Clementius Stupnagel di Montefalcone: the saga of a smart artist (smartast)

Chapter 11

Due to CSM’s father’s difficulties with the English language, he decides to move, with his son, to Canada, in fact to Jasper in the province of Alberta.

This place is like a frontier town,

with a lot of horses and dogs that look like wolves, a setting that would have pleased Jack London. Pennyless as usual, CSM’s father has no choice but to live outside of « town », in a shack on the Athabasca riverside.

CSM travels to school (Boker Z. Wash Junior High School) each day, drawn by a husky (he names « GoodBoy ») that he met in the forest.

There he again turns out to be an average student with above-average results in art, which fact enables him to expose one of his paintings of a husky at the Young Art exhibit in the school lobby.

Clementius Stupnagel di Montefalcone: the saga of a smart artist (smartast)

Chapter 10

Grand Forks is known for its copper mines, horses and italian colony, so CSM’s father feels at home there.

The same cannot be said for CSM, who winds up in the Copper Union School. Here, his academic achievements are average, and his artistic achievements go largely unnoticed until a teacher of Indian origin, Miss ThunderStorm,

compliments CSM for his painting of a horse with three legs.

It so happens that Miss ThunderStorm’s great grandfather, an Apache, rode a horse with three legs, so the legend goes. So enthusiastic is Miss ThunderStorm that she organizes an exhibition in the school entitled Student Exhibition, essentially to show this picture of the horse with three legs.

Clementius Stupnagel di Montefalcone: the saga of a smart artist (smartast)

Chapter 9

In spite of the quality of CSM’s artwork, he is thrown out of the New School because of his greasy hands. This, of course, is a pretext, the real reason being that the school no longer offers a scholarship due to his poor academic results. After an intensive search, CSM’s mother finally finds a public school (The Traphagen), not too far from where they live in Brooklyn, which means no more subway trips and no more peanuts.

Thus begins a very dark period in CSM’s life, marked by nagging hunger and the loss of his mother, who dies of malnutrition and what appears to be tuberculosis.

CSM is left with his father who still speaks no English except the names of

the horses he bets on. Actually, his father is good enough at this game to amass a small fortune ($500) which he employs to get out, with his son, of Brooklyn and the hard life of the east coast. The next stop is Grand Forks, North Dakota.