Chapter 17
The new cast made a huge difference in what Jackson could accomplish for himself. It ended about two-thirds of the way up his forearm so he could bend his elbow. Aunt Helen gave him some ointment to rub onto the ugly scab in the crook of his arm. I’m sure she applied it herself when I wasn’t there but she was self-conscious now if she was nursing him when I was around.
My apology the day of the masturbation episode hadn’t been good enough to entirely smooth things over between us. I had been insincere and hadn’t succeeded in hiding that. Helen had accepted my apology but had been horribly uncomfortable. I imagined that she wanted to add her own apology to the mix but wasn’t able to because of the outlandish circumstances. And there was too much still going on, too many powerful and awkward feelings hanging heavily in the atmosphere of the house. The situation between us seemed unmendable to me; I suspect Helen thought so too.
She knew she was in the doghouse permanently; I could see it in her frightened face. It was a doghouse of her own design and I certainly couldn’t get her out of it even if I wanted to. Her arguments on her own behalf died before she could get them out of her mouth. Looking at her face, I watched them die. Hers was a wasted love born in some oddball corner of hell. At least that was the way I saw it. But it was love, nonetheless; when I wasn’t busy with plans for her death I felt pity for her. Maybe Jackson reminded her of her lost soldier from Passchendaele.
I despised him, but my body craved him. If I could just kiss him once, I thought, he would want me too. How could he not? Helen was just an irritant; he couldn’t possibly have the same types of feelings for her that I was sure she had for him. I made up reasons why he held himself back from me: my dad, for one. I even convinced myself that he stayed away because he knew if he came close he would be a goner and he didn’t want to fall so hard at this stage in his life.
When no one was around I stole a wiener from the fridge, locked myself in the bathroom and practised giving it a hand job. That was what the boys at school called it. My effort was unsatisfactory. My whole hand was too big for the wiener and using just my thumb and first finger had a pernickety feel to it that I knew shouldn’t be part of the experience. Isabelle had told me about a girl in grade twelve named Barbara Schulz who put on a glove — one of those white cotton Sunday school gloves — before she touched her boyfriend’s dick. She carried it in her purse and then hauled it out when the occasion arose. I don’t know how Isabelle knew those kind of details; she knew a lot. I didn’t want to be pernickety, like Barbara.
Also, the wiener was fairly limp and it not being attached to anything was a problem. I wondered about fixing it in my dad’s vise in the basement. It was attached to his worktable — a present from Helen one long-ago Christmas. When I finally gave up in frustration I decided it was too risky to flush the wiener down the toilet. Imagine if it didn’t go down and I had to explain wiener pieces floating. So I took it to the river in a handful of toilet paper. I threw it over the bank and pocketed the toilet paper to take back home to flush. Hopefully some creature would find the wiener and it wouldn’t go to waste.
Thoughts of Jackson wouldn’t let me be. I could not accept that he didn’t want me. Pokes of knowledge nudged me, telling me to wise up, but I couldn’t. If he would just allow for it, I could wait forever. Through both our lifetimes I could wait for him.
Benny Boat turned up pretty much on schedule, three days after Jackson had his cast changed, just about the time my dad would have started hinting that it was time for Jackson to hit the road. Benny didn’t come back alone. He had a Negro with him that he had met in the sugar beet fields near Taber, Alberta. The Negro’s name was Tag and he was even skinnier than Benny. He was the thinnest human being I had ever seen.
They came on a Thursday to hook up with Jackson. They had ridden in on a boxcar and were tired and filthy and starving. Lines ran down their faces where sweat had worked through the grime. And both of them had black rings around their eyes.
“A surefire way of knowing a man’s been riding the rails,” said Helen. “When the smoke and grit and ash settle in around his eyes.”
Tag was so glad to meet Jackson; it was like he was being reunited with a long-lost friend.
“I’ve heard so much about you, man,” he said. “And I like what I heard.”
Jackson looked at Benny as Tag shook his hand, and Benny looked away.
I wondered what the heck excellent things Benny’d had to say about Jackson to make Tag warm up to him so immediately. I think my dad wondered too; he looked perplexed. Helen just looked as happy as could be. No one had to explain to her what was so danged great about Jackson.
“Well, I declare,” said Aunt Helen, “you’re the thinnest man on two feet. I’m surprised the wind hasn’t lifted you up and taken you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
There was no work for them in the west. As far as the Okanagan, which was as far as Benny went, there were hundreds more men than jobs.
Tag had been even farther, had made it to the coast. He was looking for his younger brother, Duke, who had set out on his own a few weeks earlier to look for work. He hadn’t told anyone he was leaving, just left a note for his family to find one morning. Duke was only fifteen and there had been no word of him since his departure. Tag’s parents were worried sick and Tag had offered to go searching.
He had started out from Detroit and made the same trek west as Benny, only south of the border. No word of Duke, not a peep, and no work prospects either. When Tag got to Bellingham, Washington he walked over the line into Canada to see if things were any better here. They weren’t. But Tag began to hear stories about a young coloured boy from Detroit and he followed those stories to Alberta where he had met Benny.
“Me, too, I had heard of young Duke,” said Benny, “but never met him. And someone in Taber said a Negro boy had been through with talk of Winnipeg. He would not stop his talk of Winnipeg, according to the man, so I talk to Tag, convince him, as you say, to return with me. We think his brother could be here.”
Aunt Helen insisted on feeding them and washing their clothes. And then the arguments began between her and my dad. Helen thought the men should pitch their tents in the yard and stay for a few days till they were rested and fed to capacity and had some inkling of what they were going to do next.
“What about the offer from Ennis Foote?” she said.
I was still unsure of Helen’s motives and I was rooting for her once more.
If our house was a curiosity to neighbours before Tag arrived, it was like a full-blown circus attraction now. There were no coloured people in our neighbourhood. There were very few in the whole of Winnipeg. We didn’t have many Chinese or other Asian types either. There was Sam Lee at the laundry on Taché; he was the only one I knew. And there was a Chinese restaurant next door to the laundry, relatives of Sam’s, I think, but I didn’t know them. My dad wouldn’t let us eat Chinese food.
We had Italians in our neighbourhood, Quint Castellano and his extended family, a few Ukrainians and other eastern Europeans like the Popkoviches, and, of course, French and the varying combinations of Métis. But mostly they lived on the other side of St. Mary’s Road. In the Norwood Flats we were practically wall-to-wall Anglo-Saxon. No full-blooded Indians and for sure no Negroes.
My dad didn’t know what to do. He wanted them out of there.
All Tag talked about was grasshoppers. Coming from downtown Detroit, he had heard of them, of course, and even seen a few in his time, but nothing like what was happening on the prairies.
“I’ve never been so afraid,” he said. “I thought it was the end of the world when I first saw them coming. A plague of locusts.”
We were sitting on lawn chairs in the backyard: Tag, Benny, Helen, Jackson, Dad, and me. It was evening of the day they arrived and no decision had been made yet as to where the men would make camp.
“Have you ever been in a grasshopper storm, ma’ams?” Tag looked at Helen and then me. He seemed afraid of my dad. Rightly so.
We both shook our heads, no.
“It’s scary, ma’ams, let me tell you. They come in a cloud of millions and black out the sky. I’m not joking. And they leave this juice behind — grasshopper juice — and it makes everything slippery and sticky. You get it on your clothes and on your skin till you want to scream. Man, I’ve never been so scared. They had to stop the train, didn’t they, Ben?”
Benny nodded, yes. Tag was talkative enough for both of them.
“I’m telling you, they stopped the train. It couldn’t get any traction because of the slippery glop from the grasshoppers on the tracks.”
“Ugh!” I said.
“Yes, ma’am!” he said.
Tag had completed his grade twelve in Detroit that spring. He was eighteen years old. His mum saw to it that he graduated. Tag was the first kid in his extended family to finish high school. There were five brothers and sisters at home (without Duke) and they weren’t starving. Both the parents had work. They were furious with Duke and scared stiff for him. So they agreed to let Tag go after him, figuring him to be the sensible one. Tag hadn’t been able to find work anyway, so he headed west. There would be one less mouth to feed at home, he reasoned, and perhaps he could find some sort of work and send a few dollars back to his folks along with his brother. He had no doubt that he would find him.
“He’s in this city. I just know it,” Tag said now.
“You’ve been a long way from home,” said my dad. “What part of Detroit do you live in? I know the city a little.”
“Yes, sir. Black Bottom, sir. Brush Street. The only part of the city for the likes of me and my family.”
My dad blushed. “Of course, son. I’m sorry.”
“No way for you to know, sir.”
My dad was quiet after that. He was out of his depth. He didn’t know what kinds of questions to ask Negroes.
Helen didn’t hang their clothes on the line till after dark when the wind died down. They still wouldn’t dry completely clean, but there was no winning against the dust. If anyone could have won the dust battle it would have been Helen; she tried hard enough. She’d be up before dawn to take in the clothes before the wind came up again.
They slept in the yard overnight. Jackson joined them outside. I guess he didn’t feel right carrying on in the lap of luxury the way he’d been. No one argued. Tag set up a small umbrella tent of his own, the type with a pole in the centre.
It was good to have Benny back with us. The murmurs of the men lulled me to sleep. Their voices were low and serious: plans for the future, I guessed, what the heck to do next.
I slept soundly that night and halfway through the next morning. It was the best sleep I’d had in weeks, maybe because Jackson was no longer down the hall. I hadn’t lain awake trying to get a satisfying breath like I did on so many other nights, when over and over I would breathe in deeply but never deeply enough. I couldn’t get that last bit of air inside me, the one I really needed.
It would have been my last day at work. I didn’t pretend to go and no one seemed to notice. Whether or not I went to work was so far down on both Dad’s and Helen’s lists of preoccupations it likely didn’t even register. When I looked out my bedroom window I saw an empty yard. The tents were gone. I ran downstairs in my nightie and found Helen in the kitchen.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Gone,” she said, busy at the stove.
“What do you mean gone?”
I would never see Jackson again. The worst that could happen had happened. I would never get to kiss him. He would never save me from anything.
“Your father made a grand announcement this morning that they couldn’t stay here any longer,” said Helen. “He got up on his high horse and told them in so many words that they would have to leave.”
“How could he do that?” I asked. “How could he just…do that?”
She turned to face me. “Your dad isn’t a mean man, Violet. He’s just very…proper. He cares about what people think of him. Like the neighbours.”
“The neighbours! The neighbours be damned! Did they have breakfast at least?”
“Yes, of course.”
Helen had fed the men oatmeal porridge, fried eggs, toast, and coffee. When they were done eating they’d packed up their tents and clean clothes and headed out. I had slept through the whole thing.
My dad was probably glad of that.
“Where did they go?” I asked. “Did they know where they were going?”
“I’m not sure. They weren’t sure.”
“Did you tell them about Mr. Foote’s offer?”
“I did.”
“Where is he?” I asked. “Where’s Dad?”
“He’s out back with the garage. He bought some paint.”
“This is crazy,” I said. “So he cares about what people think of him, does he? Does he want them to think that he turns away starving men in their time of need?”
“I’d like to sock him one,” Helen said quietly.
She was cooking. And she was cooking for a large group, by the look of it. There was a giant pot of potatoes boiling on the stove and chicken pieces sizzling in the fry pan.
“Are you having a party?” I asked.
“The boys have been invited back for supper,” she said matter-of-factly as she stuck a fork into a thigh and flipped it over.
I laughed. “Who invited them?”
“Me.”
“Does Dad know?”
“Not yet, no.”
“I’ll go and tell him,” I said and kissed Helen on the cheek.
“Would you mind, dear?” She smiled.
It felt good to be in on something with Helen again.
So the men joined us for supper in the yard. We set the picnic table and they ate like starving wolves. Carrots and stewed tomatoes and corn bread rounded out the chicken and the potato salad and there was rice pudding with raisins for dessert. We drank a gallon of iced tea and laughed a lot.
Jackson seemed glad to be back with Benny. Tag told a few more stories about grasshoppers and even my dad seemed to enjoy himself. I think he felt badly about asking the men to leave and having them back for a meal eased his conscience. He was so torn. I could feel it emanating from him. He felt for them and wanted to help them, but he was also overly conscious of the way it would look to the community, with young me and ever-friendly Helen mixing it up with these strange men. It had been hard enough on him having Jackson in the house without adding a coloured man to the picture.