The Left-Handed Pencil Case

The Left-Handed Pencil Case

When I was almost eleven years old, my mother enrolled me in French school. This was not the Lycée Français de Chicago on West Wilson but one in Côte d’Ivoire where she had been living for 12 years as a refugee from Liberia.

She and others of her Kran language group had had to run away because a Kran general in the Liberian Army had tried to knock off Charles Taylor, the Liberian president.

So on the one hand, Charles Taylor decided life would be far easier for him if the Kran people were dead or run out of the country.

On the other hand, it was just as easy to be targeted by the rebels fighting against Charles Taylor. If you weren’t running away from him, this meant that you supported him, and if you supported him, then you deserved to die. So staying put was a sign to the rebels that you weren’t serious about their cause and deserved to die but running away was a sign to Charles Taylor that you were his enemy and deserved to die. Since everybody was somebody else’s enemy, people were reluctant to be anybody’s friend.

For many, they were going to have trouble no matter what they did, so they just tried to run as quickly and as far as necessary to reach someplace that seemed relatively less dangerous. So my mother, at the age of 17, ran from Liberia across the border into Cote d’Ivoire. She was 19 when I was born. My brother came two years later. The rebels followed shortly after that.

My mom stayed put.

She figured that since she had been there before the rebels, since they weren’t Charles Taylor, and since her French was such that she could pass for Ivorian, we were marginally safer. I mean for us in that part of Africa with all the coming and going across borders since before there were borders and everyone speaking a half dozen different tribal languages, there were no fool-proof shibboleths and it wasn’t like we were Muslim Uighurs in the PRC trying to pass ourselves off as ethnic Han. So what did we have to worry about?

That was the theory, such as it went.

Chapter 2, A Few Cautionary WordsChapter 2, A Few Cautionary Words

I may as well say a couple things right here at the outset.

I don’t know who will read this or if anyone will read this.

First, this all started out as my recollection of events in my childhood.

Then it became my recollection of events in my childhood that I believed had led to where I am right now.

Then my recollection of events in my childhood, what they had meant to me then, and how that understanding led to choices and actions that led to where I am right now.

Then my recollection of events in my childhood, what they had meant to me then, how that understanding had led to choices and actions that led to where I am right now, and how subsequent knowledge of those events, both from reflection in the context of the whole thing as it now appears to my understanding and from additional information more recently acquired that either confirms my understanding of some of the events during that time or requires me to radically reassess my understanding of other events during that time and, as a result, revise my understanding of how all that led to where I am right now, but especially my understanding of who I am right now.

Looking back and looking in are complimentary activities

When you choose one strand of memory and follow it backwards, you should expect it to lead to a lot of other things, things you had forgotten, things you thought you understood, things you remember but had no clue at the time of their significance, your memory of your reasoning at any point back toward that time based on all those things and the conclusions you had drawn along the way, your feelings based on your direct experience, whether of physical pain or pleasure or on how your beliefs at the time had led you to interpret that direct experience or on how your beliefs at the time had led you to yearn for or to fear outcomes of that direct experience or your previous rationalization of them.

And those strands of memory you see stretching away from you in what you think now is the continent of your clear and intelligible present and disappearing down into what for many, I’ve been shocked to discover, is, at best, a murky past; a past consisting mostly of indistinct images of unrecognizable places and people in disconnected motion acting for unknown motives, here and there appearing something clearer, like a sea mount rising close to the surface, and much more rarely an actual atoll of memory or even an archipelago of them, leaving you to postulate their connections below the surface and that postulation leading you interpret anything you do happen to see in the murky depths in a way that supports your postulation.

But those strands of memory reaching back from who you are now to who you were then are, nevertheless, not merely disconnected and faded snapshots of a dead and distant past; they are every bit as much you as every aspect of what you believe to be your carefully controlled present. To the degree that you focus exclusively on the latter, the former are free to wind about you and trip you up. To the degree that you try to understand or sidestep or grapple with the former, the latter, floating on the thin skin of now that separates all that ever was from everything that has yet to be, risks being made to look increasingly two dimensional and contrived.

So it all leads to a continuous kind of balancing act between your inner view of understanding of past events and your outer view (so to speak) of what you believe to be your actual memories of those past events.

And that leads directly to this second thing:

Anyone expecting this to be a story to show, on the one hand, how weird and primitive our part of the world was compared to the boring and normal life of advanced Western civilization or, on the other hand, how much more authentic and organic our life was in that part of the world compared to the sterile decadence and individual alienation of Western capitalism drowning everyone in a surfeit of soul-killing materialist consumerism, think again.

Those folks on either hand are not only going to be disappointed but will probably be outraged to discover that I reject either of those views, whether that of the parochial and ignorant or that of the ideologically-diseased variety. I reject them as the lazy self-justification of those looking for an excuse to avoid the hard work of life by chasing a revolutionary fairy tale, the Franz Fanons and Karl Marxes of the world, or those looking to zero out the weirdness of their own lives by playing up what they think is the helpless, though completely merited, misery of the unwashed, disease-ridden, ignorant multitudes of the teeming and dangerous Third World.

Unwashed and disease-ridden because they’re too stupid to learn proper hygiene, uneducated because they’re just too stupid to learn, overpopulated because they’re too stupid to do anything but fuck, and dangerous because their unrestrained population growth, together with unstable strong-man regimes, threatens the normal and worthwhile societies of the world, whether those of the West or the PRC.

How?

By endangering the steady supply of resources from those regions essential for the survival of normal and worthwhile society, merited because they’re the only ones who have ever bothered to figure out how to use all that shit like petroleum, uranium, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth minerals for normal and worthwhile causes, overseen by the Bill Gates and Xi Jinpings of the world.

They are the ones eager to restrict the riotously reproducing to sustainable technology, even if it means knocking most of them off through extensive campaigns of vaccinations combined with the secret ingredient of birth control drugs, all done for their own good, of course, and for the betterment of mankind, meaning the Western socialist elites or the Chinese ethnic Han Communist elites, both of which aim to gain control of everything and everyone else.

Though it’s been evident for some time that both seem a little too complacent about the third ravening horde that has fucked up Africa every bit as much as tribalism and Marxism ever have and certainly far more than European colonialism and for far longer than colonialism and Marxism, the other M-word, the Muslims, probably because both socialist and Marxist elites look at them as just another flavor of the superstitious, great unwashed held in thrall by the existing order to be appropriated, then manipulated, and finally managed in perpetuity by the elites’ superior atheistic intellect for the elites’ own superior economic benefit.

Fools.

So Africa, one of the largest and richest of the world’s continents, is simultaneously being gang-raped three ways by three major groups of assholes. Yes, I know; I’ll be told by representatives of each of those groups, but especially by the rabid believer class, the Karens of their respective captive nomenklatura, that I’m wrong, as evidenced principally by the fact that I don’t support them and, even worse, that I probably oppose them.

Well, tough shit. That’s probably because I had to grow up supporting myself and opposing my own set of assholes who didn’t like it.

Chapter 3, The Sisterhood

My brother and I grew up on the streets speaking French, Liberian English, Kran, Grebo, and Kru. We sold kerosene by the cup door by door for lanterns. We sold pieces of wood that we picked up alongside the big highway or fish that we caught by draining small ponds. We sold whatever we could find to get whatever we needed. If we couldn’t buy it, we made it. And if we couldn’t make it, then we made do without it.

We also sold cassava that my mother grew on a small plot of land she and some others of the Sisterhood had cleared in the bush on the edge of town until the day some Ivorian men, who usually sat around all day slowly murdering their livers, managed to shake themselves out of their drunken stupor long enough to wonder just where my brother and I could have been coming from stumbling under our heavy loads of cassava leaves and roots and then had enough presence of mind and sufficient long term memory to decide to watch and wait and then follow us back to it on our next outward bound journey.

So the next time after that, when our mom and aunt sent us back to dig up another load for them to sell, we found a couple of drunks digging up our cassava while two others stood guard with their machetes. They threatened to beat us Liberians for stealing their Ivorian cassava, but they were too drunk to catch us.

They were also too drunk to make their escape when our mother and aunt arrived at the scene of the crime and gave those guys some two on four instruction in the Way of the Sisterhood, in the proper use of machetes, and in the kind of damage the rough skin of the heavy and pointed Ivorian cassava roots could do to their faces and their drunken Ivorian heads.

But that was only the beginning of their woes because the West African Sisterhood was transnational, highly loyal, and very powerful. It was immediately evident to the Sisterhood that these guys believed they had stumbled onto an easy way of getting themselves a bit of unreported income and distilled alcohol the Sisterhood would know nothing about.

Fools.

I once heard someone say it’s not nice to piss off Mother Nature. Though, as I understand things now, nature is simply everything that does exist yet is completely unconscious of that existence; so it’s really incapable of becoming pissed off. But the Sisterhood, hyperconscious of its own existence, though it doesn’t comprise everything, seems to think it knows and should control everything.

So, while it may not be nice to piss off Mother Nature, it is positively dangerous to piss off the Sisterhood, whose roots are both older and deeper than anything brought to this land by Christian missionaries or Muslim conquerers and whose reach is more extensive than any man, sober, would care to acknowledge, or drunk, could even dream of.

Here’s the deal.

From the time that the Sisterhood’s daughters, as toddlers, were given their string of cowry beads to wear next to their skin below their undergarments to generate sexual potency, they were instructed in the purpose, care, and feeding of men, how to use men’s sexual desire to subdue and control them, how to take them for everything they possessed, cast them aside, and then reel in another, but still leave the men begging for more. And they started young. I discovered later that the average age at first birth was sixteen. I knew a family of ten kids, all of them with different fathers, and their mom was still in her thirties.

And what really scared the men about the Sisterhood—or what I had come to call the West African Lysistrata League after I saw, during my high school Classics of Western Literature course, the appropriateness of that name as the abbreviated conjugate of “lysis” and “castrata”—what terrified these guys wasn’t the prospect of withheld sexual favors but the imposition on them of sexual curses.

After my mom and aunt had beaten the drunks bloody and raw and forced them at the point of the machetes to bundle the cassava and load up my brother and me with it like pack mules, they sent us on our way and then turned their full attention onto the men prior to starting in on their curses.

As my brother and I stumbled into the rapidly falling dark of the equatorial evening back toward town under our heavy loads of bloody roots, we could hear my mother and aunt reminding the drunks that they knew ALL of their mothers and wives and sisters and girlfriends and daughters and then, like they were tag-teaming, they alternately named every one of them, including distinguishing characteristics, just to crank up the terror.

I had no difficulty imagining them point their long red fingernails, courtesy of my mom’s job at the beauty shop, into the drunks’ faces and heaven help those guys if either one of the women chipped a nail on the machetes.

I told my brother to wait up because I thought this was going to get good.

And then, over the sound of the night insects that were starting to wind up, we heard our mom say, “Yes, oh, yes, all the women will hear just what you useless drunks have done to their sisters.”

By that time, one of them was sober enough, yet still stupid enough, to actually try to get rational with women of the Sisterhood by pointing out that they had not yet actually stolen anything.

My mom shut that down right there.

She pointed out that their women were going to see their blood and their skin on the cassava and then see their skinned and bloody faces. She said since it was hard enough to get the drunks to expend any effort beyond what they devoted to drinking and fucking and since the drunks were so given to bragging about everything they were going to accomplish, but never did because they were too busy being drunk, the sisters were all going to have serious questions.

Because, my mother said, her sister concurring with sarcastic murmurs, even if it were possible in the first place for her sisters to believe that the men had taken it upon themselves to clear a plot of land, buy a load of cassava roots, plant them, wait for them to root out and grow, and tend the crop—my aunt interjecting that no, she certainly did not believe it—all during the tiny amount of time left over each day that they weren’t eating, sleeping, drinking, shitting, fucking, and gambling, yet without bragging to anyone at all about what brilliant, hardworking, soon-to-be-rich entrepreneurs they were, would it even be conceivable that finally, in an astounding fit of agricultural dedication, they followed up all that secretive dedication with something so obvious as harvesting the cassava with their faces?

And then my aunt jumped in.

She was the baby of the family but over six feet tall and always got whatever she wanted. I could just imagine that pointed red claw on the end of her forefinger, by now mysteriously illuminated in the last deep red glow of the sunset, wagging at each of them in turn.

“Or will they more easily believe their sister that you guys tried to steal her cassava from a plot of land that they had helped her to clear, that she and her sister caught you and beat the shit out of you, and that’s why the cassava roots are bloody and your faces are skinned and swollen?”

And then she sucked her teeth in that long insulting way she had. And I was sure she was looking down on them from her great height with that sideways glance that conveyed, “What is this shit that I am smelling? Oh, it is you!”

And she handed it back off to my mother.

“And if any ill should happen to befall our sons and nephews because of this, then not only will you be going hungry in every possible way but the curse that we will lay on you! Hey! Your testicles will shrivel and fail and your penises will dangle unmoving like dead snakes.”

And then right back to my aunt.

“Until they withdraw into your body during sleep, unless you can get your friends to hold onto them while you sleep but they will have to sleep also, and then you will have to piss sitting down like a woman!”

How these two women, silhouetted against a baleful red sunset, as threatening and deadly as a couple of full-bosomed demons, standing there in the gathering dusk over four men they had just beaten down into the humiliation of rationalizing their loss being due to their drunkenness, could lay “like a woman” on the men as an insult in a way that simultaneously seemed to utterly incapacitate the men and render them into a state of trembling acquiescence is a mystery. I imagined, based on having seen how my mom and aunt did it with others—that it was probably either their grand bosoms and bright fingernails or their magnificently authoritative, emasculating threats that made the men in this encounter want to just lie there and take it. Probably both.

I whispered for my brother to get a move on.

The last thing I heard was my aunt saying to my mom in that way that made it obvious she was really speaking to the drunks, “You know, my sister. I believe that these...men...had planned to sell all this cassava to finance their drinking without telling our sisters and leaving the little children to go hungry. What do you think our sisters will do when they hear that?”

I was pretty sure what the men would do. That’s when the groveling and begging would start.

I whispered for my brother to pick up his pace, though I thought we’d get a good lead because my mother and aunt would milk the situation a bit longer.

None of the drunks’ mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, and girlfriends would mind in the least the beatings, threatened curses, and humiliation inflicted by my mother and aunt on their men because that would only serve to make the men fearful of pissing them off and even more tractable.

And the consequences of pissing off West African women of the Sisterhood would not be the angry glaring silences or the clipped “not tonight, I’ve got a headache” of the white women, but violent assault, like what the mother and aunt of a boy down the street visited on the head of their older brother by way of a cast iron skillet for having messed with the boy. And from what I saw later, they shouldn’t have gone so easy on him.

Chapter 4, School Days

Anyway, aside from the drama of the cassava, our practice, as I said, was to sell whatever we had that anyone wanted in order to get the money to buy whatever we couldn’t make or scavenge or do without. Then because of my mother’s job braiding hair in a beauty shop, she decided to use some of the additional income to send us to French school. She said she wanted us to have a chance to do more in life than pick up sticks and hawk fuel oil, though I thought it was more likely she wanted us to become well-to-do for the benefit of the Sisterhood.

Since I already knew how to read a little, it took me only about two months to move to the top of my class. One of the perks of the top student was to mete out punishment to students who hadn’t done their work or who were otherwise bad. Because of this, there were not many really bad kids, but there were a lot of kids who worked hard to be able to punish those who were less good and to escape punishment themselves.

Some of the kids who attained this rank remembered what it was like on the way up and could imagine what it would be like on the way back down and let both hind and foresight temper their discharge of those duties.

There were a variety of socially-approved punishments they could inflict.

They could make their victims do deep knee bends while holding both ear lobes with the opposite hands until too tired to get back up but crying out of fear of what else could be laid on them if they stopped.

They could make them stand on one foot with the other raised behind them while bending forward and pointing to a spot on the floor until they were too tired to maintain balance and fell.

They could make them put both feet up on the wall while supporting themselves on their hands until their thin little arms started to tremble and buck before completely giving out and dropping them face-first onto the floor.

A few of the kids who attained this rank, though, were particularly cruel and seemed to enjoy the job a little too much. They were usually the ones who preferred the personal touch of directly inflicting pain by means of rulers and canes.

Chapter 5, The Angel and the Demon

The boy I knocked out of first place was one of the worst of this latter group.

François, who was about 11, loved to pick on Émile, who was about 14. During reading he would call on Émile and give him the most difficult paragraphs. Then he would beat the palms of Émile’s hands with a ruler if he made mistakes. At the beginning of the year Émile wasn’t able to read well so he got beaten by François a lot.

I think the real reason François hated Émile so much was because Émile was handsome and tall and muscular and could play futebol or soccer, as they call it here in the States, really well. François was short, skinny, and always looked like he’d been sucking on something sour.

He always proclaimed loudly that futebol was stupid. But I could see how he watched Émile dribble the ball expertly downfield, dodging around the defenders using feints and an irregular gait they couldn’t anticipate, and then score by kicking the ball between the goalie’s legs after getting him to commit to block another direction of attack. No one who hated futebol could have watched it like that.

So he hated the boy who played it well. Which made no sense. It did not ever appear to have occurred to him to say, “Émile, you play so well. Could you teach me?” Instead, he seemed to feel slighted over not being given what he had been too timid to ask for but felt too powerless to demand and then inflicted pain where he could get away with it.

Francois may have come by that attitude from his father who owned the Peugeot dealership in town. Not because dealers of Peugeot automobiles are necessarily that way but because car dealers, as a class, seem somewhat predatory and cutthroat.

I think that at one time shortly after Émile came to live with his grand-uncle but before either of us started school, Émile had gotten a job there washing cars. Or maybe it was in the Renault dealership that used to be across the highway from the Peugeot lot, but had been mysteriously firebombed one night not too long after the beginning of the school year. François’s father blamed it on the rebels. The gossip was divided. Some said the owner of the Renault dealership had become a rebel leader because of it, but other gossip claimed that François’s father was actually a silent partner in the dealership and was hurt just as badly by the arson as the ostensible owner.

You’d think that the dealers would have hired an adult to entrust the care of his expensive cars to; well, considering the character of the would-be cassava crooks, maybe not. Maybe they’d want someone young enough to care to do a good job, inexperienced enough that they wouldn’t have to pay him a lot, strong enough to do the job easily and well, but hopeful enough that the job could lead to bigger and better things. So that would have been someone just like Émile.

Maybe the firebomber was someone who thought he, rather than Émile, should have gotten the job. But it would have been simpler just to waylay Émile and beat him into quitting. If you burn down the place, there goes the job, too.

So, at the time, I suspected the arson was for completely different motives. The one thing everyone was sure of was that the arsonist better hope that François’s father never discovered who he was because his retribution would be horrible. And if it was true what I overheard members of the Sisterhood gossiping in Grebo years later, a language they imagined my brother and I couldn’t understand, then I had been completely but horribly right.

I think the only thing François truly loved was an old silver pencil case that had belonged to his mother’s father. Later we would discover it was a quite valuable Art Nouveau piece that had been in the collection of Siegfried Bing in Paris. And I think the only reason François had it was because his grandfather, along with his mother, according to the tales, was dead. But how his grandfather in equatorial Africa had come to possess such a stunning work is a mystery we have still not been able to solve.

Anyway, I felt bad for Émile because I knew how I felt back when I wasn’t able to read well. And Émile couldn’t just quit school to get away from Francois because the headmaster would call his great uncle who was spending a lot of money to keep Émile in school and out of the hands of the rebels. Émile would be beaten by his great uncle when he returned home.

If Émile throttled François, as François deserved, Émile would first be beaten by our teacher, Dr. Guillaud, then by the headmaster, and then by his great uncle when he got home.

But as much as Émile, no doubt, wanted to twist that scrawny little neck and as much as François deserved it, Émile would never have dared because François’s father, in addition to owning the Peugeot dealership and being the richest person in town, was also the Chief of Police. So Émile, who was not stupid, figured that, since he’d get beaten no matter what he did, he was probably far better off getting beaten by an 11-year-old who hated him but didn’t have as hard a downstroke than getting beaten three times by strong men angry over being disappointed by him.

Chapter 6, The Demon's Scheme: Part 1, We Unexpectedly Get Praised

A few weeks after I took my place as first student, François began to mutter and complain to the other students that I was giving Émile easy paragraphs to read. In a way, this was true. But the reason they were easy was because, after school, after the other students had left, and after Dr. Guillaud had stepped out for his afternoon tea, I helped Émile read through the lesson for the next day.

We had plenty of time because we both stayed after school to wash the blackboards, beat out the erasers, and sweep the classrooms to help defray the cost of our tuition. François had never seen any of this because his father’s driver was always waiting outside in the family’s big grey Peugeot fifteen minutes before dismissal and François was always the first one out the door.

So every afternoon Émile and I cleaned the school. I helped him with his reading and then he helped me learn to play real soccer. That part of the arrangement, though, we were pretty sure François had seen. Sometimes in the evening we saw that big grey Peugeot slow down on the river road coming from the bridge near the big compound where François lived. We couldn’t be sure, because, by then, it was mostly dark and the Peugeot had tinted windows. Sometimes the car slowed and then stopped, idling on the road alongside the playing field next to the school. Sure, maybe the driver liked soccer, but we didn’t think that was it. We always played on the field until it was too dark to see. After that we went home. Since my place was closer than Émile’s, if it was getting too close to curfew, then he’d stay with me and my brother.

One afternoon after Dr. Guillaud had left for his tea, Émile and I were sitting at his desk reading through the lesson when François came back into the room. We had been concentrating so intensely on the reading that we hadn’t heard the car stop outside or François enter the classroom. François seemed just as startled to see us.

After a moment, he went over to his desk and fumbled around in it for a few seconds. Then he turned to us holding his grandfather’s silver pencil case and said, “Eh heh! Now I know what you’re doing. You’re cheating. You won’t get away with it. You will see. I already know what I am going to do. You will see!”

Then he ran out the door and we heard the Peugeot roar off.

“You will see” was the chief of the many verbal cudgels used by African mothers to create a sense of foreboding over guilt, real or imagined. It was not as immediately threatening as, “I am the one who borned you. I will pepper you tonight, oh.” That threat had power because everyone knew what it felt like to be awakened by the burning of powdered red pepper in any or all of at least five sensitive places. The anticipation could turn even the prospect of falling asleep into a nightmare.

Another favorite threat was, “I will put a slap up against your ear and you will cry blood.” That was threatening but it had little power because we had never seen anyone actually cry blood.

But what gave power to “you will see” and “I already know what I am going to do” was their undefined nature. That was the key to its torture because it left everything up to your own imagination. You knew it was going to be something bad, but you didn’t know what or how bad, though you had already had plenty of experience to fuel the imagination.

You were destined to suffer in multiple ways, before, during, and after the punishment. And if the person who levied the threat had sufficient power to follow through on it, as did a mother, an aunt, a bossy female cousin, or the son of a police chief, then the something bad could be very bad, indeed. And since it was not yet realized, you felt motivated to do whatever you could to forestall it. This usually ranged from groveling to running away and spending the night in the bush.

I must have looked scared because Émile patted my shoulder and told me not to worry about François. He said that François couldn’t hit very hard and, besides, I was the one doing the punishing now.

But I knew that François, as small and bitter as he was, had a much greater and more devious imagination than Émile and that he could find ways to inflict pain that didn’t depend on the velocity of his downstroke.

The next morning we discovered the first of these.

It was at the end of oral reading and I was up front with Émile. He read his assigned paragraph perfectly.

François raised his hand from his seat at the back of the room to catch Dr. Guillaud’s eye. Dr. Guillaud nodded and asked him what he wanted.

“Émile and Stephane are cheating! This is why Émile never makes any mistakes any longer. Stephane gives him the easiest paragraphs and even goes over the assignment with him to make sure he doesn’t make any mistakes. I caught them doing it yesterday after class.”

Dr. Guillaud fixed his gaze on François and stroked his mustache in his characteristic thoughtful manner.

Then, without looking at Émile and me, he glanced around the room, nodded as though to himself, and announced to the class that he wanted François, Émile, and me to stand before the class in front of his desk. I thought for sure Émile and I were going to be punished.

Evidently François thought so, too, because he could barely contain his glee as he hurried to the front of the room. But he still looked like he was sucking on something sour.

Dr. Guillaud had us line up in front of his desk. We faced the rest of the boys but with enough room for Dr. Guillaud to walk behind us and to swing that ferrule. The entire class had become so quiet that the only thing we could hear was the ticking of the clock, the squeaking of the wooden benches, and the scrape of someone’s foot on the floor.

Dr. Guillaud picked up his ferrule and came to stand behind Émile and me. He began to tap the two of us in turn gently on each shoulder and the head, like a king bestowing knighthood. From François’s growing excitement, it was obvious he was completely unfamiliar with the symbolism, reinterpreting it solely in terms of the work he already had in mind for the ferrule in his own hand.

“First I want to thank François for bringing this matter to my attention,” Dr. Guillaud said, bestowing the last gentle tap atop Émile’s head. “I myself had wondered at Émile’s increasing facility with his reading assignment. Thanks to the attentiveness of François, I see now that these two boys must have been up to a lot more than merely cleaning blackboards and sweeping floors while I was off having my afternoon tea.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a smug look begin to spread like a dirty oil stain across François’s face.

Dr. Guillaud, however, was not finished.

He slapped the ferrule lightly against one palm several times. We all knew how that would feel with a bit more force and how we’d be able to feel the heat of it all the way home.

“At first I had thought that it had been François’s heavy hand—”

A couple more forceful slaps of the ferrule into his palm emphasized “heavy hand.”

“—that had finally driven Émile to devote himself to the pursuit of academic excellence.”

But when he turned and casually tossed the ferrule behind him onto his desk with a clatter, a look of doubt began to taint the surety of François’s smugness.

Dr. Guillaud leaned forward until his head was between me and Émile.

“If this behavior continues…” he paused and glanced over at François.

It definitely looked as though the bad taste had returned and was fully flooding François’s mouth, though in his eyes there was still a look of forlorn hope.

“So, Stephane and Émile,” Dr. Guillaud said. “If this behavior continues, then I will be left with no choice...” He paused again to glance at François and said sternly. “I will be left with no choice...but to believe that both of you boys will go far in life.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw François begin to deflate.

“Stephane,” Dr. Guillaud said, laying a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Your progress since the beginning of the year has greatly impressed me. I know that it’s not easy growing up in another country. I, myself, was born in southern France to ex-patriots from Algeria and grew up speaking French. But you, Stephane, you had to learn another language other than your home language. And your work with Émile shows that you place a higher value on something more than simply your own good grades.”

I could sense that François had abandoned any hope of screwing us over.

“And you, Émile,” Dr. Guillaud said, laying his other hand on Émile’s shoulder. “By being willing to take instruction from a younger boy, you have demonstrated that you can acknowledge another’s expertise and have the humility to accept the help you need. Your mutual dedication to this despite the other demands on your time, not to mention outright hostility, shows initiative and discipline. Discipline, humilité, and fraternité will lay the foundation upon which you will build the success of your entire life.”

He patted our shoulders.

“You may return to your seats.”

He turned to look over at François stewing alone in the public humiliation of his failed scheme.

“And thank you, François, for bringing such a valuable lesson to the class’s attention. I am certain the whole class feels greatly indebted to you.”

François started to move toward his seat.

“Oh, and by the way, François,” Dr. Guillaud halted him with an upraised hand. “Why were you back at school so late yesterday? You are always the first out the door upon dismissal.”

François momentarily looked trapped.

“I, uh, I returned to get my grandfather’s silver pencil case.”

Dr. Guillaud gave him a few seconds of mustache-stroking scrutiny before replying. They were very long seconds.

“But you never, ever let that pencil case out of your sight.”

François looked like he was roasting on a spit. Yet he held his tongue.

“No word of explanation?” Dr. Guillaud asked, looking at him. “No? Very well, you may take your seat.”

As François returned to his seat, he glared at us both and mouthed the words, “You will see. You will see.”

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We didn’t see anything until the Monday of the following week.

Next Up:

Chapter 7, A Weekend of Peace in the Shadowless Land of Used-to-Be

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