Wake The Stone Man (9 page)

chapter eleven

At least
Slaughterhouse Five
got me reading and I started hanging out at the library again. Miss Black, the librarian, seemed glad to see me.

“Molly, do you have any plans for the summer?”

“No, not really.” I'd known Miss Black since I was a little kid. She used to let me help shelve the books. Funny thing though, I never really knew anything about her. She was just Miss Black, short and round and nice. I think she liked her job, and she liked kids. I think she liked me. When I was little I used to think she lived in the library and I imagined that when they turned off the lights and locked the doors at night she'd still be sitting in her chair behind the reference desk.

So here's something about Miss Black. The day of the funeral, when I was walking out behind the coffins, I saw her sitting in the church. She didn't have to be there, wasn't like she was family or anything, but she came.

“The library got a LIP grant.”

“A lip grant? A grant for lips?”

“L.I.P. — Local Initiative Project. One of Trudeau's ideas.”

I noticed that Miss Black always blushed a little when she talked about Pierre. I think Pierre was her Leonard.

“The grant is to catalogue our photograph collection. Would you be interested?”

“Maybe. I don't know. I've never done anything like that before.”

“It's simple. You just have to number the photographs and file them.

“OK. I guess so.”

“Good. Come back tomorrow afternoon and Mr. Klein will interview you.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Klein, the new chief librarian.”

I went to the library the next day and Miss Black took me behind the check-out desk and down a hallway past framed black and white photos of old guys in suits. Former chief librarians. As we walked into Mr. Klein's office I was wondering why the chief dudes were all guys and the librarians were all women.

“Mr. Klein, this is Miss Bell. She's here to interview for the cataloguing project.”

“Have a seat Miss Bell. I don't know how much Miss Black has told you about the project.”

“Not much.” I was thinking he looked younger than I expected — maybe late twenties.

“Well, the grant is for three months and basically the job is to catalogue the library's historical photograph collection.”

“Yeah.”

The hours are nine to five, Monday to Friday.”

“OK.”

“Are you interested?”

“Yeah.”

“We're looking for someone to start right away.”

“OK.”

“OK, you can start right away?”

“Yeah.” I knew I sounded like an idiot but I couldn't think of anything else to say. I wasn't really paying attention because I was looking at his dark eyes and his black curly hair, which was pretty long for a chief librarian if you asked me. He had a weird accent and was wearing these thick, black-frame glasses, and I could see his lips moving but I was thinking … Woody Allen. This guy reminds me of Woody Allen. So I just kept nodding and saying, “Yeah.”

“Good, well you can start Monday then.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. Is that OK?

“Sure.”

Monday morning at five to nine I was standing at the front door of the library. It was locked, of course, because the library didn't open until ten. So I was standing there with my knees shaking and my palms sweating thinking maybe I should have paid more attention when Mr. Klein was talking instead of thinking about how long his hair was.

“Miss Bell?”

It was Mr. Klein.

“It's locked.” I said.

“I know, that's why I told you to use the back door. Follow me.”

I followed him around the building to a small door near the back parking lot.

“You can leave your coat here in the lunchroom. We have coffee at ten and we have tea around three in the afternoon. You're welcome to join us.”

I followed Mr. Klein into the basement, past the furnace room to a small room with cement walls and no windows.

“I'm sorry, it's not a great spot, but it's the only space we've got.”

“It's fine.” I said.

There was a small oak desk and chair, a grey metal filing cabinet and stacks of cardboard boxes piled up beside the cabinet. Mr. Klein opened one of the boxes.

“Go through each box; they're in no particular order. Each photo will need an accession number and you'll have to devise a numbering system. Once you've entered the number on the photo you can put the number on the index card along with a description of the photo. If the photo falls into several categories you can fill out additional index cards and cross-reference. Then, once you've finished with the photo you can put it into one of these acid-free envelopes.”

Now that really struck me as funny. I mean, acid-free envelopes — envelopes that weren't on acid?

Mr. Klein continued. “Put the accession number on the envelope, then file each photo numerically in this filing cabinet.”

“Right.”

“Any questions?”

“No.”

“Good. I'm just upstairs if you do have any questions.”

I was glad when he left. I sat down at my desk. Liked the sound of that, my desk. My office. My job. I had a job. Ha, good on ya, Molly. But I was going to lose it fast if I didn't get my shit together so I took a handful of photos out of the box and placed them on the desk beside the index cards. Numbering system. The first thing I had to do was come up with a numbering system. Not hard, I liked systems. I'm very anal that way.

I came up with a system where every photo got a number, starting with the number one, then the year of the photograph, like 1907, then the subject, like grain elevators or people:

1. 1897 — People — Wedding of Charles Tuppen and Vera Books.

2. 1908 — Elevators — Fire at Elevator B.

3. 1951
— Railway — Chief Andrew Bannon gives peace pipe to Donald Gordon, president of the C.P.R., Sept 27.

I had a stack of lined index cards and I wrote the number on the back of each photograph, then on the top corner of the index card. Then I wrote a description of the photo with as much information as I could find — names, buildings and addresses. I wrote an index card for the number, an index card for the year and an index card for the subject, and I cross-referenced each subject entry like crazy, sometimes doing a dozen cards for one photo. Like I said, I'm very anal.

6. 1911 — Ship industry — S.S. Duluth pulling into dry dock at the Western Dry Dock and Ship Building Co. circa 1911. Beside the freighter is a dump scow under construction.

7. 1870 — Banks — Teepee beside the site of the new Ontario Bank.

Teepee being pushed away for the bank, I thought. Two men with long braids are sitting on the ground outside the Teepee and a mean looking guy in a black suit and bowler hat is standing beside them. Find the banker.

8. 1919 — People — Mrs. J.G. Podowosky.

Dead. Dead as a doornail, propped up in a chair dressed in her Sunday best. The photo was taken at J.R. Evans Photography Studio, so I thought the family must have thrown dead granny into the back of a truck and schlepped her off to Evan's photo studio. The family is all crowded in behind her with their best funeral faces on, and a man behind granny has his hand on her shoulder. Probably propping her up so she doesn't fall over while J. R. Evans snaps the photo. I guess the photo is to show the folks back home that granny was well and truly dead.

9. 1890
— People — Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught visits Fort McKay, May.

He is standing there with this long curly moustache and a pinched look on his face like he's constipated.

10. 1904 — Communications — building the telegraph line from Heron Bay to Fort McKay. Left to right, George Peterson, Duncan McFee, Archibald Bell.

Archibald Bell, that's my great grandpa Archie. He was just a kid. Nice looking kid. I taped a photocopy of that photo above my desk. It was nice to look up and see my great grandpa smiling down on me.

11.1896—People—An unidentified man with four kids, all bundled in fur coats and fur hats, sitting on a sled pulled by two Newfoundland dogs.

Men going off to war. Men coming back from war. Men going off to another war. There was a photo of soldiers coming back from World War Two, getting off the train in South Fort. Between the train and the station was a long table filled with fancy rolled sandwiches with the crusts cut off and pots of tea and china teacups. On the back of the photo it said, “South Fort I.O.D.E. welcome men back from the front.” I.O.D.E — Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire — there's a mouthful. I figured those poor soldiers were probably more interested in getting their hands on a cold beer and a hot girl than a rolled cucumber sandwich.

Photos of men in lacrosse uniforms standing in a long line on a frozen lake. The guy at the end, the captain of the team, was my great grandpa Archie's brother Joe. He died in the flu epidemic of 1918.

Photos of miners at Silver Mountain in 1883, and loggers in the bush north of Papoonge, and the three long buildings of the Gowanlock brickyards. Photos of men digging ditches along the first roads. First Avenue 1919 with wooden boardwalks. First Avenue 1953 with brick storefronts.

If you looked hard enough you could see stuff. You could see how the Ojibwe lived beside the Stone Man for hundreds of years, hunting and fishing and living off the land, then everything flipped ass-over-tits when the Europeans arrived. Guys in kilts and French voyageurs in canoes chasing beaver. Well, not chasing beaver exactly, though I'm sure they did a lot of that, but trapping beavers for pelts to make hats for the rich dudes back in Britain. This whole country got turned ass-over-tits because of beavers and hats. That's Canada for you.

I found a hand-drawn map labelled “1878
” — around the time my great grandpa emigrated from Colonsay, Scotland. There were about twelve houses in a circle near the waterfront. My great grandpa helped to put up the first telegraph lines and his parents ran the telegraph office from their attic. Then came the railway and things went ass-over-tits again. The rails hooked the town up to the outside world. People came from all over — Sweden, Finland, Italy, the Ukraine. Buildings boomed, elevators boomed, jobs boomed. One minute there's nothing here but bush, then overnight it's the flippin Chicago of the North. Or at least that's what those rich Brits who ran the town thought. And I guess for a while it was. At least for them.

***

I got the hang of the cataloguing, and soon I couldn't wait to get to the library in the morning to see what I was going to find in my pile of photographs. Mr. Kline invited me up to the lunchroom for my breaks, but I wasn't interested in sitting around with a bunch of people I didn't know, trying to make nice. After a while he started coming downstairs in the afternoon with two mugs of tea. We got talking, and I realized he wasn't as stiff as he seemed when I first met him. It was pretty clear from his accent he wasn't from Fort McKay, so one day I finally asked him where he was from.

“New York,” he said.

“So what are you doing here?”

“Draft dodger.”

“You actually got drafted?”

“I did. Got my notice, packed a bag and flew to Canada that day.”

“OK, I get coming to Canada, but why Fort McKay?”

“I went to Montreal first and studied at McGill for a couple years. Then this job came up and here I am.”

“Can you ever go back?”

“I don't know. There might be an amnesty for draft dodgers once the war is over. Hard to say.”

“Must have been tough to leave your country not knowing if you can ever go back,” I said.

“I didn't have a choice. It was either come to Canada or fight in a war I didn't believe in.”

I remembered all the years of watching the Vietnam War on television — people getting blown up and burned up, and I knew that if I was a young guy living in the States I'd get my ass up to Canada too.

***

I started looking forward to my three o'clock visit from Mr. Klein. We'd drink tea and talk and as I listened to him talk about his life back in the States I realized we had something in common. We'd both been separated from our families, and we were both stuck in the bush in the middle of nowhere.

“Hey, look at this.” I passed Mr. Klein a photo I had found.

“What is it?”

“It's the Mariaggi Hotel in 1884, the year it was built. Says here it was considered one of the grandest hotels in Canada at the time.”

“Is it still standing?”

“Yeah, but it sure doesn't look like this. It's a dump. I think Social Services owns it now. A lot of homeless people live there.” I read from a newspaper clipping taped to the back of the photo: “The dining room was hung with Union Jacks from one end of the hall to the other and two long tables ran the length of the room. Around the tables was a miniature railway track with trains and a telegraph line making up the story of the completion of the track.”