‘He walked straight past the wolf and picked up the dead garter snake.’ This is the exemplary sentence that young teacher Connie writes out for a good-looking, baseball-loving pupil three grades behind in his studies. ‘Fifteen years old, and thick as a plank,’ the school Principal, Parley Burns considers him. Connie chooses her words to meet what this boy really cares about. The school is in Jewel, a small town in south-west Saskatchewan, and Michael, always happier out-of-doors, really did bring in a snake, to display its beauty. Finding it, Parley killed it with his blackboard-pointer. Unfortunately the best Michael can do with the sentence is: ‘He wakt past the fol and pickt up the ded grtre snake.’ But aloud he is eloquent enough, on the snake’s regular skin-shedding, for instance: ‘[It] tugs and leaves its skin behind, like a woman’s stocking,’ he says, suggesting that on other matters he may not be so backward.
Parley is aware of this possibility, telling Connie that Michael makes mistakes to gain the attention of a young woman he finds attractive. He may well be right. That Parley himself finds Connie this there is no doubt. Yet she cannot warm to him, and only resents his attentions, his keenness to walk her home at the end of the school day. She questions his ability to grasp others’ natures, and suspects him of free-floating prurience. He reminds her of a particular tree: ‘One Pine, it was called, for no other pines grew within 60 miles of it. Parley, too, stood alone and inspired superstitious respect and awe.’
The two coincide in Saskatchewan in 1929, but nine years, and a major tragedy in Jewel later, long after Connie has exchanged teaching for newspaper reporting, the two meet again, in a town in the Ottawa Valley. Parley is now the married head teacher of a high school. A 13-year-old pupil here, who had set out alone to pick the famed local chokecherries, is found murdered, and Connie, her mind unable to expunge memories of Parley’s past perversity, can’t forebear connecting man and dead girl.
The presentation of Connie’s reactions to the events of both 1929 and 1937 is made by Connie’s niece (and admiring younger friend), Anne Flood, who, with her Ottawa residence, second marriage, and writing career, would seem a surrogate for the author herself. As we near recent times, Anne takes over in first person, a shift in vantage-point making for challenges to writer and reader. The purely technical ones Hay, a highly accomplished and resourceful stylist, manages gracefully enough, not least in the retroactive light Anne can now throw on what has gone before. But she also puts herself emotionally into the foreground, which inevitably diminishes the first part’s considerable claustrophobic power, its sense of feminine innocence threatened by male guile.
Much the same shift occurred in Hay’s remarkable 2008 novel about a radio-station in Canada’s Northern Territories, Late Nights on Air, with the character clearly closest to the author finally becoming over-dominant. In both cases a lessening of authorial astringency ensues. Hay ends by being too nice about key male characters, after having shown, often with real brilliance, that life is too complex for niceness ever to be quite enough.
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