Kid Soldier

by Jennifer Maruno

  Kid Soldier

  Jennifer Maruno

  Dedicated to Richard Charles Fuller

  Chapter 1

  Spring 1939

  The only fruit tree on a street of maples, the cherry tree towered above the privet hedge that framed the Fuller front lawn. In the spring papery blossoms dusted the yard like a layer of unexpected snow bringing fragrance to the entire neighbourhood. In the summer clusters of crimson heart-shaped fruit dangled from every branch and a thick canopy of leaves camouflaged a platform of planks. This huge tree, older than its two-storey wooden house, was a perfect place to watch the world go by.

  “I’m going to look for a job this afternoon,” Richard announced as he swung himself up to the floor of planks salvaged from Mr. Black’s garage teardown.

  “You’re too young to get a job,” Tommy replied, furrowing his brow.

  In September Richard Fuller would turn fifteen the very day Tommy McLaughlin would turn ten. Despite the difference in their ages, Richard treated the boy with curly copper hair as his equal. If he had an apple, he cut it with his pocket knife and presented half, without Tommy having to ask. He had even made them a checkerboard for the tree house.

  “What difference does a couple of months make?” Richard said as they began a game of checkers. “I’ll be fifteen on our birthday.” Richard’s eyes, the colour of a summer sky, always looked as if he was about to tell a funny story. He shoved the shock of straight blond hair away from his eyes and grinned at the boy sitting cross-legged behind the stack of red and black bottle caps they used for checkers

  “My dad says there’s no work for anyone, anywhere, so no point looking,” Tommy said, as he placed a Coke cap on a red crayoned square.

  Richard didn’t have a dad to give him direction or advice. He knew Tommy didn’t want him working because he wanted to have fun with Richard over the summer. If it hadn’t been for Richard, Tommy would have never seen the salvage operation that used dynamite to break up the Honeymoon Bridge. In January, Richard had taken Tommy to the gorge every weekend to see the collapsed structure lying on the ice below. All the onlookers gasped at the monstrous splashes that swallowed the last of the twisted metal as the ice cracked under its weight.

  “Wanna tour the farms with me?” Richard asked.

  “Sure,” Tommy said, scrambling to his feet. “Maybe we’ll see something in the river.”

  “What about Amy?” Richard asked.

  “Third Saturday of the month,” Tommy replied, landing with a thud, “and no maid.”

  Richard had forgotten about Mrs. McLaughlin’s Saturday afternoon tea parties. Without a maid, Tommy’s sister would have to push the heavy waxing machine across the hardwood floors before she polished the silver teapot and matching cream and sugar. By now, she would be setting out floral china cups for the ladies who left cards in the silver bowl on the hall table.

  Tommy zipped up his cardigan and hopped on his bike. Richard walked coatless alongside him in the fresh air. The boys followed the road along the river.

  On one side the cold, dark green water rushed from the falls to the whirlpool. On the other, the sweet oasis of orchards was alive with birdsong. Richard loved the sight of the jet-black tree trunks after a night of river mist.

  “Some farmer’s burning rubbish,” Richard said when the air brought them the smell of smoke. It was also tangy with the smell of manure. All of it felt good to his nostrils.

  They started with the Mason farm where the acres of short stubby trees began.

  “All I gotta make is fifty-two dollars,” Richard said as they made their way down the rutted lane. “Two cents a pint for raspberries, two cents a quart for strawberries, and five cents a basket for peaches,” he rhymed off. “It’ll take no time at all.”

  “Fifty-two dollars,” Tommy repeated in amazement, circling him on his bike. That was a lot of money, in his opinion. “Why do you need fifty-two dollars?”

  “For fifty-two dollars I can get what’s in the front window of Cupola’s Bike Shop.”

  Tommy went quiet. He had gotten his bike for Christmas, one of the advantages of coming from a family with a well-paid father. Although they lived in the same neighbourhood, Tommy dined at a walnut suite with cushion-backed chairs. Richard ate at a metal table with cracked vinyl seats.

  Mr. Mason put Richard’s name down for picking cherries. He told Richard they would get in touch when needed. Not having a phone, Richard left his neighbour’s telephone number. He knew Mr. Black wouldn’t mind.

  The two boys walked Tommy’s bike towards the next farm. A rusty red metal gate held a wooden plank sign with the dark letters, VOGEL, burnt into the wood.

  Tommy dropped his bike to the ground. “You’re not going to look for work with Old Man Vogel?” he asked.

  “Why not?”

  “That guy is crazy,” Tommy whispered, as he pointed towards the old farmhouse with a peeling wooden verandah. At one time it had been dark green, but hadn’t seen a coat of fresh paint in years. Twisted grey brush grew up through the porch’s broken railing.

  “Where did you hear that?” Richard asked.

  “I overheard Jimmy Côté telling my dad,” Tommy said. “He said Vogel took one look at the bushel of peaches he just picked and his eyes filled with tears.”

  Tommy looked up at Richard, but Richard ignored his over-big pleading eyes. He ruffled Tommy’s tight curls. “You worry too much,” he said. But Tommy knew Richard wouldn’t have any trouble getting hired. Everything came easy for him. He climbed trees without having to figure out where his hands and feet went. He carved a horse the very day his mother gave him his father’s pocket knife. In his corduroy pants, checkered shirt, and leather work boots, Richard already looked like a farm hand.

  The snort of a horse and rumble of wagon wheels coming towards them caught their attention. The driver, in a pair of dusty overalls over a shabby sweater, had his face in the shadow of an ancient straw hat.

  Richard rushed to the gate and swung it open. The man gave him a nod as the thick-planked wagon passed through. Richard closed the gate with a click. The man glanced back as he drove his horses out onto the road but didn’t speak.

  Tommy breathed a great sigh of relief.

  They headed to the next farm along the road that rolled through the fruit trees. Both were surprised to find Vogel’s horse and wagon waiting in the bend.

  “You looking for work?” the man asked Richard in a surprisingly soft voice.

  “Yes sir,” Richard replied, straightening his shirt. He brushed back the strands of straight blond hair falling over his right eye, then turned to Tommy and grinned.

  Tommy dropped his bike and walked to the front of the horse. “He came for a fruit picking job,” he said in a very loud voice. “There’s no fruit to pick yet.”

  The old man with the grey, grizzled beard studied Tommy for a moment, and then turned his watery blue eyes back to Richard. “Yes or no?” he asked.

  “Yes sir,” Richard replied.

  “You want work now?”

  “Yes sir,” Richard repeated.

  The old man tapped the seat of the buckboard wagon.

  “You want to come?” Richard asked Tommy as he climbed up onto the wagon seat. The man’s old woolen sweater smelled like his horse.

  Tommy shook his head. He hopped on his bike and rode away.

  Richard had only asked out of politeness. He knew Tommy would be in trouble if he was late for dinner. But Richard had all the time in the world. His mother never worried about him being late. She often fell asleep in her chair having no idea what time he got home.

  Chapter 2

  Mr. Vogel

  Richard watched the wide back of the farm horse sway as it plodded along the river road. The old farmer’s head
nodded until his chin rested on his chest. The reins fell out of his hands, but Richard didn’t try to take them. He figured this horse knew its way, even in the snow.

  He put his hands behind his head and leaned back to watch the scenery go by. They passed a field of men stringing wire between posts to make a fence. Seeing the horse and cart, they raised their hands in salute. Richard waved back.

  The orchards gave way to the wide green lawns of brick houses set well back from the road. Soon they passed small wooden houses, close to the road without any lawn at all. Mr. Vogel lifted his head when the horse slowed at the village intersection. He eased the beast around the corner and down the hill to the Queenston dock.

  Richard gave out a long low whistle when he saw the huge ship with a black and white hull looming before them. He stared up at the broad white band that circled the stack, with a large black W painted across.

  “I have to pick up special baskets,” Mr. Vogel explained as the horse clopped on to the wooden dock. “My crop goes to the Toronto market, not the cannery.”

  Richard loaded the shipment of wide-handled, narrow wooden baskets on to the wagon. Later he unloaded them into Vogel’s wooden barn at the back of the farm. The sun was almost gone from the sky by the time he finished.

  Dusk softened the edges of the hedge when the horse and cart pulled up in front of the Fuller’s dilapidated wooden house on Maple Street. Mr. Vogel handed Richard a quarter. “After school,” he said in a low growl. “Tomorrow.”

  “Thanks,” Richard said, leaping on to the sidewalk. “See you then.”

  —

  The house was hot and moist from his mother’s full day of laundry. The smell of stew drifting through the scent of freshly ironed linen made Richard’s stomach rumble. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

  “You’re home,” Grace Fuller said, making it a statement rather than a welcome. Tall and slim, like her son, she wore her hair in a single ponytail pulled to the nape of her neck. It was once all the shades of blonde there could be, but had faded to the colour of the dirty water she emptied from her laundry tubs. She remained behind her ironing board on a threadbare carpet in a room supposed to be for dining, but dedicated entirely to laundry. A faded flannel sheet covered half of the walnut table. On it sat the sewing machine she used for making small repairs. The other end held stacks of crisp linen and snowy towels.

  The eight dining chairs, except for the one his mother sat in while sewing, had found their way to other parts of the house. The china cabinet that used be in the corner had sold long ago.

  Grace Fuller never smiled and she had none of the prettiness of Tommy’s mother. Once Richard had heard Tommy’s parents talking about his mother in their garden. “She stopped smiling the day her husband died,” Mr. McLaughlin said with a deep sigh.

  Mrs. McLaughlin gave her dark curls a toss and raised her eyes to the clouds. “She spent little enough time smiling while he was alive,” was her acid reply.

  Richard knew his mother didn’t have time for smiling, having had to support the two of them. She had tried working in the canning factory on Thorold Stone Road, shortly after his father’s death, but she used all that she made on bus fare and babysitting. She had decided instead to take in towels and bed linen from the local hotels, along with other people’s washing, for a living.

  “I just got myself a job,” Richard told her, flipping the silver coin in the air.

  “Won’t last long,” his mother replied. Her iron came down with a thud on top of an embroidered hotel crest. “There aren’t enough jobs for grown men.”

  “It will help pay for school books and a few clothes,” Richard said. He didn’t mention the bike in Cupola’s window.

  “Can’t stop you from trying to earn,” his mother replied with a grimace. She didn’t even ask if he was hungry, just cocked her head in the direction of the kitchen. “Stew’s in the pot,” she said as she carried on ironing.

  —

  The next day, Mr. Vogel put Richard to work pulling weeds in the asparagus patch. On Saturday, he hoed around the base of the fruit trees.

  “It wasn’t a hard job,” he told Tommy after dinner in the tree house. “But it was dirty. By lunch time I was caked with dust to the knees.”

  “Good thing your mother does washing,” Tommy commented. “My mother would not have been happy about that.”

  “Mr. Vogel is a really nice guy,” Richard said. “He tells me what to do and then leaves me to get on with it.” When Mr. Vogel does talk, Richard thought, he tells me stories about living on his family farm. But, for some reason, he didn’t share that with Tommy. Richard got the feeling right from the very beginning that Mr. Vogel, like his mother, was a very private person and didn’t like people knowing a lot about him.

  When all the hoeing and weeding was finished, slender green stalks of asparagus began to appear. Richard loved the sound of asparagus when he snapped a stalk from the ground. Having never tasted asparagus, Richard asked. “What do people do with this stuff?”

  Mr. Vogel looked at him in surprise. “They eat it.”

  “I know that,” Richard said with a smile. “But how?”

  “Take a bundle home,” the farmer said. “Your mother will know.”

  Mr. Vogel set Richard to work in the barn. He graded asparagus according to size, while Mr. Vogel filled the baskets.

  Richard’s first packing job was to cover the baskets of asparagus with leno, an orange mesh that kept away the flies. Then he was to stamp the wooden handles with the words “Vogel Farms” in black ink. Richard took extra care to make sure he didn’t smudge the letters.

  Mr. Vogel nodded in approval.

  Friday night they loaded the baskets of asparagus onto the wagon and took them to the steamer waiting at the Queenston dock. The ship crossed Lake Ontario at night to arrive in time for the morning market in Toronto.

  “Have you ever been on a steamer?” Richard asked when the wagon was empty. He couldn’t stop thinking about living in one of the small cabins he could see on deck.

  The old man nodded and stroked the front of his grizzled beard. “Arrived at the Port of Toronto on one of those,” he said.

  “It must be great to sail off to new places and see new things,” Richard said. He turned to the old man at his side. “One of these days,” he announced, “I’m going to get on a steamer like that and see the world.”

  The two of them sat in the wagon watching the ship move away from the dock.

  “Where did you come from?” Richard asked.

  Mr. Vogel stared off into space for so long Richard figured he wasn’t going to answer. Then he jiggled the reins and spoke in low tones, just above the clopping of the horse’s hooves.

  “My story began in Holland,” the old man said. “After the war of 1914, my brothers and I returned to a destroyed farm. Our parents could barely feed themselves.”

  He stopped speaking when the horse entered the intersection, and then began again.

  “The three of us found work on a cattle boat and left to find our fortune. We landed in Toronto, paying room and board while we worked at the Kensington Market. After a few years, Paul, my youngest brother, had saved enough to buy a vegetable stall. Mark and I decided to buy some ground and grow for his business. That’s when we bought this farm.”

  It wasn’t until they returned to the barn that Mr. Vogel continued his story.

  “We lived in the barn until we built the house. But farming was too hard for Mark. He died one day of a heart attack in the middle of the orchard.”

  Richard remained silent the whole time. He knew Mr. Vogel had probably told him more than he’d told anyone else in the world.

  Chapter 3

  Mr. Black

  When school finished Richard spent full days at the Vogel farm. He ate his lunch on the wooden bench next to the shed behind the barn. Other than the trees in the orchard the barn provided the only shade.

  “What do you keep in there?” he asked one day, jerking his head i
n the direction of the small outbuilding.

  Mr. Vogel reached for a key that lay on top of the door frame. He tossed it to Richard and went back into the barn.

  Richard unlocked the door’s padlock and stepped into the dim interior. It took a few minutes for his eyes to adjust from the bright sunlight. At first all he could see were a few ancient bales of hay and a couple of lidded wooden crates. Then a large object under a canvas tarpaulin came into view. He peeled back the tarp. The tractor, not much bigger than a young fruit tree, was the colour of a raincloud. Richard ran his hand across the nose, removing a swath of dust. A small plate read CASE. His heart soared at the sight of such a famous brand.

  “Where did you get it?” Richard shouted out.

  Mr. Vogel entered the shed, dragged one of the bales of hay next to another, and pointed for Richard to use it as a seat. He removed his hat and ran his fingers through his grey-flecked hair. “My brother bought it from another farmer because it needed fixing. I told him it would probably cost more to fix than he thought, but he brought it into the shed.” He shook his head. “Shortly after he died, those crates arrived.”

  “And you never opened them?” Richard looked at the old man. “You’re going to let that tractor sit and rust while you could be using it to plough the fields?” He raised his eyebrows in disbelief.

  Vogel shrugged his shoulders and put his straw hat back on his head. “Gasoline costs money,” he said, rising from the bale of hay.

  “Is there a manual?” Richard asked, dragging the tarp to the ground.

  “My English is not so good,” Vogel said, walking out the door.

  “But mine is,” Richard said, following behind. “If you find it, I can study it at home.”

  Vogel gave a shrug and jerked his head in the direction of his home.

  Richard followed him across the yard and through the farmhouse back door. He looked around the dark kitchen with its grime-coated windows and the ancient coiled flypaper hanging from the ceiling. A dingy curtain hung over a doorway that he guessed led to a pantry.