All the Broken Things (3 page)

She knew he had been in a boat on the ocean. She and ten other families had sponsored Rose and Bo to come to Canada. And even though her name was really Ann Lily, his mother called her Teacher, out of respect, and in his mind, so did he. And now, after four years, she was his teacher. Grade eight. He preferred not to think of that boat. Sweet water or salt water.

“Have you ever been on the ocean, Bo?” she asked.

Everyone knew already. It was the source of much of the ridicule he’d endured from the class and even from some of the younger children in the school. At fourteen, Bo should be in grade nine; he’d been held back in grade five to learn to speak and read and write in English.

Teacher said, “Bo?”

He stared into the middle distance, and answered. “I was on a boat on the ocean.” He did not say that everything about the boat and the ocean shamed him. The memory of it was like a monster, but just the feeling of a monster, without the actual monster, so he couldn’t fight it. That there was no actual monster made it much worse. The bad feeling settled in if he let it.

“Can you tell the class how it was?”

He knew she wanted only and very badly to make him real to the class, but adults didn’t understand real. They understood nice and kind and the rest they tried to ignore. In this way, they were far worse than the children, who at least teased him about the rest. The odd
thing about the teasing was it made him real to the other kids for the duration of the mockery. That might be the only kind of real he would ever have.

“I don’t remember very much, Miss. It was windy some of the time. There were fish following the boat.” In fact, he remembered everything about it. He lived those five days over and over, the looping horror of them.

“Oh, lovely,” she said, stretching out the word, blinking, “and did you fish?”

“No.”

His mother made him stay far back from the side of the boat because they were a waiting kind of fish. They were sharks. He’d seen how fast they took the dead when the living shoved them off the deck. The ocean housed another world you couldn’t see unless it came to the surface, or where the water was very shallow.

When his father died, his mother asked one of the men to keep him below deck. Bo thrashed to get away but the man held him, until Bo was panting, furious. He had a right to see his own dead father. His mother told people—if they dared ask—that her husband had been lost at sea, but he was never lost. She
gave
him to the sea.

Bo’s face must have showed some of this, for Teacher put her hand to her mouth, then changed the subject.

“Okay, class, eyes up at the front.” She yanked a map down and picked up her wooden pointer. They named all the oceans until they could reel them off in any order.
It was a kind of apology, he knew—the class was lulled by it. Teacher had a way of entrancing them: Indian, Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, Antarctic, Indian, Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, Antarctic. The class had the oceans memorized, but they did not really know them, did not know the flat expanse of shimmer, did not know their boredom and how they held the key to whether they might find land and live, or just sail on forever, like some of the other boats had, never to be found, the people dying one by one.

“Bo,” Teacher said, finding her way again.

He’d been looking at his desk, and now he looked up fast. “Yes, Miss?”

“Can you show us on this map where you lived?”

Bo preferred not to. But he got up and located Toronto on the map. “Here,” he said, and the class erupted into laughter.

Teacher smiled. “Okay, but before, where?”

“Vietnam,” Bo said, and traced his finger across and across until he got there, “is here.”

“The other side of the world, class. Bo, you may sit down.” Teacher began to pace down one aisle. “Vietnam had a terrible war,” she said. “And many people had to leave.”

The whole class could feel that this was not part of the lesson. This was something else. They looked into the air, and some of them at Bo, as if he could stop her. The class seemed to tighten—not just the children, but the walls, windows, knotting around Bo. And still she went on.

“The U.S. wanted to stop communism and they did horrible things to fight the North Vietnamese Army. For one thing, they sprayed poison over their forests, and killed everything.”

Teacher had stopped pacing and was standing halfway between the back and the front of the class, going on and on. From where he sat, Bo could smell her perfume. He stopped listening to her. He just smelled her, and tried to find space. He imagined the chalk and the chalk brushes and all the little things in the room hurtling toward him as if he were a magnet, and then, without him even knowing it, he whispered, “Stop,” and she heard and looked down at him and seemed to awaken from whatever trance she’d been in.

“Class,” Teacher said, through that tunnel of waking. “History lesson is over. Moving on to something very important.” She unhooked the ocean map scroll and rummaged for another one, an old-times map that she pulled down, fidgeting until the locking system held. Smiling at them all, she pointed to Ancient Greece. “The play we are going to put on for this year’s Variety Show in June has its origins in Ancient Greece. We are going to start studying this old story now because it fits nicely with our study unit
What Is a Hero
?”

There came a heaving groan from the class. It was a reaction to the words
play
and
Variety Show
. The class felt itself too old for plays, too old to be corralled into such
a thing, even if secretly many of them loved both the idea of a play and the annual Variety Show. These students were smart enough to hide their enchantment. Teacher tried to rally them.

“The play will be based on an old
hero tale
from the Middle Ages, the story of Sir Orfeo.” She plunked a mimeographed and paper-clipped stack of papers on the first desk—Emily’s—and indicated she wanted them passed back. “By Monday, you will have read the poem, and memorized the first ten lines. It’s a poem about a hero. It’s a fairy tale. There’s magic.”

Everything changed about her when she said that it was magic. She looked beautiful. She didn’t speak for a while, and Bo stared. He wondered what she was thinking.

“What’s it about, anyway?” said Peter.

And she told them about how Sir Orfeo loved his Queen Heurodis, and how one day she had such a terrible nightmare while asleep under a tree in a garden that she ripped her clothing to shreds and also her skin. She dreamt a Fairy King kidnapped and stole her away to his fairy kingdom. Orfeo set up guards but it didn’t matter—the dream came true. Anguished, Orfeo went barefoot to the forest and for ten years searched for her, playing on his harp to keep himself company. Orfeo loved to tell stories and sing, and even the animals came to hear him. One day, he spied Heurodis with a group of fairy ladies and even though he looked terrible after
all that time in the forest, she knew him. He followed her to the Fairy King’s underground castle and sang for the Fairy King. The Fairy King loved his songs so much he offered him any reward he wanted—and, of course, Sir Orfeo chose Heurodis. The King didn’t want to give her back, but in the end, he relented. Orfeo and Heurodis returned to their land, were crowned, and lived happily ever after.

“Sounds retarded,” said Ernie, so that only Bo and a few others near him heard.

Bo thought of Orange, and watched how Teacher’s face lost its strange enchantment and went back to normal. She had not heard Ernie.

She said, “It’s a very old story.” And she turned her face a little away from them. “It has survived because people keep telling it.”

It was as if some secret was hidden in her face that no one would ever uncover. He must practise not caring. Bo’s shoulders lowered at the sound of the lunch bell ringing.

I
N THE PLAYGROUND
, Emily stopped Bo. “Why did Miss Lily say all that?”

Bo looked at her with only his eyes and not his whole face. Emily was too pretty to face. “Say all what?”

“About Vietnam.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Come on. Yes, you do.”

“I don’t.” But what he thought was that it was none of Teacher’s business. She had once said to him that he ought to know about the war and where he came from, but her attentiveness felt like pity. It was pity. Bo said, “You never talk to me usually.”

Emily shrugged. “Can I have the red tab from your jeans pocket?”

Bo knew there was a contest on, that if Emily could collect fifteen red tags from Levi’s jeans she could cash them in for a free pair. But he was still surprised that pretty Emily would ask for his. His tag should be off limits, tainted in some way. He only had them from a donation bin at the church. Some of the other boys had dared the girls to twist and grab and pull them off the pockets while they still wore their pants.

“Sure,” he said.

“I’ve got nine already.” She handed him a small pair of nail scissors and watched as he tried to reach back and cut off the red tab. But he was awkward and people were now watching. “Forget it,” Emily said. “I’ll get it from you tomorrow.”

Bo nodded, tucked the scissors in his pocket, and walked home for lunch.

E
VEN THE DOGS HAD SPURNED
the macaroni casserole. Bo left the dish on the stoop and went in the house. He ate soup with his mother, but they hardly spoke. “Thank you,” he said, when he finished. Rose smiled at him.

He found Orange in her bedroom on her mattress, rocking. Her eyes were pushed so far out of their sockets, she looked Martian. He might look weird to Orange through her convex eyes, he thought, flattened out, unreal. He lay on the mattress and curved in toward her. He hoped this made her feel safe. She was four years old.

She had sailed over in his mother’s belly. Bo imagined her in a boat—a tiny half-walnut-shell boat—in his mother’s womb, dancing waves, skirting danger. Hurry, he thought. When she was born they had only been in Toronto a short while. It was winter, and cold, and he and his mother barely knew where they were—where the hospital was and where home was, or how anything related to anything else.

Orange looked like she was sneering, her body kicking back and forth, the momentum bringing her nowhere. He watched her twitch and rock. She sometimes pummelled the floor, and bashed at the walls. She hated. One of the new English words his mum and he had to come to understand was
monster
. And another was
pity
. Certainly none of the sponsor families had expected to be caring for such a hideous thing, had not reckoned on the depth of pity they might have to feel. Orange rocked
such that Bo could tell she was moaning even though no sound came. Her rabbity head stretched out behind her, and her eyes were veined, wrong. There was nothing the matter with her mouth but her tongue wasn’t right. The doctors predicted she would scream out of frustration, but she never did. Her shoulders pinched up too high and she was so skinny it looked like her body belonged to a different head. She had only thin wisps of hair falling over her forehead. He thought: ugly means when you don’t love something.

“Orange!” Bo said. “Hello!”

Orange swivelled her eyes toward and around his face and then commenced rocking again. She lifted her arms and tucked her stumpy-fingered hands into her T-shirt sleeves and wound and wound them into the cloth. She slid down from the bed and turned and heaved herself to stand using only her crooked legs. Bo sat down beside her and waited to see if she would come to him.

It wasn’t a good idea to try to handle her.

“Little Orange,” he whispered, over and over as she rocked. He had only thirty minutes left in his lunch hour and he would like to pet her if she would let him. He did not look directly at her, but pretended to be picking at something on the bedspread. This sometimes worked as a decoy. Orange was now crouched to pounce. She looked mean.

Regularly, in catechism at school, there were stories
about healings and the miracles that Jesus performed and that the disciples wrote about in their books. There was the leper, the bleeding woman, the mute, and yesterday Teacher had read the story of the restoration of the dead man. Lazarus. He looked sad in the picture in the textbook. In all the pictures, the sick were pitiable and everyone was pleased to have them cured. Bo could never figure out if Jesus performed miracles out of grace or to prove that He was the Son of God. It seemed to make a difference, but this was never discussed.