Rosie O'Dell Page 2

  At home that evening, I asked Dad, “Was it because you didn’t want any more like me that you and Mom didn’t have any more kids?”

  “My God, we would have loved to have two or three more like you,” said Dad, dropping the Evening Telegram in his lap in shock. And he explained that Mom had had a miscarriage a year after I was born and had been advised that it would be too risky to her health to try to have any more children. “We were very lucky to have you.” He frowned. “How come you’re asking about all that right now, my man?”

  “I was just wondering.”

  That night in bed I heard sharp words between Dad and Mom downstairs when they thought I was asleep. My mother’s voice, raised unusually high, had awakened me: “Joe, you’ve got to go with me to Nina’s birthday party for heaven’s sake.”

  Dad growled back, “I’m not going, I said. That husband of hers has got their daughter poisoning our son’s mind with anxiety over being an only child now.”

  “Oh that’s just silly, my love. They’re two smart little kids who dream that stuff up themselves to try to one-up each other.”

  “No nine-year-old is that smart. Or that asinine. You know damn well where she gets it. I’m having nothing else to do with that sick prick.”

  “How did this animosity start between you and Joyce O’Dell anyway? Didn’t you start it by calling him our prize-winning poet of modern porn?”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Gladys? I never said a thing about his perverted poetry till he called me a bean-counter with an adding machine’s concept of literature.”

  “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 Snagnesses. 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 every 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 be
fore 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 explore 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 afternoon. 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?”

  “By the sounds of it, Tommy. We’ll hear in a second if we listen.”

  It could be her, then. She’d been bragging her head off in school that they were going canoeing around this time on some wild river up there. A thrill, the delicious anticipation of a wicked secret hope actually happening, rushed through me.

  “Every week some other idiot ends up drowned,” Brent’s father muttered around his Lucky Strike while the commercials pattered on. He removed the cigarette and blew a smoke ring towards us boys. “How do you guys figure it? Nature’s way of cleaning out the polluted human gene pool?”

  “It must be,” I said, grinning so wide my cheeks hurt.

  “How about you, Brent?” said his dad. “Do you even know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes,” squeaked Brent, his indignation making his alto ascend into falsetto, “I know what you’re shaggin’ talking about.”

  Mrs. Anstey’s lips fluttered with the force of the air she blew out in exasperation. “Leave him alone, Dad,” she said. “And you, Brent, stop saying shaggin’ every second time you open your mouth.”

  I didn’t know why, but I’d begun to feel strangely agitated. As the commercial ended, a mighty urge rose in me to jump up and run outdoors into the perfect day and just ignore the newscast and everything in it. I suppressed it. I didn’t want to know, yet I had to know, who’d drowned.

  “The victim was a member of a group,” the announcer intoned in tragic mode, “canoeing on the Main River in White Bay.” Th
e geography bolted me upright. That was exactly where she’d said she was going. My prayer had come true. A sensation went through me that was not the pure pleasure I’d expected. It started out bittersweet at best and ended like acid. Then a picture more horrible than anything I’d ever seen or imagined before in my life rolled through my brain: strands of her flaming hair streamed out on the current while her face, with her wide eyes on me, sank deeper and deeper into the black water till the fading paleness vanished utterly.

  My heart gave a sickening leap and my chest constricted so much I could not breathe. I felt as if I were myself drowning in a deep river of guilt. Over the roar of blood in my ears I strained to hear the name that would confirm what I already knew. The radio sounded like it was on the other side of a torrent: “… withholding the name pending notification of next of kin.”

  “Oh that’s great,” Brent’s dad growled. “Now everyone who knows someone up there will be worried to death until they finally find out who it was.”

  “Tommy, sweetheart, what’s wrong?” Brent’s mother paused in picking up my empty plate and placed fingertips on my forehead. “Do you feel sick? You’re white as a sheet.” She turned to her husband with a soft reproach: “Dad, you’re not supposed to smoke those old cigarettes at the table while the boys are trying to eat their breakfast.”

  “These are good expensive tailor-made fags, missus, not those cheap, sickly roll-your-owns filled with the next thing to cow dung I had to smoke when I was their age. The little buggers are lucky.”

  “It’s not the smoke, Mrs. Anstey,” I said, dragging her glare off her husband. “Someone I know is gone canoeing on that river where someone got drowned.”

  “Who is it? Someone from school?”

  “One of those O’Dell girls.”

  “The one in your class?”