Grand Change

by William Andrews

  Spring on Hook Road

  CHAPTER 5

  To the sweet strains of Jim Mackie’s fiddle, the thump-thumpa-thump-thumpa-thump of his feet, the backing strum of Alban Gallant’s guitar, the dancers swept head-high and proud in their majestic swirl—the dainty feet of the ladies skipping light, the heavier feet of the men quick-stepping and hammering the floor. They wove through the grand chain, pranced through the promenade, rocked and whirled together in the swing with now and then a “yuh” and a “tamarack her down.”

  After having to deal with a harsh winter, then being literally booted into the hectic drudgery of spring, a tyme was just the thing to shake things loose. And I would have to say the tyme they had for Joanie and Charlie did a bang-up job. The whole affair—though it didn’t end that way—started out as the major happening that spring. Agnes Cobly brought it to mind when she came collecting just after the crops were in.

  Agnes was a good match for John, especially physically: freckle-faced, about the same stubbiness. Her most outstanding feature was her protruding lower lip, which protruded even more after her short speech phrases: “How are youse this evening? Collecting for Joanie and Charlie’s wedding. Nice young couple, good for the community. We thought a chest of drawers would be nice. Yep, a dollar would be just fine. Better keep on the go. Don’t forget to come up for a game of auction.”

  The wedding came off pretty much the same as weddings usually go. Charlie had a few belts in him by the time he got to the altar. When the minister asked him if he would take Joanie to be his wife he said, “I’ll take her,” then he tried to put the ring on Joanie’s little finger. There was the usual snuffle around that time of course. After the marriage ceremony, two of the Wallace cousins got into a wagon race on the way from the church to the mill. They both hit the gateway at the same time and a wheel got smashed against a post. The usual sort of thing that makes the occasion memorable.

  Alf and George compromised and they held the reception in the mill and the dance in the house parlour. George decided if they tamaracked-her-down on the mill floor, the roof might tamarack-her-down itself. Since he was the father of the groom and Alf was the father of nothing but inventions that never worked anyway, he was entitled to the last say.

  Charlie’s uncle on his mother’s side was the emcee. He was a stout man with a perpetually red face, which blended in well since most of the male faces had a royal flush. He had a bit of a lisp and the more slugs he took from the punch in his glass—replenished from under the table by a nephew with hair over his eyes and a thick-lipped smirk—the more it grew. The lisp became more of a confused slur when the time came to toast the bride. “Now Ahlbhert Wallache will lead us in thishing-ah-tashing-ah-toashting the bird-ah-bhride.”

  A few minutes after Charlie’s speech, a two-minute job that ended with, “I hope you all came to dance cause we’re going to drive ’er,” something beneath the rough board floor punked and the folding table with the wedding cake shook and the tablecloth flapped and George mentioned that it would be nice to have the cake cutting and all the rest out in the yard in the sunshine. Nobody had to be persuaded.

  Charlie drove ’er at the dance that evening, no doubt about that. He said he was going to dance with every single woman there as a parting shot and he pretty well did. Between one of the sets, someone called for him to “give us a step” and right off, to shouts of “drive her” and “tamarack her down,” Charlie was prancing to the centre of the floor with mischief in his eyes, mock anger on his face and his neck bowed like a proud horse. Then, hoisting his pant legs in a curtsy in time with the sudden belt of music from Jim and Alban, he toed the floor like he was testing water. Then, like a sudden summer rain, his scuffed shoes drummed, belted, crossed over, quick-stepped and hammered the floor. Then he broke loose. Parting the crowd as he went, he danced his way into the kitchen, where he jumped, clicked his heels, landed on a chair and danced there. Another jump with a heel click and he was dancing on the stove. Then he was on the floor again, dancing his way back into the parlour.

  Charlie’s act opened the way for what might be called “participation time.” Alf took a chair in a conspicuous corner below the mantle where the Aladdin lamp glowed. In a flourish, with a lick of his tongue, he pulled loose his green tie, unbuttoned his shirt, placed both feet flat on the floor and conducted the proceedings. “We’ll have theGallants now,” Alf said.

  And they danced and sang. “Now, George. ‘Molly Dee’. Come on.” George stood in a far corner with his head canted, pursing his lips.

  “Well, I’m not much of a singer,” George said.

  “Stop putting on the dog, George, and sing,” Alf said.

  “Come on, George,” John Cobly said.

  “Show us your stuff,” Joe Mason said.

  “Well, I don’t know all the words,” George said. “But…” George steepened his head cant, hitched his shoulders and began in a low foghorn bellow: “Oh, Molly Dee. Oh, please don’t cry. Cause I must say goodbye. I’m going to sail, so please don’t wail. I’ve joined the Navy and it won’t be gravy. I’m leaving soon as the wind blows high. Oh, blow ye winds and blow them high, the skipper’s name is William Nye. Now please don’t cry, my Molly Dee…”

  “Ah, that’s enough, George,” Alf said, “if that’s the best you can do.”

  George shot a mean glance at Alf. “Well, I told you I didn’t know all the words, big mouth.”

  “You don’t know none of the words. Where’s Dan? Come on, Dan, give us a poem.”

  “Where’s Dan?” Charlie said.

  “Here, he’s coming,” John Cobly said.

  Dan Coulter, with his tie hanging out and his sleepy eyes peering past a long nose in a thin face, made his way through the gathering to stand hunched and bent-kneed beside Alf. Alf gave no further introduction, other than to throw back his head and hold out a flat hand as an offering. Dan passed his hand over his brow, swiping away a fall of grey hair. Then, directing his gaze at a ceiling corner and holding his hand out palm up in stage fashion, he flapped his oversized lips a few times and began:

  In Carpet Town, there lives a man, by the name of Mr. Jones;

  And t’would take a banker’s ledger to list the things he owns.

  He owns the restaurant there, you know, though it’s not in his name;

  The ice cream parlour, and the grocery store are underscored the same. The hardware store, the bank, the store for shoes and boots; He even owns the bootlegging joint, and the house of ill repute. I got to know about the gains of this famous Mr. Jones,

  When things got slack, a few years back and I hit him up for a loan.

  Then the cows all died, the crops all failed, so the mortgage just kept growing;

  ’Til all I had, including me, belonged to Mr. Jones.

  I could go on about it all, but to minimize my groans,

  There was scant few places where I didn’t owe this famous Mr. Jones.

  Just the funeral parlour, and oh, to keep things fair and true;

  There is the insurance company, oh yes, he owns that, too.

  About a week or so ago, I dropped in on old Doc Reeves,

  With his scope at me chest, he said in jest, “Sounds like you got the heaves.”

  But he really didn’t joke at all, when he said with a kindly face:

  “You better get things nailed down, my friend; you’re about to leave the race.”

  “If I give you an extra fin,” I said, “could you set things up a bit?”

  “This man’s in good health,” he solemnly wrote, and signed his name to the chit.

  Then I ambled down to Jones’s bank for one last goodly loan;

  Ere I left the bank I kindly thanked and shook hands with Mr. Jones.

  Then I ambled to the insurance place like I was on a spree,

  And took me out an all-inclusive insurance policy.

&nbs
p; Now me mortgage gets paid, me debts all stayed, me wife won’t have to cry.

  They’ll bury me in a Jones-built box; all I have to do is die.

  So when it’s my time to kick the pail, don’t nobody take it hard;

  Just send my bones to Mr. Jones and give him my regards.

  Throughout the recitation—which was well-lauded at the end —there were nudges and frank nods with murmurs:

  “He make that up?”

  “Probably.”

  “He made that up.”

  “Ain’t he a corker?”

  “Should be on radio.”

  Just about then, George made his way back in and stood by the organ at the other end of the mantle. He had a sneaky gleam in his eye. “Okay, Alf, time to give us a step.”

  “Yeah, come on, Alf,” came a voice from the crowd.

  “Drive ’er, Alf,” Joe Mason said.

  Alf s mouth hung open and his eyes faded.

  “Well, I’m not much…”

  But Jim Mackie and Alban Gallant, with bemused glances at each other, had already hit into a lively reel. Alf rose to his feet, gulped a few times, then began shooting out his feet in a diddle-stomp hobble.

  “Yahoo!” Joe Mason hollered. “Drive ’er, Alf.”

  Then George moved around until he stood in front of Alf and bellowed above the music, “You call that dancing? Look at him—diddly diddly de.”

  Alf gave George a dirty look and disappeared. Alf held up his hand for the music to stop. “We’ll have John and Agnes now with Sally Lutz,” he said.

  John and Agnes did a decent job on the song, with their heads back and hands clasped behind their backs. Didn’t have to be coaxed, either.

  After a respectable applause, someone called for a waltz and the dancers found their partners and the musicians played the sweet, haunting strains of “Over the Waves.” Wally Mason stood, head hung, in a corner with lament on his face, and I knew what he was feeling: we didn’t get our chance to play.

  But Linda Robins came from I don’t know where and stood in front of Wally and waited for him to make his move. Wally stood peering up with his head still hung until Linda frankly set her fists into her hips. She stood that way with her lips pursed for a bit, then caught him by both arms and hauled him onto the floor. It took Wally a while to get his feet going, but he did, eventually, with Linda’s help. She could move around pretty good, with her chin up and that frank, smug look on her face. She was pretty able, too. By the time I decided to check out the card game in the porch, she had Wally hobbling around pretty good. He even seemed like he was enjoying himself.

  The Old Man, Alf Wallace, Joe Mason and John Cobly were having a four-hander of auction. In a shadowy corner in a sunken armchair, Dan Coulter sat, sneaking sips from a cup he would replenish from under his coat. In their off-game banter, without them knowing it entirely, they were about to herald in the second, and what turned out to be the number one, major happening of that spring.

  “You really think it’ll go through, do you, Dan?” John Cobly said. “I’ll bid twenty five.”

  “Thirty,” The Boss said.

  “Thirty-for-sixty,” John Cobly said, eyeing The Boss.

  “Away,” The Boss said. “What have you been drinking?”

  “Yup,” Dan Coulter said. “We’ll have it before the fall.” Dan’s voice had a mellow placidness; the sleepiness of his stare was faded in shadow.

  John Cobly gathered up the kitty and changed around the cards in study.

  “What makes you think that?” Joe Mason said.

  “Hearts are trump,” John Cobly said.

  “The election’s coming off,” Dan Coulter said. There was the call for cards, with Alf Wallace flipping them around from the pack.

  “Okay, best in your flipper, Joe,” John Cobly said. Cards were thumped onto the table in the flurry of lift-taking exchange until one final thump came louder than the rest and John Cobly said, “Take that. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Sixty spuds mark it up.”

  “But what’s the election got to do with it?” Joe Mason said, gathering the cards, tapping them into a pack and shuffling. “It never made any difference before.”

  “Fred James bought Albert Leland out and he’ll need Hook and that part of Jar running past Harvey’s to truck potatoes from the warehouse there to his rail spur.”

  The four men at the table froze in their positions, their heads snapping as one toward Dan. There was a pause before Joe Mason spoke. “Couldn’t he shoot them down to Bob Wayne’s spur like they do now?”

  “Nope. Fred James ain’t selling to another buyer. He means to truck them.”

  “And he ain’t going to truck them without a snowplow, and there’ll be no plowing without a decent road,” The Boss said in a muse.

  “Fred James is going big,” Dan Coulter said.

  “He’s already big,” Alf Wallace said.

  Dan Coulter held his hands wide. “Bigger. There’s property for sale running from Albert’s straight through to the county road. It’ll be Fred Jones’s property in the near future, if not as I speak.”

  “Think he’s got enough pull to bring in the road machines?” Joe Mason said, shuffling the cards absently.

  Dan Coulter took another pull from his cup. “Got more pull than everyone on Hook Road put together and then some.”

  “That’s a fact,” John Cobly said. “But we’ll take her any way she comes. Hey, don’t wear the spots off the cards, Joe. Deal up, and don’t go to the manure pile.”

  “How do you know all this?” Alf Wallace said.

  Dan Coulter took another pull. “It’s written in the wind, boys, written in the wind.”

  “I asked you not to go to the manure pile, Joe,” John Cobly said.

  “Mother, I’ve come home to die,” The Boss said.

  “Let the whining begin,” Joe Mason said.

  “Thirty days,” Alf Wallace said.

  “You got guts,” John Cobly said.

  “More guts than brains, if his hand is anything like mine,” The Boss said.

  “Take her home, Alf,” Joe Mason said.

  “Let’s see what’s in the kitty…” Alf Wallace said. “Diamonds are trump.”

  They dropped the subject then. Maybe it was because they were mulling over the fact that the surveyors had come back in the spring and finished staking off the road, or maybe they just didn’t believe Dan.

  It was hard to place much store in a man’s word when he lived like Dan. Dan always drank and did things a bit different. But when his house had burnt down a few years back, and his wife, Lyla, had died from too much smoke, he went to the point of being strange. He didn’t bother building a new house—just moved into the porch, which they’d managed to save. He didn’t even bother to fix it up—just nailed a few shelves to the wall and hauled in a bed and a table; the pump and sink were already there. It was said that he’d never drawn a completely sober breath since the fire.

  But, for all, Dan was well-read and knew more than most and nobody knew for sure whether he got it right because he had the facts, or just figured it out. Whatever the case, two weeks or so later, roaring, rutting and rooting like a square-snouted boar, toppling trees and crowding them into mangled mounds of boles, limbs and stump fans, a fine powder of dust and diesel fumes clouding it, the first Caterpillar began

  working in Dan’s hollow. Then more Caterpillars came, and graders, and they sheared the ground in that determined pace, working in seemingly nowhere directions, until the road, as we knew it, turned to a broad mess of sod mounds, gouges and swerving ruts.

  They didn’t give us a lot of time to deal with our fences. But we managed to salvage what worthwhile wire and posts we could from our old line before they gathered it up and trucked it away and ran a temporary line, with a post here and there along the pasture field, abou
t halfway down to our north line, to do until we could get the permanent fence in.

  We were working on the new fence one afternoon when John Cobly dropped by. I was down in the hole for the new corner post at our gateway, shovelling out what brick clay and stone The Boss had just crowbarred loose. The Boss was leaning on his shovel, watching the action on the road. John Cobly pulled his horse and truck wagon from the maze of clay mounds and ruts into the tip of our lane. The right front wheel of the wagon butted against the round bales of barbed wire lying by the pile of cedar posts the peddler from up west had brought down. From up the road came the clanking rattles and snorts of a bulldozer.

  “They’re driving ’er, Harv,” John Cobly said, raising his voice. He pulled out his makings and began rolling a cigarette.

  “They surprised us,” The Boss said.

  “Yep, makes things look kind of bald, don’t it?”

  “They can really tear things up. That’s good enough, Jake. We might as well put in the corner post.”

  We went for the anchor post, lying with parallel planks fastened to its big end with spikes and twists of wire, and dropped it into the hole. The Boss held it vertical by its top until I’d shovelled in enough dirt to set it, then he began tamping down the clay with a thin post as I shovelled.

  John Cobly sat quietly, watching us and smoking. The horse, fidgeting now and then, had worked its way to a patch of lush grass growing by the pile of posts. Suddenly, it went for the grass and there was the slide of the collar dropping to its ears.

  “What’s that, four foot deep?” John Cobly said.

  “Four and a half; the frost comes pretty heavy here.”

  “Going to fence her all this summer?”

  “No, just this field I’m using for pasture. Do the rest in the fall if I can find the time.” The Boss was speaking around the cigarette lodged in the corner of his mouth between pounds of his post.

  “Wonder what finally brought them to it?”

  “Conservatives got more liquor for votes than usual and made the Liberals shaky, I imagine,” John Cobly smirked.