Mr. Moodie owns this grand mansion. He calls it the Blink Bonnie.” Along the wall hung tools, several polished harnesses, and a saddle. “This morning I went door to door, looking for odd jobs, and was lucky enough to find him at home.”

  “Why didn’t you try to find Uncle Charlie instead?” I didn’t look at him, didn’t want to be fooled by a smile. Instead, I stood on my toes to see the horses in their stalls.

  “I checked back at the train station and there was no word.” Father’s voice was low. “We’ve run out of money, Will. Without board, Madame Depieu will surely turn us out.”

  “She’ll turn us out soon enough anyways. She hates boys! If you had found Uncle Charlie, we could move in with him.”

  “Whisht! William, we don’t know what’s happened with him. What if there’s been an accident?”

  What if he’s dead? I couldn’t bear to think it.

  Father took a deep breath, put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Mr. Moodie has also bought a new motor car. If I stay, he’s promised I can train to look after it. No matter what’s happened to Charlie, we have a future here and we’re together. That’s all that matters.” He let go of me then and chucked me under the chin. “Talk to me as I finish up.” He led a large chocolate-colored horse out of its stall, and tied it to the carriage. “You can watch Beauty here while I muck out her bedroom.”

  I reached up and patted the horse’s warm smooth nose. “Tomorrow someone important is going to come to school to tell us how to stop disease,” I called to Father. “There’s going to be a contest too, with prizes.”

  He ducked his head from around the stall. “See there. And you wanted to go out and get a job. Education pays, my lad. And so quickly!” He grinned. “Go fetch my paper off the counter there and read to me.”

  I picked up the newspaper, climbed up onto the carriage, and read to him about a flood in Buffalo, Wyoming. Walls of water had carried off several brick blocks and wrecked a number of buildings.

  By the end of the story, Father had finished the stall and he called me over to the sink. “Let’s wash up. Madame Depieu owes us supper and I expect she will not hold it for us if we are late.”

  I pumped the water for Father and he pumped for me. Sharing a brown bar of soap to scrub our hands, we also washed our faces and the backs of our necks so that we would feel cooler.

  After drying off, we headed from the Blink Bonnie past the back of the school, down Park Street, and past a row of tall red-brick buildings till we hit the ugliest and dirtiest, our rooming house.

  We climbed the creaking stairs to Madame Depieu’s house.

  The witch poked her head out the door. “Take off your shoes!” she screeched. “I don’t want the dirt on my stairs.”

  We did as she commanded, even though the steps looked none too clean.

  At the top landing, she grabbed my arms and checked my hands. “Pas mal. Help me serve up supper.”

  I saw Father bristle, but I knew we had nowhere else to go so I shrugged my shoulders and gave him my biggest grin. He smiled back instantly.

  I brought plates of food and heavy jugs of water to the table. We ate hard potatoes and carrots and stringy meat that didn’t quite taste like beef. I only hoped it wasn’t horse. I’d heard that some of the French enjoyed eating their mounts. After supper I cleared plates and helped clean dishes. Would this be the way I spent every evening? I went to bed exhausted. It doesn’t matter, I told myself. It was only for a short while. Till we found Uncle Charlie. And, as Father said, we were together, and that was all that mattered for now.

  Next day at school, despite the oppressive heat, the class hummed with excitement. Mr. Samson told us to study our spelling words till our guest arrived. “Quietly,” he added. Still, pencils rattled and books dropped. No one could settle. When Harry fell out of his seat, Mr. Samson slammed a ruler across his desk. “All right then. Since you all know your words so perfectly, we will have a spelling bee.”

  Back home, we’d enjoyed spelling bees on the odd Friday. Because I could often picture the words in my head from all of my reading, I usually did brilliantly.

  Mr. Samson divided the class—Fred on one team with many of the boys, and I on the other with Rebecca and Ginny and the rest of the girls. We stood along the front blackboard.

  “Shoveled,” Mr. Samson called to Harry. He stood on Fred’s side.

  Not an easy one, for sure. Harry shuffled from foot to foot, repeating the word. He looked, big-eyed, toward Fred.

  “No helping,” Mr. Samson warned.

  “S…h…,” Harry paused. “A?” he asked.

  Mr. Samson shook his head and Harry sat down. “Copy it out one hundred times so you will know it next time.”

  On our side, Rebecca repeated the word and spelled it easily. Our next word was barrel. Ginny pronounced it in two syllables, as though listening to the sound each part of the word made. Reciting the letters took equally long, and her golden-brown eyes looked skywards the whole time. When she hit the first r, she paused like a wagon stuck in a rut, and then, bump, she gave the second r and the rest of the letters. After she finished she repeated “
barrel” with some attitude. “So there!” When Mr. Samson nodded, she beamed, like the sun from behind a storm cloud.

  I wanted to applaud.

  “Consider,” Mr. Samson called out for Fred.

  Smiling, he immediately launched into spelling it. “C… o…n…s…i…d…e…r.”

  There was a gasp. Mr. Samson raised one thick black eyebrow. Fred’s face fell as he realized his mistake.

  “Consider,” Mr. Samson repeated. “You need to consider carefully before you act. Fred, you know you have to repeat the word before spelling it. You may sit down.”

  A nervous twitter from the girl next to me made Fred glower my way.

  I tried hard not to smile and add salt to his wounds. My turn at it. “Consider,” I repeated. “C…o…n…s…i…d…e…r, consider.” No double letters to think about; it would have been an easy word even if Fred hadn’t given me all the letters. I spelled the word by the time he reached our desk.

  He slammed his body down on the bench, making everything on it jump up.

  Mr. Samson shouted at him, but a knock at the door interrupted any attempts at discipline. Mr. Samson opened it and Mr. Morton stepped in. He nodded.

  “Our guest has arrived,” Mr. Samson announced.

  Everyone cheered except Fred.

  “Quickly, class, line up!” Mr. Samson commanded.

  The spelling bee lines shifted to the door, and Mr. Samson led us to the end of the hall and up the staircase, Harry and Fred bringing up the rear. Through a set of double doors into a large auditorium our line marched, picking out and sitting down on hard wooden chairs.

  Students chattered among themselves nervously as they settled. An important visitor was speaking today, after all. A teacher hissed, “Shhh!”

  Up on a stage in front of us, and next to Mr. Morton, stood a worried-looking younger man in a dark suit, checking his pocket watch.

  Was this the man who would give us the secret to vanquishing disease? Would he give me the answer to the question that troubled me most?