TEN
The Woodcutter
FROM OCTOBER TO APRIL, the family’s main worry and priority was heating the old house, for the building was poorly insulated, and the climate in Muskoka was severe. Prevailing winds from the west blowing across the Great Lakes dumped enormous quantities of snow each year on the highland district. The first frosts arrived in late September, the leaves were off the trees by mid-October, and the snow was on the ground to stay in early November. Temperatures in January and February often dipped to sub-arctic levels. Waist-deep snow would accumulate on the roof of the old house and giant icicles would build up under the eaves of the uninsulated roof, often reaching down to touch the ground. The highway would be walled in by high banks of pure white snow, and during heavy snowfalls cars and trucks that were unable to mount the steep hills of the village would be abandoned by their drivers until the snowplough and sand truck from the nearby town came through. And the ice would still be in the lakes, and snow would linger in the bush until April.
The stove was the first line of defence. Everyone shared the responsibility of stoking it with wood from the time the father lit the fire in the morning until the family went to bed. During the day, it was the centre of family life. A pot of nourishing barley soup, its flavour enhanced by marrow-filled beef bones, simmered constantly on one of the back lids. It was a rare weekend when there was not an apple or raisin pie in the oven. Johnny-cake, made from cornmeal, egg yolks, shortening, sugar, and baking powder, and served with corn syrup, maple syrup, or molasses, was often on the table. Baked beans, prepared from well-soaked white beans, onions, mustard, brown sugar, tomato sauce, and bacon were another favourite. They were eaten hot out of the oven or consumed cold with raw onions and salt and pepper in heavily buttered sandwiches.
The mother kept a large kettle of water constantly on the boil on Mondays for the weekly washing of clothes, pouring the hot water into a large galvanized steel tub filled with shirts, long underwear, pants, and other articles of clothing of the working-class family of six. After soaking everything in soapy water, she would get down on her knees, plunge her hands into the tub, take each piece in turn and vigorously rub it against the scrub board until all stains had disappeared. Then, after rinsing the clothes in fresh, clear water, she would wring each item as dry as she could with her hands, don hat, coat, and boots and bring everything outside. Standing on the stoop, she would pull the clothesline towards her and peg on the damp clothing. The articles of clothing would freeze, and as they froze, underwear, shirts, and pants would thrust out their legs and arms defiantly, sway in the wind, and take on the shape of stiff, menacing scarecrows. Somehow the next day, after she shook off any accumulated snow from the clothes and brought the load into the house for ironing, everything would be dry.
On Saturday nights, the mother filled the same tub with hot water for the children’s baths, which were always taken to the sound of Foster Hewitt, Canada’s most famous sports broadcaster, excitedly providing play-by-play descriptions of Toronto Maple Leaf hockey games from Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. Like everyone else in the village, parents and children alike were fanatical fans of hockey in general and the Maple Leafs in particular. In those years, they expected their team to win the Stanley Cup, and with the help of legendary players such as Turk Broda, Howie Meeker, Max Bentley, and Gus Mortson, they often did.
In the evenings, the boy often sat close to the stove, and with firelight from cracks along the imperfectly fitted doors glistening on his face, thought of the passing of time. The subject had been a preoccupation, almost an obsession, for as long as he could remember in his short life. Years earlier, before his family moved to Port Carling, his Scottish grandfather had come to fetch him at his home in the Southern Ontario town where his father had found work as a steelworker during the war. Grandfather and grandson, only five years old, had journeyed by rail to Toronto, where they changed trains at the old Union Station. They then proceeded to Orillia, the hometown of his grandparents, where he would spend several weeks.
It was afternoon in the sweltering heat of late June 1944 when they set off on their journey. The boy, dressed in a sailor suit provided by his father’s sister, herself serving in the Royal Canadian Navy in far-off Halifax, stood for hours at the open window of the train, hypnotized by the rocking of the passenger cars on the railbed. Periodically, acrid smoke and grit from the steam engine chugging away somewhere up ahead, swept in through the window. The sweating passengers sharing the compartment took out rumpled handkerchiefs to rub their eyes, blow their noses, and cover their mouths as they cleared their throats. There was a grind of steel-on-steel and a rhythmic clickety-clack of wheels on track, interrupted by the slam of air from passing trains, the clanging of bells, and the wail of the whistle as the engine approached level crossings.
When they reached Toronto’s Union Station, it was crowded with thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The boy did not know it at the time, but the final push to free Europe from Hitler had just begun. Canada’s armed forces were in the thick of the fighting in Normandy, and casualties were heavy. All the boy could see as his grandfather led him by the hand across the marble floor of the Great Hall were black boots and legs in khaki and navy blue and air-force blue uniforms as servicemen and servicewomen hurried to reach their units or to take last-minute leave before reporting for duty.
As he stared at the flickering flames more than five years later in the heart of Ontario’s cottage country, the boy dwelled not on these details but on the setting sun he had followed through the window of the train that day of early summer. He had watched it race behind telephone poles, farmhouses, and trees and yet never move. The five-year-old had puzzled over how such a thing was possible. The ten-year-old understood – or thought he did. The memory of the racing, unchanging sun made the boy wish his life and that of his parents would never alter. He was happy sitting in the security of the old house, enjoying the heat thrown by the stove, and he wanted that happiness to last forever. He knew, however, that his parents, even if they were younger than those of his friends, would grow old and die. And he would grow old and die. Why couldn’t his family, he asked himself, like the racing sun on that day so long ago, change and yet remain the same and live forever?
The fire in the woodstove would die out an hour or two after the family went to bed, and heat would leak outside through the uninsulated walls and single-pane glass. The temperature inside would fall to subzero levels, and a coating of frost would build up on the windows. The soup on the now stone-cold stove would freeze, and the milk in the icebox would turn from liquid to ice, expanding and pushing up through the neck of the bottles in which it was contained. Water from the tap, left running day and night to keep the pipes from freezing, would splash on hitting the bottom of the sink and freeze in concentric circles. The icicles that dripped so profusely during the daylight hours when heat from the house penetrated the thin roof, would freeze rock-solid. The father’s raisin wine, however, accorded immunity against freezing by its high alcohol content, would escape unscathed from the ravages of the cold. Upstairs, the family slept cozily in their beds, covered by warm blankets and wearing the long underwear they donned from November to April. And in the mornings, the children would wait to hear the roar of the freshly kindled fire, then emerge from beneath the covers and rush downstairs, clothes in hand, to dress beside the stove.
Christmas was a particularly joyous time that December of 1951. The family had carved out a place for itself in the village, and the mother had made the final payment on the old house and now owned it outright. On December 24, a large turkey, ordered from the butcher shop, sat on a table near the sink. On the opposite side of the room was the tree, a well-proportioned balsam fir, decorated with silver artificial snow, ornaments, electric lights, and with a star on the top.
The boy was proud of the tree, for he had cut it and hauled it home himself. In fact, he and his best friend had gone together with their axes and a bucksaw to a swamp back of the dump and felled a dozen spruce and balsam fir trees, reserving two for their own families and peddling the other ten door-to-door to neighbours for a dollar each. The work was crushingly hard, especially for boys of their age and size. The snow was deep in the low-lying frozen bog, and the only trees available were giants that dominated the landscape. The boys thus had first to stamp down the snow around the bases of the trees to give themselves room to work. They then notched the trunks in the desired direction of the fall and used their saw to cut through from the other side until the prizes came crashing down. Afterwards, they lopped off the crowns and dragged them out of the bush to sell.
They had asked the permission of no one. They had no idea who owned the land. Villagers had been obtaining their Christmas trees at this place for so many years that everyone had come to believe they had a right to take what they wanted.
On Christmas Eve, therefore, all was well in the boy’s home. The fire in the stove was blazing, the woodbox was full of dry hardwood, holiday music was playing softly on the radio, the room was cozily warm, and the odour of Christmas cookies baking in the oven filled the house. The father was sipping from a glass of raisin wine and telling his children stories from his days riding the rails and working in lumber camps during the Great Depression. The mother was making last-minute preparations for cooking the Christmas dinner, and the boy was running his fingers through the five dollars in loose change that he had earned from his share of the Christmas tree sales. He had also turned eleven that day and had received a present from his mother and a birthday card with a one-dollar bill inside from his grandmother.
There was then a knock on the door. The father’s eyes lit up. While he was prepared to keep on telling his stories to his own children, he craved the company of adults, who would drink with him, listen to his tall tales, tell their own stories, and best of all, joke and laugh with him into the night. He was hoping that one or more of his buddies had remembered him and was dropping by to spend the evening.
It was, however, a very different visitor, the good-natured United Church minister on a very different mission. Normally, the father would have muttered an excuse, put on his coat, and left the house to avoid talking to him. But now, inspired by the spirit of Christmas, and desperate for a new victim to listen to his stories, he greeted him warmly, asked him to join him on the old couch, and offered him a glass of raisin wine. With a smile, the minister courteously declined but accepted a cup of tea from the mother. For the next half hour, he listened politely as the father related story after story of his life “on the bum” during the Great Depression, including a few risqué stories, warmly appreciated by his son but not ideal for a clergyman. From time to time, the minister glanced uneasily at the turkey and other food on the table by the sink and at the richly decorated tree.
The good man, who had given the impression that he was afflicted with a problem difficult to resolve ever since entering the room, finally stood up and awkwardly explained the purpose of his visit. The members of the congregation had pooled their resources to provide the makings of magnificent Christmas dinners as well as presents for the families and children of needy villagers. The boy’s family was among the lucky designated recipients. That said, he would now like some help to carry the packages from his car to the house.
The boy immediately volunteered his services. He knew his parents had bought and hidden away presents for their children, but he was eleven and would not say no to receiving even more. His mother and father, however, said nothing. For even if they had always been poor, they had never considered themselves to be so. Their working-class status they considered to be a mark of honour, and they were proud of what they had accomplished in the few years they had been in the village. They had never accepted charity in the past and certainly had no intention of accepting it now, however well-intentioned. After a long pause, the mother said the gesture was appreciated but there were families in the village far more needy than hers.
The minister, his face red, said he suspected that might be her reaction. And with a final glance at the turkey and the bountiful fixings of the next day’s meal, he hastily made his escape. After he left, the whole family burst out laughing.
Shortly thereafter, there came another knock at the door. A tall, unsmiling Provincial Police Officer, flashlight in hand, hardly gave the mother time to say hello before he began his interrogation.
“Your son has been selling Christmas trees, has he not?”
The boy thought he was in deep trouble. The Provincial Police were rarely seen in the village and were usually called in only to deal with the most serious crimes, or to back up the village constable when the problems he was facing were too great for him to handle. The owner of the swamp, he assumed, had discovered that someone had chopped down a dozen of his largest spruce and balsam fir trees, and, not trusting Old Jack to conduct a vigorous investigation, had asked the Provincial Police to find the culprit.
The mother said nothing and did not ask him in. The policeman planted his boot in the door to keep it open and continued:
“Don’t try to cover up for him. I know for a fact the young delinquent was peddling Christmas trees all over the village today. Someone cut down a prize blue spruce on the lawn in front of the cottage of one of the area’s most important summer visitors, and it was probably him.”
The boy breathed more easily. Someone else had swiped the blue spruce.
The boy’s father got up from the old couch, joined his wife at the door, and asked the policeman what proof he had to implicate his son.
“Nothing in particular,” was his answer. “But I’d like to take a look at your tree.”
The father told him to go away.
The policeman stepped inside anyway, saw that a balsam fir and not a blue spruce graced the corner, and left without a word. The family did not laugh this time.
From a very young age, the boy had been expected to help out around the old house, preparing kindling and keeping the woodbox filled. Now in the winter of 1951, in light of his exploits harvesting Christmas trees, his father judged him old enough to help him cut firewood in the bush itself. Other families in the village bought their firewood from commercial distributors or paid the owners of wood lots to let them harvest trees from their holdings. The boy’s father could afford neither. Likewise, he neither owned a truck nor had the money to rent one. In the early years, he cut his firewood in the bush on his own property behind the old house.
After taking all he could from his own land, he took to scouring the wasteland back of the dump road for trees that had been killed by insect infestations or lightning strikes. The wood belonged to someone else but the father had persuaded himself that it was a crime against man and nature to let potential fuel rot unused in the bush. In any case, he had no intention of letting his family freeze to death. He also knew that since the village garbage truck was the only vehicle to use the road in winter, there was little chance anyone would see him scrounging around on the private property in the vicinity. Even if the owner were to find out and complain to the police, the father was prepared to take his chances. He could expect little pity from the Provincial Police should they be called in, but should it be Old Jack who was entrusted with the case, there was little risk of sanction. The genial village constable was a good friend and often came to the old house for dinner on Sundays, particularly when baked beans were on the menu. He could be counted on to point out that only trees of no commercial value were being taken, and to do his best to smooth matters over.
The boy thus started to go with his father as he foraged for firewood. Accompanied by their malamute huskies pulling a sleigh, they would venture forth early Sunday mornings with axes and a crosscut saw with huge gaping teeth and proceed up the dump road past the place where the family had lived in a tent during their first summer in the village. They would then leave the road and range over the land until they found a dead tree. With his experience in the lumber camps, the father was an expert woodsman and a master with a crosscut saw. He would take one end of the family saw, and the boy the other. The boy lacked the strength to do anything other than hold the giant saw level as his father did the heavy work, pulling and pushing it through the wood. Then with the tree on the ground, the boy, taught by his father to handle a trimming axe, would do his share in removing the branches. Taking hold of the crosscut saw once again, the two would cut the trunk into manageable lengths.
When the snow was wet and deep, when the wind whipped and stung his face with ice pellets, it was misery. With the father in the lead, they would force themselves through heavy snow up to the boy’s hips. The youngster’s rubber boots, open at the top, would fill with snow that would turn to water on contact with his feet and then grow cold. But when there was a strong crust, when it was so cold there was not a cloud in the sky, when the hoarfrost on the trees sparkled and the smoke from chimneys throughout the village rose straight up to disappear into an azure sky, the work was easy and even fun. The boy would run and play with the dogs on rough land transformed into a level playing field. Then, aided by their dogs, father and son would drag their loads home on the sleigh, returning time and again until all the wood was safely stored in their backyard.
Every evening after school in the ensuing week, the boy would manoeuvre the rough logs up onto a saw-horse and use a small bucksaw to cut them into stove lengths, afterwards splitting the larger pieces into sizes to fit the firebox. Then, after carrying in armloads of wood to fill the box beside the stove, he would return to sit outside, oblivious to the state of the weather. Alone except for the reassuring company of the malamute huskies, he would think over the events of the day, enjoying his thoughts and cherishing the silence of the village in winter. Sometimes, if he was lucky, the night sky would erupt with the breathtaking spectacle of the Northern Lights shimmering and crackling above the mist rising from the fast-moving waters of the Indian River. Other times, he would sit quietly in gently falling snow and watch mesmerized as giant snowflakes drifted soundlessly through the light of street lamps in front of his home to blanket the silent highway – disturbed only infrequently at that time of the day and year by passing cars and trucks. He would, he thought, never find greater peace no matter how long he lived – and he was right.
The struggle to find wood to heat the old house would start again the following weekend.
By mid-March, it was the beginning of the spring thaw and the sounds, sights, tastes, and smells of the melt were in the air. The daytime temperatures rose, the hours of daylight lengthened, the snowbanks shrank, and the black asphalt of the highway was once again visible. The giant icicles hanging from the eaves of the old house softened, dripped furiously, and came crashing down, and the sodden, greasy snow on the roof slipped off with a whisper. In the soft, humid heat of the day, water droplets formed within the heavy snowpack on the hillsides, coalescing and percolating down to puddle on the ground, to seep out onto the shoulders of the highway and from there to run ever downwards to disappear into the Indian River.
At night, when the temperatures fell, a crust developed over the waterlogged snow, and ice formed on the meltwater. In the mornings, walking to school in the knee-high rubber boots he wore fall, winter, and spring, he was a boy of six again, scrambling over the rock-hard snowbanks to run on the crust and returning to jump from frozen puddle to frozen puddle, smashing and shattering into crystalline shards their coverings of semi-transparent wrinkled panes of ice. At recess, a sister skipped rope with her friends, chanting rhymes passed down from one generation of schoolgirls to the next over the years.
I like coffee, I like tea,
I like sitting on Bobby’s knee.
Salute to the king and bow to the queen,
And turn your back on the gypsy queen!
In another part of the schoolyard, the boy played marbles with his brother and the other children, taking his turn tossing cat’s eyes, rooster tails, plum shooters, and green streamers into a mound of moist sand piled up against the school wall. The one who succeeded in placing his marble closest to the wall won the jackpot. The boy lost some but won more, and usually returned to the classroom happy, his hands raw and cold, his nose running, his fingernails dirty, and his pockets filled with sand-covered booty of many colours.
After school, he splashed his way home through the streams of surface runoff water – a unique combination of melting snow, sand, gravel, crushed rock, dust, bark, twigs, dead leaves, and the acid rain pollution from distant smokestacks that together left an unforgettable metallic smell and aftertaste in nose and mouth. And like generations of village children before him at the time of the thaw, he stopped from time to time to play – absent-mindedly and drowsily shoving sand and dirt into the rivulets with his foot to create new channels, and building mini-dams to create mini-lakes and to hold back the flood – however temporarily.
On weekends, he carried out bologna sandwiches and soup to join the other members of his family on the back stoop to eat lunch in the fresh sunlit air. Afterwards, with the malamute huskies dancing alongside, excited at being freed from their chains to run loose through the melting, granular honey-combed snow of the bush, he tagged along as his father, his work shirt loosened and his pipe clenched between his teeth, crunched his way up the hill behind the old house. There, on a rocky, south-facing slope bare of snow, father and son sat in the sunny warmth radiating off the black, granite bedrock and listened to the cries of the crows and seagulls who reappeared over the Indian River every year at this time.
One day, seeking to preserve in his memory this special time in his life, the boy climbed on top of a snowdrift lying in the shade against the back of the old house and carved his initials and the date into the outside wall. And when the old house was being torn down forty years later, he returned to remove the board and carry it away.
As March turned to April, the snow vanished from the bush everywhere except in hemlock and cedar swamps so dense the sun never reached the ground, fishermen hauled their fish huts home, and the ice on the lakes disappeared. It was now the time of the “in-between” – between the departure of the snow and the arrival of the first leaves of the season. It was a time of sadness and a time of joy. On rainy days when black clouds hung low in the sky, black crows perched on black branches protruding from black tree trunks and sat on black fence posts. Icy rain mixed with snow beat down on withered dead leaves. Spectral pine trees clung to rock faces, their branches wrenched backwards behind their trunks into tortured arms by bitterly cold prevailing winds blowing from the west off the Georgian Bay. Pitiful specimens of cattle released from their winter confinement in low-ceilinged, filthy stables, their heads slumping, stood abjectly up to their knees in steaming wet manure outside dilapidated barns behind mean farmhouses smelling of poverty. And along the sides of the highway leading to the nearby town, the winter litter of empty cigarette packages, scraps of old newspapers, and empty beer bottles was only partially hidden by matted, wet, lifeless grass, and grit blown off the roadway from the winter sanding.
On days when the sun shone, however, red-winged blackbirds carried grass and twigs to build their nests in meadows inundated by the melting snow and in flooded marshes on pussy willow branches, which were themselves pushing out soft, silvery, and velvety buds. The pale-greens, lemon-yellows, and red-ochres of new-growth branches and twigs gave colour and life and vigour to the bush while pairs of broad-winged hawks, almost invisible against the blue sky with their white throats and light reddish chests, hunted mice, frogs, snakes, and insects in fields returning to life.
The wind-lashed pines on clifftops overlooking Lake Muskoka now assumed heroic poses – as if preparing themselves to be painted by one of the Group of Seven. The creeks swelled and burst their banks, the fish moved upriver to spawn, and frogs emerged from hibernation to lay their eggs and to sing. The dead grass, as it dried, changed from black to dark brown and then to tan. In backyards throughout the village, boys lit grass fires to give, so they said, the new shoots a better chance to grow. Summer residents who had not been to the village since Thanksgiving weekend the previous fall drove up from the big cities as they did at this time every year to inspect their properties, to hire local tradespeople to put their cottages in order, and to kickstart the local economy.
And an aging cousin of the boy’s mother from the distant reserve, who had lost a leg in the war and who was spending the spring at his shack down at the Indian Camp, trapping muskrat and beaver, pushed his canoe out into the Indian River torrent. And whooping out a cry of delight in Chippewa, he rode it like a bucking horse through the floodwaters pouring over the stop logs in the dam, just as he did every year at this time, daring the gods of the river to do their worst.
And as they did at this time every year, the boy and his brother drilled holes in the sugar maples around the old house, inserted spigots, and hung tin cans to collect the sap. In the afternoons they gathered it in buckets and carried it inside to pour into shallow pans on the kitchen stove. They then stuffed the firebox with dry hardwood, stoked the fire into a blaze, and watched as the watery extract, bubbling furiously in a sea of white foam, and casting off thick clouds of steam, was reduced to a thick, smoky elixir. Afterwards, the happy family feasted on pancakes covered with maple syrup, and on maple toffee they made by boiling the liquid into a concentrated essence and pouring it still hot onto fresh clean snow to harden into chewy candy. And at night, in their overheated bedrooms filled with the humid, sweet smell of boiled sap, the family tossed and turned in their beds before falling asleep and dreaming of spring.
By May, when the leaves, wildflowers, leeks, watercress, and blackflies made their appearance, the father had forgotten his son’s transgressions of the previous summer. And when July came, the boy stayed away from Big John at Whiting’s Drugstore and Ice Cream Parlour.