ELEVEN

A Time of Transition

THE SUMMER OF 1952 WAS a time of transition for the village and for the boy. Fewer of the steamboats, whose arrival twice a day had been a feature of village life for decades, now docked at the government wharfs. The last survivors of the grand hotels, where formally attired guests dined on English bone china with silver cutlery and danced to the music of the big bands late into the night, went bankrupt or burned to the ground. The era when the district was the private playground of the very rich was over. But increasing numbers of Canada’s growing middle class were discovering Muskoka, turning the shorelines into suburbia with their cottages, converting the waterways into boat-racing courses, and jamming the streets of the village with shoppers. Summer residents, who previously came only periodically to Port Carling between Labour Day and the May Victoria Day weekend, began winterizing their cottages and retiring in the village, in the process bringing in fresh ideas, changing old attitudes, and improving the quality of life. They would eventually even change the village from dry to wet.

Native people were now rarely to be seen on the benches around the docks in the evenings. The older generation was dying off, while the incoming one was finding work closer to home in the booming Canadian economy. Sulphuric acid blown from industrial smokestacks hundreds and even thousands of miles away came down in poisonous acid rain into the lakes to leach the mercury from the granite rock bottoms and enter the food chain. The lake trout, their flesh toxic, were wanted neither by the native fishermen for their families nor by their traditional customers. The cabins at the Indian Camp, with their pull-down counters displaying beadwork and quill baskets for sale, fell into ruin and were abandoned. Before long, the canoes along the shore would disappear. Soon only the giant white pines and a campsite for overnight visitors from the now prospering distant reserve would remain.

Visits from the mother’s relatives for meals, a glass of raisin wine, and an evening of storytelling became rare. The boy missed them and was happy when his uncles from the reserve came looking for work in the village that summer. Both found employment but neither stayed long. The younger one, whom the boy had first met seven years earlier when he was a child at the Indian Camp, was now a heavy drinker and soon quit his job. The other, who had inherited his father’s powerful physique, was a cheerful, hardworking brawler who had gained notoriety back on the reserve for picking up and heaving the Indian agent down the stairs of the community hall. Sharing the same bedroom as his young nephews, he kept them laughing with his earthy humour. He eventually threw a punch at his foreman and was fired. The boy’s mother, afraid of the bad influence they could have on her boys, was relieved when her brothers moved on.

“You are welcome here any time, but only as long as you are sober and remain out of trouble.”

Her brothers, who looked upon their older sister as a surrogate mother, never returned to stay. Rather, they telephoned her regularly to talk in Chippewa, to share their latest news, and to obtain her advice.

 

In the meantime, like everyone else in the village, the boy and his brother spent much of their spare time listening to the radio. In addition to Fibber McGee and Molly, their favourite programs were The Shadow, Our Miss Brooks, The Lone Ranger, and The Green Hornet. And late at night, when stations could be picked up from far away and when his brother was asleep, the boy would turn on the radio, keep the volume low, and listen to broadcasts from stations across the border. Indiscriminate in his tastes, the boy tuned in to anything that could be pulled out of the crackling, static-filled atmosphere, listening to dispassionate news reporters in Washington, D.C. outlining the latest developments in Congress, laconic sports announcers in Brooklyn covering the Yankees playing the Dodgers at Ebbets Field, fiery preachers in Louisville, Kentucky, with desperation in their voices, urging listeners to repent or go to hell, and disc jockeys playing the records of gospel singers celebrating their faith, of jazz musicians being ever so cool, of rhythm and blues performers on the upbeat, and of country music artists breaking their hearts for the public.

The Grand Ole Opry, transmitted from Nashville, Tennessee, was one of his favourites. For the songs about poor, down-and-out country folk looking for work, drinking too much, failing or succeeding at love, having run-ins with the law, brawling, and wandering the soulless megacities of the land had a special appeal for him since they described the woes and joys of the life of the average guy. The big hits that summer were “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” by Hank Williams and “I Didn’t Know God Made Honky Tonk Angels” by Hank Thomas.

Even the frantic hucksters flogging all manner of quack medical remedies, miracle formulas to improve the performance of automobile engines, brake pads and windshield wipers, cigarettes and chewing tobacco that were “healthy, wholesome, and guaranteed to get you a girl,” and nostrums to grow hair on bald heads pledging “satisfaction or your money back” had their appeal. No matter how remote the experiences were to the life he knew in his small village or how outlandish the claims, the radio spoke to him directly and personally, letting him know that a world out there beyond Muskoka existed, to be explored, enjoyed, and lived.

But the radio era was ending, and the television age was beginning. Already a merchant had opened a store selling television sets. A crowd of the curious congregated every night on the street outside his showroom and watched I Love Lucy, Arthur Godfrey, and Dragnet. The sound was largely inaudible through the plate glass windows. Pulled from the airwaves with the help of a giant antenna from stations in distant Toronto and Buffalo, the images were always snowy. But no one cared. Everyone was enthralled by the mystery of moving pictures broadcast from somewhere far away and appearing as if by magic on a screen before their eyes. Soon most villagers would own television sets.

 

The boy was one of the most faithful members of the crowd standing outside the showroom window. He was there not because he particularly liked the programs. He actually preferred the shows, dramas, news, and even the hockey games broadcast on the radio, since they left more to the imagination. Nor was he especially interested in the high technology on display. Rather, the flickering images he saw through the glass reminded him of a problem he understood only vaguely and that from time to time preoccupied him.

Every so often, while going about the routine business of his day, whether immersed in his homework, doing his chores, or talking to his best friend, he would suddenly feel surprise bordering on astonishment that he even existed. The objects around him, no matter how mundane – a piece of birchbark, a block of firewood, the oilcloth on the kitchen table, a buzzing fly, a spider spinning its web, the torn cover of a book – would suddenly become infused with an unexpected and often beautiful vitality. It was as if another being had taken possession of his body and was watching him interact with a world that had an existence of its own. The flashes of awareness and wonder at the miracle of life would soon pass, and he would return to the routine of everyday reality. With the passage of time, the sparks of intuition would come less and less often, until they appeared only when he was sitting alone, listening to inspiring music or reading poetry.

At this time of his life, however, when he was no longer a child but not yet an adolescent, he would puzzle over what was happening and why. It was not the sort of issue he could discuss with the other guys, with his parents or with a teacher, for fear that they would think he was odd. Not sure anyone else had similar experiences, he tried to think the problem through on his own. That gave rise, however, to other questions. Why had he received the gift of existence? Who was he anyhow? What was the purpose of life? As he watched the rudimentary television images on the main street of Port Carling, he thought perhaps he was just playing a part in a cosmic television play. This answer, however unlikely, seemed just as valid as any other.

A series of deaths in the village that summer then raised issues of a more sombre nature. A prosperous neighbour, who had purchased a television set and wanted to do a good deed, made welcome a five-year-old from a poor family to watch a children’s program. When the program was over, the youngster ran down the centre of the street on his way home and was hit by a car and killed. The boy was perplexed. He asked himself how it was possible that generosity could lead to the death of a child? He also had to rethink his assumptions about the cycle of life. He had taken for granted that one was born, passed from childhood to boyhood, to adolescence, to maturity, to old age and finally to death.

The town clerk, for example, who four years earlier had relentlessly pressed the boy’s mother to pay her property tax arrears or face the forced sale of her home, died peacefully in his sleep. The turnout at his funeral service was impressive. Much was made in the eulogies about his outstanding life and the contribution he had made to his community for so many years. No one mentioned his ruthless tax-collection methods. To the mournful tolling of the bells from the Presbyterian church, a throng accompanied his coffin to the cemetery. That was the way it was supposed to be, the boy thought. He was an old man and his time had come.

But it was different with the little boy, whose life had been snuffed out as he ran joyously home, his head filled with the marvels of the just-viewed television images. Although the boy had stopped going to church by this time, he attended the funeral service as part of a contingent of student mourners assembled by the Anglican priest for the occasion. He viewed the tiny body in the open coffin and heard the cleric try to explain in religious terms why innocent children had to die. From the look of anguish in his eyes, the priest himself, the boy suspected, found it hard to believe his own explanations.

The father of the child, a much-battered, unemployed former professional boxer, an alcoholic and a sometime poet from the big city who had married a local girl, entered the church. Wearing an old and tattered suit jacket over a tie-less shirt, his pallid, broken face swollen from crying, he held tightly to his grief-stricken wife in a heart-rending scene the boy would never forget. After the service, the father told the press he had been travelling on a bus from Toronto to Port Carling when his son was killed. At the instant of the child’s death, the father had a premonition his son was dead. He was still struggling to come to terms with the tragedy, but was confident the meaning of his death would be revealed in the fullness of time.

But the boy did not believe him. Nor would he ever understand how someone who had shown no pity to his mother when she was in such great need, and probably to other poor people as well, could live to a ripe old age while an innocent child should die before he had started to live.

Then in August, it rained non-stop throughout one weekend. Cottagers and tourists stayed away from the village, and the locals remained indoors. On the Monday morning, a high school student who had a summer job working in a souvenir shop above Whiting’s Drug Store and Ice Cream Parlour, found his employer slumped over, dead, his body in a chair and his head resting on the railing overlooking the docks. Empty whisky and sleeping-pill bottles were by his side. He had died just above the dockside bench where the boy had spent so many happy hours reading comic books and eating ice cream cones just two years earlier. The villagers said he could not take the loneliness and the rain. The boy believed that the stranger had killed himself to escape the same sort of depression that returned periodically to torment his mother.

 

The boy’s family would soon be able to install an indoor toilet and shower in the old house. Within two or three years, they would even be able to purchase a television set despite the high cost. For the family’s economic fortunes were improving. The boy’s father had found steady employment working on the estate of a wealthy American in the summers and picking up odd jobs in the winter. And in the development that would lift the family forever out of poverty, the mother went out to work.

The man who set this happy train of events in progress was an old Jewish friend of her father who had often dropped in to chat or buy lake trout from him at his home at the Indian Camp during the Great Depression. Later, he had opened a small tourist lodge in the village to cater to Jews who were made to feel unwelcome or simply turned away in that era of open anti-Semitism from the mainstream tourist hotels in the area. Now he stopped the boy’s mother in the street.

“I’m having trouble finding good help at the lodge. Why don’t you come and see if the work suits you? And bring your kids. They can play with the children of the guests on the beach and eat with the rest of us in the staff dining room. The food is kosher, but I guarantee they’ll like it.”

The boy’s mother soon reported for work, discovering that it helped relieve her depression as well as bring in a second income.

As for the boy, it was his first contact with Jews. He had, however, often heard his parents talk of a Jewish doctor who had saved his brother’s life the year before the family moved to Port Carling. His brother, sick with pneumonia, had been given up for lost, and his mother had been summoned to the hospital to be with him as he died. The doctor, however, managed to obtain a small supply of penicillin, the miracle drug that had just been developed and reserved for use on wounded soldiers in Europe. Instead of dying, his brother pulled through and the parents credited the fact that the doctor came from a community of people renowned for their great learning for saving his life. The boy was familiar with the stories of the Jewish people in the Bible from his Sunday school classes. He had also heard the usual racist remarks about them in the schoolyard. Exposed to the real people, however, he found the friendly proprietor, his family, and the middle-class Jewish vacationers no different from anyone else.

This applied to the young, good-natured waiters from the big city who laughed and joked in the dining room.

Until the day the boy saw the numbers tattooed on their arms. The young men were different, he saw, not because they were Jews, but because of the terrible things they had suffered. They were Holocaust survivors, refugees to Canada who were given summer work by the tourist lodge owner. The boy knew something of what they had been through since his uncle had been a war photographer in the Canadian Army who had entered the death camps in 1945 and afterwards tried to relate to his family the horrible things he had seen.

From their experiences, the boy believed, the waiters had gained insights into the joy of living and the tragedy of death that set them apart from anyone he knew or would ever know. He wanted to ask them about the questions that perplexed him, but sensing they would not want to talk about anything that reminded them of their sufferings, said nothing. In later life, however, whenever he faced problems that seemed insurmountable, he would think of the young men he met that summer, who had endured such pain and yet retained such a passion for life.