The Guardians

teacher, had left over the summer. (Yes, we had much obvious fun with his name, as in 'Hey, what's his Ass-worth?' whispered between us as we filed out at the end of class, an insult he seemed to think he deserved, given the way he pretended not to hear.)

Naturaly, we'd tormented him. Makeout sessions in the drum-kit storage room, blowing cigarette smoke out of the tuba, snapping Melissa Conroy's bra until a red line was blazing across her freckled back. And as for Asworth teaching us to play music? His attempts to coax a melody out of Carl's flatulent trombone or get Randy to stop ringing the triangle and holering 'Come 'n' get it!' in the middle of 'The Maple Leaf Forever' met with nothing but cacophonous failure.

Asworth's replacement, Miss Langham, was a different story.

In her presence we caled her only Miss, but between us (and in our dreams) she was always Heather. At twenty-three, the youngest teacher at Grimshaw Colegiate by a decade. Long, chestnut hair we imagined slipping a hand through to touch the solitary mole on her throat. Green eyes, at once mirthful and encouraging.

Tal but unstooped, unlike some of the senior basketbal girls when they walked the hals, ashamed of their commanding physicality. Until Miss Langham arrived to teach us a surprisingly moving brass-band version of Pachelbel's Canon, we had witnessed only prettiness, tomboys, the promise of farmer-daughter curves. But Miss Langham exceeded any previous entry in our schoolboys' catalogue of feminine assets. We had no name for it then, and I hardly know what to cal it now. Grace, I suppose.

I believe I can say as wel that we were al instantly in love with her. Desire was part of it, yes. But what we realy wanted was to rescue her one day. Show her our as yet unappreciated worth. Grow into gentlemen before her very eyes.

Sometimes, after school, we would head up to Ben's bedroom, gather at his window and wait to watch her go by. She was renting a room at the nurses' residence up the hil on the hospital grounds ('No Male Visitors After 8 P.M.,' a sign at the door declared). Most days she would take Caledonia Street, advancing with long strides up its slope, a leather satchel bumping against her hip. Alone.

When I think of the Thurman house now, what comes to mind isn't a horrific image or stab of guilt. Not at first. What I see before any of that is Miss Langham walking home along the sidewalk past its brooding facade. A juxtaposition of youth and poise against its clutching shadows. Her sure step, the hint of smile she wore even when no one was coming the other way to wish good day to. Heather Langham was al future. And the house possessed only the wet rot, the foul longing of the past.

This is how I try to hold her in place as long as I can, before the other pictures force their way through: Miss Langham clipping past Grimshaw's darkest place. It was, for al the moment's simplicity, an act of subtle defiance. We never saw her cross the street to pass it at a safer distance, as we ourselves did. In fact, she seemed oblivious to the house altogether. A refusal to acknowledge the rudeness of its stare.

But in this, of course, was the suggestion that she knew she was being watched. She was a woman already wel used to being looked at. Usualy, this looking inspired admiration and yearning in the observer. But we could sense that the Thurman house—or the idea of whatever inhuman thing lived in it—instead felt only bitterness. A reminder of its place in death and hers so vividly in life.

[3]

There are moments when the tremors disappear al on their own. Whole chunks of time when my body and I are reunited, warring soldiers clinking tin mugs over a Christmas ceasefire. I'l be looking out the window, and the hands that had been squeaking against the glass wil be calmed. Or now Sitting on the milk run to Grimshaw, the train starting away from the platform with a lurch, my heart giving enlarging shape to Randy's announcement of the end of things: Ben's dead, Trev. As we pick up speed, I can feel the closing distance between myself and the past, an oncoming colision my newspaper-reading and text-messaging felow passengers are unaware of.

And yet, I am stil. Silently weeping into the sleeve of my jacket but physicaly in control, my limbs awaiting their orders.

You can't help anyone, a voice suggests within me . You can't help yourself. Why not do what Ben did while you're still able?

Not my voice, though it's instantly familiar. A voice I haven't heard in twenty-four years.

The train rols out from under the covered platform and the city is there, the glass towers firing off shards of sunlight in a farewel salute. Al at once, I'm certain I wil never come back. I escaped something in Grimshaw once. But it won't let me go a second time.

Ticket, please, the voice says, laughing.

'Ticket, please,' the conductor tries again.

It was thought, when they built the four lanes running west between Toronto and the border at Detroit a couple years before I was born, that the highway's proximity to Grimshaw would lend new purpose to what was before then not much other than a service town for the county's farmers. But there was no more reason to take the Grimshaw exit than there had previously been to limp in its direction on the old, rutted two-lane. Like many of the communities its size on the broad arrowhead of farmland stuck between the Great Lakes, it remained a forgotten place. Never industrial enough to be outright abandoned in the way of the ghost towns of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, but not alert enough to attempt re-invention. Grimshaw was content to merely hang on, to take a subdued pride in its century homes on tree-lined streets, the stained facades of its Victorian storefronts, its daughters or sons who met with success upon moving away. Now, entering it as a stranger, one might see a gothic charm in the wilful oldness of the place, its loyalty to the vine-covered, the paint-peeled. But for those who grew up here, it was only as it had always been.

There are times of the year when certain places seem to be themselves more than any other time. Springtime in Paris, Christmas in New York. Toronto frozen at Valentine's. Even before the bad things happened, I saw Grimshaw as a Haloween town. Sparsely streetlit, thickly treed. The houses never grand but large, built at a time that favoured rear staircases, widow's-peaked attics, so that they al had their own secret hiding places. Founded by Scots Presbyterians and consistently conservative in the backbenchers it sent to Parliament, Grimshaw had little sympathy for the mystical. Any mention of the supernatural was considered nothing more than foolishness, the side effects of too many matinees indulged at the Vogue. Ghosts? 'Catholic voodoo,' as my father put it.

Yet at the same time, it was its dour Protestant character that endeared its inhabitants to the everyday tragic, to the stories of broken lives and cruel, inexplicable fate. For our parents, the dead lived on, but only in dinner-table and church-tea tales of misfortune.

Grimshaw's adults could never see their home as haunted. Their children, on the other hand, had no choice.