Simon whistled appreciatively. The screen was still open. ‘That’s something. Must be worth a pretty penny.’ Finally noticing the old man’s glare, he closed the screen.
‘Had it valuated last spring. You can have the place for three million– buildings, boats, lake and woodlot. And a disused mica mine.’
‘Heh-heh.’ Simon gave the odd snorting self-conscious laugh Angus had come to recognize when he found himself at a loss for words, which was, unfortunately, not often enough. ‘A teacher can’t afford that. Ever.’
‘Are you kidding me?’ Monaghan’s face showed pained incredulity.
‘No, Don, I’m not.’
‘You a teacher?’
‘I teach Outdoor Education at Mike Harris High. Sadie works there, too. We’re pretty smug about that. Only need to run one car. She’s a part-time E.A. there.’
‘What’s that?’
An educational assistant, a carer assigned to three handicapped students.’
‘Three?’ The old man’s voice cracked in disbelief. ‘How many do you have?’
‘Six classes, same as everyone else. About a hundred and fifty kids. Why?’
‘At seventy-eight bucks an hour?’ He picked up a recent copy of the Financial Post and pointed to an article Angus remembered seeing . His finger was trembling. ‘Says here teachers make seventy-eight bucks an hour. More than aerospace engineers, regular engineers, veter-ari-ans and lawyers. Seventy-eight bucks. I made less than that a week when I was your age. No benefits. No union. No sick days. No sick days you can bank and cash out, either. No summers off. No fat pensions. And you had to work for it. Dangerous work, too.’
‘What did you do, Mr. Monaghan?’ Angus sought to divert the conversation to a less contentious subject.
The old man seemed to resent the change of topic. He turned impatiently in his chair. ‘Paper mill. I unclogged the rollers. Nearly lost a finger once.’ He turned back to Simon, and thrust the newspaper at him. ‘Go on. Tell me I’m wrong.’
Angus decided to leave them to it. He got up and slipped discreetly on to the deck, closing the screen behind him. It was “a soft October night,” he thought, recalling Eliot’s Prufrock. The natural world was, as always at dusk, preparing itself for sleep. Shadows crept from rocky outcrop and dense woodland. Smoke from the lodge’s fireplace drifted lazily by. Only the scolding chittering of a distant chipmunk broke the silence. Already the pool of light from behind him was making itself felt in the gathering darkness. The lake had lost its silver sheen and was now a sullen black. Angus went back inside.
The three women had joined the men, but sat perched uneasily on a sofa, a captive but unwilling audience. The old man was in full spate, holding forth against public sector employees in general, their greedy unions and the complaisant governments that featherbedded them– all at the expense of long-suffering, hard-working taxpayers like himself.
‘And these teachers can’t even spell!’ Monaghan waved the Post article which he had now cut out of the paper. ‘Look!’ It was true. A photograph accompanying the article showed a teacher in a red cowboy hat holding a sign that read “Stop Bulling and Blaming Educators.” Angus shook his head. Simon, however, insisted that this was how “bullying” was spelled, until his wife corrected him, uncharacteristically sharply.
