Which proceedings consisted of the two young Braithwaites fighting over who was going to hold the streamers for Father, the two Braithwaite girls fighting over who would hand Mother the tinsel to be hung on the streamers, the five-year-old Braithwaite (me) trying to take a piece of candy from the baby (Denny), thus causing him to howl like a coyote. A normal, pleasant, domestic scene.
Suddenly the tranquility of the household was shattered by a loud scream from one of the girls. “The streamers are on fire!” And sure enough, this was indeed the case, for the heat from the gas lamp having ignited the paper, flames were dancing merrily as elves along the strings towards the fluffy living room curtains.
Then did pandemonium break loose. Everybody dropped what they were doing and ran. The little ones ran in circles, screaming, while the boys dashed out of the back door to the pump to fetch water. It took but a matter of minutes for Morley to prime the pump, fill a pail and dash through the door, leaving a trail of splashes, and pitch it all over the rug.
Hub was close behind and he had two buckets of water, one in each hand. “Clear the way for the Nokomis fire department!” he yelled, and his feet hit the icy water dropped by Morley. His feet went high above his head and so did the two buckets of water. Water covered everything–the kitchen cabinet, the curtains, and the surface of the large coal and wood range, sending a cloud of hissing steam up into the room.
At this point, Mother stuck her head into the cloud and asked, quite logically, “Hub, whatever did you do that for?” But Hub was gone for more water.
Doris, in the meantime, had dashed out of the front door and down the snow-covered street, her dark hair streaming in the wind, shouting, “My piano! Save my piano!” (Although both the boys had been subjected to piano lessons they’d never learned much, and Doris was the only who could play. So she looked upon the big, stolid upright piano as her personal property.)
The fire? Oh, Warner and Mary had pulled down the streamers and stamped them out with their feet. The only real damage was done by the water.
The next tiny tidbit of memory has to do with the Great Robbery. Since I was spectacularly involved in this, I’m well-acquainted with all of the details. It was the sort of thing that might well start a lad off on a career of crime, and often when the mood is on me I brood about this and consider how I might well have ended up on the gallows.
Across the lane from our house lived a retired gentleman by the name of Stickells. He was badly crippled up with rheumatism and so naturally everybody called him “Old Stiffy Stickells”. Despite his stiffness, Mr. Stickells was an excellent runner, as I found out to my sorrow. He had a first-rate garden, and one lazy fall afternoon my big brothers, all three of them, were lazing about on our lawn, sucking on grass stems and wondering what to do. Finally, one of them suggested idly that I sneak into Stiffy’s garden and fetch out some tomatoes that should be just about ripe by this time.
“But he’s working in the other side of the garden,” I protested.
“That doesn’t matter,” another said. “Everybody knows he’s deaf and half-blind.”
“Besides,” Hub added, “he can’t run. Even if he does see you he can’t catch you.”
It was a tradition in our family to send the youngest member to do any dirty work that was to be done. I looked around for Denny, but he was nowhere in sight, so I had to go.
My first foray was successful. I sneaked through the gate and into the tomato patch and Old Stiffy never so much as raised his head. But my small hands could carry only four ripe tomatoes and so I was soon sent back for more. The next time, though, Stiffy wasn’t at his accustomed place and, when I looked over a row of tall beans, there he was coming down the path with two empty water pails to get water from our pump. I squirched down in the tomatoes, afraid to breathe, but just as he got opposite me Stiffy made a surprisingly quick dodge in my direction.
I got out of there as fast I could go, with Stiffy after me in full stride and our dog, Patsy, always on the alert for anything on the run, after him, yapping angrily at his heels. I circled the house at full tilt, and flew across the empty lawn but Stiffy was still gaining. He would have caught me, too, if the back door hadn’t opened and Mother, attracted by Patsy’s yapping, hadn’t come out. We all stopped.
“Gracious, Mr. Stickells, don’t you think you are too old to play tag with the children?” she remonstrated mildly. Stiffy was too dumbfounded and out of breath to comment. He staggered to the pump, got his water and staggered home, with Patsy still yapping at his heels.
Patsy must have joined our family before I did, because I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t there. I think he must have been Mother’s dog. Like all the dogs we’ve ever had, it was impossible to definitely designate his breed. When asked what kind of a dog he was, Mother would say, “Well … he’s a small dog.” If pressed further, she’d amplify, “A small black dog.”
And indeed he was very small and very black. His hair was long and completely covered his face. All you could see when you looked at him was a pair of very red malicious eyes, and a tiny pink tongue when he was panting. He had no tail that anyone could ever see, and when he was standing up, not moving, it was impossible to tell which end was which.
Pound for pound, Patsy must have been the noisiest, cussedest and meanest little dog that ever lived. The only water pump in our end of town stood about twenty feet from our back door so that it was much more convenient for the neighbours to get their water from it than from the town pump six blocks away.
More convenient, but not easier. Patsy believed strongly in the sanctity of private property and would attack anyone who tried to get away with any of our water. In winter, as will happen with water in thirty-below weather, the accumulated splashings from the spout froze around the pump, making a mound of glare-ice. To fight your way up and down its slopes with two water-pails in hand, and Patsy tugging at your pantleg, was more than most of our neighbours could manage, and so they walked the six blocks to the town pump.
But of all the people who hated Patsy–and there were many – I think my sister Doris hated him worst. Doris had been bitten by a dog once. It was a family legend and was told over and over again. According to the story, this big dog had just come up and bitten her when she was crossing a field on the way to school, and Dad had been so enraged that he’d borrowed a gun and gone out and shot the animal, even though he’d never before shot anything in his life. This experience may have been the basis for Doris’s dislike of canines, or it could be that she just didn’t like the noise and the smell and the dirt they provided. At any rate, whenever anything untoward happened involving Patsy–which was about twice a day on the average–she would say with more scorn than I’ve heard anyone else achieve “And then they say – keep a dog!”
Doris was delicate in the Nokomis days. At least, she thought she was. Her most common affliction was a beating heart. Not one that was beating too little, but one that was beating too much. When Mother and Dad were away at the curling rink, as they were almost every night in the winter, they would be called off the ice to the phone to hear Doris’s plaintive complaint, “Mother, my heart is beating again.”
Whereupon Hub and I, for whom she was baby-sitting at the time, would dance around her chanting in asinine falsettos, “Mother, oh Mother, come home to me now, for my heart is beating again.” This didn’t help her condition any.
Actually, Doris was probably the most normal member of the entire family, and the most logical. Always interested in her health–well perhaps “interested” is too mild a word, “obsessed” would cover it better–she naturally became preoccupied with different nutrient values of foods. Indeed, after she became a teacher, nutrition was her major hobby. When she came home for Easter and Christmas holidays, she would be appalled to find that we were still eating potatoes and meat and bread. Especially white bread. It was, she had come to believe, thoroughly bad for you. She would say, “Well, if you persist in eating that white bread, you’ll die some day
.” And if that isn’t logic, what is?
While we lived in Nokomis we had periodic visits from Dad’s Ontario relatives. They were all nice, pleasant, conservative people, and I suppose they wondered what kind of a crazy place Warner had got to. But the railways were providing good service by then, and the thing to do was for everyone to travel west to see the wonderful Rocky Mountains. Nokomis was in a sense on the route to the Rockies, so everyone would stop off for a week or two.
The visitor I remember best was Aunt Grace, who had had a hard time on an Ontario farm, and whose husband was dead. I don’t know if she was an honest-to-god aunt or not–it was difficult to get all the exact relationships straight–but she was always called “Aunt Grace”. The two things I liked most about her were that she could recite all the poems of Robert Service, and she walked in her sleep.
I don’t think there was any relation between these two activities, but then there may have been. We kids would sit on the floor in the parlour while Aunt Grace sat in a rocking chair, going gently back and forth in time with the rhythm of the poem. As the action increased, so did her speed of rocking.
Thus, in “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” she would begin nice and slowly, then build up to such a pitch that by the time Dan was “pitched on his head and pumped full of lead” she was going at so great a rate that she nearly took off. I don’t know which fascinated us most, the rocking or the poems.
More spectacular even than this furious rocking was the sleep-walking. It always followed the same pattern. Aunt Grace Would have this dream, and would shout in a piercing scream “All out!” Then she would get out of bed, still asleep, light the coal-oil lamp, gather up all the bed-covers under one arm and, with the lamp in the other, would start through the house. Her route was always the same. She’d go down the hallway and through each of the bedrooms in turn, shouting “All out!” in each room. Whereupon each occupant would get up and follow her. Thus the night-shirt procession progressed from room to room, with Dad as close to Aunt Grace as he could get.
We’d all been well-briefed on the dangers of violently waking a sleep-walker. It might lead to sudden death, or worse. So nobody made a sound, although in winter our feet would get mighty cold, and the draft whistling up under our nighties was uncomfortable.
When she reached the head of the stairs, Aunt Grace would stop while we all held our breath. Then she would raise her hands high above her head, one holding the bed-clothes and the other the lamp, shout “Gone!” and hurl the bed-clothes down the stairs. This was my father’s cue to step nimbly forward and grab the lamp. He could never feel certain she wouldn’t pitch with the wrong hand.
Life was never dull when Aunt Grace came to live with us.
Nokomis was a very religious town. Although there were less than four hundred people altogether, there was a Methodist Church, a Presbyterian Church, a Baptist Church, a German Lutheran Church, a Roman Catholic Church, and, of course, an Anglican Church.
We were Methodists, which meant that we were the best people in town. We knew that the Catholics were evil (as did all good Northern Irish people); that the Anglicans were stuck up and hypocrites; that the Presbyterians were stubborn and mean. As for the German Lutherans, well! Germans! Everybody knew what they were jabbering about in their own language during the war. They were jabbering about the take-over of the country. No, you couldn’t really trust anyone except the Methodists.
The Methodist Church was a small white one in the middle of town. I remember it well, for it was there that I had the three most traumatic experiences of my early years: I saw my first dead person; I saw my first movie; and I was lied to, horribly and deliberately, which led to my kicking the Sunday School superintendent in the shins.
The funeral was that of a neighbour, one of the founders of Nokomis. I was dragged along with the other members of the family to show our respect. I didn’t want to go. I yelled and shouted that I didn’t want to see a dead person, until I was informed that to take such an attitude was wicked, and would quite likely bar the gates of heaven against me. Well, I wasn’t taking any chances like that, so I went.
I had seen the deceased before, of course, many times. She was very old and very wrinkled and very deaf. Often she would be brought over to our yard in the hot summer days, to sit in the shade of the box-elder trees. And we would be warned not to yell or shout or make a noise because it would disturb Grandma Pierce. Although why a noise should bother a stone-deaf person confused me.
And now she was dead. I’d seen dead cats, gophers, mice, even a dead horse once. It had fallen by the curb of the sidewalk downtown and broken its leg. It had to be shot on the spot, and while it lay there waiting to be hauled off we little kids took turns jumping over its outstretched head. As we did so the eye seemed to wink at us. But I’d never, ever seen a dead person.
So, clutching Dad’s hand I was led up to the body. There she was, lying among all the flowers in her best dress. But she wasn’t old any more. Gone were the wrinkles. Cheeks that had been hollow were plump and rosy, as they must have been when she was a young girl–before the pioneering, before the ten children, before the work, work, work of a Saskatchewan farm. Even her hair had been tinted and combed and made pretty. I stared and stared until Dad nudged me and whispered, “What’s the matter, Son?”
“Why is she so pretty?” I gasped.
“Because she’s happy. She’s with God in heaven.”
He believed it too, I’m sure he did. And I wish that I, too, could believe that he himself became young again when he died, with all the lines of sorrow and bad luck and disappointment and work wiped away. And that with Mother, also made young again, he is happy somewhere. But I can’t.
The movie. I’ve since heard it described as one of the great movies of all times, a “high point in the history of American movies”. Certainly its advance publicity in Nokomis must have been thorough. Everybody talked about it. Why, it had even been shown in the White House to the President of the United States. It surely must have strong religious overtones, too, since it was to be shown in a Methodist church, and parents were encouraged to bring their children. It was called The Birth of a Nation.
The church was packed, with many people standing at the back. A huge screen had been erected across the front and, when the lights were put out and the titles flickered across the screen, a sigh of anticipation escaped from the lips of the crowd. A moving picture! A story right there before their eyes! Certainly it had all the ingredients to make it great: all sorts of killing and violence, racial hatred, vigilantes riding in white robes and–sex. Ah yes, raw sex. At the scene where the giant Negro picks up the squirming white girl, with her long blonde tresses falling in disarray, you could feel the rut in that good Methodist church. As for me, I was scared stiff.
Afterwards, the whole country talked of little else but the wonder of the film. The Methodist minister preached a sermon on “The role of the moving picture in spreading Christ’s word.” The Lutheran minister said it was “the work of the devil”. The Nokomis Times ran an editorial assessing the prospects of making Nokomis the movie capital of Canada.
My third bad experience in that little white Methodist church sowed the first seeds that were to eventually turn me off churches entirely. We, of course, went to Sunday School. Mother firmly believed that Sunday School training was the best possible thing for her children. She never once stopped to wonder if perhaps the Sunday School teachers, untrained, untested, often uneducated, might also be lesbians, homosexuals, bigots, or fools. The fact that they did their work in the church made them perfect in her eyes.
Well, our superintendent certainly wasn’t perfect. At worst he was a sadist; at best a liar. His name was Mr. Watcherling. He liked to tell the little kids what would happen to them if they were bad. They would go to hell and burn forever. Watcherling’s eyes would shine when he said this. “Have you any idea what ‘forever’ means, young man? Not just a day–or a week–or a year, but year after year after year–forever! Red ho
t pokers shoved through your flesh, birds pecking out your eyes–forever!” And since being bad included, I was sure, stealing apples, teasing your little brother, badgering Stiffy Stickells, I was obviously for it. That is, I would have been if I’d believed him, but of course I didn’t. I’ve often wished there were a hell, though, just so that Mr. Watcherling could go there.
His biggest and meanest lie was the one about Santa Claus. My parents, of course, did the Santa Claus bit just as all good, God-fearing parents thought they must. But they never overdid it. If you asked pointed questions they’d hedge or walk away. Not good old Watcherling, however. To him Santa was one of God’s agents, who could mete out minor and more immediate favours and punishments.
As the jolly season drew nearer, Watcherling grew more vicious. “Don’t forget, young gentlemen, Santa Claus is coming right to this church. He’ll come right through that door there with his pack on his back, and there’ll be presents for the children who have been good, and none for those who have been bad!”
On the strength of that I became good. I memorized a whole long poem for the Christmas concert. It was titled “Just Before Christmas” and each verse ended with the line “So, jest ‘fore Christmas I’m as good as I can be.” I did all the things advocated in the poem. I said “yessum” to the ladies and “yessir” to the men, and when there was company, I didn’t pass my plate for pie again. I washed my face and brushed my teeth and minded my “p’s and q’s”. And I didn’t bust out my pantaloons, and I didn’t wear out my shoes. I was so good, in fact, that Mother thought I was sick.
So, on the evening of the concert I said my piece, requiring prompting only four times. Then I sat on the edge of my chair, waiting for that old whiskered rascal to show up. Finally, after interminable telegrams detailing his progress from the North Pole, he did actually walk in through that back door–cotton whiskers, red suit, rubber boots, harness-bells and all. With a “Ho ho ho,” he dumped his pack on the floor under the Christmas tree, and began to shout out names. I waited, scarcely breathing. I had my order in for a meccano set, and I knew that if there was any justice in the world at all, I’d get it.
Never Sleep Three in a Bed Page 3
