Jack of Diamonds

by Bryce Courtenay

  I finally selected one called The Watering Hole, which had white tablecloths and three fancy chandeliers. Miss Frostbite had long since instructed me on table manners, so I didn’t feel out of my depth as I was shown to a table by a head waiter. I also told myself that this was my first and last indulgence, and that I could only justify it because of the situation in which I found myself.

  As luck would have it, I was served by a woman who appeared to be in her forties. She was very obliging when I asked if she could recommend somewhere in town for me to stay the night. I explained why I had chosen her dining room and that I wanted somewhere cheap. She nodded. ‘I thought you looked a bit young for this restaurant, sir, but I completely understand.’

  ‘Please call me Jack, ma’am,’ I hastened to say.

  ‘I’m Marge and this is our busy time with a train just come in. If you can order now and eat slowly, I’ll come talk to you later, Jack.’ She smiled.

  I ordered my steak. It wasn’t cheap – $1.75 – more than I could ever remember paying for a meal. In fact the prices were pretty extortionate and I didn’t dare order anything else, like an ‘appetiser’, whatever that meant. I think it was what the menu at the Waldorf-Astoria had called an entrée. Although why someone would need something to tempt their appetite when they were already in a restaurant was beyond me. I glanced around. At the next table a couple were tucking into these appetisers. I checked the menu and identified Cream of Tomato Soup (fifteen cents) and Fresh Shrimp Cocktail (forty-five cents)! No way I’d be having an appetiser at that price, or even bread and butter, ten cents, and no jam on the table. Miss Frostbite would have been happy, though: there was Fried Fillet of Sole for seventy-five cents. I couldn’t look too long as that would have been rude, so my eyes flicked all over the place. On the other side of me a family were already on to their main courses, all of which seemed to cost $1.25: the mother had chosen Half Chicken Broiled, and the father was tucking into Calves Liver Sauté with Bacon. The two rather plain children had chosen fish. I’d never seen a kid who liked fish, and wondered where they came from. But whether they were eating Broiled Halibut Steak Maitre d’Hotel or Baked Fillet of Flounder Veronique I had no way of knowing and as far as I was concerned fish is fish and best avoided.

  Marge brought my steak and a side plate of beans and French fries. ‘Enjoy,’ she said. ‘See you later, Jack.’

  I tried to eat the steak slowly but it wasn’t possible; it was thick and juicy and absolutely delicious. The fries and beans in butter were also pretty good and I scoffed the lot. At these prices, leaving something on the plate, as Miss Frostbite said nice people always did, just wasn’t on. It would be like ignoring a nickel you came across on the pavement.

  I didn’t have dessert, although the Waffles and Pecan Maple Syrup (thirty-five cents) sounded good, but I lingered long over two cups of coffee until the train finally departed. With the restaurant empty but for myself, Marge finally approached me. I asked her if she’d care to sit down and she gave a grateful sigh. ‘Thank you, be nice to be off my feet. That’s me for the night – not my turn to set up for the next train, but the others will want to get going. Why don’t we go sit in the foyer?’

  I paid the cashier as we left the main dining room, and Marge led me into the entrance, where we sat in two comfortable chairs. She sighed again. ‘Always a rush when a train comes in,’ she said, then handed me a slip of paper. ‘The head waiter let me make a call, Jack. I’ve booked you a shared room at Mrs Henderson’s boarding house. It’s six doors down from where I live with my husband, just clear of the main part of River Street. It ain’t the best part o’ town, but it’s near everything, almost in the centre of the city.’

  ‘That’s terrific, thank you, Marge. May I pay you for the phone call?’

  ‘Tush!’ she said with a dismissive sweep of her hand. ‘The railways can pay, they make enough.’

  ‘It’s just until I can find my way around, see what’s what around the place.’

  ‘It’s Friday today. Will you stay the weekend?’

  ‘What? At Mrs Henderson’s? Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘Oh, then I’d better warn you about Sunday. By the way, Mrs H. doesn’t take boarders who drink.’

  ‘Is she Temperance?’

  ‘No, no, Apostolic.’

  ‘Huh? Can’t say I’ve heard of them. Anyhow, I don’t drink.’

  ‘Wish I could say the same for Mervyn.’

  ‘Mervyn?’

  ‘My husband. It’s why I need to warn you about Sunday.’

  ‘The Apostolics? If they’re not Temperance, what are they . . . like, a kind of church?’

  Marge sniffed. ‘Well, if you want to call them that. They’re in an old theatre across the road. It’s a religious denomination – the Apostolic Church of the Pentecost. It’s a breakaway from one of them holy-roller churches I think started in the deep south . . . Tennessee, some place like that in the States. They call themselves Apostolics for short.’

  ‘So why warn me about Sunday?’

  ‘The church is right opposite Mrs Henderson’s boarding house and they make a fearful racket.’

  Racket seemed a strange way to describe a church service. ‘You mean singing hymns?’

  Marge sniffed again. ‘Songs, more like. They have a loudspeaker right out onto the street, so what happens inside comes right on out. They start singing at seven Sunday morning, then at nine there’s the main meeting – fiery sermon, yellin’ out hallelujahs and praise the Lords – then jabbering holy ghost gibberish – they call it speaking in tongues – gospel singing, raising the roof. In the summer, baptising grown people in the Moose River and Thunder Creek. Lordy, it goes until noon, almost nonstop.’ Marge laughed. ‘I can recite some’a their songs off by heart. Their hymns of praise sound to me like black people’s music – jumpin’ and thumpin’, harmonising, horns, piano, you name it, they got it; they got the lot ’cept no church organ like a proper church.’ She shook her head. ‘I can tell you one thing for sure, Jack. If God’s trying to sleep in of a Sunday mornin’, He’s got no hope.’

  I secretly liked the idea of gospel music, if that’s what it was, the real raw thing from the south. I had my doubts, though. Joe said it was particular: ‘White folk don’t know this music. This black folks’ only.’ I’d definitely check this out, come Sunday. But then I asked the obvious question. ‘Don’t people, you know . . . complain?’

  Marge laughed again. ‘Well, yes, my husband, Mervyn, for all the good that does. He works at the railway workshops and has a regular card game Saturday nights that goes well past midnight. He and his buddies drink a fair bit and he always has a hangover come Sunday mornin’. But what can you do?’ She sighed. ‘Men will be men.’

  ‘Well, he’s part of the majority. They, these Apostolic whatevers, I imagine they’re in the minority. Surely he and the people in your neighbourhood can complain to the police or the mayor, someone in authority . . .’

  ‘Jack, this is Moose Jaw, the city where anything goes. It’s also right up on River Street, where we don’t have regular authority; it’s only grubby hands held out, greedy palms to be crossed. If the nightclubs and honky-tonks, dance halls and red-light district in the River Street area can go all Saturday night doing the devil’s work, the Apostolic Mission say they have the Lord’s permission to do His work in the same area, so they spread the gospel loud and clear for three hours on God’s own Sunday mornin’. That’s how the Times Herald said the Apostolic Church of the Pentecost put it to the mayor and the councillors when they applied for a street broadcast licence, and they couldn’t hardly refuse, could they? “It’s God fighting back in a godless city,” the newspaper said.’

  ‘Yes, but every church is supposed to do that, I mean, fight the devil. But not with loudspeakers blaring out onto the street.’

  ‘Ah, that’s not how it works here. The Apostolics say the devil’s out there in the streets, not in their church.’

  I was beginning to wonder what kind of place I’
d landed in. ‘Good thing I don’t have hangovers but I admit I don’t mind a bit of a sleep-in on a Sunday. What do you suggest, I move on before Sunday?’

  ‘Just warning you, Jack. Suit yourself. Mrs Henderson keeps a nice clean place. Mary Spragg, her cook, makes a good breakfast and dinner, I’m told, and at least your room-mate won’t be a drunk; in this town that’s rare enough. But like half the top end of River Street, Mrs H. has become a born-again Christian, so no cussing’s allowed neither and no drink at the table or in your room.’

  Marge had drawn me a map, and it looked as if Mrs Henderson’s wasn’t far from the station. ‘I told her you wouldn’t need dinner, Jack.’ Marge smiled. ‘Must go. Mervyn always forgets to put the dog out for a wee. Glad you enjoyed your steak.’

  ‘Best ever,’ I replied. Mind you, my life hadn’t been filled with juicy steaks any more than it had been with Hershey’s bars.

  ‘That’s good, Jack. You don’t wanna go paying fancy prices for a steak and find it don’t meet your expectations.’

  I’d left her a tip under my side plate and was now worried she might not get it and think me mean, but I couldn’t bring myself to mention it, so I thanked her profusely for her help. While she hadn’t asked me a single question about myself, I figured that must be the way at a railway restaurant – come and go, never to be seen again, no point in knowing any further details. Anyhow, she didn’t strike me as someone who could advise me about the music opportunities available in the city. Still, she’d been very kind.

  As Frank Farmhand had predicted, it was snowing quite heavily as I set out to walk to Mrs Henderson’s boarding house. I couldn’t help laughing to myself, wondering if playing gospel hymns – black people’s music – on the Apostolic piano qualified as scuffing. Joe Hockey had taught me several Negro spirituals, saying at the time, ‘that the Lordy Jesus side o’ jazz’.

  Talking to Marge had been one of the drollest and most unexpected conversations I could ever have imagined. I was in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, at the confluence of Moose Jaw River and Thunder Creek, where it seemed I was immediately caught up in a struggle between God and the devil.

  If only I’d known at the time what a perfect analogy this would be for my life to come.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WHAT MARGE NEGLECTED TO tell me was that her home and Mrs Henderson’s boarding house were plumb in the middle of the red light and entertainment district in downtown Moose Jaw. Both were a short walk from the railway station, and as I turned into River Street just around the corner from the address I’d been given, my eyes were soon popping out of my head. There were girls waving and calling from the windows and balconies of cheap hotels and boarding houses on both sides of the street. It didn’t seem to matter that it was snowing steadily; both sidewalks were crammed with people, mainly men, shoving in and out of the brightly lit bars, honky-tonks, gambling joints, saloons and taverns. Even on our famous trip to New York I had never seen anything like this. River Street was the devil’s playground and I had come here to play piano.

  In the first ten minutes I witnessed two street fights. Three policemen were endeavouring to halt one of them and the crowd was giving them a really hard time, booing and catcalling. I stopped to watch and asked another onlooker what had caused the fight. ‘Say, you must be new here, buddy. Just the usual – them American and Canadian railwaymen are always at each other’s throats. CPR and the Soo. It’s a regular part o’ Friday and Saturday nights. Don’t do no harm.’ He pointed to the police. ‘It’s them bastards cause most of the trouble.’

  In this part of town anyhow, the city police were obviously resented and I would later learn that they were widely regarded as corrupt, in the pay of the big gambling, drinking and prostitution interests in town.

  I was to discover that the fabled Mounties, whom I’d always thought of as synonymous with all that was good, honourable and incorruptible, were loathed by the workers and small farmers in the Western Provinces. The Depression was accompanied by a severe and long-lasting drought, which hit farm produce first. Wheat prices crashed and thousands of farmers were forced off their land. As the drought and Depression ravaged the country, the Canadian prairies had their own version of the Oklahoma dustbowl made famous by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. Like the Oklahoma families, prairie people were forced to seek work elsewhere, many of them being close to starving and penniless. The mounted police suppressed labour unrest, almost as brutally as the thugs hired by business, a practice that was rampant in the US at the time. They beat and arrested men for riding the rails – hitching rides in empty railroad wagons. They joined the goons from the CPR to attack workers in the marshalling yards, beating men senseless with baseball bats as they tried to scramble onto trains going almost anywhere, attempting to find work away from the prairies.

  The government in Ottawa labelled these desperate men communists and brutally crushed all protest. The biggest protest ever held in Canada was termed the ‘On-to-Ottawa Trek’. Over 1500 unemployed men travelled from work camps in the west towards Ottawa to have their grievances heard. In 1935, in nearby Regina, Mounties and police wielding baseball bats beat the living daylights out of the protestors and sympathetic locals. These people’s only solace was that six months later the hated conservative government was unceremoniously thrown out.

  The Canadian Mounted Police had to work for years to regain the respect of the common people in the west, and when I arrived in Moose Jaw in 1941 this certainly had not yet happened. Police of any description were suspect, and more than once I was to witness some old guy turn aside and spit at his feet at the mention of the local or federal force.

  The guy I’d queried about the fight seemed to know quite a bit about the place, so I asked him why there seemed to be a lot of men about but very few women, apart from those yelling down from the windows and balconies. ‘Itinerants,’ he said. ‘Harvest’s long over but they’re having a last fling before goin’ home.’ He then explained that special trains were run to bring labour in from the big cities in the late summer and fall. Saskatchewan alone needed 20 000 extra men to help with the harvest. ‘They got a pocketful o’ cash and soon they’ll be home again with their wives and children. This is their last chance to get drunk and get laid with nobody giving a damn,’ he concluded.

  My conversation with Marge in the railway restaurant concerning the proselytising Apostolics seemed increasingly bizarre. God and the devil, it would seem, had found a place where they could coexist. Downtown Moose Jaw was positively jumping. Several ‘girls’ had called out to me, and one had made me laugh, yelling down from an upper-storey window, ‘Hey, big boy! Come on up and lay down that heavy pack. I’ll lay you down real nice, honey!’ If only she’d known I was the original virgin.

  Every weekend during the harvest the prairie city filled with itinerant labourers; then all year round there were railway workers, grain elevator and meatworks men and, of course, young people, many over from Regina to enjoy the wicked ways denied them in the prudish provincial capital. The city was the junction for three railway networks, so there was a constant stream of commercial travellers passing through. Despite having cut my teeth on the Jazz Warehouse, I knew nothing about an urban scene like this, but at first sight, it seemed as if Moose Jaw was the ideal place to begin scuffing.

  I rang the bell at Mrs Henderson’s boarding house and presently heard footsteps approaching and saw a light go on in what I presumed was the hallway.

  ‘You him come from Marge?’ a gruff woman’s voice demanded from behind the front door. It sounded like, ‘You him come from Mars?’, which seemed apt; after River Street, staid old Toronto did feel like another planet.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I called back, thinking it must be Mrs Henderson.

  The door opened a fraction. ‘Mrs Henderson?’ I enquired.

  The door opened further and a large woman sniffed then stuck her head out. Ignoring my presence she checked the street in both directions and said, ‘Thi
s time of a Friday night, you never know what’s outside – soldiers from the camp up to no good, still some of them itinerants around; scum o’ the earth, them harvesting lot – drunks. Rubbish people everywhere!’ Having thus demolished the neighbourhood, she finally turned to face me and demanded, ‘It’s mister who?’

  ‘Spayd. Jack Spayd.’ I smiled. ‘Please call me Jack, Mrs Henderson.’

  She made no move to allow me to enter but instead looked at me sharply. ‘I’ll call you “Jack” after you’ve paid,’ she replied, lips pursed. ‘How long do you want to stay?’

  With the hall light behind her I couldn’t quite make out the colour of her eyes – green, maybe hazel – but their expression was far from friendly. Perhaps she’d once been a proper redhead, but what I was looking at was, to use my mom’s words, ‘hair that came straight out of a bottle’.

  ‘Well, I guess a week at least, so I can look around and find a job. If that’s okay, ma’am?’

  She sniffed and I took this for acquiescence. It wasn’t the warmest welcome I could remember.

  I judged Mrs Henderson to be in her mid-sixties. Stout, big breasted and heavy limbed, she was a tough-looking old buzzard, who gave the impression there wasn’t much she hadn’t seen or experienced of the human race. Almost certainly life hadn’t been kind to her, and she seemed largely unimpressed with it and her fellow humans. Her thinning hennaed hair was a particularly bright shade of ginger and was somewhat disarrayed. Beneath it, her features were almost lost in matt white powder, which stopped abruptly at her pink jowls. Otherwise, her face was devoid of any make-up, even lipstick (the devil’s paint, I was to learn). The powder had clogged the myriad creases and deep lines around her mouth, making them even more pronounced, and marking her for the heavy smoker she was, or must have been in the past. I took it that the Lord condemned lipstick but found face powder acceptable.