Flying a Red Kite

by Hugh Hood

  That first day we got back to the Yard about four. We walked into the office, clumping our boots loudly and officiously on the floor. Charlie and George had gone out somewhere in the truck and wouldn’t be back that day. Apart from Eddie, the only person in the office was a man who was sitting in Charlie’s swivel chair, bandaged to the eyes. He seemed to be suffering from broken ribs, collar-bone and arm, shock, cuts, abrasions, sprains, and perhaps other things. He was having trouble speaking clearly and his hands shook violently. He and Eddie was conspiring over a report to the Workmen’s Compensation Board.

  This man became a culture-hero in the Works Department because he was on Compensation longer than anyone had ever been before. Everyone felt obscurely that he had it made, that he had a claim against the city and the province for life. He would come back to work now and then, and after a day on the gang would be laid up six weeks more. They spoke of him at the Yard in awed lowered voices.

  “How do you feel, Sambo?” asked Bill solicitously.

  “Not good, Bill, not good.”

  “You’ll be all right,” said Bill.

  The injured man turned back to Eddie who was licking the end of his pencil and puzzling over the complicated instructions on the report. “It says ‘wife and dependents,’” he said uncertainly. “We’ll put them down anyway. If it’s wrong we’ll hear about it.”

  “I want to get my money,” said Sambo.

  “You’ll get it soon enough.”

  I could think where anybody could pick up that many lumps all at once. “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “He was Aimé’s replacement till yesterday,” said Bill unconcernedly, “but some guy on Fleet Street didn’t see the red flag. He was our last safety-man before you.”

  I thought this over most of the night, deciding finally that I would have to be luckier and more agile than Sambo. The next day was a payday, and in the press of events I forgot my fears and decided to stick with the job as long as I could. At lunchtime, the second day, most of the men expressed commiseration at the fact that I would draw no money until next week.

  Bill Tennyson came out of the office with his cheque in his hand and an air of relief written all over him.

  “Nobody got any of it this time,” he said, as nearly happy as he ever was; his salary cheque was almost always diminished by the judgments of his creditors. “How about you, Hood, you draw anything?” I told him that I wouldn’t get paid for a week and he stared at me dubiously for a minute, coming as near as he could to a spontaneous generous gesture. Then all at once he recollected himself and turned away.

  Charlie Brown told me that if I was short he could let me have five dollars. I could have used it, but it seemed wiser to say “no thanks” and stretch my credit at my rooming house for one more week. He seemed surprised at my refusal, though not annoyed.

  “You’re on the truck with Bill and Danny, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stay out of trouble,” he said cryptically and went out and got into the quarter-ton, holding a roll of plans under his stump and stuffing tobacco into his pipe with his good hand. All over the Yard men were standing in clumps, sharing a peculiar air of expectancy. Some went off hastily, after eating their sandwiches, to the nearest bank. Danny Foster let his cheque fly out of his hand and had to climb over the roofs of several low buildings on College Street in order to retrieve it. A quiet hum of talk came from the toolshed behind the office where the gang-bosses ate whenever they came into the Yard. There they sat in isolated state, old Wall, ulcerated Harris, and the cheerful Mitch, the best-liked man at the Yard, sharing their rank, its privileges and its loneliness.

  The undertone of expectation sensibly intensified as the lunch-hour passed; payday was different from other days. The whole business of the gang-bosses on paydays was to ensure that their crews should be on a job proximate to a Beverage Room. One of the reasons that Harris was so un­popular was that he was a poor planner of work schedules; his men often had to walk six or even eight blocks from the job to the hotel. Mitch, on the other hand, seemed to have a positive flair for working into position Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, so that one of our favourite places, the Brunswick perhaps or the Babloor, was just up an alley from the job. I don’t understand quite how he managed it, but if you worked on Mitch’s gang you never had to appear on a public thoroughfare as you oozed off the job and into the hotel; there was always a convenient alley.

  Bill and Danny and I left the Yard sharp at one o’clock bound for some pressing minor repairs on Huron Street behind the Borden’s plant. When we got there we couldn’t find anything that looked at all pressing, except possibly a small crack beside a drain. We filled it with coal-ass, Bill laughing all the while in a kind of sly way. I asked him what was so funny.

  “Johnny must have reported this one,” he said. “He knows where we go.”

  “Go?”

  “Oh, come on!” he said.

  “Should we stick the truck up the alley?” asked Danny.

  “Leave it where it is,” said Bill. “Nobody’s going to bother it.” He was perfectly right. The truck sat innocently beside the drain we’d been tinkering with for the rest of the afternoon, with CITY OF TORONTO WORKS DEPARTMENT written all over it in various places. A casual passerby, unless he knew the customs of the Department, would assume that that truck’s occupants were somewhere close by, hard at work. Everything looked — I don’t quite know how to put this — sort of official. Danny leaned a shovel artistically against a rear wheel, giving the impression more force than ever.

  We walked up Huron Street towards Willcocks.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, although by now I had a pretty good idea. Anybody who knows the neighbourhood will have guessed our destination already. I’m talking about that little island of peace in the hustle and bustle of the great city, the Twentieth Battalion Club, Canadian Legion, at the corner of Huron and Willcocks. This was the first time that I was ever in one of the Legion halls. I had always innocently supposed that you had to have some kind of membership. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the knowledgeable drinkers of my time at the university would never be caught dead in a public place like the King Cole Room or Lundy’s Lane.

  It was a custom hallowed by years of usage that Charlie Brown, George, and Eddie Doucette should spend Wednesday afternoon in the Forty-Eighth Highlanders Legion Hall over on Church Street. It gave one a feeling of comfort and deep security to know this.

  We went into the Twentieth and took a table by a big bay window. The houses on the four corners of Huron and Willcocks were then perhaps eighty-five years old, beautifully proportioned old brick houses with verandas at the front and side, and a lovely grey weathered tone to the walls. Like many of the original university buildings, these houses had originally been yellow brick, which the passage of nearly a century had turned to a soft sheen of grey. It was one of those beautiful days in the third week of May without a trace of a cloud in the sky, the trees on Willcocks Street a deep dusty green, and now that most of the students had left town the whole district seemed to be asleep. That was one of the finest afternoons of my life.

  “Are we gonna go back to the Yard?” said Bill to Danny, really putting the question of whether they would take the truck home with them or not. They were deciding how much they meant to drink. And the nicest thing of all from my point of view was that they took completely for granted that they would take turns buying me beers. I was always glad that I had frequent opportunities to reciprocate.

  There was an unspoken decision to make an afternoon of it.

  Over in the opposite corner, fast asleep with a glass in front of him, sat the inevitable old Sapper who would revive later on to give us a detailed account of his exploits at Passchendaele. Next to him were two Contemptibles with identical drooping wet moustaches engaged in another of their interminable games of cribbage. All afternoon
their soft murmur of “fifteen-two, fifteen-four” droned away peacefully in the background. It was a place where a man could stretch out and take his time. In all the time I was in the Twentieth after that, though I saw plenty of men thoroughly drunk, I never saw one really troublesome or nasty.

  At a big round table in the middle of the room, all by himself, shifting a pair of small eyes in a head of heroic proportions, drinking mightily, sat a young man whom I vaguely remembered having seen around the university. This was the tenor, Alan Crofoot, now a favourite of Toronto audiences but in those days dabbling in the graduate department of Psychology a block away. We grew to be good friends later on and I often reminded Al that this was the first place I’d seen him close to, though we didn’t speak. Once or twice that afternoon he glanced across at our table, plainly wondering why I had FORDHAM lettered on the front of my sweatshirt. I let him work on it.

  There wasn’t a waiter; you had to go to the window. In a minute Danny came back with three ice-cold Molson’s Blue and glasses on a tin tray. As a matter of fact we had had a fairly busy morning, we were sweaty, we had just had a heavy lunch — nothing ever tasted any better than a cold beer on a beautiful afternoon with nothing to look forward to but more of the same.

  In those days I had a small local reputation as a better than fair beer drinker with plenty of early foot, though with nothing like the stamina or capacity of Al Crofoot, say, or any of half a dozen other redoubtable faculty members and graduate assistants of my time. But I couldn’t even stay close to Bill and Danny, who drank two to my one, never appearing to feel it and never becoming obstreperous or downright disagreeable as I regularly did myself, and as my usual drinking companions often did. It was a great pleasure to pass the afternoon with them. And when five o’clock came they both pressed money on me, in the un­spoken recognition that I would naturally go on to another Beverage Room after dinner. We parted on the best of terms.

  Soon this comfortable alliance was dissolved by circumstance, when Aimé arrived back at the Yard after doing his thirty days. He flatly refused to go out with one of the gangs; he had earned his place on the coal-ass crew, he felt, and no goddamn college kid was going to get it away from him. Bill and Danny were indifferent in the matter, as was natural, and at length, about a quarter to nine the first morning Aimé was back, Charlie called me in from where I was sitting smoking to ask me how I felt about it. You see, he respected the prescriptive right that I’d already acquired in the job. There was an unspoken but very strong sentiment at the Yard that once a man got his hands on a soft spot he acquired a kind of generally sanctioned right to it. Charlie peered at me sidewise as I came into the office and leaned casually, as I’d already learned to do, on the counter.

  “What about this, Hood?” he asked sharply but, I sensed, half-apologetically. “Aimé wants his job back.”

  “Fine,” I said. He looked at me with relief, palpably surprised that I hadn’t made more of a fuss.

  “You’ll have to go out with Harris,” he said warningly.

  “Okay.”

  Aimé looked at me. “No hard feelings, kid, you understand.”

  “No,” I said, smiling. He went outside and picked up a shovel. Soon I could hear him wrangling with Danny over who was to sit in the middle.

  “Goddamn French-Canadian bastard!”

  “Shut your fat mouth, Foster!”

  The three of them got in the truck and drove off.

  I sat in the office wondering how things would be on Harris’s gang. He had the reputation of being a driver, a tough man to please. He hadn’t been a boss long and the responsibility bothered him, mostly in the stomach. He had a lean hatchet face and sunken cheeks, the face of an ulcerated man, with hysterical eyes and a marked Birmingham accent. Like many of the men at the Yard he had a lot of trouble with his wife.

  He and his boys had been piddling around with a tiny sidewalk installation on Bloor Street, between the Chez Paree and Palmer’s, for several days. They couldn’t seem to get the camber shaped right and the rain lay in puddles instead of draining off into the curb. Twice now they had had to come back to the job to rip out recently installed bays of concrete. Bloor Street, you understand, was the street of all streets about which we had to be most careful — Toronto’s Fifth Avenue — our display street as far as Charlie’s professional reputation was concerned. He hadn’t wanted to let Harris handle the job, but Wall’s gang was tied up elsewhere and the work had to be done immediately.

  As a finisher, Harris lacked confidence in himself and the resulting sureness. A concrete finisher has to be able to coax the water in the concrete to the surface, together with as many air-bubbles as possible, smoothing the surface and shaping the sidewalk — sculpting it — so that it curves almost invisibly from a high point in the centre down to either side. This is all done by the eye and the hand, sometimes with the aid of a level and a piece of two-by-four, but always pretty crudely, and Harris didn’t have a good enough eye. Concrete is an interesting medium, plastic enough to allow some correction but quick-drying enough to require a firm decisive trowel-stroke and what a draughtsman would call a good line.

  Driving me over to Bloor Street, Charlie said little, but I knew he was embarrassed about taking me off the coal-ass truck. I didn’t really mind because I’d expected to get a little light exercise on this job, but you’d have thought he was sending me to Siberia.

  “Here’s another man for you, Harris,” he said when we got out of the quarter-ton in front of the Laing Galleries.

  Harris eyed me with a great sourness; like everyone else at the Yard he knew that while I wasn’t exactly weak, I was damned clumsy. I knew what he was thinking but he couldn’t very well say anything; he’d been after Charlie for an extra man for weeks.

  “Can you use a sledge?” he asked me doubtfully.

  “Sure.”

  “Go and help them throw the broken stuff in the truck.”

  I said nothing and walked along the street to where the rest of the gang were cleaning out some bays.

  “Got you working now, Hoody,” said Freddy Lismore as I wandered up.

  “Don’t let Harris throw you, kid!” said Wally Butt, the assist­ant finisher. I grinned and, bending over, began to pick up pieces of broken sidewalk, the largest weighing not much more than thirty-five or forty pounds. Some of them had sharp edges though, and could cut your fingers badly if you weren’t careful. Fortunately I had a pair of cotton work gloves in my hip pocket. I wasn’t killing myself, but as I lofted a chunk of concrete into the truck Charlie came over and spoke to me.

  “You’re out of shape,” he said briefly. “Work into it slowly.”

  “All right,” I said, “and thanks.” He disappeared in his little truck and Harris came back, giving me a highly critical stare. I took it easy all right, but everybody in the gang took it even easier. And as is always the case with any gang of workmen, there was one guy who pottered around between the toolbox and the job, doing absolutely nothing. On Harris’ gang that would be “Gummy” Brown, always called “Gummy” to distinguish him from Charlie “One-Punch” Brown, the foreman. Gummy had a single black tooth on the left side of his upper jaw — all the rest was a great void, justifying the nickname. He had been drunk, it was held universally, since the world began.

  If you counted Gummy, Harris had seven men under him, and the use of a truck owned by its driver and rented by the city. This truck-driver went back and forth from the asphalt-plant on the waterfront, bringing loads of ready-mixed concrete — we almost never had to mix by hand — and the art of managing the gang largely consisted in exhausting the last load for the day at about ten to four, leaving plenty of time to clean off the shovels and put up barricades and lights, moving at a sober and godly pace, before quitting time. At ten to five Gummy Brown would get the keys to the tool-box from Harris and we’d stick the shovels, picks, crowbars, and trowels in the box. Gummy would lock i
t with enormous satisfaction and we’d all walk off the job, meeting there by prearrangement the next day. While we were on that Bloor Street job, I had a two-minute walk around the corner to where I lived and I used to be home washing my feet before five o’clock. And this comfortable situation lasted through the early part of the summer.

  I stayed with Harris for about six weeks that first summer, all through the ill-fated Bloor Street job, then on Robert Street fixing householders’ sidewalks a bay at a time, insignificant jobs, and finally around the Art Gallery and Hashmall’s Pharmacy on Dundas Street. I broke out concrete, used the sledge, floated off — the works. The only thing I would never risk was swinging the sledge at a spike. I could never hit the damn thing — poor timing and eyesight, I suppose — and it was dangerous for the man holding the spike.

  It might be of interest to the reader to follow a simple job from start to finish. First came the problem of getting the old cement up and out, which could be managed in several ways, depending on its age and hardness. If there happened to be grass or mud at the edge of the sidewalk, we took a long bevelled bar and worked it under the concrete, placing a rock under the bar for leverage. Then a couple of us would rock up and down on the bar to see if we could lift the slab; usually we could. When it was a foot or two off the ground, one of us would hit it in the middle with the sledge, splitting the whole slab into small chunks which could then be thrown into the truck to be disposed of at the waterfront as fill. We would clear out eight or ten bays at a time, shovelling out the rubble underneath and levelling the ground in readiness for the fresh mix.

  There could be complications. At a ramp behind the bus terminal on Elizabeth Street we found that the old concrete was over three feet thick, to take the weight of the buses. Worse still, it was criss-crossed by heavy reinforcing wire which resisted pliers and had to be cut, strand by strand, by driving a spike through it with a sledge. This reinforcing wire had to be watched carefully for it was rusted and the broken ends were dangerously sharp; that small job lasted nearly two weeks.