The Beggar Maid Read online

  There is a green hill far away

  Outside a city wall

  Where the dear Lord was crucified

  Who died to save us all.

  Mr. Burns’s singing was not pious but hectoring, as if he longed, even now, for a fight. Religion, around here, came out mostly in fights. People were Catholics or fundamentalist Protestants, honor-bound to molest each other. Many of the Protestants had been—or their families had been—Anglicans, Presbyterians. But they had got too poor to show up at those churches, so had veered off to the Salvation Army, the Pentecostals. Others had been total heathens until they were saved. Some were heathens yet, but Protestant in fights. Flo said the Anglicans and the Presbyterians were snobs and the rest were Holy Rollers, while the Catholics would put up with any two-facedness or debauching, as long as they got your money for the Pope. So Rose did not have to go to any church at all.

  All the little girls squatted to see, peered in at that part of Mr. Burns that sagged through the hole. For years Rose thought she had seen testicles but on reflection she believed it was only bum. Something like a cow’s udder, which looked to have a prickly surface, like the piece of tongue before Flo boiled it. She wouldn’t eat that tongue, and after she told him what it was Brian wouldn’t eat it either, so Flo went into a temper and said they could live on boiled baloney.

  The older girls didn’t get down to look, but stood by, several making puking noises. Some of the little girls jumped up and joined them, eager to imitate, but Rose remained squatting, amazed and thoughtful. She would have liked to contemplate, but Mr. Burns removed himself, came out buttoning and singing. Girls sneaked along the fences to call to him.

  “Mr. Burns! Good morning Mr. Burns! Mr. Burns-your-balls!”

  He came roaring at the fence, chopping with his cane, as if they were chickens.

  Younger and older, boys and girls and everybody—except the teacher, of course, who locked the door at recess and stayed in the school, like Rose holding off till she got home, risking accidents and enduring agonies—everybody gathered to look in the entryway of the Boys’ Toilet when the word went round: Shortie McGill is fucking Franny McGill!

  Brother and sister.

  Relations performing.

  That was Flo’s word for it: perform. Back in the country, back on the hill farms she came from, Flo said that people had gone dotty, been known to eat boiled hay, and performed with their too-close relations. Before Rose understood what was meant she used to imagine some makeshift stage, some rickety old barn stage, where members of a family got up and gave silly songs and recitations. What a performance! Flo would say in disgust, blowing out smoke, referring not to any single act but to everything along that line, past and present and future, going on anywhere in the world. People’s diversions, like their pretensions, could not stop astounding her.

  Whose idea was this, for Franny and Shortie? Probably some of the big boys dared Shortie, or he bragged and they challenged him. One thing was certain: the idea could not be Franny’s. She had to be caught for this, or trapped. You couldn’t say caught, really, because she wouldn’t run, wouldn’t put that much faith in escaping. But she showed unwillingness, had to be dragged, then pushed down where they wanted her. Did she know what was coming? She would know at least that nothing other people devised for her ever turned out to be pleasant.

  Franny McGill had been smashed against the wall, by her father, drunk, when she was a baby. So Flo said. Another story had Franny falling out of a cutter, drunk, kicked by a horse. At any rate, smashed. Her face had got the worst of it. Her nose was crooked, making every breath she took a long, dismal-sounding snuffle. Her teeth were badly bunched together, so that she could not close her mouth and never could contain her quantities of spit. She was white, bony, shuffling, fearful, like an old woman. Marooned in Grade Two or Three, she could read and write a little, was seldom called on to do so. She may not have been so stupid as everybody thought, but simply stunned, bewildered, by continual assault. And in spite of everything there was something hopeful about her. She would follow after anybody who did not immediately attack and insult her; she would offer bits of crayon, knots of chewed gum pried off seats and desks. It was necessary to fend her off firmly, and scowl warningly whenever she caught your eye.

  Go away Franny. Go away or I’ll punch you. I will. I really will.

  The use Shortie was making of her, that others made, would continue. She would get pregnant, be taken away, come back and get pregnant again, be taken away, come back, get pregnant, be taken away again. There would be talk of getting her sterilized, getting the Lions Club to pay for it, there would be talk of shutting her up, when she died suddenly of pneumonia, solving the problem. Later on Rose would think of Franny when she came across the figure of an idiotic, saintly whore, in a book or a movie. Men who made books and movies seemed to have a fondness for this figure, though Rose noticed they would clean her up. They cheated, she thought, when they left out the breathing and the spit and the teeth; they were refusing to take into account the aphrodisiac prickles of disgust, in their hurry to reward themselves with the notion of a soothing blankness, undifferentiating welcome.

  The welcome Franny gave Shortie was not so saintly, after all. She let out howls, made ripply, phlegmy, by her breathing problems. She kept jerking one leg. Either the shoe had come off, or she had not been wearing shoes to start with. There was her white leg and bare foot, with muddy toes—looking too normal, too vigorous and self-respecting, to belong to Franny McGill. That was all of her Rose could see. She was small, and had got shoved to the back of the crowd. Big boys were around them, hollering encouragement, big girls were hovering behind, giggling. Rose was interested but not alarmed. An act performed on Franny had no general significance, no bearing on what could happen to anyone else. It was only further abuse.

  When Rose told people these things, in later years, they had considerable effect. She had to swear they were true, she was not exaggerating. And they were true, but the effect was off-balance. Her schooling seemed deplorable. It seemed she must have been miserable, and that was not so. She was learning. She learned how to manage in the big fights that tore up the school two or three times a year. Her inclination was to be neutral, and that was a bad mistake; it could bring both sides down on you. The thing to do was to ally yourself with people living near you, so you would not be in too much danger walking home. She was never sure what fights were about, and she did not have a good instinct for fighting, did not really understand the necessity. She would always be taken by surprise by a snowball, a stone, a shingle whacked down from behind. She knew she would never flourish, never get to any very secure position—if indeed there was such a thing—in the world of school. But she was not miserable, except in the matter of not being able to go to the toilet. Learning to survive, no matter with what cravenness and caution, what shocks and forebodings, is not the same as being miserable. It is too interesting.

  She learned to fend off Franny. She learned never to go near the school basement which had all the windows broken and was black, dripping, like a cave; to avoid the dark place under the steps and the place between the woodpiles; not to attract in any way the attention of the big boys, who seemed like wild dogs to her, just as quick and strong, capricious, jubilant in attack.

  A mistake she made early and would not have made later on was in telling Flo the truth instead of some lie when a big boy, one of the Morey boys, tripped and grabbed her as she was coming down the fire escape, tearing the sleeve of her raincoat out at the armhole. Flo came to the school to raise Cain (her stated intention) and heard witnesses swear Rose had torn it on a nail. The teacher was glum, would not declare herself, indicated Flo’s visit was not welcome. Adults did not come to the school, in West Hanratty. Mothers were strongly partisan in fights, would hang over their gates, and yell; some would even rush out to tug hair and flail shingles, themselves. They would abuse the teacher behind her back and send their children off to school with instructions not to t
ake any lip from her. But they would never have behaved as Flo did, never have set foot on school property, never have carried a complaint to that level. They would never have believed, as Flo seemed to believe (and here Rose saw her for the first time out of her depth, mistaken) that offenders would confess, or be handed over, that justice would take any form but a ripping and tearing of a Morey coat, in revenge, a secret mutilation in the cloakroom.

  Flo said the teacher did not know her business.

  But she did. She knew it very well. She locked the door at recess and let whatever was going to happen outside happen. She never tried to make the big boys come up from the basement or in from the fire escape. She made them chop kindling for the stove and fill the drinking pail; otherwise they were at liberty. They didn’t mind the wood-chopping or pumping, though they liked to douse people with freezing water, and came near murder with the axe. They were just at school because there was no place else for them to be. They were old enough for work but there were no jobs for them. Older girls could get jobs, as maids at least; so they did not stay in school, unless they were planning to write the Entrance, go to high school, maybe someday get jobs in stores or banks. Some of them would do that. From places like West Hanratty girls move up more easily than boys.

  The teacher had the big girls, excepting those in the Entrance Class, kept busy bossing the younger children, petting and slapping them, correcting spelling, and removing for their own use anything interesting in the way of pencil boxes, new crayons, Cracker Jack jewelry. What went on in the cloakroom, what lunchpail-robbing or coat-slashing or pulling down pants there was, the teacher did not consider her affair.

  She was not in any way enthusiastic, imaginative, sympathetic. She walked over the bridge every day from Hanratty, where she had a sick husband. She had come back to teaching in middle age. Probably this was the only job she could get. She had to keep at it, so she kept at it. She never put cutouts up on the windows or pasted gold stars in the workbooks. She never did drawings on the board with colored chalk. She had no gold stars, there was no colored chalk. She showed no love of anything she taught, or anybody. She must have wished, if she wished for anything, to be told one day she could go home, never see any of them, never open a spelling book, again.

  But she did teach things. She must have taught something to the people who were going to write the Entrance, because some of them passed it. She must have made a stab at teaching everybody who came into that school to read and write and do simple arithmetic. The stair railings were knocked out, desks were wrenched loose from the floor, the stove smoked and the pipes were held together with wire, there were no library books or maps, and never enough chalk; even the yardstick was dirty and splintered at one end. Fights and sex and pilferage were the important things going on. Nevertheless. Facts and tables were presented. In the face of all that disruption, discomfort, impossibility, some thread of ordinary classroom routine was maintained; an offering. Some people learned to spell.

  She took snuff. She was the only person Rose had ever seen do that. She would sprinkle a bit on the back of her hand and lift the hand to her face, give a delicate snort. Her head back, her throat exposed, she looked for a moment contemptuous, challenging. Otherwise she was not in the least eccentric. She was plump, gray, shabby.

  Flo said she had probably fogged her brain with the snuff. It was like being a drug addict. Cigarettes only shot your nerves.

  One thing in the school was captivating, lovely. Pictures of birds. Rose didn’t know if the teacher had climbed up and nailed them above the blackboard, too high for easy desecration, if they were her first and last hopeful effort, or if they dated from some earlier, easier time in the school’s history. Where had they come from, how had they arrived there, when nothing else did, in the way of decoration, illustration?

  A red-headed woodpecker; an oriole; a blue jay; a Canada goose. The colors clear and long-lasting. Backgrounds of pure snow, of blossoming branches, of heady summer sky. In an ordinary classroom they would not have seemed so extraordinary. Here they were bright and eloquent, so much at variance with everything else that what they seemed to represent was not the birds themselves, not those skies and snows, but some other world of hardy innocence, bounteous information, privileged lightheartedness. No stealing from lunchpails there; no slashing coats; no pulling down pants and probing with painful sticks; no fucking; no Franny.

  There were three big girls in the Entrance Class. One was named Donna; one was Cora; one was Bernice. Those three were the Entrance Class; there was nobody else. Three queens. But when you looked closer, a queen and two princesses. That was how Rose thought of them. They walked around the schoolyard arm-in-arm, or with their arms around each other’s waists. Cora in the middle. She was the tallest. Donna and Bernice leaning against and leading up to her.

  It was Cora Rose loved.

  Cora lived with her grandparents. Her grandmother went across the bridge to Hanratty, to do cleaning and ironing. Her grandfather was the honey-dumper. That meant he went around cleaning out toilets. That was his job.

  Before she had the money saved up to put in a real bathroom Flo had gotten a chemical toilet to put in a corner of the woodshed. A better arrangement than the outhouse, particularly in the wintertime. Cora’s grandfather disapproved. He said to Flo, “Many has got these chemicals in and many has wished they never.”

  He pronounced the ch in chemicals like the ch in church.

  Cora was illegitimate. Her mother worked somewhere, or was married. Perhaps she worked as a maid, and she was able to send castoffs. Cora had plenty of clothes. She came to school in fawn-colored satin, rippling over the hips; in royal-blue velvet with a rose of the same material flopping from one shoulder; in dull rose crepe loaded with fringe. These clothes were too old for her (Rose did not think so), but not too big. She was tall, solid, womanly. Sometimes she did her hair in a roll on top of her head, let it dip over one eye. She and Donna and Bernice often had their hair done in some grown-up style, their lips richly painted, their cheeks cakily powdered. Cora’s features were heavy. She had an oily forehead, lazy brunette eyelids, the ripe and indolent self-satisfaction that would soon go hard and matronly. But she was splendid at the moment, walking in the schoolyard with her attendants (it was actually Donna with the pale oval face, the fair frizzy hair, who came closest to being pretty), arms linked, seriously talking. She did not waste any attention on the boys at school, none of those girls did. They were waiting, perhaps already acquiring, real boyfriends. Some boys called to them from the basement door, wistfully insulting, and Cora turned and yelled at them.

  “Too old for the cradle, too young for the bed!”

  Rose had no idea what that meant, but she was full of admiration for the way Cora turned on her hips, for the taunting, cruel, yet lazy and unperturbed sound of her voice, her glossy look. When she was by herself she would act that out, the whole scene, the boys calling, Rose being Cora. She would turn just as Cora did, on her imaginary tormentors, she would deal out just such provocative scorn.

  Too old for the cradle, too young for the bed!

  Rose walked around the yard behind the store, imagining the fleshy satin rippling over her own hips, her own hair rolled and dipping, her lips red. She wanted to grow up to be exactly like Cora. She did not want to wait to grow up. She wanted to be Cora, now.

  Cora wore high heels to school. She was not light-footed. When she walked around the schoolroom in her rich dresses you could feel the room tremble, you could hear the windows rattle. You could smell her, too. Her talcum and cosmetics, her warm dark skin and hair.

  The three of them sat at the top of the fire escape, in the first warm weather. They were putting on nail polish. It smelled like bananas, with a queer chemical edge. Rose had meant to go up the fire escape into the school, as she usually did, avoiding the everyday threat of the main entrance, but when she saw those girls she turned back, she did not dare expect them to shift over.

  Cora called down.

>   “You can come up if you want to. Come on up!”

  She was teasing her, encouraging her, as she would a puppy.

  “How would you like to get your nails done?”

  “Then they’ll all want to,” said the girl named Bernice, who as it turned out owned the nail polish.

  “We won’t do them,” said Cora. “We’ll just do her. What’s your name? Rose? We’ll just do Rose. Come on up, honey.”

  She made Rose hold out her hand. Rose saw with alarm how mottled it was, how grubby. And it was cold and trembly. A small, disgusting object. Rose would not have been surprised to see Cora drop it.

  “Spread your fingers out. There. Relax. Lookit your hand shake! I’m not going to bite you. Am I? Hold steady like a good girl. You don’t want me to go all crooked, do you?”

  She dipped the brush in the bottle. The color was deep red, like raspberries. Rose loved the smell. Cora’s own fingers were large, pink, steady, warm.

  “Isn’t that pretty? Won’t your nails look pretty?”

  She was doing it in the difficult, now-forgotten style of that time, leaving the half-moon and the whites of the nails bare.

  “It’s rosy to match your name. That’s a pretty name, Rose. I like it. I like it better than Cora. I hate Cora. Your fingers are freezing for such a warm day. Aren’t they freezing, compared to mine?”

  She was flirting, indulging herself, as girls that age will do. They will try out charm on anything, on dogs or cats or their own faces in the mirror. Rose was too much overcome to enjoy herself, at the moment. She was weak and dazzled, terrified by such high favor.

  From that day on, Rose was obsessed. She spent her time trying to walk and look like Cora, repeating every word she had ever heard her say. Trying to be her. There was a charm for Rose about every gesture Cora made, about the way she stuck a pencil into her thick, coarse hair, the way she groaned sometimes in school, with imperial boredom. The way she licked her finger and carefully smoothed her eyebrows. Rose licked her own finger and smoothed her own eyebrows, longing for them to be dark, instead of sunbleached and nearly invisible.