Authors: Bill Rowe
“Well, we’ve got to go to her birthday. Nina is my best friend.”
“Yeah well, maybe you should rethink having a best friend who would marry a
whisky-fuelled rhymester of smut.”
I didn’t hear any reply from Mom. Her footfall sounded on the stairs, and she
walked up to their bedroom and closed the door. A few minutes later Dad came up
too and I heard quiet murmuring from the bedroom till I fell asleep. The next
morning they were as affectionate to each other and to me as usual, and from
then till the night of the near-brawl at our
Christmas party, I
never heard Dad say a word, mean or nice, about Joyce or Nina O’Dell.
Now, Mrs. O’Dell, whom I’d called Auntie Nina from time immemorial, I really
liked. Her face was so beautiful I found it hard not to stare at her. Whenever
she looked at me she broke into a big smile. “You’ve got your mother’s eyes,”
she often said. And the other daughter, Pagan—Jesus, poor little Pagan—I liked a
lot too, even though she was two years younger. She was way prettier than Rosie
and a hundred times nicer, never saying anything spitey to someone. Pagan had
her mother’s shiny dark hair and brown, fawnlike eyes, while Rosie had ended up
with her father’s orangey mop and brazen face and straight-ahead
greenish-blueish-hazel eyes like a stalking cougar’s or something, all of which
looked all right on a man, but definitely not so hot on a girl.
I could tell little Pagan had a crush on me from how she hung around all the
time blushing whenever I noticed her, and it was too bad the two sisters’ ages
were not interchanged because Rosie I hated. But since she and I had been born
to the two best friends in the same week in the same hospital, me four days
ahead of her—which made her contrary again whenever I lorded my elder status
over her—our mothers considered us natural playmates from birth. What gradually
undermined this maternal illusion was our wholehearted attempt at least once
during every play date to massacre each other. Before we were ten years old our
moms had mostly stopped dragging us back and forth to each other’s homes.
Although we lived in the same neighbourhood, we started out attending different
elementary schools. I went to Smearies and she went to Snagnesses, which was how
the kids said the names of our schools no matter how often teachers urged us to
enunciate St. Mary’s and St. Agnes’s properly. To my thinking by the start of
grade five, the segregation of myself and Rosie O’Dell between my Protestant
Smearies and her Catholic Snagnesses was the chief benefit of the old
denominational education system. Then, two weeks into grade five, I walked back
into my classroom after recess and thought for a moment I was having a really
bad dream. Right there, in the middle of the room, two rows away from my desk,
sat Rosie O’Dell. She was smiling at me and gave me a little wave as if she was
actually glad to see me.
The teacher welcomed her as a new student without explaining her abrupt
appearance. Some of the kids asked Rosie, but she answered only that her parents
had decided to move her and her sister here from Snag
nesses. This
struck every child in the class as wacky. Oh, we could understand why the two
girls themselves might want to come to the best school in the world, our
Smearies, but their parents? We were all acquainted with our own mothers’ sighs
over how good the music and singing were at Snagnesses under the nuns.
That night when Auntie Nina dropped in to see my mother, I put together from my
listening post upstairs the whole story. Last year, the parents of a child at
St. Agnes’s had written the principal to complain that Pagan’s name was too
contradictory for a Catholic school environment, and that “the name ‘Pagan’ as a
Christian
name was absurdly oxymoronic and doctrinally confusing to
the other pupils.” They suggested asking Mr. and Mrs. O’Dell for permission to
stop calling her Pagan and to use her second name, Ivy. That name was equally
secular, they said, which proved they were not fanatical about pushing religion
down anyone’s throat, but the name Ivy was less jarring than Pagan on the nerves
of those of more devout religious sensibilities. Everyone could be happy, they
claimed, with a little compromise on both sides.
Getting wind of that initiative, Joyce O’Dell had fired off a letter to the
principal detailing his revulsion on several levels. The principal replied that
neither she nor the staff intended to pay any attention to the name-change
suggestion. Then, soon after Pagan had entered grade three, she came home and
told her father and mother that from now on she wanted to be called Ivy; some of
the kids in her class at Snagnesses wouldn’t play with her because her name
Pagan was going to make them all go to hell.
Joyce O’Dell went off his head and stormed the school the next morning. Finding
the principal in the staff room with the teachers just before classes were to
start, he roared at her standing there nonplussed in her nun’s habit that “this
place is as full of superstitious fanatics as a Spanish
auto-da-fé
.” Then
railing that “my daughters’ psyches will be safer among the Protestant bigots,”
he whisked both Rosie and Pagan out of their classrooms and enrolled them at St.
Mary’s.
From that day, I experienced frissons of impending doom. Since the end of
kindergarten till this year I had held the title of Smartest Kid in the Whole
Class. And I would hold that title in everyone’s view, including His own, by
divine right, up to the end of time. But just before Christmas break, the year
Rosie arrived at Smearies, in a bloodless coup as painful as if I’d been impaled
on a bayonet, I was ousted. Rosie O’Dell beat me in ev
ery test,
just barely beat me but beat me nonetheless, and became the new and undisputed
Smartest Kid in the Whole Class.
Meanwhile, gym sessions were providing their own measure of chagrin. I enjoyed
my status as one of the best half-dozen athletes of my age group in the school.
Brent Anstey was the top athlete, but I didn’t mind that because he was also my
best friend. Soon, the physical education classes in grade five placed Rosie in
the elite also. And as the weeks went by she won every race and every game
against all the girls and nearly all the boys as well. All except Brent. They
were neck and neck. Her overhand throwing of a ball was the skill that
astonished the other students most. She was left-handed and with that left hand
of hers she threw faster and harder and with better aim than any boy in the
class but Brent.
“What’s a girl doing throwing like a boy, anyway?” I sneered to Brent one day
at gym, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“No need to get jealous, Tommy,” Rosie shot back. “Give me a couple of years
and I might be able to teach
you
how to throw like a boy too.” The gym
teacher’s face went cherry red and she burst out laughing before she could turn
her back. All the kids, including Brent, joined in the merriment. My best
friend’s face carried a look of frank admiration.
“I could’ve died,” I heard the gym teacher tell another teacher in the
corridor that afternoon. “She’s so quick and sharp with her comebacks for
someone so young.”
That Rosie was smarter, faster, and sharper than them didn’t bother the rest of
the class. Even Brent didn’t seem to mind that she sometimes got close to
overtaking him in speed of running and height of jumps. Many of the boys were
smitten by secret love, judging by the way they showed off so grotesquely in her
presence, and most of the girls thronged around her during breaks, vying for her
notice. But all year long I ignored Rosie O’Dell except to sneak looks at her
sitting at her desk in the classroom, as poised and controlled writing or
drawing with that left hand as when she threw a ball in gym, and I would loathe
her with all my heart.
Then, in the last period of the last day of grade five, as the teacher was
completing the report cards to hand them out, she asked if some students would
fill in the time by describing what they were going to do during their summer
holidays. I jumped in with my plans to stay for a couple of weeks with Brent and
his parents in Twillingate. I looked at Brent, and when he didn’t say
anything—he always seemed shy about speaking to more than one or two persons—I
described from our discussions how we would ex
plore the tickles
and runs and isles of Notre Dame Bay in his father’s boat, jig codfish, look at
icebergs close up, swim in the pond, catch connors off the wharf. Murmurs of
envy rose. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Rosie listening quietly. She was
smiling pleasantly at me—oh it looked like a smile of pleasure but it was no
doubt contrived to hide her jealousy. Then the teacher asked her what her plans
were.
Now that she had turned eleven, Rosie replied, her father was taking her
camping and canoeing with two other whitewater friends on the Main River that
flowed from the Long Range Mountains into White Bay. That would be the high
point of her summer, not only because of the pure adventure, but also because it
meant her father considered her equal now to the currents and rapids of this
challenging class three river. As she described the thrill and risks of shooting
the rapids, so many questions flowed from classmates that the teacher pulled the
big map of Newfoundland down over the blackboard and asked Rosie to stand in
front of it and trace the river with a pointer. The final bell rang while she
was in the middle of some event—criminally overdramatized, I thought—and kids
had to scramble to get their report cards. I was glad of this commotion at the
end because it was the moment I’d been dreading and I wanted no one to ask me if
I’d come first or second. Rosie and I had been too close in too many tests for
me to know before this instant, but I feared the very worst.
I glanced at “position in class” on my report card and closed it as quickly as
the stab of pain bit into my heart. I slid my eyes towards Rosie. She was over
there grinning faintly at her card while girls pressed around her asking,
“What’d you come? What’d you come?” She displayed her card to them as I shoved
mine into my bag and walked out the door. Brent came running up behind me. I’d
forgotten him in my mortification. We heard the squeal of voices in the
classroom telling each other: “First. Rosie came first.”
Brent and I said goodbye for the summer to friends in the corridor and walked
out of the school without lingering with the many others who were gabbing.
Outside, Brent said, “When Jakey Power, buddy at St. Bon’s, got more goals in
hockey this year than me, Dad told me not to let on how pissed off I was—just
come up with a secret plan to beat him next year.”
“I’m not pissed off,” I said. “It’s only a shagging old report card.” I
carried the aching knowledge throughout me that, with all the secret plans in
the world, I would never beat her.
Brent and I parted to walk home to lunch, agreeing to meet that af
ternoon. All the way home I nursed one fervent prayer in my soul: Please make
Rosie O’Dell, on her trip down that river with her father, tip over her canoe.
Again and again with increasing intensity, with all my heart and soul, I wished
and prayed and willed: Please, please, make her tip over and drown in that
river.
BEFORE I HEARD THE
headline in the morning news on the radio, I
never really believed in my heart that my fervent prayer for the destruction of
Rosie O’Dell would be answered. It was too much to ask. The idea of her being
dead and gone from my life forever was so delightful that it could not come
true. This was the third morning of my two-week stay with Brent at the old
family homestead in Twillingate, which his parents used as a summer country
house. Previous mornings when the news began, Brent and I had to go quiet or
risk the ire of his father who wanted to listen carefully to every item. Brent
and I leaned forward in our chairs at the kitchen table, chewing the too-big
bites of toast and jam in our mouths as fast as we could so that we could take
off outdoors. I averted my eyes from Brent’s so that we wouldn’t burst out
laughing at nothing again, and I gazed out the window at the forget-me-nots and
daisies nodding in the breeze-rippled meadow, the wavelets down on the harbour
shimmering in the radiant sun, the cathedral iceberg glistening white-green-blue
in the sea beyond. We’d be out there soon, enveloped the whole day long in all
that enchanted loveliness…
“Canoeing mishap claims one on a Northern Peninsula river,” shot from the
radio, piercing my vacancy. Did I hear that right? Could it have meant what I
thought it did? I stopped chewing to listen better. “Details after this,” said
the announcer. I looked at Brent whose eyes were wide as he looked back.
I turned to Brent’s father at the other end of the table, sucking on his
cigarette and studying the lame old Labrador in the corner who was studying him
right back. “Yes, yes, my pup, we’re going to have you put down soon, yes, yes,”
he said in the tone of one encouraging his dog to go for a walk. “Don’t be one
bit anxious about that. Yes, yes, soon as we find a vet who’ll do it cheap, it’s
curtains for you, yes, yes.” And the Lab wiggled his entire body and wagged his
tail with all the force his stiffness would allow. I gulped down my half-chewed
chunk of toast to ask my urgent question. The heaps of Brent’s mother’s homemade
raspberry jam I’d spooned on managed to keep it from choking me, but an edge of
crust scraped my
throat. I swallowed some milk, but I would feel
the rawness there for days, and a ghost of that pain would visit my throat at
times for the rest of my life, reminding me of how eager I’d been on this
beautiful childhood summer morning to confirm my wishful thinking: “Mr. Anstey,
did that mean someone in a canoe got drowned in the river?”