The Snow Geese (21 page)

‘Are you on vacation?’ Brenda asked me.

‘Not exactly. I’m watching birds.’

‘OK,’ she said, nodding.

‘Snow geese. They migrate up to Hudson Bay from around Winnipeg. Some of them nest very close to Churchill.’

‘OK. I think I’ve seen them.’

‘Snow geese?’ said the man with the stick.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve been following them up from Texas.’

‘You like trains?’

‘Yes.’

Brenda pushed back her chair and stood up, wiping her hands with the paper napkin.

‘I’m just going back to my roomette,’ she said. ‘I’m going to rest up back there.’

‘Don’t be late for lunch!’ the man said.

‘Because they’re going to run out, right?’ Brenda replied, smiling, before disappearing through the door into the accommodation car.

Across the aisle, the man was still leaning forward, in earnest, hands on the pommel of the orthopaedic stick, facing the window. Spruce trees drifted past, with the odd duck or gull or Canada goose, the white startlings of iced-over lakes.

‘How long are you going to stay in Churchill?’ I asked.

‘Just tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Quick turnaround.’ He kept his eyes on the window.

‘Do you live in Winnipeg?’

‘Live in Thunder Bay. You ever been to Thunder Bay?’

‘No.’

‘It’s on Lake Superior. That’s one of the Great Lakes. Know the Great Lakes?’

‘No.’

‘Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. Spells
HOMES
. That’s how you remember.’

The s sounds of ‘spells homes’ delivered with a raspy hiss.

‘Are you going to visit someone in Churchill?’ I asked.

‘Nope.’

‘Is this a vacation?’

‘Guess so. I like trains.’

The man’s name was Marshall. He
loved
trains. After breakfast, in the dining-car, with the boreal spruce forests and frozen lakes of central Manitoba filling the windows on both sides, he told stories about the railways, holding forth in his deep, croaking voice. He seemed to have been waiting for an audience. His reminiscences gathered momentum; he banged the stick’s rubber hoof on the floor in front of his shiny black shoes for emphasis, his brow pulsing like a squirrel, his eyes trained on the window as he talked, the whole carriage lit as if for a photograph when the train met a lake and sunlight flashed off the open snow surface. Marshall had loved the railroads since 1947, when, aged fifteen, he’d run away from home in Montreal and boarded the first train he could get out of the city.

‘I don’t know if it was stubbornness, pride, sense of adventure, independence or somesuch,’ he said, ‘but that was the last ticket I bought for a long, long time. Jumped my first rattler, which is what you’d call a freight train, at the Richmond watertank outside Toronto, and rode in a boxcar to Washago with an old hobo named Jerry. We stayed overnight in the derelict station they had there, and when we woke up at daylight the sun peeked in at an angle into the ticket office which was all dust and cobwebs, so I got up to pull down the shades to keep the sun out and twenty-one dollars fell out of the blind in single dollar bills. A bonanza! Then me and Jerry jumped a rattler to Parry Sound where we went straight to a beanery run by Bert O’Dell for breakfast, lunch and dinner all rolled into one, and after that I jumped a rattler to Capreol, and the conductor in the caboose at the tail of the train was Fred “White Pine” Thomson, he was six foot six inches tall and white as a glass of milk, and another conductor was Boob Graham, named “Boob” on account of his wife wearing the pants, and then I wound up in Sioux Lookout and got myself recruited for forest fire duty. We all slept in tents and I slept next to a regular wino named Shotgun Benny Ferguson and we worked from sunrise till sunset till we were played out, burnt out, smoked out, dirtied up with smoke and soot and ravaged by came-from-hell mosquito and blackfly. Never wash, that was the thing: keeps the mosquitoes away and your in-laws also.’

Marshall had lived on the railroads, sleeping in boxcars, meeting old friends in the railyard communities called hobo jungles, jumping rattlers from one end of Canada to another, Atlantic to Pacific shore: the Rocky Mountains, the St Lawrence River, the granite shield of Ontario, the open plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Now he was holding court in the dining-car, sometimes lifting one hand from the pommel of the stick and gesturing, or banging its hoof hard on the floor as the
Hudson
Bay
rocked and trundled on north-east through Orok, Finger, Budd and Dyce, his stories rehearsed and fluent, annals of a bard or troubadour.

As a Canadian and, in theory, a taxpayer, Marshall had considered himself one of the owners of the railway. Why should he pay twice for the same service? When a constable had tried to arrest him on a train in Biggar, Saskatchewan, Marshall had given him a piece of his mind. ‘We all of us pay income tax,’ he said, his rasping voice gathering force as he mimicked his own younger self, squirrel-brow working busily above bulging, gelid eyes, ‘and this son-of-a-whore railroad runs at a deficit of 100 million dollars a year of taxpayers’ money! Technically speaking, we’re all shareholders in the company! I know that between Halifax and Prince Rupert there’s one spike with my name on it, and all I’m doing, mister, is looking for the damn thing!’ Marshall paused and looked straight at me for a moment, as if I were the constable and Marshall were the teenager waiting for some rejoinder to his tirade. But I said nothing. Marshall turned back to the window, still flickering with spruce trees, and gazed out absently, in a fugue of his own devising.

‘What kind of people were jumping the trains in those days?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ said Marshall, snapping back, ‘these were folk like Suitcase Simpson, he never had a backpack, and Boxcar Kelly, I guess he was born on a boxcar, he’d been on them most of his life, and Branchline Shorty, always on a branchline, never on a mainline, and Hollywood Slim, who wanted to be a movie star, he’d been in Hollywood in the twenties and thirties, he wanted to be in those D.W. Griffith pictures but he never made it, and Slim’s girlfriend Gravel Gertie, and Tommy Slater from Sapperton, eighty years of age, used to work in Boston lighting gas lamps, got laid off when electrics arrived, hadn’t worked since, and Tommy’s girlfriend Nightmare Alice, she
was
a nightmare – tough as nails, swore like a trooper, drank with the best of the guys and fought like a bunch of wildcats – and Sticks Wilson, walked with a crutch but if he was chasing a boxcar he threw the damn thing in and ran like an athlete! Sometimes you’d travel together and sometimes you’d catch up with them at the jungles which usually you’d find on the outskirts of railroad marshalling yards, places like Kamloops, Boston Bar, North Bend. We stole potatoes, stole corncobs and carrots. If you had money you spent it on wine: Calona Royal Red at three dollars seventy-five a gallon – drink enough of that, you’d start singing “O Canada” in Chinese!’

Marshall thought of the trains as his education. ‘I went to university,’ he said. ‘Sure I did. Majored in bum-ology and tramp-ology, coast to coast on tea and toast!’ In the 1930s, Marshall explained, the singer Hank Snow had had a hit called ‘I’m Moving On’, and the hoboes liked to say, ‘I’m going to pull a Hank Snow’, which meant that they were going to jump a train and move on. Marshall talked about greenhorns – boys who thought themselves hoboes but knew nothing of the world or the railroads in it – and about freezing winters during which greenhorns and hoboes alike kept to the cities, staying in Salvation Army hostels known as Sally-Anns. When a constable asked them where they were going, they’d say, ‘My sister’s place!’ and the constable would ask, ‘Who the hell’s your sister?’ and they’d reply, ‘Sally-Ann!’ There was a law against vagrancy – the penalty was a fifty-dollar fine or thirty days in the can, but this would be waived if you left town within twenty-four hours, in which case you’d get a suspended sentence called a floater. Marshall was always on the lookout for the Canadian National Railway security men, the railroad bulls. Whenever he was arrested and asked for his address, he’d say, ‘CN19586. It’s the last boxcar out at Transcona Yard. You can’t miss it!’ Somehow he wound up at Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, where he operated a small bulldozer as part of a team laying a pipeline, but he got restless and hitched a ride out of town without paying his hotel bill. He was arrested in Regina and hauled up before a judge with a notorious drunkard named Haywire Walker. Walker was a squaw man, which meant he had a taste for Indian women, and he’d been accused of selling liquor to Indians. Winter was fast approaching, and Walker had his eye on some comfortable accommodation. When the judge found him guilty and sentenced him to thirty days, Walker said, ‘Is that all? It’s getting cold!’ The judge said, ‘You’re a wise guy, huh?’ and raised the sentence to sixty days. Marshall was sentenced to thirty days in the Regina bucket for skipping the hotel in Maple Creek, and when the month was up he heard they were looking for a cook, so he said he was a chef with wide experience and got the job as gaol cook. He went down to the cells with pork chops taped to his calves with sticking plaster and exchanged the pork chops for the prisoners’ tobacco allowances.

‘Did you actually know how to cook?’ I asked.

‘Couldn’t parboil horseshit for a Hudson Bay trapper,’ Marshall replied. ‘Not if my life depended on it!’ He banged the floor three times with his stick, as if to summon an equerry, then broke into a complex, virtuoso laugh that began life as a wild cackle, slowed down and deepened to the splutter of an old boat’s engine starting, then thinned out into a nasty asthmatic wheeze, as if his lungs had turned to thistles. Marshall, holding a white handkerchief to his mouth, cleared the wheeze with a volley of rough, globby coughs and spat whatever had arrived in his mouth into the handkerchief, which he then held out at arm’s length and eyed intently, inspecting his pulmonary handiwork.

‘Time for a rest,’ he said, returning the handkerchief to the pocket of his creased charcoal trousers. He stood up and walked towards the end of the car, his rolling gait accentuated by the rocking motion of the train. A leather belt, like the ribbon round a gift plum pudding, encircled Marshall at his widest point – an equatorial band that marked out his northern and southern hemispheres. He turned at the carriage door.

‘Don’t be late for lunch!’ he said, and disappeared, my head ringing with the singsong of boxcar, bogie-truck, gondola, caboose.

Wekusko, Button, Dunlop, Medard. Back in the tiny jade-grey roomette, I gazed out at the parade of spruce trees, their sharp nibs like the teeth of a saw, notching sky. The rattling four-syllable figure of the wheels crossing the rail-sections made a bass continuo above which the roomette’s several percussive lines (the clitter of curtain hooks, the trembling of the grille on the fan, the shake of the stowed basin on its latch) played like maracas, timbrels, castanets. When I walked back along the train to the dining-car, I found Marshall sitting alone at his table, eating a sandwich. He was holding one half of the sandwich in each hand and taking alternate bites: left, right, left, right. Two mats were laid at the table across the aisle where Brenda and I had eaten breakfast, and when Brenda came into the dining-car we sat in these appointed places, leaving Marshall with a table to himself. After lunch the chef tuned the radio in the galley to a live broadcast of a Cree pow-wow, voices wailing pell-mell in the static hiss and crackle. Brenda pushed her chair back and stood up, wiping her mouth with a napkin.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said to Marshall, ‘I won’t be late for dinner.’

‘I didn’t say anything!’ he protested. ‘Who heard me say anything?’ The note of a child’s pleading was incongruous in his gruff, bullfrog’s voice. Brenda left the dining-car.

‘Did I say anything?’ Marshall asked me, grinning, raising his hands, palms upwards, a gesture of blamelessness.

‘I’d love to hear more about the trains,’ I said.

‘Ah!’ said Marshall. ‘Step into my office!’ He indicated the empty chair opposite him. I crossed the aisle and sat just where he had bidden. The orthopaedic stick lay across the white tablecloth close to the window, next to a smoky white plastic pill-tidy with seven compartments marked Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su in black letters, each containing a salvo of five or six tablets and capsules. Marshall took a deep breath and began reeling off clauses of the Railroad Act, which he seemed to know by heart, and then he skipped to the signalling procedures used on each of the different branchlines of the Canadian railway network, and suddenly it was 1960 and we were in the Yukon, where Marshall was cooking for crews working on the White Pass Railroad, and then he was cooking for geological survey teams investigating the furthest reaches of Alaska and Labrador.

‘Slow down!’ I said.

‘Oh sure!’ Marshall replied. ‘I can talk! People tell me I never shut up! Thing is, in 1940, when I was in school, they’d run out of vaccination needles due to the metal shortages caused by the war, and all they had left were gramophone needles, and when it was my turn for vaccinations they jabbed me with a gramophone needle and I’ve never shut up since. Must be in the blood!’

He laughed, began to wheeze, produced the white handkerchief from his charcoal trousers, held it to his mouth and cleared his lungs with a volley of coughs, his eyes watering and bloodshot. He breathed deeply for a moment, mustering strength, then went on with his stories as if nothing had happened, talking as the
Hudson Bay
made progress north-east through Lyddal, Odhil, Hockin and Sipiwesk and took on passengers at Thompson – Cree families from the reservations at Nelson House and Split Lake, wearing baseball caps, smoking cigarettes, crowding the dining-car tables behind us and embarking on epic poker games, the broadcast pow-wow soon drowned out by shouted wagers and disputes and the slap-slams of one-dollar and two-dollar coins palmed hard on the Formica tables.

‘I grew up in Montreal,’ Marshall continued through the hubbub, eyes bulging, burly forearms resting flat on the white tablecloth, ‘in a neighbourhood of White Russian Jews, garment workers mostly: St Viatur, Fairmont, Clark Street, St Lawrence, the kind of places the book writer Mordecai Richler writes about in his book
Horseman of Saint Urbain
. We were six children. My parents split when I was twelve. I went to foster parents and ran away like I told you. Hit the sawdust trail. Grabbed an armful of rattlers and headed for the sunset. Most of the people travelling the railroads were seeking one thing or another, coming from broken homes or looking for love or a better way of life or a pot of gold. It was a way of escape. Nowadays they use drugs, but we used a cheap bottle of wine and a boxcar. Faith was the thing. You had to have it: faith. There was a Sally-Ann in Vancouver called Harbour Lights where they had a prayer meeting every Sunday evening, and the Sally-Ann in Edmonton was run by Captain Lesley. They had these nice glass panels with patterns etched in the glass, and when a hobo got refused a meal he’d throw a brick through the glass panels, so they soon forgot about the glass and bricked it over. That’s where I met Cartier the Booster. He stole from department stores. He’d ask me my measurements and I’d say, “Twenty-eight-inch waist, fourteen-and-a-half-inch collar”, and in fifteen minutes he’d come back with a whole new outfit from the Army and Navy – twenty dollars’ worth of clothes and he’d sell them to me for all of five. In Regina there was Crooked Nick Scotty Woods with his colostomy and vanilla extract, the vanilla had a small alcohol content so Crooked Nick Scotty Woods drank it morning, noon and night and smelled like a walking bakery as a consequence. The Can Heat Artists drank all the methylated spirits they could squeeze out of Sterno stoves, and the Baysie Boys drank bay rum hair tonic, so much of it that some of the Chinese grocery stores bought bay rum in forty-five-gallon drums and sold it off in two-ounce bottles named spark plugs, and if you brought back an empty spark plug bottle they’d exchange it for a cigarette. Then there were the skid row bars – the Occidental Hotel in Winnipeg, corner of Main and Logan, ten cents for a glass of beer, the Dodson, the Travellers’ in Vancouver, the Royal in Edmonton, 96th Street . . .’