Grand Change
Copyright © 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopyingor other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
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Cover design by Matt Reid
Cover photograph by John Sylvester
eBook design by Joseph Muise
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Andrews, William (William John Lloyd), author
The grand change / William Andrews.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-927502-10-5 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-927502-14-3 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS8601.N4547G73 2013 C813'.6 C2013-904713-1
C2013-904714-X
The publisher acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada
through the Canada Book Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts Block Grant Program.
Masters of Their
Own Realm
They had a simple philosophy: a penny-saved-penny-earned, earned,
don't-put-your-eggs-in-one-basket philosophy; a philosophy based on innovation, self-sufficiency, self-reliance and the art of making do. And not a book-learned philosophy but one relayed through past generations by those schooled in the art of survival.
Their mornings began with the crow of a rooster, or the whirr of an angry alarm clock, depending on the sun. When sundown came, the end of the usual day, they counted what little leisure there was as something to be treasured.
If they prayed, and some of them did, it was for a fighting chance. Nine times out of ten that was all they got; nine times out of ten that was all they needed. For their hands were deft and strong, they were confident in their own self-reliance and they took their satisfaction from the daily battles. They were masters of their own realm.
Prelude to Hook Road
For decades leading up to the nineteen-fifties, the people
of
Hook Road had seen little change. The last loads of mussel mud had been hauled and the more easily managed lime, obtained at railheads, was spread by machine rather than by shovel. Stumpers were no longer used, the days of major land clearing past. Horses no longer trod the revolving floors of horsepowers; the gasoline engine had been integrated. There were smaller changes: modifications in machinery, cold storage, radio, telephone. But other than that they in their little one hundred or so acre mixed farms knew life much the same as it was at the turn of the twentieth century.
Their farms were geared for self-sufficiency and to keep overhead down. Their land was strategically fenced for crop rotation; the stock nourished the land with its waste. The diversity of produce ensured a backup system; if they didn't make good on potatoes, there was pork, or beef.
They had orchards. They killed their own meat, churned their own butter, grew their own vegetables, raised their own poultry and collected their own eggs. They preserved food in cans, bottles, barrels of brine, cellars and cold outbuildings.
When it came to actual farming and transportation, they had the surest, most independent means of getting the job done. Their implements were simple, durable, easily repaired in a pinchâoften with haywire and binder twine or the most basic of tools. These went hand in hand with manual labour and the horse, that most amazing, courageous, obedient beast, which, against mud, snow, cold, heat and drudgery, was virtually unstoppable.
The horse was the cog everything revolved around, even with its limitations, which pertained mainly to lack of speed.
Outside of the Saturday night trip to town, a train trip to the city during Old Home Week or a day of shopping maybe once a year, Hook Road people were Hook Road bound. This brought on a reliance among community members. Ensuing necessity brought out those who could double as midwives, veterinarians, blacksmiths, carpenters, fiddlers for the tymes. Hook Road had its own homegrown characters and comedians. Its hockey heroes learned their basic tricks on the nearest frog pond. And this all made for a tight-knit community where a man could rely on his neighbour for anything from a visit to an axe handle.
But change was in the making, had been for a number of years. Progress, stunted by a depression, was beginning to find its feet due to better economic times brought on by the Second World War. Compact tractors, adaptable to horse machinery, with pulleys to replace stationary engines, were available now and affordable through modern financing. Wider roads were being built, augmented by better graders, and snowplows kept them open for year-round motor travel. Electricity, which to this point had hummed its wires on main roads only, stood ready to move in with its ensuing conveniences.
These changes were not without allies: the effort of walking behind a gang plow from dawn to dusk, the dexterity, endurance and patience it took to tend the implement while keeping three horses in line and the constant chore of keeping the horses watered, fed, harnessed and hitched made it easy to acknowledge that a tractor would save much work. A moonlight ride in a pung sleigh with the fresh, chill air curling your breath may have held a certain romance, but when the cold ground drift swirled and cuffed, lashing white chill at your face, and the horseâat times barely visibleâbegan bucking and plunging, it wasn't difficult to dream about the warmth and convenience of a car. Pumping water with a hand pump, washing clothes by hand and going to an outhouse in the middle of a snowstorm were excellent promotions for electricity.
There were other allies, of course, including TV and rock and roll, and they all conjoined and converged on Hook Road like a flood, with the anaesthesia that comes with easier, better times. Few questioned the outcome.
In actual fact, the sweep of change sounded the death knell to a way of life that had endured for over half a century. For Hook Road people, it was not unlike watching chaff being windblown from a barn floor with the barn doors open. And it was not so much the change, nor the loss, nor the gain the change wrought, but that something left, never to return.
Hook Road is fictional; the characters who live there are fictional, too. The rest, according to those who lived through such a time, including this writer, is based on historical fact.
Hook Road
You can still recognize the road by its directions, dips and
rises: the due north run from the Jar Road; that quick hump between the intersection and the crown of the short downgrade; the long, level slide; the sudden drop into the hollow; the slow rise to the hollow's north bank, where the road flattens briefly before sloping down to the creek; the low section to the swamp bog and beyond; the sudden hook west that gave the road its name; the final short jog to the front road that went about a mile northwest and spilled out into the village.
There are other reminders. The little brook in the hollow, spring fed from the low ground in a back field, still tinkles through the square, wooden tunnel with its creosote smell; the heavy, wooden bridge at the creek, often repaired and upgraded, is still a reasonable facsimile of what it once was; the half-buried millstone still juts out from the creek's north bank as a remnant of the old mill; the swamp bog, in swamp tradition, still has its mangle of broken, awry, half-stunted trees.
But you won't find horseshoe picks or wagon-wheel ruts in the roadbed anymore. The bees don't hum along, touching down on blueberry bushes and wildflowers on the ditch banks. There is neither bush nor wildflower to be seen, only weeds and the odd scraggly tree. There are no cream-can stands or mailboxes at gateways; mostly there is not even a gateway to mark where they once stood. The houses, barns and outbuildings of the farmsteads are all gone; it's virtually impossible to random where they once stood. It's difficult to even random where the inner fencelines ran through the farm fields.
It's a wide, highly graded road now, well gravelled, its ditches deep and broad enough to hit brick clay, discouraging undergrowth and slough holes from runoffs. It was built to be used year-round, and it was, until a few years back when “closed” signs were put in from late fall through early spring. Access to croplands is its main purpose now.
But if you could go back to another time, a time when horses moved the scant implements and vehicles through fields of seeding and harvest. A time of dusty roads, foot-sucking mud and snow trails blurred by the white of winter. A time when liniment bottles, their necks poking through crowning cobwebs, cluttered the hand-hewn sills of horse stables, where jumbles of harness hung on steel hooks: oval collars with their pads, bridles with their blinders flopping sideways, curved hames poking here and there, drooping traces, hooped britchen and rope reins. A time when the walls of cow stables were decorated with manure-crusted stools, kicking chains, spray cans, shelved cans of DDT and tins of udder salve; when stookers with their stoop and squat formed the tent-like stooks to the thwacks of binders in the golden fields of fall and forkers forked the grain sheaves onto the veeing wagon racks where the builders built the load; when potato pickers bent in their trudge while whirligigs fanned out the tubers with their tails; when you could still hear the puck and hough of a stationary engine, the wrack-a-wrack-a-wrack of a thresher and the seethe haw of a crosscut saw in a winter-chilled woodlot, the bump of wood sleigh runners in the pitches, the creak of a hand pump. If you could go back to that time, you would know that what now is a by-road, an in-road, was an artery into part of a thriving community.
It was a sunken road then; two wagon rigs could pass but with not a lot of room. It was hard and dusty in the summer, more like a ditch in wet times and when the winter came it would sleep and be no more a road than the fields beside it, recognized only by the twin fencelines running on its banks.
It would slowly reappear with the sinking of the snows, familiar, but foreboding nowâits banks grey-brown and spiking bare bushes, dead weeds, grasses and small trees; its bed worm-lined and gutted by runoffs; and with flat, deceptively smooth beds of muck at the sloughs.
Then, that which gave it purpose, the traffic of plodding horses and wagons, almost bucking through its mire, would appear.
It was quite an ordinary road, seeing little of the unusual except for the odd pack peddler or a stranger looking for work, or his way. Those who travelled it went hand in hand with the dreams, hopes, defeats and scant victories it had known for all its time.
My great grandfather watched it turn from a pair of wheel ruts running between the farmsteads to a crude wagon path, saw it begin to sink with the gradual rise of its banks from runoff erosion and the scrape of horse-drawn, stone-loaded drags hauled sideways.
My grandfather walked it carrying a muzzle-loading shotgun to shoot the black ducks that would huddle in the millpond, when there was a millpond, and the mill supplied the area with grist. He walked it from the village train station, home from the Great War, his mind confused and his inner being shattered. He hauled home the last load of grist produced at the mill on it. He brought my grandmother home as his bride in a light wagon on it.
My father drove my mother home on it to start their married life together in the same light wagon.
He drove in the same wagon to the village church to bury my mother upon her death at my birth.
I often walked the road. I cursed it when I had to wade around slough holes but I loved it when my bare feet would scuff up dust in its summer-dry bed. It held a mystery then, with small birds twittering and flittering through the low trees and bushes at its banks and with bees busy at the flowers there. Usually, I would be heading to or from school. But sometimes I would be heading for the creek, perhaps in an evening with the others to gather at the bridge and do our harmless foolishness, our voices and laughter rising above the rush and splatter of the water falling from the spillway of the back-sprung old mill, with its awry shingles and bulging sides. Perhaps it would be on a Sunday, or on a seasonal farm break, with the brown fishing line wrapped on the broken end of the alder pole I used last time in my pocket and the old army knife with its square blade and punch tied to my belt with a string. Others would be at the bridge too and the bright excitement off a fish hole would mingle with the summer breeze on our faces and in our hair and with the pleasant sun on our shoulders. And we would cut the alder poles and wrap the line on the end, then drape over the bridge on our bellies, swinging the line under. There would be that hollow plunk of the sinker hitting the water, then the sudden tugs, then the
splunge
in the water and the wriggling fish arcing through the air with the upswing of the line to land smack on the bridge bed, to curl, dust-patched, with that stare.
But my favourite memory is of riding down the road in a truck wagon with my father, heading to the little town for goods. I was a very small boy then. It is the first thing in life I can remember.
I suppose it took over an hour to go the seven miles to town. The steel wagon wheels, thick-spoked and heavy-hubbed, clattering on the rough road; the long wagon box creaking its song, remnants of chaff, seed oats and potato sprouts jigging on its rough bed.
Our seat was a board placed crosswise on the box sides. I sat upright and alert, my feet dangling above the wagon bed. My father sat hunched over, his forearms, with folded shirt sleeves, resting on his thighs near the knee patches of his overalls, his large, calloused hands loosely holding the rope reins with their ends dangling and furling round his pant cuffs and worn boots. His eyes, peering through the shadow of his cap peak, had a tired, sleepy look.
The horse moved in a steady plod, his tail swishing lazily around the britchen wrapping his rump. Once in a while, his ears would do their dip and pointâsometimes from the pass of an infrequent car, sometimes from the flip of the reins on his long, hollow back summoning a faster pace.
In time, the clatters and creaks began to soothe as the road turned to grey asphalt with tarred cracks running along square storefronts.
As we came into town, the warm, sultry wind lazily stirred the odd loose scrap of paper lying in the near vacant streets. A round sign, nestled in the arc of a steel pole by a gas pump, waved its shadow over the pump's disc head, glass cylinder tank and looping, hung hose; its creak added to the afternoon's dry humdrum as we passed by. The small shop-like garage beside the pump smelled heavily of gasoline, rubber and grease and had a square car out front with its engine's side covers folded up like a bat's wings.
The smells of crushed oats and various animal feeds came to us as we sided the ramp that fronted the feed mill warehouse. The attendant there had the same sleepy, tired look as my father. His voice sounded sleepy as well in their scant conversation. He threw down bloated bags of cow concentrate and pig starter that bounced slightly on the wagon bed, and handed down a receipt that my father stuffed into the bib of his overalls. From the hardware store, as we drove up and parked by its high windows, came the smells of oiled harnesses and hemp ropes. From my perch on the wagon seat, through the windows, I saw collars, pads and hames with their buckles and straps hanging on a wall. Below them, shovels, axes and forks reclined. To their left, a barrel stood with various tool handles protruding from its mouth and muskrat traps hanging from its lip.
I watched my father climb the store's worn wooden steps and walk through its doorway, his form growing faint in the darkened storeroom. When he emerged, he gingerly carried a ball of barbed wire. The stocky storekeeper, in an apron, followed with a plowshare in one hand and a fork handle in the other. The wire ball thumped, the plowshare clunked and the fork handle rattled as they were placed on the wagon bed.
The two men stood then for a while, talking of prices, the coming election and the best horse liniment. The breeze tousled the scant sprigs of hair horseshoeing the bald on the storekeeper's head as friendly so longs were exchanged and he made his way back into the store.
We pulled up to the small grocery store then and stopped beside the window case where there was a pasteboard sign of a Coke girl smiling with a wink. The doorbell tinkled its welcome as we went in, my father carrying two crock jars. I stood waiting and watching on the heaving board floor amidst the smells of stale oranges, smoked herring and cream soda pop. I could hear the tick-tock of the square clock on the wall above the hum of the water-filled pop cooler down at the far end of the long counter.
Through the open door to the storage room, I saw the storekeeper twist the spigot handles on reclining molasses and kerosene drums and squat, watching their contents pour into loop-handled, round-lipped measuring cans he used to fill the crock jars. Later, the storekeeper scooped beans from a barrel by the counter and shuffled them into a brown paper bag. Then, rocking a large knife, he cut a wedge out of the cheese disc and weighed it on the scales sitting squat near the disc on the counter. Brown paper crinkled and rustled as he swiped a sheet from the steel-framed roll sitting next to the cheese disc, wrapped the cheese and tied the package with a string running from a shelved spool through a hanging steel eye.
Then we took the groceries (there was a bag of rolled oats, a bag of sugar and a caddy of tea as well) to the wagon.
Cold storage wasn't far away and we walked there, leaving the horse, his sleepy head hanging and one foot resting, untied by the store.
The stick-handled door opened with a swirling fog of frost and we made our way down a narrow corridor with tiers of ice-encased lockers on either side, stopping at the one we had rented. My father opened it and a white puff surged out as he retrieved a roast of beef wrapped in brown paper. As he closed the locker, I couldn't help thinking of some iced-up castle I saw in some fairy tale book.
The coldness of the place made the heat of the afternoon outside seem strange. My father watched my feeble attempt to climb up on a wagon wheel before boosting my behind with his hand. Then he walked stiffly across the street to a small shop with a large steel Players sign nailed to its side. He returned with two small ice cream cones and handed one to me as he climbed onto the wagon. We sat then, quietly biting at the ice cream for a while.
The horse, in his sleepy pose, was still except for the odd tail swish at a bothersome fly. A piece of paper scuttled by, swept by the breeze, its scuffle mingling with the creak of the sign still waving its shadow not far away.
The sleepy, tired look seemed to deepen in my father's eyes as he took the reins in his free hand and, reining the horse, wheeled the wagon in mid street. The inside wheel scraped against the wagon box with a protesting screech. Once more the clop of the horse's feet resounded in the quiet streets and, as peacefully and unnoticed as we clattered into town, we clattered out.
I don't recall too much about Hook Road on our way to townâtoo excited, I guess. But on the way home I remember how different things looked from the opposite side, something that has reminded me ever since of two sides of life.
The trip we all took to see my father off to war I can recall as being filled with confusion and fear.
We drove down the road without conversation on a clear, early summer day. A strange foreboding rode with us, and it carried into the old station house where we sat on pew-like benches in the waiting room with its pot-bellied stove. The smells of old varnish, coal dust and stale tobacco spit seemed to add to the dry, vacant atmosphere and the foreboding. From the office, behind the high ticket window, the rattle of the Morse code receiver echoed loud and hollow like all the other sounds, be they squeak, scrape or bump.
Then there was a faint vibration. The crossing bell sounded from the roadway by the potato warehouse, its clang muted by the station walls. The hands of ticket holders began checking belted suitcases and paper shopping bags. The vibration increased rapidly. You could hear it now. Soon it was a rumble. The panes in the high windows began to ping. An old man on one of the ledge-like benches, fixed in the grooved walls, spit a stream of tobacco juice into a cuspidor beside him.