And she never blamed her Warner for any of the bad times. She knew he was the best and kindest man alive, and that was that.
Warner, his full name was George Albert Warner, went West, I’m sure, to get free of a stern Middlesex County Victorian family and two domineering older sisters. Born on a farm, he was still no farmer, just as his father, George, son of Thomas, who had emigrated from Armagh years earlier, was no farmer. Warner went to the old Model School on Gould Street in Toronto, and taught in a small school in Ontario for a spell. Then a friend told him that teachers were in great demand in the new territories, and a man could make a fortune buying and selling farms. So, he left his family, some of whom he never saw again, and went West.
He was a tall, lean young man, with a dashing black moustache and a deep voice. To bring a little culture to the farmers in the school district near Summerberry where he taught, he gave poetry readings in the evenings. Byron, mostly, and Keats–the fiery romantics. Mary heard him and, just as in the story books, fell head over heels. And he fell for her, too, and from that time on wanted no other woman. So they were married in Grenfell a week before Christmas, in 1901. He was within a month of being thirty-four years old, and she was twenty-five. They vowed to love each other through sickness and health and for better or for worse and–by gawd!–that’s what they did.
At first it was all adventure. Warner didn’t want to be a teacher, not really, so he studied law at night and on the weekends until he was admitted to the bar, and became one of the province’s first lawyers. Then he looked around for some town where the action was. Naturally, he picked on Nokomis–wasn’t it the fastest growing community in the West? After all, from nothing to a population of three hundred plus within three years is a truly phenomenal rate of growth.
Down on the main street, between McEwen’s store and the bank, Warner built a one-storey frame office with a big desk and a notary’s seal that made funny raised marks on paper. There was plenty of legal work in the booming community. Somebody was always suing somebody else over property lines, water rights, and so on, and there were a lot of deeds to register. Being a friendly, capable man with no racial bigotry, Dad fitted well into the polyglot population and prospered. He once told me that he cleared ten dollars a day, and that was plenty to raise a family on.
My father licked me only once in those Nokomis days and according to his lights I sure deserved it.
It was the stick-horses that got me into trouble. Stick-horses–now there was a game. It required absolutely nothing bought at the store, or given to you at Christmas time, just some willow-gads cut from around the slough. The slim ones became driving-horses, the heavy ones powerful work-horses – Clydesdales or Percherons, depending on your choice. They all had names. Kate and Harry, of course, because they were the names of our real horses, and Flick and Floss, Jack and Lady. The names of horses in a team had a fine euphony. I had a great stable of stick-horses when I was five.
You drove your stick-horses by clutching them at the top and digging them into the ground, in the same way as a mountain climber uses a staff. When the load was heavy, and the horses pulling hard, you dug in deep and shouted your head off–“Giddap, Kate! Come on, Harry boy, pullll! You can do it!” But with the drivers you just clicked your tongue, and away they went at a good slick trot down the dusty road.
Horses must have a stable, and the stable for my stick-horses was the rear outside wall of the garage that housed our Russell car. I’d marked off the stalls with little rows of stones, and each horse stood in his stall by simply leaning against the wall. It was necessary, horses being what they are, to pitchfork the manure from those stalls from time to time. I had a fork with a broken handle, and I’d work like a real farm-hand behind those horses, doing an essential job.
Unfortunately, my mentor in barn cleaning was a hired man who worked for us for a short time, named Nick Casey. Often I’d sit on the edge of the oat bin and listen to Nick shovel manure. And, horses being naturally ornery, he gave them many instructions in what was surely the most profane and colourful vocabulary in existence. “Move over there, you Roman-nosed bastard!” he’d command. “Stand still, you stupid bugger!” And these were just warm-ups for the really ripe stuff that followed. I stored all the words away in my head, to be used on my own steeds when they wouldn’t behave.
Which brings me to that warm Saturday afternoon when I thought Dad was busy at the office. I was irritable and hot, just as Nick Casey usually was, and the stick-horses were at their orneriest. At the top of my piping voice I called them all the words I’d ever heard Nick use, along with some I’d picked up from my older brothers and a few that I invented. The air was blue.
Now it happened that Dad, whose strongest expletive ever was “Oh pshaw”, had come home early from the office and was tinkering with the Russell inside the garage. The walls were thin, and my voice came through loud and clear. His reaction was immediate and positive. He didn’t ponder as to whether or not he should ignore the incident. He didn’t decide to write a letter to any friendly adviser in the newspaper, to ask what should be done about a swearing child. Nor did he consider taking me to a child psychologist. None of those things. What he heard was sinful, and he knew all about how to stop sinful actions in his children. He came around the corner of that garage with blood in his eye. He grabbed my best driving-horse, a lean and limber steed named Racer, and lambasted the tar out of me. I would like to be able to report that this licking cured me of swearing once and for all. But of course it didn’t. I’m still a terrible curser. Similarly, my father never drank or smoked: most of his kids do. He went to church every Sunday of his life except when he was sick: most of his kids don’t. So much for good parental example, and the power of the rod.
Such were the Nokomis days, the good days, the prosperous days when we lived in the biggest house in town, owned the first six-cylinder car in the district, and went for vacations to Watrous Lake. Father was the mayor of the town, and the president of the curling club, and the founder of the local chapter of the masonic lodge. No wonder the house and the yard, the horses, cats, dogs, chickens, and cows all stand out in my memory. But mostly I remember the people who lived in the old stone house with me–and what a wacky bunch they were!
2 The Brothers and Sisters
I always think of the brothers and sisters in pairs. As I knelt in my long flannelette nightie on the cold floor of the attic bedroom I shared with Hub I prayed for their blessing in groups of two. It was, “God bless Poppa and Momma”. The essential pair. If anything happened to them I was done for, I knew. They alone stood between me and the moaning wind and the darkness and all the terrors of the night.
Then it was, “God bless Morley and Peter”, the two oldest brothers, always referred to in our family as “the boys”. Born just over a year apart, they played and fought and worked together constantly. They slept together, too, and sometimes when there was company or – later – a roomer, one of us younger kids would have to sleep with them – three in a bed. (This was a horror that I will deal with later.) They used to talk a lot in bed those two. I can still hear the soft rumble of their voices late at night or on a Sunday morning, “The way I figure it … if a fellow can only.…” Constantly, they would be trying to solve some intricate riddle of life.
Morley was lean, sharp-faced and wiry, with the reddest hair I’ve ever seen. He was a mild boy, quiet, good-natured and friendly, but with a keen sense of justice and a fiery temper. It didn’t do to get him riled, as I once discovered when I foolishly recited in his presence the bit of doggerel, “Red-headed gingerbread … five cents a cabbage-head”. He happened to be washing his hands at the time and they were covered with lather of strong soap and barn dirt. He simply turned and rubbed the grimy mess hard into my face until I howled for mercy.
As the oldest boy, one of Morley’s chores was to dress me in the morning, and he hated it. As often as not he’d beat it and leave me to fend for myself, but he was always caught out because I invaria
bly put my shoes on the wrong feet. Things of simple logic, such as which shoe goes on which foot, have always baffled me. If there’s a wrong way to do it, I will.
Morley never managed to establish any real rapport with the Nokomis educational establishment. He hated to be cooped up in school, much preferring the fields, the dark brown soil, and the company of animals. About all I remember of his scholastic career is that he once threw a snowball at the principal and scored a direct hit, and that he left school early to work on the farm.
Doris and Phyllis, the next pair for whom I requested divine blessing, were also opposites. Doris had long black hair, and Phyllis’s was red as a sunset. Doris was cautious, nervous; Phyllis active, saucy and adventuresome. They slept together, and hated it. Their arguments and accusations rang through the house.
“You’re on my side of the bed again.”
“I am not! It’s just as much my side as it is yours!”
“Ha! If we drew a line down the centre … see … it would go right here.”
“It would not.”
“It would so. And your big b-t-end is at least a foot over it. Move it.…”
“It’s no bigger than yours.…”
And so on–far into the night.
Hubert and Max were the next pair in the rhythm of the prayer. Hub. What can I say about Hub? His full name was Hubert Frances Warner, but you’d better stand well back if you intend to call him by his middle name. He was convinced that it was a girl’s name, and nobody was going to call him that.
There used to be a magazine series entitled, “The Most Remarkable Character I’ve Ever Known” or something like that. Hub will always be my most remarkable character. Somehow his commonsense and toughness typify for me the early West. He just couldn’t be licked. The school system attempted in its self-righteous stupidity to destroy him. It wasn’t that he was rebellious or delinquent or mean. He’d have been delighted to fit into their neat little pattern, but they wouldn’t let him. For Hub had been born with an almost complete inability to spell. None of the family spells well, but he was hopeless. He had a natural curiosity, and liked all the other school subjects. He could also remember how to put together the most complicated gadget after he’d taken it apart, and knew more stories than any other kid in the neighbourhood, as well as the location of every garden in town that had ripe tomatoes or carrots worth taking. But somehow that peculiar arrangement of nerve-ends, or whatever it is that makes some people good spellers, was lacking in his brain. The teachers looked upon this as a mean, deliberate attack on their status and security. They could all spell well, and anybody who couldn’t must be bad.
So they told him he was no good and would never amount to anything; that he was a menace to himself and society, and would surely end up in jail. Hub simply didn’t believe them. They must, he concluded, be nuts, to take such a ridiculous attitude and, since they were nuts, nothing they said had any relevance. He ignored them, and it’s a good thing he did.
In contrast to Hub I tended to fit neatly into the school establishment, and it’s a good thing I did, for I had none of his practical ability. To his credit, he never held it against me, even when I left him far behind, and showed little malice even when Mother would demand, “Why can’t you be more like Max? He never plays hookey.” Despite her other admirable qualities, our mother was singularly lacking in tact.
An aunt who visited us when I was very small tells of coming upon me sitting in a round tin tub in the middle of the kitchen floor being bathed. And swearing and howling. Soap was getting into my eyes and mouth and ears, and while I squirmed and fought to get free of Doris, who was doing the job, I exploded with the ultimate in rage, frustration and scorn, “You … you … dirty Timothy Eaton coward!”
I’ve never been able to figure how old Tim should be connected with cowardice, but the mention of Eatons was natural enough, because their mail-order catalogue was the most important book in our household.
It had everything. A child could pore over it for hours, the way he might sit in front of a television set today, being amused, educated and mesmerized. Consider what that book had to offer. It brought us a whiff of the outside world, showing us how the other half lived. Ladies in fashionable clothes, riding in grand buggies, pulled by elegant horses. Sail-boats skimming along the margin of a lake. And, as today’s boys sit dry-mouthed ogling television ads featuring semi-nude females, we could get our kicks from the women’s underwear pages.
I think I liked the harness ads best. Great powerful white steeds with bulging muscles stood straining against the traces. There was an ad for a stump-puller, I remember, which showed a big horse walking in a circle. He was working a winch, which was attached to two monstrous stumps. At any moment, one of them would be torn from the earth. To a boy who’d never seen a tree trunk thicker than a man’s arm, these stumps, as big around as laundry tubs, were indeed a marvel.
For little girls, the catalogue was the perfect cut-out book, with children, adults, dolls, toys, furniture, baby carriages–everything they could want. On Valentine’s day we cut out the faces of children and pasted them on bits of cardboard, along with red hearts and cute rhymes.
The catalogue was even used for shopping sometimes. Especially before Christmas, when we would lie on our bellies on the living room rug and pick out all the things we wanted but never got. Most of our clothing came from there, and there’s never been a thrill like shoving your bare leg into the downy warmth of new fleece-lined drawers.
And when it was finished with in the house, the catalogue was moved to the toilet out back, where it performed an even more vital function. Nobody has yet got around to producing illustrated toilet paper–a frightful industrial oversight in my opinion–but when they do, it will not be better than the old Eaton’s catalogue.
There was no partner for the last name in my prayers; it just sort of hung there like the last line in an unfinished couplet. “God bless Momma and Poppa … Morley and Peter … Doris and Phyllis … Denny and … uh.…” He was the youngest of the Nokomis family (Betty was born later in Prince Albert) and he was small and thin and red-headed and thoughtful. He suffered greatly from being the only one lower than me in the pecking order and I teased him without mercy. I knew exactly how to make him cry or swear, or laugh until he peed his pants. I could make him lose his temper completely, and he would fly into such a towering rage that he’d grab a butcher knife and chase me around the yard with it.
Why did I do this? I really don’t know. Barbarism of children, I guess. I got it from above, so I dished it out below. He was my very own patsy, my meat. He was there, and I could handle him. What I did to him in those early days, the frustrations and rages and sorrows I caused, are as much built into his character as the effects of the bullying I got from above are built into mine.
So there we were. Seven new kids in a new town. In a country too young to have traditions of its own, making do with the religious and racial traditions brought in by that astonishing mixture of peoples. And what of us kids? Unknown to our parents–to ourselves, even–we developed new ways. Ways fashioned by the flat prairies, the black soil, the constant winds, the bone-dry summers and the mean winters. Fashioned, too, by the one-crop economy. A fatalism, an acceptance of what nature gave us. If it rained we were prosperous; if it didn’t we were poor. Not just the farmers, but everybody else who worked for them. And no one could affect the amount of rainfall by a single drop.
A new race of Canadians we were. Not the fur traders or the Métis, but the solid dirt farmer. All the fatalism, sardonic humour, wildness, stubbornness–or strength of character, whichever you prefer–yes, and paranoia, too, all these began in Nokomis, and towns like it, with the Braithwaites and families like them. This country made us, and wherever we go and whatever we do, we can’t ever be quite the same as other Canadians.
3 Fire—Robbery—and the Beating of a Tender Heart
Tiny waifs of memory loiter in my mind from those early Nokomis days. Why do they lin
ger, when so many other things, which were probably of more importance, have been forgotten? Perhaps because they were big, like the first moving picture, a fire or a death. Or traumatic, scarring my little id with frustration, fear or rage.
There was the Great Christmas Fire, for instance. Beside threatening us with the loss of our home, it showed our family in all its madness. Christmas was big in our family. Not so much the religious connotation, except for a desultory concert in the Methodist church, but rather a Dickens-type Christmas. There were stockings carefully hung by the chimney, oranges that came but once a year, visitings, and the wonderful red and green decorations.
These decorations, very inflammable, were made of crěpe paper, and were stretched across the living room, looping down from the centre lamp, and tacked firmly in the corners. And huge red paper bells, which were stored flat, were opened up miraculously at Christmas to be hung in doorways and bump on people’s heads.
At the time of the Great Fire, it may have been 1917 for all I know, the pre-Christmas scene was as follows: Warner Braithwaite, resplendent in shirt sleeves held in place by little metal garters, and a starched collar, stood sweating on a kitchen chair in the middle of the living room, the other furniture having been pushed back for the occasion. He was attaching streamers to the base of the lamp. This was a gas lamp, you must understand, and it was throwing a festive glow on the proceedings below.
Never Sleep Three in a Bed Page 2
