by Don Gillmor
The Jazz Age was ending; all that postwar optimism had to go somewhere. Josephine Baker grinning as her breasts wobbled in black and white. But few people actually lived in the Jazz Age. They went to work and saved and had kids and got their Buicks stuck in the mud. They argued about baseball and went to church and had picnics and drank lemonade. And then the Depression hit.
You could see it on people’s faces. In their homes you knew there was saved string and candle wax and pennies and coupons and a suspicion of good fortune. My mother had already seen starvation and had adopted the usual defences: She raised a few cattle, grew a garden, canned the excess, wasted nothing.
The Depression tested the faith of a lot of people, though it probably strengthened the faith of just as many. For one thing, the world looked like the Old Testament, at least around here. Dunstan O’Connell’s ranch was blown out and dead, a foot of sand piled against the barn. It was eight miles south of here. The provincial inspector came by one day and tested his cattle, what remained of them, and found two of them were diseased. I remember getting up early and riding out to the coulee and we herded them into that natural pen, driving them down the incline. A dozen men, neighbouring ranchers who had the sense not to say anything, stood at the top of the small ridge, loading their rifles. The cattle were skittish and a few fell. O’Connell gave the sign and fired the first shot, and a dozen shots immediately followed. Dust rose as they stampeded in useless circles and dropped in heaps. They bellowed and panicked and we kept firing until every steer was down, and then searched for movement among the brown and white carpet and aimed for heads. I remember O’Connell staring down at the carnage. He was sixty-six and it would take three years of hard work and perfect weather to reclaim the land. He was finished and he stared at that lifeless mess and knew it. We carefully spread lime over that mess and rode back.
Dunstan bought my mother a radio in the thirties and she used to listen to Amos ’n’ Andy, a show that came up from the United States about two negroes who were always getting into some kind of jam. It was her favourite show. She never laughed; she said she just liked the sound of their voices.
There was a family that lived a few miles south of us—the Clancys—a hard-luck clan. They came to town in 1906 on their way to Banff. Cochrane was quarantined then because of smallpox, and when they got off the train to get some air and stretch their legs the conductor wouldn’t let them back on. Maybe contaminated, he said, wasn’t going to take the chance. Clancy threw a fit but it didn’t do him any good. Their bags were taken off and the family was stuck in a town of three hundred people. They never left.
Mary Clancy had an army surplus phone set attached to the fence near her house. It was hooked up to the barbed wire that went all the way to our place. We had a phone set too and my mother and Mary talked to each other along the barbed wire. The government had quit paying for phone lines because they blew down and were too expensive to repair and there weren’t enough people out here to make it worth their while. You had to yell sometimes to be heard. It was mostly Mary yelling into the phone and my mother on the other end listening to her tales of Irish grief. They were a curious pair.
Mary’s husband died of pneumonia in the winter of ’32. They loaded him onto the wagon to take him into town but he was dead before they got there. It was thirty-five below. There were seven kids in that house. It was built on a hill and it took the west wind full force and in the winter it just blew right through the place. They put newspapers up on the walls as insulation. They’d gather papers from town and make their own paste and glue them to the walls, one on top of the other. They had a neighbour, a widower named Levant, a man in his sixties, living alone. One day he was at the Clancys’, staring at those newspapers. There’s a photograph of a cow standing on a railway track and he wanted to know what happens to that cow. He can’t read, he’s illiterate, not that unusual for the time. So he asks the eldest daughter to read the story to him. She starts reading, “A heifer belonging to Lucas Porter of Cremona wandered down the spur line last Tuesday” etc. This girl was maybe eighteen, she wasn’t pretty but she had a beautiful voice, the kind of voice where you don’t want the story to end. She reads him the whole story. Not much of a story but he’s hanging on every word. He asks for another one, then another. He starts coming by twice a week and sits in the rocking chair as she reads the newspapers on the wall. They keep getting new ones to paste over the old ones. They might be three inches thick. He pays her a dollar each time. Men working as navvies made that in a twelve-hour day. It wasn’t the news that kept him coming back; some of the papers were six months old. It was her voice. She’d read him a story about a man who had his thumb cut off at the Quigley sawmill, or a lost pig, or a calf that fell through the spring ice, floating downriver, its brown eyes staring up as though through a window. She read comics and cattle prices and wheat futures, and he lived for the sound of that voice.
During the Depression everyone talked politics. They beat the subject until it was bloody and useless, then brought it up again the next day. I guess we were hoping someone would come along with an answer, but no one ever did.
Mackenzie King was prime minister for twenty-two years and yet Willie (as he was known) was almost invisible. His reign was like a magic act where no one ever figured out where the lady vanished to. There were moments when I thought King had vanished as well; the magician’s final trick. He was as placid as a bowl of porridge. Had we known his actual thoughts, we would have run for the hills, but that’s probably true of most people. So we had a leader who didn’t lead and we convinced ourselves that this was progress.
1
MACKENZIE KING, 1935
Physically, William Lyon Mackenzie King was ordinary, scrupulously, almost aggressively so, inclined to stoutness (who would have guessed at the athleticism of his youth?), his hair sparse and flattened onto a spherical head. He was staring at Mrs. Etta Wriedt of Detroit, a serious and slightly pinched woman whose prosaic face stared upward, studiously vacant, though her words came out in quick conversational rhythms. She was speaking the words of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the former prime minister, dead for sixteen years. She reminded King of Laurier when the light was fading in him, his feminine beauty betraying him near the end. Laurier had been a great leader, possessed of an enviable charisma, a quality no one accused King of having.
There had been trouble at the last seance, and the unresponsiveness of the spirits was put down to a lack of receptiveness among those present (a lack of faith, really, and certainly King wasn’t guilty of this). Or perhaps there had been a mysterious absorption of ectoplasm in the twilight. It happened on occasion, he was told. The spirits unable to communicate, like a static-filled phone line. The session before that had been so electric! From the grave Laurier praised King’s loyalty (though he had also stressed that he must redouble his efforts to learn French).
—What is the best course, Wilfrid?
—The best course is to follow history, Mackenzie. History is a like a swift river. You can fight the current, but you rarely win. The Conservatives inherited the Depression, and they have become the Depression. People are afraid. They are looking for certainty.
—How can I give them that?
—You can’t. Any certainty you utter may come back to haunt you. We can never be certain. But you can bring them calm.
—Will I be re-elected prime minister?
—You were predestined, answered the voice from beyond, coming from its resting place near the corseted sternum of Etta.
—Wilfrid, will I be loved?
King waited for the reply, patient with the spirits. Five silent minutes, Etta’s expressionless face staring upward. Then, a faint sound of something. Trumpets, perhaps, thought King, ever hopeful.
“I’m afraid he’s gone, Mr. King,” Etta finally said, her face drained and pale.
Laurier was right; it wasn’t a good time to be in power. The last five years had seen locusts and dust storms. The Nile turned to blood, frogs r
aining down, a darkness over Egypt. A million men without work. In Quebec, priests were charging fifty cents to say Mass. Out west, men were setting forest fires in order to get work putting them out. They were burning the wooden sidewalks on the prairies in winter to stay warm. The barter system had returned; rural doctors delivered babies in exchange for live chickens. And through this torment, men made alcohol out of potatoes in their kitchens. It was the colour of milk and made them blind and they sat on their porches and felt the seasons change against their skin while children spooned oatmeal into their slack mouths. Out in the relief camps, men were busy doing useless work, simply a way of quarantining their misery from the rest of the nation, keeping them hidden. All those men without women, a constant war between flesh and spirit, skirmishes that went on for months. King understood that battle: the eternal struggle.
What politician could save these men?
He would bide his time, consult the dead. His campaign slogan came in a vision, “King or Chaos!” He would bring a judicious stillness to the country, a determined lull. His rhetoric was as flat as a Presbyterian hymn; he roused no one. This was his gift, to keep the country unroused, to keep it from rising up against the impossibility of itself.
2
MICHAEL MOUNTAIN HORSE, ALBERTA, 1935
Michael’s first ride was with a truck driver carrying a load of sallow horses, their bony frames visible through the wooden slats. The spring was dwarfed, unwilling to bring much life, and Michael looked at the wreckage of the prairies go by. A grey farmhouse sat abandoned, sandy soil drifting to the windows. There had been reports of topsoil ten thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, a black blizzard that moved a million tons of earth across the continent, the last grains taken out to sea.
The driver talked about women the whole trip. “Thing about women is, they like a man with the gift of the gab,” he said. “I got regular work, and I got the gift, and that makes me Rudolph Valentino.”
Michael looked at him, maybe sixty, a short man with an honest homely face and small hands that gripped the large wheel like a child’s. “What they got, most of them, is loneliness. Got it like the Spanish flu. Some of them have husbands. That makes them twice as lonely. You know why?”
Michael stared at the brown fields. Unhelpful clouds scudded east, dust swirling in the dry wind. “Why?”
“Their husbands are in the relief camps or on the railway. They’re gone and there’s a hole to fill. They need someone to come along, tell them they’re swell, show them you know what they feel.”
“And what do they feel?” Michael asked.
“Alone, mister. Every day is hard and there ain’t any relief.”
“You’re relief.”
“That’s it. They’re sorry to see me go. I get in my truck, they go back to their kitchens and cry in their aprons. Some of those gals, they learned some tricks somewhere. Take me all day and a chalkboard to explain.”
Michael had heard versions of this story from dozens of men. The whole world was filled with lonely housewives, all of them panting and inventive, and judging by the storytellers, not too choosy. How was it that Michael never encountered them?
“Good-looking boy like you. You don’t have work, don’t have a girl. Some times we live in.”
“If I had a girl, I wouldn’t tell you,” Michael said.
“You’d be smart,” the man said, laughing. “They get tired of good looks. It’s a scientific fact. Me, I make an impression.”
Michael stared at the hair growing out of the truck driver’s ears, his erratically shaven face, grey skin drooping at his jaw. He thought about Marion. Love is a flame, they say. Love is a woman with a gun. Love, you murdered my heart.
The truck stopped outside of Gleichen to let Michael out, the driver implying with a broad wink that he had a romantic liaison to attend to. Michael walked along the road in the spring heat. A family slowly passed him, their small house on wheels, being pulled by four draught horses, the caravan moving only slightly faster than Michael on foot. Michael guessed from their clothes that they were Ukrainian. A girl, maybe twelve, stared at him from the side window for fifteen minutes. Michael waved to her but she didn’t wave back. Another team pulled a few pieces of farm equipment and Michael supposed they were heading north, to where the drought hadn’t caught hold, though the land was unbroken and less arable there.
Michael walked until ten that night, the red glow faint behind him, and then lay down in a copse of elm trees that were half a mile off the road and slept. In the morning he ate the last of the bread he had taken with him and hesitantly drank from a slow, small stream, the water tasting faintly of wood. He walked until noon and then stopped at a gas station. A man pulled up in a Model T that was so covered in grasshoppers it looked like a living thing. The man offered Michael a dollar if he’d clean off the hoppers, and he spent an hour with a rag and a bucket of kerosene before he got them all.
Michael walked for three days, sleeping outside and occasionally taking a fish from a stream with the line he had. Outside Brooks he set his bedroll down beside a rusted truck that sat in a field and slept. When he woke up, the sun was a muted glow over the flat horizon. He walked east until late afternoon and then approached a farm that was a half mile off the road. The white paint had almost completely faded and there was a stain on the west wall the colour of tobacco where grasshoppers had congregated and left their sticky juice.
The soil outside the farmhouse was patchy and eroded but it wasn’t buried in sand like some places Michael had seen. As he got closer he saw a field behind the house that was a lush green. It seemed like a mirage. He hadn’t seen anything like it on the prairies. It was on a slight downward slope behind the house and barn, hidden from the road, hoarded.
Michael walked up to it and felt something like awe. When he stooped down to examine the miraculous crop, he saw that it was Russian thistle, a weed, an extraordinary field of useless green.
“Come to see the miracle, mister?”
Michael turned to see a woman who looked to be about forty but was probably closer to thirty. The Depression scoured faces. Her skin was raw, as if scrubbed with a stiff brush, and she had a man’s hands. She was pretty though, or at least capable of prettiness. So many faces were occupied with more pressing wants. Her eyes were a pale blue.
“I was wondering what could grow like this.”
“There’s the devil’s trick for you. Green as paradise and useless as sin.”
“I’m also wondering if you have any work,” Michael said.
She looked at him, assessing—he wasn’t the first to stop by—then looked past him to the barn and the slouching fence. “I got lots of work, mister,” she said. “What I don’t have is money to pay you for it.” She gave him another hard look. “I can feed you,” she said simply.
Together they stared out to the property. “Tools are in the barn,” she said. “That might be as good a place as any to start.”
Michael retrieved the tools and laid them out on a piece of stiff canvas. There were some grey timbers outside the barn and a few pieces of odd-sized wood inside. He spent three hours patching the barn where the boards had rotted through, straightening bent rusty nails on a stone and reusing them. As the sky darkened into heavy blue, clouds collecting in the west, the woman came out with a bowl of thin stew and some bread and introduced herself as Hannah. Her husband had gone off looking for work and maybe he’d found it or maybe he’d found something else. He’d been gone six months, she said.
After he ate, Michael took his bedroll to the barn. In the morning Hannah gave him some tasteless porridge in a shallow bowl. The heavy clouds from last night had come to nothing. The house was plain inside, with a few photographs on a small varnished table that had a tissue of lace on it. There was a photograph of a balding, unsmiling man who Michael assumed was her husband. There was a piano, and when Michael asked if she played, she said no.
He worked for three weeks, repairing what he could, working the garden, s
preading poison for the hoppers. In the evenings they sat on the sofa in the parlour and one evening she undid his shirt buttons and pulled her dress over her head. Her breasts were heavy and her skin was white and milky and shone almost. They made love on the sofa and afterwards she got up and walked naked over to the piano and sat down and played “Flying Down to Rio,” singing the words in a sweet tenor. Michael asked for another song.
“You just get the one,” she said, smiling.
There was a knock at the door and for a moment Michael thought it might be her mirthless husband, though he realized it would be odd for a man to knock on his own door. He scrambled into his clothes and Hannah slipped on her dress and answered the door. It was still light, and in the doorway were two boys, maybe ten and six, obviously brothers. They each had the same homemade haircut, and each one carried a pail filled with dead gophers.
“They’re a nickel apiece,” the older boy said, the smaller one just staring ahead. Both their faces had the dark cast that came with strong winds blowing dirt into their pores and a monthly bath.
“A nickel,” Hannah said.
“Yes ma’am, killed fresh today.”
Michael wondered how far the boys had walked. The nearest farm was two miles away, but they would have come farther than that. Michael felt a light breeze trying to move the dead air.
“Good for stewing,” the boy said. “Or frying. You can fry them up.”
Hannah looked at the two boys and said, “Give me one pailful.”
“I can let you have a better price on the second pail,” the boy said, not relishing carrying them all the way back home.
“Let me see how this first one works,” Hannah said. She went into the kitchen and came back with a tiny purse, counting out forty-five cents for nine gophers.
The boy thanked her and he and his brother walked off down the road.