Flying a Red Kite

by Hugh Hood

  “You look like a pretty good light-weight, Hoody,” he’d say. This always convulsed Mitch.

  “Try and hit me,” I’d say, dancing around jabbing, or pretending to tie him up inside. Like most students, I had terrible co-ordination.

  “Going to get in shape on the city,” we’d sing absurdly, and this was also good for laughs. Then we’d swing our shovels for a minute as though our lives depended on it. A girl would go by and we’d straighten up and inflate our chests, holding ourselves immobile.

  “Who’s she looking at, Mitch,” Frank would say, “me or Hoody?”

  The poor girl would blush and we’d gurgle happily and foolishly to ourselves. We never tried to offend or embarrass a passing girl but they never could resist a peek at Frank, and if we caught them at it, why then the joke was legitimate.

  But life on Mitch’s gang was too good to last, at least for me, though it went on and on for them and still does. When vacation-time came I went back on the night-watch at the Yard, guarding the piles of sand and gravel and the tools in the shed, feuding with the firemen or throwing a football with them, depending on the state of our relations.

  Early in June in the summer of 1953 there occurred the most momentous event of my career as a fill-in watchman, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. There were weeks of preparation of one kind or another in case of crowds, but somehow the most weighty arrangements of the whole affair went untouched until seven-thirty on the morning of that eventful day.

  It was a fit day for a Coronation, the sky an absolute crystalline blue, the air dry and soft, and College Street slumbrous and deserted at seven o’clock in the morning. I had promised Jimmy Baird, whom I was to relieve, that I would come on early so he could go home and get dressed up with his medals on for the parade. The bagel shops were silent — you could hear birdsong on College Street!

  I was whistling “Land of Hope and Glory” softly to myself as I came into the office. The sound woke Jimmy who stared at me with infantine sleepy eyes, hardly recognizing me — the emergency calls never woke Jimmy — as he rolled off the top of the desk where he’d been lying, straightened his collar and tie, and prepared to leave.

  “Anything doing?” I asked.

  “Not a thing.” There was never anything in the book after Jimmy had worked a shift. I suppose the sight of his lifeless body was enough to frighten marauders away, though; he looked quite dead when he slept.

  “Tommy Cowdrey’s the driver,” said Jimmy as he left. “If anything comes in, call him.” He slunk out the door. I stood in the gateway to the Yard for a while, looking east and west along College Street, and there wasn’t a sound, nothing stirred. Then, a long long way off, perhaps as far away as Sherbourne Street, I could hear a streetcar, the clicking of the points as the trucks passed over them and then the rumble along the street; it was coming fast and I could predict exactly from the sound when it would come in sight away along to the east about St. George Street. A car with an Alabama plate went slowly past with a tired driver slumped over the wheel. They must have driven all night. A single policeman idled in front of the Mars Grill.

  Inside the office the phone rang suddenly, urgently. I caught it on the third ring. It was seven-thirty. “Number Two Yard,” I carolled into the mouthpiece, and then I got a shock.

  “This is the Commissioner,” said a tense voice. “Is Foreman Brown there?”

  “No, Mr. Chambers.”

  “Then you’ll have to get hold of him. This is an emergency.” The hair stood up on my head; there was real urgency, even fright, in the Commissioner’s voice. “We’ve got to erect a temporary Comfort Station in Queen’s Park,” he said. “The bandstand facilities won’t be nearly enough. I’ve just had the Parade Marshal on the phone and he’s furious.” He began to give me explicit instructions.

  “We’ll use the same model we used on VE Day. Twenty-four compartments, twelve of each. Brown has the plans. He’ll need workmen, lumber, paint or stain, buckets, chloride of lime, and the appropriate signs. Get him into the Yard and call the crew. Then call me back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very good. Who’s speaking?”

  “Hood. Fill-in watchman.”

  “All right, Hood, I’m counting on you. Get busy!”

  I called Charlie at once and he was galvanized into action. “You’ll find the plans for the model in my desk. Do you know where the key is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call Eddie and tell him to pick me up. Then get out the plans. Then call Wall and tell him to call six of his best men and have them meet me at the Yard. They’ll draw double time, tell him, but they’ve got to come in. I don’t know how we forgot about this.” He hung up in great distress of mind and I began to carry out his instructions.

  By eight-fifteen Eddie and Wall and six labourers were standing uncertainly in the Yard. Charlie was inside on the phone like some great captain adjusting his tactics after a military disaster. “My right flank is crushed, my centre in full retreat, my left wing collapsing. Very good, I shall attack!”

  “Send the partitions to the bandstand,” he was shouting, “and some green stain, and don’t forget the signs like last time.” At eight-thirty he and the men departed for the site of the proposed Comfort Station.

  As you remember there was an enormous parade that day which was to assemble on the university front campus, the back campus, and in Queen’s Park, and which was to move off at one-thirty. Besides the marchers and police and civil dignitaries, there would be great crowds of spectators, hotdog and ice cream vendors, flag and souvenir salesmen — altogether about seventy-five thousand people. I wondered if twenty-four compartments, even adding on the bandstand facilities, would be enough.

  Soon there came an anguished call from a payphone at Hart House. It was Charlie. “No buckets!” he wailed.

  “No buckets?” I echoed, thunderstruck.

  “They’re out of them at the Supply Department. Now look, Hood, we’ve got to have those buckets. There are ten thousand people here already and they all want to use the facilities. Call the Commissioner and ask him to get them from Eaton’s Mail Order. They’re sure to have some.”

  I called the Commissioner and he was aghast. “There won’t be anybody there today. Maybe I’d better have it broadcast.”

  “Don’t you know anybody at Eaton’s?”

  “I know Lady Eaton, of course,” he said doubtfully. “I’ve met her at civic functions. But I can’t call her.”

  “We’ve got to have them, sir”

  “All right,” he said “I’ll get the buckets. What size?”

  “The largest,” I said, “galvanized iron.” He hung up and in a matter of seconds Charlie was back on the line. “What about those buckets?”

  “Chambers is calling Lady Eaton,” I said, and he seemed reassured.

  At eleven the buckets arrived on the site and instantly the crowds swarmed around the workmen demanding access to them. But the walls and roof weren’t complete yet, and Charlie was afraid of offending public decency; he held the besiegers off until the partitions were up and the roof decorously in place while the swarms of bandsmen, hotdog vendors, and children with balloons grew thicker. At length the last nail was driven home, the last plank solidly in place, the buckets in a glittering phalanx.

  The Parade Marshal blew his whistle, the drums rolled; it was one-thirty. The parade moved off and the crowds began to disperse, streaming down University Avenue towards the reviewing stand. In fifteen minutes Queen’s Park was deserted except for a child chasing a floating balloon. The Comfort Station went unused.

  Away off down on Front Street bagpipes skirled.

  Muttering curses, Charlie ascended to the roof-tree, and taking a hammer ripped out the first of the planks. For him, for all of us, the holiday had been a magnificent fiasco. “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.” For weeks a pal
l of meditative, reflective gloom hung about the Yard.

  Nothing in my second summer exceeded the high adventure of that day. There were a few memorable happenings, but the glory seemed dimmed. There was the time that Charlie incautiously named Gummy Brown to fill in the extra watchman’s shift. I had been on the job for eight hours prior to his arrival and had spent the evening watching the fights on tele­vision, on the third floor of the Fire-hall. After the fight was over I had a couple of cups of tea and a chat with the Fire Captain which was interrupted by a hail from the ground floor, which drifted up through the holes in the floors through which the brass pole descended.

  “Gummy’s here,” shouted one of the hook-and-ladder men.

  “Tell him to come on up for tea.”

  “I don’t think him can make it.”

  The hook-and-ladder man was wrong because in a minute a red and black face hove into view on the stairs. It was Gummy, drunker than usual, if that were possible, and making heavy weather of the ascent.

  “Chrissakes, Hoody!” he got out. “Whyncha in the office?”

  “The fights,” I said.

  He began a disconnected tirade to the effect that one should never leave his post, seizing a stalk of celery as he eased along the table towards the teapot and inserting it in his mouth.

  “Can’t chew it,” I heard him say before he slumped over.

  “Come on, man,” said the Fire Captain, “on your feet!” This Captain was a bit of a puritan who disapproved of the free-and-easy manners which obtained under Charlie’s aegis. “On your feet!” he said again.

  Gummy lifted his head and squinted at him and then, discerning the voice of authority, he rose and lurched backwards out of the door of the lunchroom.

  “Watch it there, Gummy!” I cried, but too late. He disappeared soundlessly, magically, through the hole which circumscribed the brass pole, falling freely three storeys to the cement floor of the garage and breaking both legs. Fortunately he was completely anaesthetized against the pain, which otherwise might have been very great. He lay there, the celery stalk between his lips, quietly gumming it like a cow with a cud, while we eased him onto a stretcher and waited for the ambulance.

  “Take my shift, Hoody,” he said as they carried him off. “Double time.”

  I saw the Compensation reports on that one, and you’d have supposed that Brown, Norman, 37, married, was the very model of sobriety and conscientiousness. It was at length established that as Gummy’s shift hadn’t actually begun he was not entitled to compensation. The case was appealed on the grounds that he had been travelling to work, though how a fall through a hole could be construed as “travel to work” rather eludes me. The last I heard, the appeal was pending.

  The damned old snake of a Fire Captain was a troublemaker. One evening when I was doing a four to twelve, a Friday night as I recall, four friends of mine appeared with a case of beer and an old car. One of these was later to become a reverend and dignified professor of law at a hoary academic institution and I won’t embarrass him by mentioning any names. It was his idea that we should consume the case of beer during my shift and then hasten to the Chez Paree in the car to get in another couple of hours. There were two men and two girls besides me, and the girls drank perhaps a pint each, giving the rest of us a good start.

  There was a good deal of singing and noise, and though I had drawn the blinds, a policeman friend of mine twice entreated us to be more quiet, not for his sake but because some people on Nassau Street, two blocks away, had lodged a complaint. And at that he drank a pint of our beer, care­fully rinsing off his mouth and hands afterwards.

  Now while we were enjoying ourselves in this innocent and peaceable fashion, that spy of a Fire Captain crept across the Yard, peeked around the drawn blinds, and noted carefully what was going on. Having satisfied himself with what he considered enough evidence to obtain my discharge, he withdrew unnoticed. Next day he went to Charlie and told all, but without realizing it he had played into Charlie’s hands. It was perhaps true that I was treated with coolness, even severity, for a day of two. There was even some talk of sending me out with a gang again. But Charlie knew, and I knew, and finally the Captain knew too, that the folkways were too strong. The affair was passed over and, in fact, when one of the watchmen suffered a heart attack in September, Charlie kept me on till Armistice Day, a wholesome object lesson to the Fire Captain. I carried on my graduate work during the days.

  My last few weeks on the job, the nights were getting pretty chilly, and I had instructions from Charlie to keep the space-heater on all night. “I’m always cold when I come in at eight o’clock,” he said, “so keep things good and warm for me, Hood.” I promised him that I would. When I went off the job for the last time, on the cold morning of November the 11th, Charlie nodded to me curtly.

  “We’ll be seeing you, Hood,” he said, his sharp little eyes looking all around the office to see that things were in good order. And then, amazingly, “Take care of yourself.” I nodded silently and, leaving the Yard behind me, I started for home.

  I only ever saw them once more. Four years later I was on Richmond Street on Midsummer’s Day, going in to be interviewed by Jack Kent Cooke for the editorship of Saturday Night, a job which I had no business applying for and didn’t expect to get. As I came abreast of the Consolidated Press Building, my throat constricted and I stopped in my tracks.

  For there they all were, Mitch’s gang, lounging around a dozen open bays, waiting for the truck. There was Mitch, grinning as cheerfully as ever, Gummy hobbling idly around on a cane, Bill Tennyson, who recognized me and came over to say hello. And there, parked across the street, was a new green International quarter-ton and in it, gripping a pipe between his teeth and puzzling out a roll of plans, sat Charlie. Everything was just the same; they were all the same and would always be the same. I said a word or two, jokingly, to Tennyson, and then he went away.

  I glanced at the sky; it was a hard blue and there wasn’t a cloud to be seen. I squared my shoulders and went inside to my doomed-to-be-mutually-unsatisfactory interview. And it struck me after it was over, that silly interview on which Jack Cooke wasted half an hour of his time and his indubitable charm, that I’d be wiser not to try for impossibilities but to set down records of things possible, matters like these, tales of the way one man paid for his education in the bad old, good old days before the creation of that warm featherbed for talent, the Canada Council.

  Three Halves of a House

  East of Kingston the islands — more than eleven hundred of them — begin to sprout in and all around the ship channel, choking and diverting the immense river for forty amazing miles, eastwards past Gananoque, almost down to Stoverville. But a third of the continent leans pushing behind the lakes and the river, the pulse, circulation, artery, and heart, all in one flowing geographical fact, of half the North Americans, the flow we live by all that long way from Minnesota to the Gulf.

  Saint Lawrence’s Gulf, martyr roasted on a gridiron, Breton saint, legend imported by the French to name the life’s current of a hundred million industrious shore-dwellers, drinking the water, lighting their houses by it, floating on it in numberless craft. “Seas of Sweet Water,” the Indians called the lakes, and to the east the marvellous Saint Lawrence with the weight of the American Northeast inclining to the Gulf.

  So the channel must be cut, though the islands press against the current in resistance, cut sometimes through needles’ eyes and wearing deep, deep, through solid pressed ancient rock a hundred and fifty feet down, two hundred, icy cold ten feet below the surface. A holidaying swimmer floats up half-frozen in the narrow channel from a shallow dive, swept forty feet downstream in three seconds by the drive of the current, lucky to catch an exposed tree-root at the edge of a corroded island and haul himself ashore, the water sliding and driving beneath him two hundred feet down to the anonymous rock.

  Try to swim upstream, brother,
at Flowerlea! And feel yourself carried backwards through your best stroke, feel yourself whipped out of yourself as the river pulls at your thighs, hauling you down away eastwards as though you were falling helpless down a chute. Then grab at the skeletal roots, hang on, swing in the water and ride an eddy ashore! Fight the weight of eleven states and half of Canada, something to think about swinging on your sodden shredded branching root while fifty feet away — not an inch more — a ship seven hundred and fifty feet long glides ghostly past, soundless, what a thing to meet on a holiday beach! Not a thing to swim too close to, glistening black walls rising out of the water above you like an apartment building — SCOTT MISENER on the bows and the name of the line reading backwards to the stern in letters twice your height, swimmer, and not a sound from the ship, the current moving the ship as easily as it moves you. A deckhand leans incuriously at the rail, lifting a friendly hand, and is gone, whirled away eastwards while he lowers his arm.

  SCOTT MISENER, ERIKA HAMBURG, TOSUI MARU, BRISTOL CITY, MOOREMACGLEN — they hail from everywhere, upper lakers, tankers, the few remaining canallers, ocean-going freighters built by thrifty Danes for the lakes trade, drawing twenty-seven feet precisely, up and down all day and all night with their myr­iads of sirens sounding the whole range of the tempered scale. The shipmaster confers anxiously with his pilot through the forty perilous miles, threading needle after needle. At Flowerlea the channel is so narrow the summer cottagers can lean over and assess the deck-hands’ breakfast bacon. In the fall the last of the cottagers sit around their barbecue pits with a liner in the front yard, the shipmaster pacing about above them, cursing them and their hotdogs, the handiest things to curse. He is afraid of the Flowerlea channel, so narrow, and of the weight of water astern hurrying him along, the navigation season waning and his insurance rate about to jump skyhigh if he doesn’t clear the locks by the appointed day.