Michael Mitchell - Final fire: a photographers tales from a very small island: a memoir

Liar, liar, pants on fire!

Your nose is longer than a telephone wire.

Childrens chant

It aint braggin if you really done it.

Dizzy Dean

Our little gang slouches home from school, circling around the girls, torturing and teasing, laughing. At the top of the hill descending beside the towns buckle factory, Ronny peels off from the group to enter his house, a shabby old red-brick tragedy on the corner. He runs in the open front door and climbs the stairs to his parents second-floor apartment. His dad slumps in a press-back wooden chair at the kitchen table with a gun barrel in his mouth. We are in grade five.

I pull a wide plank of clear white pine from stock at the end of my high schools wood shop. While the girls across the hall bake cupcakes in home ec. the boys are each charged with building a fireside bench. Wood shop followed a drafting class that was easy. There, in collective secret, wed combined our shabby skills to produce a single technical drawing of the Arts and Crafts bench we were each now building. One by one wed go to the head of the class to present the same drawing and get our grade. Brecky, our short fat shop teacher chain-smoked, so his teeth were baby-shit yellow and his breath stank. He made each of us sit on his knee. Now Mikey, what nice little picture do we have from you today? Both of us were looking at the name box on the sheet of drafting paper. It was not only now smudged gray like a November day I was already the tenth person to erase a classmates name and block-letter in my own but it was getting flocked, like fancy wallpaper, from so many erasures.

As Brecky bounces me on his knee I glance back into the shop classroom. The left wall is a row of full-height industrial lockers. While I undergo this ritual humiliation my classmates have retreated into those narrow cabinets. By folding the doors back against each other they had created a series of little triangular hideouts. Their feet poked out the bottoms while columns of smoke rose from the tops we were all hooked on Exports or Players Plain. We and Brecky were caught in an ageless game. We cheat. He knows we cheat. We know that he knows that we cheat. He knows that we know that he knows. Its our collective dance of pretend the real-life lesson of the classroom. We will all eventually be future small emperors in our gotchies bravely, or not so, faking our way through grown-up lifes many performances.