“He’s the guy who signed Terry Bartholomew with Chicago last year,” I added.
Ig giggled. Poppa closed the pickle jar.
“How much will he take?”
“I don’t know. Ten percent, I guess. The more he gets for me the more he gets for himself. That’s how it works, Poppa.”
“Only there, son.” Der.
Poppa was finished with agent talk. He stood, the smell of gasoline and sawdust rising with him.
“Let’s go, then. Time’s wasting.”
So much for the vision of my homecoming. My scrapbook still sat in the suitcase, seventy-three filled pages of clippings from the Sudbury Star, the North Bay Nugget, the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, the Oshawa Times, the Peterborough Examiner, Toronto’s Telegram, and the Globe and Mail. Pictures for Ig, words for Poppa, and they hadn’t even seen it yet. I couldn’t just go and get it. That would ruin the effect. They should beg it out of me.
But Poppa said Time’s wasting. Almost as if it had wasted so quickly no one had noticed I was gone most of the time over all those years. I may as well have walked in to Hatkoski’s for a haircut and just come back, for all it seemed to matter. No glory, no party, nothing. It was just like I’d never left.
Even Danny Shannon was much the same. Forty pounds heavier, maybe, his walk even looser, if possible, hair thick and dandied, same smile, but everything else the same: loon calls, ugga-buggas, booze plans, sex jokes. He had no interest in hearing about Sudbury or about Billings or about Orr or about the new league penalty record or the all-star selection or even about my chances of making it. He wanted to stuff his green ’62 Chevy with his new chums from down at O’Malley’s mill — Tiny Fetterly, who couldn’t have made our old Pomeranian team as stickboy, Dominic Toposki, Stan Lacha, any mix of a half a dozen others — and then he wanted to do nothing but drive around making up lies about his year in Vernon and having me verify them for him. Talking about Maureen the Queen like she was Ann-Margaret or something.
He was using me, the bastard, and I was helpless. I knew if I balked he could always tell the true side of what happened between Maureen and me, and I would rather have Bobby Orr make a goat of me in front of four thousand hometown fans than have that get out. As far as I was concerned, he could use me all he wanted as long as I got equal time. But though I waited it never came.
I had told Torchy that Pomerania was like stepping into time machine, but I hadn’t realized how right I was. The sole concession to modern times was cars. The guys Danny worked with worshipped Detroit the way the older Poles thought of Czestochowa. The new confession was Household Finance over in Renfrew, undoubtedly with the same proportion of lies. Danny claimed his Chevy had clocked 117 down on the flats. He had chrome moons, Lake pipes, a modified Thrush shift and a hydraulically suspended record player that could take 45-rpm records. All this, parked each night in front of a house that only last summer got running cold water, that still used an outhouse, that burned slabs from the mill in a welded oil drum with ductwork hammered out of truck fenders, that didn’t get a single newspaper or magazine in the mail, that didn’t, in truth, ever get mail.
If I’d been a car they might have been impressed. After all, I had shut down Bobby Orr.
But they could care less. Anything beyond Pomerania lay like snakes below the bed. Danny and his friends were perfectly willing to accept anything about me that was still Pomerania but the other stuff I could keep. They weren’t interested in taking the blinders from their eyes to see what it was I had become.
Piss on them. I looked around Pomerania and saw water to haul and wood to chop, freezing all winter, slapping flies all summer, rotting turnips and soft carrots and wizened-up potatoes from February on, disaster when you missed your moose, people willing to take a quick deer at the expense of a front fender, people sweating about what the priest knew, hating Hatkoski of the barber for his two-year old Buick, cursing the endless stream of American tourists and camper trailers and Airstreams and the songs of rich, blond-haired kids as their chartered buses hurtled through town on their way to the summer camps in Algonquin Park, where roughing it meant having to share a horse. Piss on them all.
It finally came to me that I had been wrong. The outside world wasn’t the place to escape to; Pomerania was the escape, was still the escape just as it had been a hundred years ago when all the frightened, petrified Jazdas and Dombroskis and Hatkoskis and Batterinskis were told to head up the Bonneclare River until they came to a big damn hill that wouldn’t grow anything and would kill most of them before they reached forty, but where at least the Russians and the Prussians and the damn Germans wouldn’t find them. Pomerania was still their fortress. All that had changed was they no longer felt a need to defend it.
Who would want in?
At least Poppa now had a telephone. One long, two short. It quickly got so I couldn’t bear to be in the house: every ring would leave me wrapped in cold, clammy slime. At least the mail didn’t come to me. I went for it, and in that way felt protected when away from box 14 in the rusted green row by Dombroski’s turnaround. But when I did go I felt weak, weaker yet when the box revealed nothing but its usual black, empty space.
The work was a welcome distraction. Poppa landed a contract hauling for O’Malley Brothers back of the abandoned grist mill on the creek. Seven in the morning and we’d be stepping lightly across the broken trestle and off into the bush, forcing wet, cold pants through yet more spruce undergrowth. I carried the two chainsaws, Poppa the gasoline, oil mix, six-quart basket of screwdrivers, wrenches, chain tightener, sharpener, lunch and extra spark plugs. Two miles straight back to avoid the bog along the creek, up over the hardwood hill following a blaze he’d set with orange fluorescent paint he’d snitched from the highway’s depot, down the bluff, across a slope of birch and poplar, over a smaller creek and then into the spruce and jack pine and tamarack bog where the creek led in to Kaszuby Lake.
Poppa went rain or shine. June was mostly shine, and by mid-month the mosquitoes were like a second shirt by the time we’d arrived at the cut. Citronella didn’t work, nor 6–12, finally only tump pots of old oil, rags and our own pee, pots that worked but which we couldn’t light until we got to the clearing, meaning the two-mile hike in was a free buffet for the little bastards. It made the work more of a distraction, less of a welcome. I bought a couple of green hats with cheesecloth netting for our heads, took to long-sleeved shirts, tucking my pants into grey work socks and even gloves, but all to no avail. Poppa said nothing, blinking through his shell of flies like they were nothing more than the confusion of first wakening.
I remember we cut all that month. Poppa felled and I trimmed; then, the last week, cousin Jazda came in with his horses and we hauled what would move easily out to the bush trail coming in at the south side of the lake and moved the rest with a rope system Poppa devised for hauling pulp from the swamps. Two men on block and tackle, the other, me, trussed up like a workhorse in hip waders, slugging the trees out to where the horses could move without breaking through the bog. When we were finished we had better than two hundred cord and I felt strong enough to put both of Bobby Orr’s knees permanently in the goal judge’s cage.
School let out on the twenty-eighth, and the first tourists passed through town that evening. The pulp would have to wait until fall and early winter now. Summer meant live bait and four out of every five dollars Poppa would earn this year. It could have been much more, but Poppa had no imagination. A mile up from the White Rose he had nailed a single plywood board to a tree with one large word, BAIT, written on it, and below that two more, BATTERINSKI’S ROAD.
“It’s useless,” I said.
“People find me,” he said.
“You’d get two, three, maybe five times as many if they knew exactly where,” I argued. “They can’t tell from that whether you’re a hundred yards or a hundred miles away or in what direction. You could be in Vernon for all they know.”
“They find me.”
Dey coul
d have him. Poppa didn’t understand the first thing about selling. Riley, despite his faults, knew he’d starve waiting for people to find his hardware store. You had to suck them in.
I tore down the sign. Danny drove me in to Renfrew and I bought a proper stencil and a small brush and two cans of paint, one black, one white. I got a large plywood board from town and spent the weekend turning it into two signs, one for each direction on the main highway. I nailed them back-to-back at the end of the road where it bleeds into the main highway, each with a huge arrow at the bottom pointing up our road.
BATTERINSKI’S LIVE BAIT
NEXT TURN
TWO MILES IN
ALWAYS OPEN, 24 HRS.
Worms
Leeches
Frogs
Minnows
Crayfish
FREE FISHING HINTS
“I have no leeches,” Poppa said.
“You say you’re out of them.”
“What does it mean, ‘free fishing hints’?”
“It means you tell them to go over to Black Donald for pike or up Sabine creek for speckles.”
Poppa thought the whole thing absurd and said he wouldn’t lie to people, not even tourists. But once the car horns started honking he seemed to find the lies easier to hold on to than the leeches or crayfish, which we never seemed to have in stock. Ig took to sitting down at the end of the drive on a big rock, cap pulled down almost over his eyes, and at the first sound of an engine he’d come running up screaming for Poppa or me that we had customers.
Customers. I wondered what they thought. First thing I’d check would be their licence plates. Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York — and if Ontario I’d check where they bought their big cars, Ottawa, Toronto, Hamilton. Station wagons bottoming on the ruts, Cadillacs humming as the power steering ground around the final lane turn, tiny Morris Minors and Volkswagens with two bars where they would be tagged on behind silver Airstream trailers. What did they think in their pork-pie hats and Bermuda shorts and once-a-year sissy beards? They’d pull in with their soft bodies and obvious wealth and fine teeth and be met by an aging retard with a goofy cap pulled halfway over his head, giggling and walking around the cars trying to see himself in the mirror or tapping on the windows and smiling toothlessly at the little boys and girls who’d shrink back and shriek while their father held on to his brand-new sparkling white Styrofoam minnow pail and pretended everything was just fine — all the while watching poor Ig like he’s a strange dog about to lift his leg. Then along would come Poppa, all gruffness and pitch-black hands and broken nails and egg yellow caked along his chin and the smell of small engines, worms, coal oil, chickens and gutted fish wafting up from him like a shed pail that’s just been opened after a year.
“Yah?” Poppa would say.
“You got any worms?”
“Yah.”
“Great. Great day, huh? Great day for fishing.”
“How many?”
Nervous, shaking, desperate for small talk that wouldn’t come out of Poppa unless he was related to you, the tourists would follow him into the shed, passing by the outdoor toilet, sniffing the lime confusedly, stepping over every stain and spill like it might be a nest for tsetse flies. I tried to handle every customer I saw. I tried to talk to Poppa about the importance of “return customers,” and Poppa said they’d come back when they ran out of bait and he wasn’t about to go suckholing to a bunch of slickers for a lousy sixty cents a box.
I quadrupled his business. I filled pickle jars with leeches just by leaving the jars overnight Dougald Pond with an uncooked pork hock in the bottom. I built a net out of cheesecloth and filled burlap sacks with frogs from the creek. I got extra minnow traps at the Renfrew Canadian Tire and could get more than we’d need in a week just with bread crumbs and an overnight sit in Sabine Creek. But they wouldn’t keep in the heat, so with Ig’s help I diverted the trickle in the small creek that used to run under Jaja’s milk house, cut out the aspen that had grown up there and dammed off a small reservoir with stones, hammering fine mesh behind so they couldn’t escape downstream and another mesh about ten feet upstream, hammered onto posts and then down deep into the muck. It worked. The perfect holding tank.
The first week the signs were up we made $220, more than Poppa would usually make all July. On Wednesday of the second week, with Ig and I prepared to go down and turn over rocks in Black Donald Lake until we had enough crayfish to fill a washtub, Poppa came up with a longer than usual face.
“I took down the signs this morning.”
I looked up. “You what?”
“Batcha don’t like all the honking. It upsets her.”
I couldn’t believe it. Ig began to giggle.
“It upsets her!” I said, very near shouting. “Does $220 also upset her? You want we should throw that away too?”
“You wouldn’t do that,” Ig said, covering his mouth not to laugh.
“She’s not well, Felix,” Poppa said. “You’ve got to understand.”
I didn’t.
“What if I put up a sign at the end of the lane telling them not to honk?”
Poppa shook his head. “Just let thems come who know us.”
Dems. And even with a “th” it was wrong.
“They don’t have to honk,” I said. “We’d have a sign and Ig’s always there anyway. You could stop them, couldn’t you, Ig?”
“You betcha, Feelie. I’d stop ’em.” Ig made a loud honking sound and then throttled himself, giggling.
I looked up at Poppa, pleading. I didn’t want to lose the business. It wasn’t the money but the distraction. I hadn’t thought of Wheeler or the NHL in days.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Poppa said.
I got up and looked at him. Go for a walk? Here? Batterinskis have lived here for a hundred years and no one ever went for a walk.
“A walk!” Ig shouted. “Let’s go for a walk!”
Poppa fixed him with his hard look. “You can dump the dishwater.”
Ig whooped and jumped up. For him, that was even better. He’d get to throw the water over the ashes back of the work shed and perhaps there’d be mice lying there from last night’s traps. Ig believed dishwater on their coats made them seem alive again. If they were stiff already and the flies hadn’t gotten to them he could set them up in the soft ashes like they were real again and throw stones at them. Squealing, Ig ran off in anticipation.
Poppa stood waiting. I let him lead back across the garden and past the coop to the old milk house with its buckled roof and the new minnow corral. There Poppa stopped.
“It’s this,” he said.
“It’s what?”
“When you put this in you cut out the trembling aspen.”
“It was in the way.”
“I know, but she thinks it’s sacred, you know that.”
I was so angry I could spit. “No,” I said, blood rising. “I did not know that.”
“Some of the older ones say aspen was the tree that sheltered the Holy Family when they ran from Herod.”
I couldn’t believe it. I felt like laughing, the way Ig handled difficult moments, but knew I’d better not.
“Well, that may be,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. “But I doubt they passed through here.”
“Don’t be smart, son. She thinks it and that’s it. She’s very upset.”
“So let her be upset. Why should she always get her way.”
“She’s not well.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
Poppa’s hand moved slowly across my face, snapping my neck half off as it hit. The force seemed all out of proportion with the speed. I’d seen it coming enough to duck but couldn’t because it was Poppa. My eyes filled with tears, helplessly. I wanted to ask him why he and everyone else always caved in to her, why they let the bitch ruin their lives, why he let her stay on when she wasn’t even a proper member of the family. She only came along after my true grandmother, Poppa’s real mother, was dead. The bitch wasn’t one o
f us, not really.
“Break your dam,” Poppa ordered.
“But why? How will that bring back her damn trees?”
“Just break the dam. And no more questions, please.”
Sacred. How distant the meaning of the sermons at St. Martin’s from Batcha’s bizarre interpretations. Father Schula would call the painting of Our Lady sacred; Batcha would say the barn swallows are sacred. Father Kulas would talk about the baptismal waters, the host, the communal wine, the cross — all sacred; Batcha would say blindness was caused by the parents of the blind person harming a swallow or a lark. She would place three crosses on the door to the chicken coop, maple twigs under the doors, maple keys buried under the threshold. Every person has a star, his value decided by its size, his life ended by its fall. Every stroke of lightning kills a devil. Sacred, all of it.
Bullshit, all of it.
My relationship with Batcha was even cooler now than before, if that was possible. Our warmest moment was her greeting, the flicker of a smile and then to her room. She sat each day in her rocker with the window view of the yard, the rungs of the chair grinding on the floor as she shifted slightly down the floor slant from the Bible table to the potbellied stove. If she remembered, she took the Polish bible with her, not reading but holding it gently on the afghan covering her lap, eyes closed, lips moving silently. If the door opened the wolf eyes also opened. A body moved, me, and the eyes moved with it.
I like to think I tried. I bought lemons for the old bitch when I picked up the minnow traps in Renfrew. She believed a wedge rubbed over the face would tighten wrinkles. I brought her a sheaf of supple poplar from our pulp cut for her stupid cross-making, but she burned them and insisted on cutting her own down by the creek. After that we rarely spoke.
The Last Season Page 16