Jack of Diamonds (32 page)

‘Well, I guess a week at least, so I can look around and find a job. If that’s okay, ma’am?’

She sniffed and I took this for acquiescence. It wasn’t the warmest welcome I could remember.

I judged Mrs Henderson to be in her mid-sixties. Stout, big breasted and heavy limbed, she was a tough-looking old buzzard, who gave the impression there wasn’t much she hadn’t seen or experienced of the human race. Almost certainly life hadn’t been kind to her, and she seemed largely unimpressed with it and her fellow humans. Her thinning hennaed hair was a particularly bright shade of ginger and was somewhat disarrayed. Beneath it, her features were almost lost in matt white powder, which stopped abruptly at her pink jowls. Otherwise, her face was devoid of any make-up, even lipstick (the devil’s paint, I was to learn). The powder had clogged the myriad creases and deep lines around her mouth, making them even more pronounced, and marking her for the heavy smoker she was, or must have been in the past. I took it that the Lord condemned lipstick but found face powder acceptable.

Most of the rest of my landlady was concealed behind a heavy woollen knit-one purl-one no-nonsense brown cardigan, a baggy skirt and faded floral apron, below which heavy grey woollen stockings, and black felt slippers the size of small canoe paddles protruded. Taken together with her ginger hair and ghoulish face, she was an altogether formidable-looking woman and I confess I was immediately intimidated. Mrs Henderson could well have passed for Dolly’s older sister.

‘That will be three dollars for bed and breakfast, four dollars fifty with dinner. We don’t do lunch, but you will let me know if you’ll be out for dinner – can’t go throwing out good food – and there’s no reduction, unless you say so the night before; cook needs lots of notice so she don’t waste money marketing.’

Still standing on the doorstep I reached into my wallet and handed her five single dollars, whereupon she drew fifty cents from her apron pocket in change, then stepped aside and smiled for the first time . . . well, sort of twitch-grimaced. ‘C’mon in,’ she instructed, as if I’d only just knocked and she’d opened the door to welcome a not particularly good friend or a tradesman. Then, reaching for a key on a rack beside the door, she beckoned me to follow her.

As we walked down the hallway towards the rear of the house, she kept up a flow of instructions. ‘I always need the rent a week in advance. We don’t want you sneaking off in the dead o’ night, do we now, Mr Spayd? You wouldn’t be the first. I’ll show you to your room. You’ll be sharing with Mr Greer; he’s long term, clean, tidy, don’t snore week nights ’cause he works nightshift at the grain depot, don’t come home till eight in the morning and don’t drink.’ We’d turned into a dark passageway in what seemed to be the rear of the two-storey house. She stopped to click on a light. ‘Always switch off the light if you’re going out at night; can’t waste electricity.’ We proceeded a little further down the passage and came to a halt outside a door marked 7, a lucky number for me when playing cards and the first good omen. Mrs Henderson made no move to open the door but turned instead to face me. ‘Mr Greer is a born-again Christian and so am I,
praise His precious name.
’ The last four words were said as an attachment to the sentence, almost as a throwaway, and I would come to learn that they were always attached whenever she mentioned matters of salvation, witnessing for the Lord, the church, its pastor or congregation, known collectively as
the Lord’s work
. ‘We don’t allow strong drink on the premises. Come home drunk, you’ll get your marching orders quick smart and no rent returned, can’t say it more plain than that, can I?’ She paused fractionally, her green eyes pinning me down. ‘You a drinker, Jack?’

It was the first time she’d used my name in this one-way conversation. I smiled in what I hoped was a reassuring way. ‘No, ma’am. Marge at the railway explained about drink. But it’s okay, I never touch a drop.’ She looked at me doubtfully so that I felt the need to explain further. ‘You see, my father was, ah . . . is an alcoholic.’

‘You mean a drunkard?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose that’s another word for it.’

‘Ain’t no other word for it. No point in using fancy names. Strong drink is the devil’s way of leading the world into temptation. You smoke?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Dirty, filthy habit, wicked, wicked. This is an iniquitous city, Jack.’ She fixed me with another warning look. ‘You’ll want to be careful,
fall thou not into temptation, saith the Lord
,
praise His precious name
. A young man like you can easily get into trouble. There’s plenty of that around here, all of it the devil’s work and he’s lurking, Jack. Satan is everywhere you turn.’

How was I ever going to tell her I was in the entertainment business, a jazz piano player and potentially a part of the wicked and iniquitous city? Hoping to change the subject, I asked, ‘May I have a shower every morning, ma’am?’ Miss Frostbite had advised me about the importance of personal hygiene after discovering that a daily shower wasn’t customary among the populace of Cabbagetown. As a schoolboy, I’d become accustomed to having a shower after I completed my piano practice at Miss Frostbite’s place. She had installed three showers at the Jazz Warehouse and so there were no excuses, everyone on her staff was expected to be clean. She could smell what she called ‘BO’ from ten feet away. If she passed a kitchen worker who hadn’t attended to his or her personal hygiene for two or three days, she’d say in a reproving voice, ‘There is absolutely no excuse for body odour.’ Once said, it wasn’t lightly forgotten.

Mrs Henderson’s head snapped back at my request. ‘Certainly not! You’re not a labourer, are you?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Well then, two hot showers a week ought to be quite enough and they come with the rent. Anything extra is ten cents a shower, fifteen cents a bath. Money don’t grow on trees, but someone’s got to chop them down to heat the water. All that lumber and lugging and bath cleaning costs.’ She made it sound as if she was the lumberjack responsible for the entire process involved in feeding the furnace.

Perhaps it was her first attempt at levity. I wasn’t sure. I handed back the fifty cents change she’d given me, wondering how much more she would extract before she finally let me into the bedroom. But that, for the time being anyhow, seemed to be that. She unlocked the door and handed me the key, but not without further admonishment. ‘You must
always
lock it when you’re going out. I can’t be responsible for your bits and pieces, so don’t come crying to me if anything gets stolen. Take your keys with you. I don’t need no careless and inconsiderate person waking me up in the middle of the night and asking me to walk down them stairs with my lumbago to let them in. And be quiet when you come in. Have some consideration for others.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Henderson, I will be very careful. Just where is the bathroom, ma’am?’

‘Down the end of the passage, the door without no number, and don’t leave your things lying around in your half of the room, and kindly clean up the bathroom and wipe the floor after you’ve been. I don’t want no ath-a-letes feet. Only men on this bottom floor, no men allowed upstairs. Brush next to the privy, don’t want no dirty splashboard neither. Breakfast seven to eight-thirty, till nine o’clock on Sunday, though you won’t want to sleep in with the Lord’s work going on outside,
praise His precious name
.’

With this last remark Mrs Henderson’s demeanour suddenly changed and she smiled a more or less proper smile, the cracks in her face powder shifting and her voice assuming a slightly softer tone. I was to learn that there were two Mrs Hendersons: the first was
God’s precious child
, who was working towards what she referred to as her sanctification; the second was tough as old boot leather and worked at keeping her boarding house shipshape.

‘We are having a revival meeting, starting at noon after the regular prayer meeting this Sunday,
praise His precious name
. Perhaps you’d like to come, Jack? The church is just across the road. It’s the old theatre, you’ll see it in the morning.’ She indicated a window above what was to be my bed and my half of the room. ‘Snowing too heavy now, but you’ll see it when you go out in the morning. Don’t do the neon Friday night.’

I didn’t ask what she meant by this last remark. Mrs Henderson in her guise as boarding-house keeper had given me a fair old verbal bludgeoning. Surprised by the sudden change in her persona, I agreed to attend a revival meeting, whatever that was supposed to be.

Later, having been to the bathroom and cleaned my teeth and changed into my pyjamas, I lay in bed in my half of the room trying to justify my pathetic spinelessness in acquiescing so quickly to my landlady’s suggestion. I told myself I was only going for the music, though I doubted there’d be Negro spirituals. Joe had once told me, ‘Negro spirituals, that like white folk tryin’ to have themselves their own jazz. Ain’t pretty but sometime it got itself some nice Lordy Jesus rhythm.’ I was going to hear the Lordy Jesus rhythm. After all, I was a musician, it was my professional duty to check out every type of local music. Comforting myself with the thought of this act of musical piety I felt considerably better about my moral cowardice. I assumed my room-mate would be home on Saturday and Sunday nights, and asked myself if it meant that these were his big snoring nights. I’d simply have to wait and see, but for now I was dog-tired, and soon drifted off to sleep.

Mr Greer, my room-mate, turned up for breakfast, and after Mrs Henderson introduced us – ‘Mr Spayd, Mr Greer’ – he said quietly, ‘Call me Jim.’ He seemed a nice enough gent and informed me he worked permanent night shift as a grain blender at the grain terminal, explaining, ‘I like to do the Lord’s work at the railway station.’

When I looked blank he explained that he handed out tracts and testified to passengers passing through Moose Jaw. ‘Otherwise I sleep until it’s time for my dinner, then I have my quiet time with the Lord, then it’s time to go to work.’

After breakfast – oatmeal, toast and tea (two fried eggs on Sundays) – I left to explore Moose Jaw. The theatre church across the road was easy enough to spot and I asked myself why it was that an abandoned theatre, despite being occupied for a different purpose, still looked forlorn, like an old dancer who had sustained a permanent hip injury. The large and lonely-looking building explained Mrs Henderson’s cryptic reference to ‘the neon’; on the front of the theatre-cum-church was a large white neon cross with APOSTOLIC CHURCH OF THE PENTECOST spelled out in pink neon tubing. The sign was turned off during the day, but it was sufficiently large to dominate the building.

I must have kept my head down in the heavy snowfall of the previous night, because somehow I hadn’t noticed this proclamation in lights of God’s residence. I was to learn that the neon sign was turned on every night as soon as it grew dark. There was a church service every night of the week, each with a particular purpose for members of the congregation, the point being that the Apostolic Church of the Pentecost was active seven days a week, and not just on the Lord’s day. They were busy ‘grabbing the devil by his tail daily’.

The Sunday revival meeting I was to attend with Mrs Henderson was after the regular church service from nine o’clock to eleven o’clock, where the Holy Spirit seemed to be especially present. That in turn followed the Sunday quiet time meeting that came after the gospel record broadcast at 7 a.m. to rouse the neighbourhood. The revival meeting began shortly after 11 a.m. and had the singular purpose of saving souls, with singing and hellfire preaching to encourage us sinners to be born again,
washed in the blood of the Lamb.
The revival reinforcement meetings on Tuesday and Friday evening were to strengthen the faith of those who were born again at the Sunday revival.

My visit with Mrs Henderson, who had previously attended the earlier service, therefore had as its primary purpose the saving of my soul, along with the souls of other sinners dragged in by members of the congregation. We were to
look into the glorious face of the Lord
, confess our sins and be born again.

I was too young at the time to understand the mechanisms of conversion, although later I came to understand that any fundamentalist cult requires at least two indoctrinating events per week to reinforce the message and further isolate the convert from the society outside the cult to which they had belonged in the past.

It must have snowed all or most of the night, for River Street and the surrounding streets were blanketed in snow and looked pristine despite the previous night’s mayhem. Nothing looks more shut than a nightclub or tavern or other place of entertainment with the neons and the lights switched off and a chill morning-after wind battering at the barred and padlocked doors. Bright artificial light has the advantage of concealing the creaking and aching bones of tired buildings that are all too apparent in the harsh light of day. On this Saturday morning, much of River Street above its blanket of snow looked a little like Mrs Henderson’s face, beaten but not entirely bowed, the whiteness from the newly fallen snow covering all but the creases and disrepair on the older buildings that had remained unmaintained during the previous decade of the Depression.

Reading the billboards and posters outside the clubs, saloons and gambling joints, I made a note of several likely places I might apply to for a job. Nothing appeared to be open except for the slightly better hotels, where the whirr of hoovering and the smell of floor polish indicated the major activities of the morning.