The Badger Riot (31 page)

All he could think about was how sorry he was to have gotten involved with that bastard of a taxi driver, Vern Crawford. A few hours ago he'd been standing outside the pool hall in Windsor. He had just played and won two games of pool. No one could beat Cecil at pool. The prize was two bottles of homebrew. Cecil, not used to drinking, had downed them too fast. Now he felt somewhat dizzy.

His father had been on the IWA picket line in Peterview for the past two weeks, him and his sister Emily left with their stepmother and her brood of five kids that she'd had for his father. Their stepmother was particularly bad when Father was away, and beat him and Emily with the broom as often as she could.

As he had rounded the corner of the Brown Derby Café, a taxi had cruised by and stopped by the curb. A guy rolled down the window and asked Cecil if he was interested in going up to work on the Millertown Dam. Because he was cold and broke and didn't want to face the old stepmother, he opened the front door to the cab and hopped in.

The man sitting in the driver's seat was talking fast, and Cecil, who wasn't real good at words and speech, had to struggle to keep up with him. The man didn't seem to notice, or even care. His name was Vern. He fired questions at Cecil. “You ever work in the woods?”

“Yes, sir.” Cecil watched furtively as the taxi driver lit up a cigarette. He wanted to ask him could he have one too.

“When was that?”

“Last year.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“That's old enough I s'pose.”

“I worked as a scab too.” Cecil thought he should tell Vern that he had work experience in that field as well.

“What? Jesus Christ!” Vern's taxi swerved as he swivelled his head to look at Cecil. “How did a young fella like you get to be a scab?”

“Uh . . . uh . . . I dunno. Just happened. We went to Badger and went up in a camp. We wudn't there no more than a couple weeks and real loggers came and drove us out in the snow.”

“Go on, b'y! So you must've been part of that crowd that was in Anderson's camp when they beat it up. Did you get a good fright? Where'd you run? Who picked you up?”

Cecil hadn't been able to keep track of the questions that had
come out of Vern's mouth like machine-gun fire. He was sorry he'd mentioned it. He shrunk his head down into the collar of his jacket again as if by doing so he would become invisible to the world.

As they'd approached the Oasis Tavern, halfway between Windsor and Badger, they saw two fellows standing on the side of the road with their thumbs out. Vern muttered, “Poor bastards out in the cold, they looks like they needs a job too.”

He put on the brakes and rolled down the window. “Need a ride, boys?”

“We're hitchhiking to Springdale and we don't have any money,” one of them said, as he eyed the taxi sign on the roof of Vern's car.

“That's all right, boys, jump aboard. 'Tis too cold to be out on the side of the road, and you mightn't see anyone else for hours.”

That was all the men needed to hear; they scravelled into the back seat.

As the beige Chrysler hurled up over the road to Badger, Vern had kept up a constant stream of chatter. Approaching an intersection, he slowed down and turned left into the town. One of the men in the back piped up, “Excuse me, buddy, we're going to Springdale, so if you could take us up onto the Halls Bay Road, we'll see if we can't pick up a ride there.”

“Now boys, listen here. I got a proposition for ya. How would you like to go back to Springdale, or wherever it is you comes from, with a few dollars in your pocket? Wouldn't it be grand to go home and show your women a bit of cash for a change? Well I knows a way you can do it and it don't take nothing at all.”

By this time the car had moved over the railway tracks and into the centre of Badger, where the evidence of the now-famous loggers' strike was in plain view. The men in the back nervously eyed a number of overturned cars with the windows beaten out of them.

“Now listen here, old man,” one of them said, “we don't know what you have in mind, but we knows what is going on up here in Badger and we wants no part of it. Sure look out the windows. It looks like a war happened here, b'y. Stop the car and let us out.”

Cecil also looked out through the window of the taxi. The beer he'd drunk an hour earlier had filled his bladder and was making him squirm in his seat. Seeing the overturned cars and the fire barrels had started him feeling scared again, remembering his last trip to Badger.

“Go on with ya. There's nothing to this. You just sit back now and watch me. I'll have you up in Millertown in no time.” Vern manoeuvred around the corner onto Church Road.

Even Cecil had seen there was no way the taxi was getting up to Millertown. The street was lined with police and loggers. Some of them had recognized Vern's taxi and were yelling and cursing at him, as Cecil and the two men in the back tried to hide their faces.

It had taken a while, but with the help of the police, Vern had made it up the street to where the road turned toward Buchans and Millertown. Then things had deteriorated pretty fast. Their way was barred by about two hundred men.

Cecil thought he'd never seen so much anger, not even in his stepmother when she beat him. When he got older and bigger, she'd had to pass that job over to his father and his thick leather belt. The men pounded on the bonnet and the windshield of Vern's taxi with their sticks. Then a ring had formed around the car, and bodies had pressed in close to the windows. Before Cecil could figure out what they were doing, they lifted the car off the road.

It had been too much for the young man. His full bladder let go – piss or urine, call it what you want. When the car banged down on the road, he couldn't take any more. He felt the dreadful wet warmth as it spread out from his crotch and down one of his legs. Through the curtain of his misery, terror and shame, Cecil could smell vomit. It wasn't his, thank God, so that meant that one of the guys in back had thrown up.
Vomit's worse than piss, isn't it?
He felt a bit better to know someone was suffering worse than him.

Vern had been screaming at them all. “You dirty bastards! Not fit to get in a car. Friggin' animals are cleaner than you fellas.”

Cecil, overwhelmed with the noise and confusion, never knew
how it happened, but somehow Vern had managed to escape. The men in the back seat said afterward that the taxi driver was as lucky as a shithouse rat.

But Cecil and the two men hadn't been so lucky. Vern put them out on the A.N.D. Company office steps. They'd cried that he couldn't leave them, certain they'd be killed before daylight. Vern had said that he didn't give a fuck what happened to them – just get the hell out of the car. All three had tumbled out and the taxi roared off on three wheels into the night.

Cecil was shaking, too scared to know what to do. One man tried the A.N.D. Company office door. “Son of a bitch is locked up tighter than a virgin's hole,” he said. “We're leavin', buddy. What you gonna do?” Cecil couldn't answer; his thoughts jumbled around inside his head and his speech deserted him.

The Springdale men disappeared over among the A.N.D. Company warehouses and sheds. Cecil was left all alone.

He thought of the bad luck that had dogged him from the day that his mother had died. He thought that if life was no better than this, it was best to die or be killed and have it over with. He wanted to cry, but his stepmother always told him that only sissies cried.

He was jarred out of his jumbled thoughts by the presence of a woman. It was dark, about six or seven o'clock.

“Cecil? Is that you, my son? Where'd you come from?”

“Missus Annie,” he sobbed, and he couldn't say any more. He wondered if God had sent her.

She took him by the arm and led him over the road to her house. His pissy brigs were stiff with the cold. They chafed his private parts as he stumbled along behind her.

Her kitchen was like a warm womb, and smelled of baking bread. Poor Cecil was shivering with cold and delayed shock. He clung to the woman's arm like a small child. Missus Annie knew what needed to be done. She'd dealt with this young man before and she knew he couldn't handle a lot of words at once. She handed him a pair of knitted underdrawers and a pair of worsted brigs and motioned to the back room. Cecil shambled inside.

He changed as fast as his shaking hands would allow. Forgetting his heap of soiled clothes on the floor, he went back out to the kitchen. That was another of Cecil's problems: he often forgot things in the moment, but could recite dates and happenings from years and years ago.

Missus Annie had a lunch on the table for him: tea, fresh bread and butter, some cold meat. Bear meat, she said, as she sat opposite him and watched him eat ravenously.

“Are you a logger with the union, Cecil?”

“No, missus.”

“So you're one of the other crowd then, what they calls scabs.”

Cecil concentrated on his steaming teacup, unable to look at Missus Annie's eyes. He felt even more ashamed of himself than when he'd been pissing in his pants. Since his mother died, no woman had cared for him as this Mi'kmaq woman had. Cecil wished she was his mother, wished that he belonged to the close-knit Mi'kmaq community.

The door burst open. “Ma, ma, you'll never believe what's happened!” It was one of the Drum men. He saw Cecil and stopped. “Who the fuck are you?”

His mother shook her head and pulled her son into the other room, leaving Cecil alone to chew on his bear meat. Not that he had much appetite. He figured her son was a striker.
Just wait until she tells him about me. I'm dead now, for sure.

The time when he was with Missus Annie for the infection in his leg, someone had told Cecil that she had twenty-two children. They said she had ten sons, but Cecil never learned their names and he didn't know this one. After a few minutes, this son and Missus Annie came back to the kitchen. She laid her hand on Cecil's shoulder. “My son thinks it would be best if he took you over to the railway station now,” she said. “You might hitch a ride on a freight train. You can hide under the station stand until one comes along.”

Cecil thanked Missus Annie. He wanted to hug her, but couldn't get up the nerve to do so. In his mind she was the mother he'd lost, and he loved her. As he walked out to the road with her son, he
could see her standing in the door, the lamplight silhouetting her short, round, motherly frame.

It was late, nine o'clock. By this time Badger was swarming with Mounties and Constabulary officers as they searched out fugitive strikers. Cecil barely had the strength to walk over the road with Missus Annie's son. He was quaking with fear.

When they reached the railway station, Missus Drum's son held out his hand for Cecil to shake. Cecil was grateful for the handshake. No one had ever held out their hand to him before. When their hands parted there was a two-dollar bill left in his. It came to Cecil's mind that it might be the same two-dollar bill that he'd given Missus Annie back when she healed his leg. Before he could say anything, the Mi'kmaq turned and walked away. Cecil put the money down in the bottom of his boot. It was good money, enough to play pool for weeks.

The station platform was deserted. The nor'west wind was whipping down the tracks. It had been mild earlier, but the wind was up now. There was no freight train in sight. Cecil saw the dark hole under the station stand. He thought about it for a bit. He'd never liked dark places. They reminded him of his stepmother and the attic. But it was cold, and he was afraid that a cop or a logger might come by.

And it
was
dark. Cecil could hear breathing and snores and curses as he crawled in. Someone kicked him in the ribs – hard – when he almost knelt on him. After awhile, another body crawled in. Cecil kicked him as hard as he could, just because someone had kicked him.

He dozed off. Stepmother always said, “That stupid Cecil! He'd fall asleep in a snowbank.” If she only knew how true that was, but Cecil wasn't about to let her or Father know about all this goings-on. All he wanted was to get through this night and see daylight.

It's been four days since Ruth left to go in to St. John's. This hasn't been too bad, I think. Ruth has been looking after my comforts for almost twenty-five years. I miss her, but after all, I am a grown, independent man. I can do this.

There's nothing to keeping house; just wash a few dishes, maybe sweep up the floor. I can wash my own clothes when I get them dirty. The clothes that I have on I've only been wearing for five days, and there's hardly a peck on 'em. I think women washes clothes too much anyway. Something for them to do, I guess.

There's no point in me going upstairs to sleep in our bed. That would only dirty up the sheets unnecessarily. And yes, I have to admit, it would be too lonely in that bed without Ruth. I'll get that quilt again, and a pillow, and make up a bunk on the daybed by the kitchen stove. Ruth will never know. I'd have it all put away on the day she comes home.

I'll keep myself busy all day long. “A man's work is never done, though he toils from sun to sun.” That was my father's favourite quote. There's some firewood to be sawed up, cleaved into junks and stacked in the woodshed. The felt on my roof has come loose on the corner. Won't be any good if Ruth comes home to a leaky roof! First thing she'll ask is what I've been doing all the while she was gone.

I get my ladder and climb up on the roof, nail the loose piece down with felt nails and smear some tar over it to keep the wet out. It's a mild day, the first mild day of the year. The sun has the power
now, as my father used to say, and when it's shining down on the roof felt it is warm enough to spread a bit of tar. No good trying to spread tar in cold weather.