After Sylvia Read online

  And for most of that first hour the dog continued to run around and around the portable, the huge rock still dripping in his mouth. Finally he put down the rock, then sat and whined at it just beneath the window where Owen sat.

  At recess time Owen decided to stay in to towel down the blackboard and avoid the dog, and perhaps catch a glimpse of the multiplication code if Miss Glendon had left it out on her desk. She was so inexperienced she might make that mistake on the first day of school, Owen thought.

  Miss Glendon was sitting very still, her thin fingers clutching her face.

  “I tried to cook my own egg this morning,” Owen said.

  She didn’t move, didn’t say anything.

  “There were eggs everywhere!” he said. “Every time I turned around I broke another egg!”

  She didn’t even seem to be breathing. Owen saw text books open and sheets of paper with small, scratchy notes. One page, which he could only see partially, did have a strange collection of numbers. Owen tried to keep them straight in his head. Seventeen and nineteen and twenty-three and a string of others that disappeared under a grammar book.

  Did they have something to do with this year’s multiplication code?

  “Last night I was trying to listen on the crystal radio just in case,” he said. “Sometimes there are aliens in the area.”

  “Are there?” she asked finally in a tight little voice.

  “Sometimes. Are you not from around here?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  He thought maybe she would explain where she was from, but she clammed up again.

  She seemed too young to be a teacher, like someone who suddenly had to be grown up and act like she knew it all when she didn’t.

  “Sometimes there are aliens,” he said. “But we had a fire instead, and I got caught out on the drainpipe. I almost broke my neck. But it was all right in the end.”

  “Yes?” she said. Owen thought she sounded a little more hopeful.

  So he said, “Uncle Lorne was on the radio, so that just goes to show that anything can happen.”

  “Can it?” Miss Glendon said uncertainly. She had raised her head by then and Owen got a better look at her. Her face did seem quite pretty, behind all that hair, and she had green eyes that glistened, but her lower lip was raw from where she’d been biting it.

  There were a few minutes left in recess, so Owen excused himself and ran outside. Other kids were playing with the dog now, throwing his rock for him. A huge crowd had gathered. Kids were yelling and cheering.

  Then the principal, Mr. Schneider, came out. He looked like he had aged during the summer, and was now over a hundred. Perhaps he had grown an inch or two as well. He strode into the crowd without saying a word, and all the children fell away.

  Owen watched as the dog placed the sodden rock at the principal’s feet and then backed up, squirming and begging.

  “Whose dog is this?” Mr. Schneider asked darkly.

  No one spoke up. Owen had the feeling that if he opened his mouth the asphalt on the playground might buckle and swallow him whole.

  “So, you’re nobody’s dog,” Mr. Schneider said. He bent down slowly and picked up the rock and looked off in the distance, as if trying to find the point farthest from the school to aim for.

  “Get away! Get. off the property!” Mr. Schneider growled, and the dog backed away. Then Mr. Schneider wound up — his arm was as long as a major leaguer’s — and the dog crouched, ready to explode and give chase.

  But instead of throwing the rock far into the distance, Mr. Schneider hurled it straight at the dog.

  Owen watched in stunned silence. The dog rose to nab it, but somehow managed to turn at the last instant, catching the full impact on his chest and foreleg. He yelped pitifully and hobbled a step or two while the old principal lurched after him.

  Some of the older boys laughed and jeered. Then they went after the dog, picking up stones to hurl at him and whacking his back legs with sticks. The bell rang but it didn’t seem to matter. The principal went on yelling at the dog, and the boys kept chasing, while the dog ran and hopped with his ears flattened, his foreleg bleeding.

  “You leave him! Let him be!” Owen called, but no one paid any attention.

  In just a few moments the dog was chased off the school property. Many of the boys would have gone after him if the principal hadn’t reminded them that the bell had rung. Recess was now over.

  Back in class Owen stared out the window. He didn’t know if he wanted to see the dog back again or not. He somehow felt as if it really were his fault that the dog had got into such trouble and was now injured. He couldn’t stop wondering how a principal could throw a rock at a dog, a friendly one at that.

  On his way home after school Owen saw the dog lying low in the weeds by the side of the road. He had the same rock, but he was shivering, and the wound on his foreleg was black with dried blood. Owen squatted beside him and scratched his ears, smoothed back the silky fur between his eyes and along his strong neck.

  “What’s your name, boy?” Owen whispered. The dog closed his eyes and licked at his sore leg.

  They walked home together. The dog limped and carried the rock for a time and then dropped it, so Owen picked it up.

  When they got to the house Owen gazed at where the upper portion of the drainpipe had been and at the wreck of it now on the ground. It seemed impossibly high, where he had been dangling just the night before.

  “You stay here,” Owen said, dropping the rock by the steps.

  In the kitchen Margaret had put a large bowl and some eggs on the table. Owen cracked them one by one. He got used to the feeling of egg on his fingers, and how much pressure to use in the cracking and the splitting. Many of the first eggs had broken yolks by the time they squirmed into the bowl, but toward the end the new yolks were firm and round and whole. Owen could imagine them sizzling in the pan just like his fathers.

  “So how was your first day?” Margaret asked him. “Was there anybody new or just the same old crowd?”

  “I brought a friend home,” Owen said.

  “Where is he?” Margaret asked.

  “I left him outside.”

  “Owen!” Margaret said. Owen followed her down the hall. “When you bring somebody home you don’t just —”

  She went out the door.

  “Oh, no. Owen! No.” But then she saw that the dog was shaking, that his leg was hurt.

  “Wherever did you find him? What’s his name?” she asked.

  Owen concentrated on the second and more important question. He didn’t say the first name that occurred to him. This dog was a boy and it simply wouldn’t do to call him Sylvia.

  “Sylvester,” he said. “Sylvester the dog.”

  There were all kinds of things that Owen wanted to say to convince his mother to keep him. But he said the strongest thing he could think of right at the beginning.

  “He chose us. I think we have to keep him,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Margaret said doubtfully, but she was stroking his bad leg. “Dogs take a lot of work. You have to walk them and feed them and —”

  “So are broken eggs,” Owen said.

  “What?”

  “A lot of work,” he said.

  Owen felt his mother looking at him, as if she might be wondering, almost for the first time, what sorts of carnivals and circuses might be going on in his mind. They both scratched and stroked Sylvester’s ragged fur, and the dog sighed and crooned.

  “Broken eggs are a lot of work,” she said finally, with just enough light in her voice to fill Owen with hope.

  The Code

  “DAD will never let us keep him,” Andy said. The three boys were sitting on the front steps soothing Sylvester’s black hair with Leonard’s brush, which had the softest bristles. The dog trembled and rested in the
shade on a bright white bath towel that Owen had found in the guest cupboard along with a matching facecloth that he wet and used to wipe off the last bits of dried blood.

  Now Margaret was in the kitchen fixing supper, and the boys were left to greet Horace with the news.

  “He might like Sylvester,” Owen said hopefully.

  “He doesn’t like anything these days,” Andy said. “It’s because of his work.”

  “What is his work?” Leonard asked.

  Andy snorted.

  Owen didn’t know either and he was glad that Leonard had asked.

  “Selling insurance,” Andy said. “It means you tell people about all the horrible things that might happen to them, and then they pay you money.”

  “So the horrible things won’t happen?” Leonard asked.

  “So when they do happen you’ll be protected,” Andy said.

  “Protected from what?”

  “From people asking too many questions!” Andy said, and he glared at Leonard.

  Just then Horace’s car pulled up, the tires sending gravel sputtering ahead. It was an old car but new to the Skyes, a real station wagon with wood on the doors like a stagecoach in the movies. Horace had bought it for less than a hundred dollars from a friend who owed Horace for a load of lumber that Horace had given him after he’d decided not to build a new front porch.

  Owen watched his father get out of the cat. His blue jacket was wrinkled from the drive, and he had opened his tie so that it hung loose around his neck like a rope.

  As soon as he saw the dog, his face clouded.

  “What’s this?” he asked. Owen pleaded as hard as he could silently. But Horace said, “No, no, I’m afraid not. There’s no way —”

  But Sylvester whimpered and moved his paw pitifully, so Horace knelt down to feel the dog’s leg. Owen was amazed at how gentle Horace’s fingers became, how intently his eyes narrowed. Sylvester flattened his ears and Horace smoothed them down to the tips until the dog sighed.

  “How did this happen?” Horace asked.

  Owen told him the whole story. When he got to the part about Principal Schneider hurling the rock at Sylvester from just a few feet away, Horace became nearly as angry as he was the time the boys had flipped Popsicle sticks at cars on the highway and almost caused an accident.

  “How could they let somebody like that be in charge of children?” he fumed. “What a disgrace!” And he stormed into the house.

  Leonard and Andy followed to see what he was going to do. Owen stayed with Sylvester, but he could hear it all from the steps anyway. There was the angry whirl of Horace dialing the phone, then a pause while Owen held his breath.

  “He’s not answering!” Horace said finally, his voice shaking the house.

  “Dear, calm down!” Margaret said. “I’m sure he’s gone home after work.”

  “He just injured a poor, defenceless dog! What kind of man —”

  There was the sound of more dialing, and finally Margaret said, “No, darling, please — “

  “I will!” Horace insisted.

  “You should calm down!” Margaret said. “You shouldn’t be calling him at home.”

  But it was too late.

  “Hello!” Horace yelled into the phone. “Is this Principal Schneider? What kind of jackass do you think you are?”

  Owen couldn’t believe his ears. He’d never heard his father say that word before.

  “You want to know who I am?” his father said. “I’m Horace Skye, and I’ve got, three sons in your school.” He proceeded to name them all, starting with Owen, so that Principal Schneider could make no mistake about who they were.

  Owen gasped in horror.

  “That’s right!” Horace yelled. “And the dog you injured this afternoon that was my dog. And I can tell you, sir —”

  Instead of telling him, however, Horace fell

  quiet for a time. Then he said, “Well, I don’t care about...”

  But he did care enough to listen a while longer.

  “Yes, I understand there are by-laws,” he said then, in a more subdued voice. “But I have to tell you that my dog wouldn’t — “

  He fell quiet again.

  “Certainly,” he said at last, in such a quiet voice that Owen had trouble hearing. “I can see that opening the school grounds to dogs would pose a safety risk. And you’re absolutely right, sir, that you do hold your policy through the company I work for. I’ll have to check the fine print, but you could well be correct in saying that allowing animals on the property might undermine your coverage...”

  A slight gust of wind came up and Horace’s voice became wispy and impossible to follow.

  A little while later Horace came back out on the steps and sat beside Owen and Sylvester. He looked like a kite come too hard to ground. He felt up and down Sylvester’s leg again.

  “Nothing’s broken,” he said finally. “He’ll be fine in a day or two.”

  “So we can keep him?” Owen asked.

  “We’ll see,” Horace said in a tired voice.

  They fed Sylvester scraps of leftover sausages. Margaret wouldn’t let the dog share the boys’ bed in the attic, so he slept on the steps on an old blanket they found in the garage underneath the rusted remains of an ancient push-mower.

  In the morning the leg was still sore. Horace lingered on the steps before going off to work, nuzzling the dog’s long nose, scratching up and down his furry body.

  “We’re going to have to get him a brush and some proper food,” Horace said. “And a collar with tags. I can register him in town. If you boys get in any trouble with that principal — “

  When he stood up he had dog hair all over his suit.

  “I think you’ve done enough, dear,” Margaret said.

  Owen was worried that Sylvester might try to follow him to school again, but the dog remained on the steps, licking his leg and guarding his rock.

  At school the kids in Owen’s class were even wilder than the day before. Miss Glendon was soft and trusting and had trouble seeing several different directions at once. And so spit balls flew like hail while she wrote on the board with her back turned. Owen was struck twice by shots from Dan Ruck, who often was so bored in school that he could barely get his head off his desk. Owen didn’t dare fire back in case Miss Glendon caught him and sent him on to Principal Schneider.

  Finally Miss Glendon lost her temper and called a snap multiplication quiz. In a quiet fury she handed out blank sheets of paper.

  “Just write the answers. I’ll give you ten seconds per question. Ready?”

  She started firing off questions. Owen gripped his pencil tighter and tighter, and the numbers swam in his mind. What was twelve times six? He thought about seventy-two but wasn’t sure. What if you now subtracted nine? Then it would be sixty-three. Or if you added four and divided by two it would be thirty-eight. What if you were supposed to switch the digits for even numbers and multiply by three for odd?

  He fell two and three and four questions behind, erasing and scratching out and thinking some more.

  He wasn’t the only one having problems. Martha Henbrock held her hair in her fist in frustration, and others said, “Wait!” and shot their hands up and held them there with their other hands when they became tired. But that, too, was a mistake.

  “No questions during the quiz,” Miss Glendon announced. “Only answers!”

  Owen scored zero out of forty, the very worst in the class. But almost everyone had done badly. Only Michael Baylor had passed — and he scored thirty-nine, so he must have known the code and not told anyone. It was just like him to keep it all to himself.

  Miss Glendon handed back the test sheets in furious silence.

  “There’s no room in the curriculum for us to review the times tables!” she said. Her voice was strained and the cords of her neck
stuck out. “We’re going to have a test like this every day!” she said. “What are fractions going to mean when you can’t even handle multiplication?”

  Exactly! What would they mean? Owen wanted to explain to her that she needed to tell them the code for that year. It might be against some teacher’s union rule but it made the most sense to him. If she told them straight out then they’d all do better on the tests and she wouldn’t get so upset as a new teacher and look bad.

  It was the kind of thing that Leonard might have asked if he had been there. But Owen was frightened. Miss Glendon might think that he was stupid. Or that he was trying to cheat, to get the teacher to just tell them straight out what they were supposed to solve for themselves.

  She was on to social studies now. Owen watched her draw a large map of the Pacific Ocean on the blackboard. She had acres of blue chalk for the water and white for the whitecaps and green blobs for the Hawaiian Islands.

  Owen couldn’t help himself. His hand shot up.

  But she didn’t turn around. She was engrossed in outlining the coasts of North and South America. Owen’s arm turned numb and he felt the hot surge of embarrassment climb his face as others in the class stared at him. Martha Henbrock passed a note to Joanne Blexton and they both looked at Owen and snorted. Dan Ruck was getting ready to fire another spitball.

  Then Michael Baylor and two others on the far side of the room dropped their social studies textbooks at precisely the same time. Miss Glendon whirled and glared at them. She turned to Owen.

  “What is it?” she said in a murderous voice.

  Perhaps now, he realized suddenly, was not the best time.

  “Ask your question, Owen,” she pressed.

  “I, uh,” Owen stammered.

  “Don’t waste our time!” Miss Glendon snapped. “What is it?”

  One more second of confusion and Owen was sure he would be on his way to the dog-hating Mr. Schneider.