Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 04 - Sunny Dreams

by Alison Preston

  Aunt Helen insisted on feeding them and washing their clothes. And then the arguments began between her and my dad. Helen thought the men should pitch their tents in the yard and stay for a few days till they were rested and fed to capacity and had some inkling of what they were going to do next.

  “What about the offer from Ennis Foote?” she said.

  I was still unsure of Helen’s motives and I was rooting for her once more.

  If our house was a curiosity to neighbours before Tag arrived, it was like a full-blown circus attraction now. There were no coloured people in our neighbourhood. There were very few in the whole of Winnipeg. We didn’t have many Chinese or other Asian types either. There was Sam Lee at the laundry on Taché; he was the only one I knew. And there was a Chinese restaurant next door to the laundry, relatives of Sam’s, I think, but I didn’t know them. My dad wouldn’t let us eat Chinese food.

  We had Italians in our neighbourhood, Quint Castellano and his extended family, a few Ukrainians and other eastern Europeans like the Popkoviches, and, of course, French and the varying combinations of Métis. But mostly they lived on the other side of St. Mary’s Road. In the Norwood Flats we were practically wall-to-wall Anglo-Saxon. No full-blooded Indians and for sure no Negroes.

  My dad didn’t know what to do. He wanted them out of there.

  All Tag talked about was grasshoppers. Coming from downtown Detroit, he had heard of them, of course, and even seen a few in his time, but nothing like what was happening on the prairies.

  “I’ve never been so afraid,” he said. “I thought it was the end of the world when I first saw them coming. A plague of locusts.”

  We were sitting on lawn chairs in the backyard: Tag, Benny, Helen, Jackson, Dad, and me. It was evening of the day they arrived and no decision had been made yet as to where the men would make camp.

  “Have you ever been in a grasshopper storm, ma’ams?” Tag looked at Helen and then me. He seemed afraid of my dad. Rightly so.

  We both shook our heads, no.

  “It’s scary, ma’ams, let me tell you. They come in a cloud of millions and black out the sky. I’m not joking. And they leave this juice behind — grasshopper juice — and it makes everything slippery and sticky. You get it on your clothes and on your skin till you want to scream. Man, I’ve never been so scared. They had to stop the train, didn’t they, Ben?”

  Benny nodded, yes. Tag was talkative enough for both of them.

  “I’m telling you, they stopped the train. It couldn’t get any traction because of the slippery glop from the grasshoppers on the tracks.”

  “Ugh!” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am!” he said.

  Tag had completed his grade twelve in Detroit that spring. He was eighteen years old. His mum saw to it that he graduated. Tag was the first kid in his extended family to finish high school. There were five brothers and sisters at home (without Duke) and they weren’t starving. Both the parents had work. They were furious with Duke and scared stiff for him. So they agreed to let Tag go after him, figuring him to be the sensible one. Tag hadn’t been able to find work anyway, so he headed west. There would be one less mouth to feed at home, he reasoned, and perhaps he could find some sort of work and send a few dollars back to his folks along with his brother. He had no doubt that he would find him.

  “He’s in this city. I just know it,” Tag said now.

  “You’ve been a long way from home,” said my dad. “What part of Detroit do you live in? I know the city a little.”

  “Yes, sir. Black Bottom, sir. Brush Street. The only part of the city for the likes of me and my family.”

  My dad blushed. “Of course, son. I’m sorry.”

  “No way for you to know, sir.”

  My dad was quiet after that. He was out of his depth. He didn’t know what kinds of questions to ask Negroes.

  Helen didn’t hang their clothes on the line till after dark when the wind died down. They still wouldn’t dry completely clean, but there was no winning against the dust. If anyone could have won the dust battle it would have been Helen; she tried hard enough. She’d be up before dawn to take in the clothes before the wind came up again.

  They slept in the yard overnight. Jackson joined them outside. I guess he didn’t feel right carrying on in the lap of luxury the way he’d been. No one argued. Tag set up a small umbrella tent of his own, the type with a pole in the centre.

  It was good to have Benny back with us. The murmurs of the men lulled me to sleep. Their voices were low and serious: plans for the future, I guessed, what the heck to do next.

  I slept soundly that night and halfway through the next morning. It was the best sleep I’d had in weeks, maybe because Jackson was no longer down the hall. I hadn’t lain awake trying to get a satisfying breath like I did on so many other nights, when over and over I would breathe in deeply but never deeply enough. I couldn’t get that last bit of air inside me, the one I really needed.

  It would have been my last day at work. I didn’t pretend to go and no one seemed to notice. Whether or not I went to work was so far down on both Dad’s and Helen’s lists of preoccupations it likely didn’t even register. When I looked out my bedroom window I saw an empty yard. The tents were gone. I ran downstairs in my nightie and found Helen in the kitchen.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked.

  “Gone,” she said, busy at the stove.

  “What do you mean gone?”

  I would never see Jackson again. The worst that could happen had happened. I would never get to kiss him. He would never save me from anything.

  “Your father made a grand announcement this morning that they couldn’t stay here any longer,” said Helen. “He got up on his high horse and told them in so many words that they would have to leave.”

  “How could he do that?” I asked. “How could he just…do that?”

  She turned to face me. “Your dad isn’t a mean man, Violet. He’s just very…proper. He cares about what people think of him. Like the neighbours.”

  “The neighbours! The neighbours be damned! Did they have breakfast at least?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Helen had fed the men oatmeal porridge, fried eggs, toast, and coffee. When they were done eating they’d packed up their tents and clean clothes and headed out. I had slept through the whole thing.

  My dad was probably glad of that.

  “Where did they go?” I asked. “Did they know where they were going?”

  “I’m not sure. They weren’t sure.”

  “Did you tell them about Mr. Foote’s offer?”

  “I did.”

  “Where is he?” I asked. “Where’s Dad?”

  “He’s out back with the garage. He bought some paint.”

  “This is crazy,” I said. “So he cares about what people think of him, does he? Does he want them to think that he turns away starving men in their time of need?”

  “I’d like to sock him one,” Helen said quietly.

  She was cooking. And she was cooking for a large group, by the look of it. There was a giant pot of potatoes boiling on the stove and chicken pieces sizzling in the fry pan.

  “Are you having a party?” I asked.

  “The boys have been invited back for supper,” she said matter-of-factly as she stuck a fork into a thigh and flipped it over.

  I laughed. “Who invited them?”

  “Me.”

  “Does Dad know?”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “I’ll go and tell him,” I said and kissed Helen on the cheek.

  “Would you mind, dear?” She smiled.

  It felt good to be in on something with Helen again.

  So the men joined us for supper in the yard. We set the picnic table and they ate like starving wolves. Carrots and stewed tomatoes and corn bread rounded out the chicken and the potato salad and there was rice pudding with raisins for dessert. We drank a gallon of iced tea and laughed a lot.

  Jackson seemed glad to be bac
k with Benny. Tag told a few more stories about grasshoppers and even my dad seemed to enjoy himself. I think he felt badly about asking the men to leave and having them back for a meal eased his conscience. He was so torn. I could feel it emanating from him. He felt for them and wanted to help them, but he was also overly conscious of the way it would look to the community, with young me and ever-friendly Helen mixing it up with these strange men. It had been hard enough on him having Jackson in the house without adding a coloured man to the picture.

  They had set up their tents in the large field near St. Mary’s Road and Cromwell Street. The nearest homes were perhaps two baseball diamonds away. The Willises lived in one of those homes. One of their claims to fame was being one of the poorest families in the Norwood Flats, if not the poorest.

  The Willis twins, who had been just fourteen when Sunny disappeared, still lived there with their mum and sister when they weren’t in jail. I guess they were having a run of good behaviour if, indeed, it was them that Isabelle and I saw on the dock that night. They would be around twenty-seven now, old bad boys who satisfied their sense of fun by shredding the clothes of young girls out for a night-time swim. But killing clothes wasn’t enough to send them back to jail.

  Our men had set themselves up on city property and they weren’t the only ones there. They had found a spot under the shade of two large oaks. It was a precarious situation. Single men on the move were constantly told to shift, get out of town, even to spend a night behind bars. They were treated like criminals when often their biggest crime was riding a freight car or not informing the relief people that they were leaving home so their mothers could claim their share for her other children.

  More often than not there was no crime at all, just the fact of their being on the move instead of staying in one place. The cops could easily charge them with any one of a number of so-called crimes: vagrancy, loitering, trespassing, or being a public nuisance. These men, our men, were transients, not tramps, and I thought I knew them well enough by now, even Tag — he talked so goldarn much — to know that they were good men looking for honest work that for the most part didn’t exist for them.

  Except for Jackson, of course. I was entirely unsure how good a man he was, and what he was doing living so rough when he didn’t have to. But I didn’t care.

  Dad came into the kitchen for a few minutes after supper when Helen and I were cleaning up.

  “I wonder if we could put together some sort of breakfast package for the men,” he said.

  Helen and I exchanged a glance.

  “Sure, Will, we could do that,” Helen said. “Go and ask them if they can build a fire over there where they’ve set up camp.”

  “Why doesn’t he just let them stay in the yard?” I asked after he had gone back outside.

  “He just can’t, Violet,” said Helen. “He just simply can’t.”

  I looked out the window and saw Jackson and Benny out by the lane talking together. They seemed to be arguing. At least Jackson was. Benny was on the receiving end.

  My dad sat with Tag at the picnic table. I guessed they were talking about grasshoppers.

  Fraser phoned me that evening and we went for a walk by the river.

  “Benoit Bateau is back in town,” I said.

  “Yes,” Fraser said, “I heard there were tents set up in your yard.”

  “Word travels fast,” I said.

  “Is it true there’s a Negro staying at your place?” Fraser asked.

  “They’re not at our place anymore, and yes, there is a Negro.”

  “What’s he like?” asked Fraser.

  “Nice. Kind of funny. He’s looking for his younger brother who ran off from home. He’s from Detroit and he talks about grasshoppers a lot.”

  “Yeah. Dirk was saying he was from Detroit.”

  “Sheesh!” I stopped walking and stared at Fraser. “What’s with that dadratted Dirk! What the Sam Hill? Does he spy on people? Does he spy on my family?”

  “I think Gwen’s mum puts him up to it,” Fraser said.

  “That’s too weird. What does any of this have to do with Gert Walker?”

  “She’s just a nosy old bat is all. Isn’t Gwen supposed to be your best friend? You could ask her about it.”

  “All her time lately is spent with evil Dirk, master spy and gossip. And clothes killer,” I added quietly.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you say clothes killer?” asked Fraser.

  “Yes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that Dirk and the Willis boys sliced my clothes and Isabelle’s clothes to bits when we went swimming in the river.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What were you doing swimming in the river?”

  “Doesn’t what I was doing swimming in the river seem kind of unimportant next to Dirk cutting our clothes to shreds?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “I should say so!”

  “Maybe I could ask him about it when I see him again,” Fraser said. “See what he has to say.”

  “Yeah, that’d be good,” I said. “Would you do that?”

  “Yes,” Fraser said. “I will.”

  A little swirl of grey dust eddied up in the dry field between us and the motor boat garage. Then I saw a flame and I realized that what I was seeing was smoke; the ground was on fire. Fraser saw it too and we ran to stomp it out. And then we saw another and another. We stomped them out, too.

  “Jesus loving Christ,” I said. “Our whole world could burn down around us. What if we hadn’t been here to put out these fires?”

  “Someone else would have,” said Fraser.

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “I think I want to go home now.”

  I didn’t want to see any more fires and be responsible for the safety of the whole neighbourhood.

  “My dad’s still interested in a new shed,” said Fraser as we trudged off over the parched scrub toward my house. “Your aunt phoned him about it.”

  “Darn it all anyway,” I said. “I think I’m going to run away from home.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s…please, never mind.” I wasn’t ready to share my icky notions about Aunt Helen with Fraser, that was for sure.

  “Where are your men staying?” Fraser asked.

  “Over in the field behind the Willises’ house,” I said. “And they’re not my men.”

  Fraser said he would go with me in the morning to seek out Benny. His dad just wanted one man, he said. He didn’t want a man with casts on his arms and he didn’t have to say which of the other two he didn’t want. I wondered if Mr. Foote would dislike Benny because of his French-Canadian accent.

  Chapter 18

  The next morning Fraser and I walked over to the field to find Benny and talk about the shed. The worst that could happen, I imagined, was that we would find the slain bodies of the three men, killed by marauding railroad bulls. The railway police had a bad reputation for violence.

  We found them all right. So far no one had murdered them or driven them off. Jackson was playing solitaire with a grubby old deck of cards. Benny and Tag were sitting in the scrub a little ways off from their camp. Benny looked to be in a trance; Tag seemed a little twitchy, like the trance thing wasn’t coming easily for him.

  “Benny sometimes goes into trances,” I explained to Fraser.

  “Great,” he said. “My dad’ll be pleased.”

  I tossed an almost full pack of Sweet Caporals onto the ground next to Jackson’s cards.

  “Tailor-mades!” he shouted.

  Tag was there in an instant and even Benny wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t interrupt his efforts.

  All of us lit up except for Fraser.

  When I introduced him, the three men said hello through clouds of smoke.

  “Fraser’s dad needs a man to build him a shed,” I said.
/>   I wondered if they would think Fraser was feeble because he couldn’t build a simple shed for his dad. These hard times were complicated. So often people wouldn’t know if their work was of value, like in my dad’s case with the garage, or if they were being offered charity in disguise. This case had even more sinister reasons in my eyes, connected to Aunt Helen’s middle-aged desperation and her search for one more sunny day.

  “They live on Monck Avenue not far from here,” I said. “His name is Ennis Foote and he’s a pretty grumpy guy, but his wife’s nice and his son’s okay.” I gave Fraser a little shove and he grinned. I wanted Jackson to think that Fraser and I were a couple, that we had sexual intercourse regularly in all kinds of interesting positions and places.

  “My dad’s not grumpy,” Fraser said.

  “Yes, he is,” said I.

  “No, he isn’t,” said Fraser. “He’s just quiet and a little opinionated.”

  “Just the one man?” asked Benoit.

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. “It won’t be a fun job for you, Benoit, but it will get you a few dollars, a few meals and a place to pitch your tent.”

  “What about these two?” he asked Fraser. “Can they camp with me in your father’s yard?”

  “Hmm, I don’t know,” said Fraser.

  I did know, or at least, I was almost positive, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it and Fraser didn’t say anything more.

  Tag knew.

  “I’m going to sign up with a relief camp,” he announced. “I hear they feed a man pretty well and I should check them out for signs of my brother.”

  “Those are horrible places, Tag,” I said.

  “Better than starving,” he said as he lit another cigarette. “Or going to jail.”

  “Maybe.” I wasn’t so sure.

  Single men out of work in those days were considered dangerous. The politicians wanted them gone, out of sight. They feared a revolution from these men with time on their hands. They didn’t want them hanging about listening to agitators spouting off about rising up against the system. The agitators were referred to as commies or Bolshies. In reality, most of the men were too tired and hungry to read pamphlets containing words like proletariat and bourgeoisie. But the government couldn’t see that.