Grandmother O’Toole says structure and consistency are the backbones of a righteous life, so at the exact same day and time of each week, she and I walk to purchase the week’s groceries.
These excursions are a good and true measure of how much I have matured over the years. To the best of my recollection, they began around the time I was seven years old, well before I’d trained myself to think using the scientific method. If they had started after my education, it wouldn’t have taken me so long to wonder why, instead of walking straight down Main Street to buy the groceries, we took a detour that kept us off Main for one block before we returned to it.
Without fail, every Saturday morning at seven thirty-five, we would leave home and walk four blocks directly east on Main Street. When we got to Second Avenue, we’d turn left and go north for a block, passing Harrison’s Furniture Shoppe. We’d turn right on Holmes Street, heading east again for a block, and once we reached Third Avenue, we would turn back right, head south for a block, and back to Main. Then we would turn left and continue east for another eight blocks to reach Shanahan’s Groceries.
We had been doing it for so many years that the whole exercise seemed completely normal to me, never mind that we were walking three blocks out of our way and passing Langston’s Groceries, said to be a perfectly fine grocery store, only to walk another eight blocks down to Shanahan’s.
Our behaviour was much like Mr. Younger’s old workhorse: The poor beast had walked a certain way home from the fields for years and couldn’t change its route even though the Youngers’ barn had burned down and they had long ago moved. The horse was walking a way that didn’t make any sense, but he was comfortable doing it. With the help of a fireman, I finally reasoned that Grandmother O’Toole and I were doing the same thing.
But even as young as seven, I had an inkling that something wasn’t right with our walks. It was at that tender age that we’d made our usual Saturday morning turn north on Second and were in front of the furniture store when, as we passed, I looked into the window of Harrison’s.
What I saw made me stop dead in my tracks. I called, “Grandmother O’Toole! Wait! Come back!”
She said, “What nonsense is this? Ye’ve no money for buying overpriced furniture. Keep walking.”
But my surprise had been real and deep enough that I ignored her. I pointed at the window and said, “There! Look!”
She came back, looked into the window, and said, “Well?”
I pointed, and even though she told Father otherwise, I truly wasn’t trying to be disrespectful or impudent; what I saw in that window caused heartfelt surprise.
I’d always pictured Grandmother O’Toole as a towering silo of a person. I thought if she was standing in the east at six in the morning, the sun’s rays would have difficulty reaching earth until she decided to move. But as my eyes beheld the two people reflected in the shop window, my head spun.
There was no doubt who the boy with the dazed expression and the bright red hair was. It was obviously I. Who, then, was the tiny, sad, tired old woman standing next to the boy? The woman who was peering so intently into the window with her right hand shading her eyes? The woman in rather shabby clothes who was only a wee bit taller than the redheaded lad; the woman who couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds?
I said, “Grandmother O’Toole, that’s you! And we’re the same size!”
She swung her cane at me, but if I see it coming, I’m usually able to dodge it.
Soon after that, on another Saturday morning, the smell of smoke was heavy in the air as we left home. The ruckus we’d heard earlier in the morning had been Harrison’s furniture store burning to the ground. When we made our turn onto Second Avenue, the street was completely impassable. Firemen were still pumping water on the smoking remains of Mr. Harrison’s store.
One of the firemen said, “Hello, Mrs. O’Toole, Alvin. Afraid you’re a bit late. If you’d’ve come earlier, you’d really have seen quite a blaze.”
I said, “Hello, Mr. Thompson. We didn’t come to look at the fire, sir; we’re on our way for groceries.”
“Groceries?” Mr. Thompson gave me a peculiar look.
He said, “Why didn’t you just keep heading down Main? Langston’s is right there, you know; why come this way?”
Those words were as revelatory to me as the sight that led the little boy in the fable to say, “But the emperor has no clothes!” As soon as Mr. Thompson asked that question, our route to groceries became obviously strange to me as well. Why had we made this detour for all these years?
I looked at Grandmother O’Toole, but she was glaring at the fireman. My skin flushed. About the only people she hates more than black Canadians are Canadians in uniform; this could turn into a terrible fight.
She seemed to grow right before my eyes, becoming silo-sized again. “Why’s the way I walk to the grocery store any matter to ye? Perhaps if ye were as concerned about what goes on in yer house with yer wife and daughters when yer gone, ye’d not be so keen to be prying into other people’s business.”
She grabbed my hand, and relief washed over me that she said no more. We went back to Main and walked the block we’d never walked before.
When we passed Langston’s grocery store, Mr. Langston’s son, Huey, was standing in front, sweeping the sidewalk.
He called, “Good morning, Mrs. O’Toole; good morning, Alvin. Terrible about the fire, isn’t it?”
She pulled me along by my collar and hissed at me, “If ye say one word to him, ye little magpie, I’ll strap ye within an inch of yer blessed life, then tie ye to a tree in the South Woods so’s that black savage Lion Man can come and eat all the meat off yer very bones.”
Most times she ended that story by saying that all Father would find was my skeleton at the base of a tree. Today she was too angry to give the usual ending.
We walked right by Huey Langston and I kept my eyes down, saying a prayer of gratitude that an ugly confrontation had been avoided.
I could have saved my gratitude.
Huey Langston called after us, “Would either of you like to sample these grapes that just came in?”
Grandmother O’Toole stopped as if she’d been slapped. She released the collar of my shirt and walked back to Huey Langston. She hadn’t shrunk from her talk with Mr. Thompson.
She snapped, “So tell me, you think we need yer charity, do ye?”
He seemed surprised. “Dear me, no, Mrs. O’Toole; it’s just that the grapes are exceptionally sweet, and I thought …”
Grandmother O’Toole said, “Pardon me if ye would, before ye foul the air with any of the balderdash tha’ ’tis rattling about in your head, and tell me, is yer father still among the living?”
“Well, yes, Mrs. O’Toole; he’s not doing well, you know. Poor man will be ninety-five years old in September.”
Grandmother O’Toole said, “Would ye be so kind to deliver a word or two to him for me?”
Poor, innocent Huey Langston said, “Why, of course! Hearing from old friends and customers is one of the few things that brings a smile to Dad’s face.”
A knot began tightening in my stomach.
“Wonderful!” she said. “But I was neither a friend nor a customer of the rotten old bugger. I know it’s convenient for ye to forget, but yer lovely, ailing father wouldn’t serve us, wouldn’t even let us in the door. So would ye kindly tell him that Sinead O’Toole says that tonight she’ll pray hard that the lamb of God stirs his hoof through the roof of heaven and kicks yer father square in his arse straight down to hell? Could ye pass that along to the fine old gentleman for me? Perhaps ’twill help speed the old rotter on his way.”
Grandmother O’Toole’s lungs must be similar in size to those of an elephant, for as Mr. Huey Langston stood there sputtering, she dredged up a huge wad of saliva from her chest and splashed it on the window of Langston’s Groceries.
She dragged me toward Shanahan’s Groceries. I don’t know who was more appalled, me or Huey Langston.
A few blocks down Main Street, I found my voice. “Grandmother O’Toole! How could you say those horrible things, and why did you do that to the Langstons’ store? Father will die of embarrassment. He is the judge after all!”
She stopped and grabbed my shoulders.
She said, “Listen, ye little redheaded monster. Ask yer father about those people. Those good, God-fearing Canadian Langstons. Ask him if he remembers what they were like not so many years passed. Ask him about the sign the upright Mr. Langston had in that very window of his shop.”
I knew I was stepping over my bounds, but I had to say, “Sign? What kind of sign could make you treat someone so rudely?”
“Ask yer father why we used to have to go all the way to London or even down into that cursed Buxton to shop. Have him tell ye why we had to pay some other Canadian person to shop for us in Langston’s before Shanahan’s opened up.”
“What?”
“Oh, so ye don’t know everything, do ye?”
“Grandmother O’Toole, what are you talking about?”
“ ’Tisn’t my job to explain these things to ye. Ask your da. Let him tell you about the sign that hung in that window not twenty years past, big as anything, that said, WE SERVE NEITHER BLACKS – NOR DOGS – NOR IRISH.”
“What? Really?”
“I swore those many years ago that my shadow would never darken the doorstep of that store. Now that carbuncle of a son wants to act as though all’s forgiven and forgotten. Well, ’tis not. It will burn within me till the day I die.”
“I didn’t know they did that. How could they not let people in because of where they’re from?”
Grandmother O’Toole was hopeless. Any sort of sympathy or understanding I might have felt toward her flew away when she said, “They did it because they’re fools. That’s why I hate these Canadians even more than I hate the English.”
Then she brought up one of her favourite subjects to moan about – the Saint Lawrence River and Grosse Ile, where she and her family first landed in Canada.
“ ’Tis beyond the personal, laddie. Yes, the Canadians murdered many of us on those ships in the river, but if you’re approaching things with the mind of a divil, which is all they’re capable of, that can be understood. They didn’t want the jail fever to spread and they didn’t care who they hurt to stop it.
“But that filthy sign in that window is what opened my eyes to show these Canadians are lower than even the scabbiest Englishman.”
She banged her cane on the sidewalk. “How dare they? How dare they put a good white Irish soul in the same light and breath that they put one of those black heathens from Buxton? ’Tis the grandest of insults; for that they’ll never be forgiven.”
Even though I was only seven years old when it happened, I still remember how clearly I wished I could spend my Saturday mornings somewhere else.