Grand Change (14 page)

The noise was deafening now. John Cobly just nodded his head at The Old Man and left, too.

We finished digging the hole, put in the anchor and the brace posts, chopped the notches for the brace and spiked it top to bottom between the two posts. The Boss grabbed the puller bar lying on the pile of poles; I grabbed the end of the wire curling close by and jammed it into the flipper-like catch on the puller bar.

The Boss, setting the bar's end hooks against the corner post, with the bar across his thigh, leg-levered it, and the wire strand whipped taut, cuffing up dirt on the mounds by the upright posts spaced down the field to the other corner post. “Might as well run another strand before noon,” The Boss said, holding while I stapled on the wire with the claw hammer. He wired out a fresh bale then and held the end to the post while I stapled it. Then he rammed the puller bar through the bale hole and, taking an end of the bar each, we headed down the field with the bale ticking and rolling on the bar between us and the barbed wire trailing off behind.

Prelude to
Summer on Hook Road

Regardless of the roadwork, the summer scenes came on
as
usual on Hook Road. In fine early mornings, the sun, rising above the ragged gloom along the horizon, blazed patches along the cow paths that wound their way through pasture greens like angleworms. The sweet summer smells of new mown hay mingled with the soft summer breezes that faded the lowing of the cows, rising from their rest, stretching stiffly, ambling in their lines through the paths and into the lanes, their ankles cracking, their hooves puffing powdery clay, their long shadows jabbing at the peeling fence posts lining the lanes like guard soldiers with rifles held at ease.

In the stables, the smells of dry manure and sour milk from yesterday's spills mingled with the mists of DDT being sprayed over the cows' backs with plunger-worked sprayers in a fight against the warble fly. Buckets rattled and clanked. Board-made milking stools creaked under the weight of being squatted on. Heads ducked under the casual swish of tail brushes.

At roadside stands, bearing cap-headed, shoulder-gripped cream cans, on their day, came the revving, roaring and stopping of the cream truck.

In the hayfields, the breeze —what there was of it—blew hot, and it seared as much as the sun. The hands of the forkers were calloused as smooth and hard as their fork handles. The forkers would often spit on their hands for grip before sweeping the coils onto the stack-like loads where the builders built, wading, high-stepping and jump-tramping. Over the sheared fields, curlews darted in low, gliding flight, as if cutting through drudgery; horses moped in high-wheeled rakes, the sleepy drivers toeing the trips at the windrow, the half-hooped rake teeth rising tail-like to fall with a
wang
. Through stands of timothy and clover the hay-mowers swept, their cutting bars rattling, their drivers bouncing on stemming seats as if riding something's tail, their horses plodding, with sweat-soaked muscles shining in the sun.

At the barns, the horse-drawn cables ran through pulleys on barn walls and pulleys on the track carriages down to pulleys on the two-tined forks. The workers would plunge into the loads with their feet, then step aside and shout their commands to the horsemen. And a wig-like lift would rise, lock into a carriage and sweep through the loft to fall with the pull of a rope. The fall of a lift would puff cool air at the stowers, standing with sweat pouring down their faces, waiting to wallow in the unsettled hay, fork-pulling at the lift, spreading it, ramming it into corners, gritting, grunting and jump-tramping.

In the potato fields, at intervals, the farmers stalked the drills, searching the tops, bending at times to brush with their hands or root up the “black leg” and the “blight.” Sometimes they would spray the potatoes, too, with sprayers that were not much more than a half-barrel on wheels with a pressure pump, a pipe boom and a network of hoses, pipes and end nozzles.

In the evenings, there were games of what could best be termed as “cow pasture ball.” Rocks, shingles, junks of board were used for bases, board clubs for bats and usually a sponge ball, which, regardless of its colour, always wound up with a green cast either from cutting through the grass or the odd cow splatter. Care had to be taken not to hit the ball over the fence, especially if the other side was a grain field: you could lose the ball. And it was a good idea to note where the cow splatters lay, for obvious reasons.

Saturday night was the big night. We'd get spruced up to the smells of boughten soap and shoe polish and clatter into town with the lowering sun poking blazes between fence posts and glinting dully on the steel tires of the light wagon.

We'd pull up at the long, open shed with its ever-present smell of horse manure, its roof showing black patches where shingles had blown off. The Boss would tie the mare to the tie rail—gouged by the bites of restless horses—that ran the full length of the back wall, with its gaps from missing boards.

Presently, we'd stand looking into the glass-panelled showcase of the theatre. Usually a gaudily painted man would be looking back with a mysterious eye, the brim of his stetson canting back, a bandana wedging his throat, smoke curling from his brandished six-gun. The smells of popcorn would waft through the open door as we walked through. After getting our thirty-cent ticket at the wicket, we'd pause in the lobby, with its dry stately atmosphere (somewhere between a restaurant and an undertaking parlour) and check out the future billings on the wall.

At the showroom door, the ticket taker looked much like an undertaker, with his sombre expression. Inside the dimly lit
room there'd be the murmur of multiple conversations
mingling with the sound of the odd pop bottle clunking off the steel seat legs as it wobbled down the slope. We'd flip down a hard seat and sit, waving at familiar face here and there, with bright smiles for the occasion.

Suddenly, the flicker would flash in the flapping rooster as he crowed in the show. Trumpets would blare in the news of the world, with the usual scenes of war and political notables. Gloomy, eerie music would conduct the safari man through his jungle serial and his dealings with bad traders and treasure-seekers, which usually ended with him in a death struggle with a lion or a gorilla (to be continued next week). Somewhere in the preview segments, the singing cowboy would run down a train on his super smart horse, jump a boxcar on the fly, tangle with owl hoots and sing, riding through the sage with his cowgirl.

Then the man with the smoking gun would enter, stalking his way down the dead streets at high noon, his spurs clinking, his right hand poised over the six-gun at his hip. Then came the showdown stare into the eyes of a snake-faced rustler, the flashing quick draw, and Snake Face bites the dust. Then there were the death rattles of more six-guns and lever-action rifles, seasoned with shootouts and riders tumbling from their saddles until a pretty lady got rescued and she and the hero rode into the sunset with THE END at their backs. After the show, we'd be ready to swagger down the streets of Tombstone for a showdown.

But we'd settle for a gallhoot run through the shadowy alleys between the windowless sides of the bank and the funeral parlour. Then we'd swagger out onto the crowded sidewalks of Main Street and coolly greet those we knew and wonder about those we didn't.

Up one sidewalk and down the other we'd go; past the booth, with its smells of steamed clams and hot dogs; past strong, quiet men slouching around shadowy storefronts talking of farm concerns, their black suit coats augmented by the rolled-up cuffs of their new overalls showing white. And through the muddle of bodies onto the sidewalks, the ladies with wave-set hair bustled from shop to shop with their lists.

We'd pause now and then at a store showcase and gaze at the merchandise in the big windows: a shiny bicycle (we'd never own) standing beside an array of axes, picks and shovels in the hardware store; denim jackets hanging in the clothing store above a shelf spaced with boots and folded plaid shirts.

We'd come to the open door of the restaurant with the red-capped stools at a circling counter and rows of booths along its walls. Usually, someone we knew would be in one and we'd go and sit with them and flip through the nickelodeon song leaves in the glassed-in box on the wall while they ate. And the bass-booming songs from the nickelodeon would weave through the buzz and ripple of conversations and there would be the steamy smells of hot hamburg sandwiches and coffee and thick waves of tobacco smoke.

If we had an extra dime, sometimes between the two of us, it would go for a comic at the small shop smelling heavily of the smoked herring that were kept in an open crate with a “five cents each” cardboard tab in their midst. There the proprietor stood, peering through a visor shadow and leaning on a counter cluttered with bubble-gum packs, candy bars and glass jars of candy canes, candy cones and licorice cigars.

The comics were in individual stacks on a back shelf. There would be Kid Long on a cover, standing feet apart with his 45s brandished high, gun smoke wafting around him, his hat behind his shoulders, hanging by the chin laces knotted at his throat. The G Man would be on another cover, in a trench coat, confronting ugly hoodlums with a blazing tommy gun. The combat soldier, advancing through shellfire, firing his rifle from the hip, would grace another cover. And it would be too bad, but you'd have to make a choice and live with it.

Soon it would be ten o'clock and we'd be back at the shed at our prospective wagons. In the shallow glow of a naked bulb on an electric pole we'd mount up and move out. Fleeting shadows would flare at the mare's feet; now and then the glare of a car's lights would sweep, leaving it hard to see. And the town lights would fade, the pavement would break into clay, the darkness would turn the mare into a dark silhouette. We couldn't see the road, but she could and she'd road along making the turns in the darkness until she stood in the barnyard, snorting and waiting to be unhitched.

Summer on Hook Road

The Saturday night trips to town were always highlights, regardless of whatever else did or didn't stick out. That summer there were few other things that did. The road grading stood out, of course, but by the time summer got going anyways decent, we had grown used to the stink, dust and noise and having to either work our way through it or detour when we went somewhere.

Joe Mason was taking a heifer to Young Tom's bull one night and got her tangled up in a road grader. That was interesting. I was heading out with my guitar to play with Wally and I met Joe and the heifer coming out of Joe's gateway. The heifer was hauling Joe, with the rope wrapped behind her ears and muzzled at her nose, her head bent low and back, her nostrils snuffing dust around her front hooves, her mouth belching out mournful bawls, foam and saliva. Joe was leaning back, dragging on his heels, with the rope running around his shoulders and his left hand clutching the lead with his arm straight out. But his lean went too far, either that or he slipped, and his rear end
whumpfed
into the dust in the lane and then Joe was sprawling in a slow turn like a chip in an eddy, his bald head barely visible in a cloud of powdery red clay.

He got turned around enough to butt his feet against a gatepost somehow and the heifer swapped ends in a wild fishtail as she snubbed up, switching her tail with her head low and her eyes mean. Joe tied the rope to the post and hunched with his hands on his knees, breathing heavy. Then he grabbed a hank of grass and attempted to rid his overalls of the dusted green manure he was dragged through. Eventually he shuffled up to the cow's rear end and caught her tail. After a few swipes, and with a sharp twist or two, he got her headed in the right direction. Suddenly, she burst forward and Joe untied the rope on the fly. Away they went, the heifer at a steady trot, Joe loose-roping with his bowed legs churning in a hop, skip and jump. They were making pretty good time until the loose rope end got tangled around Joe's legs—
whumpf!
—and down he went again. There was a windrow of loose clay running along the edge of the road and Joe, refusing to let go of the rope, got dragged through it head first, until the heifer barged under the hoop of the road grader and got the rope tangled up in the shear with her head snubbed into a pile of dirt. There must have been a half-bushel of clay down Joe's overall bib. It took quite a bit of hand flapping, leg shaking and cursing to get things cleared away. I put my guitar down and offered to help.

“Nope,” Joe said, “she's good right where she's at.” He hobbled down to Young Tom's, still flapping at his pants and cursing, and he and Tom came back with the bull.

Wally and I went to the exhibition that year, on our own for the first time. The Yodelling Cowboy came back again with the champion fiddler. They were playing in the coliseum where they held the stock shows, vaudeville acts and whatever.

While we waited on the train-station platform on a bright August day with a sultry breeze, a couple of truck wagons clattered into the village sleepiness and an old truck rattled through. In a field next to the station, a horse-drawn sprayer blew a fog of mist along its extending booms, its pump pistons thump-sucking regular beats among the spray-hiss and the
clumps
of the horses' footfalls. The diesel engine had been in for a while by then. We didn't pay it much attention when it came square and quiet, emitting its heat waves and diesel stink: it just wasn't a steam engine.

We were the only passengers on the platform and among few in the coach car. An old lady and a young boy sat across the aisle from us. The lady had a straight back and it fit snug against the hard seat. The boy's feet dangled about a foot from the floor and he wore a sailor suit with a pork pie hat, ribbons and all. They were eating fudge from a brown paper bag. Once in a while, the lady turned her face, which was shadowed by a black straw hat, and peered at us through rimless glasses in mid-munch.

The conductor came, swaggering with the sway of the car, and stopped to punch our tickets, the halting snaps muted by wheel rumbles and the
click-clack, click-clack
of the coupling joints. “Where are you young whippersnappers going?” he said, his square, low-set hat brim half hiding his bemused look. We told him. “Be the last they'll see of you two bucks.”

Once we got over the excitement, mingled with a mild dose of fear, the feeling of being on our own for the first time, there was nothing to do but watch the scenery go by and put up with the stops, waits and shunts at flag stops and stations. By the time we got to the square city depot, with its slanting canopy, that dry stiffness had set in.

We got directions from a shaggy old man with dirty porcupine quill whiskers set in a bloated face, his faded, bloodshot eyes peering out from beneath the brim of a rumbled slouch hat. He worked a tobacco cud a few times, spat into a cuspidor by the bench he sat on outside of the station and flung his arm sideways in a point. “Follow that street until you see the Ferris wheel,” he said in a gravely growl. “And if you don't come back, write.”

The grounds were just shaking up when we handed in our quarters at the entrance booth and stepped in. A roustabout in oil-stained jeans and a torn T-shirt,was testing the bell ringer, setting the peg a certain way and swinging the steel-bound wooden maul with grunts. We stood and watched the cube-like slide go up and down the long, flat pole until it finally dinged the saucer-like bell on top. Over by the stage for the girlie show demonstration, one of the girls stood in curlers and a housecoat, taking sucks at a cigarette veed between her fingers. Regardless of the caked-on makeup, which was wrinkled and down-slashed around her eyes and lips, her face was jaded and pale. Just above the board fence at the edge of the grounds, through the shadow of the towering grandstand, the necks and heads of racehorses, with their checkreins and blind bridles, sailed past in exercise, the quick, flat patter of their hoofbeats coming in staccato through the quiet.

Wally tried his luck at catching a prize with one of those crane affairs in a glass cubical. He got his quarter stuck in the chute and he stuck his hand through a little open side door and jiggled it. Suddenly this big heavy jawed Italian came out of nowhere and grabbed his hand. “I got you; you go to jail,” the man said.

I don't think Wally wet his pants—maybe a few drops. We did a bit of spluttering to convince him of the facts, and he finally let us go with a warning and a black look.

We staggered around the grounds then, taking in the usual midway scene for a while. We didn't have much more than enough money for the train trip home, so we wound up sitting in the cool, deadened sanctity of the coliseum, watching the stock judging and waiting for the vaudeville acts, which were to be followed by the Yodelling Cowboy. The vaudeville acts came on and performed to the blare of horns and suspended snare-drum rolls with their punctuating bops: the jugglers, unicycle drivers and wire walkers; the bikini clad lady, with her whip and poodles that pranced, rolled drums and jumped through hoops; the clown, with a red nose ball and hair sprigging around a cracker box hat, who roared around in a little car that blew smoke and backfired.

Finally, the Yodelling Cowboy came on. The fiddler didn't look at all like I thought he would. I had him pictured as a stately man with slim hands with long fingers. When I saw this big, blocky man with ham-like hands and banana fingers walking around the stage before the show, sawing segments on a fiddle, I thought maybe he was a stagehand fooling around. But it was him, all right, and when he did his own hit tunes of sweet two-steps and compelling breakdowns—different, a cut above the rest—the strains filled the coliseum, captivating the audience. The staple songs of the Yodelling Cowboy and the lesser songs of the backup crew, augmented by country corn skits and jokes, paled before him, as far as I was concerned. The only thing I noticed about the guitar players was that they didn't go up and down their guitar necks like Alban Gallant.

Wally sat with his face in kind of a delirium, his mouth open and his eyes sticking out. A pretty blonde attendant was selling pictures of the band members at the stage at intermission and Wally bought one of the fiddler and got him to autograph it. He quietly took Wally's picture from his squat on the stage's lip.

“Could you put that ‘To Wally'?”

“Okay,” the fiddler said in a quiet, sincere voice.

“I play the fiddle, too.”

“Do you? How long have you been playing?”

“Little over a year.”

“Well, always nice to meet a fellow fiddler.”

“I hope to be as good as you some day.”

“I'm sure you will. I'll remember your name. We'll probably meet again. Good luck.” He shook Wally's hand.

Wally kept looking over his shoulder at him as we walked away and got tangled up in a pile of empty chairs.

Things got kind of interesting after the show. Wally was hanging back, getting a last look at the fiddler and I guess I was, too, and we forgot that the train would be leaving around the end of the show, at six. By the time I noticed the watch nestled in the red hairs of a stout arm on my left, its hands said five after six. Wally's mouth hung open when I pointed it out, and he gulped with that eye-bug of his.

“Now what do we do?” he said.

“Try to find someone from home and bum a ride, I guess.”

The whole thing got kind of strange then. Tiredness was
setting in with the lengthening shadows, and we'd had
nothing to eat but a hot dog since noon. The muddle of laughter, screams, Crown and Anchor clinks and hawker calls, interspersed with the motor bursts of the rides, amidst the dust and smells, were beginning to blend together with a sultry gloom.

Wally kicked a tent peg and snarled, “Of course there wouldn't be anyone here we know. Of course not. Stupid trains. We should have stayed home.”

“Well it was you that wanted to come and see your fiddler, and you that hung around mooning over him until it was too late,” I said.

“I didn't twist no arms. I didn't twist no arms.”

“Looks like we'll be twisting thumbs.”

“Huh? You mean hitchhike?” Wally gulped and went bug-eyed again. “I ain't never done that.”

“We'll never learn younger,” I said.

Wally curled his lip into a snarl and gave me a sidelong leer. Then his eyes bugged again and his mouth dropped. “Where do we go?” he said in a weak voice.

We got directions and made our way toward the main road out of town. The streets appeared dirty and grey now. Loose papers and candy-bar wrappers skittered along the cracked and stained sidewalks in the sultry breeze. After a few miscues due to direction confusions, we finally got our thumbs up by the long, dirty-grey ribbon leading toward home. We stood between staying and bolting. After some of the terror subsided a bit, I started noticing that the oncoming drivers were giving us blank stares.

Then a big red-headed guy stuck his head out of his car window, glared at us and hollered, “Get over on this side.”

We crossed the street hoping for better, but the steady stream of cars went by in that moping parade. The long shadows quenched the sun's last blazes, and everything fell into the dirty greyness of the sidewalks. The air grew sticky in the sultry breeze. I had that stranded feeling. Up ahead, three other young fellows, much like us, came onto the sidewalk and started thumbing, too, in a backpedal.

“What are we going to do if we don't get a ride?” Wally said.

“I don't know,” I said. With the cars going by in a relentless stream, and the drivers passively paying us no mind, what hope we had that wasn't drowned by fear was rapidly fading.

When a car finally swerved in and stopped, we stood gaping for a while, unsure of what to do. Then a girl with a pert face, framed by brown hair, stuck her head out the front passenger window and beckoned with a flutter of her hand. We ran then and scrambled and fumbled our way into the back seat of the medium-old car. There were two girls in the front seat, beside the driver, who was a conventional-looking sport with a brush cut.

“Where are you boys going?” the outside girl said.

We told her.

“Not far from Summerside, right?” the guy said, watching for his chance to get back into traffic.

We agreed.

I could see him smirk in the mirror. “I'm an old bus driver.”

“Not that old,” the middle girl said.

“We'll get youse close,” the guy said.

We got underway again and I was just beginning to feel secure when I heard the outside girl picking at the guy in motherly tones: “Ah, come on, pick the poor little fellows up.”

“What do you think I am, a bus driver?” the guy growled.

“That's what you just said,” the inside girl said.

The guy grudgingly pulled over and the three other hitchhikers crowded in on us. But they didn't go far.

The driver guy lost his good humour for a while, but the girls, teasing and joking like two pigeons, brought it back. The middle one would break into a current country song now and then in a pleasant voice. They were all in their late teens or early twenties and you could tell by their light banter that they were either out for a joyride or headed for a dance.