THE MORNING sun hammered the roofs of the stores along Central Avenue. I could smell the tar in the black–top, and my skin burned as if I stood too close to a stove with a roast in the oven. In spite of the heat, the two RCMP officers who led the Dominion Day parade wore their dress regalia, tan stetsons, black breeches and red serge jackets with tight collars that grazed their chins. The glare on their brass buttons made me blink.
Behind the Mounties on their regulation black mares rode a posse of local politicians and businessmen. They were decked out in cowboy boots and cowboy hats, some sitting as comfortably as Gene Autry about to burst into song, others slippery in the saddle, reins gripped so hard you could see their hands turning white. If we got lucky, this year’s cavalcade would include a hockey player who’d gone on from the Swift Current Indians to an NHL farm camp. He’d be waving from a red convertible with a big Ham Motors banner covering each side.
Some distance behind the riders, so that the horses wouldn’t spook, lumbered a life-sized black-and-white pinto made of steel. He clanked stiff-kneed between the float carrying the Ladies of the Nile and the flatbed truck of old-time fiddlers, who broke into the Red River Reel whenever the parade paused to let the entries in the rear catch up. As famous in our town as Trigger, the pinto was named Blow Torch. His mane of real horsehair gleamed. Smoke puffed from his nostrils every five minutes or so, and he let out a roar that came nowhere close to a whinny or a neigh. Everyone laughed and clapped as he clomped by. The clamour he made was like a grain bin collapsing in on itself in a high wind.
People referred to Blow Torch’s creator, Mr. McIntyre Jr., as an inventor. He’d inherited McIntyre’s Foundry from his father, and though some considered him eccentric, his construction of the mechanical horse made him even more of a celebrity than the mayor or the skip who’d almost won the Brier. Mr. McIntyre rarely accompanied Blow Torch in the parade, though. Usually it was a clown, maybe one of the bull wranglers from the rodeo, who held the reins to make sure the steel pinto didn’t veer into the crowd.
My family could have walked the four blocks from our house on Fourth West to Central Avenue, but Dad didn’t walk anywhere he could drive. He’d herded my mom, my brother and me into the car and parked as close as he could get. To watch the parade, we always stood in front of the Lyric Theatre near the middle of the route that passed rows of houses before the stores began. Swift Current’s downtown was only three blocks long, but it boasted a second theatre, the Eagle, and three department stores: the Metropolitan, Christie Grant’s and Cooper’s. Cooper’s was the only store that sold merchandise on two levels. Mom took me there once a year, and we climbed to the second floor to buy me a new pair of shoes. There were three cafés strung along the avenue, the Modern, the Venice and the Paris, and at the end of the street stood two hotels—the York and the Imperial. The third hotel, the Healy, was one block east.
The parade started on top of the hill by the elementary school, where the marshalls lined up the horses, the marching bands, the fire truck, the floats, the Shriners with their red scooters and toy train built out of tin and plywood, the waxed and polished police car, and the big new farm machinery from John Deere and International Harvester. If you looked down the six blocks of Central Avenue from that height, you could see all the way to the CPR station house at the end.
As people stood at the curb, alert for the police siren that would launch the spectacle, they dabbed sweat from their foreheads, sipped from Thermoses of coffee or bottles of pop and chatted about the weather, wondering if those black clouds rolling in from the west meant rain or if that was dust darkening the sky. Should the women make a quick trip home to close the windows and take down the washing from the line? Lots of farmers had driven in for the day, and Mom and Dad would always ask those nearby how many bushels to the acre they expected this year and how many weeks till harvest. Had anyone got hail out their way? Were the dugouts filling up after last week’s rain? Impatient with the wait, kids and some adults would step into the street and peer up the hill to see if anything was moving. For the parade and the rodeo we’d go to later, I always wore my red felt cowboy hat with the wooden toggle that made the rope short enough to snug under my chin.
Tommy Ham, the father of my best friend, Lynda, owned the Chrysler dealership in town. I looked forward to waving at him as he trotted by on his big palomino. When he spotted me and my parents, I hoped he’d doff his white cowboy hat and sweep it high above his head. For the first few years, I couldn’t understand why my father wasn’t on a horse alongside him. After all, when my dad was a kid, he’d raced a gelding named Tony in all the local fairs and won cash prizes he’d taken home to his father. I was impressed when he told me he got to keep some of the money for himself.
DURING THE WEEK, my father drove a green, snub-nosed oil delivery truck with the words Emerson Crozier painted in white letters on the driver’s door. The Pioneer Co-op paid him a wage to fill the tanks for the growing number of residents who had switched from coal to oil. We were the only family on our block who rented; our neighbours owned their houses. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew the distinction was important, especially to my mother, though she fancied up the inside of our house as best she could. Three pictures hung on the walls of our living room. Two were copper bas-reliefs Dad had won curling. One depicted a parrot in a palm tree and the other a covered wagon pulled by horses. The third picture, of a deer beside a lake with a mountain backdrop, was frame–less, painted on a piece of particleboard by a man who’d crossed the prairies in the early 1940s and set up his easel in the streets. Dad had bought it for two dollars outside the bar at the York Hotel.
The kids my age in the neighbourhood, including Lynda, went to kindergarten in the mornings. I didn’t. In those days, you had to pay for it. My other best friend, Ona, who lived next door, was one year younger. Maybe because she and I still hung around together in the mornings, the absence of my other playmates didn’t bother me much. The difference between us didn’t show up until the first week of Miss Bee’s grade 1 class at Central School. They could read the words our teacher wrote on the board and say them out loud. I could not.
I hadn’t known I had a shortcoming in the area of books and letters. Along with a few pocket books with yellowed pages and the black Bible my mom received from the Anglican church when she first took communion, there were three hardcovers in the house—an ancient Book of Knowledge, its pages as durable and thick as the cardboard inside a newly purchased shirt; Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, its corners chewed by mice; and the spine and covers, back and front, of Zane Grey’s The Code of the West. No one ever said what had happened to the rest of the book. The family library fit easily into a wooden apple crate turned to stand on end in the front hall. Inside it, Dad had nailed a shelf. The bottom level and three cardboard boxes along the wall were heaped with comic books. My brother, Barry, had the best collection of any of his friends. At the end of each month, he spent all his newspaper deliv–ery earnings at Bill Chew’s on Central Avenue. It was every kid’s dream of a corner store, stocked to the ceiling with racks of pocket books, magazines and comics. On the glass counter sat big-bellied jars of caramel milk bottles and hard globes of gum, strawberries with marshmallow centres and licorice cigars that blackened your teeth and tongue.
On Saturday mornings my brother’s friends traded comics in our front hall. For that hour or two, the wide passageway filled with the smell of grubby eleven-year-old boys who’d come in from playing Dinky Toys in the dirt, bubblegum wadded in their cheeks like chewing tobacco. Their sales pitches and chatter were punctuated by pauses and pops as the bubbles expanded, then burst, a transparent pink skin covering their mouths and chins. As long as I was quiet, my brother let me watch as he and his buddies spread their treasures in front of them, the titles blaring from the boldly coloured covers. The best bargainer of them all, Barry would get three comics for every one he gave away.
Although he was seven years older and loved to tease, calling me “Turkey Dirt” in front of his haggling friends because of the freckles that dotted my face, my brother never denied me access to his stash of comics. Everything was there, from Superman and Archie to the Classics, which retold the great novels and myths on cheap paper in comic-book style. In those vibrant pages my poetry education began. Evident even to the youngest purveyor was the value of the succinct, densely packed narratives charged with words like POW! SHEBANG! BAM! When my brother shouted them out and pointed to them on the page, they detonated like the circles on the red narrow scroll I stole from him and pounded on the sidewalk with a stone; I dared not borrow his cap gun, even for the shortest time. The stories unrolled so effortlessly in sounds and pictures, I didn’t miss not knowing the meaning of the other words on the page.
After the first few days of observing her new students, Miss Bee divided our class into four groups of readers: bluebirds, meadowlarks, sparrows and crows. I was placed in the last group, and Lynda became a bluebird. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the difference. Bluebirds were so special that farmers like my uncles and grandfather built houses for them, nailing the small boxes to the fence posts along the fields. When a bluebird took flight, you’d have sworn a scrap of sky had grown wings, and they and the yellow-throated meadowlarks sang so beautifully it was as if someone had tossed a dipper of well water into the air, each drop a clear, bright sound. Even tough men like my dad and grandfather had to stop in their tracks to listen. Crows couldn’t carry a tune. They cawed and cawed; something stuck in their throats, and they had to cough it up. They flapped through the air like tar shingles torn loose by the wind. On the ground they walked stiffly, as if they’d had polio like Jimmy Coglin up the street and their legs were caged in metal braces. If too many of them gathered in town, the city sent out a man to shoot them.
Sitting with a group of crows in the classroom, stum–bling over the words in our reader, was not where I wanted to be. I felt no anger at Miss Bee for her lack of subtlety, only disappointment in myself for being stupid. From my desk, I stared at the letters of the alphabet. Along the top of the blackboard, they marched in a row from A to Z, as unstoppable and unreadable as a line of warrior ants.
Every morning, after we’d settled into our desks, Miss Bee walked down the aisles to check our palms and fingernails. On the bulletin board near the door she’d tacked two big hands. One was cut from white bristleboard, the other from black. If you passed her cleanliness test, she pinned your name, printed on a strip of paper, on the white hand. If you failed, she pinned your name on the black hand, and often that happened to me. Dirt loved my fingernails; it wormed under them even if I’d cleaned them on the way to school with a toothpick. Some of my classmates never got to move from the black hand to the white, and I felt sorry for them. They were the kids who didn’t have the right kind of scribbler and whose crayons had worn down to nubs they could barely hold.
A few months into grade 1, I walked home after school with some new friends who lived a couple of blocks from my street. At the top of our alley, one of the girls pointed out my house, with its ramshackle garage, buckled back porch and junk-filled yard. “I wonder what poor people live there,” she said.
“Maybe it’s the Thistlewaites,” the other girl replied.
The Thistlewaites were known to be on welfare. I’d seen the shack they lived in near the swimming pool. The six Thistlewaite kids came to school in old clothes that never fit, and they smelled bad, but once a week they spent money on candy. That I could never understand. We weren’t on welfare, we weren’t that hard up, yet Mom rarely gave me money for sweets.
I walked half a block farther with my new friends. Then, I ducked down the nearest alley and snuck back home.
OUR TWO-STOREY house with its wide front verandah, now collapsed, must have been beautiful years before the landlady had let it run down and my family moved in. My parents didn’t have the wherewithal or the money to repair what was broken or to clean up the yard. Ona’s house was the same vintage and style, but the flash of its clean white paint made you wish for sunglasses, and the house front yard displayed to passersby a bed of rose bushes and a neat, trimmed lawn bisected by a cement sidewalk. Three doors down, Lynda’s house was the newest on the block. Their small stuccoed bungalow had been built by her father. When he was in a good mood, sitting in his favourite armchair with a drink beside him, Mr. Ham would talk to me and Lynda in the voice of Daffy Duck. On the doors inside their house shone glass doorknobs like gigantic, multifaceted diamonds, and on the living room wall hung the only piece of real art I’d ever seen, an oil painting of the cutbanks south of the city limits done by a local high school teacher named Mr. Uglum. My mom was not impressed. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want a picture of something they could see every day just by driving five minutes to the edge of town.
Lynda took singing lessons, and she and Ona studied dancing and piano. Lynda showed me how to shuffle-off-to-Buffalo after her first few dance classes and how to play “Chopsticks” with two fingers on the keyboard of the piano that sat glossy and square-shouldered by their big green couch. Ona’s piano was in a room off the kitchen that her mother called the parlour. From our backyard, I could hear Ona practising every Saturday morning it was warm enough for the windows to be open, the sounds of her finger-work drifting through the screens. Sometimes I climbed to the top of one of the oil drums Dad had hauled home for salvage and did a little dance by pounding my feet in time to the song she was playing over and over, waving my arms about the way I thought a ballerina would. I felt envious of Ona, but then she was the one cooped up inside on a weekend morning.
To move up the bird ladder at school, I threw myself into the thin books I was allowed to take home from the six shelves in the grade 1 cloakroom. I asked my mother to help me unlock the secret code that filled the pages. So I’d feel better, she joked that maybe I was a crow because of our last name. My brother had been nicknamed “Crow” for a while, until he grew tired of it and threatened to punch anyone who called him that. After finishing the supper dishes, Mom would sit me on the couch and help me read out loud, making me stop and go back to the start of the sentence if I didn’t get the sounds right. I knew she hadn’t had any books to read when she was a child; she had no favourites among the collection I brought home, and she didn’t get bored. The stories were as new to her as they were to me.
It didn’t take me long to fly from where the crows gathered to the more ethereal habitat of the meadowlarks and then the bluebirds. At home, Mom and I were soon into the old Book of Knowledge my brother had gone through several years before. Some of the pages were water-stained or marred with black crayon that I’d stroked across the paper as a little kid. Mom and I went over and over the page called “Little Verses for Very Little People.” I memorized “Rub-a-Dub-Dub”: “Three men in a tub; The butcher, the baker, / The candlestick maker; / And they all jumped out of a rotten potato.” The last line never failed to make us laugh. Many of the stories in the book were beyond me, and Mom, too. They sounded like nothing we’d ever heard before, but I delighted in the strange phrasing. If I was playing by myself outside, I’d recite into the lilac branches the first sentence of “Common Land Birds of Canada”: “The Orioles and the Meadowlarks are relatives of the Blackbirds, but differ markedly in their habitats.”
One spring day Miss Bee led me and another classmate down the hall with its dark oak floor and wainscotting to the grade 2 classroom. Standing in front of the teacher’s desk, each of us in turn read a page of the grade 2 reader without having seen it before. I got stuck on the word “detour” and tried to slur over it, but Mrs. Anderson, the other teacher, stopped me. “A good reader doesn’t skip over words,” she admonished. I felt ashamed for trying to fake it, but the older students clapped anyway when I was through.
At the end of the year, Miss Bee awarded me the prize for having read the most books in first grade. It was a black plaster-of-Paris cocker spaniel leaning on its front elbows, bum in the air, as if it were about to pounce. When I brought the prize home, Mom put it on the china cabinet beside my brother’s first hockey trophy. Eventually, the spaniel ended up on my bedroom dresser. Its head tilted like the RCA Victor dog’s, but it wasn’t music from a phonograph its long, curly ears were waiting for. Alone in my room I read out loud, as I had once with my mother, passages from the old Book of Knowledge: entrancing descriptions and perfectly punctuated sentences that might have flowed from the pen of an English governess. Over and over I recited the verses I had to memorize for school, and, later, the mantra of a boy’s name married to every rhyme I knew. My plaster spaniel sat loyal, attentive, listening.