Descent

5 - "I'm sure dressing up in outfits and yelling at stuff is really tough"

Tommy's last class was history, which was new for him. In Grade 5, in Kingston, they had not had history class at all. Tommy felt like history class was "real school" and made him feel sophisticated, like he was finally learning something useful. He was terribly disappointed to learn, on the first day in September, that this was "Canadian History" with a specific focus on the colonization of Quebec and the settling of Upper and Lower Canada. Tommy balked at this narrow focus and what he considered to be government propaganda. Everybody knew that nothing exciting had ever happened in Canada. 'History' meant three things: WW2, Ancient Rome, and "The French Revolution" which Tommy really only knew anything about because of Les Miserables, which he had on CD. Why anyone would waste time learning about Canadian history was completely beyond him.

History class was located on the fifth floor of the school, requiring Tommy to climb four flights of stairs after gym glass, which he considered to be a personal attack on his thighs. Huffing and puffing, his legs burning with every step, Tommy had to hold himself up on the railing as the rest of the school thundered past him. He would be late to class, the last one in, he always was, and although no one would say anything, he'd have to walk the gauntlet of judgement from the kids already sitting at their desks. He'd feel his teacher, Mr. Bigham, staring into the back of his fat head, annoyed that he'd had to interrupt himself while he waited for this pig of a 12-year-old to sit down.

When Tommy got to the top of the stairs, he shoved the fire door crash bar and stepped into the long, dark, empty hallway. The bell had gone while he was still a flight away, and there was no one in the hall at all, just the sour smell of kids and the drifting bits of dust lazily tumbling through shafts of autumn light. Construction paper posters in red and blue hung in the space between the tops of lockers and the bottom of the foam ceiling tiles telling him to "Try Vegetarian" and "Respect!"

When he got to the door of his classroom he took a big breath, both to steady his nerves and just to finish his recovery from the arduous climb, then turned the knob and stepped in. The room was dark when Tommy entered--Mr. Bingham had set up the overhead projector. A black and white map of Rosshaven beamed onto the pull down screen at the front of the room. Bingham stopped speaking, as always, and cleared his throat as a cue for Tommy to head towards his desk. Tommy heard a few kids whispering in the dark, but nothing specific. He found his desk (second from the back on the right side) and plopped down onto his seat, still breathing heavily. The air was thick in here, too, and he started to sweat.

Mr. Bingham continued, "Rosshaven was founded in 1855 by three families on a contract from the Hudson's Bay Company to set up a trading post that would connect Kingston and Bytowne, which we now call Ottawa."

The map was of the town from above and labelled "Rosshaven, 1876" though it could have been made yesterday for all the differences. There was one major intersection south of a river crossed by a narrow bridge, and train tracks ran in diagonal from northeast to southwest just to the south of downtown. Outside of downtown were only five buildings, all represented by big empty rectangles on the map.

"Downtown Rosshaven," Mr. Bingham continued, "had a general store, a stables, a farm supply store, and that's about it. The train station, which is still in use today, housed a post office for communicating with the outside world."

Mr. Bingham circled the rectangle at the top of the map in red pen. The shadow of his hand temporarily eclipsed the image of the town like a colossal spider.

"This is where the school is now, where we're sitting this very moment." Mr. Bingham cleared his throat again, "The Bedford Bennett Meetinghouse was a place for the townsfolk to meet and discuss local issues. It was also a storehouse and hosted seasonal events like auctions and markets."