Cyril and I were in there one Saturday morning, standing, eyes level with the top of the counter, watching the wonderful transactions. All that money. Unbelievable. And then it happened. A farmer put a five-dollar-bill down on the counter and, as an afterthought, asked for some dried beans. Harry Redpath turned and scooped them out of a bin into a paper bag while the farmer turned to examine work socks, leaving that five-dollar-bill unguarded. A small hand snaked out and back, and two small forms disappeared through the front door.
What a time we had! At the Chinese restaurant we blew the entire five dollars on candy. Liquorice plugs and pipes, black-balls, all-day suckers, candy kisses, gooey marshmallows, and–the crowning delight–a full, two-pound box of chocolates.
Clutching all this loot, we hurried across the tracks and in the shade of a grain elevator sat down and consumed the lot. Oh, the wonder of it! All the candy you could eat. Nobody to say, “You’ve had enough now”; no brother or sister to share it with. No thought of keeping some for the next day. Just gobble it up. And then, oh the belly-ache! A belly-ache that started in the stomach and spread all over the body. We rolled on the grass and groaned until our stomachs rebelled completely and heaved the whole gooey mess out. And what tasted so good going down was so foul on the return journey. Late that afternoon we staggered home, were dosed with castor oil, and put to bed. But nobody ever knew the real story of our wild bacchanal.
“Was the war bad?” I asked my father as we watched the Kaiser burn.
“Very bad. Many good men were killed in it.”
“Why did they have it, then?”
“Oh–many reasons, I suppose. But they’ll never have another. That was the last one. A war to end wars. It can’t ever happen again.”
It was in the spring of the next year that I saw my first aeroplane. It was recess, and we were playing pump-pump-pull-away in the school yard. Chasing each other, squealing, shoving, arguing. And then this sound. Like a motor-bike or an automobile (there were a few automobiles in Nokomis already) but, wonder of wonders, this was coming from above. Every kid stopped running and turned his bare face to the sky.
“Look!” one shouted. “Away, way up there. See? It’s too big for a bird!”
“Don’t be so stupid,” an older kid scoffed. “It’s an aeroplane. I’ve seen them in a magazine my Dad gets from the old country. They used them in the war to fight with.”
“How does it stay up?” a little girl asked.
“With wings, of course, you dumb girl.”
“Hey … look … it’s circling around.”
And sure enough it was. Making large circles in the sky and coming lower and lower towards a stubble field on the edge of town. Then it disappeared behind a strawstack.
“It’s landing!” my big brother Morley shouted. “Come on!”
So we jumped the fence and headed for the stubble field. Every kid from Grade One to Grade Eight. That school yard emptied like a hog-yard at slopping time.
The four teachers followed as fast as they could run.
When we got there, running carefully in our bare feet through the prickly stubble, there was a big crowd of towns-people already gathered. The aeroplane, a two-seater B.E. 2C bi-plane, was roped off to protect it from inquisitive hands. The pilot, a lean young man in leather jacket, breeches and leather leggings, stood idly dangling his helmet and goggles in his hand while he talked to Floyd MacDougal, recognized by all to be the best mechanic in the country.
We kids from the school quickly penetrated the crowd, wormed our way out to the front, and stared at the man from the sky. A new breed. A new man. Imagine being up above the trees, the houses, even the grain elevators!
“How fast will it go?”
“Over a hundred miles an hour, I heard him say.”
“A hundred miles an hour! Faster than Doc Harding’s car!”
“Gosh!”
But the daring young man wasn’t there just to amaze us with the wonders of his flying machine. He was there to make money. Discharged from the Royal Flying Corps, with only one marketable peacetime skill, he was “barnstorming” around the country, selling rides to the adventurous. “Five dollars for five minutes in the air … up in the clouds … if you’ve the nerve for it.” You sat in the front cockpit with no cover of any kind, and only a strap to keep you from falling out.
Who would be the first to step forward and risk his neck?
Well, the first to step forward, much to our amazement, was our own Grade One teacher, Miss Williams. My six-year-old heart thumped right down onto the dusty stubble. There was no rescue I could perform. I couldn’t even talk. The pilot helped her in and fastened the straps. Then he got in and signalled to Floyd MacDougal, who removed the blocks from in front of the two spindly wheels and spun the propeller. It caught, and the dust rose in a cloud as the crowd moved back a respectable distance, the men holding their hats against the wind and the women holding their skirts. I was holding my breath.
The roar and wind increased incredibly. The thin, wire-spoked wheels began to turn. The frail craft bumped across the uneven field. For a long time it rattled along the earth. Then, slowly it wobbled into the air while three-quarters of the population of Nokomis let out a rousing cheer. The wings shuddered a bit, but she stayed up, gradually gaining altitude. The pilot circled back and came in low over the crowd. We scattered and cheered and waved our caps like crazy.
The pilot stayed around for two days, taking people up for rides. The grown-ups of the town talked of little else for weeks. Jimmy Spence, who ran the drug store, said that the things would never be of any practical use. All right as a toy, maybe, but you’d never get him up in one. Harry Bruce at the livery stable scoffed at the whole idea. The horse, he said, would always be the principal means of transportation and power. Look at the motor-car. Completely undependable. Reverend Millar preached a sermon about it on the text–“No matter how high ye may fly, there is always a reckoning.” And the Grade Eight teacher got back at his class for leaving the school yard by making them write a composition about “The future of the aeroplane.”
As for us little kids, we played aeroplane endlessly. An orange crate makes a great fuselage, since it already has two seats. It doesn’t take much work to fasten two long boards to the rear end, coming to a point where a couple of pieces of cardboard make a tail. On the front, an apple box with a board on a spike makes a first-class propeller. So we’d pull our imaginary goggles down over our eyes, adjust our imaginary helmets, shout “Contact!” and Brrrorrr, away we’d go into the wild blue yonder to shoot down the Huns by the dozen. An older kid had got hold of newspaper clippings that told about Billy Bishop and everybody wanted to be him. Baron von Richthofen–the bum–nobody wanted to be.
5 Hallowe’en Horrors
Hallowe’en night in Nokomis was a night of horrors. There was none of your dolling yourself up in Aunt Ellen’s old dress and clumping up to front doors begging for treats. No, it was a night of vengeance. A night when the young took it out on the old, when revolution and protest and defiance and violence filled the air. A night of mystery, when adults crouched in their homes, not in fear of witches and black cats and ghosts, but of kids. And of the roaming, hell-raising bands of young men, And people prayed that the gangs would pass them by and not single them out for reprisal.
There was something of the old Celtic idea of the beginning of winter in our Hallowe’en nights. Certainly the first snow often came on October thirty-first, and that was the official end of autumn. Winter would lay hold of us after that, and end any roaming of streets at night.
It was the official end of hard work, too. Harvest was finally done. The grain and the gardens were all in. There were chores to do, of course, cows to milk, stock to feed, wood to cut and haul, but the big job of getting in the grain was over. “Bringing in the sheaves,” they sang in the little white church. “We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.”
So the young men from the farms, transients who’d been working on the threshing g
angs, regular hired men, and the wild young sons of farmers would come into town in buggies, or astride clumping work horses, to raise hell. The focal point for their fun was the Chinese café, for the Chink was always fair game.
The Chinese café was an institution of the prairies. Every town had one, and they all looked about the same. Narrow, dark places with a counter on one side and a row of shabby booths with wooden benches on the other. The benches were especially built so that it was impossible to sit comfortably on them. They had a tendency to slide the sitter under the table, so that he had to keep feet braced and elbows at the ready.
But the café was the only place to go for a cup of coffee or a meal, or to meet and gab with other farmers. “The Chinaman’s”, as it was called, took the place of the club, the pub, the recreation centre. Since there was officially no liquor at all in Saskatchewan then, the Chinaman often also became the local bootlegger, supplying a horrible brand of rotgut homebrew concocted in somebody’s dirty cellar.
One might suppose that since the Chinaman performed such a variety of essential services he’d be treated with some kindness by the locals. Not a chance. Since the community comprised such a mixture of nationalities, racial prejudice was a luxury the pioneers couldn’t afford. Except for the Chinaman. That bewildered individual was the outlet for all the pent up racial bigotry of the district. He was alone, helpless, beyond the pale. Even the kids could badger him without restraint:
Chinky chinky Chinaman,
Sitting on a rail.
Along came a blackbird
And snipped off his tail.
After that, the rhyme got dirtier and meaner, and we kids never passed the Chinese café without chanting at least a part of it.
The Chinaman retaliated by serving the foulest meals ever tasted. He usually lived alone, because the laws of the land prevented him from bringing over his wife or children. He made his home in the tiny rooms behind or above his café where, by peeking in the windows, we’d catch glimpses of him poring over Chinese newspapers or eating with chopsticks.
We knew he was eating some loathsome mess known as “chop suey”. Chop suey! The very name filled us with revulsion. We had some vague idea it contained chopped up rats or toads, or something equally horrible. We had no idea that the Chink was actually dining on savoury, succulent Chinese food, cooked with loving care, in dazzling contrast to the greasy mess he threw in front of the farm hands, travelling salesmen, section labourers and the rest of us. Fat bacon was our lot, and old eggs; tired, warmed-over potatoes, shrivelled peas that hadn’t seen their tinny home in days, followed by “laisin pie”, with a leather crust that no one ever ate, and coffee you couldn’t believe.
There also persisted an unpleasant, murky notion that the evil Chinese were constantly on the look-out for sweet, innocent Christian girls whom they enticed into their dens and violated with their corkscrew penises. What other obscenities were committed in those small back rooms could only be imagined, and, believe me, we imagined plenty.
At one point, the official records show that gangs of toughs wrecked the Chinese café in Nokomis so regularly, and so thoroughly, that the harassed owner was finally forced to close the place and try his luck elsewhere.
But the best-remembered incident was what the rowdies did to a Chinaman named Charlie one Hallowe’en night. Charlie was a dapper young man who, like his white contemporaries, was anxious to get ahead in the community. He was handsome, sleek-headed, always polite and soft-spoken, and laughed a lot, showing straight rows of beautiful white teeth. He obviously had some money behind him, because he fixed up the Chinese café so that it was better than it had ever been, the booths painted in attractive colours, and new linoleum on the floor.
In a effort to establish himself with his fellow businessmen, he treated them to a dinner. The menu, cooked by himself, consisted of chow mein, sweet and sour, fu yung, egg rolls and other Chinese delicacies. My father, strictly a meat-and-potatoes Methodist, conceded that it was actually pretty good when you got used to it, and that Charlie was “as decent a fellow as most white men he’d ever met.” However, not one of the so-impressed businessmen even considered inviting Charlie to his home in return.
But Charlie made one terrible mistake. To brighten up his place, and improve the service, he hired as a waitress a handsome Swedish girl from one of the farms. Her name was Olga, and it was soon apparent from the way she and Charlie looked at each other behind the counter that their relationship was developing into much more than that of employer and employee.
The young bucks of the district, some of whom had made their own crude overtures to Olga, eyed this relationship with deep resentment. Imagine that filthy Chink with a white woman! They’d heard all the stories about Chinese and the white slave trade and they weren’t, by gawd, going to permit anything like that in their community. Of course they couldn’t do much about it but sulk, since Charlie had come to terms with the Establishment, but Hallowe’en now, that was a different matter.
They cursed and muttered darkly about tar and feathers. Probably that’s all they would have done, had not the preacher chosen on the last Sunday of the month to talk about the origins of All Hallow’s Eve, and how it was celebrated by the Celts with bonfires. Hey, that would do the trick. A bonfire! Boy, wouldn’t that warm old Charlie’s pants for him, eh? There was a lot of laughing and back slapping and yes-by-godding, we’ll burn the yellow bastard’s place down!
Then the obvious fact penetrated their thick skulls that if they put fire to Charlie’s place the whole street of bone-dry frame buildings would go with it. There was no fire equipment in town, and when a blaze got going, and the wind caught it, that was the end. Many another town had been wiped out in just such a manner.
Then Harry Tompkins had an even better idea. Sitting on a table in his folk’s living-room was a hand-grenade that had been brought home from the war. There it sat in wrinkled glory, and Harry had become something of a local hero by recounting how good he’d been at throwing these things, and how he’d wiped out more than one machine-gun nest. “Just pull that there little pin,” he’d explain, “then throw the bugger fast because when she blows she’d blow this house higher’n a kite.”
His listeners shuddered at the very thought of it. And gazed fascinated at the small pin.
“If we was to toss that little baby in through Charlie’s window,” Harry told his pals over a jug of home-brew in the livery barn, “it might blow some sense into that horny Chink.”
So the plans were laid, and late, late on Hallowe’en night a dozen or so of the bravest young men gathered in the vacant lot behind Charlie’s. Down amidst the drying pigweed and tin cans and broken bottles they crouched, waiting, and sucking courage from the homebrew bottle. Finally Olga left for the night, the lights went out and all was quiet.
What happened next was subsequently re-told so often that the details, in fact the very dialogue, were well-documented.
Harry Tompkins fished into his pocket and pulled out the wicked little oval of iron. Again he explained how the thing was worked. “Just pull this little pin here and count three, then let her go, right through Charlie’s window.”
Nobody laughed now, and somebody suggested that the treatment was a little drastic.
“What the hell, he’s only a Chink!”
Of course. That settled it.
“Don’t forget to count three,” Harry admonished.
“Ain’t you going to do it?” somebody asked.
“Well … shit … I supplied the grenade. I can’t do everything in this frigging deal. Besides, my throwing arm’s a bit stiff.”
More silence then. Who would toss the grenade? The effects of the homebrew were wearing off, and here they were. Couldn’t just pack up and go home. Not after so much talk and all. Besides, who would suggest such a thing? Charlie’s building loomed a black mass in the darkness. They knew it was there, and they knew something had to be done about it. The night was bitter cold and snowflakes whirled by in the
wind. The gang shuddered collectively.
At this point I suppose they might have left, gone and shoved over a few outhouses, maybe burned up a shed, and then gone home. But suddenly Charlie’s bedroom light went on again. Through the drawn window blind they could see his shadow moving about. Then the back door creaked open and the pale waving light of a lantern showed, as Charlie started down the path towards his own backhouse.
“He’s going for a shit,” one of them whispered. “Now’s our chance.”
“Yeah, throw the goddamn grenade,” another admonished. “While he’s not in there. After all, we don’t want to kill the bugger.”
It was the perfect solution. With half-frozen fingers Harry fumbled with his grenade. “Got to find the bloody pin,” he mumbled drunkenly. Then–“Ah … that’s it.”
“Let ‘er go, Nute!” one of the gang yelled, but Harry didn’t let her go.
“What’s happened?”
“I dropped the goddamned thing … in the weeds … help me find it!”
“No … no … get the hell out of here … fast!”
But they weren’t quite fast enough. They had scarcely stumbled and scrambled and rolled a dozen yards before the frosty air was split by the damnedest explosion Nokomis had ever heard. No one was actually killed, but the next day Doc Brown had to dig a few splinters of shrapnel out of a few backsides. Nobody bothered Charlie much after that.
It was to the younger boys, between the ages of eight and fifteen, however, that Hallowe’en night really belonged. All year long they kept an unofficial record of people of the town, some of whom would be left relatively alone, and others who would “get it”. Before the actual night, kids spent hours preparing tic-tacs, a fiendish device made by notching the edges of the biggest spool you could find, putting a spike through the hole, and wrapping a string around the spool. When the notched edges were held tight against a window and the string yanked hard, spinning the spool on the spike, the resulting racket had been known to make old ladies jump clear out of their rockers.
Never Sleep Three in a Bed Page 5
