by Hugh Hood
Last summer I met a group of Oakdale bandsmen on a Toronto streetcar; they were wearing what they call their summer uniform, a shoddy sweatshirt, a $2.98 item, and sleazy cotton trousers of a vile light blue, the colour of faded blue jeans. They don’t wear gold capes anymore, winter or summer, and they have some sort of plumed shako, and they look like ushers in a second-run movie palace. Nothing endures.
So I imagine Mr. Thompson, as old as the century, which would put him in his early sixties, sitting in the summer twilight on the veranda of his house, which must be paid for by now. He’ll be getting on to retirement age, if he hasn’t already reached it. But perhaps he left Canada Packers when he left the Band; I don’t know and I haven’t any decent way of finding out. It would have been hard for him to carry on at the office, don’t you see, because in a way he loved that goddamn Band.
I think of him sitting upright in a porch chair somewhere on Belsize Drive or one of the little residential streets in through there, between Yonge and Mount Pleasant, impassive in the changing light, hearing the dreadful new sound rolling across the city, miles and miles, to remind him, sitting innocently there, of past glories, things that are utterly vanished, that will never come back again, his face firm, his chest out even though he’s seated, his face sunburnt an even red, eyes unblinking in the growing darkness, listening to the young in action.
And as the summer darkness comes on, the children riding their bicycles noiselessly along the quiet street, going home, shadows in the dark, I almost feel myself sitting on the veranda steps beside him, and I want to tell him what we thought of him, Perce McIlwraith, Johnny Delancey, Morgan Phelan, Ted McGarry, all of us who loved him in return. It’s almost time to go inside now, but in the darkness, oh, in this last time, I can almost reach out and take him by the hand.
Recollections of the Works Department
In the spring of 1952, six weeks after I finished my M.A. courses and involved myself in further graduate studies, I decided that I’d have to find a better summer job.
I had been working for the English publisher, Thomas Nelson and Sons, as a stockroom boy. The pay was low, and the work remarkably hard. I had only been on the job ten days, but after an afternoon stacking cases of the Highroads Dictionary (familiar to every Ontario school child) ninety-six copies to the case, in piles ten cases high, I saw that this state of affairs could not go on. These packing cases were made of heavy cardboard, strongly stapled and bound; they weighed seventy-five pounds each and they had to be piled carefully in a complicated stacking system. You had to fling the top row of cases into the air, much as you’d launch a basketball. I started to look for something less strenuous.
At length an official of the National Employment Service who handled summer placements at Hart House, a Mr. Halse, a man remembered by generations of Varsity types, suggested that I try to get on the city. I took an afternoon off from Thomas Nelson’s and went up to the City Hall, to Room 302, a big room on the west side with a pleasant high ceiling. I was received with courtesy and attention, and after filling out some forms I got a job as a labourer in the Works Department, Roadways Division, payday on Wednesdays, hours eight to five, report to Foreman Brown at Number Two Yard on College Street tomorrow morning, thank you! I stood at the counter a little out of breath at the speed with which I’d got what I came for.
“You’re not very big,” said the clerk at the counter. “Are you sure you can handle a pick and shovel?” As the wages were twice what I’d been getting, I thought I’d try it and see.
“I can handle it,” I said. I’ve never seen anybody killing himself at the pick-and-shovel dodge. I asked the clerk for the address on College Street and, oddly enough, he didn’t know it.
“But you can’t miss it,” he said. “It’s next to the Fire Hall, three blocks west of Spadina. Ask to see Mr. Brown. And you’d better get on the job on time, the first day at least.”
I thanked him and strolled back to Thomas Nelson’s where I explained that I’d found something that paid better, and would they mind letting me go at the end of the day. They didn’t seem surprised.
“You’ve got three days’ money coming,” said the stockroom superintendent dolefully. He sighed. “I don’t know how it is. We can’t keep anybody in that job.” I said nothing about the cases of dictionaries.
Although it was the middle of May, the next morning was brisk, a bright sunny day with the promise of warmth in the afternoon. I was glad that I’d worn a couple of sweaters as I came along College Street looking for Number Two Yard. It wasn’t hard to find. It stood and still stands just west of the Fire Hall halfway between Spadina and Bathurst, on the south side of College. It’s the main downtown service centre for roads and sidewalks, responsible for the area bounded by Bathurst, Jarvis, Bloor, and the waterfront. Any holes or cuts in the roadway, any broken sidewalks, or any new sidewalks not provided by contractors, are tended by workmen from this Yard. It also serves as a reception desk for calls connected with trees, sewers, and drains from all over town. There’s always a watchman on duty to attend to such matters, day or night.
I walked into the office and stood next to a washbasin in the corner, feeling a little nervous. Most of the other men on the crew were ten years older than I, although I spotted a couple my own age. None of them looked like students, even the young ones; they were all heavily tanned and they all discussed their mysterious affairs in hilarious shouts. There was a counter in front of me, and behind it some office space with three desks, a space heater, some bundles of engineers’ plans of the streets hanging in rolls above the windows. It was the kind of room in which no woman had ever been, but it was very clean.
Outside a green International quarter-ton pickup with the Works Department plate on the door came smartly into the Yard. A one-armed man got out and began to shout abusively at the windows of the Fire Hall. This was the foreman, Charlie Brown, who conducted a running war against the firemen because they persisted in parking their cars, of which they had a great many, in his Yard. He bawled a few more curses at the face of the Fire Captain which was glued to a third-storey window, and came inside, immediately fixing his eyes, which were brown, small, and very sharp, on me.
“Goddamn-college-kids-no-bloody-good,” he shouted irritably, running it all together into a single word; it was a stock phrase. He glared at me pityingly. “Where the hell are your boots?” I was wearing a pair of low canvas shoes of the type then known disparagingly as “fruit boots.”
“Cut ’em to bits in five minutes!” he exclaimed, quite rightly. I wore them to work one day later on, and the edge of the shovel took the soles off them in under five minutes.
“Go across the street to the Cut-Rate Store. Tell them Charlie sent you. Get them to give you sweat socks and boots. You can pay for them when you draw some money.” I tried to say something but he cut me off abruptly and as I went out I could hear him mumbling, “Goddamn-college-kids-no-bloody-good.”
I had a good look at him as he banged noisily around the office when I came back wearing my stiff new boots. He was a burly man, about five-eleven, with a weathered face, a short stump of a right arm — the crew called him “One Punch Brown” — a pipe usually in his mouth. He was the kindest boss I ever had on one of those summer jobs; there was no reason for him to care about my shoes. The workmen cursed him behind his back but they knew that he didn’t push them too hard. And yet he managed to get the necessary minimum of work out of them. I found out, purely by accident, that the way to make him like you was to say as little as possible. It was fear that made me answer him in monosyllables but it suited him.
Charlie had four men in the office with him and three gangs of labourers out on various jobs, widely separated in the midtown district he was responsible for. In the office were an assistant foreman named George — I can’t remember his last name — and a clerk named Eddie Doucette who sometimes chauffeured Charlie around town. Usually Charlie drove himself, and ho
w he could spin that little International, stump and all; he used the stump to help steer, along with the good arm.
Then there were two patrolmen who kept checking the streets and alleys in our district, reporting any damage to the roads and sidewalks, and the condition of any recently accomplished repairs. Johnny Pawlak was one of them, a slope-shouldered rangy guy of thirty-three or thirty-four, a bowler and softball player, the organizer of all the baseball pools. The other was called Bill Tennyson, a lean, wiry, chronically dissatisfied griper, always in trouble over his non-support of his family, and half-disliked and suspected by the rest of the men in the office for vague reasons. Finally there were the three gangs out on the job: Wall’s gang, Mitch’s gang, and Harris’s gang. Wall ran a taut ship, Harris an unhappy ship, and Mitch a happy one. I never worked for Wall, but I did the others, and the difference was wonderful.
When I got back from the Cut-Rate Store it was already half-past eight. “What are we going to do with this kid?” I heard Charlie Brown ask rhetorically as I came into the office.
“Aimé’s still off,” said George softly. “You could send him out with Bill and Danny.” They stared at me together.
“Ever handled a shovel?”
“Yes.”
“Go and help with the coal-ass.”
“Coal-ass?”
“Do you see those men and that truck?” They pointed out the windows. Across the Yard beside a couple of piles of sand and gravel a stubby old guy and a man my own age were sitting, smoking idly, on the running-board of a city dump-truck.
“Go out with them today. And take it easy with the shovel or you’ll hurt your hands.”
I left the office and walked over to tell the two men, Bill Eagleson and Danny Foster, that I was coming with them.
“What’s your name?”
“Hood.”
“All right, Hoody,” said the older man, Bill, “grab a shovel.” After a moment he and Danny stood off and studied my style.
“Do much shovelling?”
“Not a hell of a lot, no.”
“Swing it like this, look!” They taught me how, and there really was an easy way to do it, one of the most useful things I’ve ever learned, a natural arc through which to swing the weight without straining the muscles. It was the same with a pick or a sledge; the thing was to let the head of the instrument supply the power, just like a smooth golf swing. When we had enough sand and gravel, we yanked two planks out of a pile and made a ramp up to the tailgate.
“We’ll put on the coal-ass,” said Bill Eagleson.
“What’s that?”
“Cold asphalt. It’s liquid in the barrel and dries in the air. We use it for temporary patches.”
Danny and I rolled an oil-drum of this stuff around to the bottom of the ramp. Then we worked it up to the tailgate and into a wooden cradle so that one end of the drum was flush with the end of the truck. Bill screwed a spigot into the end of the drum and we were all set.
“You’re the smallest, you sit in the middle,” they said flatly.
Apparently Danny and the absent Aimé fought over this every day. When we had squeezed into the front seat, Bill checked over the list of breaks in the roadway and we set out. It was already nine o’clock.
As we drove slowly along, the barrel bouncing and clanging in the back, they told me that our job was to apply temporary patches where damage had been reported by the patrolmen or a citizen, to save the city money on lawsuits. The idea was to get the patch down as soon as possible. They weren’t meant to be permanent but they had to last for a while.
We stopped first behind some railway sidings on the Esplanade, next to the St. Lawrence Market, to fix some shallow potholes. Bill filled a large tin watering-can with coal-ass and spread the black tarry liquid in the hole. Then Danny and I filled it with gravel. Then more coal-ass, then a layer of sand, and finally a third coat of the cold asphalt to top off.
“It dries in the air,” said Danny with satisfaction, “and tomorrow you’d need a pick to get it out of there.” He was quite right. It was an amazingly good way to make quick repairs that would last indefinitely. From the Esplanade we headed uptown to Gerrard Street between Bay and Yonge where we filled a small cut in the sidewalk. Then Bill parked the truck in the lot behind the old Kresge’s store on Yonge.
“Time for coffee,” we all said at once. We sat at the lunch counter in Kresge’s for half an hour, kidding the waitresses, and I began to realize that we had no boss, that Charlie wasn’t checking on us in any way and that Bill had only the nominal authority that went with his years and his drivership. Nobody ever bothered you. Nobody seemed to care how long you spent over a given piece of work, and yet the work all got done, sooner or later, and not badly either. If you go to the corner of St. Joseph and Bay, on the east side, you can see patches that we put in nine years ago, as sound as the day they were laid down. By and large, the taxpayers got their money’s worth, although it certainly wasn’t done with maximum expedition or efficiency.
When we’d finished our coffee it was obviously much too late to start anything before lunch, so Bill and I waited in the truck while Danny shopped around in Kresge’s for a cap. He came back with something that looked like a cross between a railwayman’s hat and a housepainter’s, a cotton affair that oddly suited him. We drove back to the yard, arriving about eleven forty-five, in comfortable time for lunch. We were allowed an hour for lunch but it always ran to considerably more. The three big gangs didn’t come into the Yard except on payday, unless they were working close by. It seemed to be a point of protocol to stay away from the Yard as long as possible. Each gang had a small portable shed on wheels, in which the tools, lamps, and so forth, could be locked overnight, and these sheds are to be seen all over the downtown area.
After lunch we fixed a few more holes. About two-thirty or three we parked the truck in the middle of Fleet Street with cars whizzing past on both sides. Danny handed me a red rag on a stick. “Go back there and wave them around us,” he said. “We’ll fix the hole.”
I stood in the middle of Fleet Street, that heavily travelled artery, and innocently waved my flag, fascinated to see how obediently the cars coming at me divided and passed to either side of the truck. Now and then a driver spotted me late, and one man didn’t see the flag at all until the last second. I had to leap out of his way, shouting, and he pulled way out to his left into the face of the oncoming traffic and went around the truck at sixty-five.
Pretty soon Bill and Danny were finished and we got into the truck and drove off. “Payday tomorrow,” said Danny thoughtfully. “You won’t draw anything this week, Hoody. They pay on Wednesday up till the previous Saturday.”
“We’ll buy you a beer,” said Bill generously. He began to tell me about himself. He was an old ballplayer who had bounced around the lower minors for years, without ever going above Class B. Afterwards he came back to Toronto and played Industrial League ball until the Depression killed it. Then he had come on the city, and had now been with the Roadways Division for fifteen years.
“Just stick with us, Hoody, and keep your mouth shut,” he said, repeating it with conviction several times.
“You’ll be with us at least until Aimé gets back,” said Danny.
I asked what had happened to Aimé. It appeared that he’d been found sitting in a car that didn’t belong to him, in a place where the car wasn’t supposed to be. He got thirty days and it was taken for granted that he’d be back on the job, same as ever, when he got out. Many of the men had had minor brushes with the law. A few weeks later Danny got caught, with two of his friends and a truck, loading lengths of drainpipe which they planned to sell for scrap, at a City Maintenance Station south of Adelaide Street. They just drove the truck into the station after supper and spent six hours loading pipe. They might have got twenty-five dollars for it, dividing that sum between them. It didn’t seem very good pay for six
hours’ work; when I suggested this to Danny he shrugged it off. He hadn’t figured out that his time was worth more than he could possibly have made on that job.
Bill Tennyson, the sulky patrolman, had often been charged with non-support by his wife, and with assault by his father-in-law. He passed his nights alternately at his nominal place of abode, where his wife and children lived, and at a bachelor friend’s apartment in the Warwick Hotel. An unsettled life, and an irregular, whose disagreeable circumstances he used to deplore to me in private lunch-hour chat. Charlie disliked him, and used to ride him quite a lot; he was the only man in the whole crew to whom Charlie was consistently unfair. He had that irritating goof-off manner which always infuriates the man who is trying to get the job done. Yet he had no vices, drank little, didn’t gamble. No one knew how he spent his money and no one liked him.
He had his eyes on Eddie Doucette’s desk job. But Eddie could type after a fashion, and had some sort of connection at the Hall which everybody knew about and never mentioned — he might have been a nephew of the City Clerk or the Assistant Assessment Commissioner — I never found out for sure. But nobody was going to get his job away from him.
Eddie wore a cardigan and a tie, and rode around in the truck with Charlie and George, while Tennyson wore sports shirts and walked his beat. The rest of us wore work-clothes of an astonishing variety. My regular costume, after Aimé came back and I had to get off the coal-ass crew, was an old Fordham sweatshirt which my brother in New York had given me and which by protocol was never laundered, jeans, work-boots, and the same pair of sweatsocks every day, and they too were never laundered; they were full of concrete dust at the end of the day and by September were nearly solid. I could stand them in the corner, and they never bothered my feet at all as long as I washed off the concrete as soon as I came home.