Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Before turning off on the old logger’s track to his cabin in the woods on the other side of Mansonville, Moses stopped at The Caboose, where he found Strawberry exactly as he had left him a month ago, brooding over a quart of Molson.

  “It’s good to see you, Straw.”

  “That’s not what my wife said the last time I seen her. She said would I be wanting some of the same when I’m eighty. Not from you I ain’t is what I told her. Besides I’m thinking of divorcing her for being so unsanitary. Every time I want to pee in the sink it’s fill of dirty dishes.” He guffawed and slapped his knee. “You look like I feel.”

  “Have you been taking care of my cabin?”

  “You only just got here, Mister Man, and you’re starting to put the pressure on. Nobody’s gonna break into your place because they know you got nothing there but all those damn books and maps and empty bottles and salmon flies that ain’t no good here. Whatever you’re drinking will be good enough for me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Again?” Strawberry asked, amused.

  If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn’t to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island. Signs over the ancient cash register reading NO CREDIT or TIP-PING ISN’T A CITY IN CHINA. A jar of rubbery pickled eggs floating in a murky brine, bags of Humpty Dumpty potato chips hanging on a spike. A moose head or a buck’s antlers mounted on the wall, the tractor caps hanging from it advertising GULF or JOHN DEERE or O’KEEFE ALE. The rip in the felt of the pool table mended with black tape. Toilet doors labelled BRAVES and SQUAWS or POINTERS and SETTERS. A Hi-Lo Double-Up JOKER POKER machine in one corner, a juke box in another, and the greasy sign over the kitchen door behind the bar reading EMPLOYES ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.

  The Caboose had a notice board.

  SURPRISE DART COMPITITION

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  TROPHY’S

  The board listed a cottage for sale on Trouser Lake, last month’s Slo-Ball League schedule and a HONDA MOTORCYCLE LIKE BRAN NEW FOR SALE.

  The Caboose was a clapboard box mounted on cinder blocks, more flies inside than out. Tractors and dump trucks and pickups began to bounce into the parking lot around five P.M., uniformly rust-eaten, dented badly here, taped together there, often an old coat hanger twisted to hold a rattling or leaky muffler in place. Once the men settled in they began to mull over the day’s events. Who had been found out by the welfare office and who was the latest to be caught putting it to Sneaker’s wife, Suzy, and was it Hi-Test again who was stealing those big outboards on the lake. Whether the new barmaid at Chez Bobby was worth the cost of a dinner first or if she was only trying it on because she had graduated from high school in Ontario, she said. Where you could get the best deal across the border on used tires for a grader and at the bottom of which hill were the fucken provincial police lying in wait right now.

  The lot outside The Caboose, punctured with potholes, overlooked a lush meadow lined with cedars. There were picnic tables out there as well as an enormous barbecue, the engine a salvage job done on an abandoned four-stroke lawn mower. Sundays in summer the truculent and hungover Rabbit would turn up at seven A.M. to begin roasting a pig or a couple of shoulders of beef for the community dinner, all you could eat for five bucks, proceeds to The Old Folks Home in Rock Island. The Rabbit was once dismissed for pissing in the fire. “People was looking and it puts them off their feed.” He was fired again for falling asleep in the grass after guzzling his umpteenth Molson and failing to notice that the spit hadn’t been revolving properly for more than an hour. Then he beat up an inspector from the Commission de la Langue Française outside The Thirsty Boot on the 243. According to reports the inspector had ordered The Thirsty Boot to take down their sign and replace it with a French one. “Sure thing,” the Rabbit had said, kneeing the inspector in the groin, just to cut him down to his own height before laying into him. “We’re gonna put up a pepper sign all right. Only it’s gonna read ‘De Tirsty Boot’.” After that he could do no wrong.

  Behind The Caboose there was a gravel pit and a fished-out pond and beyond that the mountains that had been lumbered twice too often, the cherry and ash and butternut long gone. Bunk, who also trapped during the winter, had a shack somewhere up there. He took the odd fisher, some fox and racoons and beaver. The deer were everywhere.

  Moses had stopped at The Caboose in the first place by accident. Late one afternoon six years earlier, having spent two days sifting through historical society files in Sherbrooke, searching for references to Brother Ephraim, he went out for a drive and got lost in the back roads. Desperate for a drink, he pulled in at The Caboose and considered not getting out of his Toyota because two men, Strawberry and Bunk, were fighting in the parking lot. Then he grasped that they were both so blind drunk that none of their punches were landing. Finally Strawberry reached back and put all he had into a roundhouse, sliding, collapsing in a mud puddle, and just lying there. A gleeful Bunk reeled over to his pickup, climbed in, the piglets in the back squealing as he gunned his motor, aiming himself at the prone Strawberry.

  “Hey,” Moses yelled, leaping out of his car, “what in the hell are you trying to do?”

  “Run the fucker over.”

  “He’ll bite a hole in your tires.”

  Bunk pondered. He scratched his jaw. “Good thinking,” he said, reversing into a cedar, jolting the protesting piglets, then charging forward, swerving into the 243.

  Moses helped Strawberry to his feet and led him back into The Caboose.

  “Whatever you’re drinking will be good enough for me, Mister Man.”

  Strawberry, blue-eyed, tall and stringy, all jutting angles, was missing two fingers, a souvenir of his days in the bobbin mill, and had no upper teeth. Moses drank with him and the others until two A.M. Then Strawberry, insisting that Moses was now too drunk to drive, settled him into his Ford pickup and took him to his house on the hill to spend the night on the sofa. No sooner had they staggered inside than Strawberry dug out his shotgun, rolled back out on to his rotting porch and fired a couple of rounds into the air.

  “What are you shooting at?” Moses asked, startled.

  “If I lived in some big-shot apartment building in the city like you probably do, Mister Man, all I’d have to do is drop my boots on the floor and the neighbours would know I was home safe. Here I fire my shotgun so’s they know I’m back and they don’t need to worry no more. I may be stupid, but I ain’t crazy.”

  The next morning Strawberry’s wife made them bacon and eggs and then they moved on to Chez Bobby, having agreed to have just one for the ditch before Moses proceeded to Montreal. Three hours passed before Strawberry suddenly leaped to his feet. “Shit,” he said, “we got to get to Cowansville.”

  Strawberry, charged with drunken driving a month earlier, was due to appear in court that afternoon. First, however, he took Moses to The Snakepit, a bar around the corner from the courthouse, where Bunk, Sneaker, Rabbit, Legion Hall, and some of the others were already waiting. By the time Strawberry’s supporters, Moses still among them, drifted into the courtroom, they were quarrelsome drunk. They waved and whistled and hollered imprecations at the first sight of Strawberry standing there, grinning.

  “Order, order in the court,” the judge called out.

  “I’ll have a hamburger,” Strawberry said.

  “I could give you ninety days for that.”

  “That’s nothing.”

  “How about a hundred and twenty?”

  Fortunately, Strawberry’s lawyer intervened at this point. He was the judge’s nephew and the local Liberal party bagman. Strawberry got off with a suspended sentence and everybody repaired to Gilmore’s Corner to celebrate. They made three more pit stops before they ended up at The Beaver Lodge in Magog. “My great-grandaddy Ebenezer u
sed to drink here,” Strawberry told Moses, pointing out a sign over the bar that had been salvaged from the original hotel, destroyed by fire in 1912.

  WM. CROSBY’S HOTEL

  The undersigned, thankful for past favours

  bestowed upon this

  LONG-ESTABLISHED HOTEL

  is determined to conduct this establishment in a

  manner that will meet the approbation of the public,

  and therefore begs a continuance of Public Patronage.

  REFRESHMENTS SERVED AT ANY HOUR

  OF DAY OR NIGHT

  Wm. Crosby

  Proprietor

  The next afternoon Moses phoned Henry Gursky, in the Arctic, and borrowed enough money to buy the cabin high in the woods overlooking Lake Memphremagog.

  Strawberry, Moses discovered, painted houses between drinks. He could also be driven to cut wood or plough snow. But, for the most part, he was content to hibernate through the winter on the fat of his welfare cheque. “Hey, I coulda been rich, a big landowner,” Strawberry once said, “if not for what my crazy great-grandaddy done. Old Ebenezer Watson gave up the bottle for God, a big mistake, joining up with a bunch of religious nuts called the Millenarians. Eb lost just about everything, his life included. All that was left was some ninety acres of the old family farm. It went to Abner, my grandaddy.”

  Strawberry failed to turn up the next afternoon. Moses was seated alone when one of the rich cottagers stumbled into The Caboose. Clearly distressed, he held a slip of paper before him like a shield to guard against contagious diseases. “Pardonnez moi,” he said, “mais je cherche—”

  “We speak English here,” Bunk said.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Strawberry Watson, the house painter. I was told he lived up on the hill, just past Maltby’s Pond, but the only house I could see there is obviously abandoned. It’s unpainted, the grass hasn’t been cut, and the yard is full of rusting automobile parts.”

  “You found it, mister.”

  THE DAY MOSES DROVE IN from the clinic in New Hampshire, Gord, who owned The Caboose, was tending bar. He wore a black T-shirt embossed with a multi-coloured dawn. A slogan was stencilled over it:

  I’M FEELING SO HORNY

  Even The Crack of Dawn Looks Good To Me.

  After a hard Saturday night Gord’s first wife, Madge, had died in a head-on collision on the 105, totalling their brand new Dodge pickup in the bargain, and ever since Gord wouldn’t hear of buying another new truck. “I mean, shit, you drive it out of the dealer’s lot and five minutes later it’s already second-hand, ain’t it? Like my new wife.”

  His new wife was the widow Hawkins. The courtship had been brief. One afternoon, only a couple of months after he had buried Madge, Gord got into a bad fight in The Thirsty Boot with Sneaker over his wife, Suzy. Actually Sneaker wasn’t living with his wife at the time, but was shacked up with a hooker from the Venus di Milo in a trailer tucked into the woods off the 112 Still, he resented anybody else cutting his grass. Gord made the mistake of saying, “I don’t know why you ever left her. As far as I’m concerned, she’s still awful good fucking, eh?”

  Gord, nursing a sore jaw and a couple of loose teeth, carried on to The Snakepit, Crystal Lake Inn, Chez Bobby, and the Brome Lake Hotel, stopping somewhere along the line to buy supplies at a dépanneur. Tins of baked beans and soups, a bag of frozen fries, some TV dinners, and a big bag of Fritos. He also bought a chicken and made straight for the widow Hawkins’s cabin in South Bolton, kicking in the door at two A.M. “I’m tired of eatin’ shit. So this here is a chicken,” he said. “Got it at a dépanneur. You cook it good for my dinner tomorrow night and I’ll fucken marry you. But if it’s tough, forget it, eh?”

  Gord liked to post items clipped from the Gazette on his notice board. Once it was the news that troopers in Vermont had arrested a man wanted for the serial murders of thirty-two women within the past five years.

  “He sure as hell shouldn’ta done that,” Strawberry said. “There ain’t enough of them to go around as it is.”

  One of the men who frequented The Caboose ran a gravel pit, another owned a dairy farm, others picked up carpentry jobs here and there, and still more worked as caretakers or handymen for the rich cottagers on the lake. For most of them it was a matter of stitching twenty weeks of summer work together in order to qualify for unemployment insurance in the winter. Failing that they went on welfare, bolstering their take on the barter system. If Sneaker painted Gord’s barn he came away with a side of beef. If Legion Hall retiled Mike’s roof he could have the hay from the field across the road and sell it in Vermont for $2.50 a bundle. The men owned their own cottages, cut their own winter wood, and counted on shooting a deer in November. Some of the wives worked on the assembly line in the Clairol factory in Knowlton and others served as cleaning ladies for the cottagers on the lake. The wives, who usually gathered at their own tables in The Caboose, ran to fat, bulging out of tank tops and stretchy pink polyester slacks.

  Moses usually avoided The Caboose on Friday night, Band Night, which brought out the noisy younger crowd, who were quickly herded into the basement, where—according to Strawberry—they smoked Hi-Test. “You know, whacky tobaccy.” But he seldom failed to turn up for the Sunday night steak dinner because Gord’s father, old Albert Crawley, was always there. Albert remembered Solomon Gursky from the days, during Prohibition, when he used to run convoys of the booze into Vermont through the old Leadville road. More than once, Albert said, the word out, the road bristling with customs men or hijackers, they had hidden the stuff in the old talc mine, which had been in the Gursky family since 1852. Other times they had unloaded the shipment at Hector Gagnon’s farm, which straddled the border, packed it in saddlebags that were strapped to the backs of cattle, and drove the herd into Vermont at three A.M.

  After Albert was badly wounded one night, taking it in the gut, Solomon set him up in a hotel in Abercorn, and weekends couples drove in from as far away as Boston and New York. W.C. Fields had slept there. So had Fanny Brice. Once Dutch Schultz, accompanied by Charles “the Bug” Workman, had come to look over the hotel, but Albert had sent for Solomon, who had hurried out from Montreal with some girls from the Normandy Roof Bar, smoothing everything out nicely. Then along came Repeal, rendering the hotel redundant, and it became necessary to burn it down for the insurance money.

  Whenever Moses turned up at The Caboose after a long absence Gord would send somebody to fetch his father. He would also, as he did the day Moses drove back from New Hampshire, unlock a cabinet under the bar and fish out a bottle of Glenlivet, which Albert and Moses, in a joke they never tired of, would call Glen Levitt. This in remembrance of the time Mr. Bernard, never a great speller, had ordered the wrong labels for a shipment, endearing himself to Solomon for once.

  “Legion Hall has a pile of mail for you,” Strawberry said.

  “Let the man enjoy his drink,” Albert said.

  “Hold the phone, he don’t any more.”

  “Again?”

  “Yeah.”

  Albert Crawley’s head bobbed upright. He began to laugh and cough at the same time, heaving, spilling tears and phlegm. “If I could drink with Solomon Gursky just one more time they could plant me happy tomorrow.” Then his head slumped forward and in his mind’s eye Albert Crawley was out there with Solomon again, standing in the dark of Hector Gagnon’s farm on this side of the border, waiting for the long overdue blinking headlights from the other side, a perplexed Solomon digging out his cherished gold pocket watch again, the watch that had once belonged to his grandfather and was engraved:

  From W.N. to E.G.

  de bono et malo.

  Albert had held his cigarette lighter to Solomon’s watch and the instant it had flared the firing had started and Solomon had pulled Albert down into the tall grass with him, but too late.

  “Pour me another one of them Glen Levitts, will you, Moses?”

  Nine

  Moses was wakened the next morning by a phone call
from Gitel Kugelmass’s daughter. Gitel had been arrested for shop-lifting at Holt Renfrew. Other ladies, Moses reflected, might be caught pilfering at Miracle Mart, even Eaton’s, but for die Roite Gitel it had to be Montreal’s classiest emporium. Moses agreed to drive into Montreal and take Gitel to lunch at the Ritz “for a talk,” something he hadn’t done for several years.

  In her late seventies, somewhat shrunken but unbent, Gitel still favoured a big floppy hat, a fox collar more moth-eaten than ever, antique rings. But her startling makeup, more suitable to a harlequin, was applied with a tremulous hand now, an unsure eye. A nimbus of too-generously applied powder trailed after her. Cheeks burning bright with rouge suggested fever more readily than femme fatale.

  “I realize,” Moses said, “that you meant to pay for the perfume, you forgot, but please be careful in the future, Gitel, now that you have been charged once.”