coiled around his neck.
“Granny Rose made a job of it,” he said. “She got up on the hayloft and tied one end of the rope around the beam and the other end around her neck, and then she jumped. I thought it was a wild turkey hanging down. A dead body is
heavy
. They cut the rope and they needed two men to hold her as she came down.”
He lit another cigarette with his bluish-white fingers, the black hairs smoothly attractive between the knuckles. “A year later my sister was born with a strangle mark around her neck. Girls are lucky. They can hide things under their long hair.”
That queasy fall of 1929 was like being at sea on an anchored boat. The school rocked in the unfathomable waves of Parley. His way of looking at Connie, at Susan, at girls in general. His way of looking at Michael. He wasn’t awarehe wasn’t alone, or didn’t care. They weren’t a director’s eyes, assessing talent. Or bedroom eyes. They were more like the eyes of a night prowler standing outside your bedroom window.
There was the day he rounded on Connie for heaving a theatrical sigh of exasperation just for the pleasure of it. “Having an artistic temperament,” he snapped, “does not make you an artist.”
It was obvious he was talking about his savage disappointment in himself and it was childish of him to be so transparent in his self-pity. She folded her arms and asked him why, with his love of theatre, he wasn’t
in
theatre, why was he here in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of nobodies.
Her forthright temper quieted him, just as it settled down a class. An honest answer came sheepishly out of his mouth. He had tried to be an actor. He didn’t have the talent.
“I wasn’t good enough. That’s the truth.”
A trim, tall, disdainful man. He pursed his lips, picked up a pencil and sharpened it to a fine point in the pencil sharpener screwed to the edge of her scuffed and darkly varnished desk. But he was more real to her now, more human.
Word filtered from his landlady, Mrs. Wilson, to Mrs. Kowalchuk, and from Mrs. Kowalchuk to Connie, that he was a perfectly ordered man who liked a bowl of porridge for breakfast and a bowl of porridge before bed.Porridge-breath, thought Connie, for whatever sorry woman might share his bed.
Over the years she would read widely and catch glimpses of Parley Burns in figures like Odin, the Norse god, solemn, aloof, and so abstemious that he gave any food set before him to the two wolves at his feet. All she had to do was pull an egg sandwich out of her lunch pail, and he fled.
One day he called Jake Aarp a Sassenach for not remembering his lines as Sir John Durbeyfield, then wrote
Sassenach
on the blackboard. “To the dictionary,” he said. Jake found the word and reported back that a Sassenach was what the Celts called an Englishman.
“An invading, unwelcome Englishman,” Parley said.
He illuminated the insult by pulling down the roller map of Europe and using a pointer to show where the Angles and Saxons and Jutes sailed across the North Sea and invaded England in 449. “They slaughtered the native Celts, who either fled or, like King Arthur, resisted. But gradually the old Celts were driven westward,” he said, “and in their place the Anglo-Saxons set up seven kingdoms, including Hardy’s Wessex,
here
. The beaten Celts called the Anglo-Saxon invaders Sassenachs, from which we get
Saxon
. Then a few hundred years later, the Norsemen swept down, murdering, plundering, pillaging, until Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, fought back. In 878 he had his great victory at the battle of Ethandune, right about
here
. The Danes retreated, and Alfred rebuilt the monasteries and schools and saved the English language from disappearing. Hence, ‘Great.’ Two hundred years latercame the Norman Conquest of 1066, and French entered the picture, enriching primitive English with thousands of beautiful words like ‘enter’ and ‘enrich.’
Entrer. Enrichir.”
He called them the
“Granny Rose made a job of it,” he said. “She got up on the hayloft and tied one end of the rope around the beam and the other end around her neck, and then she jumped. I thought it was a wild turkey hanging down. A dead body is
heavy
. They cut the rope and they needed two men to hold her as she came down.”
He lit another cigarette with his bluish-white fingers, the black hairs smoothly attractive between the knuckles. “A year later my sister was born with a strangle mark around her neck. Girls are lucky. They can hide things under their long hair.”
That queasy fall of 1929 was like being at sea on an anchored boat. The school rocked in the unfathomable waves of Parley. His way of looking at Connie, at Susan, at girls in general. His way of looking at Michael. He wasn’t awarehe wasn’t alone, or didn’t care. They weren’t a director’s eyes, assessing talent. Or bedroom eyes. They were more like the eyes of a night prowler standing outside your bedroom window.
There was the day he rounded on Connie for heaving a theatrical sigh of exasperation just for the pleasure of it. “Having an artistic temperament,” he snapped, “does not make you an artist.”
It was obvious he was talking about his savage disappointment in himself and it was childish of him to be so transparent in his self-pity. She folded her arms and asked him why, with his love of theatre, he wasn’t
in
theatre, why was he here in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of nobodies.
Her forthright temper quieted him, just as it settled down a class. An honest answer came sheepishly out of his mouth. He had tried to be an actor. He didn’t have the talent.
“I wasn’t good enough. That’s the truth.”
A trim, tall, disdainful man. He pursed his lips, picked up a pencil and sharpened it to a fine point in the pencil sharpener screwed to the edge of her scuffed and darkly varnished desk. But he was more real to her now, more human.
Word filtered from his landlady, Mrs. Wilson, to Mrs. Kowalchuk, and from Mrs. Kowalchuk to Connie, that he was a perfectly ordered man who liked a bowl of porridge for breakfast and a bowl of porridge before bed.Porridge-breath, thought Connie, for whatever sorry woman might share his bed.
Over the years she would read widely and catch glimpses of Parley Burns in figures like Odin, the Norse god, solemn, aloof, and so abstemious that he gave any food set before him to the two wolves at his feet. All she had to do was pull an egg sandwich out of her lunch pail, and he fled.
One day he called Jake Aarp a Sassenach for not remembering his lines as Sir John Durbeyfield, then wrote
Sassenach
on the blackboard. “To the dictionary,” he said. Jake found the word and reported back that a Sassenach was what the Celts called an Englishman.
“An invading, unwelcome Englishman,” Parley said.
He illuminated the insult by pulling down the roller map of Europe and using a pointer to show where the Angles and Saxons and Jutes sailed across the North Sea and invaded England in 449. “They slaughtered the native Celts, who either fled or, like King Arthur, resisted. But gradually the old Celts were driven westward,” he said, “and in their place the Anglo-Saxons set up seven kingdoms, including Hardy’s Wessex,
here
. The beaten Celts called the Anglo-Saxon invaders Sassenachs, from which we get
Saxon
. Then a few hundred years later, the Norsemen swept down, murdering, plundering, pillaging, until Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, fought back. In 878 he had his great victory at the battle of Ethandune, right about
here
. The Danes retreated, and Alfred rebuilt the monasteries and schools and saved the English language from disappearing. Hence, ‘Great.’ Two hundred years latercame the Norman Conquest of 1066, and French entered the picture, enriching primitive English with thousands of beautiful words like ‘enter’ and ‘enrich.’
Entrer. Enrichir.”
He called them the
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