Free Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay

up at 12 o’clock. He listened to the big booms of the clock, the big booms, the loud, full sounds of the big clock.”
    He had gone on to write about “aproching as sighlently as humanly possible” and “weighting in the black scielence of the savadgely wether beten trees.”
    His way with words was like a small child’s way with colour - an aptitude that generally fades into eight-year-old mist. And his good vocabulary came from where? “Do your parents like to read?”
    “My father says my mother reads every day and most of the night.”
    Connie went to see her, the brunette, who welcomed her and told her that Michael had been the quickest child, walking at nine months, talking before he was one, remembering the words to the songs she sang, loving to cook with her in the kitchen. “I would read him things and suddenly discover that he knew them. ‘The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow, Gave the lustre of midday to objects below.’ But when I tried to teach him to read, we got nowhere. Nothing was wrong with his eyes, either. He could see a ladybug at a hundred feet. In grade one he tore out two-thirds of his hair, he was so frustrated. I found tufts of it behind his bed and under the chair. But he talks and thinks
well
.”
    Her son reminded her, she said, of an older brother who had also been backward in reading, though sharp as a tack in other ways.
    Connie asked what had become of him, this older brother.
    Well, that was a sad story. He got in with the wrong sort, and died young and badly. She had named Michael after him. “My sister spent hours teaching my brother. She would do the same for Michael, but we’re so far away. Pontiac County. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it.”
    Connie knew it well enough. It was in Quebec, across the river from where she was born, a wooded and rolling part of the world with some good farmland.
    The next day, on one of those awkward walks home with Parley, Connie found herself talking about her visitto Mrs. Graves. “I wish I knew what to do. I wish I
knew
more.”
    “Not every child is a scholar,” he said. “You can’t gift-wrap a toad.”
    She pushed her hands deeper into her pockets.
    “You think I’m harsh. But either you have it or you don’t.”
    He wore an aftershave scent and she smelled it in her room sometimes when she turned her head quickly. There he was, perched on her shoulder and floating around her head.

7
The Inspector
    Connie didn’t tell Parley that she was taking French lessons, but he knew. He began to speak to her in French, and she would have to ask him to repeat himself and still not understand. It was a little game he played. You should have come to
me
for French lessons.
    In December, the school geared up for the customary Christmas concert of recitations, songs, drills, plays, a mighty endeavour that involved every child and turned Connie’s classroom back into a theatre. The children stayed in at recess writing out copies of the songs and skits, they stayed after school and helped each other memorize their parts, and soon whole Friday afternoons were given over to practising. Tula drew Christmas scenes freehand on the blackboard with coloured chalk, and it was her idea to string across the ceiling blue crepe paper of variouslengths in a great X-shaped fringe that moved prettily in the air currents.
    At noon on the Friday of the evening concert, the children went home and the school trustees came in and set up a Christmas tree in the hallway and adorned it with glass and paper ornaments. Everyone came back in the evening dressed in their best to see the splendid tree and underneath it, for each child, a bag of candies, nuts, and oranges. As with
Tess
, the school filled up until there was standing room only.
    Parley didn’t don the Santa beard or the comic wig. He was the director, never the ham. Connie loved to wear a costume. Mrs. Kowalchuk had provided her with an old taffeta ballgown her mother had worn, and she sashayed