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Reprinted from Who Has Seen the Wind by W. O. Mitchell:

Forbsie’s fat face shone. “Do we have to line up?” he said to Artie.

“Everybody does,” Artie answered, his face contorting at the offending glasses. “The girls go in the girls’ door an’ the boys go in the boys’ door. You better not let ‘em catch you going in the girls’ door.”

“Why not?” asked Brian.

“You’re not s’posed to. There’s two toilets. There’s the girls’ toilet on the girls’ side — an’ the boys’ on the boys’ side — in the basement.”

“Is there!” said Forbsie.

“That’s where old Tinhead is.” Artie referred to Mr. Briggs, the school janitor, said to have a silver plate in his head ever since he had served with the Princess Pats in the war.

Ahead of them and behind them small groups of children made their way to the school on the eastern edge of the town. “There’s the China Kids,” said Artie.

Brian saw them, the Wongs, Tang and Vooie. It was Vooie’s first day at school, and his sister, Tang, with the protectiveness of an older sister, had the collar of his coat clenched tight in her hand. Brian had seen the Wong children often, for they had grown up on that section of gray cement that ran before their father’s Bluebird Café. Now that the mother, a small amber woman brought from China by Wong to bear him Tang and Vooie, had died, the father had left Vooie to his sister’s care. He cooked meals for the children, and that was all. Brian knew Wong too, a small, stooped Chinese with a white mustache, who wore summer and winter a rooster-comb-toque. Brian had seen him often behind the café counter with its welter of cigarette and tobacco packets, its jaw breakers, licorice plugs, whips, pipes, and staring fried-egg candies.

Brian’s confidence ebbed as they neared the schoolyard on the prairie edge and as Artie regaled the other boys with stories of the terrible Miss MacDonald. She was cranky; she hated kids; it was she, he told Forbsie and Brian, who would be their teacher.

Until the bell rang, Forbsie and Brian stood with their backs to the orange brick of Lord Roberts School, watching other boys play catch, or wrestle in the bare dirt. The swings on the town side were occupied; girls swinging idly with one foot trailing, the boys pumping high and mightily. When the bell rang somewhere in the depths of the school, the children formed reluctantly into two lines at the doors; those left outside the lines were the beginners, forlorn little souls whom Miss MacDonald came out to shepherd in to the school. She assigned them their seats in the lower grades room, at the head of the stairs, told them to sit quietly and play with the colored plasticine Mariel Abercrombie had passed out. Then she turned to hand out the readers to the Grade Threes, of which Artie Sherry was a member.

The first excitement over, Brian began to find school a rather disappointing affair. Forbsie sat across from him, Artie two rows over. He would go over and see Artie for a while, Brian decided; he got up and started down the aisle. Miss MacDonald, at the board, turned and saw him. “Sit down, Brian.”

“I’m just going over to see Artie.”

“You’ll have to sit down.” She turned back to the board.

Brian continued on his journey to Artie. She wasn’t his mother; he wasn’t hurting anything; he wasn’t doing anything wrong.

“I said to sit down!”

He stopped at the end of the aisle. “I’m not doing anything wrong. I just want to see Artie for a minute.”

“You must put up your hand if you want something. Then I’ll give you permission to see Artie.”

“May I see him then?”

“If you sit down.”

“I’ll just have to get up again. May I see Artie?”

“No.”

He stood watching her.

“Sit down in your seat!”

He continued to stand. Miss MacDonald’s thin face reddened slightly. She bit her lip. “SIT DOWN!”

Brian stood. Utter classroom quiet had descended. Outside the window a meadow lark went up his bright scale with a “one-two-three-and-here-I-go.” Miss MacDonald began to walk down the aisle in which Brian was standing. He reached into his hip pocket and felt the comfort of the water pistol there. Miss MacDonald stopped three seats ahead of him. “Will you sit down!”

Wordlessly he drew the pistol out, being careful not to squeeze the bulb. He held it behind his back. Miss MacDonald reached out her hand to guide him back to his seat. It paused in midair as Brian brought the water pistol to view. One clear drop of water hung from the end pointing at Miss MacDonald’s mid-riff. Her mouth flew open. She stared at the pistol and at the slight drip of water from the small hand holding it.

“You sit down,” Brian ordered her. She stared at the pistol and at the slight drip of water from the small hand holding it.

“I filled it,” Brian assured her, “out of the fountain. Why don’t you sit down?”

Her face flamed. “Give me that pistol!”

He made no move to hand it to her. “Then put up your hand,” he said, “or else I’ll squirt.” A look of determination appeared on Miss MacDonald’s face. “It squirts good –”

Her hand darted out to the water pistol. Startled, Brian squeezed. The pistol squirted. Miss MacDonald, with her dripping hand, jerked the pistol from his grasp. She propelled him from the room.

As he walked ahead of her to the end of the hall where the Principal’s office was, Brian’s heart pounded; he was in for it. The front of her dress dripping, Miss MacDonald knocked on the Principal’s door. It opened, and Mr. Digby, tall and sandy-haired, a questioning look upon his rough face, stood there.

With emotion poorly concealed, Miss MacDonald told him what had happened, the indignant spray of saliva from her thin lips unheeded, the corners of her mouth quivering. When she had finished, Digby said:

“You’d better let your classes go. Miss Spencer has, hers. I’ll attend to Brian.”

The door closed on Miss MacDonald’s outraged back.

Mr. Digby walked to the desk, sat down; he leaned forward with his elbows on the top. “Well, Brian?”

The boy stared at him.

“Little trouble?”

With his dark gaze deliberately unflinching, Brian continued to stare.

Mr. Digby’s long fingers began to drum the desk top. He leaned back in the chair; the fingers drummed on. He cleared his throat. The drumming stopped. It began again.

“Don’t — Won’t you talk to me?”

Unchanged, Brian’s face looked up to the Principal; no expression was there, certainly no inclination to talk was indicated. Mr. Digby rose from his chair, Brian’s eyes lifting with him. Silently the schoolmaster cursed Miss MacDonald. He wondered when the fact that she was dealing with bits of human being would become evident to her; he wondered when she would show the slightest spark of understanding and leave the narrow confines of herself. Even a sense of humour — she was so wrong as a teacher, predicating everything a child did, of herself.

“You — Don’t you like school, Brian?”

No sign betrayed Brian’s response one way or the other to the institution of education.

“We’re only trying to — to –” What were they trying to do? He’d talked it over enough with Hislop when he’d been here. Each year a new crop. Teach them to line up six times a day, regulate their lives with bells, trim off the uncomfortable habits, the unsocial ones — or was it simply the ones that interfered with . . .? “We . . . want to help you. You want people to like you, don’t you?”

He could see the gentle swell and ebb of the boy’s chest under his sweater, that and nothing more.

“You want to get along with people. You want to grow up to be . . . ” An individual whose every emotion, wish, action, was the resultant of two forces: what he felt and truly wanted, what he though he should feel and ought to want — regardless of the logic of his own particular individuality. Give him the faiths that belonged all other men; let them light up the heart of darkness with which his little soul was born. His mind shied from his thinking like a horse from too high a jump. The thing was to get the child to talk — without frightening it out of him. “Miss MacDonald is your teacher now. You must do as she says. It’s like — it’s like . . .” He cast about for something to say, any wedge to slip under the barrier between them. “You do what your mother tells you,” he pried. “You don’t disobey her.”

Still no interest or understanding showed in the boy’s dark eyes.

“Everybody must learn–” What could he say! What would the boy understand? “Have you a dog, Brian?”

There was a flicker of the boy’s eyes. That was it.

“He does what you tell him. You expect him to do what you want him to. A dog isn’t much good if he won’t do what he’s told.” He looked for a moment at the boy with his erect back, his legs slightly apart. “Does he do any tricks?”

“He can jump over –” The words spilled out, then stopped.

“Over your arms if you hold them out?”

“Over a stick,” Brian corrected him.

“Oh.” The teacher was silent because he knew it was the right moment to say nothing.

“Tricks aren’t any good. He’s going to catch gophers. That isn’t a trick.”

The Principal nodded.

“They’re for catching gophers.”

“That’s right.”

“Fox terriers. He’s a fox terrier. I don’t like her.”

“Don’t you?”

“She tried to make me sit down. I didn’t feel like sitting down. I wasn’t hurting anything.”

“What if everyone in the room wanted to stand up? She couldn’t teach very well then, could she?”

Brian considered a moment. “She stands up.”

“That’s because she’s the teacher.”

“Does she have to stand up to teach people things?”

Digby nodded.

“Maybe I have to stand up to learn things,” suggested Brian.

“Do you have to?”

“Maybe I do,” said Brian. “Does she?”

“Maybe she does,” said Digby.

“Well, I don’t.”

“You could learn anyway,” suggested Digby, “couldn’t you?”

“Yes, I could. But I don’t think I’ll learn from her. I better have another teacher.”

“I don’t think that could be arranged,” Digby explained to him. “You see, she’s the only one we have for Grade One. You want to go to school, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes. I’m going to find out about things.”

“Then you’d better try to get along with Miss MacDonald.” There was a note of firmness in Digby’s voice.

Brian was silent. Digby reached into his desk drawer; he drew out the water pistol and handed it to Brian. “She’d like you to have this back,” he said, knowing that it was the farthest thing from Miss MacDonald’s desires.

“Thank you. It doesn’t work very good anyway.”

“All right. No more school today — this afternoon. Think about what I said.”

Brian stood for a moment at the door. “I like you,” he said.

For some time after Brian had left, Digby sat at his desk. On the half-opened window behind him a fly, lulled to languor by the morning sun, bunted crazily up the pane, fell protestingly, and lay half-paralyzed on the sill, the numbness of his sound lost in the emptiness of the office.

Reprinted from Who Has Seen the Wind by W. O. Mitchell. Toronto: Macmillan, 1997 (first published 1947). Pp. 77-84.

read a review of Who Has Seen the Wind (1991 edition)
read his obituary in the Globe and Mail
return to W. O. Mitchell