Eastern Passage (17 page)

I
had gone to Europe in the spring of 1953 principally to gather material for the story of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment. That summer and fall I did the same in the regiment’s home territories of Hastings County and Prince Edward County, a scant three hours eastward of Albion Township.

Even before the 9th of September, 1939, the day Canada committed herself to the war against fascism, men and youths from the two adjacent counties had begun volunteering for service. By war’s end, more than two thousand lumbermen, miners, and bush rangers from Hastings (the northernmost county), together with over a thousand farmers, fishermen, and small-town dwellers from Prince Edward County had served with the regiment. It took one of its nicknames – Plough Jockeys – from the southerners, and the other – Hasty Pees – from the northern county men.

I needed to know more about the peacetime lives and the world that had spawned and nurtured these men. The first of many visits was to the home of Cliff Broad, a close comrade during the Italian campaign and the man who had led Baker Company during the Lamone bloodbath. Late in 1945, Cliff returned to Bancroft, the unofficial capital of north Hastings, where he took over the largest of the town’s three garages. It held the General Motors franchise and so was nominally a bastion of capitalism but Broad’s Garage operated more like an outpost of socialism. As Cliff put it:

“I wasn’t running no goddamn business to make a fortune for myself, or for some Yankee outfit as was already too goddamn big for its britches. I run her to make a
living
for me and a bunch of characters been addled by vino and gunfire.”

Broad’s Garage provided work for many veterans and helped a lot more by selling them GM vehicles at a discount
not
authorized by the manufacturers. This deviation from proper business principles did not sit well with General Motors’ high command.

“Boss man for Canada called me a lousy Commie on the phone,” Cliff recalled with unconcealed satisfaction. “So I called
him
a capitalist bloodsucker. And things ain’t never been the same between us since.”

When I wrote Cliff in the summer of 1953 to tell him I planned a trip to Bancroft, and asked if I might stay with him a day or two, he replied in typically succinct fashion.

I set off in Lulu Belle, which seemed appropriate since she was of army ancestry and tough enough to be at home in a once-bustling
mining and lumbering region even though, to quote Cliff, it was one that had been “pretty near mined out, lumbered off, and generally fucked up.”

Cliff was not at his garage when I arrived but a mechanic, whom I recognized as a survivor of the regiment’s mortar platoon, obligingly called his boss’s home and got his wife on the phone.

“Etta Mae says for you to stay put and they’ll come and git you afore you can say shit!”

A few minutes later, a battered pickup screeched to a halt and out spilled Cliff and his pint-sized wife. He was waving a bottle of rum and she, an empty pint jar.

“Fill’er up, you old son of a bitch!”
roared Cliff as Etta Mae thrust the jar into my hands. “You got catchin’ up to do! They’s a bunch waitin’ for you up to the house right now … and they ain’t whistlin’ Dixie!”

I tailed the pickup to a nondescript bungalow on the edge of the sprawling little town, then followed the Broads into their front parlour – which was ankle-deep in week-old chicks.

“Watch your feet, goddamn
it!” Cliff bellowed. “You step on one of them puffballs and Etta Mae’ll be up and down your back like a Tiger tank!”

With this he shoved me into a kitchen full of squalling people (every one of whom seemed to have a glass or mug in hand) and into the arms of a squat, demonic-looking woman who held a glass in
each
of her hands.

“Nelly
B!” Cliff bawled in my ear.
“Watch out for her! Got the kick of a high-octane mule!”

And, he might have added, the tongue and disposition of an alley cat. Nelly B did not approve of my beard. With a penetrating scream she promptly categorized it as belonging to the
“wrong end of a fucking porcupine! Back off! It makes my poor ass ache!”

I was not prepared for a Bancroft party, which typically began in mid-morning and could continue for several days. Consequently
I was much relieved when Cliff steered me out of the milling mob of people and chickens for an introductory tour of the town.

Our first stop was Bancroft’s sole legal “liquor outlet.” It was owned by the Ontario government but managed by Bogey Alexander, who had been our regimental quartermaster in Italy. Bogey presented me with a 48-ounce bottle of Lemon Hart Demerara Rum and, when I tried to pay for it, barked almost savagely:

“Bloody well not! Least the fucking government can do for a guy’s been fighting for King and Country the last few years is
give
him a good bottle of booze when he comes home! Here now, have another! Don’t want the one you got to feel lonely!”

Cliff and I spent most of that afternoon drifting around town, frequently stopping to share Bogey’s largesse with passers-by. One of these was a police constable who had been a lance corporal in my platoon until part of a foot was blown off by a land mine during the invasion of Sicily. He joined us in the cab of the pickup and helped himself generously to the Lemon Hart.

“Well, shit a brick,
Mister
Mowat. I figured you wasn’t worth the powder to blow you to hell when you was our platoon lieutenant … downy-faced kid as didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground! Like to get us all killed, only most of us made it through so I guess I can call you Squib now, eh? Anyhow, you’re no problem now. No sons-a-bitchin’ Jerries gunning for us now. Safe as farts in a sewer now.”

Safe from German soldiers, but there were other dangers. By the time Cliff got us back to his house, I was so far out of it that Etta Mae made me rest on a cot in the cellar, with a hound bitch nursing a litter of pups under my bed.

Dawn found me asleep in Lulu Belle, parked squarely in the middle of Bancroft’s main street.

Although the hour was early, traffic was already heavy; mostly overladen logging trucks whose drivers were not amused to find us blocking the right-of-way. Some steered their behemoths so close to
the jeep they set it rocking like a canoe in a tide rip. After a couple of such close encounters, I abandoned Lulu Belle for the relative safety of the Broads’ bungalow, where I found Cliff and Etta Mae breakfasting on rum and coffee, oblivious to the welter of chicks, dogs, and party debris surrounding them.

I feared there would be repercussions from my road-blocking escapade but Cliff poured me an eye-opener and reassured me.

“Don’t fret none, Squib. I’m Bancroft’s police commissioner, and
you
are a
guest
of this goddamn town. The boys will bring your jeep back to you good as new.”

Nevertheless, he may have concluded this would be a good time to exchange the urban for a rural milieu and to introduce me to the world of his forefathers – principal amongst whom was Harv Gunter.

“Harv was my granddaddy on my mother’s side. No more’n five foot six, he was the
big
gest man ever lived hereabouts. His left eye -’my leetle eye,’ he called it – was a good bit smaller than the other, which give him a look would make you think twice about crossing him. Could lick his weight in wildcats but never had to do much scrapping. All he had to do was squint at a fellow and maybe open and close his two fists, as was as big as hams off a bull moose.

“Although Harv wasn’t a fellow to throw his weight around, he was as good as king of Wes’makoon, which is what we call most of north Hastings. The Indians as lived here before hell boiled over and the palefaces arrived called it something in their own lingo that sounded like West-al-macaroon, after a big lake in the middle of it. But their name got whittled down, same as the timber as used to cover the country like hair on a bobcat got shaved off.

“Harv’s granddaddy, Ananias Gunter [Gunther], was a soldier of fortune with a Hessian regiment as helped chase the Yankees south when they invaded Canada round about 1812. After that little ruckus was over, Ananias and some of his buddies figured not to go home to the Old Country in Germany where dukes and earls and suchlike
owned pretty much everything, so the British discharged them here and they started making a living.

“Ananias joined a logging crew working the Ottawa River. Pretty soon he tied up with a spry young Algonquin squaw who took her paleface up the Madawaska to Wes’makoon Lake, where her people lived.

“Ananias liked the gal, the country, and the folk so much he settled himself down right there. And passed the word to some of his old chums to come and join him. Which some of them did. One was an ex-Limey grenadier named Broad, and he was no slouch at starting a family hisself.…

“But what the hell! You don’t want to listen to me blowing off about Wes’makoon when you can look it over for yourself. Throw what you need into the back of my truck and we’ll be on our way.”

We drove south out of Bancroft for half an hour before turning eastward along a dirt road into the hinterland. At first sight, Harv Gunter’s world seemed unprepossessing: lumbered off, burned over, and scarred by mining forays. However, life had not abandoned it. Larch, birch, poplar, and spruce saplings were hard at work masking the destruction and healing the wounds. Innumerable clear little streams, which we gingerly crossed on shaky wooden bridges, were full of trout. The streams invited us to stop and test the palatability of their water mixed with white lightning (moonshine) from a screw-top can labelled
Emergency
, an integral piece of equipment aboard Cliff’s truck because, as he put it, “you never knows when the devil might come calling.”

We saw no other people until we reached Gilmour, once a settlement of lumberjacks, now reduced to little more than a dusty crossroads and a weathered general store owned by Lorne McAllister, an ex-Hasty P who had taken a bullet in the belly during the battle to liberate Rome.

Lorne pronounced our emergency rations to be “near as fucking wicked as I-tie vino,” before sending us on our way with a warning
to watch out for a black bear he had raised from a cub but that had now gone off on its own and was making its living catching trout from bridges and culverts along the road.

“Crazy bugger thinks he owns them places! Lays with his arse humped up right in the middle of the road, lookin’ down into the water ready to take a swipe at any trout swims close.

“Best you wait ’til he sees fit to let you by. Been known to take a swipe at a car if you interrupt his fishing. Name is Bert … in case you want to try talkin’ your way past.”

Beyond Gilmour we were in moraine country where the last great glaciation had deposited a network of sandy eskers and gravel drumlins on the unyielding granite. This had provided hospitable ground for trees, moose, deer, beaver, eagles, and suchlike but the soil was too poor for cultivated crops. Nevertheless, we passed the occasional clearing. Cliff identified these as having once been “farms.”

As the hot afternoon drew on, we came to an area of ancient bog surrounded by a few hundred acres of something resembling arable soil. Fields had been laboriously carved into its surface and their outlines were still preserved by remnants of snake-rail fences. Nearby was what had once been a village of log and frame houses. The doors and windows of most gaped wide and I saw no living beings, not even a dog, on the deeply rutted street.

“This here’s what’s left of Gunter,” Cliff explained. “Where them as favoured farming tried their hands. Harv weren’t one of them!”

He gestured contemptuously out the truck window.

“Real
Gunters, and the Broads and their like, was
woodsmen –
not plough jockeys! Lived offen the land the way God made her. Did a bit of lumbering, log-driving, and furring enough to get what little cash they needed. And they lived the hell of a lot better,
and
longer, than them poor damn groundhogs in Gunter trying to raise cattle beasts and garden truck.”

The road ended a few miles farther on at a small clearing on the southern end of what the map calls Westlemkoon Lake. Cliff drove right to the shore, where a heavy-bodied skiff was moored to a rickety pole wharf. Turning off the truck’s engine, he reached behind him and pulled out a virginal bottle of Demerara rum which he uncorked with his teeth before handing it to me.

“We’re nearly home, me lad. This here’s the
Queen Mary
, oldest boat on the lake and queen of them all. She’ll take us the rest of the way. Have a swig.”

The lake’s southern arm did not seem particularly remarkable to me. Surrounded by low-lying land, the water was shoal, boggy, and full of small brush-covered islands appearing to be nearly awash.

“Not your tourist country, thanks be!” Cliff commented as he gassed up
Queen Mary’s
pre-war outboard.
“Moose
country, and deer and bear. If it’s pretty scenery you wants, you got to go to the north end. But if it’s a full belly, peace of mind, and company as feels the way you do, this here’s as good as pushing through the Pearly Gates!”

I was curious about our hulking, flat-bottomed, square-ended scow. Cliff explained that she had been built by his father, Will, at the time Queen Mary was newly come to the throne.

“Will was a dab hand with wood. Give him an axe, a swede saw, and a bowie knife and he could-a built a yacht
fit
for a queen. He built this one for Harv as he wanted a boat strong enough to haul a moose. Will made him one strong enough to handle an elephant -’cause you never could tell what Harv would bring home.”

The noisy, smelly, single-cylinder Evinrude churned us northward along a western shore presenting an unbroken green palisade of remarkably large trees, some of which may have predated the tree-killing scourge that devastated the New World after the white man’s coming. We ran for an hour then Cliff put the helm hard over and we headed toward the forest wall. Less than a hundred feet from it, a water-gate seemed to open before us as the forest briefly swallowed
the
Queen
, then spat her out again into a hidden reach stretching far to the westward.