A Good Day's Work

by John Demont

  A milkman’s enemies are legion: blizzards, gridlock, meter maids, leaky fridges. Time is the ultimate foe when you have somewhere around two hundred stops a day to make and a route that reaches from the newest suburb to the oldest corner of one of the country’s longest-lived cities. “You think you’re okay and then there you go,” Bill moans. “Oh my, oh my. I knew this was going to be a bad day soon as I got up. You know what? I was right.” Lose a couple of minutes on each stop and the interminable day extends even longer. What’s worse, the problems grow exponentially. When Bill is late, his customers—the stores, restaurants, nursing homes and other wholesale stops that make up 90 percent of his income—start looking at the clock. If he simply didn’t show up—well, you never know, the entire Halifax Regional Municipality might just clank and hiss to a halt.

  Today all Bill had to do was conjure up 3,600 mislaid seconds from thin air. Hard to do when your timetable is already as tight as a Hank Williams lyric. When you are sixty-one years old, operating on six hours’ sleep, beset by tennis elbow and carpal tunnel syndrome along with a host of other physical maladies. So, you hunch a little lower over the steering wheel. You narrow your eyes. You crank 101.9 FM a little louder on the dial, listening to announcers who sound like they’ve had the same kind of life experiences you’ve had. Then you blow through town as the streets unfold before you, and you search for slices of lost time.

  For a decade Bill has arrived at my house at around 5:30 a.m. every Tuesday and Friday to drop off a few litres of one percent milk. Occasionally, when the kids were babies or if I had to catch an early flight, I’d glimpse his truck out there idling in the street. I never once saw his fleeting shape between truck and doorstep. For ten years we’ve communicated by worn pages torn from a notebook, scraps of paper or a used envelope filled with crabbed writing. Usually he was informing us that we owed him money, that a holiday was coming up or that he and his wife were actually going on vacation, which, he explained, they seldom did.

  It always made me feel guilty and a little sad to get these messages. Sometimes I’d stand on the step, hold the piece of paper in my hands and try to imagine what this man who made the calcium appear looked like. I didn’t know then that our lives had been intertwined for half a century. That his father, Bill Sr., used to deliver milk to my parents when I was growing up a couple of blocks from my current address. I can’t remember laying eyes on him either. I just took his existence for granted, like the Tooth Fairy. My parents left tickets or money in a glass bottle on the front step. The next morning there’d be milk.

  I was a boy of my time and place. Sometimes, when sleeping in a tent in someone’s backyard, we’d get up in the dark before the Bills, Jr. and Sr., arrived. Then we’d skulk through the streets looking for milk money to steal. A decent score would mean a bottle of Mountain Dew, a roll of wine gums, maybe even a round of Fudgsicles. Milk, though, was what packed muscle onto our adolescent frames. At the kitchen table, I’d pour it into an Esso service station glass that urged car owners to Put a Tiger in Your Tank, then I’d empty it in one gulp. I’d drown my Raisin Bran until the fruit bobbed in the wake like baby seals. I’d run through the door, hair plastered to my forehead from some kids’ game, yank the fridge door open and just chug straight from the bottle.

  I reached for the milk jug for practical reasons: milk was cool and refreshing. It was not water. All these years later I wonder whether there is something infantile about milk’s attraction. Or whether a human body just naturally has a hankering for all the calcium and protein that led some marketing genius to label it “the perfect food.” I just know that the weight, texture and taste of milk—along with the feel of corduroy and the first few bars of the theme from Get Smart—never fail to transport me back to a time when a thirteen-year-old still pondered the great riddles of the universe: Who’s tougher, Captain Kirk or Gordie Howe? What exactly were SpaghettiOs? Betty or Veronica? And that when my time comes—when I lie in a bed unable to conjure up a few words to describe what the whole strange experience has been like—it is my firm belief that the taste of milk may be one of the few shards of memory still ricocheting through my hollowed-out cerebrum. Making Bill Bennett a perfect entry in a book such as this.

  BILL Bennett Jr. told me to wait under the big skim milk sign that marked the turnoff to the Farmer’s Dairy. “Be there at 1:40,” he said. That way, after getting the day’s load, he could pick me up in his van before starting deliveries. “You’ll know it’s me because my name’s on the side in big letters,” he told me over his cell. Usually Bill travelled alone. Which meant that once he had quickly rearranged the front of the van, my seat was an overturned milk crate covered by a blanket, to the right of the driver’s seat.

  “I could have done anything,” he said. “My mother’s mom had some money and she said she would pay for my education. But I got my grade ten, then stopped because I hated school, every second of it. That was around, let’s see, 1964. I had been working with my dad since before I could remember. So I started working with him in one of those old flat-nosed DIVCO vans.” You can see the miles in his face: the skin around his pale eyes, cross-hatched and wrinkled from all that staring into the dark; the grey flecks in his brown-red beard; the nose bent like a Bedouin chieftain’s. He radiates the kind of weary pride I’ve seen in five-hour marathoners, union organizers and bar-band bass players.

  Bill says he’s five foot ten,, but he looks shorter. After four decades of humping his dolly up and down stairs, through restaurant basement passageways and across convenience store parking lots, he’s got a permanent slouch, as if forever shouldering some unseen weight. Bill jokes about having a belly, though I don’t detect one. On the other hand, anyone can see what he means when he talks about having “bumps” on his hands from all those years of handling cold stuff without gloves.

  Today he’s in his “uniform.” Greenish fleece, blue T-shirt, navy work pants. Black shoes, like the ones old-time basketball referees used to wear, a blue Niagara Falls ball cap. The big surprise is his voice. Not so much the rasp, as unexpected as that is for someone who has reputedly never smoked a cigarette or drunk anything stronger than chocolate milk. I was expecting someone taciturn, maybe who had even lost the power of speech after all those years of working alone in the dark—the way that fish living deep in the ocean are blind because they no longer have the need to see. Truth is, this boy can talk. “Is what I do important?” he barks. “I never thought about it, but oh God yeah. People need milk, so why not do it? I’ve hurt myself many times. Falling down steps, I twisted my ankle. I never missed a day even when I had spinal meningitis. I went in and helped out. I even went to work when I had kidney stones, and you know they hurt. Forty-one years and not one day missed. It takes a man to come out and do this all day for twelve hours. That or a dummy—one or the other.”

  The tumble of words, I suspect, just makes him feel less alone out here in the dark. At two o’clock in the morning, city bars are just starting their second act. Police stations, emergency rooms and all-night convenience stores are busy. In the suburbs and bedroom communities most people are dreaming. Outside, the world is filled with a humming silence. No car, dog or human moves. Lit by front-porch bulbs that someone forgot to turn out, twenty-first-century streets look like an Edward Hopper painting: cool, soft-focused, as if some revelation is at hand.

  I get the distinct feeling that even if I weren’t here, Bill would still be addressing his sleeping customers, the moon, even his own product in the back of the van. The monologue, out of necessity, is his dominant conversational form. He snorts at the inequalities of life, grouses a little about his lot and rants a bit about his pet peeves (traffic cops, competing dairies, lousy drivers). By nature, though, he is an infallible optimist, a buoyant spirit who believes “you have to take the bad with the good” and that “things will turn out all right in the end.” An effervescent personality who likes to punctuate his upright words with a “ha-ha-ha-ha,” the occasional “mama mia!” or an
“ay, caramba” like Bart Simpson.

  When he feels really good about things—and sometimes even when he doesn’t—he can’t contain himself. “Dad had a good voice,” Bill says. “He used to sing in all the choirs and sounded just like Bing Crosby. I’ve got a good voice too. He was Catholic, Mom Protestant. I used to sing in both churches every second week. But that was years ago when I was young and foolish.” Nowadays he does a lot of his singing on the job. In the run of a day you might hear him sing a cappella snatches of “Yellow Submarine,” “Love Me Tender,” “Downtown,” “It’s Hard to Be Humble” and “Over the Rainbow.” Or he might join in on songs from the radio that only a country music aficionado could know. (If you wanted to conjure up someone from that world he resembles, think Merle Haggard—proud, weary and just a little pissed off.) Sometimes, for no obvious reason, he gives the words a reggae inflection or makes them sound like Count Chocula is singing them. Other times he sings words that seem a little silly: “Ten little turkeys all in a row. One little turkey said I don’t know”; or “Giddy oh, giddy oh, giddy I oh. I smell the blood of an Englishman.” When I ask him about the improvisations, he shrugs: “I make up those lyrics. I make them up all the time. I make them up and throw them out. I’m always singing and acting the fool. My wife says, ‘Will you be quiet—all you do is sing or whistle.’ I say, ‘Be happy that I’m happy.’ ”

  The first time I hear him sing—Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler”—it is in an octave high enough that I steal a glance to see if he is serious. We are heading west into a small residential enclave that is more rural hamlet than city suburb, so Bill drives with impunity on either side of the street as he searches for his customers. He rolls down his window, then from the van shines his big, boxy flashlight on the mailbox or front window to see if the red-and-white Farmer’s sign is face out (Delivering Convenience Right To Your Door) or reversed (No Thank You!). If the house is running low, Bill slams the van into park, climbs out and scuttles around to the back of the vehicle, his gruff monologue trailing behind him in the night air.

  His ride is nothing special: sides white and unadorned other than with his name; the roof flat except where broken by a sloping refrigeration vent. The cab, where he sits, littered with an empty plastic oil bottle, used Tim Hortons cups and the tools of his trade: sunglasses, an alarm clock, an invoice printer, a blanket and some rain gear. End to end the van can’t be more than twenty feet long, and is utterly devoid of glamour. Which in that respect doesn’t make it much different from the oldest picture of a milk wagon I could find when I went looking one day in the Nova Scotia archives. The black-and-white photo showed a hollow-eyed middle-aged man—not unlike Bill—sporting a moustache like a push broom. The old-timer wore a peaked miner’s hat, jacket, vest, tie, dress shirt, cuffed trousers, and workboots. His buggy seat was probably six feet off the ground. The horse was big. So were the wheels. Milk cans filled the back.

  This was before refrigeration, when iceboxes were literally boxes with ice, providing little storage. One of the enduring memories for the people of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, would have been the clip-clop of Rod Morash’s horse ambling by memory from house to house to drop off bottles of fresh milk and take away the empty bottles from the day before. That and the trail of steaming “road apples” deposited in the street, letting people know that the milk wagon had passed their way. In those rough days most of the necessities of life—meat, fish, laundry, ice, vegetables, bread and other things—were delivered person to person by horse-drawn wagon. Progress was coming though. By 1918 the photographic record shows enclosed milk carts that afforded the driver-owner some comfort and more storage. A few years later the vans seemed worthy of minor royalty: the carriages white with elegant dark trim, the spoked wheels less clunky, the horses bigger, better kept, more regal.

  When Bill Bennett Sr. climbed onto a Twin Cities milk wagon for the first time back in the midst of the Great Depression, a horse still hauled his wagon over the cobblestones and dirt roads of Halifax. Corner stores didn’t really have refrigeration equipment. Supermarkets were still ahead. That left milkmen, even if the old horse and wagon was already on the road to obsolescence. The experience of Borden’s Farm Products in New York City was illustrative: in 1928 Borden’s operated 3,025 horse-drawn routes, requiring 3,697 horses. By 1946, while handling roughly the same number of customers, it was running only 168 horse-drawn routes, with just 181 horses in its stable.

  All of which is to say that twenty years later when Bill Sr. started bringing milk to the DeMont household at 1681 Cambridge Street in Halifax, he was behind the wheel of a motorized van. An accountant who grew up in the same neighbourhood as I did remembers him as a wrathful, glowering figure who seemed to like to yell at any kids who inconvenienced him. That doesn’t square with the popular mid-twentieth-century image of the milkman: the smiling guy in the crisp white uniform who arrived glass bottles jingling in metal baskets, then left with the slam of the milk box lid.

  They were always more than just deliverymen. In the early days many of them would keep a house key and put the milk, eggs and cheese right in the cellar icebox, and later in the refrigerator. They would help in other ways too, leaving food out for a dog or cat, reaching something on a high shelf for an elderly customer, changing a fuse for an ill-equipped housewife. They apparently aided housewives in distress in other ways too. Every joke in the surprisingly large genre of milkman jokes runs along the lines of this one I found after about thirty seconds of perusing the Internet. A man and his pregnant wife go to the doctor, who mentions a new treatment that allows a female to transfer the pain of childbirth to the father. The couple decides to give it a shot. The mother is hooked up to the machine. The doctor starts it up. The mother starts to feel better, but the husband doesn’t feel anything. Puzzled, the doctor turns up the machine. The mom’s smile grows; the husband reports no change. The doctor keeps cranking the machine: the woman feels very, very happy; the husband just shrugs. Eventually they go back home and walk up to the front of their house, where the milkman lies dead on the front step.

  Bill Bennett Sr., who worked twelve-hour days and was married to the same woman for forty-five years, had no time for servicing bored married ladies. By the time his only son started tagging along on the route Bill was driving a step van, so called because of the ease with which it allowed the driver to step in and out from behind the wheel to make deliveries. It was built by the Detroit Industrial Vehicle Company. DIVCO produced trucks for bakers, laundrymen, even paper boys. In the 1950s and 1960s, anyone who delivered anything probably drove a DIVCO truck. Starting in 1937 until production ceased in 1986, DIVCO trucks were essentially designed the same way: an all-steel body, a bumper-less, streamlined bulldog front, a drop frame that allowed the driver to drive the van while standing instead of expending all that energy getting in and out of a seat.

  My guess is that Bill Sr. drove a Series 1 DIVCO van, the main milk truck on North American roads during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It packed a six-cylinder, seventy-five-horsepower engine. The controls, including the throttle and brake, were on the steering wheel. When packed to the roof, it could hold fifty-seven cases of milk bottles. Pedal to the metal, this model could near fifty miles an hour.

  I never saw one drive anywhere near that fast. I remember them anyway. I was a child then and the world I recall—the clothes, the homes, the avenues, the storefronts—was pretty much the one I see when I look at old pictures of DIVCO trucks today. The street is always empty, it is always Saturday morning and the sky is forever streaked with blue. Nothing bad has ever happened and no one anyone loved had ever died.

  I’m not alone in this fantasy. At vintage auto shows all across North America, cars nuts ignore the sparkling Mustangs and Corvettes and surround stubby, reconstituted DIVCO milk trucks. They ooh and aah about the paint jobs, the movable seats, the classy grill, the vintage AC systems that blew huge amounts of cool air into the yawning interiors. Then their eyes glaze over in a haze of desire
as they rhapsodize about bygone days. “You take a DIVCO to a car show, it always draws a crowd,” Les Bagley, director of the DIVCO Club of America, which has 750 active members nationwide told me. “You could have a ’57 Chevy sitting right next to it, and it would still draw a bigger crowd.”

  NOWADAYS Bill Jr. drives a Ford van with a V-6 351 engine under the hood. At about two tons, it is a fraction of the size of the one his dad drove in the 1960s and about half as big as the one Bill himself captained in the eighties. Vans are shrinking out of necessity: declining family sizes mean fewer kids and fewer kids mean fewer milk drinkers. Juices, power drinks and designer coffees have eaten into milk’s market. As well, most of the recent immigrants to Canada come from countries where milk has never been a traditional drink. The upshot is that Canadians now drink about half as much milk per capita as they did twenty years ago. But it’s the rise of the supermarket that really killed the milkman. In the United States, 80 percent of retail milk sold during the 1950s was home delivered. Today it’s less than 1 percent. In the United Kingdom and Wales, doorstep deliveries now account for 10 percent of milk sales. No such exhaustive statistics are available in Canada. But it’s safe to say that the downward slide has been just as precipitous here.

  In 2008 Farmer’s Dairy employed six hundred people, but very few of them delivered milk. Farmer’s, which started in 1921, at that point had just seventy to eighty vans delivering its products across Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. The dairy is a farmer-owned co-operative, which means the profits go back to the farmers who produce the milk. That’s admirable. But it also means that drivers are independent contractors who are paid a volume-related commission and don’t receive a salary, paid vacations or any other benefits.