Grand Change (18 page)

We talked about the subject again a few times before winter. By then, the grain was threshed, the potatoes were sold and moved out and the wood was sawed. After the first big storm
I hired on with Fred James. I boarded at home half the
winter, then went for room and board at Mrs. Deighan's. She was a widow in the village.

That's pretty well how I left Hook Road. Not much more to it. I went back to visit, of course. But the road was never the same after. Once you leave a place, you see it from a different perspective, and the place wasn't the same, anyway; the old communal spirit was gone, among other things. The changes on Hook Road snowballed after I left. Add a few short years and it was pretty much as it is now.

The Old Man was the first to go. He put in a crop of grain and did pretty well what he said, but his old frame couldn't handle things even with what he had. The following spring he held a sale. Most everyone on the road showed up, though most of them didn't buy that much. The old farm fraternity, what was left of it, had something to do with bringing them out; but I'd have to say mostly it was because the reality of the beginning of the end of Hook Road community was hitting home. You could see that in the sombreness everyone affected through the whole sale. The auctioneer, a skinny, sharp-faced, jovial type, who had a joke with every article, soon gave up his quips after getting nothing but deadpan expressions from the crowd.

Nanny busied herself as usual, always her way of dealing with whatever. She helped organize the sale trail. The Old Man sat in the old armchair in the yard, whittling at a stick, pausing at times to glance up at something being sold. There was a firm tightness to his mouth and his eyes would grow misty and he'd look down to hide it. When they auctioned Bill off, he couldn't take it anymore—went and hid in the horse stable. When he came back they were into the household articles and the armchair was gone.

One by one, with the curt spasmodic bid shouts from the crowd spacing into the auctioneer's singsong, ending with the stark finality of his “sold,” the articles worth next to nothing in their usefulness, priceless in their memories and meaning, disappeared into a sea of indifference. And as they went, those that did (most of the horse machinery didn't), the sombreness grew. It was sad to see it all go, like watching something die. As they were selling the property, I noticed the old light wagon standing battered and all but paintless by itself in the barnyard. I could have cried.

The farm went to Angus Simms. He was expanding on his back property south of Jar Road, just across from ours. The Old Man and Nanny lived out their days in a little house they bought in town.

Joe Mason packed it in a few years later; sold out to Tom Dougal. His back went bad and he was over his head in debt anyway. He had a brother in Toronto; moved up there, got a job as a janitor in a big school. Wally wound up there, too. Joe got a toupée about the time Wally's head was beginning to smooth off and he got the idea to start a wig shop. Last I heard, he was still at it. Linda Robins just
happened
to wind up there, too. She finally nailed Wally down. They wound up with a house full of kids.

Alban Gallant sold out to James not long after Joe left; moved into the city and ran the new rink they built there until he retired, His daughter, Candide, was the county beauty queen one year.

John Cobly took cancer not six months after Alban left; died within a month. James got his farm, too. Agnes went to live with one of their daughters.

Jim Mackie was next to go, though not by much. He moved to Sault Saint Marie, Ontario; got work handling a crane. I heard he won a fiddle contest up there. Tom Dougal got his farm, too.

Dan Coulter took a bit of a twist. He got watching some TV evangelist and caught religion; quit the booze and whatnot. He sold out to Hallis Main, who joined his own property to Dan's on the west side about the time Jim left. Dan moved into town; got to be quite the churchgoer—even did a little lay preaching. The church he went to pretty much buried him when he went out. He had no children and no living relatives.

Things went bad all the way around for the Wallaces.
Charlie's marriage went sour before too long. Joanie didn't seem to fit into the Wallace scene too well, and Charlie got into the booze a bit heavy over things. The marriage blew to pieces and Joanie took off with an airman. Charlie moved into the city and went to work with Alban Gallant at the rink and played hockey with the senior team there, when he was sober. The liquor got him pretty bad. He was a hockey bum for a while, played Allan Cup–calibre in Ontario until the booze took him down. Last I heard, he was a skid row bum in Toronto and Wally and Joe Mason were trying to bring him around.

Alf went kind of soft in the head at the last. I was down fishing at the creek one Labour Day and caught him sitting hunched over on a block in the shop with his arms dangling off his knees. The ashes in the forage were crusted and grey like they'd been there for a long time. Off to the side, the wood sleigh he had started about five years before sat with an auger sticking up from a half-finished hole in one of the bunks and there was a cobweb running from a handle tip to the middle of the bunk.

He didn't reply right away when I spoke; just sat looking at me with his eyes slightly staring and his face slack. When he finally did, it was in a low monotone, melancholy and distant: “Used to make knives from files, skates, too,” he said. “Fixed the lock on Harvey's musket back then. Shod twelve horses in one day and I was an inventor and…” Then George came in.

“Come on, Alf,” he said. “I need you to help me get that fence fixed. No good in you sitting here all day, mooning.”

“I'll be right with you,” Alf said.

“No, you won't,” George said. “No, you won't. You'll sit here all day, mooning. Now come on, with Charlie gone you're going to have to pitch in. There's no more horses to shoe and your inventing never got you anywhere and never will.”

I decided to leave. Alf wound up in a mental institution. George carried on for a while with Hilda working in the food plant, the big concern built just outside of town. Then he
rented to James and went to work in the plant, too. He
finally sold out to James and moved to town.

Tom Dougal hung on the longest; went into dairy. Then he
decided to go bigger and by then there wasn't any more
available property nearby so he sold out to Simms and moved out west.

There were only the big tractors and big machines of the modern era riding on the road then, when they needed to, and the odd vehicle taking a shortcut. Gradually, the houses and farm buildings—with windows like sad, vacant eyes—became dilapidated, their roofs back-sprung, their sides bulging.

One by one, they were burned and their cellars were filled in, until they were all gone, completing the obliteration of what was once the Hook Road.

It has been reported, or imagined, or whatever, that ghosts
of the past hang around places that have been vacated. I don't experience any such phenomena on Hook Road anytime I'm around. Too bad there isn't such a thing; might enhance whatever memories and nostalgia I might be able to scare up. The various outside connections that played their part in Hook Road life don't help much, either. One of the problems is that whatever brings familiarity is pretty much overcome by what's changed, new or missing in its surroundings.

In the village the railroad winds through like a grassy path, stripped naked by the absence of ties and rails and the station and warehouses that ran beside it. Standing by it, it's hard to imagine a steam engine idling with its chant, its steam and coal smoke sweeping over warehouse men loading a box car, banking a wagon rig and its driver pulling away from the general store, sweeping upward and fading into nothing.

A car door slams from farther up. A resident getting set to commute to work or some other function. He merely lives here, knows nothing of the local past and probably wouldn't be interested anyway.

There are other survivors: the church and the hall, but they're surrounded by big modern houses and don't fit anymore; the school, but it's been renovated into a house and made a misfit more than the others. It's hardly worth mentioning the few old houses in a row, two of them in broken-down gloom with their roofs caved in, their yard fences with pickets pointing in crazy directions, broken and matted with weeds. The silence of the place has an eeriness to those who knew what it was.
There's more life in the graveyard now; at least you can
experience the familiarity of the names.

In the town, there's action at Tim Horton's, the quick-pick store, the pharmacy and the craft shop. You can get liquor at a vendor's. If you're a tourist, you can have a look at the railroad artifacts and pictures at the rebuilt station house or rent a bicycle for a ride on the rail trail. All other venues of importance—the funeral parlour, bank, rink and the rest—are in the outskirts.

It's quite a modern town now, with new buildings
differently arrayed than the old so that you'd have trouble reckoning where the horse shed and a lot of other places were. The buildings remaining have been made to fit in, like the grocery store, whose rustic appearance coincides with the craft shop's.

The town is modern, clean and functional and you can stand at a corner on a Saturday night and catch absolutely nothing of the buzz and festive excitement of an evening once so special or what made it that in a time so different from long ago. So wide is the gulf.

But time and change go hand in hand. And change will come whatever and there's no going back. The changes to Hook Road came swift, diverse and so complete that, when you look things over, all that really remains lives in the hearts and minds of those of us who lived there, and we grow increasingly few.

But to this writer's experience and knowledge, there have been few if any progress-related change sweeps that were so sudden and complete as the changes that happened on Hook Road. But it's interesting to note that, in a fleeting moment, usually at the funeral of another missing link, where we comment on how it takes a funeral to bring us together, hands clasp and eye contact is made and a thousand things lived to the point of needing no mention flood in and we're just as much a part of Hook Road as we ever were.

Home Again

How would it be, I wonder, to walk once more through the
fields, with their gentle roll, while a friendly moon spreads its bask on the crusted snows of March and fence posts, showing white on their snow side, stand in line like old friends.

I went home to visit on such a night, from the village where I stayed when I worked for the potato farmer.

I can remember finding the latch on the solid old front door by knowing where it should be in the darkened porch, still smelling of potatoes and clay.

The kitchen somehow seemed smaller as I stepped inside, but the old oil lamp on the table gave the same shallow, friendly glow it used to. We sat around the cheery old stove with our feet on the oven door in sort of a huddle, just like we used to, especially during the fierce storms that used to snuff cold and snow through the cracks. There were jokes, twenty questions, talk of almost a year's happenings and lunch.

And then I walked back to the village, my future bobbing like the dark shadows before me.

The years have gone somehow and the future fades into the past. The chances of life have wrought their change. Yet I wonder, how it would be, on an evening by the light of a bright March moon, my feet crunching on crusted snow, to visit home once more.