Summer of the Mad Monk

The Summer of The Mad Monk

By Cora Taylor

The year is 1936. Philip Tyler is an imaginative, 12-year-old boy. He lives on a farm outside of the small town of Delia in Alberta but their farm is suffering and their lives are suffering because of the Great Depression. They have lived in poverty for as long as he could remember, so he, like many other boys in that time had to be creative and imaginative.

School was nearing the end of the year, and he and his best friend Digger had nothing to look forward to. Diggers father had noticed and he gave the boys an old .22 to work on because the barrel was crooked. Pip and Digger had worked on the thing for weeks and when they were done, it looked funny so they carved the handle to look like an old Colt .44. They had so much pride in their, “homemade” gun.

The next thing Pip knew was that they were in town, when Digger took it out to show Pete McKnight. Pip knew this was not a good idea because Pete was known as the town trouble maker. Pete McKnights face was wiped clean of all expression, and he had a look Pip had never seen before on him, a look of raw envy.

Pete took the gun, and was playing around with it when he accidentally shot it off and it went whizzing past the town drunks’ head. It noise was so loud that people came running from everywhere. So they threw the gun in a bush and they ran off. But they didn’t get very far before the sheriff caught them.

After that, their parents came for the punishment at the town hall. The sheriff said that they would have to destroy the gun. So he gave the gun to the new blacksmith in town to destroy. The blacksmiths name was Raspinsky. There was something very odd about Raspinsky. He had ice blue eyes that could almost hypnotize a person and he walked and talked like he was authority. They said he was from Russia and that he knew very little English.

A few days later he and his father had gone to visit a close family friend, Mr.Hewitt. Jack Hewitt always lent Pip books to read because Pip never had any. This week, Jack lent Phillip, “The Russian Revolution” which was only fourteen years before. Phillip got very caught up in the book and he started realizing that the Tsars family doctor, Rasputin, had seemed to remind him a lot of Raspinsky. Rasputin was a monk who gave aid to the tsar of Russia family, but many thought that he was evil because he could heal people telepathically. So they wanted to kill him. So they gave him wine that was poisoned with enough cyanide to kill two dozen people and it didn’t work so they shot him, stabbed him and they threw him into the Cain River in Russia.

Phillip thought that he might be still alive, in the form of Raspinsky! So Pip did a lot of research and settled the Raspinsky was definitely Rasputin. A few weeks later, Pip gained enough courage to go up to the blacksmith and ask him. Right before he was going to knock on the door of the shop he heard the voices of two people, (One which was Raspinskys) and another voice in Russian. So he found a hole in the wall and he looked through but he could not see anyone because they were behind him! A the Russian man grabbed Pip and pulled him into the shop and asked why he was spying on them and he just told them the truth that he thought Raspinsky was Rasputin and Rasputin was trying to escape death by fleeing to Canada.

The blacksmith said he was amazed by how much Phillip knew about him and he told Pip that if he told anybody that he would have to kill him. Phillip felt like he grew a foot taller! The next day, he heard that the police were coming to get Raspinsky because he murdered somebody in Manitoba. But it was just a lie made up by the town’s boys because they were scared of him and they wanted