Talking at the Woodpile (29 page)

Years later I helped Dad get a load of winter wood up on Hunker Creek. We drove the rattling two-ton stake truck up the winding road a few extra miles to visit Winch's cabin. The door was open; no one had lived there since Winch had left. I stood on a stump, maybe the one Winch used, to look for the toe bones on the sod roof. I couldn't find them. Rodents must have spirited them away to gnaw on for the minerals. Inside the cabin sat the old stove, and next to that, bolted securely to the wall, was a metal bed frame sans mattress. On the third log above the bed, carved in deep letters, I read these words:

God's gifts to man

He has chosen to ignore

So in pain he will walk

Through reality's door.

– Winch

My father went to the truck, and I took a moment to look out over the valley. Hot summer days had infused the bushes and trees with more energy than they could possibly hold, and with the approaching winter, the plants were burning out their life in surreal, vibrant colours, paying homage to the retreating sun. The wind came up and blew the grasses on the valley slope like waves on the sea. For a moment I heard something and strained to hear it again. From somewhere above, below or across the valley came the unmistakable sound of many drummers beating one drum.

I returned home after completing my first year at the University of Victoria, leaving daffodils in Victoria for snow in Dawson City. There was a summer job waiting for me at the Flora Dora Café—washing dishes—and I started in right away.

It was great to be home with my parents. The first couple of days, my mom wouldn't stop crying or feeding me.

“You've lost so much weight! Did you forget to eat?” she asked.

My dad was more interested in my marks and life on campus; we talked for hours.

I visited the Halloos at Rock Creek as soon as I could. We had kept in touch by writing a few letters during the year. The lunch table was packed when I walked in, and I was greeted with yells of surprise and bone-crushing hugs from both the men and the women. I was seated at the head of the table; Winch gave up his spot for me.

“Look here, you're all grown up and educated,” Lulu said, beaming with pride. She'd hugged me repeatedly and now set a plate of boiled cabbage and beef in front of me.

“I'm only first year,” I said.

“Nonsense,” Stella said. “You're probably smarter than all the other students.”

I went along with her and said, “Well, I am pretty smart.”

That brought about a chorus of laughter. OP, in his exuberance, put a headlock on me and gave me a knuckle rub. “That's our boy!”

It hurt, but I'd learned to laugh these things off.

I straightened my hair and enjoyed the rest of my lunch. I was happy to be back with the Halloos; they were truly my brothers and sisters, and I'd missed them. Sitting there, I admired how uncomplicated their life was compared to Victoria and university.

Lulu was pregnant with a boy. The baby's gender had been determined by the tried-and-true method of needle-and-thread dowsing. Her pregnancy must have influenced fertility in the other women, because Olive, Stella and Missy were all due about the same time.

“It's going to look like spring lambing around here in a few months,” Uncle Zak said. “Better line up the midwives, hot water and clean towels.”

“It's doctors, nurses and hospitals these days, Zak, but thanks for the advice anyway,” Stella said.

Winch had gotten over his obsessions with aliens and religion, and this lack of a cause allowed the brothers to pay more attention to their music. They pulled guitars, amps, and a drum kit out from under tarps and dusted them off.

An assortment of colourful electrical cords was stretched from the barn to the house, and the music began. The electrical circuits soon overloaded, so the children were trained to run up the hill and reset the breakers when they tripped.

Late at night, when the house slept, the men themselves had to reset the breakers. No one volunteered, so the brothers developed an elaborate contest of paper, rock and scissors combined with straw-drawing and coin-flipping. It took more time to come up with a loser than it did to reset the breaker. Through some sleight of hand, Zak's turn never came up. The men would run up the hill, bending over to rest a number of times with their hands on their knees, and arrive back at the barn out of breath and too tired to immediately pick up their instruments.

I sat in on one of these midnight practices, when the shouts from the house were changing from “Knock it off!” to pleas of “We are trying to sleep here.”

One night, very late, all three sisters—Lulu, Olive and Stella—marched down to the barn with their nightgowns flowing out behind them and pushed over the amplifiers, forcing the brothers to quit.

“Why don't you ever learn who is boss around here?” Stella yelled, as the chastened brothers clutched their instruments and bit their tongues so as to not make matters worse.

The band needed a new name. With their father in mind, they called themselves the Dawson City Ditch Digging Authority.

“Why that name?” I asked after a practice one evening in the barn.

Clutch started to explain, and his brothers joined in. All three pulled up paint-splattered sawhorses.

“It's like this,” OP said. “Our names are not our real names.”

No kidding
, I thought.

“We changed them to change our lives,” Clutch said.

“OP's name is Leonard, Clutch's is Bernstein and mine is Chopin,” Winch said.

“I never would have guessed.” I was now mystified, especially because of Chopin.

“Our parents were amateur musicians and played a bunch of instruments,” Winch went on. “It was an unusual day when the radio or the record player wasn't crooning out Armstrong, Sinatra, Holiday and others. They were both big people like us, and Mom was always cooking and baking.”

“They met at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. Ma was studying nursing, and Dad was studying architectural technology,” OP said. “It was love at first sight, they told us. Soon after graduation they married, bought a house and started a family.”

“Winch and OP arrived first; my parents didn't expect twins, and neither did the doctors, so that was a big surprise. I was born a year later, but I've always been ahead of my brothers in school because I skipped a few grades,” Clutch said. “From the start they encouraged us toward music. When the Bolshoi Ballet performed
Swan Lake
in Winnipeg, Dad took us out of school, and we made the three-day journey in our '58 Cadillac. During the summer holidays, we practically lived at Banff National Park where the School of Fine Arts produced plays and concerts. We attended so many of these that the people of Banff thought we lived there. We were easy to spot because we wore suits with white shirts and ties, and our brown Oxfords shone. Ma always made sure we were spotlessly clean. We used to play around the stages and meet the stagehands. This was more interesting than the performances themselves.”

“Leonard and Bernstein took piano lessons, while I practised the violin,” Winch said. “Dad invested in a violin—not a Stradivarius, but an expensive one just the same. From the start we showed talent. Day after day, mornings and afternoons, we practised Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mozart and Bach. We were the best in the school band. The teacher featured us as an ensemble at concerts, and our parents would sit in the front row beaming with pride. I showed enough promise that Dad said I was a prodigy.

“But we got older and went through puberty, and everything changed. We started to get interested in girls and cars. We skipped school and failed our grades. Dad shook his finger in our faces and warned us over and over, ‘You'll be the kings of the ditchdiggers if you don't take your education seriously.'”

Now I knew where they got the name for the band.

“We grew our hair and beards and developed this badass attitude. It's just a show! We aren't really as bad as we seem, we're just actors,” Winch said with a smile.

“I don't believe you're acting,” I said.

“We'll get you for that later,” Winch said.

“So did you dig ditches?”

“We got part-time jobs pumping gas, changing tires and pulling wrenches at Mike's One-Stop Auto Garage on Main Street. That was far more interesting than school or concerts! We were good mechanics and we could fix anything. ‘Bunch of professionals,' Mike told his customers. We doubled his business.”

“We pooled our $1.25 an hour earnings and bought a '52 Buick, which we had running perfectly. Cruising around town and the surrounding countryside, we became popular with the girls. We started playing rock 'n' roll and called ourselves the El Caminos.”

“Our neighbour Taffy has a green 1959 Chevrolet El Camino parked in his backyard under a tarp,” I said.

“Yeah, we know,” said OP. “We tried to buy it so we could relive the good old days, but he wouldn't sell.”

“We asked him to put it in his will for us, but he told us to go to hell,” Clutch said. “Apparently his gypsy neighbour is going to get it.”

“Life was good back then,” OP said. “We were free. We had money, friends, rock 'n' roll and each other. We quit school and were rarely home. Ma was upset, and Dad was angry when he saw us throwing everything away.”

“It was sad,” Clutch said. “We loved them, but things went sour. Dad was a control freak.”

“The thing that hurt most was the name calling,” Winch said. “He called us stupid, idiots and punks. We moved out and rented a farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Our friends moved in, and it was one big party. We went home to see Ma, and on one occasion we told Dad, ‘The only reason we visit is to see Mom.'”

“That hurt him badly,” Winch added.

“In the meantime we met the Robinson sisters—Lulu, Stella and Olive—and got married together on the same afternoon,” Clutch said. “We thought we were the luckiest men in the world to land such beauties. Mom came to the weddings. Dad didn't.”

“You should have seen that wedding,” OP said with a grin. “It went on for four days and almost wrecked the house. The cops were called twice to shut us down. That's when Winch spent his wedding night in jail. Lulu was not impressed.”

“Yeah, that's the first time I realized I married someone with a temper,” Winch said. “We bought Mike's garage and ran it for a few years, but it seemed we were always in some sort of trouble with the townsfolk and our neighbours. A friend living in the Yukon spent some time with us and convinced us to move here. We packed and left, bringing with us whoever wanted to come along. When we left Alberta, there were grandchildren our dad had never seen. I think he lost the thing he loved the most, but he was unable to accept the lifestyle we had chosen.”

“We were musicians, but not the type Dad wanted us to be,” OP said. “We played rock 'n' roll and knew its history from front to back. We knew that the guitarist of Stone the Crows was electrocuted on stage, that Deep Purple's original drummer Harvey Shields was replaced by John Kerrison in 1967 and that Mott the Hoople was named after Willard Manus's novel by the same name. We made up our own version of Trivial Pursuit. We could play thousands of songs by heart and harmonize as well as anyone.”

I found the brothers' history intriguing, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear it was rich in music and talent. It was sad about the family split, but it can be confusing when another direction is forced upon you.

“You have to be yourselves. You have to follow your calling,” Lulu said over Winch's shoulder.

Everyone has a story, I realized. At that moment I knew what kind of journalist I wanted to be, one who sought the facts from the past and the present to do justice to someone's life. If the brothers hadn't told me their story, I would never have known it.

Discovery Day weekend near the end of June is the big event in Dawson City. I was helping out as the manager for the Dawson City's Ditch Digging Authority and got the word out that the Halloo brothers were available to play dances. The city council discussed the possibility of bypassing the perennial favourites, the New Tones from Whitehorse, and asking the brothers to play. Some councillors were adamant that the Halloos shouldn't play here or anywhere else on the planet. Walter Rather was the most outspoken. “Those people have been nothing but trouble since they arrived here. Why encourage them to stay? They'll only buy more goats with the money we give them!”

Walter's argument had weight, but the Halloos' price was less than the New Tones'.

“We have to be responsible to the taxpayers and take the best price,” one councillor said.

“Even
you
have to admit it's a bargain, Walter,” Richard Cooper scolded. “And last time the New Tones played, their conductor got so drunk he fell in the river and never showed up for half the night. When he did, he looked like a cross-eyed Cab Calloway on steroids. He didn't even face the band when he conducted!”

The council voted for the Ditch Digging Authority.

At about eight in the evening, the brothers tuned up for the dance with a Beethoven overture. A crowd had filled the hall to capacity in eager anticipation of a night of dancing. The lights were dimmed except for the stage, and Winch launched into the searing opening chords of Chuck Berry's “Johnny B. Goode.”

Out of the dimness, a sea of orange and beige rushed toward the stage. The Halloo women, every last one of them from a six-year-old to Zak's sixty-year-old wife, wore matching ankle-length printed dresses. Their rubber boots had been traded in for new white tennis shoes, but they still wore knee-high woollen socks. The women hooted and hollered encouragement, and Winch duck-walked across the stage. It would've made Chuck proud.

Other men did not dance with the Halloo women. No one dared. I too stayed clear, though Lulu tried to drag me onto the dance floor. I dug in my heels all the while, yelling, “I can't dance! I can't dance!” Much to my relief, she gave up and left me alone.