Alone in the Classroom Read Online Free PDF Page A

farmer who had given her an engagement ring with the smallest diamond in the world. The story was a legend in our family. How one summer, after picking strawberries all afternoon, Evelyn was doing the supper dishes and noticed with a sick jolt the tiny voidin her ring: the diamond had fallen into the strawberry field. They went back outside, she and her husband, and she tried to remember exactly where she had picked, and they patted the ground under the same leaves and between the same rows, searching until it was dark, but they could not find the diamond. Nothing to be done. Evelyn canned the fruit and stored the jars on shelves; she wore her ring without the diamond. In the winter they began to eat their way through the preserves. One day towards Christmas, her husband was eating the usual dish of berries for dessert when he bit down on something hard. A filling come loose, for Pete’s sake; what next? He fished it out of his mouth. It was the diamond.
    Restoration is even more miraculous than discovery. The Bible was right about that. A prodigal diamond outweighs a fat ruby.
    Connie first heard the story from her mother, then coaxed it out of her aunt when Evelyn came by train to see her ailing sister and arrived in time for the funeral. The day after the funeral, Evelyn gave the coral beads to fifteen-year-old Connie, who would give them to me years later on the day I was married.
    Evelyn stayed for a month, helping to finish the clothes for the men, as she called the widower and his pair of small sons. They sewed and talked, plump aunt and skinny niece, and Evelyn confessed that the loneliest two years of her life were the first two years of marriage. The farm was isolated, the work was hard, and her husband refused to have a child until they were on their feet.
    Connie said, “What happened after two years?”
    “I began a correspondence course. And that gave me something else to think about.”
    What a sad, soft, passive woman her aunt was. What a sweet and boneless woman.
    “How did the two of you meet, anyway?”
    In a boarding house in Toronto, when she was going to normal school to become a teacher and he was working as a clerk at Eaton’s - this was before a bachelor uncle did him the dubious favour of leaving him the small farm southwest of Toronto. Their rooms were side by side, separated by the bathroom they shared, and he heard her throwing up every morning before another day of practice teaching. “He asked me to marry him because he was lonely.”
    “Not sympathetic?” Connie said. She was holding out for a little romance.
    “No.” Her aunt did not back away from the implications that rippled over her marriage. “Just lonely.”

    Late Friday afternoon. A flurry of movement behind her as she wrote on the blackboard. She wheeled around.
    Unaccountably, Michael had darted away from his desk. In the scramble, Parley reached the boy before the boy reached his goal. He grabbed him and cuffed him back into his seat, then took the long wooden pointer from the sill below the blackboard and stood poised.
    A girl let out a gasp as the snake slid past her feet on the varnished wooden floor, and Parley stepped forward and brought the pointer down.
    His dark, grisly excitement, high cheekbones, contorted mouth,
arousal -
Connie had seen it before, at an Orange Day parade in Toronto when the drum and fife band came around the corner in full regalia to find their way blocked by a car: the drum major upped with his orb and smashed it through the windshield.
    Parley bared his cold teeth. “Dispose of your viper,” he told Michael. “Then find me in my office.”
    Afterwards, when school was over, Connie erased the blackboard from top to bottom. Bits and nubs of chalk lay beside the pointer on the grooved wooden sill, fitted grooves for laying the varying lengths down. The dusky light on the blackboard, the felt eraser in her hand. How drying it was, though Parley’s fingers never looked dry, his perfect hands,