BILLY
Mr Carmody is large.
Mr Carmody is built like two tree trunks joined up the waist coat buttons, tall and wooden and unbending, his clothes never quite finding the shape of his big shambly frame. One of his eyes doesn't quite move the same as the other, has a sort of Long John Silver squint to it, and his cheeks are jowelly, which give his head a sort of pumpkin look.
On the end of a pair of wrestler's arms his fat clumsy hands hang like boiled steaks, each with five pork sausages attached, brown from the cigarettes he endlessly rolls and smokes, hands especially designed by the education system to catch any errant older boy square in the middle of the back, and make them expel a sharp OOOF! of air as the shock wave whumps through their chest.
Mr Carmody is a loud, untidy, chain-smoking bully.
Mr Carmody is Thomas’s teacher.
Each day Mr Carmody moulds soft Grade Five, Six, and Seven heads into the shape of hard dogma, ready for Friday tests that earn either a little green "EXCELLENT" stamp or a lesser blue "Very Good" stamp on the corner of the smart kid's pages. Otherwise it’s a mark out of ten that has a dark look come with it, and an even darker comment, both of which get darker as the scores go down.
On Friday afternoons Mr Carmody rearranges the seating order for the next week, with the darkest comments down the front nearest himself, grading back through the shades of grey to the Very Good blues, and the Excellent greens up the back. This is Mr Carmody’s science of teaching children in a one-room country school in 1949.
Thomas and his mate Jim are both blessed with just enough cleverness to be able to manage their results so they come out of Mr Carmody’s wheat-from-the-chaff technique each week side by side up near the back. Except for that time they set fire to the – but, that’s another story.
This is about Billy.
Billy was thirteen, and right from the beginning he reminded Thomas of his Uncle Lew's draughthorse, as Billy was very strong, and very large, and very friendly, and sort of ambled when he walked, and always seemed to have half a dozen of the smaller kids hanging off him, who he tolerated with plodding good humour.
And Billy played lunchtime footy the same way, never got past a slow jog, always mindful of his size and strength going for the ball in case he accidently flattened someone, although nobody seemed to make any such concessions to Billy, and he just took the thumps and the bumps with an odd little two-grunt laugh that was truly his own.
Billy came with one of the work-following families, the ones that every so often seem to simply arrive from somewhere over the horizon, spill from a tired old truck with their own village of kids and dogs and porridge-grey army tents and take over an outside edge of the town for a while, then one day two weeks or two months later just aren't there any more.
Billy's mum trundled him in one Monday morning, a tall scraggy woman with a sharp nose and a loud voice and she stood at Mr Carmody’s desk and insisting in no uncertain manner that her boy had to finish his education before it was too late entirely and that he’d done some of Grade Seven by correspondence and that she was a taxpayer and Billy had a right to learning same as everyone else and not once did she let go of Billy’s sleeve or lose the set of her jaw. Mr Carmody went a little red in the face.
In reality Billy couldn't read or write or add up better than a Grade Three or Four kid, but he was put in with the Grade Sixes anyway. But right at the front. Knees and feet always awkward and out in the aisle, elbows at odd angles as he laboured under Mr Carmody’s dark eye.
But Mr Carmody and Billy just never seemed to hit it off.
Maybe it was his mother that got them off on the wrong foot. Or maybe it was his big boots always out in the aisle, or maybe it was his around-the-top, tongue-straining, left-handed ink-splodge and nib-twisting writing that upset him, or maybe it was his creative spelling or his imaginative use of numbers. Or maybe it was simply that Billy could be as indifferent and unmoving as a corner strainer post if he chose to be, which seemed to be every lesson of every day.
Whatever it was Mr Carmody dished it out to Billy regularly in a ritual that was always the same.
Mr Carmody would set it going by looking over Billy's shoulder in the course of his up and down the aisles, and he'd make a loud sarcastic remark about what he saw on Billy’s page, and this would just get under Billy's skin and he'd simply make a lovely big mistake right there before Mr Carmody's very eyes which would make the man go red in the face and he'd thump Billy on the back which would REALLY bring the mule out in Billy so he'd do something like make a big ink blob on the page or scribble over it or once he even pulled the page clean out of his exercise book and tore it up very carefully into eight equal pieces.
Then Mr Carmody would march him off to the woodwork shed for ten minutes, Billy with a silly smile on his face and Mr Carmody with his eyes bulging out and his whole head like a huge beetroot. Billy would take his six cuts without a word or a flinch and everyone would keep their heads well down for the rest of the afternoon.
And that's how it was, just about every day for a couple of weeks. Until that morning.
Thomas and Jim and the other Grade Sevens were out in the woodwork shed coaxing hatracks and pinboxes from stubborn bits of timber, while in the distance Grade Six was being taught English, that quickly turned to Mr Carmody bellowing at Billy how the i goes before the e except after c you fool.
The boys waited.
In no time at all Billy was bullied in through the doorway by a shining red face accusing him of doing it on purpose you stupid great ox, and there's only ever one way to teach your kind, and you'll never learn anything without the help of Mr Birch, and for the second time in two hours his fat porky hands grabbed the length of killer willow from top of the tool cupboard.
As always, the others froze as the two of them took their positions in the battle of wills.
But this time it seemed to be different. Billy didn't hang his head a little and look steadily at Carmody's paunch, but instead he drew himself up and pulled back his shoulders and looked Mr Carmody steady and steely in the eye. And in this way they kind of - squared off - like duellists - only one was without a weapon.
The first cut came down hard from somewhere up in the rafters – THWAK! - and with malice, Carmody teetering forward onto his toes a little for maximum effect, jaw set in a dull rage.
But only the once.
Billy's big labourer's hand closed over the cane as it arrived the second time and he wrenched it free, then he belted Carmody with it - hard - right across his upper arm - WAP! - fair on the muscle, and while the dumbfounded man was sort of stumbling backwards, Billy took the willow in both hands and gave it a vicious greenstick fracture - KERACK! - about an inch from Carmody's slack and disbelieving mouth. Then he simply handed it back to him, and he took it so gently it seemed like he was going to say thank you.
Billy looked him in the eye for one more second, with his chin stuck out a fraction, and in that second the man became only a man, and the boy became an equal. And without a word Billy shuffled off back to his desk.
Spectators and saws and chisels and pieces of wood were still frozen in the moment, but Carmody just turned away, and walked out.
The rest of that morning had a kind of storm cloud over it. Like waiting. Full of whispers. But Carmody was oddly quiet, and just a touch pale, and sort of polite, like a shorthorn bull is polite while it waits for you to get halfway across its paddock.
Lunchtime was full of the usual stuffing down of sandwiches from well-used brown paper bags, then lots of rowdy red-rovers-all-over and grabbing of squealy girls. Up on the paddock that was the school oval a knot stood around two green-kneed boys sorting out the pecking order on the wire grass, strengthening the bonds between either two friends or two enemies, as even the best of mateships invariably contained a good stoush or two.
In the near distance doing his rounds Carmody was stalking the circle of urgers, but watching Billy spectating from the edge. Barely noticed he eased up and started making quiet comments about how good wrestling was for boys, as the two on the grass scrambled to their feet, all shocked hair and shirt-tails. Everyone waiting for whatever came next.
But Carmody just went on, oddly smiling, telling them how a bit of wrestling was good for you, and he’d done some himself when he was a boy, made you big and strong. Like Billy here.
Billy looked down at the ground and worried the grass with his foot, but the corners of his mouth twitched a little at the unexpected compliment.
Yes, he bet Billy had done some wrestling, had a good build to him already, look at these arms and shoulders - and he also bet that Billy could already beat any three of you puny weaklings - couldn't you Billy - and Carmody was smiling all the while.
The two kids that had been fighting started half-heartedly pulling at Billy's arms, and another kid went for his legs, and Billy laughed, happy to be in the fun and on the right side of Carmody for once, but like some great boulder, barely moved.
Carmody gave one of the other kids a push. What did I tell you, he’s stronger than four of you together, and the kid grabs Billy round the waist. Ah you wrestle like a bunch of girls, I said you couldn't do it, and he nudged two more kids into the stumble of arms and legs, what a mob of sissies, Billy's better than half a dozen of you babies, call yourselves wrestlers, couldn't wrestle your way out of a paper bag, go on, get into it, show 'em how it’s done Billy, and he began to circle the pack, one by one pushing another and another boy in.
Billy just moved a foot every now and then to keep balance but otherwise his muscles simply flexed a bit more and a bit more, taking up the strain, his smile now set firmly on his jaw, trying to hold on to the fun and his balance as more and more kids hung off his rocking frame, some now getting thrown off and thudding onto their backsides, springing back in as Carmody peppered them with sarcasm, shoving more and more boys into the pile, until everyone was in it, eight or ten of them yelling, grunting, grabbing, falling off and back into it like some vertical tug-of-war, all noise and knees and jolts in the cheek, oblivious to all but Carmody’s urging and the desperate need to gain ground, until the rabble of bodies began to crumble, pulling down and down and down, until the prey was finally pulled right to the ground, flat down, subdued down and beaten, with a war-whooping winner on every corner, each looking up at Carmody with a smug sense of achievement, waiting for his acknowledgement.
But Carmody just walked away. Smiling.
There underneath them was big friendly Billy, with fat silent tears rolling down each side of his face, and staring straight up into the blue.
There was a sudden and awful sense of urgency to the piling off, as if all the boys had been caught thieving, or worse, and they quickly turned to helping Billy up, with awkward snatches of compliment as they picked his clothes clean and patted his back and straightened his well-darned jumper.
But Billy never said a word. He just shrugged them off and wiped a wet nose and a wet cheek along his sleeve and shuffled off home and never looked back.
They never saw Billy again.
And Thomas and Jim could never talk about that day.
© T. R. Edmonds 1985
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