When I was quite young, I had the measles.42 Everyone did in those days and lots of people died from measles too. It wasn’t just a childhood disease that you got and got over. In isolated places it was dreaded, especially by families with very young children.
Why measles just now? Well we have had visitors to stay a few days and everything had to be uprooted and scrubbed beforehand and I’ve cleaned windows and cars and shampooed rugs and stuff till I’m exhausted. For supper I cooked fish the way Mother did, but either the fish, or I, wasn’t up to scratch, because I was told it was nowhere like my mother made it, so I’ve been taking a spell, and I’ve been staring at a patterned cushion, and finding out all the things I can see in it that aren’t supposed to be there.
If you look long enough, you can see things in any intricate pattern, like wallpaper, or our neighbour’s tree branches. It’s windy tonight and I can see in the branches a perfect dog on a leash trying to run, while a lady in a fearsome hat holds him back by brandishing a whip over his head. The neighbour, Mr. Tye, doesn’t know that dog is there and is going to cut that tree down, and if he does he’ll be sorry one day even if he does go to church regularly.
Where do measles come into this? Well, when I had them, my room, which wasn’t mine but my cousin’s (we had measles together), was kept dark because of our eyes. I used to lie there and see things in the seams of the ceiling that was put up long before drywall, plaster, or any of the things they use now to prevent kids from seeing all sorts of unimaginable things while they have measles. They did have wallpaper in those days though, and poor was the house that didn’t change its floral patterns every twelve months. Geometric patterns weren’t popular, though some of them did have neat things hiding in them. I was sure I was doomed to Hell and Damnation one time when I discovered something interesting in Aunt Mary Harnett’s wallpaper.
Aunt Mary’s sitting room, which in those days was only opened one, for special visitors, two, when the minister came, or three, when someone was finished with this mortal coil and qualified to be laid out in his probably one and only suit with his eyes closed and his mouth shut. See what crazy things kids notice? They buried one old fisherman with a button on his vest undone and I felt badly about him stomping along to the Throne in his heavy sea boots and getting sent to Hell for being improperly dressed, but my dad said not to worry. The old man, who was a bit of a case anyway, would likely catch it for other reasons, not the least of which was a fondness for black rum. I felt better, but I was about to tell you why I was personally on the way to H & D.
Well, Aunt Mary (she wasn’t my aunt of course; it’s an honorary title that anyone who lived to get grey hair was given), well, her sitting room with its heavy table with an even heavier Bible in the centre of it, had floral wallpaper. Roses I guess, not like roses I had ever seen, but fullblown roses on Fogo are a bit rare anyway.
In those days there were no bathing suits as you might see today, that are so low on the top and so high on the sides that one wonders how people stay in them, so kids had little idea of the Female Form Divine except that it consisted of a head, frequently very tired and harassed, at the top, and a pair of laced up boots on the bottom. Everything in between was mostly black with a white apron on the front. Strangely enough though, when small babies needed comfort and sustenance, mothers would deftly release a part of themselves that the babies liked very much. Little girls would go right up and touch the baby, but boys were taught that they must not look at this interesting display, and should avert the eye or leave the room.
Well one day, Sunday of course, visiting at Aunt Mary’s with my dad and not being overly interested then in stories about people long dead (for which failing I have constantly reproached myself), I was looking at the roses in the wallpaper and suddenly I saw not one, but two of these interesting objects pertaining to my idea of the Female Form Divine wherever I looked. Perhaps the designer saw what I saw, I wouldn’t know, but not only were they there, they were there in innocent profusion. I stared till Aunt Mary asked what was wrong with me. I was caught. Before I could think of H & D, I had blurted out my find, and the poor old lady was shocked beyond belief. Our visit came to an abrupt end. The sitting room door was locked and my dad and I walked home. He smoked his pipe and seemed to cough a good deal.
Word got around, of course, and Aunt Mary had a lot of kids to visit in the next days. The sitting room was locked, blinds drawn. Much later I heard my dad tell his friend Gilbert that once you looked the way I described, it was obvious enough. Roses for those who saw roses, and for those destined for H & D, stronger fare. And Playboy thought they started it all!
If you had measles, you probably had them at home, missed school for a while or lost some summer holiday days. Me? I had measles on the top of a cliff fronting the Atlantic Ocean, and if you sailed straight away from the front of my uncle’s house, the next land after Funk Island was Ireland. Made it seem quite close and homelike to know that over that line on the horizon was the old turf, black house people who hated Cromwell and somewhere the Boyne River, the name of which was never spoken without a sigh, even though many of us had no idea why the sigh till we went to school and read history.
If you are going to have measles then, the place to have them is in an old house on the top of a crag looking at the great swells coming in perhaps from Ireland itself. The time to have measles is when the ocean is angry and turbulent, when the grey rollers come crashing into the cliffs incessantly, trying to batter them down, when the rain clouds scurry by and water falls from the sky to meet the saltwater flung up by the sea. The old house should be so near the edge of the cliff that the front windows run with sea spray, and if there should be a crack in the glass you can hold a finger there and taste the salt, feel a strange emotion that is entirely unlike the emotion one feels when swimming in the sea on a sunny day. Spray from a south-east gale tastes different, more remote, foreign, unknown, as if it came from the very bottom of the sea, undisturbed for centuries.
So my measles were to the tune of the gale and the wind and the rain. I could not have asked for a better way to be ill. We had just arrived in Wild Cove, my father’s home, a village straggling for half a mile along the top of the cliffs. The houses were small, so we went wherever there was room, and of course my brothers and sisters all had measles too, as well as the rest of the village kids. Despite the storm, my parents had to bring us food from house to house. They didn’t enjoy our measles.
For two days, I didn’t. I was too sick. But when I got a bit better and wanted out, of course I was refused, and I stayed indoors with my cousin, who had lived on the top of the cliff all his life and saw little to be ecstatic about. How I wanted to go out and be part of the wind, rain and sea. When I went to bed, the little brook that ran through the centre of the village and supplied the drinking water was a modest little stream with what looked like a ridiculously high wood bridge spanning it. Two days of constant heavy rain turned the brook into a torrent that not only reached the high bridge, but actually ran across the plank top. People wore rubber boots and walked to the middle of the bridge and dipped up their pails of water. From our room I could see how the usually peaceful little brook now tried to tear the pails out of people’s hands. I wanted to be out there so badly.
Then my mother would come with my meal, scold me for having the blind up, though the days were so grey that one would wonder if there was a sun any more. So I’d go back to staring at the seams and the wallpaper, seeing all sorts of things in them, images born of the storm and the tumult outside and probably being just as hard on my eyes anyway. All in all, I enjoyed my measles, though I desperately wished I could be outside. One thing, though. The storm lasted so long that I was nearly recovered and my mother said I could go out first fine day.
I awoke early one morning. The rain could not be heard on the roof and the light in the room was different. I could hear the sea crashing against the land, and, when I raised the blind, the sun was just coming out of the sea and looking on a clean washed land. People tended to keep sick rooms closed and a week of storm hadn’t helped. I dressed and went quietly outside, and the world was all my own. There was no one else. The sheep, horses, and goats were showing up from wherever they had sheltered. A few chickens were scratching around but not too hopefully. Everything was wringing wet. There was no wind and the air was like cool water on a hot day. Just to breathe was pure pleasure.
I came to the bridge, and the stream was still flowing across. Measles and complications or no, there was no way I could cross that bridge except in bare feet, and I did so. The water was cold, cold, but so unexplainably good. I walked along the top of the cliff watching the great combers come ashore. I saw beach rocks the size of grapefruit thrown high in the air, and as the wave receded, I heard the stones that had been thrown into the cliff rattling back into the sea only to be flung high again on the next wave.
Perhaps the confinement for the measles helped to make liberty that much sweeter. I can’t say, but never again have I thought of measles as a thing to fear. Rather, the combination of measles, the great and unusual summer storm, and the brisk and beautiful day that followed has always seemed to be one of the truly wonderful experiences of my childhood.
If you round Cape Freels now, and head nor-west or thereabouts toward Stag Harbour Run, you will see the tidy little villages of Lumsden and Carmanville on your port hand. On your starboard is a line of cliffs, bare, uninhabited, given over to the horses and sheep, and perhaps the ghosts of the people who once lived there. The little graveyard is probably long overgrown with willow and alder, but I would bet that a few graves will show signs of recent care. People who have lived in such impossibly isolated and remote places don’t just up and leave. They will go back and put their feet in the almost invisible paths where the long dead people walked. They will clear the encroaching brush away from a grave, and they will sit on the boulders at the top of the cliff and look toward Holy Ireland, and while breath is in their body they will never forget.
What is there to remember? Years of toil, years of poverty when the Great Depression crushed the fishermen almost into the very rock. They remember that, though there are fewer and fewer people who are left to remember. They remember the days after a storm and they remember those who were taken by the sea. They remember the hopelessness of the widow with a young family and they remember the dazed look in a man’s eyes as he stumbled away from a fresh grave, home to his family who now had no mother. And they remember the great kindness and spirit that gathered round to help the afflicted. They remember the bad days and the better days. They remember the sun lifting out of the calm water when the ocean is like a mill pond, and they remember the chill days when the Arctic ice crowded close ashore bringing the seal herds, and men went walking over the floating ice, so far out that the land was only a loom to the west, walking into the danger of storm or freezing, of being adrift on ice that moved even farther from land.
They accepted the hardship and danger as well, risked if there were a few skins to sell for cost, some meat for the family. Perhaps you will tell me that a man will not walk twenty miles over the ocean when at any moment his next step might be his last, and return rejoicing if he can figure that he made somewhere between one dollar and three, rarely more, in a day.
They will come back to the cliffs and they will feel the past and they will be happy to have been a part of that fearful struggle to stay alive and independent. And, one by one, they will go, never to return, and they will lay their bones elsewhere. And, one day, not too far away, no one will come back, except the odd tourist or someone looking for a lost horse. I like to think that the ghosts will meet near where their little church stood, and where they gathered on those rare days that a minister said prayers, that they will smoke their spirit pipes and yarn as they once did in the days before the world became small. The graveyard will disappear and the only memorial to those incredible people will be the cliffs where they chose to live, and this memorial will stand for all time to come, as long as the seas come thundering in from the old sod, which they loved and never saw. There is something inexpressibly sad about a deserted settlement, especially to one who saw it alive. There would be no point in ever going back, but I will never forget the sea the storms and the people.
It’s been a strange week. We had visitors and saw Lower Fort Garry, the Selkirk Marine Museum, and all the things one shows visitors, but to me it was a time of grief and backward looking. My old friend Buster Brown died Friday evening.
It was a merciful release but one cannot experience such a thing without thinking about what it all means. Here was a man who at seventeen joined an army to go to France to fight in a war that he really knew little about. Wounded, he was invalided home, recovered, joined the RCMP and went to the Arctic where he travelled and explored for RCMP several years. He then joined HBC and, for the next forty years, worked in a variety of capacities, always following new and sometimes controversial ideas, always producing results for his Company.
The doctors said he wasn’t aware, that he knew and felt nothing, but I know he did feel, that he had fears. I have been with him here at Deer Lodge when he seemed to be quite passive, when he didn’t ever seem to know that I was there, and his face would twist with fear and he’d fight the restraints that held him in his chair and suddenly he would scream, “Help me, help me,” and once he stopped screaming and looked at me and said, in a perfectly reasonable but terrified voice, “Can you help me to get out of here.” I got an orderly and we put him in his bed and he reached out and took my hand and held it tightly till he went to sleep.
This was my best friend. Our paths first crossed in the Arctic where we worked together many years. Nature is a reasonable mother. She seems to have a plan, but why she takes a man who was mentally and physically way above the average and reduces him to this is beyond imagination. I am to be a pallbearer on Thursday.
I was asked to speak at the funeral. That I was unable and unfit to do. Can I stand before a church full of people, not one of whom knew Buster in the way I did, and talk about him while he lies there forever silent? Can I say in the time allowed what he did, what he meant. Can I say why it was one of the fiercest determinations of my life to see this man awarded the Order of Canada for his efforts on behalf of her and her northern citizens?
In my limited command of the language there are no words to express these things, and a funeral is not the place perhaps to say them. So I have passed that burden to Shirlee Smith who will say simple and compassionate words of goodbye to a man that she has always admired and respected, a man who was forceful and strong, a man that not everyone liked because of his absolute respect for law, order and loyalty, and a man that no one can ever say other than that he was completely and unreservedly honest in all his dealing. If a man ever stood on the earth who was equal in my affection with my own father, that man was W.E. Brown, who I would like to hope, left me a better man and his country a better place.
I am rambling. Old men tend to do that. Old men tend to grieve over things that cannot be altered. There are many rules that direct us and one rule is that people die. Another is that no one can ever stop it. Five years ago I actually said goodbye to Buster, in his apartment late at night, when we had talked of old times old friends, old events for hours on end. He knew of the malignant thing that had taken possession of him, and he said, “Len, there is something going wrong in my head. The doctors can’t do a thing about it. When the time comes be patient with me. Above all, never leave me.” That I could promise and I have seen him regularly and watched the terrible thing take his reason, take his speech, and now take his very life. If I could have said one thing to him before he died, it would be, “Buster, I have never left you.” And that, Claudia, in this whole sad event, is the thing that gives me some comfort.
Buster was not a superstitious man. He had no problems with passing people on stairs, spilling salt or any of the silly things that people occupy themselves with. But long years ago, sitting half-frozen in a shack in Churchill, waiting out a storm, he said to me that while he had no use for such things, he had noticed that news of a death is often followed by news of two others. Why? He wouldn’t guess. I guess I smiled because he said, just wait, you will see one day.
Well, I sincerely hope that Buster is now sitting some place yarning with two of his great friends, L.A. Learmonth and W.O. Douglas, and I hope that they can take a few seconds off as I write this, because Buster, as usual, you have the last word. Within hours of your death and of my knowledge of it, I was advised of two totally unexpected deaths. Now have your laugh and go back to your yarns, but before you go, Buster, best of friends, I meant every word I wrote a few moments ago.
Now I’m away. Will phone you soon, and find out when it will be convenient for me to drop by.
Best of everything, Len.
One must thank one’s hosts for the kind and considerate things they do for a guest and one may search his mind for the proper words. They never are quite what he wants to say, but I have a special window in my fortress of recollections through which I can see the very special things that happen. I have a new and precious addition to that recollection: a parrot, hummingbirds, chipmunks, a furry masked man at the door for a handout,43 long soul-soothing conversations, and the friendship of cherished people.
So what else? Well a bear, perhaps two years old, in blueberry country. He was feeding along the road. A porcupine trying to cross the road. He was almost halfway when I saw him, so, stubborn like all porky’s, he stopped and shook up his quills. I tried to be reasonable, said, “Why don’t you keep going. A car can hit you here.” He said never a word. Just looked at me. So I got a stick and tried to prod him along. What do you think he did? Went back to the side he started from. Of course he did. He was a porcupine, wasn’t he?
Shirlee Smith wants the Repulse story. I sent it to you as a piece called “Mercy Mission.” The reason she wants it is that it never got much publicity at the time. HBC was a bit embarrassed at letting their stocks fall so low, a bit more embarrassed about clearing the store out in favour of a camp trade at Wagar Inlet so as to have clean shelves at Repulse for the goods which never came. The people who made or agreed to those events played their cards close to their vest and there was never much that got to the archives or Mrs. Smith. The then-personnel manager advised me when I came out that Buster Brown had told him that he felt I was due a bonus, but they were not giving me one because officially I hadn’t done anything remarkable, only what I was paid to do. He also said he would take a dim view if I spoke to the media or did anything foolish in that direction. It didn’t bother me because generally I felt the same way, though I would have been glad to accept the bonus.
So Shirlee wants the Repulse thing, though she won’t find any HB House gossip there. Obviously a certain amount got into the papers. Some place we have the clippings and it’s easy to see how the information was restricted as much as possible. It was a bad few years for HBC from a publicity point of view: the Fort Ross evacuation, the Repulse incident and the loss of the Nascopie, one following closely on the other.
The wreck of the gallant Neophyte, on the other hand, received little or no attention. Too bad, because it, in its way, was quite a story and goes to show that a man will sometimes go to sea in an unseaworthy vessel and survive, when as Capt. Shaw says, he has to have the heart of a lion just to board the ship.
Briefly, Neophyte was a Dutch canal barge, with an ancient hot-bulb diesel that could help the horses get her around the canals, but for use in open sea she was useless. Somehow she arrived in Churchill in several pieces during the construction of the port. She was put back together, and because of her long deck that was mostly hatch, she was to be used to carry dredged material out to sea and dump it. She didn’t work well in that trade, as they couldn’t get a clam down her hatches without tearing her half apart, so she was tied up, used for storage and, as usual on government jobs, she had a skipper and an engineer to live aboard and keep her painted and polished for no earthly reason.
So when the war came, and freights became heavier and heavier, the HBC bought the Neophyte to carry cargo around Hudson’s Bay. A mistake to be sure, but needs must when the devil drives.
She actually made several voyages. She could snort along at four or five knots in good weather and going downhill. When she hit headwinds, she was lucky to stay in the same place, just bobbing up and down. Usually, she wasn’t lucky, and with full power ahead, she drifted astern. Eric Carlson was her captain and a braver man never went afloat.
The wreck? Glad you asked. Well she left Churchill bound for Severn. The weather was bad, heavy winds, fog, high seas. The winds were behind her and for once she scooted south at a fair rate, though her decks were continually awash. When Eric figured she was somewhere abeam of Severn, he headed her into the wind, hoping to be able to hang around till the visibility improved so he could find Severn. You see, at the time, none of these rivers were properly buoyed or marked. At low tide, the HBC managers would send men out in canoes and they’d stick small spruce trees in the sand to mark the channel. Honest. On the ship they had all the complicated navigational aids you would expect on a canal barge, plus a slightly more modern magnetic compass, which in that area of variation is slightly more useful than a straw in the wind.
Anyway, the gale increased. Neophyte was driven south past Severn, and by the time the gale blew itself out, the crew were exhausted. So when Eric managed to claw back to the Severn area, he was ready to take most any risk just to find shelter. And in a way, luck was with him. He managed to find one of the spruce trees still standing. I should mention that the land is so flat in that area and the shoals and sandbanks extend so far off, that even when one finds the trees he still had a long way to go before he even sees land, and the channels are by no means straight. While generally heading west, you are pointing every which way as you follow the forest to land.
Well most of the trees were gone, but with a much higher than usual tide, the Neophyte and her crew staggered from tree to tree, sometimes going aground, but always making some sort of progress. At last they could see land. Success was nearly in their grasp when suddenly, in all those miles of sand, Neophyte found the only large boulder for miles and miles, and she sat squarely on top of it, in fairly rough water. The inevitable happened. Neophyte was heavily loaded, her bottom could not stand the strain. The plates ruptured and the boulder entered, since it is a fact that two objects of the same size cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Eric saw the hatches bulge upward and as the strain became heavier on the falling tide, the hatches gave way and cases of canned goods, oranges, spuds and the like erupted through the deck.
Neophyte was a gonner. At dead low tide, there was no water to be seen except that in the channel, but Neophyte wasn’t in the channel, she was half a mile off. That’s what happens when you lose the trees. We went there to pick up the crew shortly after, and Captain Barbour of the Fort Severn and I went to see the wreck. She was submerged at high water except for the pilot house and masts. At low water, one could stand on the boulder that had wrecked her. It stood inside the hatches and level with their top. It just about filled the whole cargo space of the vessel. Today there are huge self-unloading and loading bulk carrying vessels. Way back in 1947, Neophyte actually unloaded herself, though not to anyone’s advantage, but as far as I know, she never made the national news. Buster Brown had the old hot-bulb removed and we hauled it back to Churchill in the Fort Severn. He thought it would be a museum piece, but no one was interested and it sat in the pier shed in Churchill then disappeared. Too bad. They are not to be found on this side of the water now.
As usual, your letter was a delight. I can see you with the snow and the woods at Clarendon all wrapped cosily about you. You know when I was small and we lived at Rigolet, our house was on slightly higher ground than the rest of the HBC post, which was all that was there. The hills ran back quite steeply but were covered with a dense forest of spruce, fir, birch, tamarack and willow. We had lots of snow so close to the Atlantic. A single fall of four feet was normal, so usually it looked like a Christmas card. The green trees would be all heaped with snow. There were white buildings with red roofs and trim, and little pathways from house to house. The ice pans drifted silently past on the outgoing tide only to return on the next flow. I may have been bitterly cold but Claudia, it looked warm.
The sleigh dogs would curl up their tails over their noses and sleep the winter night away, only awakening now and then for no apparent reason, to howl in response to a howl heard from another team probably ten miles away north some place. Their howl was passed from team to team all along the coast miles and miles to the south. After they had howled, they carefully trod their beds again, then settled down to sleep. If it snowed, all that could be seen when daylight came was a hump here another there, but the first rattle of the door had them on their feet and they too looked warm.
After a calm night of frost the harbour was frozen. Will or my father would take an ice chisel and test the ice, marking the limits of safety with little clumps of the ice they chipped out when testing. Then we could go skating on this great big outdoor rink that never needed shovelling. That’s a luxury.
Sometimes mild weather prevented the ice from freezing immediately. So what? In every direction there was a hill. A few passes up and down with snowshoes, and overnight it was ready to slide on.We used miniature Eskimo komatiks, homemade toboggans with only half curl, easy to make but the hard upper edge accounted for many a nose bleed for the careless. We also used barrel or puncheon staves. If the cooper was in a good mood, perhaps we’d get a four-and-a-half-foot oak stave that could be planed and polished to a mirror finish. We never stood or sat on them, always knelt on one knee. Imagine it, a kid perched on one knee, the other leg held straight out behind, like Katerina Witt, though hardly as graceful. Hands in pockets, again the careless ones, and we’d go down hill like rockets. When one knee got sore from kneeling on the hard wood, substitute the other knee.
When both knees were sore and cold, head for the old dog feed house, where there was a fireplace five feet long, and perhaps half a dozen men, trappers and hunters, in to buy supplies, busily cooking meat and seal fat to feed their hungry teams. There were ten or so irons to hang the big iron pots on. The size of the fire depended on the number of cooks. There was never a problem in getting a warm-up. Most of the light was provided by the fire but there was a coal oil lantern hung high on the rafters. It was always lit, but the glass was so smoked up that all that could be seen was a sulky glow among the smoke from the fire, the steam from the pots, and the fumes from half a dozen black pipes stuck in their owners’ faces. They smoked plug tobaccos, hard as a rock, black as Satan’s heart.
If sliding and skating palled, though they never did for me, the older kids could follow the hard-packed dog team trail across the portage path about a mile, to a lake where we’d fish for trout through the ice. The trout were not large and not very plentiful, but we had fun and were proud when our catch appeared on the table.
But I do remember the frosty fall mornings when everything was so beautiful that it was an exquisite pain in the chest to see it, and I’d get up early so that I could go check my rabbit line. Perhaps have time to climb the highest hill where the migrating ptarmigan used to stop to feed on the millions of black berries, (service berries) that grew here. If one could get a few of those astonishingly quick and shy birds, he felt rewarded for the work he had put in, and doubly rewarded when they were the main course for Sunday’s dinner.
The customs officer at Rigolet was Capt. William Parsons, old when I first remembered him, and ancient when he finally quit the job. He was a small man with a white goatee and he was peppery too. He must have been in his eighties when I first remember him. He lived in the customs house and, with his equally ancient tidewaiter, ate all his meals at our house. With our family, the HBC clerks and Pappy, as everyone called him, and John Smith, there were fourteen or fifteen people sitting at our big table for every meal.
It was not easy for my mother to prepare meals for such a crowd.44 Almost all vegetables had to be imported and we ate venison, seal, cod, salmon, birds of all sorts, and trout and smelt when they were available. Pappy liked his “country meal” and except for bear, which he refused to touch, he ate anything. Well, to be exact, bear too, if it were referred to as venison. Anyway, when “fall meat” was on the table, he’d enquire which of us was responsible for the rabbits or partridge. Once when I’d made a fairly adequate donation, he remarked that some day I might amount to something. Since Pappy doted on my two sisters and apparently loathed all boys, I figured that was as close to the old man’s heart as I’d ever get and was suitably impressed.
Newfoundland governments had a way of changing rapidly in those days, and when it changed, it really showed. All patronage appointments were terminated immediately after an election to make room for the incoming recipients. Well, one time Pappy’s luck ran out. His powerful friends couldn’t help him. Anyway, he was nearing ninety, and for years my father had done all his work, which wasn’t much anyway, for him. Pappy’s son, Ralph Parsons was the last fur trade commissioner of the HBC. He happened to be at Cartwright when the election results came through.
The men to replace Pappy and John were already on their way to Rigolet. So to save Pappy unnecessary strain, R.P. sent a boat from Cartwright to Rigolet to warn Pappy to be ready to go. The boat came late at night, long after Pappy had gone to bed. The orders were that he was to be awakened and given the telegram, no matter what the time might be. So, with some misgivings, my father walked over to the customs house to awaken Pappy. The old man had a dicey ticker and Dad was a bit apprehensive as to how Pappy might react. But he woke him anyway. The old fellow immediately feared that his equally ancient wife had had an accident and asked my dad to read the telegram to him. When he got it, he laughed and said, “If John Snow (the new customs officer) wants this bed he’s going to wait till I get my sleep. Tell the missus that I’m going to be late for breakfast,” and he rolled over and went back to sleep. Snow arrived the next morning and waited forlorn while the old man took his time, had his sleep, his breakfast around eleven, then calmly packed up his belongings and left the place to John Snow. He chuckled when he told my mother that he’d accidentally broken the big teapot that morning, and that John Smith had “clean forgot” to stack the fire or to get in a supply of wood. Poor Snow and his tidewaiter landed in a cold rain to a cold house. Later, my father went to see him and asked him for supper till he could get established.
The patronage thing biggled on Snow too. There was no need for a customs officer at Rigolet really, and after a year he was laid off. He could never replace an institution like Pappy anyway. The old man was so well known that people would drop by the post just to leave smoked salmon roe, or a special trout, or something else the old man liked. He always came early in spring, left late in fall, and there was something missing when Pappy stopped coming.
He had a bunch of cronies who usually came down on the coastal steamer with him in spring and who went back with him come fall. They were Tom Dawson, the fish warden, who had lost both feet in the Greenland sealing disaster, and Father Edward O’Brien who came to Labrador for twenty-five years to visit the Naskapi Indians, to bury the dead, marry and baptise and do all the things their regular priest from Quebec never seemed able to do. There was another customs man at Cartwright, who had been sworn to a temporary Justice of the Peace position to make some seizure of property legal, and who forever after, signed himself Judge Murphy and who was called that by an amused and indulgent community. He never did get another chance to act even as a J.P. and his self-imposed judgeship hurt no one and kept the old fellow happy. There were also Jack Smokum, Stan Brayirl and a host of others who would each need a whole book to do him justice.
Together they were a crew such as you’d never find again or anywhere else. Only on Labrador in the twenties I guess. These old fellows went to great lengths to outwit one another. They resorted to barefaced robbery on the ship coming and going to get hold of one another’s rum supply. If one could steal his roommate’s liquor supply and generously share it with him in another cabin, that was a triumph to crow about until the pirate was himself victimized.
It was before radio or TV, and these old scamps, and others, were our entertainment. There are many who would never agree that radio and eventually TV brought us more laughs. One of Pappy’s favourite stories was about how he smuggled several bottles of rum aboard the coastal steamer SS Kyle. It was during the prohibition and the ship’s cabins were frequently searched before sailing. The rules of good sport dictated that the police search cabins only.
So Pappy, as was customary, wrapped his cache in oilskin and stowed it in one of the lifeboats. He had a suspicion that he had been observed by another of the group, so he watched that man carefully, and was rewarded by seeing him put an oilskin package in another boat. So, expecting that his cache was known, he moved his bottles to the other boat and put the other fellow’s bottles where his had been. He was gratified to see the other man shove his arm into the boat several times to check that his liquor, now actually Pappy’s, was safe, and at a suitable time he removed what he thought was Pappy’s cache.
One oilskin parcel looks much like another anyway, and he invited his buddies, including Pappy, down to his room as soon as the ship sailed to have a snort. When all the available space on bunks and seats was filled, he gleefully hauled out the oilskin parcel, prepared to give Pappy the bird. And by golly he did. Unwrapped, the supposed liquor turned out to be a couple of deceased chickens addressed to a nurse up the shore and placed in the boat by a steward as that was the closest thing they had to refrigeration.
In seconds, there was a mad scramble up to check the two boats. Alas, not only they had been observing the actions of others. Both parcels were gone. The bereft owners held hasty council and decided that the only way to ever recover part of the loss was to visit as many cabins as they could and drink what was available, but it was a dry voyage. Somewhere along the way, someone asked Pappy’s opposite number, a good Catholic, if he’d perhaps brought along a little holy water. The good man, entirely misunderstanding the question in his grief, said, “Well, I did have a couple of bottles or so, but some thief stole them and drank ’em.” When Pappy told the yarn to my father at our dinner table, Father O’Brien was present and he laughed as heartily as anyone else.
The father, a good man, and loved by everyone on the coast, was not teetotal, and there was a story about him and a parishioner who used to drop in now and then, confess to a few mistakes and take a little punishment. Well, one time the father’s basement needed cleaning, and the parishioner’s penance included doing a little work there. In the course of his duties, he found several or more empty bottles which, being a thrifty man and opposed to waste, he was examining in the hope that a little fluid might be left behind. The father came up behind him quietly and said, “You are wasting your time Tom. They are all dead soldiers.” To which Tom replied, “Yes, and thank God, every one saw a priest before he died.” The story is now a regular in Newfie joke books, but it was a word of mouth thing when I was young.
Poor old Bert Swaffield died at eighty-eight in February. In a way I’m not sorry; he wasn’t happy. Bert was like me, born in the HBC. He started, like me, on Labrador, where his father was manager at Cartwright. He was sent to Rigolet as an apprentice where my father was manager, and later went into the Eastern Arctic. He was ahead of me by fifteen years but I took over posts where Bert had served, and his mark was always there.
He was a bachelor most of his life, and to read his journals was to see a very particular little man quietly working away in the Arctic with one thing in mind, to do as much as he could to further his Company’s interests. He rarely had a white apprentice or assistant. He preferred one man posts. Every window had a little ticket showing the date, in red, when it had been cleaned, and the date, in blue, when it would be cleaned again. Ditto the stovepipes. The journal recorded when the floors were done, when the dogs were fed, when ice was brought in to melt for water. Every detail. The store shelves, in his time, all behind the long counters that separated customers from goods, no self-serve there, were all neatly ruled off, and the item that would occupy that space was neatly printed therein. Bert was no mean penman. If he ran out of that item, then the space remained bare till next ship time.
You know, despite modern computer stock checks and modern ordering procedure, Bert’s system was about as effective, and had the benefit of complete visibility. He only had to glance around his shelves and in his warehouse to know what he had and what he needed. Granted, he didn’t have as many items, and only one re-supply per year, but his methods, laughed at now, were singularly effective in his time, and he operated in the Arctic, as we all did, an unheated store. Let Mr. Modern Merchandise work that one out, standing on a bearskin to keep his feet from freezing and using painted sticks for money.
So I feel for Bert in his last days. All he wanted really was to be near his old buddies, to retell all the old yarns, tell all the old fables, grin at the old jokes and be concerned at where the fur trade was going or gone, and he retired here to get that. When Bert picked a retirement spot, it was as much because it was his company’s headquarters as anything, as long as he could visit the office. He grieved with the rest of us when our old fur trade department became the Northern Stores and was horrified with the rest of us when Northern Stores was sold to become North West Trading Company, and not a part of HBC any more.
Some one said to me about Bert, how stupid it was to allow a company to rule one’s life. I couldn’t explain it, I didn’t ever try. It wasn’t Bert’s company as much as it was his family. He was happy. I think all his life he was happy. He reached a place in his Company that he wanted, a post manager in the old sense. He worked alone for years before radio and air transport. He made decisions regarding many things because there was no one else. He was protective and paternal of his native customers and they came to him for advice and help. He could have been wrong sometimes, but he always acted in what he figured were the natives’ best interests.
Bert was hired by the same man who hired me, Ralph Parsons, sometimes referred to as the King of Baffin Island. He was probably told the same thing that I was: “You will be in charge of an isolated post. You will not be able to call for help or advice and you would not be going there if we did not feel that you could handle it. We do not expect miracles. We do expect you to use the goods and materials we send in to you to good purpose. You will not list those goods out in “lashings and leavings” (his exact words), but if one of our people (the natives) suffers hunger from your actions, I will see that you are discharged as quickly as I am hiring you now.”
Bert never forgot that, nor have I. I would wish that people who have written false and misleading things about HBC methods could have lived and worked with Bert for a year.
Bert’s books balanced to a cent. We were all expected to do that. Bert would hunt for a week for a one cent error. Wasted time we are told. Just write it off and get on with business. That wasn’t the point. Bert was just as accurate and fair in all his dealings, dollars and cents involved or not. You could say his life balanced to the cent. He never worked for anyone but HBC. He ran post offices, he kept vital statistics. He wore a dozen hats, but no matter what hat he wore, it had the HBC flag on it. Everything he did was with the approval and authority of his Company, and where his old bones lie, that is a tiny bit of HBC land. He would never want it otherwise.
What am I trying to say? Well, I think that little Bert, in a very quiet way, left some large and enduring footprints, and I regret bitterly that he could not spend his last days in the place he would have chosen, with those few people remaining from the country and life he loved. There will be a little file in the HBC Archives, a few contracts, a few letters, the record of a man who lived his life, did his best and caused no problems, and in perhaps a hundred years some person will pick up that file of a remarkable man. That person probably will never understand that file, with unknown harbours on Mansel Island, Swaffield Harbour, and he will never know that this man, so long dead was, in his way, a great man, because even in his lifetime there were very few like him. And perhaps we should see that a note to that effect is placed in Bert’s file, so that what the official file does not say will be known.
My back door just opened gently and no one came in. The cats are asleep in the living room. Muriel is at a rummage sale. I could say perhaps she didn’t close it properly when she left, but she went out the front door. Anyway, a reasonable solution isn’t so exciting. Perhaps I disturbed a few HBC ghosts in the previous pages. Fitz has come to look. He is sitting at the top of the stairs looking from me to the open door. Too bad, but in this case there is a reasonable solution. During a long cold winter, the doors are rarely left open. When they are, it’s because groceries are coming in, fish even. So he likes to be there. Who knows, he might get more than just the smell. In any case, there are apparently no chills running up and down Fitz’s spine, nor mine, so the ghost, if any, is friendly.
It seems that recently nearly everyone I talk to has a new ghost yarn, some fairly responsible people. Of course, I don’t believe in ghosts except the ones no one can explain. My mother and the old midwife who helped me into this world agree that there was something around when I was born, well yes, beside me. They both maintained that all their lives. Never put a lot of stock in it myself, even though I was there. You see, I was pretty young at the time. But last summer, seventy some years after I came into the vale, I was visiting some people in St. John’s, Newfoundland. The wife of my friend casually mentioned that she had been in North West River many years before. She was a member of a religious group at the time and she had had a strange experience. Guess where. In the very house where I was born. She said it couldn’t have been association of ideas, because she hadn’t had any idea that anything had happened there before. And to cap it all, her young daughter, about six I think, had also seen the same apparition. See what I did just getting born? I ghosted up a whole house.
Still not convinced? Well Gino Watkins, an Oxford explorer, and J.M. Scott, also of Oxford, spent a year in Labrador doing a survey for the proposed British air route. They rented a house in North West River and apparently saw or heard nothing out of the way. However, in J.M. Scott’s fine book, The Land that God Gave Cain, he mentions that one of the men they employed slept in the house one night, and then moved elsewhere because the ghost would not let him sleep. Guess what again? That was the house where I was born.
Only thing I remember about that house was the beautiful clear drinking water that could be pumped up into the kitchen. There was an old farm style hand pump there, and we used to go in just for a drink. The house was empty at the time but was later used by a HBC employee who, as far as I know, never saw or heard anything.
But last summer I visited a sister in St. John who had been with my mother shortly before she died, as had my other sister Marge. They both tell me that Mother always said that she and old Aunt Lizzie had heard strange and unnatural sounds in that house.
I lived in a house in Hebron, and slept in a room that no one would use because of a ghost, but in four years, he or she never appeared to me, though several times there were strange happenings that could be traced by very human foot prints outside.
Gotta tell you this one, too good to miss. A man now in his eighties told me, perhaps forty years ago, and told me again in practically the same words again this year, and he isn’t fooling. Both times he became very agitated when he told me.
Many years ago he was sent to Dundas Harbour on Ellesmere Island for the winter to see if the place might be a good area to relocate natives who were going hungry in Amajuak. A landslide there had stopped up a small river where they used to get lots of char to feed themselves and their dogs. At the same time, the RCMP decided to send a constable to Dundas to check on the Greenland natives coming across, and particularly to see if they were hunting musk ox. It was decided to house both men in the same building.
There was little to do, and there were absolutely no natives over there, so the two men took turns in running trap lines. One would stay home to keep the house warm, and prevent the food from freezing, while the other would go away trapping for a couple of weeks.
Well, one time my friend was home and the policeman was away. It was a cold blustery night, and he was sitting with his back to the table, reading by the light of a lantern hanging overhead. He sensed that he wasn’t alone, and looked around, and there on the other side of the table was a man Ches had never seen before. Not a native, a white man.
Ches says he dived for his sleeping bag and huddled there till morning. The fire went out in the coal stove and the lamp burnt dry. He doesn’t remember much about the night. It was uneventful except for his terror.
By morning he had a grip on himself, and was able to believe that it was a vivid nightmare. In any event, when the policeman came back, they talked about it and agreed that it was all the result of isolation and being housebound too much. They agreed also, on a schedule of one week there and one week away, with at least a week together between times. There were no further incidents. Dundas didn’t measure up as far as seals and walrus were concerned, so the place was closed again.
Some years later, Ches was some place, I forget where, but an RCMP inspector was showing some official photos of RCMP activities in the Eastern Arctic. He handed Ches a photo of a man standing facing the camera with a smile on his face. Ches says he felt the same terror he felt in Dundas Harbour, but he’d never seen this man except across a table on that unforgettable night years before. He said he was about to ask the inspector not to explain anything more, but was too late. The inspector said, “This is one of our very early men in the Eastern Arctic. He shot himself accidentally at Dundas Harbour many years ago and is buried there. As I said, Ches becomes terribly agitated when he talks about it, but has some sort of compulsion to do so every so often.
What is the answer? I wish I knew. One doctor said perhaps Ches was shown the picture before he went to Dundas and told about the shooting, but his mind refused to accept it, just banished it. Perhaps something in the book he was reading started the memory again long enough for him to think he saw the man whose features were imprinted some place in his brain from the picture. When he saw the same picture years later it might have triggered what he thought was a face he’d never seen before except in that dream or nightmare.
Except Ches isn’t the sort of person you’d expect to have illusions. He’s one of the most solid unimaginative people you could ever meet, but he is convinced there was a man there that night. As a ghost story, it’s a good one, but what actually happened? I guess the doctor could be right. After all, Ches wasn’t that old at the time. He was one of the two farthest north men in all Canada. Perhaps some place inside his mind he didn’t care to be going where one of the few white men ever to get that far had died. Perhaps his mind refused to believe that there was a third man there, frozen solid, but except for being dead, was exactly the same as he had been before the bullet killed him. Again I can’t see Ches being the type to worry about that, but there is a lot of machinery inside the human head that no one has directions for.
I don’t believe that ghosts talk. Sometimes I think it would be sort of neat if they did. A yarn with Franklin or Parry would be a good way to pass time, and incidentally clear up a few points.
The other day Charlie Reiach told me that years ago, when he was in Tuk, they lived in the same little house that I used when I was there. He told me that one day after a heavy rain, some earth slipped and exposed a grave of an old woman. She had been buried without a coffin, and was completely frozen, having been in permafrost. He said her features were quite clear of ice and most of her shoulders. The rest could be seen through an ice covering. So he had her covered up again, but as she was in an area where there was quite a lot of weather movement, she had to be reburied several times while he was there. Charlie said she was a kindly looking old soul and he got sort of fond of her, especially since she was only yards from the house door.
Well, many years later I was in Tuk. The sand spit where the house stood was being eaten away by the Beaufort Sea. Global warming, greenhouse effects, you name it. Anyway, it was getting to the point where my bedroom window was right on the edge of what was left of the bank. The house must be moved. I knew nothing of Charlie’s old friend. So I got the borrow of a bulldozer from N.T.C.H., laid out some long stringers, and was about to move the house to a new location, when an old fellow came along and asked me not to let the dozer go over a certain part of the yard. I wanted to know why, and he said his father’s mother was buried there, and offered to show me.
He stripped the back the turf, and there was a wooden deck, put there, as I know now, by Charlie, and under that a few more shovels full of dry sand, and there was the old lady just as she was when she was put there many years before. We couldn’t abandon her to the hungry Beaufort, so we took her out, still encased in her ice coffin, and we buried her on the highest ground we could find. We put her right back into permafrost, and if all of Tuk eventually goes under water, that unnamed old lady will likely be last to go. Her name? I don’t know. I asked her grandson who was perhaps sixty-five. He scratched his head but couldn’t get a name for me. In my mind, since last spring, she’s “Charlie’s friend.” I guess she’ll have to be satisfied with that.
One thing about the permafrost, it’s so clean about things. Also at Tuk, the Dew Line people opened a gravel pit to get material for their airstrip, and far down they found a man’s body. Big excitement. There was a local graveyard. Why wasn’t he buried there? RCMP got into the act. Planes came down from Murvik with fingerprinters and all the science fiction stuff. The two churches overhauled their lists to find out who might be missing. As these fellows used to change names more often than socks, that didn’t help much.
One day, old Portuguese Joe strolled over to the pit in the permafrost where they were keeping the old fellow, and pointed out that the buried man had been there a long time before any whites ever entered the country. On his hands were mitts of sea otter, once a trade item from Bering Straits, but not seen in any area east for a hundred years or more. He wore ivory labrets in his lips. His clothing, all animal skins, had been made with bone needles, his boots were nothing like the type presently worn.
Joe was no mean detective. He pointed out that the man was wearing light fawn clothing. He must have died soon after the caribou calved, as there was little wear on the garments. Any fawnskin clothing that passes a winter is very well worn. This wasn’t, so he died in the spring. Joe pointed out too, that while pingos45 usually erupt upwards, they sometimes go the other way and leave pits. The pits are usually full of gravel due to frost action on the limestone that usually fractures to form the pingos. Joe’s idea was that this fellow had probably been walking across the pit formed by the reverse pingo on the ice, had fallen through, and had frozen in at the bottom among the gravel. If he had been buried, it would have likely been near the sea and some tools or weapons left with him.
Over the years the ground moved again, the water drained away, and our friend lay quietly in his permafrost bed till the Dew Line tractor broke his rest. Last I heard, there was a squabble about who owned him. Dew Line was then mostly American. They wanted him too. He was still in his frozen pit when I left. Don’t know who got him, or if they ever found out what his last meal was.
42 On Fogo Island where the Budgells were on furlough.
43 A raccoon.
44 Usually Phyllis Budgell had help preparing these huge meals.
45 A pingo is a mound of ice found in the Arctic, subarctic, and antarctic that can reach up to 60 metres in height and hundreds of metres in diameter. It can only happen where there is permafrost. When they collapse they leave pits.