The Badger Riot

by J. A. Ricketts

  Alf let it be known that he was available for functions as Badger’s photographer. Soon he was invited to weddings and anniversaries where he would snap shots of couples as they celebrated. The clergy often called on him too for their events. Some people asked for pictures at a wake and a funeral. Businessmen around the town would get him to take shots of their establishments. He also took pictures for the Badger section of the Grand Falls Advertiser and wrote the weekly social column as well.

  As a result, Alf got into the habit of taking his Hawkeye with him almost everywhere he went. People were used to seeing him with its leather case slung over his shoulder. It was easy to use outdoors. All he had to do was aim and click. For pictures indoors he had to screw on the flash attachment and put in a flashbulb.

  With his gammy leg, he limped all around town taking pictures of scenic spots. The rivers were beautiful in any season. The view from the large round hill was wonderful. He made up a set of postcards and they sold well.

  Out in the little goat house, he’d develop and print, cut, and frame his snapshots of history that he hoped would last for years to come. He could have made a full-time living out of it, but it remained a hobby.

  By the spring of 1952, with Pap, Phonse and Ralph out on the drive, Jennie found herself missing Tom more and more. It gnawed at her insides: the not knowing, not seeing. Then, when Mam wasn’t around, one of her sisters whispered to her that Tom had quit the Buchans mines, had come back down to Badger and was on the drive. That was weird, she thought. Tom had long had a balance problem, so he certainly wouldn’t be out jumping from log to log. Neither could he swim, a carefully guarded secret that he’d only told his wife. So what on earth was he doing? And why had he come down from Buchans? Jennie longed to know.

  She asked Phonse once, on the sly, if he saw Tom around anywhere. “Jennie maid,” Phonse said, “to tell you the truth, he asked me about you the other day, asked how you were feeling. You know he worked in Buchans mine all winter? He missed home, he said, so now he’s wongin’ on the drive.”

  Jennie was astonished. “Wongin’? Tom is wongin’?”

  To people who didn’t live near logging operations, wonger and wongin’ were strange words, certainly not found in any dictionary. It all had to do with the drive, described very well in the song The Badger Drive. The logs were fed into various brooks and streams that flowed into the great Exploits River. Along the way there were hundreds of men who worked to coax the logs along and keep them from getting jammed up.

  In anticipation of the logs reaching the River, a movable cook camp was established to feed the drivers and see to their sleeping arrangements. The logistics of moving and setting up again were carried out by the wongers. There was a wongin’ boss too; he supervised the operation, including the five or six riverboats that carried the food and the men’s belongings.

  It was the wonger’s job to pitch the sleeping tents and the cook tent on the riverbank, to be ready for the men coming ashore in the evenings to eat their supper – mostly bread, beans, lassy buns, and tea steeped in kettles called sluts – then they hunkered down to sleep. Next morning, each driver rolled up his clothes bag and set it on the riverbank for a wonger to collect. Then he was fed his breakfast – bread, tea, and beans – and went out for a day on the moving logs. The wonger-cook made up his bread dough and put it in a big warm iron pot to rise. Beans were put to soak in another pot to soften up for the supper meal. The wonger-helpers packed up everything, loaded it aboard the boats, and the convoy moved off down the River. The cook boat carried the iron pots with the bread rising and the beans soaking.

  The drivers usually made only three or four miles in the run of a day. Sometimes they would stay in the same spot for a couple of days, until word came for them to move on downriver. It was slow work. The wongers, too, had to keep an eye out for the moving pulpwood. Whenever they reached a designated spot, everything was unpacked. The iron pots were buried in a firepit to bake the bread and cook the beans, and the sluts were filled to boil over another fire. After a number of years they got small stoves, but some wonger-cooks liked the firepits the best. More even heat, they said. In the evening, the men came ashore once more and the same routine started again.

  The drive went on during the Newfoundland springtime, which was cold and wet in any year. The men were wet all day long from mishaps in the River and from the rain. At night they lay down in wet clothes, side by side in the tents. They slept in their canvas breeches and the seasoned men used to warn the new guys to keep their legs straight during the night, since the breeches would dry out and be stiff as a board the next morning. At night, you’d hear fellows saying to each other, “Now, b’ys, keep dem legs straight tonight. You don’t want to look like a crippled old man in the morning.” Pap and Phonse always complained that they were never dry or warm from the time the drive started until it finished.

  Ralph was different from all of them. He didn’t wear the canvas breeches. Cold didn’t bother him, wet didn’t bother him. Ralph was as one with the River.

  This was off-season for cutters. Many of them were cross-trained to work on the drive as well, but Tom had never done it. He had a fear of the deep, fast-running River, perhaps stemming from his boyhood when he’d try to follow Ralph on the logs and usually end up getting wet.

  When Phonse told Jennie that Tom was wonging, she knew it was for a reason. She hoped it was for the same reason that she’d thought he went to the Buchans mines: to earn extra money to build their house. Jennie prayed to God, Protestant and Catholic, Please God, let the house be for me. Please God, if he ever loved me, let him come and get me.

  But the days went by and no word from Tom. No word from Suze or Mr. Albert either.

  Mam said one day, “In a small town like this, you’d think that they would drop in to see how their daughter-in-law was doing. I always thought Mr. Albert liked us. But I guess old Suze has him firm under her thumb and has threatened him to stay away from us.”

  Jennie was too proud to go and seek out her husband. She felt that too much had happened in between to heal the breach. And, because she hadn’t gone back to work at Plotsky’s, she wasn’t part of the hustle and bustle of loggers coming and going.

  Jennie was given to crying spells. The doctor said that she had low iron, but Mam had a different opinion.

  “Jennie,” Mam said to her one evening as they washed up the supper dishes, “there’s nothing wrong with you now except you’re pining for that big Protestant galoot in on Halls Bay Road.” She vigorously scrubbed the cooking pot with steel wool. “What you needs, my maid, is a change of scenery.”

  12

  Rod Anderson’s yearning for the sea lessened with time. Ruth’s love helped heal the resentment inside him. He became tamer, less morose, but still, from long habit, he kept many things inside him.

  Their daughter, Audrey, was born in 1936. If Eli had hoped for a boy to carry on in Rod’s footsteps, he never said a word. And it didn’t matter to Rod. He loved his little girl and was thankful she was strong and healthy. Soon the old man was holding her, letting her grasp his finger, and calling her Poppie’s girl. One day he brought home a pram he had bought from one of the A.N.D. Company management for five dollars. It was the Cadillac of prams, woven with a combination of light and dark brown wicker and lined with flowery cotton. He said the man had told him it was made in England.

  “Come see what I got for Poppie’s girl,” he cooed gently as he lifted his little six-month-old granddaughter and put her inside.

  Even though Rod had married Ruth in the Catholic Church in Buchans, he didn’t “turn” to her religion. Eli and Rod faithfully attended the United Church. Many years before, Eli had purchased a pew – a common practice among the more affluent Protestants. Every Sunday morning the two, father and son, so similar in appearance, marched up the aisle and claimed their own special place.

  When Audrey came along, Eli spoke privately to Rod. They were walking home from church. “Me son, I wants with al
l me heart and soul to have that little maid raised up in the Protestant religion, as you were and as I was. Do you think you can talk to Ruth and come to an agreement without too much fuss?”

  Rod understood his father’s thoughts because he’d been having the same ones himself. “Yes, Pop, I agree with you. The Andersons have always been United Church. I don’t have anything against the Catholic Church, but I think I’d like to see little Audrey raised as a Protestant.” They had reached the gate of their home. “Let me deal with it, Pop. Say no more for now.”

  So it was that little Audrey was baptized, went to Sunday school and then to grade school, all in the Protestant religion. Eli never knew how Rod worked it out with Ruth and he didn’t ask. There was a period, however, when the air in their house was tense and the cooking wasn’t as good, so he knew that Ruth hadn’t been entirely happy about it.

  When Audrey was four years old, Eli Anderson decided to retire. “Now Rod, me son, you knows everything I can learn you. I’ll be here if you wants advice, and don’t be afraid to ask me, but I am never crossing the River again. I’m finished with the woods.” Rod was twenty-five years old.

  In 1942 the SS Caribou was sunk by a German torpedo with a great loss of lives. Rod thought of his dream and what Melv’s spirit had told him so many years ago. On the day of the sinking, Rod walked over by the River in the quiet evening gloom. If it was true about the loon being his spirit guide, he felt that the loon’s call would let him know that Melv was reinforcing his message of years ago. There was no call. Maybe it’s their migration time, Rod reasoned, as the practical side of him took over.

  Eli lived to be seventy years old. One night, he died in his sleep, of natural causes, the doctor said. Rod was really on his own now. The old man was gone.

  In 1953, Audrey finished her schooling at seventeen and went away to St. John’s to work. Her mother’s relatives helped Audrey get a summer job at Government House. In the fall she studied for a third-grade teaching certificate. At Christmas of that year, she came home to Badger to teach in the Protestant school. Over the winter, Audrey corresponded with a young St. John’s man, whom she had met quite by accident, she said. When school let out for the summer, she went back to the city.

  Bridey Sullivan’s cousin Margaret, one of the Aylwards from Stock Cove, was in-service in St. John’s. Bridey wrote to her and asked if it was possible to get her daughter Jennie a job. Margaret wrote back and said for Jennie to come on in and she’d be waiting for her at the station.

  Jennie didn’t know what to do. She talked to Ralph. “B’y, I really don’t want to go. All I wish is to be with Tom. No, don’t say it. Don’t!” she said, as Ralph started to interrupt. “You want to go and talk to Tom and tell him that I’m going away. I say no! Tom has to realize that if he comes in a package with his mother, I want no part of it.”

  Ralph laughed, threw his hands in the air, wished her well, and walked away.

  On a mauzy May evening in 1952, Jennie walked down the track to the railway station to get the train. Pap carried her suitcase and her sisters trailed along behind. Halfway to the station they met Ralph coming up. “I came to see if you needed help with your suitcase,” he said, taking it from Pap’s hand.

  At the station her father went inside to buy her ticket, leaving Jennie and Ralph on the platform. Her sisters milled about excitedly. No one in their family had ever gone on a train trip before and they weren’t missing a moment of it.

  Ralph cleared his throat. “Be careful in the big city, Jennie. ’Tis not much like Badger, you know.”

  Jennie nodded. “I dare say you’re right, b’y. But Mam’s relatives have prospered in there. They’ve all found work and adjusted themselves, so I suppose I will too.”

  Pap came back with the ticket. Because St. John’s was an overnight trip, he’d scraped together seventeen dollars to buy Jennie a sleeper on the train. To have a sleeper was a luxury. Mam had asked him to do it because she was worried that the long trip would be too much for Jennie, who was still recovering from her illness. Most people travelled sitting up in the coaches, but it was a long, tiring ride.

  It was a very new experience for a young woman who had never been any farther east than Grand Falls. If her heart hadn’t been so sore and aching for Tom, Jennie knew she would’ve enjoyed it. The sleepers were like compartments. When night came, the conductor turned the seats, then hauled another one down and they became upper and lower bunks. You got into your bunk, pulled the curtains, and it became your own little world. Jennie was a bit nervous. She didn’t know what to do about undressing. Suppose the conductor saw her in her nightie? But she didn’t want to arrive in St. John’s in a wrinkly dress. It was new, from Eaton’s catalogue, mint-green with white polka dots, empire waistline and straight skirt. With her white shoes and purse, Jennie felt she was making the right fashion statement for the big city.

  Finally she decided to take off the dress and shoes and sleep in her full slip. She intended to leave on her nylon stockings but the garters were cutting into her thighs. So off they came, and she poked them out into the toes of her shoes, which she kept beside her on the bunk. As she tried to drift off to the rhythm of the swaying cars, Jennie wished Tom were here to share the bunk with her, but it was no good thinking about that.

  St. John’s was big, dirty, sooty and noisy with people rush, rush, rushing here and there. Margaret met her at the train and they got the bus up to a big house on Kings Bridge Road, where she worked as an upstairs maid. It was a gorgeous place, set in among big trees, like a park. Jennie was awestruck. The rich sure know how to live, she thought.

  “Now, my dear,” Margaret said as they unpacked Jennie’s clothes, “I’ve got you a job as kitchen girl. You have to wash all the dishes and the pots, bring in the scuttle full of coal, feed the fire in the big stove and peel vegetables.”

  Jennie pulled the uniform dress on over her head and tied the apron strings. “I dare say I can manage that, once I get the hang of it. Thanks Margaret, my dear, for getting me this place here with you.”

  Jennie was amazed how the rich people ate roasts of beef with blood still in them, surrounded by puffy little puddings. “Yorkshire puddings,” cook said. Everything went on the platter: the beef, the Yorkshire pudding, the vegetables, the potatoes. It looked nice, but the meat was too rare for the Newfoundland servants to appreciate. The master and his lady always had dessert: sweet puddings with sauce and trifles with custard. Cook said they were English people and they ate in the English way.

  “Sure, my dear, I s’pose they don’t know what salt meat and pease pudding is all about,” Margaret told Jennie.

  “Well, for sure they never ever had a roast of moose or a piece of bear meat,” Jennie added.

  “I was thinking about going down to the waterfront and getting them some seal flippers,” joked the cook, and they all had a grand laugh.

  The mistress of the house was kind to them all. Jennie thought that she dressed some grand. Margaret showed Jennie the lady’s closets, full of stylish dresses and hats. She had many fur coats, and a mink stole – more expensive than Suze’s fox, but still as ugly. One of the lady’s coats, a nice light brown wool, fawn-coloured, caught Jennie’s eye because it was so soft and smooth. Margaret said the wool was cashmere that came from some kind of goat in foreign countries. Jennie never forgot the feel of it. To her it was better than mink and fox. Maybe because the goat didn’t have to die as the fox did.

  Jennie worked all spring and summer and it was as if Tom, her own husband, never existed. Mam never mentioned him in her letters and Jennie was too proud to ask. She made a few friends and went out to a couple of dances. A couple of fellows asked her to step outside with them, but her heart was with Tom and she couldn’t begin to think of going out with other men.

  The Eastern Bible College in Ontario was an imposing place. Damian Genge from St. John’s had been there for a year studying to become a preacher, a job for which he felt God had called him. On the last day each indu
ctee was given an envelope with his assigned posting.

  Damian was proud of himself. He figured that with his good looks, his eloquence, his ability to whip up religious enthusiasm in the congregation, and his impeccable knowledge of the Scriptures, he would surely get a posting in Grand Falls, or Corner Brook, or even in St. John’s. Being from St. John’s, he felt he was a cosmopolitan kind of guy with lots to offer the richer high-toned churches. So, when he opened his envelope and read BADGER, it was a shock. He had to get a Newfoundland road map to discover where it was located. A long look told him it was buried so deep in the interior that only a place like Buchans could be more remote.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t too bad at all. The church was a fair size, the parsonage was in good shape, many people came to the prayer meetings, and Grand Falls was only eighteen miles away. Still, he had a nagging feeling that someone somewhere didn’t like him enough to give him a St. John’s church. He was pretty sure that his friendship with Jonathan Frost, another student at the college, was viewed as just a close friendship and nothing more, but you never knew. There were eyes everywhere. Whatever it was, he was an ordained pastor and he was here in Badger to do his best.

  It had been tough going at first and sometimes still was. His monthly letter from Jonathan was the only bright spot in his life. Jonathan was posted in Hearst, in Northern Ontario. It was a bigger town than Badger, but had a similar industry – forestry. It would likely be many years before they would meet again, if ever, but Damian was determined not to dwell on sad things. Maybe God really did have a plan for him. However, no matter how many hours he spent on his knees praying, so far God had not seen fit to show him.