North to Benjamin Page 9

  Edgar wanted to say, “I don’t know, it just came on. It doesn’t always sound like barking to me!” But he didn’t know what was going to come out, so his jaw stayed glued.

  “Was it that business back in Toronto? Your mom told me a bit about what went down with what’s his name. Roger, was it?”

  Edgar stayed by the side of the road, where it wasn’t so slippery. It was going to be another bright day. The sky looked clear, and once again there was no wind. It felt easy to breathe despite the cold.

  “Anything you want to say to me, anytime you want to talk, I’m a good listener!” Ceese said.

  It really wasn’t very far to the school. In a couple of blocks, when they were down on the flat, they turned right again, toward the Moosehide Slide in the distance. The road was wide, wide. There was room enough for several snow-and-dirt lanes. They walked on the wooden sidewalk, stepping down onto the snow when they had to cross the street. What was it about the look of the school? Obviously, the building had not been here during the gold rush days. It looked more modern, newer but still boxy. Kids were playing, running, shouting in the fenced-in area, all in colorful snowsuits and jackets. Edgar pulled his cheeks back. He hoped the kids would see Ceese but not him.

  They mounted the wooden stairs. Ceese pulled open the door for him. “That’s the library to the right. Want to have a look?” They had to take their boots off and go through another set of doors. It seemed fine, this library: shelves and shelves of books; lots of windows, too; an upstairs with even more books. And many places to be quiet and hide.

  Ceese introduced him to the librarian on duty, a woman named Lucetta who smelled of toast and jam and something sickly. It was hard to know what it was. Her face was a little gray. “Edgar’s brand-new today!” Ceese announced. “He and his mom just came in from Toronto. First time in the Yukon! But he’s got an eye for books, I can just tell. Don’t you, Edgar?”

  Edgar nodded. He was eager to go along the bookshelves, looking at the titles and the covers.

  “What grade are you in, Edgar?” Lucetta asked.

  Edgar felt his throat constrict, his face flush.

  Ceese and Lucetta were both looking at him. So he held out four fingers, not in an obvious way, but they could see what he was doing. He was small for his age, and he liked seeming younger. It was another way to hide. Still, he thought about adding more fingers. . . .

  “No need to be so shy here,” Lucetta said. She bent down so that her face was close to his and he had to look into her eyes, which were red-rimmed, a bit sad. “Everyone is really friendly here.”

  They accepted it.

  So Edgar nodded. He felt himself trying to smile, like someone posing for a picture but who does not know what he is pretending to feel.

  They left the library, put their boots back on, and then pushed through another set of doors that led into the noisy halls of the school. It all looked familiar. How many schools had he been to in just the last few years? Usually his mother came with him, but not always. Sometimes she expected him to just introduce himself to the principal and she would come later to fill out the paperwork.

  This principal was short and wide, with a grinning face and a shirt that did not quite stay tucked in on the side where his belly spilled over his belt: Mr. Trant. He shook Edgar’s hand formally, and when Ceese said Edgar was from Toronto, Mr. Trant talked for several minutes about the Maple Leafs and what a sorry hockey team they were. “It’s the corporate influence. I know everyone says it, but it’s true—they never have to have a good team because all the seats get sold anyway! Still, it’s hard not to watch them. They’re like a slow-motion train wreck, Saturday night after Saturday night. But a great thing about living in the Yukon is the time shift. You can watch the Leafs lose and still have time to do something else in the evening!”

  Edgar had never been to a hockey game. Although, of course, in Toronto he had heard lots of people talking about the Leafs. He nodded, and shook his head, and looked at Ceese when Ceese said something about the goaltender. And then Ceese said, “Edgar is looking to join the grade-four class. His mother is going to come by later with all the paperwork. I’m just hoping maybe we can get him started right away. Is Marie-Claire still teaching that group?” Mr. Trant said that she was, and Ceese said to Edgar that he was in for a treat. “Everybody falls in love with Marie-Claire,” he said. “I wish I could go back to grade four again!”

  “You’d have to learn to sit still, Ceese, I’m afraid,” Mr. Trant said, and Ceese shook his head in mock sadness.

  “I’d never make it through!”

  So it was arranged. No one complained. He was small, smaller than average. Marie-Claire too—Ms. Lajoie, which meant “joy,” Edgar remembered from his scattered French classes—was shorter than Ms. Nordstrom and had dark hair that clung to her very pretty face. She smelled of fierce joy, as if she had just walked miles through the bush, loving every breath of cold air. That was the feeling Edgar got as he breathed her in, when he was shaking her warm hand a few steps inside her classroom. The children looked at him, of course they did, but he felt himself falling into her kindly eyes and did not let himself look away quite yet. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Edgar!” she said rather formally, with a trace of a French accent. “Where would you like to sit?”

  Ceese took her aside, and they spoke as if they were old friends. Ceese was explaining Edgar’s shyness, that he would need to be quiet as he got used to the new circumstances.

  She had an easy smile, and though she was not tall like Ms. Nordstrom, her neck was long, a little like a swan’s, and she held herself straight, perhaps like a dancer.

  Edgar was supposed to find a seat, but how could he? He was looking at Ms. Lajoie. He was feeling already the way he had with Ms. Nordstrom, like walking out of a dark place and into sunshine. A word popped into his head: “easement.” What did that mean? Maybe this feeling of melting and feeling at ease with the world.

  He would be able to speak normal words with Ms. Lajoie, with Marie-Claire. (How her name rang like a bell!) He would.

  She turned to him now. Ceese was gone. “Why don’t you take your seat, Edgar? How about this one?” She pointed to the very first seat at the front, close to the door.

  “Thank you. I am so pleased to be here,” he said.

  He heard the words perfectly pronounced, and yet part of him also heard what the rest of the class reacted to: “Woof! Woof-woof! Woof!”

  Cackles of laughter, a most alarmed expression on Ms. Lajoie’s face.

  “What was that, Edgar?”

  His lips screwed tight. “Hmmm-hghgh,” he said, and dropped his eyes, and boiled inside.

  How could this be happening to me? How could—

  Edgar sat hard in his new seat and held his face in his hands. Ms. Lajoie was speaking, the class continued. For a time it was all noise in his head. Gradually he started to peer between his fingers. A poster on the wall close to him showed a colorful, expanding column of galaxy gas, or something else from outer space. Edgar had seen similar photos in a book at the Toronto Reference Library, where he used to go sometimes when his mother was shopping and wanted an hour to herself.

  His blood still surged beneath the skin of his face. He wished, with all his powers, that he would wake up soon and it would be morning again and he would be in his old bed in Toronto.

  Maybe . . . maybe he would still have his camera, though. Maybe that part of the dream he could keep, and Benjamin, too, and Caroline. Was it possible that in a dream you could feel like you have lived several days and traveled a great long distance and become a dog-boy?

  “Edgar,” Ms. Lajoie said. “We’re going to be hearing from a number of students today in what we call interest talks, prepared presentations on some subject of their own personal interest. I don’t want to put you on the spot, but I’m hoping that at some point you will feel comfortable telling us just a bit about the city where you’ve come from. In some ways Toronto and Dawson couldn’t be more differ
ent, wouldn’t you say?”

  He could not pull back his cheeks. He was stuck at his new desk being stared at.

  Everything real, real.

  A girl named Vanessa with red-streaked hair—who looked somehow, in the shape of her face and the paleness of her skin, like she might be the daughter of the librarian—stood up first and talked about her favorite book, Mr. Marbles’s Mushrooms, which she clutched to her chest while she talked. She also swayed, as if she were singing a song, and didn’t quite keep her eyes open.

  “Mr. Marbles marries Margery Mushroom, and their children aren’t Marbles. Well, some of them are, but some of them are Mushrooms, because Mr. Marbles agreed to share everything when they got married, even names. So she changed her name to ‘Marbles’ and he changed his name to ‘Mushroom,’ and their children, some came out Marbles and some Mushrooms, and even some Mushroom-Marbles, while others were clearly Marble-Mushrooms. And when they went to school, it was hard to keep clear who was what because they all borrowed each other’s clothes. Then one day Maryellen Mullins-Maxwell-Moffat, their cousin, came to visit their town called Milford. . . .”

  She was tapping her foot too while she was telling the story. She wore a thin red sweater and a bright purple scarf.

  “You only have five minutes, dear,” Ms. Lajoie said when Vanessa had been talking for some time. Edgar thought: Maybe if she talks the entire period, I won’t have to say anything about Toronto.

  But she didn’t talk the whole period. A boy named Salvadore gave a demonstration of card tricks he had learned from his uncle, who was a professional dealer in Las Vegas, where he was not allowed to do card tricks but had to be strictly honest all the time. Still, he did know how to draw an ace every time from the bottom of the deck, or the top, or anywhere, really, and it could be the ace of spades every time too if he wanted. Salvadore was taller than many of the other children and not fast with the cards the way his uncle probably was. Edgar was reminded of playing poker with Roger for nickels, which Roger had kept in a double plastic bag. No matter how much or how little they’d played, Roger had always won all the nickels. But he had taken the time to teach Edgar some of the rules, about full houses and flushes and when diamonds are wild.

  “Edgar?” Ms. Lajoie finally said when Edgar was convinced she had forgotten about him, maybe even couldn’t see him anymore. “Why don’t you tell us a few things about life in Toronto? Did you ride the subway? Or the streetcar?”

  She waited at the front of the class, her face full of expectation. It was if she were holding out a plate of treats he knew he would drop as soon as it reached his hand.

  A wretched moment of silence. “There is a very tall building in Toronto, isn’t there?” she said finally. “What’s it called?”

  One of the boys shot up his hand. Ms. Lajoie ignored him, but still the boy said, “The CN Tower!”

  “Thank you, Rémy. I didn’t ask you, did I?”

  Edgar didn’t look to see if Rémy was embarrassed. The whole room smelled like it was full of laughter not yet happening—swallowed up, strangled.

  Edgar stared at one tile on the floor. It was gray-purple, if that was a color. No. Lighter than that. But a lot of feet had darkened it over time. Could he smell all those feet? They filled his mind somehow as he waited for his new teacher to insist that he stand up in front of everyone and say something—anything—about his old home.

  Ms. Lajoie was looking at him, looking. He didn’t have a notebook, but the girl sitting on his left seemed to have several, and even some extra pens and pencils. He reached across and pulled a notebook and pen toward him, thanking her with his eyes. Then on the back blank page he wrote: My throat got raw on the airplane. Toronto has a lot of trees and cars. Sometimes I rode in one too. A car. Not a tree.

  He lifted his eyes finally, stood, and handed the notebook to Ms. Lajoie. She thanked him as he was sitting down again. Then she read aloud his note.

  When she finished, she looked around and with her eyes kept the class from erupting with laughter. “Welcome to Dawson, Edgar,” she said. “I think you’ll find we have more trees here than cars. And thanks for telling me about your throat. We won’t ask you to do too much talking today.”

  CAVE

  AT RECESS EDGAR WAITED, WAITED for Ms. Lajoie to invite him to stay inside and read, because of his throat, but she didn’t, so he went outside with everyone else. The sun was higher now, the sky too blue to seem real, somehow—impossible in Toronto. But not impossible for here. The hills shone white, with dark pinpricks of trees, and the ravens circled, circled, as if for the joy of being able to, high above everything, close to the sun.

  It was possible to stand at the fence and just look.

  Caroline found him alone and said, “How’s Benjamin?” Edgar wanted to tell her that he had failed in his first duty, that Benjamin had not gotten a walk this morning and now he was suffering or he had peed on the floor of the beautiful borrowed house. But Edgar didn’t—he couldn’t—open his mouth. It was a useful story that his throat was raw. His throat was even beginning to feel that way, now that he had written such a lie to his brand-new teacher, who had a kind heart. Edgar felt it was so.

  “Forget anything I told you about Jason Crumley and all that kissing nonsense,” Caroline said to him. “He’s just a jerk, which is what my mother said grade-eight boys were going to be like. They are the way they are. You wait it out. Things get better eventually.” She was looking at him too closely. “Are you, like—not talking to anybody anymore? ’Cause your mother dragged you all the way up here?”

  If only he had brought a notebook and pen with him! He would have explained everything to Caroline. She would have understood it all, even if he had said, “I think I’m turning into a dog.” But he wasn’t turning into a dog, not really. Part of him was doggy, and part of him was just the same. Mainly he just couldn’t speak anything but dog.

  Caroline would understand that, wouldn’t she?

  Somebody called for Caroline, and she drifted off to talk to some big kids lounging around a frozen basketball hoop, near where the sun was fairly strong. Edgar watched a light brown, shaggy dog sniff along a row of houses across the street, not looking up. She was quite far away, but somehow Edgar knew she was heavy with puppies. He felt he had smelled her along the street up near the house on Eighth. When he closed his eyes, he could smell her even better. He had a sense of himself shrinking, getting closer to the ground, becoming furrier . . . and then just trotting away, no one giving a care if he came or went.

  It would be nice to be a dog. Just at this very moment.

  The bell rang, and the yelling, running, playing kids headed back to the doors in their colorful winter jackets and tall warm boots. Edgar waited by the fence and watched them, wondering now if indeed he had been transformed into a dog and so was excused. As soon as the doors close, he thought, and the yard was empty except for him, he would trot off and find that light brown dog and ask her what she was sniffing about, between those houses.

  The kids filed in. Edgar felt himself becoming warm, the way a dog would beneath a thick coat of fur. The teachers on duty herded the children. All was in order; no one was noticing him.

  It would be like one of Salvadore’s uncle’s card tricks, Edgar thought. To just slip into fur and root around as a dog for a time.

  The tall teacher turned, spied him. If he were a dog, if he—

  “Hey! You’re late already! Get a move on!” the teacher yelled.

  No fur, no easy escape. Edgar ran, like a boy, toward the closing doors.

  The doors shut behind him, and Edgar hurried along the hallway. Kids all around him were wrestling off their winter coats and boots and scampering into their proper classrooms. His room was . . . somewhere. He thought it was just along this way and then around the corner, but that was the kindergarten classroom he’d almost turned into. Edgar retraced his steps as the halls got quieter . . . and then he was alone again, lost. There was the office. It would’ve been a simple
thing to pop in and say, “I’m sorry, I’m just new. I’ve forgotten where Ms. Lajoie’s room is,” and someone would have given him directions or walked him back. It would have been simple for anyone, perhaps, but not for him, not in his current state.

  The tall teacher who had herded him back into the school was gone now, disappeared to his own duties, maybe. And now Edgar was back at the front doors. He could simply walk out again, he realized. No alarm would go off. But he turned instead where he remembered the library was. He hung his coat on a hook by the door, pulled off his boots, walked in socked feet through the doors. Other kids were there, sitting silently at tables, absorbed in books or in working. The computers along the wall were occupied. No one looked at him.

  He was good at disappearing. He pulled back his cheeks. He melted into nothing practically as he eased his way between the shelves of books. Maybe Ms. Lajoie would just forget that he was her new student and carry on with the lessons for the day.

  He spied Lucetta, the librarian with the gray face and red-rimmed eyes, absorbed in something on her computer at the main desk. She did not have to see him. She did not have to look up . . . as he climbed the stairs to the second level, where more books were. Like: Race Across the Top of the World. Sled dogs on the cover. He carried it to a small table in a back corner, and then he spied another book, The Collected Short Stories of Jack London. So he took that one, crawled under the table, and pulled the chair into place so that he would be safe.

  Here. Here it was: “To Build a Fire.”

  Day had dawned cold and gray when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail. He climbed the high earth-bank where a little-traveled trail led east through the pine forest. It was a high bank, and he paused to breathe at the top. He excused the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o’clock in the morning. There was no sun or promise of sun, although there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear day. However, there seemed to be an indescribable darkness over the face of things. That was because the sun was absent from the sky. This fact did not worry the man. He was not alarmed by the lack of sun. It had been days since he had seen the sun.