Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

Perhaps it made her think of what might have been.

  These were the only years in which I personally knew Winnie. Her home was less than three blocks from ours, a short walk up Minerva to Lorne, then left along Lorne past Mary Street to the corner of Lorne and Lansdowne. That was where our white clapboard house stood—the place we’d moved to from near Whitney, on the eastern edge of the southern extension of Algonquin Park, in 1950. Winnie often came to visit us at Lorne Street because we were her closest “family,” as her sister, Marie, had married into the McCormick family. She also visited the family place at Lake of Two Rivers, where my grandparents Tom and Bea McCormick had built their two-storey log home in the early 1940s and where they had once lived year round with my mother before she’d married and started her own family. After my grandfather’s retirement from the Department of Lands and Forests, the McCormicks still spent more than half the year at the lake, and we spent every moment there from the day school let out until it went back in September, my family living in three small cabins built along the rocks of the Lake of Two Rivers point.

  Winnie would sit in one of the brightly painted wooden lawn chairs my grandfather made and work her beads like a rosary. Sometimes she’d twirl her glasses—perhaps they were sunglasses—and run down the tourists for a vast variety of crimes that included blocking the roads every time a deer wandered out of the woods to feeding the bears through the wire fences at the dump. One afternoon she got so wound up that her glasses flew out of her hand and high into a nearby spruce tree. I had to retrieve them for her, getting pitch on my hands in the process.

  She’d kept her parents’ small cabin on Canoe Lake, a few rolling and twisting kilometres down Highway 60. We all knew that Tom Thomson had once sat on the wide front porch and painted a storm breaking over Little Wapomeo Island. And family lore had it that he had hand-painted some of the old tea cups in the cupboards.

  And then, of course, there were the Thomson sketches Winnie kept at her Minerva Street home in Huntsville. “My mother believed she never looked at them,” Addie Sylvester told me in the spring of 1973, shortly before Jimmy Stringer broke through the Canoe Lake ice and drowned. Addie and her mother often stored those sketches when Winnie would travel, keeping them in back of the wood stove, but they had no sense of what they’d one day mean. “I don’t know why [she] thought they’d be safer over here,” Addie said. “We didn’t value them, you know. They weren’t anything more to us than the pictures on a postcard. I didn’t realize what they were till later. If only I’d stolen one … but I guess Winnie would have had them counted,” she added with a high-pitched giggle, “and I never would have gotten away with one.”

  Addie was also eccentric. She worked nights and, like Winnie, never married—the two spinsters living alone directly across the street from each other. Addie was a tiny woman with long, curling yellow-white hair and a little girl’s voice that often surprised people making calls after midnight. After her retirement from Bell, she had stayed on in the large house her father had built to house a photography studio that no longer existed. Fancy wallpapered rooms that in the years before the Great War would have been filled with family and customers were now portioned off with blankets and plywood, with small openings cut in the bottom so Addie’s dozen or more cats could come and go as they pleased. She also had a small collection of old dolls she arranged in the sitting room as if they were quietly visiting, oblivious to the scurrying, scrapping animals.

  Addie sang in the Anglican church choir for sixty-five years—she died in 1975 at age seventy-three. My sister, Ann, also sang in the choir, often sitting next to Addie, but Addie was so much shorter than everyone else that when the choir stood, she looked like a child whose hair had gone white. My mother was probably her closest friend. I would sometimes walk down from the hill with my mother to play with the cats while the two women visited over tea, and I would hope that Addie, who giggled like a little girl, would stand on her kitchen stool and reach up for the cookie tin she kept filled with Peek Freans. She seemed almost a doll herself, so tiny that her legs, like mine in those days, did not even brush the floor when she sat rocking slightly in a kitchen chair while the two women talked. Meanwhile, I kept watching the cats come and go and hold their constant elections to decide relative order.

  Sometimes Winnie Trainor, another good Anglican, would join them. But even when she wasn’t there, she was a presence, the two often laughing, at times cruelly, at other times affectionately, at her various eccentricities. Addie believed it would have been such a simple matter for Winnie to sell off a painting or two so she could live more comfortably. But, in another way, she understood Winnie’s reluctance to change anything. “After you’ve lived alone for a while, you just get tired,” she said. “You don’t care what people think. I know; I’m that way.”

  Addie would giggle as she remembered more of Winnie’s oddities. “She’d do a wash and she wouldn’t hang her clothes on the lines as long as the people living below had stuff on their lines,” Addie remembered. “She had great big, long lines you know. She’d bring her things over and hang them on my line. And what is funny is I didn’t have much of a line, so I would take my things and have them hanging over on one of hers. Mine’d be on hers—and hers on mine!

  “She’d come into your house, pick up something you might have bought two years ago and want to know how much you paid for it, where you got it and when. And, of course, you’d have forgotten—and she’d get mad.

  “She was snoopy and she’d talk about everybody. Even her best friends she’d talk about. She’d be over one afternoon visiting you and all friendly and then leave and go right out and tell everybody you were the worst person around. I think she only got that way when she got older.”

  Winnie kept great bundles of keys, Addie said, all carefully tagged. There were padlocks on doors within the house and locked trunks behind the padlocked doors. In the years after Tom’s death, Addie claimed, Winnie grew increasingly frightened of the dark. “She was afraid to stay alone when her parents would be away. I’d have to go over and stay with her and leave my mother alone. And she always checked to make sure the doors were locked. She’d check about eighty times. She was terrified of the dark. She could get on your nerves.”

  Like Addie Sylvester, Winnie’s other close neighbours, the Eastmans—Art Eastman kept a working stable into the 1960s—sometimes took guardianship of the Tom Thomson sketches. “Winnie would bring them over,” the Eastman’s daughter, Minnie Carson, remembered. “And we’d put them up in the attic.”

  Mrs. Carson believed Winnie held some bitterness about the way Thomson’s value as an artist seemed to increase after his death. “She always said, ‘We would have married if he would have had this fame in the first place rather than later,’ ” Mrs. Carson told me. “She could have sold the house, of course, but it wasn’t worth too much then. She only had her Old Age pension.” We’d say, ‘Sell some of them pictures and buy yourself one’—but she wouldn’t. ‘Well,’ we’d say, ‘you can’t take them with you, you know.’ ”

  Given that Thomson’s small sketch Birches and Cedar sold for approximately $1.4 million during the economic downturn of 2009, it’s safe to say that Winnie Trainor’s dozen or so sketches would have been worth roughly $20 million on today’s market. Yet to Winnie, they seemed to hold little more than sentimental value. She never did frame the ones she kept or put them on her walls, either in her Huntsville home or at the Canoe Lake cottage. And she also never did sell them, despite endless suggestions from her neighbours that she do so. They puzzled as to why she would continue to live in that dreary old upstairs apartment with no central heating, television set, or running hot water.

  Curiously, as the decades passed following her death in 1962, Winnifred Trainor became an increasingly central figure in a mystery in which, at first, her role had barely registered. Today, screenplays, musicals and works of fiction have been written about her. She’s even featured in The Tragically Hip’s song “Three Pistols” as th
e woman who hides in the shadows as young girls come to place flowers on the grave, sweeping the flowers away once they’ve gone. And yet her name doesn’t even appear in the ongoing Tom Thomson story until 1969, when Ottelyn Addison, Mark Robinson’s daughter, joined with Elizabeth Harwood to produce a slim volume called Tom Thomson: The Algonquin Years. Addison, accepting the identification provided to the National Gallery by Jessie Fisk, printed the misidentified photograph of Winnifred Trainor in that book, and the photograph of the mystery woman has been “Winnie Trainor” ever since. “Winnifred,” Addison and Harwood wrote, “comely elder daughter of Hugh Trainor, took a great interest in Thomson and his work. Tom visited her at Huntsville and gave her some of his sketches. One or more of these are reportedly of houses on the street in Huntsville where the Trainors lived.”

  There was no suggestion that there might have been more to this relationship than friendship. The authors used only a back-of-book footnote to add: “It was rumoured around Mowat Lodge in 1916–17 (chiefly by Annie Fraser) that Tom Thomson and Winnifred Trainor were to be married. A letter left carelessly lying on a dresser gave some substance to this rumour.”

  And yet, in the four decades since this first small mention, Winnie Trainor has increasingly emerged as a character of tremendous intrigue and interest. Sherrill Grace, author of the 2004 study Inventing Tom Thomson, sent an email to me in 2009 after I’d suggested to her that Winnie Trainor’s life might represent a greater heartbreak than Tom Thomson’s death. “I absolutely agree,” she said, “Winnie is the real tragedy. Tom Thomson’s death is a tragedy for our art, but the human pain, surely, is Winnie.”

  Part of the tragedy was that Winnie did not enjoy much sympathy in her lifetime. As Winnie grew older, she became known as “an opinionated woman.” Joe Cookson was a local Huntsville historian whose family owned Grandview Farms on Fairy Lake, a tourist lodge where, in her later years, Winnie worked in the laundry. He wrote to me in the fall of 1976 and said, “I was acquainted with this lady, so much so that I avoided like the plague any verbal controversy with her. Anyone who dared cross her trail, especially in money matters… [was] subjected to her caustic tongue, be it ditch digger or mayor.”

  Winnie’s sharp tongue and strong opinions may have been the cause of frequent rifts between her and her younger sister, Marie. “They didn’t get along,” said Addie Sylvester. “They used to scrap.” All the same, Marie and her family would come to visit, usually in summer. When Winnie knew that her three nephews and niece—Robert Roy, Hugh, Terence and Marilyn—were on their way to Huntsville from Endicott, New York, she would ask the Eaton’s delivery men to drop off two empty appliance boxes, which she would then set up on her front porch. As each rambunctious boy would be dressed and cleaned for a trip downtown, he would be picked up and dropped into one of the boxes to keep him clean and quiet until the others were ready. When she had a third boy and Marilyn ready, she would then release the others so that all four, sparkling clean and groomed, were ready to go out.

  “I can manage two,” Addie remembered her shouting from the Trainor verandah, “but I’ll be damned if I can manage three!”

  “Winnie was A-number one as far as we were concerned,” said neighbour Minnie Carson. “No one had a better character. When it came to writing letters or filing for pensions or finding out about anything, she was always there. This was the Winnie Trainor that we knew. She was very outspoken, didn’t mince words and didn’t bother to go behind your back. I never thought of her as being odd.”

  Minnie remembered her old neighbour as being capable of great charm, when she wished to show it, and as a very attractive woman when she took the time to look her best. “Winnie was a very, very good-looking girl—good looking until she died,” Minnie said. “When she’d go to Endicott, she’d stay here until the train came and Art would drive her down around 2:00 a.m. She’d look like a million bucks.”

  “She could be a fine-looking woman when she wanted to be, but she just looked like a hobo most of the time,” said Jean McEown, Winnie’s downstairs tenant. “She’d have her socks rolled just about to her knees. But she was a good looking woman, even when she was older. She dyed her hair as blue as the sky sometimes.”

  We youngsters had our own thoughts about who Winnie Trainor was, and they differed sharply from those who befriended and defended her. For months around the time of Winnie’s death in the summer of 1962, a large brown squirrel had been frozen between two wires leading into the green hydro box that sat on a pole directly in front of her bedroom window. It had been zapped and mummified in a crucifixion position until, eventually, time and the elements caused the carcass to rot to a point where the animal’s remains finally fell to the curb and vanished in the runoff headed for the river. Because of this bizarre coincidence, among others, neighbourhood children considered her a bit of a witch and avoided her house.

  She had been the bane of my existence when I was younger. My mother would often cringe when she looked out and saw “Miss Trainor” making her way up Lorne Street to our house a block higher along Reservoir Hill. She was a sight never to be forgotten: a large, dark, sullen figure moving slowly and deliberately, black hat over dark, scowling eyes, her black stockings slipping and rolling down thick legs under a dark dress, an umbrella held in one hand to deal with wandering dogs or teasing children as much as the possibility of rain. She seemed to have no smile in her, thin lips set in permanent disapproval. That darkness permeates my memory of her is no surprise, for she almost always wore black or various shades of grey and her deep-set eyes were quick, judgmental—missing nothing.

  She would climb the steps—always using the front door (the Stringer brothers always came to the back door)—plunk herself down in the best porch chair or, in colder weather a chair in the kitchen, and spend several cups of tea complaining to my mother about everything from the altar decorations at the Anglican church they both faithfully attended to the near-criminal behaviour of certain children she had seen in the recent company of my mother’s children. The visits were never relaxed.

  I was terrified of Winnie myself. My friends loved to play tricks on her—nicky-nicky-nine-doors usually—and I nervously went along with whatever was proposed. Once we filled a brown-paper bag with dog excrement, doused the bag with lighter fluid, then set it on her porch, lighted the bag, pounded on her door and ran. We then dived into a bush on the far side of the street and tried to stifle our snorts and hysterical giggles as she came out in her heavy black shoes, stomped out the fire and quickly realized what we had done to her. I spent that entire evening back home, waiting in dread for the phone to ring.

  There was never any doubt that Winnie was watching. Once, while walking home from the Huntsville Memorial Arena, which stood on flat ground near the river—stick slung over shoulder, skates tied and hung over stick, duffel bag full of sweaty hockey equipment hanging off the stick like a hobo’s belongings—I saw her hobbling in her slightly arthritic way along Centre Street. Our trajectories were in line for a confrontation, so I slowed down, the way someone on a portage might slacken their pace on sighting a bear in the distance, but she saw me and called me over.

  She was smiling, her rather yellowed teeth surprising in their welcome, and she asked me if I’d just come from a game. I had. Since it was Saturday morning, the squirts on the town all-star team had been allowed to play with the peewee house league, even though we were one age level below—eight- and nine-year-olds playing up against ten-, eleven- and even some twelve-year-olds.

  “You’re doing well with your hockey,” she said.

  I mumbled something, surprised she would even recognize me, let alone know that I was on the travelling squirt team that was sponsored by the town doctors and went by a sports moniker you could never even imagine in later years: “The Pill Rollers.”

  She removed a glove, unclasped her large, black purse and fumbled about inside until she pulled free a roll of clippings from the weekly Huntsville Forester.

  “You’re quit
e the little goal scorer, aren’t you?” she said, unfolding the clippings in her hands so I could see they were the same weekly sports roundups I so carefully pasted into a red scrapbook each Thursday after the Forester came out. (One entire page of that scrapbook was devoted to my practising a spectacular variety of autographs that no one would ever seek.)

  “Thanks,” I mumbled.

  “One day you’ll be in the NHL,” she predicted, quite inaccurately. Still, it was the nicest moment I ever recall having with her. As I remember it, she reached out and tousled my head, but surely imagination has pasted that one into the scrapbook too.

  We used to “hitch” outside her home. It had nothing to do with her but everything to do with the intersection of Minerva and Centre. In winter, cars had to come to a full halt at the stop signs on Minerva before pulling out onto Centre and gunning the engine to make it up the steep hill heading toward the town line. In winter, this meant spinning tires, even if they had chains on, and since this was in the days before the streets were salted, a fresh snowfall would leave the backstreets smooth, hard and slippery until the sander got around to them.

  My two best friends, Eric Ruby and Brent Munroe—my accomplices in the paper bag caper—would hide with me in the bushes near the taxi stand and wait until a car slowed at the corner. Fresh snow also meant snow-covered windows, something that drivers rarely bothered to brush off apart from a large enough peephole in the windshield. We would hurry to the back of the car and crouch down, holding fast to the back bumpers. We wore mukluks (grey leather winter moccasins with no tread), and they slipped effortlessly over the smooth surface as the cars—especially those with jangling chains wrapped around the rear tires—picked up speed. We’d hitch up the hill to Florence Street and then catch rides back down on cars that had to slow for the stop signs on Florence. Halfway down the hill, we’d let go and see who could skid the farthest, sometimes covering several blocks on the long hill—three kids sitting happily back on their heels as they flew down the hill at forty kilometres an hour or more. If another car was coming fast up the hill, the wise thing to do was bail out into the opposite snowbank.