Wake The Stone Man

by Carol McDougall

  Now that really struck me as funny. I mean, acid-free envelopes — envelopes that weren’t on acid?

  Mr. Klein continued. “Put the accession number on the envelope, then file each photo numerically in this filing cabinet.”

  “Right.”

  “Any questions?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I’m just upstairs if you do have any questions.”

  I was glad when he left. I sat down at my desk. Liked the sound of that, my desk. My office. My job. I had a job. Ha, good on ya, Molly. But I was going to lose it fast if I didn’t get my shit together so I took a handful of photos out of the box and placed them on the desk beside the index cards. Numbering system. The first thing I had to do was come up with a numbering system. Not hard, I liked systems. I’m very anal that way.

  I came up with a system where every photo got a number, starting with the number one, then the year of the photograph, like 1907, then the subject, like grain elevators or people:

  1. 1897 — People — Wedding of Charles Tuppen and Vera Books.

  2. 1908 — Elevators — Fire at Elevator B.

  3. 1951 — Railway — Chief Andrew Bannon gives peace pipe to Donald Gordon, president of the C.P.R., Sept 27.

  I had a stack of lined index cards and I wrote the number on the back of each photograph, then on the top corner of the index card. Then I wrote a description of the photo with as much information as I could find — names, buildings and addresses. I wrote an index card for the number, an index card for the year and an index card for the subject, and I cross-referenced each subject entry like crazy, sometimes doing a dozen cards for one photo. Like I said, I’m very anal.

  6. 1911 — Ship industry — S.S. Duluth pulling into dry dock at the Western Dry Dock and Ship Building Co. circa 1911. Beside the freighter is a dump scow under construction.

  7. 1870 — Banks — Teepee beside the site of the new Ontario Bank.

  Teepee being pushed away for the bank, I thought. Two men with long braids are sitting on the ground outside the Teepee and a mean looking guy in a black suit and bowler hat is standing beside them. Find the banker.

  8. 1919 — People — Mrs. J.G. Podowosky.

  Dead. Dead as a doornail, propped up in a chair dressed in her Sunday best. The photo was taken at J.R. Evans Photography Studio, so I thought the family must have thrown dead granny into the back of a truck and schlepped her off to Evan’s photo studio. The family is all crowded in behind her with their best funeral faces on, and a man behind granny has his hand on her shoulder. Probably propping her up so she doesn’t fall over while J. R. Evans snaps the photo. I guess the photo is to show the folks back home that granny was well and truly dead.

  9. 1890 — People — Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught visits Fort McKay, May.

  He is standing there with this long curly moustache and a pinched look on his face like he’s constipated.

  10. 1904 — Communications — building the telegraph line from Heron Bay to Fort McKay. Left to right, George Peterson, Duncan McFee, Archibald Bell.

  Archibald Bell, that’s my great grandpa Archie. He was just a kid. Nice looking kid. I taped a photocopy of that photo above my desk. It was nice to look up and see my great grandpa smiling down on me.

  11.1896—People—An unidentified man with four kids, all bundled in fur coats and fur hats, sitting on a sled pulled by two Newfoundland dogs.

  Men going off to war. Men coming back from war. Men going off to another war. There was a photo of soldiers coming back from World War Two, getting off the train in South Fort. Between the train and the station was a long table filled with fancy rolled sandwiches with the crusts cut off and pots of tea and china teacups. On the back of the photo it said, “South Fort I.O.D.E. welcome men back from the front.” I.O.D.E — Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire — there’s a mouthful. I figured those poor soldiers were probably more interested in getting their hands on a cold beer and a hot girl than a rolled cucumber sandwich.

  Photos of men in lacrosse uniforms standing in a long line on a frozen lake. The guy at the end, the captain of the team, was my great grandpa Archie’s brother Joe. He died in the flu epidemic of 1918.

  Photos of miners at Silver Mountain in 1883, and loggers in the bush north of Papoonge, and the three long buildings of the Gowanlock brickyards. Photos of men digging ditches along the first roads. First Avenue 1919 with wooden boardwalks. First Avenue 1953 with brick storefronts.

  If you looked hard enough you could see stuff. You could see how the Ojibwe lived beside the Stone Man for hundreds of years, hunting and fishing and living off the land, then everything flipped ass-over-tits when the Europeans arrived. Guys in kilts and French voyageurs in canoes chasing beaver. Well, not chasing beaver exactly, though I’m sure they did a lot of that, but trapping beavers for pelts to make hats for the rich dudes back in Britain. This whole country got turned ass-over-tits because of beavers and hats. That’s Canada for you.

  I found a hand-drawn map labelled “1878” — around the time my great grandpa emigrated from Colonsay, Scotland. There were about twelve houses in a circle near the waterfront. My great grandpa helped to put up the first telegraph lines and his parents ran the telegraph office from their attic. Then came the railway and things went ass-over-tits again. The rails hooked the town up to the outside world. People came from all over — Sweden, Finland, Italy, the Ukraine. Buildings boomed, elevators boomed, jobs boomed. One minute there’s nothing here but bush, then overnight it’s the flippin Chicago of the North. Or at least that’s what those rich Brits who ran the town thought. And I guess for a while it was. At least for them.

  ***

  I got the hang of the cataloguing, and soon I couldn’t wait to get to the library in the morning to see what I was going to find in my pile of photographs. Mr. Kline invited me up to the lunchroom for my breaks, but I wasn’t interested in sitting around with a bunch of people I didn’t know, trying to make nice. After a while he started coming downstairs in the afternoon with two mugs of tea. We got talking, and I realized he wasn’t as stiff as he seemed when I first met him. It was pretty clear from his accent he wasn’t from Fort McKay, so one day I finally asked him where he was from.

  “New York,” he said.

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “Draft dodger.”

  “You actually got drafted?”

  “I did. Got my notice, packed a bag and flew to Canada that day.”

  “OK, I get coming to Canada, but why Fort McKay?”

  “I went to Montreal first and studied at McGill for a couple years. Then this job came up and here I am.”

  “Can you ever go back?”

  “I don’t know. There might be an amnesty for draft dodgers once the war is over. Hard to say.”

  “Must have been tough to leave your country not knowing if you can ever go back,” I said.

  “I didn’t have a choice. It was either come to Canada or fight in a war I didn’t believe in.”

  I remembered all the years of watching the Vietnam War on television — people getting blown up and burned up, and I knew that if I was a young guy living in the States I’d get my ass up to Canada too.

  ***

  I started looking forward to my three o’clock visit from Mr. Klein. We’d drink tea and talk and as I listened to him talk about his life back in the States I realized we had something in common. We’d both been separated from our families, and we were both stuck in the bush in the middle of nowhere.

  “Hey, look at this.” I passed Mr. Klein a photo I had found.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the Mariaggi Hotel in 1884, the year it was built. Says here it was considered one of the grandest hotels in Canada at the time.”

  “Is it still standing?”

  “Yeah, but it sure doesn’t look like this. It’s a dump. I thi
nk Social Services owns it now. A lot of homeless people live there.” I read from a newspaper clipping taped to the back of the photo: “The dining room was hung with Union Jacks from one end of the hall to the other and two long tables ran the length of the room. Around the tables was a miniature railway track with trains and a telegraph line making up the story of the completion of the track.”

  “So what was the dinner for?” he asked.

  “Something to do with the building of the railway I guess. Look, they even give the menu: Lake Superior whitefish, braised fillet of beef, roast partridge with bacon and for dessert Charlotte Russe — whatever that is.”

  Mr. Klien picked up another clipping: “Three hundred guests gathered for the grand march descending the staircase into the ballroom for the Bal Poudre.”

  “What’s a Bal Poudre?” I asked.

  “It means literally ‘powdered wig ball.’”

  Mr. Klein passed the clipping to me and I saw the ladies in their fancy ball gowns coming down a winding staircase. “Hard to believe this town was such a happening place back then,” I said.

  ***

  That afternoon I spent hours cataloguing each of the Mariaggi photographs and cross-referencing them by the names of the people, the clothing and the events. I made a photocopy of the Bal Poudre and put it over my desk, beside the photo of my great grandfather.

  After work I walked out of the library along First Avenue. After a long day in the basement looking at old photos it was hard to get my head back into the present. I felt like Billy Pilgrim — unstuck in time. One minute I’m walking down First Avenue in 1971, then zap, it’s 1898 and there’s a dirt road lined with wooden shacks, then zap, it’s 1910 and there’s a horse and carriage going by, then zap, it’s 1958 and the Santa Claus parade is coming down a paved street.

  I stopped on the street that evening and looked up at the clock on the tower of the Empire Building. It had stopped. I wondered when. I looked down the street again and I saw that everything had stopped. The front of the Odeon Theatre boarded up, Portland’s Ladies Wear closed. There was a homeless shelter beside the Lorna Doone. The street was dead.

  When did it happen? I looked down First Avenue again and felt like I was living in a ghost town. No rotten egg stink was coming out of the mill — the mill was shut down. No Auto Works rolling subway cars off the assembly line — the factory was closed. No grain being loaded into grain boats — the grain elevators had been empty since the grain started moving west to Asia.

  I heard a plane overhead and looked up. Flying east. Probably filled with people with one-way tickets to Toronto. Lucky them.

  chapter twelve

  Late in August I found a stack of six cardboard boxes piled outside my office door. I went to Mr. Klein’s office to find out what they were. He was talking on the phone and motioned for me to wait until he finished.

  “You found the boxes?” he said when he hung up the phone.

  “I did. What’s in them?”

  “I don’t know. They were brought in yesterday.The woman who brought them said she works in the office at St. Mary’s residential school. They’re tearing it down apparently.”

  “Tearing it down? I didn’t know that.”

  “She said she’d been a student at the residential school when she was a kid. Anyway she’d been told to shred these papers, but she brought them here and asked if the library would take them.”

  “Do the Sisters know she brought them here?”

  “No, and she asked me not to tell anyone.”

  “So…”

  “I’ll have a look through first, make an inventory of what’s there. If there are important papers I think I may have to hand them over to the Sisters of St. Mary’s.”

  “I could do that for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Have a look through the boxes. Make an inventory.”

  “I couldn’t pay you, Molly.”

  “That’s OK. I could do it on my lunch break. Do a bit each day.”

  “That would be great, if you’re sure you don’t mind. It’s a lot of work.”

  “I’d like to do it.” I hesitated. “I had a friend who was there.”

  “At the residential school? What was it like?”

  “I don’t really know. Bad I think. She didn’t talk about it much. I think stuff happened there. Stuff people didn’t talk about. I think the church tried to cover things up.”

  Each day at noon I ate my lunch at my desk and unpacked the boxes from the residential school. In a lined journal Mr. Klein had given me I listed everything I found. In the boxes I found journals from the 1940s with the names of students and their places of birth. I found files with correspondence between the Department of Indian Affairs and the Catholic Diocese. Looked like important stuff. I found photos of students standing in front of the school and photos of inside the classrooms. I found newspaper clippings from the local paper. I found letters from parents.

  One afternoon Mr. Klein came downstairs with two mugs of tea and I showed him some of the documents I’d found.

  He looked at two letters — one from a parent saying her child had been beaten, and the response from the school administrator denying any mistreatment.

  “So there’s more correspondence there?” Mr. Klein said. “More letters like these?”

  “Lots more. And one whole box is filled with lists of all the students. Some of the stuff looks really old. You’re not going to give these papers back to the church, are you?”

  Mr. Klein was quiet for a moment while he read through one of the documents I’d given him. When he looked up he said, “Lets finish the inventory first. Once that’s done I’ll decide what to do with them.”

  Over the next few weeks I continued going through the boxes, and the more I went through the correspondence the more I understood why the church wanted to destroy the records. I started making photocopies of some of the documents for myself. I didn’t tell Mr. Klein, just slipped them in with the papers I was photocopying for the cataloguing project. I took them home to read through when I had more time.

  ***

  One Saturday I took my camera and walked to the residential school. I arrived as the sun was rising. I wanted to catch the changing light. I stood behind the chain-link fence and took photos of the demolition crane in front of a pile of rubble and bricks. I could see the back wall and the narrow interior walls on each floor. The back section of the roof was intact but the front of the roof was gone. It was like looking into a giant dollhouse.

  I took my camera bag off of my shoulder and screwed on my close-up lens. I took shots through the fence of the exposed belly of the school. The sun was just above the horizon and there was a subtle change in light, silhouetting the dark walls of the building against the soft blue-gray of the morning sky behind.

  I walked the length of the fence and found an opening I could squeeze through. Once inside I checked to see if anyone had seen me. There was no one around. I walked through the piles of bricks, shooting everything I saw. I knelt down and took a photo of the shards of stained glass from the chapel window. I noticed something under the glass and reached down carefully to pick up a small black shoe. The shoe of a child, maybe five years old. I held the shoe in my hand, so small and worn, and wondered where the child was now. I thought about Nakina and wondered how old she was when she was brought here?

  When I stood up I saw bright fingers of light coming through the cracks in the crumbling wall. I took that shot, light breaking through darkness. I tucked the tiny shoe in my pocket and made my way back to the other side of the fence.

  Before I left I turned to take one last shot. I stood on the spot where I had first seen Nakina, fingers curled over the top of the chain-link fence. I raised my camera and looked through the lens: crumbling walls of brick and broken glass. All the children gone. Nakina gone.

  ***<
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  My job at the library ended in September. On my last day Mr. Klein took me out for coffee to the greasy spoon across from the library.

  “You did a great job with the photos, Molly,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Have you ever thought of going to library school?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “If you ever do, I’d be happy to give you a reference. You have a very organized mind and good attention to detail.”

  “I always thought I was just anal and boring.”

  “Two essential qualities for a librarian.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “I haven’t told anyone yet, but I applied for a job in Montreal,” he said.

  “So you’re leaving?”

  “Just heard back today. They’ve offered me the job.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Molly, you know those papers from the residential school?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve put them in the archives, in the basement behind the closed stacks. They are in a box labeled SMP.”

  “SMP?”

  “St. Mary’s Papers.”

  “I’m glad you kept them,” I said.

  When we got back to the library Mr. Klein gave me a gift, a mug with the library crest on it.

  “Thanks,” I said. “It will remind me of our afternoon tea breaks together. I really enjoyed them.” I put on my coat. “Good luck in Montreal.”

  “Thank you.”

  As I left the library I was surprised how sad I felt to be saying goodbye.

  ***

  That night Anna took me downtown for drinks to celebrate. “So, what are you going to do, Molly?” she asked.

  “Order a rye and ginger.”

  “Ha funny. And after that?”

  “What?” I was trying to stuff Anna’s canes under the chair across from us.

  “Seriously. What’s your plan?” she asked.

  “No plan.”

  “I thought you were going to art school,” she said.

  “Stupid idea.”