Grand Change (2 page)

The rumble became deafening and seemed to have lift as we made our way out to the board platform, stepping around an attendant manoeuvring a high-backed, high-wheeled baggage wagon by its D-handled tongue.

I had a feeling of excitement mingled with awe and dizziness as I watched the big black engine, weaving ever so slightly with the rails,
pumpf, pumpf, pumpf
its way past. With the crank of its drivers and the turn of its wheels, half hidden by steam curls and with grey-black smoke billowing from the short stack next to the clanging bell on its long black snout, it was as if it was bursting from a cloud. I wondered how something so huge and powerful could be controlled by the man with the high, striped cap in the square cab window, but his look was unconcerned.

Soon the rumble and vibration began to fade into innocent creaks. The steam curls trailed off. The clacks of the coupling joints spaced out. The weave of a passing coach grew lazy. Suddenly it all came to a screeching shunt with domino clunks of ramming car couplings and a blast of steam.

I can't remember exactly what my father said when he squatted to shake my hand and say goodbye; I can only remember the sadness that seemed to hang like a veil in his eyes and on his face.

The trip with my grandfather to school for my first day was less fearful, but not by much. It was a gloomy September day to start with, almost at the point of rain. There was no conversation that time either. When we pulled up to the school, standing in its own gloominess, its paint-worn shingles and waterspouts adding to its grim demeanour, I sat frozen to the wagon seat, looking up the worn stone steps leading to the porch door, with most of its brown paint worn off and its doorknob hanging awry. My grandfather cleared his throat, his hands fumbling with the reins. Presently, he rolled up his hip and reached into his pocket for a brown-cornered nickel and handed it to me. His voice was frank and quiet when he spoke. “Go ahead, Jake,” he said. “You'll be all right.”

I climbed down from the wagon and stood watching my grandfather drive away, hearing the hoof clops and wheel clatters fade into the distance, feeling totally alone. Slowly, I climbed the steps and entered the porch, which was cool and smelled of dustbane and pine oil. The door to the classroom needed only a push; the knob and lock were completely gone from the hole, which was jagged and knife-cut. The door opened with a creak that echoed loudly in the empty, high-ceilinged room with its large south windows. To this day, I can still see the step-flattened bubble gum patches cemented to the floor and the initial-scarred desks sitting on their rails with their curved seats flipped up. They seemed to herd past the pot-bellied stove and jam toward the broad desk standing before the blackboard. And I stood in the dry, wondering atmosphere of the first day waiting for what was to come. It
was a long wait, for a long day. My trip home that day gave
little relief because I knew I would have to return the next day.

Then there was the longest trip home. The day the telegram came. It was a crisp, clear autumn day without even a whisper of a breeze. It's a day I not only remember pretty much in its entirety, but I can still feel.

Wally Mason and I walked to the village early that morning. We had a few cents from collecting beer bottles and decided to buy some licorice pipes from the canteen behind the station, where old Sam Dougan sold cigarettes, candy and pop and kept a pinball machine and a punch board.

We stood on the station platform munching on the licorice, waiting for the school bell to ring. Farther down the track, the men at the potato warehouse were loading a boxcar with hand carts, walking straight-backed and rigid for balance, bobbing their way over the heaving ramp between the warehouse landing and the boxcar, the ears of the potato bags flopping like pigs' ears.

Suddenly, the
putt, putt
of a trolley coming into the village broke in. We watched it pull up to the station, seething out billows of blue smoke. Two section hands, seated low in its seats, peered coon-like around its square shield. The men, in their greasy striped overalls and high caps, rose from their perches and, teetering the machine on its toy-like wheels, moved it off the rails to the side of the station platform. Then, taking their long, steel lunch cans and a point-headed mallet apiece, they walked past the platform. “Nice day, fellows,” one of them said. We agreed. The bell clanged for school, the noise somewhat muted by the distance. As we started off, I heard the men talking in casual tones.

“Think the war will soon be over, Bill?”

“Yeah. They're getting things pretty well under control.”

It was a usual day at the schoolhouse with those echoing sounds: the hoarse, urgent whispers; the spit balls dinging the ears; the angry strap and the fearful
awooo!
; the scribbling bustle; the mispronounced words of the reader; the hesitant, try-again attempts of the speller, standing bug-eyed with mouth agape in the spelling line. Then the knock came, abrupt and singular.

I watched the teacher move from her desk and open the door. I looked over her shoulder and noticed the sprig of hair wisping from her bun into the wedge of clear between the partly open door and the jamb. Slowly, my grandfather's face appeared, swathed in a greyness that matched his capless head. There was a stark defeat in his eyes and his mouth was drawn tight. When the teacher turned, she had the same grave greyness about her face and her eyes were big and when they turned to me they had a bewildered stare. Things hung for a while before she turned back to The Old Man and I saw her shoulders stiffen. She closed the door and paused with her back to the class, then turned as if in some kind of trance and slowly made her way to me. She took a deep breath, let it out and opened her mouth to speak, but it froze open and her eyes fluttered and grew misty and pained. She squared off her shoulders and swallowed hard. “Your grandfather has come for you, Jake,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “He wants you to go home with him.” She moved to her desk and stood watching me with the pain growing in her eyes.

Everybody sat watching, grey and frozen, while I fumbled with my books until I got them into the old army pack I used as a school bag. “Everybody back to work,” the teacher said, her voice too soft to have much command.

It seemed like a year went by before I got to the door. My grandfather sat hunched over in the wagon, looking small and withered. The greyness seemed to hang on him like flour on a mill hand. He had his cap peak low. I could barely see his eyes.

He did not watch me climb the round, steel mount step on the wagon box and sit beside him. He flipped the reins and, saying nothing, drove to the village and pulled up at the canteen. He sat rigid for a while before handing me a dime, his movements stiff and pondering. “Get a chocolate bar, Jake,” he said, his voice harsh and strange.

I never like to think about the trip home, the coloured leaves on the trees and bushes on the roadbanks and what green there was left in the grass, all veiled by stiff, cold greyness. It's hard enough to think about my grandfather unhitching the horse with the grey defeat hanging on him, and him staying in the barn while my grandmother stood in the door, her eyes reddened and her face flushed and puffy. Or about her sitting beside me on my bed, hugging me close, her sobs and heavy sighs spacing between the words that wouldn't sentence until they came out with stark finality: “Dear, Waldron's been killed in the war.” The minister at the pulpit speaking in morbid tones; the veterans parading and saluting with stiff, grave, faces; the lonely, haunting bugle calls; Mabel Mason sitting with my grandmother, patting her hands and comforting her; they're all are difficult to think on, but the trip home the day the telegram came is next to impossible.

My grandparents took me from there. I called her Nanny. I called him Gramps when he was around, The Old Man or The Boss when he wasn't. Not out of disrespect; it was common in those days. We had the first farm on the south end of Hook on the western side. Its most distinguishing feature was that the farm buildings centred the farm near the western boundary with a lane running to Hook and another to Jar, which ran along our southern boundary. We were known as the Jacksons: Harvey, Ella and me, Jake.

Prelude to
Autumn on Hook Road

“Once the exhibition is over, the fall is here,” went the
saying
along Hook Road, and around August twenty-second the chill crept into the air and those crisp, clear days came. Soon the farmers began hauling out their binders, those senseless-looking humps of angles, cogs, rollers, canvas and rods, each with a cutting bar, a lever poking here and there and something resembling a riverboat paddlewheel. And they took flat sticks and packed that heavy black grease into grease cups among the works, on the side wheels and on that big, cleated wheel underneath at the centre of gravity, which bore nearly everything and everything ran off. And they inspected the canvas belt that rolled on its floor and the two smaller ones that rolled counter-wise and upright, then patched the tears and fray holes from last year's work. And they gnashed the triangular cutting bar teeth against hand-cranked grindstones, grinding them into shape. On the next trip to town, they bought the cross-wound twine balls in tarpaper with an end sprigging from the centre hole.

As the days grew steadily cooler and the yellow transparent apples began to ripen and the grain was rapidly turning from a green-yellow patchwork to gold, they walked through their stands amidst the pungent smells of mustard weed and floating thistledown. And they rubbed the grain kernels between their palms and looked at the sky, their minds mulling on when to start the harvest. With potato digging in close proximity, timing was crucial and the weather, always the weather. They consulted their almanacs. Some held to animal habits: dogs eating grass, bee behaviour, chicken antics. Some pondered on the moon. Some just went by chance like everybody else. Nothing was constant or totally predictable, except that there would be long, drawn-out drudgery ahead. And they steeled themselves as for a marathon.

On his chosen day, a farmer fed his horses oats against the coming trudge and buckled on the messes of harness and hitched them to the binder's double tree. The horses would be gimpy from pasture freedom since haying, but with terse commands and rein slaps they would run the binder into the field for the first pass.

Then there was action in every corner, with the driver bouncing on the tail-like seat, one foot strapped to the sheaf carriage trip. With an eye to the horses, the rolling canvas, the paddlewheel sweeping grain into the cutting bar, the twine running through an eye here and there from the ball can to the knotter, the filling sheaf carriage for the trip at the windrow. And it didn't hurt to look behind once in a while for loose sheaves or a cog or something that decided to take off on its own. With a hand to a lever to adjust for rough ground in rein juggle and an ear for alien sounds from the cutting bar, the packer, the kicker, the grain rushing through the works. If there was room left he could think about dinner. And there likely be would be stops, curses, kicks, skinned knuckles and a trench through the stubble from a jammed centre wheel.

Eventually, the bugs would get worked out, the various components and actions would harmonize, the horses would fall into their rhythm, pulling as one. Around the field they went to the stutter of the cutting bar and the thwack of the kicker kicking out sheaves. Gradually, the ragged windrows would begin to lengthen.

Looking insignificant in the theatres of the fields, with the constant rustle of the sheaves and the stubble underfoot, tucking sheaves under their arms, bending with a slight squat to set them head to head to form the stooks, the stookers worked, pausing now and then to bind a loose sheaf with a hand-knotted band of grain stalks. Their arms and chests chafed from the thistles and nettles packed in the sheaves. And if it was early morning, a dew would give strength to the chafing and their arms, pant legs and shirt fronts would be soaked. In time, the fields lay like golden brushes, spotted densely with the stooks, standing by their short shadows like so many miniature tents.

Then, with spiked-together racks flanging at the sides, the cross-boarded uprights awry, the wagon rigs in their lazy rock moved in and the forkers heaved on their forks, arm working against arm, sweeping the stook sections high and onto the load, where the builders built, placing the sheaves around the racks' square perimeter, sometimes flipping them to get the butts out.

Some days, a bright, golden stillness filled the fields, disturbed only by the hums of hummingbirds, the rustles of sheaves, the tinkles of trace links, the rattles of harnesses as horses shook their noses at nose flies. But the cold winds came, too, growing increasingly bitter, and the forkers fought gusts of wind that could sweep fork loads away. Sometimes, after an overly heavy rain, they had to tear down the stooks and spread them to dry. But they rolled steadily on until the horse hooves clopped on the barn floors for the last trip and the last sheaves were forked in relay up walls of sheaf butts in the lofts.

Then, as in the changing acts of a play, the scenes along Hook Road changed. Whirligig potato diggers, their rear ends fanning like tails of peacocks, sweeping clay and potatoes against their canvas booms, crept along potato drills while the digger men hunched on stemming seats like sleepy crows, guiding the sets of pole-divided horses in a relentless plod.

Spaced the lengths of the fields, bobbing like multicoloured clothespins on lines, hoisting their baskets in underbelly swing, clawing like digging dogs to clear away the tops and flip the potatoes into the baskets, the pickers hunched and trudged. At their sides, filling bags stood in their ragged rows like dummies, their loose mouths flopping in the breeze like unruly mops of hair. Here and there along the lines, pickers rose and stepped out to squat, thigh-set their basket, bag-mouth its rim and dump. Along the ragged rows, the low-slung sloven rigs with their high back wheels moved, while the loaders, with a knee boost, hoisted the filled bags by their mouth corners.

When daylight began to fade, the diggings were harrowed over and the pickers gleaned, moving and picking like pecking robins. Finally they came home from the fields, their clay-caked boot heels clopping on wheel paths, their strides stiff but gratefully free from the back-bent trudge, the lingering clay choke still in their nostrils, its grit still in their eyes and fingernails.

From the sides of houses, at the foundations, came the cobbles of the day's last potatoes being rolled down cellar holes, and the drivers with their sloven rigs moved faint in gloom as they faded away for the day. From kitchen windows, kerosene lamps shed their mellow comfort, their extending basks spreading like hope across footpaths shadowed by duckweed. In kitchens came the rattles of dishes and murmurs of voices at the plots of suppers. In gloomy porches, somewhat subdued now, the workers filed, taking their hand-washing turns at sink pumps with a flub of yellow lye soap and a hand wipe on an endless towel on rollers; their mind-stomach coordinations fixed on the heavy farm fare of meat, potatoes, thick gravy and bread puddings steaming on parlour tables.