Grand Change (9 page)

Winter on Hook Road

There were three major happenings that winter. The first,
according to the old timers, was what qualified as an old-fashioned winter. It was not in league with the storm of '26, when they could see only the rooftops of the houses in town and they had to bring in food by toboggan. But by the standards of the day, it was a hair-raiser.

It came just after the January thaw, and we were pretty much confined to base for about a week. Outside, the wind went raving mad and the old house creaked and groaned as if in the throes of a nightmare. Aside from the day's threshing, we only left the house to hack junks of beef off the carcass hanging in the shop, feed and water the stock, milk the farr cow and keep the manure accumulation to some kind of toleration by piling it outside the cow-stable door.

Going to the barn in itself was a venture. When you opened the back door the wind would try to snap it out of your grasp and fight your closing it, then belt you, suck at your breath and lash your eyes with fine snow. You'd lean against the house for a breather and catch glimpses of the barn peak flashing through the white blast.

Then you would have to have to fight your way, sometimes held to a standstill, finally stumbling from the sudden release, into the lee of the barn.

The cold was never far away in the house. The water and milk buckets skimmed heavy with ice. Snow snuffed through the crack under the front door, and through the spaces at the window sashes. The windowpanes were blanked white with thick, furry, fancy frost patterns. The lamp would flicker and smoke from drafts coming from several directions. Some nights we didn't go to bed at all. It was too cold, even with all your clothes on, heated bricks at your feet and a stack of bedclothes supplemented with an overcoat. We huddled around the kitchen stove with our feet on the oven door, listening to the radio, playing twenty questions or listening to The Boss tell his tales of yesterday.

He could do a pretty good job when he got his pipe tucked into his cheek and the muse came into his eyes. He was almost as good as Tom Dougal, and like Tom, he didn't just tell stories, he painted pictures. When he talked about the time he fell asleep driving the stumper at five years old, I saw the small bare feet, tanned and clay-speckled, dangling from the capstan top, the small head nodding at times, the reins beginning to slither through the small hands; saw the heavy plug horse hitched to the arm extending from the capstan top, his tail lazily sweeping at droning flies, a sifter bowl guarding him from nose flies, an empty feed bag hanging on one of his hame's horns. A few yards away, the large stump leaned at a steep angle, its smaller roots running like veins through clinging clods of earth, its larger ones, broken or hoe-cut, creating a ragged fan.

And I saw the men bringing solid, thumping cuts to the roots of a stump, pausing to brush at blackflies, their exposed forearms glistening in the sun; saw the smoke rising from the grey ashes of the lunchtime fire, sweeping lazily over stump holes and clay-spattered brush, grouping and settling around the jumble of stump heads and root fans at the clearing's edge. And I saw my great-grandfather garner the boy in his arms, lay him at the shade of a tree so he could sleep.

I was never at the mud beds, but when The Boss talked about them I came close. I could see the man guiding the horse on the roundabout, pulling at the capstan arm, a cold ground drift sweeping the ice; hear the
queeze
in the twin upright beams of the digger frame as the chain rattled through the pulley centring the crossbeam; see the chain running up from the slush-speckled water until the fork head suddenly appeared with a
splunge
to rise in its swing and halt, hovering over the bobsleigh siding the uprights; see the digger man at the end of the beam pulling the rod on the beams back, and the fork head dropping a glob of sloppy black mud into the sleigh box.

And I felt I was there when The Boss balanced himself in the wood sleigh with the horse frog-leaping, sometimes disappearing in the wild white swirl of a blizzard, heading out for the doctor when my father was born.

He had gotten Joe Mason to take Mabel over to be with Nanny while he and Tom Dougal fought their way into town. They wore out three horses in the seven-mile trip. They would cover each horse with a buffalo as it played out, and get a fresh one from the nearest farmstead. And I could see the two men in their slow, tormenting journey, beating their arms, stamping their feet, taking turns at the reins and wading out to clear snow from the horse's nostrils; see them urging at the horse's bridle, with the horse down and snow-stuck, then finally standing wind-whipped in the blast, yelling and gesturing, their words muted by the wind. The stories didn't make the wind and cold go away, but they helped make the night go by.

We threshed grain on the third day after the storm set in. The thresher was in a short loft above the barn floor. The engine sat on the barn floor with the belt running up at a fairly steep angle. The thresher resembled some kind of animal with its long jaw, humped back and long, square tail, and when it began to hum its mill, rattle its grain trough, shake straw off its tail with a
wrack-a-wrack-a-wracka
, the loft girders trembled, the barn jiggled and your teeth rattled. All other sounds were drowned out: the thud of the sheaves that Nanny threw down from the loft hitting the table, the pucks of the engine, the swish of the grain stalks The Boss fed into the thresher's mouth after cutting the sheaf bands with a mower-blade tooth on a stick.

I tailed the shaker: hauling back the straw from the rear end with a fork, my eyes slitted against the blowing chaff, my nostrils smudged by blowing black smut. I can't say I ever cared much for tailing the shaker; I never knew anybody that did.

We did some grading then, down in the cellar where it was damp, cold and confined, where time got bogged down amidst the snuff of The Boss clearing his nose with his thumb and forefinger, the cobble of potatoes as he rolled them—picking out the bluenose, seconds, jumbo and rot—and the hiss of the gas lantern hanging from a rafter. The lantern's glow fell on the potatoes and humped the slanting grader, with its slat bottom and board sides, but didn't touch much else. The grader's four thin legs and the bag hanging at its mouth were
in semi-darkness; there was blackness at the top of the
potato pile, and shadows cupped the few potatoes sheeted by light. In their corner, the weigh scales stood vague, the vertical post and the horizontal arm with the balance bar beneath forming a gloomy F. The pile of bagged potatoes was a black block. When you moved, those big, gloomy shadows would bob around. A slight dust would rise from the rolling potatoes and its choke would mingle with smells of the cellar's brick clay, the lantern's naphtha gas, the rotting potatoes and the septic-smelling pile of new bags by the grader. And it all combined to a boredom you could cut with a knife.

I took care of weighing, sewing and piling the bags and forking them on. I used to see how fast I could sew up a bag: working the long-handled needle and twine through the edges of the bag mouth, looping the ears and tying on the tag. Then I'd try furling the bag off a knee boost onto the pile without knocking it down.

Between bags, I'd take the short, D-handled potato fork, with its multi-tined bowl, and fork on, seeing how fast I could do that without spilling potatoes over the side of the grader or crowding The Boss. I guess you could say I didn't care too much for grading either.

But we couldn't go too far with grading, in case the potatoes sprouted in the bags before we could move them out. Pumping water for the animals and throwing down hay was all we had for heavy work then. Not much to do clear of that but get the time in.

I read what I could find. Me and The Boss played cards until we got sick of it. Then we went at crokinole for a while. We wound up working the jigsaw puzzle Aunt Laura gave us for Christmas. It pictured a Venetian boatman oaring a curled-up gondola past water-cut, autumn-coloured buildings. It took up half the kitchen table. Nanny didn't seem to mind though. Kept knitting and cooking, fooled around with the puzzle once in a while.

Coming on toward the end of the storm, we ran out of salt and molasses and began double-boiling the tea to stretch it out. The Boss ran out of tobacco; tore up whatever butts he could find for cigarettes until there were no more to scrounge and he was out of papers anyway. He took a crack at a dried-out cud of plug, shredded and wrapped in newspaper. We were short of matches, too, and he used a splinter held between his thumb and forefinger to light his horn-like roll. He poked the splinter into the stove and it came out with a heavy flare; it lit things up pretty good, and then there was this flame running toward his face, getting bigger, and he whipped it away and wrung it, it blazing all the more, until he dropped it and stomped it into the floor in a cloud of smoke.

“Anything left for a curtain call?” Nanny said. “Why didn't you use your pipe?”

“Mind your own business,” The Old Man said. He had his eyebrows scorched a bit; there was a brown patch here and there among the grey. He got kind of grouchy then, pretty much kept to solitaire and the radio for the rest of the day. I was getting to the point of missing school; even took a look at my books.

But sometime during the night, the wind relented and, like some kind of animal that failed to devour, skulked away. In the morning, the house was warm again, and quiet. The song of the kettle was not disturbed by house creaks and wind howls; the morning music on the radio was not disturbed by static.

Outside, there was that glistening white in a bright, cold stillness. The pillar of smoke from Tom Dougal's chimney rose straight up. Across the fields, Joe Mason was breaking the road, standing sideways in the wood sleigh, one-handing the reins, his arm extending straight. His horse was labouring in the heavier drifts, sometimes frog-leaping, its head wagging with the effort, its breath mingling with the steam rising from its back. And when he reached the wind-swept bowl in our yard, he had to leap down, for the wind-blown snow had formed a cliff.

The Old Man sang out to Joe from the horse stable: “Enough snow down for you, Joe?”

“A little more and we'll be climbing mountains, or digging tunnels,” Joe said without stopping.

Our road allotment ran out our south lane and west to the end of Jar, where the Calders lived, just beside the short woods road leading to Albert Leland's warehouse. People from the other district came through there in the winter.

When I finally got going, after poking for the sleigh through two feet of snow and shovelling out, I pretty well had to break the road all over again. The snow was piled up at our gateway so bad, I had to cut our fence fifty yards from our gateway, work my way around the heaviest part and cut the Calder fence to get onto the road.

It was quite a job getting the manure out—all the weaving and meandering around drifts—and there was just one patch of the snake-like pile visible. I had to take a guess and fork off where I thought the end would be. It took me all day.

On the way to the village next day, where the sleigh road ran along a ways with the railroad, you could see the blocks of snow flying from shovel heads, coming seemingly out of the white in their quick shoot and drop from the railroad cutting. The pass of a locomotive was identified only by its slanting smoke billow, rising to mingle with the drifting snow in its cold ground sweep. At the crossing, you could see the ledges tiering the solid white walls of the cutting, where men bent, rammed their shovels, straightened and hurled the snow to the next level, their shovels sweeps followed by white, powdery swirls, adding to the coldness of the scene.

The storm left, but the cold hung around. That hit home the hardest when we got back to school. The stove was hot enough. Its heat waves rose up the vertical pipe and waggled a cobweb hanging just past the elbow on the wire-hung vertical pipe running to the safe in the wall. Those near it sat in their sweaters with sweaty hands. But those in far comers sat leg-locked, breathing out white puffs, in their coats, overshoes and mitts.

Going to the outhouse was an experience. Except for a crust of snuffed-in snow by the door and the light shaft slanting from the small, square open window, it was dark, for starters. Working off your pants and getting your underwear flap properly gapped in the cold exposure wasn't too pleasant either. I'm not even going to mention too much about having to touch down on the hole, except that the elements and individual endurance definitely played a part in the sitting time. They played an even bigger part in the hand wash at the icicle-bearded pump in the yard with a tin cup hanging from its nose.

The cold snap hung on until well after Tom Dougal's death: the second major happening that winter.

Tom's property frontage was on both sides of the road, running from our line and Joe Mason's down to the brook. His farmstead buildings were about fifty yards in from the road on Joe's side. He and his wife, Ethel, lived with young Tom, his son, and his wife, Ruth. The rest of his children, three boys and three girls, were all married and living away. Young Tom had pretty much taken over the farm. He was a dead ringer for his dad: stout and slightly paunchy, with a block head, bushy hair and eyebrows, and a kindly slant to his eyes.

Old Tom was the best I ever heard at telling a story or a yarn. I'll never forget the evening Wally Mason and I had dropped in a couple of years back and Tom was in the right mood. When Ethel let us in, he was in the middle of lighting his crooked stem pipe with a lighted splinter; his eyes, peering from under his bushy eyebrows, growing bigger with each draw on the pipe bit, each cheek-denting pull hauling a ragged flame into the packed bowl, until a huge puff of smoke came and wiped it out.