Tom Bedlam

by George Hagen

  Shortly after this exchange, Mrs. Brasier succeeded in igniting herself during breakfast. A lick of flame crept up the back of her skirt as she spun in front of the kitchen fireplace and followed her into the dining hall. By the time she approached the masters' table, it was devouring her apron strings.

  She ignored the boys' cries of warning until the fire engulfed her cotton cap. Then, clamping her hands over her ears, she cried, “Oh, God save me, I'm ablaze!”

  Mr. Phibbs sprang to the rescue. Seizing his stick, he considered beating the flames off the woman's back but thought better of it and, instead, pulled Mrs. Brasier's petticoats over her head to smother them.

  One of the risks in having an unfortunate mishap in plain sight of scores of curious, fertile minds is its appropriation to school mythology. So inspired was Winesap that he composed a parody of Tennyson's “Lady of Shalott”:

  There was a fire within a room,

  That licked and sparked inside the gloom.

  We all portended certain doom,

  For the lady of Brasier One day it set her skirts aflame And wrenched a cry from that poor dame, Her backside was exposed (for shame!)

  Poor old lady of Brasier. When next you pass a fire, dear Be sure to beat the embers clear There's nothing worse than a burning rear

  (Just ask the lady of Brasier).

  Mrs. Brasier, however, was more concerned with the loss of her hair than with the exposure of her person. Humiliated by her reflection, she marched up to Mr. Goodkind's office and demanded an assistant. “I slave in that kitchen at risk to life and limb. I must have help!” she cried.

  “But, madam, there is nobody for miles who could fill such a position,” murmured the headmaster. “What are the chances, with the available fees, that we might find someone worthy of you?”

  Mrs. Brasier, though prey to the elements, was no weak soul when she wanted something. “I've a niece,” she replied, “a girl of many talents. She could be brought from Boleford at a moment's notice.”

  “Boleford?” Mr. Goodkind frowned. “To live at the school?”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Brasier. “She could sleep in the nurse's chamber.”

  “Of course!” the headmaster remarked. “We've been in need of a nurse ever since the last one passed away.”

  “A nurse?” Mrs. Brasier scowled. “She is to be my kitchen maid.”

  “My dear woman, if she is to live under our roof, eat our food, she shall serve the school in every capacity possible. During meals, she shall assist you, and when she is not so employed, she shall care for the boys.”

  “Care for the boys? Lord help them, she's a half-wit!” Mrs. Brasier cried, forgetting that she had been singing the girl's praises.

  Mr. Goodkind interrupted her with the confidence of a man who has no doubt about the basic truths of men and women. “She is of the gentle sex, Mrs. Brasier, is she not? Surely she can administer aid if one of the boys falls ill?”

  They negotiated a wage that Mrs. Brasier was sure her niece would accept, and Mr. Goodkind reduced that by a few farthings to please the board of trustees.

  A WEEK LATER an apparition sailed across the moor towards Hammer Hall; Privot saw her first as he did his solitary exercises upon Hammer Peak. The folds of her woolen cloak billowed like a black spinnaker as she rode beside the driver on a cart. She was narrow-faced, with dark hair tied back in a bun.

  “What does she look like?” the shortsighted boys asked as they squinted.

  “She's a beauty,” declared Privot. Though his eyes were weak too, he saw an opportunity to assume authority and made the most of it. “A natural beauty, she is!”

  Like castaways watching a sail on the horizon, the boys spun their own fantasies from this first impression. As her features became more visible—a pale, slender face, sullen eyes, and a minuscule pout of a mouth—Tom found himself yearning for Sissy, but the reverent silence around him suggested that the other boys were already smitten by the newcomer.

  CLOSER SCRUTINY of Mrs. Brasier's niece took place at the evening meal. Plain-featured, with a nervous, bobbing chin, Polly displayed the awkwardness of a girl who had recently assumed adult proportions. Her elbows, fingers, knees, and ankles conspired against her, jerking, bobbing, and twitching. She was a sturdy girl: her waist wasn't narrow, and neither were her calves. For the evening she had braided her hair into pigtails, which swung jauntily and gave her a pretty grace that drew the attention of every boy.

  When Mrs. Brasier directed her to apportion the soup to the masters first, the girl seized a wooden ladle and, trembling, spilled most of its contents before reaching the first bowl. Terrified by the many eyes focused upon her, she became increasingly clumsy.

  “Smaller amounts, Polly. Nobody will lick it off the table, my dear!” snapped her aunt, to which Polly would reply with a cascade of “Oops, ma'am, forgive me, oh deary, sir, forgive us!”

  Mr. Phibbs received a generous serving of soup in his lap, and Mr. Trent's waistcoat was sprayed with his helping. The other masters regarded the girl with a degree of fear as she approached. But Polly was determined to improve; she compensated by reducing the quantity she poured. By the time she had circled the table, the last master, Mr. Grindle, received no more than a tablespoonful. He seemed gratified by this, however, and delicately removed the bone hairpin that lay adrift in it.

  “Mrs. Brasier,” he remarked, raising the item for the entire room to see. “This, I believe, is yours!”

  The cook snatched the hairpin without a word while Mr. Grindle stared at her contemptuously.

  As Polly served the boys, she encountered a more generous audience. Each lad forgave her when the soup was spilled, and all eyes followed her path around the tables.

  To her credit, Polly wanted to do a good job; her lips were pressed so firmly together that they turned white as she ladled.

  Lopping made the mistake of asking her name, which gave her such a shock that she emptied a ladleful onto his kneecaps. The boy bolted up from his seat with a scream, while Polly (torn between her roles as nurse and ladler) spun about, spilling soup in an arc around her. Eventually she ran after Lopping (still brandishing the ladle), which convinced him to run out of the hall for fear of being burned again.

  “I LIKE HER EYES,” said Cooper dreamily that evening when they were all in bed.

  “How touching,” muttered Mansworth.

  “Figuratively speaking,” ventured Winesap, “she doesn't have much bottomwise. Mrs. Brasier, on the other hand, has a solid figure.”

  “So does a sack of potatoes,” countered Privot.

  When Lopping entered, all eyes noted that his knees, bandaged with yards of gauze, were as bulbous as the joints of a flamingo. If Polly's affection could be measured in gauze, Lopping was now king of the hill.

  Noting the others' jealous stares, he said, “What?”

  “Did it on purpose, didn't you?” said Mansworth with disgust.

  “What?” Lopping repeated.

  “You took advantage of her sympathies,” added Privot.

  Perplexed by these accusations, Lopping winced down the aisle to his bed. Tom observed grimly that Mansworth and Privot had just claimed territory—not the classroom this time, but the devoutly desired affection of Polly Peckam.

  ONE MORNING SNOW appeared over Hammer Peak. It iced the fields and sugared the fences and dappled the thatched roofs of the local shepherds' cottages. Tom surveyed this vista from the window at the head of his bed—in the attic, the windows ran along the floor, just below the eaves. He spotted a figure in the flurry. It was Mr. Grindle, out for his morning stroll; the seat of his trousers was powdered with snow from where he must have rested to catch his breath, his wispy gray hair was in disarray, and his shirttails dangled from beneath his waistcoat. Tom wondered how it would be to teach, like Grindle, and see a pageant of boyhood pass while time aged him until his face was withered and his figure gnarled like an old tree.

  Suddenly Tom smelled onions and felt Arthur crouching n
ear him.

  “How miserable must that fellow be?” whispered Arthur, pressing his nose to the glass.

  Grindle paused by a patch of bulrushes topped with snow and burst into a coughing fit. For a moment, his hazy silhouette crouched and bobbed in the field as he hacked until his shirttails flapped and his head sank even lower to the ground.

  “Should we help him?” Tom wondered.

  Arthur narrowed his eyes. “He's all right,” he said firmly. Indeed, within moments Grindle had recovered and resumed his slow pace through the snow. “My father can tell at a glance what's wrong with a man on the outside. All he needs to do is listen to his chest and he knows what's wrong on the inside.”

  Tom considered Bill Bedlam's virtues but could think only of a man on a tightrope, in a wedding dress, waving a parasol. “Are you going to be a doctor?” he asked.

  Arthur shuddered. “Besides my terror of heights—that horrible run up the mountain makes me retch—I can't stand sick people. The sight of blood makes me faint. Anybody with an illness gives me the jitters. When Mr. Barby had toothache, I couldn't go near him for a week.”

  “But you can't catch toothache,” Tom countered.

  Arthur's expression turned combative. “When did you become a doctor?”

  “I just know” Tom answered, somewhat irritated by Arthur's disdain. “Toothache is not like other diseases.”

  “Many things that are wrong with people are transmitted,” Arthur replied. “Communicable. That's what they call it. Things we don't understand.” His stare lingered on Tom, as if to emphasize his authority in this regard.

  “Not toothache,” Tom insisted.

  “Cruelty, then,” Arthur continued, “and greed. And lust. I don't know anything more catching among boys than those things.” He snapped his fingers before Tom's eyes. “Just like that, they all become sick with it.”

  “Perhaps cruelty is catching,” conceded Tom, remembering the round of assaults Arthur had received when he arrived. “But I can't imagine lust being so.”

  Arthur gave Tom a knowing glance.

  “What?” replied Tom.

  “If you're going to be a doctor, you must be observant.”

  “I never said I was.”

  “Then stop contradicting me,” Arthur glared. With that, he rose and walked away, taking the smell of onions with him.

  There was an increasing number of scalding incidents. At the masters' table, smaller portions became the request (clearly an attempt at self-preservation). All of the masters had lost weight—the result of Polly's inability to convey any steaming substance from pot to bowl without risk of a burn or blister.

  The inverse ratio was the case among the boys, who eagerly demanded second and third helpings merely for the privilege of gazing upon Polly's face and the sweet pleasure, if they were scalded, of forgiving her.

  The Welsh laundress, Mrs. Mollet, who washed the boys' clothes every two weeks, noted the enormous amounts of gray sludge that bubbled to the surface of her laundry tub. “My word, how these lads spill over themselves. Like pigs at a trough!” she declared.

  Of all the boys, Arthur was least enamored of Polly, and he noted the others' adoration with scorn. “Astonishing. You'd think she was doing them a favor by dripping all over them,” he remarked to Tom.

  When Polly approached his place, Arthur withheld his bowl. “Not for me,” he cried.

  “Just a little?” Polly replied.

  Arthur turned over his bowl to make his wish clear.

  Polly seemed offended. “You'll waste away to nothing,” she warned him.

  “Better than having blisters on my hands and legs,” Arthur said.

  Polly closed her eyes briefly. She seemed stung by his remark. Her ladling hand tipped, and Lopping received a piping hot dose of pea soup on his hand. He turned his yelp of pain into one of forgiveness. “It's nothing, really,” he cried. “I hardly felt it!”

  But Polly gave him no smile. Arthur Pigeon's indifference to her had reined in her heartstrings. From then on, Polly begged him to eat, but Arthur spurned her.

  “She likes you,” Tom whispered to Arthur when they were alone.

  “It doesn't help her aim,” Arthur sniffed. “She could kill someone with that ladle. Imagine my epitaph. Death by ladle” Then he added, “Have you noticed that she smells of onions?”

  Tom tried a different tack. “She watches you from across the room,” he said. “She adores you, Arthur.”

  COMPETITION FOR POLLY'S attention was becoming heated. After Mansworth gave the girl a pair of pink satin ribbons for her hair, Privot produced a black choker. Polly wore both gifts the next day and paused to display them to Arthur.

  “Do you like them?” she asked, shaking her pigtails and touching her neck demurely.

  “I neither like nor dislike them,” he replied.

  Polly clamped her mouth shut and went about her duties, scalding many more boys at dinner than usual. It was clear that she was unhappy, so her admirers became all the more determined to win her heart. Ribbons, sweets sent from home, and even scribbled portraits appeared on the dining tables, but they meant nothing to Polly because they were not from Arthur.

  During an afternoon lesson, Tom noticed that a figure had been drawn upon one of the desks, carved with a penknife, then inlaid with black ink. It was Polly, with her solid frame and petulant features. Within a week, more of these images had appeared on desks, tabletops, and even on the oak trees near the stables. When he pointed them out to Arthur, the boy nodded. “See?” he said. “Lust is catching.”

  MANSWORTH'S REVENGE

  IN APRIL, MRS. BRASIER CAME UP WITH SOME INVENTIVE SOLUTIONS to the lack of beef at the market. One such dish was referred to as “pigeon stew,” though it was rumored that almost anything from squirrel to vole might lurk in it.

  Polly served all the boys at the table, saving Arthur for last. When she appeared before him, Arthur turned his bowl facedown.

  “Pigeon stew?” she asked, trembling.

  “Why on earth would I eat pigeon stew?”

  “It would be fowl and cannibalistic” intoned Winesap, “for a Pigeon to eat pigeon stew.” Some boys laughed, but they were silenced by Polly's concern.

  “I don't want you to waste away, Arthur,” she said. “Please, let me find something for you!”

  It was true: Arthur was wasting away. Tom noticed that the skin on the boy's wrists was drawn so tightly that he could see the throb of his pulse.

  Polly whispered in Arthur's ear. “Tell me what you would like to eat and I'll get it from the kitchen.”

  Arthur whispered something to her, and she slipped away. To the other boys, however, it had looked like the most intimate kiss, and as if Arthur had scored another triumph.

  LATER THAT EVENING, Arthur scrambled up the stairs to the attic with a bundle in his shirt. He spilled the contents into his cot and began to throw apples to the other boys.

  “I have a dozen,” he declared, grinning. “And they're delicious. Polly took them from Mrs. Brasier's pantry. They're only for the masters, apparently.”

  “I hope you're kind to her now,” said Tom.

  Arthur threw his last apple to Mansworth, who caught it, staring at him with bitter derision. The apple in his hand might well have been a gauntlet.

  AT BREAKFAST THE NEXT morning, Arthur inquired after Polly's health.

  She looked startled. “Beg pardon?”

  “How are you, Polly?”

  “I'm well, thank ye,” she replied, lower lip trembling. She reached into her apron and gave Arthur an orange.

  He slipped it into his pocket. “Very kind of you, Polly.”

  Her forehead cleared, and she gasped, blinking, as if to savor this rare treat. As she went about serving the other boys, Tom noticed a new grace in her step.

  Mansworth frowned as he observed this exchange from the far end of the bench.

  “What are you looking at, Mansworth?” Winesap laughed.

  “Lost love!” joked Coop
er.

  As the other boys echoed their amusement, Mansworth brooded over Polly through the dark curtain of his forelock.

  AFTER THE INCIDENT in the dining room, Mansworth found another boy basking in his spot on Hammer Peak, in the same position, mocking his languid pose. And on the run down, a posse of boys made a habit of bumping him into the bracken. Each gesture inspired another to target the fallen leader.

  Nobody bothered Privot. He was too strong, so he was left alone. He held Mansworth responsible for his fall, however, and appeared content to let his rival bear the abuse of the others.

  Mansworth directed no attack on his tormentors; there were simply too many. Instead, he focused his fury on the boy he blamed for his troubles. He shadowed Arthur in the corridors and sat directly behind him in the dining hall, maintaining the proximity of a predator.

  One Saturday afternoon, Hammer Hall was flooded with light. The boys tumbled out into the courtyard, where Mrs. Mollet had hung the sheets for their half-yearly bleaching. The sun, a stunning blue sky, and the drone of bees on the meadow nearby signaled a new season, and the boys became giddy and silly. A game of tag erupted. Someone found chalk and started to scrawl pictures on the flagstones. Arthur seized a sheet from the washing line and spun it around his waist, then whirled across the courtyard chanting babble.

  Mansworth, ruminating on his nemesis from a doorway, could contain himself no longer. “Aren't you worried that you'll look like a girl, Pigeon?” he asked.

  Arthur shrugged with careless abandon. “It never occurred to me,” he replied. “Do you worry about appearing to be a girl, Mansworth?”

  Shaking aside his forelock, Mansworth growled, “Give me that!” and seized the sheet so roughly that Arthur lost his balance and struck his head on the flagstones. In an instant, Mansworth was on him, pressing his right foot upon Arthur's neck until the boy was gasping for breath.

  “Let him be, Mansworth!” cried Tom.

  Mansworth eyed the others, daring them to join Tom in defending his victim. “Who wants to help him? C'mon, let's see who all of his friends are!” Then he adjusted his heel to rest upon the boy's sternum.