by Sara Cassidy
“Well, Leland?” Mr. Carling says.
“My hand hurts,” I say.
“How can it hurt? You’ve hardly written a thing.”
I try not to cry.
“I write slow,” I say. “Can I draw a picture?”
“Leland, you aren’t in grade two to draw pictures,” Mr. Carling says as he unwraps a candy. I would like a candy.
Sammen stink, I write.
The bell rings. The kids stomp in, big and loud and smelling like the wind.
Chapter Seven
Mr. Carling lets me go to Goldstream after all. It’s a long, bumpy ride on the orange school bus. At the park, a biologist cuts open a dead salmon. She teaches us not to say Yuck! but rather, How interesting! The salmon’s heart is a deep red-purple. Its liver is purple-brown. Its brain is white! The biologist tells us that a salmon’s eye weighs more than its brain does! It makes me wonder if salmon think with their eyes. I sometimes feel that I do.
The biologist holds one of the fish’s eyeballs between her thumb and finger, and we take turns looking through it. Everything is upside down! The fish’s brain turns everything right-side up again. The biologist says our brains do the same thing.
I go into the woods and lie down along the long trunk of a fallen tree. I stretch my head back so everything is upside down. I just lie there listening, watching the tree branches take root in the blue sky. I close my eyes. The moss and leaves smell good. Then I hear heavy footsteps.
I open my eyes. Mr. Carling is right beside me.
“Leland! Are you hurt?” He speaks quickly.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“Thank goodness,” Mr. Carling says. He wipes his forehead with his hand. Then he asks sharply, “Why are you off the trail?”
I spy a bright piece of garbage in the brush.
“My granola-bar wrapper blew away,” I lie. “I was getting it. I…I tripped.”
I get up. Mr. Carling brushes dirt and leaves from my jacket.
“We have to catch up to the others,” he says, heading back to the trail. Then he falls.
“Ouch!” he yells. He stays on the ground, rubbing his foot. “Oh. Oh.” He tries to stand and winces.
“Leland, I need you to hurry to the nature house,” he says. He points through the woods, to a building with a red roof. “Tell Madame Maillot that I’ve twisted my ankle.” Madame Maillot is a teacher that is helping him today. “Tell her I’ve gone to the bus.” Mr. Carling gives me a serious look. “Don’t get lost, Leland. Don’t forget what you need to tell Madame Maillot.”
I nod and hurry to the path. I look back once to see Mr. Carling hopping toward the bus. He stops to rest every few hops.
I chant:
Madame Maillot, Madame Maillot Madame Maillot has got to know
I cross a little bridge. The stream below sounds like xylophone music. I crouch and peer through the slats of the bridge. The water under the bridge wrinkles and unwrinkles as it moves. It never stops. I drop a stick over the rail, then run to the other side and watch it pop out. The stick bobs along. It gets smaller and smaller until I can’t see it anymore. I grab a handful of leaves and toss them down. They bounce along on the back of the stream, like little canoes. The stream burbles. I put my hand to my ear to listen. It says:
Madame Maillot, Madame Maillot
I forgot! I run like mad. In the nature house, Madame Maillot is talking to the class. I grab her sleeve. “Not now, Leland,” she says.
But I say, “Yes, now. Mr. Carling fell in the forest. He twisted his ankle. He will wait for us on the bus.”
“Thank you, Leland,” Madame Maillot says. She gets down on her knee and looks me in the eye. “Well done,” she says.
Mom doesn’t usually answer the phone during supper, but tonight she jumps up when it rings.
She listens for a moment. “Yes! Great! Thank you!” she says. She hangs up and sighs. “That was no help. The caller saw Pumpkin on our street—five days ago.”
We’re quiet as we clear the table. Mom opens the window and shakes out the tablecloth, which she does every night. Then she hangs the tablecloth over the back of her chair, which is normally the sign for us to get into our pajamas. Then the phone rings again.
“Hello?” Mom says. “Yes. That’s our poster. Oh. My son, Leland. Yes, quite an artist. He did what? The house with the bird baths?”
Mom gives me a funny look. “Leland, someone wants to talk to you.”
I take the phone. “Hello?” I ask.
“Hello!” The woman’s deep voice makes me think of chestnuts. “My name is Pamela.”
“Camelot?”
“No, Pamela. I got your picture, Leland. In my mailbox.”
“Oh, it’s you!” I say.
“You didn’t sign it. But I saw your poster. I hope you find your lost cat. I knew when I saw the poster that it was the same artist. You have a special way of mixing colors.”
“Thank you,” I say. Silas is Rollerblading around me, and Liza is practicing her fiddle. But all I really hear is Pamela’s warm voice.
“I’m a painter too,” she says. “Would you like to paint with me sometime?”
“When?” I’m so excited I nearly shout.
“How about tomorrow? After school.”
“How about instead of school?” I ask.
Pamela laughs. “After.”
Chapter Eight
Mr. Carling is probably very mad at me. Delilah has to pull hard to get me to the classroom. Mr. Carling is on crutches. His left foot is in a pink-brown bandage.
“Is it broken?” Angela asks.
“It’s only a sprain,” Mr. Carling says.
I give him the card I made last night. I drew dozens of feet—human feet, webbed seagull feet, bald eagle claws, bear paws. And I wrote very carefully: I hope your foot is strong again soon. Sorry. Leland.
“Thank you, Leland,” he says.
I can’t tell if he’s angry or not. He looks a little sad. He doesn’t get mad at me all day. But it’s raining, which means everyone has to stay in for recess.
After school, Mom walks me to Pamela’s house. I’ve packed paintbrushes, paints and cookies in my backpack. Mom’s best friend knows Pamela and told Mom I’d be safe with her. We open the gate to her yard, and it’s like pushing a button: birds sing and the smells of grass and flowers swarm us.
Pamela bursts out the front door. She’s wearing a long red skirt, a fuzzy olive-green hat and a thick white sweater with buttons made of pencil stubs.
“I hope you brought a sweater,” she says. “I don’t turn on the heat unless the pipes are going to freeze. The cold keeps me sharp!”
Inside, the walls are covered in paintings and drawings. The shelves and windowsills are filled with seashells, bird bones, stones and nests.
“Your mom paid for ten painting lessons,” Pamela says. “But I’m sure you have as much to teach me as I have to teach you.”
She leads me into a room with a bouncy-looking velvet couch and two easels in front of the fireplace.
“First we’re going to wash the windows,” Pamela says. She hands me a cloth and a spray bottle. “We can’t paint without good light. Good light makes good shadows. Good shadows make good shapes.”
After the windows are clean, Pamela suggests we paint pictures of the fireplace.
“With no fire?” I ask.
“Sure. When we look at a fireplace, all we see is the fire. What will we see if there’s no fire?”
I peer into the fireplace. The ash is like feathers. I stand back and look at the chimney. The bricks are orange and red, just like fire.
“Artists don’t paint what things look like. Artists paint what they see,” Pamela says. “Just paint what you see, Leland.”
So I paint a pile of feathers in the grate and dark-orange flames licking up around it. The fireplace, the mantelpiece and the chimney are fire!
“Wonderful!” Pamela exclaims.
Her painting is spooky. She painted every piece o
f blackened wood, every soot stain, every dirty crack in the bricks.
“Why did you paint it so sad?” I ask. “You seem so happy.”
“I am happy,” Pamela says. “But maybe I’m happy because I don’t hide from sad things. I don’t pretend they don’t exist.”
Chapter Nine
I have been thinking about what Pamela said about not being scared of sad things. I thought about the place under the back stairs with the broken pots. One day after school, I put on a sweater and drag a chair down the back stairs. I sit there with my notebook and drawing pencils and stare at the cobwebs and shriveled spiders. I feel frightened. But I take a deep breath. Nothing here can really hurt me.
As I draw, I see why the stuff is there. The spiders can spin webs, safe from rain. The pill bugs eat the rotting bouquets. I don’t like the bits of plastic garbage though. They stand out too much. I color them superbright.
Liza opens her bedroom window and asks what on earth I am doing. A few minutes later she joins me.
“Here,” she says.
“What are they?” I ask.
“Gloves.”
“I can’t draw with gloves on!”
“You’re right,” she says. She goes back into the house and returns a minute later.
“Now try them.”
“Cool!” I say. She cut the fingers off the gloves!
My hands are warm, but my fingers are free to hold the pencil.
Pamela taught me to draw as if the nib of the pencil was my eye. She said to follow the edges of things as if the pencil was my eye moving along them. It is difficult to draw the broken edges of the pots. They’re so sharp, they hurt my eyes!
At our next class, I show Pamela my drawing. “What are the colored things?” she asks.
“Bits of plastic,” I tell her. “That neon-orange thing is a Play-Doh lid. That’s the handle of an old beach shovel, and that’s the top from a peanut-butter jar. I don’t like them.”
“Why?”
“Because they don’t move. They don’t change. They just…” I can’t find the right words.
“They stand out,” Pamela says. “Plastic is stubborn. It’s kind of selfish, isn’t it? It doesn’t really join the world.”
“Yeah! That’s what I feel!” I say.
“I know,” Pamela says. “Your drawing showed me.”
Mr. Carling moves between the desks on crutches. We’re supposed to be writing about rain. Angela’s hand moves across her page so quickly, it’s as though her fingers tell the page her story. I write: Rain knocks the last leaves from the trees. Puddles are mirrors.
“You’ll have to stay in for a while,” Mr. Carling sighs when he sees my story.
I sigh too. But then Delilah growls, and I start to feel hot. My heart pounds in my head. I’m angry. Really angry. This must be what Mom calls seeing red. I can’t see anything, just red air.
The recess bell rings, and everyone leaves except me. Mr. Carling stays at his desk. I look at him for a long time, the way I looked at the fireplace and the cobwebs under the stairs. I see him. He’s like a little bird, half busy, half nervous.
“Are you mad at me because you hurt your foot?” I ask.
Mr. Carling looks up. He raises his eyebrows. “I was,” he says. “But it was mostly my fault. I’m clumsy on rough ground.”
“I like rough ground,” I say.
“I like to stick to the path.”
“I like it off the path,” I say. “I love the woods. Almost as much as I love drawing—”
“And daydreaming?”
Delilah growls and bares her teeth.
“I don’t daydream,” I say. “I think about stuff.”
“Listen, Leland. You’re at school to learn,” Mr. Carling says. “You have lots of time to play and daydream, or think, before and after school, all evening and all weekend. You only need to be on the path during the school day.”
“On the path?” I ask.
“Focused. On your work.”
“Mr. Carling?”
“Yes?”
I take a deep breath, like I did before I looked under the back stairs. “I don’t like it when you keep me in at recess,” I say. “It doesn’t make me write faster. It just makes me sad.”
“I see,” Mr. Carling says. He bites his lip and looks at the ceiling. “I guess it’s like me being stuck on crutches just because I’m a little clumsy,” he finally says. “I’ve always been clumsy. Why should I be punished for it? You have a wandering mind. I know you’re clever, Leland. And creative. I’m not that creative.”
“Oh, you probably are,” I say. “You just need to take some lessons, maybe.”
“How about we make a deal?” Mr. Carling asks. “I’ll be more patient.”
“And I’ll try harder to do my work,” I say.
“If I see that you’re trying, I won’t keep you in.”
Mr. Carling puts his hand out. I put my fist out. Mr. Carling closes his hand and knuckle-bumps me. Then Delilah unfolds herself from my cubby, shakes herself out and wanders right out of the room with a little bark. She is saying goodbye. She is telling me that I don’t need her anymore.
“You can go out now, Leland,” Mr. Carling says.
I dash outside. I climb to the top of the jungle gym and jump off, making deep footprints in the sand, like brushstrokes on canvas.
Chapter Ten
Pamela and I are at our easels in front of different windows. We are to paint every single thing we see.
“Think of the window as a painting that we are copying,” Pamela says. “Remember: look, watch, stare, peer, study, observe.”
My window is filled with Mr. Gloomy Rooms’s backyard. I paint the old rowboat lying upside down in long grass. I copy every slat of wood on his old garage. I’m working on the garage window when I see something move. Something orange. It’s waving. It’s a tail!
“Pumpkin!” I shout.
Pamela runs over, paintbrush in her hand. “Where?”
“In that garage!”
Pamela leaps into her rubber boots. I grab my sweatshirt. We run to Gloomy Rooms and peer into the garage. It’s her! Pumpkin! She’s so thin! She meows like a kitten. Pamela yanks on the shed door. It scrapes against the ground. Pumpkin jumps into my arms. She is bony and some of her fur has fallen out.
“What a cutie!” says Pamela.
“She’s not usually so skinny,” I say, crying. “Oh, Pumpkin!” I’m happy and sad at once.
“What is going on?” Mr. Gloomy Rooms is at the back door of his house. He’s got a bristly beard and is wearing full-body long johns.
“This cat has been in your garage for a while, Geoffrey,” Pamela says.
“Must have snuck in last week when I fetched a can of paint.”
“Didn’t you hear her meowing?” I ask.
“What did you say?” Mr. Gloomy Rooms shouts.
“Geoffrey doesn’t hear too well,” Pamela says.
“What’s that?” Geoffrey asks.
“We should wrap her up,” Pamela says.
“Yes! Good idea. Come in, come in.”
We follow Mr. Gloomy Rooms—Geoffrey—into his house. It’s dark inside but tidy. We sit at his kitchen table, which is turquoise and flecked with golden stars.
Geoffrey wraps a tea towel around Pumpkin, who purrs on my lap. Then he heats a pot of milk on the stove.
“Can I phone home?” I ask.
“I don’t have a phone,” Geoffrey says. He laughs when he sees how shocked I am. “I don’t need one. I’ve got no kids or relatives to check on. I never married.”
“Do you have email?” I ask.
Geoffrey laughs. “Lord, no!” He looks into my eyes as if he’s looking for something deep inside.
“I’m eighty-six years old,” he says. “I used to deliver coal, the same as you and your brother deliver newspapers.”
He pours milk into a saucer. Pumpkin laps it up.
“Poor girl,” Geoffrey says. “She’ll be all right. Probabl
y caught a few mice in there to keep her engine running. How did you know she was in there?”
“I was looking,” I say, “really, really hard.”
We eat a special supper to celebrate Pumpkin’s return: sardines on toast. Pumpkin gets to eat at the table.
“So, does Leland get the reward?” Silas asks.
“I think Geoffrey should,” Mom says.
“But he didn’t do anything!” Liza says.
“No, but he feels really badly that he locked Pumpkin in, even if it was an accident,” Mom says.
“He’s doesn’t need an iPod cover,” I say. “He doesn’t even have a phone.”
“How about yard work?” Silas says. “His grass sure needs a trim. I could do that.”
“I could weed,” Liza says.
“I could borrow Mikel’s oil can and oil the hinges on his gate,” I say.
After supper, Mom shakes out the tablecloth, and Silas lets Pumpkin out the back door for her evening roam. “Don’t go far,” he warns her.
I sit at the dining-room table with my paints and brushes. I work on a picture of an old man wearing white long johns in a tidy kitchen, pouring warm milk into a dish for a golden-orange tabby cat. On the way to school tomorrow morning, I will tuck it under Old Geoffrey’s door.
I will make sure my name is on it.
Sara Cassidy has worked as a youth hostel manager, a tree planter in five Canadian provinces and a newspaper reporter. Her poetry, fiction and articles have been widely published, and she has won a Gold National Magazine Award. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with her three children, a cat named Pumpkin and two goldfish. Leland also appears with his family in Sara’s two novels in the Orca Currents series, Slick and Windfall. For more information, visit www.saracassidywriter.com.
