In the stable, the sick cow’s eyes showed blank, white circles in the light when she turned them to me from where she lay. I could hear the snuffs of her breathing mingling with the cud chews of the other cows and their chain rattles. The tap affair protruding from her side showed no signs of escaping gas and her belly was not barrelling. She snuffed again curiously, then turned her head away peacefully and chewed her cud.
I had left the radio on, and when I got back to the bask of light strewing from the kitchen window across the pitted foot path in the snow, I could hear one of the big bands with that mellow horn gnash playing “Silent Night.” I paused, noticing the peaceful stillness, and watched the northern lights over the city lights again.
Inside, the usual whine of the kettle, the odd crack from the stove’s firebox, the lamp’s glow and the shadows on the wall all seemed to augment the music of Christmas coming from the radio. I sat in the armchair by the radio with another cup of hot chocolate. A mixed choir began singing a carol medley, giving background music while a lady narrated the Christmas story. When they finished, I worked my way—winging and wooing—through the stations, fielding carols. The stations were beginning to blank out by the time the heat from the stove had begun to die away and I was pleasantly tired. I took the lamp and went into the living room and looked at the small tree, modestly dressed with the winds of red and green crepe rope with their squished spaces, the paint-peeled coloured bells and balls, the pigs’ hair icicles, the crockery angel on the top sprig with her wand and the jagged hole in her dress. I hung my sock on the mantel, reaching over the line of Christmas cards waggling wing-like in the heat waves from the Queen Heater burning below. Of course I didn’t believe in Santa Claus anymore; it was just a part of Christmas I still enjoyed with Nanny. I paused for a few moments, feeling the mirth-like coziness brought together by the spruce and burnt maple smells, and as I went to bed I knew that tomorrow would be Christmas, and it would have that specialness it always had, musical dreams or no musical dreams.
I woke early, like always, and got the sock from the mantel; like always, it had an orange, that hard, smooth candy in animal shapes, a couple of striped canes and a handful of grapes. And like always, it was special.
The day broke fine and clear. There was a cold, bright freshness in the morning when the animals traipsed to the ice-bearded watering trough, with its axe-chipped hole. The steers rammed their heads into the snow like playful children blanking their faces white, their breath puffs seemingly coming from the snow. There was still a cold, bright freshness when Aunt Laura and Uncle Jim and their twin boys rode in from town in their pung sleigh with bells jingling.
It was nice sitting around the kitchen amidst the Christmas dinner smells, going through the usual greetings, exchanging gifts and showing them off, finally eating goose, mashed potatoes and jimmies, topped off with plum pudding to the point of a groan. Then we sat and listened to Uncle Jim tell about town goings-on, and him discussing politics with The Boss while The Boss whittled a plunger for a cut goose quill so the children could shoot potato plugs. But I had other things on my mind.
I stuffed my pockets with lumps of fudge and the hard candy from my sock, grabbed my new fleece-lined leather mitts from under the tree and headed for the porch. I threaded my hockey stick through the spaces in my skates and swung them over my shoulder. There was a steady drip from the icicles on the eaves of the porch; a few drops fell down my neck as I stepped out into the cold, bright freshness again.
Across the sparkling fields of snow, I could see the banks of the cleared ice patch below Joe Mason’s house rising above the white glare. Wally, hidden below the knee, was skating limp-legged and laboured. He was pushing a board nailed to a two-by-four, with support sticks, for a scraper.
Jenny and Shirley Mackie were on the ice, too, skating straight-backed, straight-armed and tottery, sweeping in a forward slant, taking a stride and daring to take another, coasting for the rump-waggling, sidewise stop, with…whoops!…there goes Jenny!
As I trudged with my feet plunging through soft-crusted snow, I saw others come wading, their breaths puffing and swirling around their faces and cap lugs.
We came to sit on our sticks, with their rags of tape at the blade. We blew on our chilled fingers between the tightening of waxed laces and the usual hockey banter. Finally we rose like wounded birds scattering from a roost with the ever-present stick for support. Then it was pick sides, drop the puck and drive ’er, with spaced boots for nets, no refs and no offsides. And there were the rip and swish of rust-pitted blades cutting and swerving, the whacks of clashing sticks, the cheers of the score. And somewhere outside the white banks, the cares and defeats of life skulked like defeated dogs, and until early winter shadows grew long before distant trees, the world was on hold.
The banter was somewhat subdued as we sat on our sticks again. Steam wisps rose from our hands as we pried the laces loose from their castings of sprayed ice and hauled off the skates and stuffed our feet into stiff boots where they would grow hot. Feeling the ice strange to our feet without the fight for balance, we said our “see yas” and saw the first flickers of lamps in distant windows punctuating the peace of Christmas night.
Prelude to
Winter on Hook Road
From the first big storm, except for the hockey, skating and coasting circuses, the scenes along Hook Road pretty much included a horse and sleigh. In milder days—after limp-foot lugging seventy-five– or one hundred-pound bags of Green Mountains or Sebagos up the stone steps of gloomy cellars—the farmers rocked and swayed with the pitches, perched on the buffalo-covered wood sleigh loads, sometimes in a string.
At mid-afternoon, on sleighs returning from the potato buyers, the scholars of the old schoolhouse rode, perched on sleigh sides like multi-coloured birds chirping on telephone lines. And there were songs in chorus and jokes, which sooner or later evolved into push-offs and laughing and foot-skipping races to catch up, with slung school bags swinging in flurries of flying snow until the driver’s rein slapped the horses into a jog, resulting in pushing, foot-slipping, laughing races to catch up. And sometimes a speed comment from a passing sleigh would bring on a foot race, and the cheers and jeers of a racetrack, until they hit a heavy run of pitches.
At other times, the fanners rode their wood sleighs on the trails to woodlots in skeleton, with the sides and bottoms removed, stakes stemming from the bunk holes, the drivers standing spread-foot sideways on two bunks.
There the axes of winter rang in lonely echo. And the crosscut saws see-sawed in their sidewise bite, with two men kneeling, their arms pumping like the drivers of a locomotive, the saw teeth barely missing their upright shins, the spurting sawdust speckling their gumboots and the snow at their toes.
Then, on moonlit evenings, the blood mares drew the pung and jaunting sleighs, their tails and manes a wisping blur, their swift hooves flipping fragments of snow over the dashboards and peppering the buffalos and ticking of the leather mitts, their shadows bobbing, weaving and poking at the white-capped fence posts sailing past.
The January thaw gave an interesting twist to the scene. The snow sank, and with it torrents of rain and rivers and lakes appeared in low-lying areas, horses plunged and sleighs floated. With the freeze, the snow turned to the texture of bread dough, the rivers and lakes to glass-hard sheets of ice that would “pick” from the sharp corks of horseshoes, and the sleighs would slew and side-haul at the horses.
And there were scenes of harshness, too: of horses fighting their way through cold, blasting ground drifts while the drivers, their heads ducked into their collars, one-handed the reins and school children huddled under buffalos fighting off a numbing chill.
Winter on Hook Road
CHAPTER 4
There were three major happenings that winter. The first, according to the old timers, was what qualified as an old-fashioned winter. It was not in league with the storm of ’
26, when they could see only the rooftops of the houses in town and they had to bring in food by toboggan. But by the standards of the day, it was a hair-raiser.
It came just after the January thaw, and we were pretty much confined to base for about a week. Outside, the wind went raving mad and the old house creaked and groaned as if in the throes of a nightmare. Aside from the day’s threshing, we only left the house to hack junks of beef off the carcass hanging in the shop, feed and water the stock, milk the farr cow and keep the manure accumulation to some kind of toleration by piling it outside the cow-stable door.
Going to the barn in itself was a venture. When you opened the back door the wind would try to snap it out of your grasp and fight your closing it, then belt you, suck at your breath and lash your eyes with fine snow. You’d lean against the house for a breather and catch glimpses of the barn peak flashing through the white blast.
Then you would have to have to fight your way, sometimes held to a standstill, finally stumbling from the sudden release, into the lee of the barn.
The cold was never far away in the house. The water and milk buckets skimmed heavy with ice. Snow snuffed through the crack under the front door, and through the spaces at the window sashes. The windowpanes were blanked white with thick, furry, fancy frost patterns. The lamp would flicker and smoke from drafts coming from several directions. Some nights we didn’t go to bed at all. It was too cold, even with all your clothes on, heated bricks at your feet and a stack of bedclothes supplemented with an overcoat. We huddled around the kitchen stove with our feet on the oven door, listening to the radio, playing twenty questions or listening to The Boss tell his tales of yesterday.
He could do a pretty good job when he got his pipe tucked into his cheek and the muse came into his eyes. He was almost as good as Tom Dougal, and like Tom, he didn’t just tell stories, he painted pictures. When he talked about the time he fell asleep driving the stumper at five years old, I saw the small bare feet, tanned and clay-speckled, dangling from the capstan top, the small head nodding at times, the reins beginning to slither through the small hands; saw the heavy plug horse hitched to the arm extending from the capstan top, his tail lazily sweeping at droning flies, a sifter bowl guarding him from nose flies, an empty feed bag hanging on one of his hame’s horns. A few yards away, the large stump leaned at a steep angle, its smaller roots running like veins through clinging clods of earth, its larger ones, broken or hoe-cut, creating a ragged fan.
And I saw the men bringing solid, thumping cuts to the roots of a stump, pausing to brush at blackflies, their exposed forearms glistening in the sun; saw the smoke rising from the grey ashes of the lunchtime fire, sweeping lazily over stump holes and clay-spattered brush, grouping and settling around the jumble of stump heads and root fans at the clearing’s edge. And I saw my great-grandfather garner the boy in his arms, lay him at the shade of a tree so he could sleep.
I was never at the mud beds, but when The Boss talked about them I came close. I could see the man guiding the horse on the roundabout, pulling at the capstan arm, a cold ground drift sweeping the ice; hear the queeze in the twin upright beams of the digger frame as the chain rattled through the pulley centring the crossbeam; see the chain running up from the slush-speckled water until the fork head suddenly appeared with a splunge to rise in its swing and halt, hovering over the bobsleigh siding the uprights; see the digger man at the end of the beam pulling the rod on the beams back, and the fork head dropping a glob of sloppy black mud into the sleigh box.
And I felt I was there when The Boss balanced himself in the wood sleigh with the horse frog-leaping, sometimes disappearing in the wild white swirl of a blizzard, heading out for the doctor when my father was born.
He had gotten Joe Mason to take Mabel over to be with Nanny while he and Tom Dougal fought their way into town. They wore out three horses in the seven-mile trip. They would cover each horse with a buffalo as it played out, and get a fresh one from the nearest farmstead. And I could see the two men in their slow, tormenting journey, beating their arms, stamping their feet, taking turns at the reins and wading out to clear snow from the horse’s nostrils; see them urging at the horse’s bridle, with the horse down and snow-stuck, then finally standing wind-whipped in the blast, yelling and gesturing, their words muted by the wind. The stories didn’t make the wind and cold go away, but they helped make the night go by.
We threshed grain on the third day after the storm set in. The thresher was in a short loft above the barn floor. The engine sat on the barn floor with the belt running up at a fairly steep angle. The thresher resembled some kind of animal with its long jaw, humped back and long, square tail, and when it began to hum its mill, rattle its grain trough, shake straw off its tail with a wrack-a-wrack-a-wracka, the loft girders trembled, the barn jiggled and your teeth rattled. All other sounds were drowned out: the thud of the sheaves that Nanny threw down from the loft hitting the table, the pucks of the engine, the swish of the grain stalks The Boss fed into the thresher’s mouth after cutting the sheaf bands with a mower-blade tooth on a stick.
I tailed the shaker: hauling back the straw from the rear end with a fork, my eyes slitted against the blowing chaff, my nostrils smudged by blowing black smut. I can’t say I ever cared much for tailing the shaker; I never knew anybody that did.
We did some grading then, down in the cellar where it was damp, cold and confined, where time got bogged down amidst the snuff of The Boss clearing his nose with his thumb and forefinger, the cobble of potatoes as he rolled them—picking out the bluenose, seconds, jumbo and rot—and the hiss of the gas lantern hanging from a rafter. The lantern’s glow fell on the potatoes and humped the slanting grader, with its slat bottom and board sides, but didn’t touch much else. The grader’s four thin legs and the bag hanging at its mouth were in semi-darkness; there was blackness at the top of the potato pile, and shadows cupped the few potatoes sheeted by light. In their corner, the weigh scales stood vague, the vertical post and the horizontal arm with the balance bar beneath forming a gloomy F. The pile of bagged potatoes was a black block. When you moved, those big, gloomy shadows would bob around. A slight dust would rise from the rolling potatoes and its choke would mingle with smells of the cellar’s brick clay, the lantern’s naphtha gas, the rotting potatoes and the septic-smelling pile of new bags by the grader. And it all combined to a boredom you could cut with a knife.
I took care of weighing, sewing and piling the bags and forking them on. I used to see how fast I could sew up a bag: working the long-handled needle and twine through the edges of the bag mouth, looping the ears and tying on the tag. Then I’d try furling the bag off a knee boost onto the pile without knocking it down.
Between bags, I’d take the short, D-handled potato fork, with its multi-tined bowl, and fork on, seeing how fast I could do that without spilling potatoes over the side of the grader or crowding The Boss. I guess you could say I didn’t care too much for grading either.
But we couldn’t go too far with grading, in case the potatoes sprouted in the bags before we could move them out. Pumping water for the animals and throwing down hay was all we had for heavy work then. Not much to do clear of that but get the time in.
I read what I could find. Me and The Boss played cards until we got sick of it. Then we went at crokinole for a while. We wound up working the jigsaw puzzle Aunt Laura gave us for Christmas. It pictured a Venetian boatman oaring a curled-up gondola past water-cut, autumn-coloured buildings. It took up half the kitchen table. Nanny didn’t seem to mind though. Kept knitting and cooking, fooled around with the puzzle once in a while.
Coming on toward the end of the storm, we ran out of salt and molasses and began double-boiling the tea to stretch it out. The Boss ran out of tobacco; tore up whatever butts he could find for cigarettes until there were no more to scrounge and he was out of papers anyway. He took a crack at a dried-out cud of plug, shredded and wrapped in newspaper. We were short o
f matches, too, and he used a splinter held between his thumb and forefinger to light his horn-like roll. He poked the splinter into the stove and it came out with a heavy flare; it lit things up pretty good, and then there was this flame running toward his face, getting bigger, and he whipped it away and wrung it, it blazing all the more, until he dropped it and stomped it into the floor in a cloud of smoke.
“Anything left for a curtain call?” Nanny said. “Why didn’t you use your pipe?”
“Mind your own business,” The Old Man said. He had his eyebrows scorched a bit; there was a brown patch here and there among the grey. He got kind of grouchy then, pretty much kept to solitaire and the radio for the rest of the day. I was getting to the point of missing school; even took a look at my books.
But sometime during the night, the wind relented and, like some kind of animal that failed to devour, skulked away. In the morning, the house was warm again, and quiet. The song of the kettle was not disturbed by house creaks and wind howls; the morning music on the radio was not disturbed by static.
Outside, there was that glistening white in a bright, cold stillness. The pillar of smoke from Tom Dougal’s chimney rose straight up. Across the fields, Joe Mason was breaking the road, standing sideways in the wood sleigh, one-handing the reins, his arm extending straight. His horse was labouring in the heavier drifts, sometimes frog-leaping, its head wagging with the effort, its breath mingling with the steam rising from its back. And when he reached the wind-swept bowl in our yard, he had to leap down, for the wind-blown snow had formed a cliff.
The Old Man sang out to Joe from the horse stable: “Enough snow down for you, Joe?”
“A little more and we’ll be climbing mountains, or digging tunnels,” Joe said without stopping.
Our road allotment ran out our south lane and west to the end of Jar, where the Calders lived, just beside the short woods road leading to Albert Leland’s warehouse. People from the other district came through there in the winter.
Grand Change Page 7
