AT HOME on the radio Nat “King” Cole is still singing the song “Too Young.”
All day today in the stores and restaurants where we stopped you could hear radios playing the song “Too Young” by Nat “King” Cole. I love the sound of his voice. Deep, strong, soft, kind of raspy.
I love the way he says the word “love.” He pronounces it “lawv” — “They try to tell us we’re too young...to really be in lawv.”
I could listen to this song forever. The violins. The piano.
Grampa Rip is saying stuff about getting some maple syrup.
“The sap’s running,” he’s saying. “Just oozing out of the trees, filling up the pails. Perfect weather for it. Warm in the day, cool in the night. That’s what you need...”
Grampa Rip’s mind is jumping all around. It’s not a good thing. Usually it means that soon his mind will go away for a while.
“And don’t forget, when you brush yer hair, pull the hairs out of the brush and take them and shove them into the corners of the screens so’s the birds can pick at them for to make their nests...and we’re goin’ to plant some catnip seeds in pots for Cheap, put them in the windows, lots of water and sunshine...grow in no time...”
Grampa and I are eating our supper.
Grampa loves potatoes. Tonight there’s fried potatoes and there’ll be enough left over for breakfast. He also loves pork. Roast pork. Pork hocks. Fried pork, pork pie, pork steak, stuffed pork, boiled pork, pork stew, pork and beans, cabbage and pork...
Tonight it’s fried pork.
I’m chewing and listening to Grampa Rip with one ear and with my other ear I’m listening to Randy in the truck today.
Today in the truck Randy started asking me questions.
“Are you a Communist?”
“A what?”
“A Communist. A Red.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what a Commie is?”
“No.”
“A Commie is a guy who believes everything should be shared by everybody with everybody. Like for instance if I had ten dollars and you had zero dollars I should give you five of my dollars so’s we’d be even.”
“Everything.”
One of our customers today was the Russian Embassy on Charlotte Street right around the corner from Baron Strathcona’s fountain at the top of Strathcona Park. We stopped in front of a big locked iron gate.
A small iron gate in the middle of the big gate opened and we went in. Randy told me I was to go in with the guard and he’d show me where the cases were kept. He told me to bring out five cases of empty quarts and then bring in five cases of full quarts, all ginger ale.
“They love ginger ale,” he said. “They must guzzle it down with their vodka.” Then he said, “And don’t make any mistakes! We don’t cheat these guys. If they thought we were cheating them they’d probably shoot us on the spot, no questions asked!”
I had to carry five cases down a set of iron stairs to a metal room one at a time and then one at a time carry five empties up. Ten trips!
The guard who watched me the whole time looked strong enough to lift Randy’s whole load of two hundred cases all at once. His shoulders were like basketballs and his head was like a pumpkin. He could have picked skinny little Randy up and used him as a toothpick. I thought that if this guard worked at McDowell’s Grocery and Lunch on Sweetland instead of that rickety old man, Randy never would have cheated him out of one cent! The little coward.
Also, I thought if this guard here is a Communist, why isn’t he sharing these trips with me? Five trips each? Commies are supposed to share everything equally, aren’t they?
During one trip we looked at each other. He looked right in my eyes. I looked right in his. I tried to see Russia in there but I couldn’t. Share and share alike? No sign of it.
I went out and sat in the truck. Through the small iron gate in the big one I could see Randy being paid and a tall man in a gray suit signing the bill.
I tell Grampa a little bit about the Russian Embassy but he’s only half listening. He wants to talk about his visit today at McEvoy’s Funeral Home on Kent Street.
“You know, Martin,” he says, “today at McEvoy’s I met a man I haven’t seen in over sixty years! Imagine! Sixty years! And, Martin, I have to tell ya, I made a joke that made a bunch of them at the funeral laugh out loud. He said, ‘Rip, is that you?’ and I said, ‘Yes it is, Dermit.’ And then I said this. I said, ‘As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted by the passage of sixty years, how’s everything going, anyway?’ Ya see, Martin, I pretended that we were resuming a conversation that had only been interrupted for a moment, not sixty odd years ago.”
Grampa’s going into one of his slippages. That’s what he calls them. I’ll keep an eye on him. That’s one of my jobs.
We wash up the supper dishes and I decide to see if Grampa wants to take a stroll, get him some fresh air, calm him down a bit.
Down on the corner of Bank Street and Somerset in front of Borden’s Dairy a boy and a girl are licking their ice cream cones and then kissing each other.
“Go ahead,” Grampa says, soft to himself. “Spring in Ottawa is very short indeed, as is life itself.”
We pass some very old men in front of the Ritz Hotel standing around smoking pipes and talking about spring.
“You know, Martin, I once knew an old fella with a perforated eardrum. He had a really funny trick he could do. He’d take a big suck on his pipe and blow the smoke out of the side of his head!”
After a stroll down to the Rialto theater where you can see three movies, a serial, a short, a cartoon and a newsreel for fifteen cents and where Grampa Rip, who knows everybody, knows Kelly O’Kelly, the world’s oldest movie usher, we’re back to the corner of Somerset and Bank.
The Somerset streetcar is stalled there because the trolley has slipped off the electric wire. The pole of the trolley is rubbing on the wire and there are silver and gold sparks showering down. The streetcar conductor gets out and shuts the streetcar doors so people won’t sneak on when he’s not looking.
There’s a little crowd stopping to watch. The conductor is a huge handsome man with lots of beautiful wavy gray hair showing under his cap. His shoulders are as wide as a doorway.
Grampa Rip knows him, of course.
“That’s Pete Lowell,” Grampa Rip tells me. “Once, when Pete was young, when he first started with the old Ottawa Electric Railway, a streetcar he was driving slipped off the track right on this very corner. It was Christmas and the car was packed with people — Christmas shoppers loaded down with parcels. Pete got out and examined the situation. Then he got back in the streetcar and made a little speech. He told them that what he usually did in these situations was he’d ask the people to kindly get off the streetcar for a moment while he lifted it back onto the track but since it was Christmas and they had so many parcels he didn’t want to inconvenience them so it would be all right if they just stayed right where they were and hang on and be quiet and don’t move around and he’d be right back.
“Then he went out and lifted the streetcar — people, parcels and all — back onto the track. Strongest man in Ottawa back in those days. Famous for it.”
Pete Lowell is now pulling down on the trolley rope, swinging the trolley pole back and forward until the wheel is ready to touch the electric wire and the sparks are firing across the blue-black spring sky and the small crowd gives up a cheer when the wheel hits the wire and the lights of the streetcar glow back on and the motor goes back humming and the people inside start talking to each other about what just happened.
“Good evening, Rip Sawyer. Haven’t seen you in a while,” says Conductor Pete Lowell. He’s heading back to get back into his streetcar, lots of the passengers watching as he walks.
“It’s a grand evening, Pete Lowell,” says Grampa Rip. And some of the people watching have looks on their faces that make you think that they wish big Pete Lowell, famous streetcar conductor, would say good evening to them, too. They’d be glad if he did. Maybe even proud.
It’s time to take Grampa Rip home to bed. He needs a rest. So do I. Tired. Worked hard today. Carrying, lifting, bending. Stealing.
Here’s a little spring rain coming. Sweet.
Soon there are puddles like tiny silver mirrors on the Somerset Street sidewalk.
We head back home by way of Cooper Street, past the Producers Dairy horse stables.
Grampa Rip likes to cut through the stables and into the Borden’s Dairy stables, which are even bigger, to get back to Somerset Street and our place.
The Borden’s stables has two stories. There could be more than fifty horses in here.
All to deliver the milk every day except Sunday.
“But the trucks will soon take over,” Grampa Rip is saying. “The horse-drawn wagon is about to be no more. A new time is beginning, Martin. Your time.”
There’s the smell of the horse hay and horse balls and horse breath and horse piss and horse meat and horse spit and harness and fermenting oats.
“Worker horses,” says Grampa Rip. “Horses that work for a living — those are the horses I like. They’re like men workers who work and women workers who work...”
And the horses are shaking their big handsome heads, rattling harness hanging there and snorting and blowing sometimes out their noses making the flapping sound.
“...it’s not how big you are or how pretty you are or how strong you are or how fast you are...”
And the beautiful shivering horse-body flesh and the thumps from the horse stalls stomping now and then and horses laughing deep from their throats, horse throats and chuckling deep and grunting glad to be home.
“...it’s how reliable you are and how honest you are,” says Grampa Rip.
At home Cheap is on Grampa’s giant rocking chair. He lies there like he’s dead — on his back, his paws sticking up. But he’s just pretending, acting. He does this just to make me worried.
“You’re not dead, too,” I say to Cheap. “You’re just pretending...”
He rolls over and starts licking his toes, making Grampa Rip’s rocker rock. Grampa told me once they like to have their toes clean so’s they can have — in case anything quick and dangerous happens — a clean getaway.
I can hear the oil furnace go on. The night is cold. Good for the maple syrup. Humming goes the furnace.
I feed Cheap.
“Now?” says Cheap. “Now?”
I bring Grampa Rip his cocoa and his Bible and his beads. He’s in his long pajama gown and he’s got his nightcap on with the little tassel hanging. He’s sitting up in bed. He has his hands clasped over his potbelly with his prayer beads woven through his big fingers. He looks calm and pleased.
“I’m going to a funeral wake tomorrow,” he says.
“That’s nice,” I say. He goes to one nearly every day.
“Yes,” he says. “I like funeral wakes.”
“I know you do, Grampa Rip.”
“Yes, funeral wakes are good to go to. You can meet a lot of wonderful people from the past at a funeral wake. Oddly enough, my boy, one of the grandest places to meet the living is where they all come to honor their dead.” He takes a sip of his cocoa and opens his Bible anywhere.
“God bless you,” he says to me, looking in my eyes. “God bless you, whoever you are.” He doesn’t remember who I am.
“Goodnight, Grampa,” I say.
Cheap gets back in the giant rocker to wash his face. The rocker moves. Sometimes when that happens, Grampa Rip Sawyer thinks that it’s his grampa, Hack Sawyer, in the chair, come back to haunt us.
Grampa Rip sleeps with his open hand on top of his head. Fingers spread out over his bald head and his nightcap which is half off — like somebody who just remembered something very important and has just slapped himself over the head saying, “Oh my God, I just remembered I didn’t turn off the stove. The fried potatoes will be burnt black!”
I go to the front window to pull down the blind. In the foggy windowpane I see the face of Gerty McDowell. The butterfly on her straw hat.
I wipe the window and Gerty disappears.
Under the streetlight, across the street, sitting on the park bench in the light rain with his gray coat.
It’s the Gray Man, again.
It’s also the man I saw today signing the Pure Spring bill at the Russian Embassy!
YOU WERE walking with your father across Angel Square. Then down York Street and to the corner of Friel Street where Horrors Leblanc lived.
Your father was talking most of the way about how Phil was getting worse. The older Phil got the harder he was to handle. He’ll never be right, you have to face that.
You always knew that. You wondered was your father only just finding that out now? Hadn’t you known that ever since you could remember?
“Since the baby died your mother’s never been the same,” your father said. “It’s getting harder and harder to take care of Phil. He’s a handful and more.”
Then he changed the subject. He didn’t want to talk about this any more.
Your mother always told you that Phil was born at five to midnight at the end of the day, and you came into this world ten minutes later at five after midnight at the beginning of the day.
The end. The beginning. Poor Phil.
Your father worked in the same office as his friend Horrors Leblanc.
“Horrors was always a good sport,” your father started, changing the subject. “Once we took a fish, a catfish, and nailed it with a half a dozen roofing nails, the short nails with the big heads, to the underside of Horrors Leblanc’s wooden chair that he sat in every day at his desk.
“Soon the fish began to rot and stink and everybody in the big office who came up to Horrors’ desk would wonder why it was that Horrors smelled so bad.
“Horrors searched everywhere — all through his desk, emptied out all the drawers, and even took up the rug and looked — but couldn’t find out where the horrible smell was coming from. He never thought to turn his chair upside down and look there...and for days and days everybody in the office was saying, ‘Why is it that Horrors smells so horrible?’”
He wanted you to see the humor. But you wouldn’t.
“Was it funny?” you said.
“Yes, it was FUNNY!” he said. “Anyway, Horrors is lending us his car because of this very important trip we have to take.”
You were silent.
“Very important trip,” he repeated.
You were still silent. You knew that if you asked what it was, he wouldn’t tell you. You looked at the scar on his forehead right between the eyes.
“Most important trip this family will ever take.”
“What trip? Where are we going?” you asked.
“You’ll see,” he said.