The Badger Riot (34 page)

“Jennie,” yells one of the women. “Come back up this way. Get ready. The police are coming.”

I pick up the little girl's green mitten and give it to her, wishing I had something to give her to wipe away her tears, but I have nothing. I turn to hail Vern, but I see his car has slipped off down the back road and away from the scene. I can see my niece, Madeline, up on the bank. With her is Amanda Elliott. I hoist little Melanie Crawford up to them. “Keep her with you! Don't let her go!” I shout to them.

I sprint back to the women. The police are almost abreast of us. I look at the strikers; my eyes search for Tom. He's ready, him and Ralph. They've formed a line across the road. Most of them are armed with sticks of various kinds. “Stand firm, men,” shouts a logger.

The bystanders – children and all – are silent. We are silent too. This is it; this is what's been in the pit of my stomach for a month.
It is as if the air holds its breath. Onward the police march, hup, hup, hup.

I wipe the moisture of my breath from the inside of the church windowpane. My hand is shaking. Oh Lord God, they're right below the window. Maybe I should run back to my house behind the church and bar the door. But I can't move.

Jennie Hillier looks up and sees me peering out. She holds up her hand to me. I can see her lips moving. “It's the pastor,” she is saying. Others have seen me too. I want to draw back but I cannot. I feel riveted to the glass.

The perfect line of black fur caps marches past the church and goes farther up the road. The strikers are standing in their own line, watching the police pass by not five feet away. No one moves. Not the men. Not the people on the snowbank.

As I watch, the police unit turns around and comes back down. It's abreast of the loggers now. Everything is dead quiet. An officer shouts: “Right wheel!” The constables turn right and face the strikers. Even from my God's-eye view, high above the crowd in the church window, I can feel how tense they are – tightly coiled like a spring.

Someone, deep in the crowd, throws something. I can't see what it is, but I see it glance off the shoulder of a policeman, who whips around. His nightstick connects with the arm of a striker, who hits back.

And that is all it takes to start a riot.

The police wade into the crowd, raining down blows left and right. I am horrified. Merciful Lord, those men are no match for trained police. They'll beat the daylights out of them. I am so terrified that I forget to pray. My hands grip fistfuls of my hair in anguish – hair which never has a strand out of place. I rub my face and realize I am crying, crying for the cruel, brutal injustice being meted out below.

Jennie, no! Stop! Of course she can't hear me as she jumps from
the snowbank and onto the back of a policeman who's grappling with her husband. All three go down together, swallowed up in the legs and bodies around them.

In slow motion it seems, below – slightly to the right and a little apart from the main body of the fighting – I see a striker and a cop struggling against each other. A stick is raised; the policeman ducks, but the vicious blow connects with the left side of his skull.

Even through the window, I can hear the crack. Lord, oh Lord, in my whole lifetime I never expected to hear a human skull break open. The crowd has heard the peculiar broken-flowerpot kind of sound too. Everything stops and the crowd parts. There, in the snow, lies a police officer. Blood pools around his head and seeps into the snow, making a pillow of red.

God's voice, inside my head, galvanizes me into action. It's as if my whole life has been building for this moment. I am a man of God, and God is telling me to run. I race up through the church, out through the side door, and into the parsonage. I grab some towels and, with God's voice still upon me and the wings of angels on my feet, I tear around the end of the church and onto the road.

“Look, Madeline, the Mounties are coming. No, not Mounties. The Constabulary!”

“Should we go, Amanda? No, we can't go.” Madeline's voice is high-pitched as though she's almost crying. “We can't go down on the road. The police are coming up it. If we go down the other side of the snowbank and get inside that fence, we'll get soaked. There's water under the snow.” We both know, from living in Badger all our lives, that the River has a way of creeping slowly in under the snow at this time of the year.

“Wow, look at those police, Madeline. Those heavy long, coats! Must be hard to march in them.” I'm still clutching her damp coat sleeve.

The policemen are staring straight ahead as they march, three abreast, up the road. Every one of them has a nightstick on his
shoulder. Black fur caps. They are some grim. This is serious. Something is going to happen. The crowd is silent. The air crackles with tension.

The taxi has gone down a side road toward the River. The men seem to have forgotten it as they turn to cope with a bigger problem. They're watching the threatening line of police coming toward them, three abreast. The strikers stand aside and the formation marches on up the road, past the church, toward Mrs. Sharpe's house on the left. As they pass, the men mutter among themselves, not sure which way to turn. I think they're relying on the ringleaders out in front to show them what to do.

Oh, here they come back down. The loggers surge forward. Now the police are viciously attacking the men! Oh my God, the loggers are no match for this! Those men are trained to use their night-sticks. Crack! Crack!

We're all crying now. Our minds can't take it all in, such incredible violence. No one has seen anything to compare with this.

I try to keep track of my brothers, but the crowd is too thick. The strikers are putting up a strong fight. Crack! Oh my God. Oh! A policeman is down. His fur cap is knocked aside. There's blood on the snow. Everything stops. I forget to breathe.

“Jennie.” One of the women grabs my arm. “Jennie, I'm scared.”

I nod. “I'm scared too,” I tell her.

The police march up the road. My God, the sight of them is enough to scare anyone, and I fear for Tom. They're so menacing, so black, so tall and straight. Such perfect marching order. It's like the war pictures of the German soldiers that they used to show in the town hall before the main feature of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans or Gene Autry. The sight of the Germans marching in such perfect order used to scare me. I remember thinking, back then, how lucky I was not to be living in Germany. And now, fourteen years after the war, I'm watching something so similar that I shiver with terror.

The loggers watch silently as the police file past the church. A movement in the window catches my eye. It's Pastor Genge. He sure has a bird's-eye view, looking down like that on everyone, the same kind of view that God must have. Has God put the pastor up there as His representative? What a thought!

The police have turned around up by the sawdust dump and are coming back. What are they trying to prove? I suppose by marching in formation they think they can intimidate us into letting the scabs through. But there are no scabs here now. Vern and his scabs have escaped. Surely they can see that.

The men stir restlessly, as men do when in a crowd. They mumble among themselves. I catch Ralph's eye. He nods ever so slightly. He is thinking that all hell is going to break loose. He and Tom stand side by side at the forefront of the men.

After its turnabout, the menacing black line comes back and stops in front of the strikers, wheeling to face them. Someone, deep within the strikers' group, throws a snowball, or something like it. It's possibly just a saucy gesture. The thrower could never have foreseen the consequences of his act. Whatever has been thrown glances off the shoulder of one of the officers.

The anger-charged atmosphere is affecting the police as well as it affects us. They're tensed and waiting to strike out. Clunk! A nightstick connects with the shoulder of a striker. A striker's birch billet connects with the shoulder of a policeman. Ralph, quick, wily Ralph, ducks under a nightstick held high. He grabs the arm and twists. The policeman drops his weapon. Ralph kicks it in under the milling feet of the men. Ralph releases the man and scoots away. The officer immediately looks around for someone to grab.

I see the cop making for Tom, who is tussling with another one. The cop leaps onto Tom's back. I can't take any more. I leap off the snowbank and onto Tom's attacker. We all go down, Tom, the policeman and me. Tom shakes free in an instant and is whirled off into the crowd of police and loggers. But I'm not. The policeman has me in a hammerlock, his strong arm around my throat. I can't
breathe. Stars dance in front of my eyes. My heels drum uselessly on the frozen ground.
Tom, help me.

Suddenly I am free. I roll over onto my knees and raise my head. The cop is on the ground and Ralph is standing over him with his stick. Tom is lost somewhere in the crowd.

“Ralph! Thanks. Geez, I think he would've choked the life outta me.” I'm shaking like a leaf. I look at the policeman lying on the snow. Not a gig in him.

All around us the place is gone mad. Ralph stares at me as if he's in a trance. “Jennie. My God, Jennie, I dreamt this event ten years ago.”

I don't understand what Ralph is saying and I pay him no heed. I crawl over to the downed officer.

“He's not moving, Jennie. What have I done? Have I killed him?”

“I don't know. Let me look after this. Go, Ralph. Get away before someone sees you. Go. We've lost our chance and we can't win this anyway. Go on, I say.”

“Go? What about you? I can't leave you.”

“Don't worry about me, b'y. Tom will see to me. You get yourself away from here as fast as you can. We don't want to see you end up in jail. Go. Go now.” I lean over the policeman and roll him over. When I look up, Ralph is nowhere in sight.

Tom finally gets clear and rushes to me. “Jennie. What happened? Are you hurt? What's wrong with that feller? Is he dead or knocked out?”

“He's knocked out, Tom. See, he's coming around now.” Sure enough, he's conscious, with a cut on his forehead. He sits up, groaning.

Another officer comes over. “Here, what happened to you?” He helps his fellow policeman to his feet. “Who hit you?” He turns to me angrily. “You?” I look at him. “Christ! You're a woman.”

Then we all hear it: a sharp, clear crack like someone broke a flowerpot. Time stops. The policeman turns from me toward the sound. Tom raises his head like a fox on the scent. Utter stillness
falls over the scene. The people on the snow aren't yelling, the men aren't cursing and yelling. Nobody is scuffling with anyone else. We're all just a bunch of human beings standing still in the silence.

Time starts up again, and the sea of strikers and police parts to reveal someone down on the snow. There's blood . . . oh my God! This one is hit seriously. I start to sob, great heaving sobs. Part of it is delayed reaction to being nearly choked; part of it is from what I am witnessing. It feels like my heart is crushing inside my chest and I can't get the air into my lungs.