Bright Shining Moment Read online

  “Take off those boots and put them in the cloakroom,” Sister tells her. “You know better than that by now.”

  “But I haven’t got any stockings on today, Sister.”

  “Take them off anyway, please. The floors are already too wet. And try to walk where it’s dry when you return to your desk.”

  Jeanine sighs again. She shuffles back to the cloakroom and kicks off her boots. Her feet are dirty. And they stink. Everyone wants to laugh, but no one dares. Not just for fear of making Sister even angrier, but because we all know Jeanine will ambush you on the way home from school if you laugh at her. Then she’ll scrub your face with snow, right after she pulls out a clump of your hair and punches you in the nose.

  Nobody blinks as Jeanine pads back to her desk, wafting her smell behind her, then plops down in her seat. Her dark eyes are as hard as alleys. I look quickly back at Sister. She’s wearing a tight smile. I wonder if she likes doing this to Jeanine. But I know that’s a very bad thing to think about.

  We’re all quietly facing the front of the class when Sister drops Jeanine’s wad of chewing gum into the wastebasket, then carries on with the lesson.

  0

  I know some other bad things about Jeanine Bonenfant. Her family is even poorer than ours. Her mother never gets out of bed. If you walk through the front door of her house, you will see a bed in the living room, with Jeanine’s very sick mother slumped on a pillow. She will be buried under sheets that are grayish and used to be white. That’s what Monsieur Nadeau, the bread man, has told Maman.

  Something is wrong with Madame Bonenfant, but nobody knows what. They say Jeanine’s father works hard at his job, but they have even more kids in their family than we do. Eight, I think, but I lost count because it seems like almost every spring there’s a new one. Not last spring, though, because she never got out of bed since last winter, Jeanine’s mother. Jeanine’s older sister, Jacqueline, can’t go to school anymore because she has to look after all her younger brothers and sisters. I would hate that. They also say Jeanine’s father is a drunk and sometimes he hits his children, and I think that might be true.

  I know Jeanine steals from her mother’s purse, which is why she always has money for candy. And coins for the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul charity box too, which helps poor families in our parish without enough food and clothing. I never have any money to give. There is a cardboard box on Sister’s desk, a box with a slot in the top, and every day she tells our class about all of those needy people. And every day she instructs her students to bring in some coins to drop into the box for them. Sister says that so many people are “destitute and desperate,” and that sometimes their fathers “must resort to begging” in order to feed their families. At our house, there’s always enough food for everyone, and we always have clean clothes to wear.

  More than anything, I would love to take some coins to my school for those poor, sad families. I would love to be like the other girls in my class who are lucky enough to get to walk up to the front each day and drop a coin through the slot as Sister beams from behind her desk. I would love to be the one everyone watches walking up the aisle to the desk and making the other coins clink when I drop one in. But I am not allowed. There is no change to spare in our family, with so many mouths to feed. Maman doesn’t miss a chance to remind us whenever I mention Sister’s charity box on her desk. “I have hungry children of my own, tell that to your teacher.” But I never will!

  Yes, Jeanine is poorer than we are. But she doesn’t seem to think so. And that day after school, when she’s shuffling along for home in her thick rubber boots with bare feet in them, with NO socks, she lets me know, once again.

  “You’re so poor that your mother makes your hats,” Jeanine yells from the other side of the snowy street. “And you have stinking horses and chickens and a barn in your backyard, and sometimes you even ride to school in a sled!”

  My hands turn into fists. Why did she have to say those things to me? I want to run across the street and punch her big nose. Maman has never made our hats. She buys us felt hats at the United store for fifty-nine cents. We girls wear store-bought hats in the Sauriol family, not homemade ones like our brothers wear. And those smelly horses and chickens! And the stupid sled that I hate riding in so much. I know I can’t punch Jeanine. I’d never win a fight with this girl. I can hit her with words, though. It’s my only hope.

  “Well you’re so poor, your mother makes your stockings!” I holler back at her. “But they’re so full of holes that you have to go barefoot in winter because your mother never even gets out of bed to mend them anymore!”

  Jeanine shrieks. She takes off running, turns down a side street, and disappears. My cousin Lucille and I link arms and giggle and chatter about what just happened as we wander slowly home, taking a shortcut through a back laneway.

  Jeanine steps out from behind a fence and stands there blocking our way. Her coat is too tight across her chest. She isn’t wearing mittens, and her hands are red and raw.

  “What did you say back there?” If she were a dog she would bite me, I know it.

  “Nothing,” I tell her as I watch my cousin running away.

  “Don’t lie to me, Sauriol. I heard what you said,” she shrieks again. She grabs me before I have a chance to run. She trips me, knocks off my hat, and yanks on my hair. She kicks great flurries of snow into my face until my mouth and nostrils are full and I’m almost choking. Now she looms over top of me and stares down, her face a tight and fiery mask. She makes a yucky sucking sound in her throat, then lets a long string of snotty drool dribble onto my face. I feel it hot and horrid on my cheek. I want to swipe it away, but I’m too terrified to move. She leans in close. I can feel my heart pounding hard underneath my coat. Maybe she can hear it too, it’s so loud in my ears.

  “That will teach you to say such stupid things!” Jeanine screams in my face. Then she steps away but keeps on staring at me, her nostrils flaring like a horse, like the two in our yard, where I wish I was.

  I lie there, perfectly still, afraid of what she might do next.

  “Don’t you ever talk about me again, or next time it will be even worse for you, Sauriol.” Then she adds, “Maudite habitante,” with a growl.

  A damned peasant! Jeanine, the dumb and dirty poor girl from the other side of Scott Street—from Mechanicsville—has called me a damned peasant! And spit in my face! For the first time ever, I feel angry enough to kill. Still lying there on the ground, I scrunch up two fistfuls of snow in my quaking hands, then stop, resisting the devil’s temptation to sit up and hurl the snow into Jeanine’s ugly face. Maybe because my guardian angel is whispering into my ear, knowing I don’t stand a chance. “To light and guard, to rule and guide.”

  I drop the clumps of snow, then stare at the sky, where fat flakes drift to the ground in lazy circles, until I hear her boots churning through the snow and know she’s gone. When I finally take a chance, I sit up slowly and wipe the spit from my face with my wet mitten. All I can see is snow and the slanted blue shadows of the houses all around me. Maybe somebody saw what just happened and is laughing behind a curtain in one of the windows. I hate that maybe someone saw Jeanine beating me up, and that maybe they’ll tell everyone they know.

  I pick myself up and brush myself off, pull on my hat, and scuff my way through the snowy streets the rest of the way home. I try my best to wipe the scowl off my face just before I walk through my back door. Jeanine Bonenfant pushed me down today, but I don’t want anyone to know. Oh, but I won’t forget this. I will never forget what she just did to me, or the horrible insulting thing she called me. And I will find a way to get back at this girl.

  3

  Four Little Chickens

  As soon as I reach Hinchey Avenue, where we live in the Hintonburg neighborhood of Ottawa, across the tracks from the poorer people in Mechanicsville, I start to catch my breath and feel safe again. There are
also lots of poor people in our area, which we like to call the Burg. But there are richer people too, a couple of streets over, west of Parkdale. People with nice cars, people with important jobs. The Burg is a better place to live than Mechanicsville, even though we do live close to the tracks.

  Whenever I get home from school, there are always good smells coming from the kitchen. No wonder—Maman spends nearly all of her time in there.

  “Where’s Yvette?” I ask after kicking off my boots.

  I stand them up by the door so Papa won’t step in a puddle and yell at me when he comes stomping in from outside. He spends lots of time out there—bang, bang, banging on the anvil in the yard, making things and fixing things for people. He makes knives and forks, and resoles our shoes out there too, usually on Saturdays. He also makes horseshoes for our horses.

  “Your sister is still in bed,” Maman says, and I can tell by the furrows on her face that she’s worried. “Still not feeling well after the cold she’s had for two weeks.”

  Or maybe an excuse to stay away from school because she’s afraid of Jeanine and her sisters and brothers, I think but don’t say out loud. Their whole family is scary. They don’t have a Holy Roller like Bernard or a bookworm like Arthur or a quiet sister like Yvette. All of them are like a pack of wild dogs, just waiting to jump on somebody or pelt them with snow or even punch them in the stomach or eye. I’ve seen it happen. And that snow today was bad enough.

  “Where are the boys?” I sniff the air. Raisin pies are cooling. I don’t really care where my brothers are right now. All I can think about are those pies.

  “Doing their homework in the living room by the fire.” Maman sees what I’m looking at. “Have one,” she tells me. “Go ahead.”

  “Really?” I can’t believe my luck, but she knows how I love them. “A whole one?”

  “Bien sûr,” she says, then sets a small steaming brown pie on the table and a fork beside it. “I made it just for you, you know. I knew you’d be hungry when you got home. And there are a few more for everyone else to share.” I don’t waste any time scooping forkfuls of the molten pie into my mouth, not caring how much it burns. I don’t want to share this pie that’s packed with raisins and a sweet, gooey syrup. I’m eating every bite because Maman said so.

  Then I sit in the rocker by the stove, staying warm and reading. It’s Papa’s chair, but we can use it when he’s working outside. He likes it here, after working all day delivering wood and doing odd jobs for people, then hammering on the anvil when he gets home. He sits in this chair to read the paper and to rest, and sometimes even to tell us stories. It’s my favorite reading place. As soon as he comes in, though, the chair is his. So when I hear his boots stomp out on the back porch, I jump out of Papa’s chair.

  Papa’s face is red and grim like always. I wonder if he’s happy, because he doesn’t smile very much. Maman says it’s because he has to work so hard to feed his four little chickens, ses quatre petits poulets. That’s us children—even though we have real chickens out in the henhouse that give us eggs every day.

  I don’t like the chopping block and axe out there, though.

  Once when I was small, I had a pet chicken I named Babette. I chose her when she was just a fluffy, little chick and watched her grow. She was black and would sit on my lap while I stroked her feathers. Then one day when I got home from school and ran to the henhouse, Babette was gone. I didn’t eat supper that night, and neither did Maman. And I couldn’t eat any chicken for a while after that day, either.

  At the table today, Maman and Papa aren’t speaking. But I catch them looking at each other. The boys are too busy eating to notice, and Yvette is playing with her food, pushing cabbage around on her plate and not eating. I’m not so hungry now, either, because I know something is wrong. I want to know what it is, but I’m afraid to ask in case it’s about the war.

  We are afraid of the war. The English, the Americans, and the Canadians are the Allies. And we’re fighting enemies. I know about that. Sometimes there are bold headlines in Le Droit, our newspaper. Maman, Papa, and Arthur talk about the war in quiet voices. Arthur knows a lot about it, but I don’t want to know too much, so I try not to listen. When it all started, I used to catch Maman crying at the stove or while she did the laundry, and I knew something scary happened again. But when she would see me watching, she’d quickly wipe her eyes on her apron and try to smile. A pretend smile, because I knew she was really scared.

  Maman loves King George and the Queen Mother and the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, who all live in London, England. She cuts pictures out of the newspaper and glues them into a scrapbook. When they came to Ottawa a few years ago, in 1939, we went to see them, the king and queen. They passed by the corner of Parkdale and Scott Street, so close to our house, and we saw them waving from their big black car.

  It was only a few months later, in September, when Britain and France declared war on Germany. Maman started to cry when a neighbor came by to tell us, right after he had heard the news on the radio. Then, when we heard that our prime minister, Mackenzie King, announced that Canada would be joining the war too, Maman cried even more, and I followed her around for three days, holding on to her apron. Yvette didn’t care, Bernard prayed, and Arthur studied every single word in the newspaper. As soon as the Germans invaded France and occupied Paris, there was no hiding the worry on her face. Maman says our ancestors are from France and that we still have distant relatives there even though we’ve never even met them.

  When they started dropping bombs on England, Maman cried some more. Then, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor last year and the Americans joined the war, she cried a little bit more. Just for a day or so before she put on her brave face again. But she often says it’s terrible what’s happening in Europe.

  I don’t know much about any of it except that bombs are falling and people and soldiers are dying every day. Sometimes I’m glad to be my age because I don’t have to know so much about all the awful things that are going on in the world. And I have Jeanine Bonenfant to worry about most of the time now, anyway.

  They aren’t talking about the war right now, yet Maman and Papa still look very worried. I’m afraid to ask why, so I sit there and wait. Papa puts his fork down and clears his throat, and the others all look at him. Whenever Papa clears his throat that way, it means he’s about to say something important to us. And our father doesn’t speak very often. So when he does, we’re sure to listen.

  “We will have tenants living with us. Starting at the end of this month.” That’s his announcement. I just stare at him because my head is full of questions I’m afraid to ask.

  “What does that mean, tenants?” Bernard dares to ask, because he’s the second youngest and braver because he doesn’t know any better yet.

  “It means other people who will pay us to live in our house,” Arthur explains with a scowl. “So where are we supposed to live, Papa?” Arthur is the bravest of all, because he’s the oldest and he talks to Papa like a man.

  Maman watches our faces. She looks sad but forces a smile, I can tell.

  “We will live down here on the bottom floor, and the tenants will live upstairs,” she explains. “We’ll move our beds down here. They will use our upstairs rooms as their rooms.”

  “But there’s no kitchen up there,” Yvette whispers. “I don’t want them to eat with us. And I don’t want them to eat our pies!”

  Maman tries to laugh. “They’ll bring along their own things for their kitchen. And their own food. And we’ll move some of our furniture upstairs for them to make room for our beds down here. You children will sleep in the front room, and our bedroom will be in the dining room. It will be an adventure. And it will help us; we need more money.”

  Silence around the table. We always need more money. That’s why I can’t have coins for the charity box. But what will it be like to have strangers living in our ho
use? Will they use the same bread man and the same milkman as we do? Will Maman have to do their laundry as well as ours? She spends every Monday in the kitchen washing our things in a big tub. On wash day, we have cornflakes for breakfast because Maman is too busy to make porridge. And sometimes before school I help her. I guess I’m not fast enough, though, because she always tells me to stop taking my time. But I can’t go any faster than my time, can I?

  Maman hangs everything to dry outside, even in winter. Then she carries it all back inside stiff as boards; shirts and dresses that look like flat, invisible people are inside of them until they thaw in the warm kitchen. They smell fresh like outside, all of our clothes and sheets, and I love the smell.

  Papa looks stern now, though, so I don’t want to ask any questions.

  “But what if we don’t like them?” Yvette says. “What if they’re not nice?”

  “They will be nice,” Maman says. “Très gentilles. Papa and I have met Mr. Coleman already. They’re just a mother and father and one little girl named Carolyn. She’s younger than Aline and older than Yvette. Bernard’s age. They’re from London, England. Mr. Coleman has a job here for a short time, and they don’t want to buy a house. He’s staying at a hotel right now, and his family will arrive soon from London.”

  “Will they talk funny?” Bernard asks. “Will they talk French like us? I don’t know much English yet.”

  Neither do I, but I know more than Bernard. We’re learning it in school now. Some of my friends are better at it than I am, though, because they have an English parent or neighbors on their street or even English friends. So they get a chance to practice sometimes. But at the library, I try to read English books sometimes, for the practice.

  “Will she go to school with us?” Yvette says. “I don’t want her to.”

  “Non, ma belle. They are Protestants,” Maman tells her, and Yvette and Bernard gasp.