the unicorn goat

It was mystical for me.

This is a natural state for an urban six year-old responsible for an increasingly neurotic single mom barricaded in a one room 'apartment'. The 'apartment' was shared with some feral kittens who lived hanging from the curtains, with a tiny sister who did the same, with an absent dad's ghost, a virtually unknown dad who was constantly sending electric tigers from the moon. The room was surrounded by the howling of the woods and the relatives.

There was also an equally threatening external environment beyond the farm and beyond their grunting at the dinners I suspected every evening to include one of the horses, either Dobbin or Maude.

There was lots of dead stuff lying around outside the door at the farm. I stepped over it most mornings, rain or snow, on my way to the school a mile away.

Beyond the corpses and the unicorn goat there were usually the predatory pubescent German twins often waiting there in the lane to try to pull down my pants. I thought this had something to do with the war.

At the school, a one room school with a row of desks for each grade, now a museum, the entire curriculum seemed to consist of the humiliation of the new kid.

I was often picked for the game of 'hit the smallest guy with a branch' and excluded from the game of 'throw the ball blindly over the school' unless it was to try to push me under the ball as it came down. There were points for this.

I didn't understand at first about the different grades in different rows and I did all the work of all the grades and answered all the questions. I believe this may have annoyed some other children.

I would at times walk past the iron stove at the back of the room, bending to warm my bum as I went by, as I answered something, usually without having been asked, go to the dusty library of twenty books on two shelves at the back and pick out a book to refer to while I finished my reply.

I once linked 'Dick and Jane go to the shop' with a quotation from a pristine book , probably donated or stolen, that I was proud to be the first to open. It was was a collection of Provencal poetry from the Ottawa Library.

The red-headed, brown, violently freckled lady wrestler who was the permanent temporary teacher accused me once of cheating after I attained a perfect score on spelling, including of the word 'apocalypse'.

In humiliation and fear I fled the school. I was especially frightened of her three-foot ruler which smashed almost almost constantly across the knuckles and heads of the bigger kids as they mutilated each other between the rows. Kids I now know were probably my relatives from the five village families.

On that rainy morning I ran across the bridge over the foggy and mad rapids, past the post office to the little brick cottage next to it. There I hid under the table in the kitchen of the mysterious widow. Was she the one who had donated the poetry book to the school?

The teacher sent the whole school baying after me. The widow saw me, heard the mob and taking down an ornamental sword from the wall stood in the doorway swinging the sword at my pursuers. I was Bonnie Prince Charlie. I was Arthur Pendragon. She was The Lady of The Lake. This was a pretty far-fetched destiny for the descendant of Orangemen farmers.