by Daniel Perry
THE WORST THING the seniors can write — or spell — is Fag, but that one washes off pretty easily. In Currie, everyone’s straight. And everyone’s white, too. Well, almost. The tobacco farms hire workers from the Caribbean, mainly Jamaica, and four or five times a summer, you’ll see a picker cycling on the shoulder of the county road, usually on his way to the Price-Mart for cigarettes. My older sister Stella worked there as a cashier under the usually pointless We I.D. under 25 sign. Earlier this year, three Jamaicans came in, and Stella got fired for carding them.
“Are you kid-din’? Twenty-five? We are past it,” one man insisted.
Stella was sure they were old enough, but her manager was standing right there. She had to ask. Had to dig in when they refused.
“Sir, I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t sell you cigarettes without I.D.”
“I come here and pick you’ tobacco five years now, and I can’t buy it wit-out you axin’ I-D?”
That’s where the manager stepped in.
“Just give them to him, Stella,” he whispered. “Don’t be a hero.”
BEN AND I were opponents every summer until this one, when we both made Currie Blue, the stacked team in our age group. Ben’s the backup catcher behind our captain Chad Mitchell, and I’m the second-best pitcher. We got to know each other well on the bench, and after practice on Fridays we’d walk home together, through the alley behind Main Street. Passing the quiet back doors to Darla’s Flowers and Currie Home Video, our conversations would echo to the end of the row and drown in the racket behind Brewskie’s: The Only Bar in Town, just like the sign says, with Only underlined in case you didn’t get it. The sign out front could say anything, though; Brewskie’s is the kind of place where you’re only cool if you use the back door. It’s also the other place you might see a picker. Most times when we approached we’d see Ryan and Pat, already drunk and hassling the bouncer. We’d crouch behind a dumpster and watch an exchange like this:
PAT: You’ve got to let us in.
RYAN (nodding aggressively and leaning in): Yeah!
(Marty shifts uncomfortably.)
PAT: Come on, Marty. Can’t let the spooks at our girls.
RYAN (louder): Yeah!
The two would tower over him while a line-up formed behind, chanting Mar-ty’s a ho-mo until the pudgy doorman exhaled heavily and scanned the alley for a cop. The cop. Currie only has one. When he was finally sure Bob Moore was nowhere in sight, Marty would hustle the two of them inside.
BEN CAUGHT THREE games the week Mitchell and his family were at the lake. His throws to second were solid, and the pitch calls were smart, but the problem was his bat. At our first practice with Mitchell back, Coach Little told Ben he was done for the season.
That was the first night we stayed late at the diamond. Ben had it in his head that he’d prove everyone wrong. I threw to him until eleven, when the floodlights clanged off, and then we walked home through the alley, which had filled with seniors while we trained. They clustered around Pat, who hovered over a kneeling Jamaican. The man had to be in his forties. Ben and I took up our positions.
“That’s our money, Picker,” Pat said. “And we say you don’t spend it here.”
He drove his fist into the migrant’s teeth. The man fell to the ground, where he cowered and turned out his palms. Pat wiped the blood on his jeans.
“Please,” the man begged.
Pat snorted.
“Had enough already? No wonder you can’t get a job in Ja-may-ca,” he taunted, drawing it out in an un-Jamaican accent. He leaned forward and spat out a nicotineyellow gob. It stuck in the worker’s eyebrow. Pat cocked his fist to swing again.
Marty caught the arm and twisted it behind Pat’s back, growling, “That’s enough!” He looked down the alley. “Get out of here before Moore shows up.”
Pat broke free of the bear hug and he and Ryan took off down the alley. They cut through the Price-Mart parking lot and vanished down Main Street over Memorial Bridge, so low to the Waubnakee River that when you’re dared to jump, you have to. The crowd dispersed and Ben and I crossed the lot, too. We were nearly to my street when Moore’s squad car finally screamed past.
I ASKED BEN once what had happened with his father.
“He left, I guess. I don’t know,” he said. “It just didn’t work out.”
In Currie, that’s not saying much. A lot of marriages don’t work out. Ben’s parents are just among the few that did anything about it. Splitting up here is tough because right away, everyone finds out, and worse, they tell everyone else why it’s happening, regardless of whether they actually know. I’d bet the decision was easy for Ben’s mom and dad, though. Anything would be, compared to walking down Main Street feeling the stares: Mom White, Dad Black, Baby Benson somewhere in between.
“Every year, someone falls for a picker,” Stella told me once. She may not have much to go on — she’s only sixteen — but she’s been going to Brewskie’s every weekend for a while now. I sneak out some Saturdays and meet her for a cigarette in front. I don’t tell Mom Stella’s not at Jessie Mueller’s house, and Stella doesn’t tell that I smoke.
“It’s usually a fat hick who works at the plant,” she said, “but every once in a while, it’s a young girl who’s going somewhere.” A bitterness crept into her voice. “Someone who might get out of here one day.”
She lit a second cigarette.
“The girl ends up head over heels, and starts thinking they’ll be the ones. That this time, for this couple, things will be different. But they never are. The man goes home when the season ends, before the girl even knows she’s pregnant, and then she gets to decide. She drives into London for an abortion, or she has the baby and hopes for the best.”
“The best?” I asked.
Stella swept her drooping blonde bangs off her forehead.
“For the guy to never come back,” she said. “The girl lays low until the baby’s born, and then she tells people it’s adopted or a nephew or something.”
She pursed her lips and turned away, blowing the smoke out her nostrils.
“Look around. There are only four black kids at our school. Jeez, you’re friends with one of them. Nephew Ben. Have you ever seen his parents?”
Anger welled up in my eyes. I flipped her the bird and stormed off down Main Street, unsure what upset me more — that she had said Ben came from Minute Rice and pancake mix, or that she was right about there being no black families in Currie.
COACH LITTLE HAD been true to his word, but Ben said my pitches were helping. We stayed late every week, and afterward, we watched the fights. All that ever changed was the victim.
The last week before school, Pat chose a picker who was around thirty-five, six-foot and bulky from a summer in the kilns. The man held his own until Ryan jumped in; now, he lay on the ground. The attackers rained kicks on his sides and taunted, “Leave our women alone,” as he rolled and tucked, absorbing the blows. Between an onlooker’s legs his eyes implored us to do something but we darted back into the dumpster’s shadow, terrified that our cover was blown.
Ben whispered, “That’s my dad.”
“No way,” I said.
Ben peeked around the corner.
“No, it isn’t. I don’t think. But it could be.” He looked at the sky and let out a weighty breath. “I can’t wait until they let me inside.”
Pat took the worker by the collar. He lifted him to his knees and smashed his nose with a left. The seniors cheered.
I tugged the shoulder of Ben’s jersey.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Our cleats drubbed like hail on the asphalt. I didn’t think they heard us run off.
THERE ARE TWENTY-FIVE desks in the classroom. I already know I’ll be sixth. Mrs. Kulich calls Matthew Bartlett — lawyer’s kid, he’s such a dork — and then the pompous Brown twins, Jake and Gary. I’m on my feet before I hear my name. Ryan vacates my new desk, and on the way by he makes sure to brush me hard with his s
houlder.
Mrs. Kulich smiles and carries on. Mike’s next, then Pig-Tails. Her name is Megan Cavanagh. Her desk creaks when she sits, and right away, loose-leaf ruffles. She passes a folded paper to Kimberly, who drops it over Ben’s shoulder. I see Ryan nod in the back row, eyes shining with way more anticipation than waiting for last names beginning with T requires.
Ben unfolds the note.
YOUR DEAD TABACO BABY.
He looks up at Kimberly.
“Ryan Tern,” Mrs. Kulich says, groaning. The ox looks up with a goofy grin. I hold my breath. Maybe she saw. She checks the seating plan and breaks the order to give Ryan his permanent spot now, in row four.
Ben crumples the note. He drops it on the floor. Kimberly retrieves it.
“That’s so racist,” she whispers.
Ben replies, “No, it isn’t.”
Ryan lurches right and thunders into his new seat. He takes a penknife from his jeans and starts marking his territory, carving his name in the wood. He looks up when Mrs. Kulich starts the lesson, averting his eyes to scowl at Ben instead.
That’s you, Ryan mouths. Tobacco Baby.
Ben returns the stare.
Takes one to know one, he mouths back.
Eyesore
AFEW SUMMERS AGO it wandered up to my grandparents’ farm, burrs in its red and gold fur and stinking of pond water. It looked like a Retriever or a Collie to Grandma Anne, and she had a feeling it was older, and female. It sniffed around the old barn while she yelled girls’ names from the porch. It came running at “Lucy,” so that’s what Grandma called her.
Called it. When you write, you call a dog it. “It” would have been a fine name. “It” looked like an Addams Family cousin. But Grandpa Ralph, he had other names for Lucy, secret ones like “Bitch” and “Cunt” he used when Grandma was out of earshot.
See? It’s important she’s a she.
After Christmas last year, Grandma told Ralph she never should have quit school to marry him and she moved home to Edmonton. She met a Russian doctor with a collection of inoperative antique rifles on his walls there, but that’s not what this story’s about.
IT’S THREE-THIRTY IN the afternoon. I’m just off the bus from Currie High School, Grade Nine, and I barrel through the front door to answer the ringing phone.
“Mike, hi. It’s your Grandpa Ralph.”
He starts every call this way — never just Grandpa, never just Ralph. His next question is always the same, too.
“Is your Dad there?”
“No, he’s at work,” I say.
Grandpa Ralph says he’ll call again later and hangs up. He’s always forgetting that Dad’s back on afternoons at Ritter, arm swelling again and an MRI in London still a month away. Ralph forgets because to him, “at work” is all-or-nothing: he goes away for months at a time on the oil pipeline in Alberta. No one understands why he hasn’t just moved there. Growing up in Currie Township is no reason to stay. Ralph’s left every spring since before Dad was born, and returned every fall when the ground out west has frozen, finding children, now grandchildren, taller and tanned after spending the summer cutting grass and tending to his oversized garden and his fruit trees for the pickles and pears and apples and cherries Grandma Anne used to spend every August sealing in Mason jars.
A long time ago, before Dad quit drinking, he wobbled out to Ralph’s in his roaring Olds Cutlass and started a Boy-Named-Sue fight about these summers. Grandma Anne screamed from the porch while father and son rolled in the dirt laneway like school kids, stopping only when Mom’s Uncle Frank happened by in his truck and broke it up. He loaded Dad into the box and drove him back to town, or so I heard years later — I didn’t see it, I was asleep in my crib. Mom says that even Dad kicking in the screen door didn’t wake me.
LUCY. SHE STARTED as an outdoor dog, but on cold winter nights Grandma would open the back door and let her in, wiping the snow from her paws with an old towel. And even after Grandma left, until the spring, Lucy spent most nights in the house, where I would pat her belly and ruffle her fur as I lay beside her on Ralph’s living room carpet, on my stomach with the newspaper’s sports page spread in front of me while Ralph in his recliner ranted along with Coach’s Corner, Dad agreeing from the couch.
Since making his amends way back, before I started kindergarten, Dad’s been Ralph’s best friend. They go deer hunting every November, and in the winter they make me help cut wood for Ralph’s stove, which means standing around in the bush behind his farm freezing my toes while they run chainsaws and yell at me to pick up the logs and load them into the old wagon attached to Ralph’s burgundy Massey-Harris.
As I scratched behind Lucy’s ears on a Saturday night just before the playoffs this year, Ralph said, “Be careful. You let a woman in once,” but he trailed off. Dad laughed, then caught himself, as though he’d just remembered I was there.
THE BUS FROM Currie Elementary trails blue, oil-burning smoke as it passes the house, having just unloaded Nancy and some other kids at the ValuGas. When she gets home we watch Y&R at four and make fun, and then it’s the Simpsons rerun at five before we start on the chore list Mom always leaves. It’s like a game, seeing how long we can put it off before we lunge across the finish line.
Nancy’s job is dishes and mine is the vacuuming. That’s why I don’t hear the kitchen phone ring. It startles me to see her in the doorway between the dining and living rooms, tears on her cheeks under her glasses and arms limp at her sides. Dishwater drips from her hands.
“What?” I ask. “What is it?”
“Grampa said, ‘I need you to be a secretary,’” she says, which is Ralphspeak for “take a message” when someone’s daughter picks up. “He’s going to work tonight,” she starts. “He called from the airport — ” She collapses into my chest, sobbing and unable to talk.
The pipeline’s so dangerous that it has to pay well; no one would take the jobs, otherwise. Ralph’s cheated death for more than thirty years. He has the money to retire, and he’s barely fifty. His whimpering secretary is tenand-a-half. “He can’t keep Lucy,” she blubbers. “He said to remind Dad to ...” She sniffs. “To shoot her, and bury her behind the shed.”
Louder sobs, and a widening wet patch on my T-shirt. I hug her close to me. The rug stays half vacuumed, the dishwater goes cold, and a minute later we hear Mom’s brown Buick crunch the laneway gravel. Its engine dies. Her keys jingle. The door opens. She looks at the vacuum, its hoses still strewn about. She adjusts her glasses and eyes me, then Nancy, then me again. When our chores aren’t finished, she knows why. She sighs.
“What were you fighting about?”
She’s been working at the bakery since early this morning. Her curly blonde hair is frizzing and purple bags underline her wire-rims.
“We weren’t fighting,” I say, and because we didn’t chorus, “Nothing!” she believes us.
Nancy, on the couch now, looks down at our cat, nestled in front of her under the coffee table. It — she — jumps to her feet and breaks for a bedroom down the hall. I explain to Mom in the shortest way possible. Nancy starts crying again anyway.
“I don’t think so,” Mom replies. “I don’t think so.” She turns back to the door where her keys are still in the lock. She removes them. “Nancy, we’ll be right back,” she says. “Put on your shoes, Michael.”
UNTIL RALPH HAD it torn down four years ago, Lucy lived inside the old barn. After dinner every night, Grandma would walk up the laneway with two small Rubbermaids, one filled with Lucy’s food and the other with chow for the umpteen stray cats that came and went and often left kittens. Ralph complained about how much Grandma spent on kibble, and threatened to drown the cats — “For their own sake,” he said — but after the demolition crew finished, he and Dad cut up the timbers and filled in the pond where I learned to fish and skate; whole Currie Township generations played shinny here, dawn to dusk on weekends. The cats have run off and now there’s just more grass for someone to cut — me, for a hundred
bucks a summer. Dad calls out west if I miss even one Sunday, saying, “We can’t have it looking like an eyesore,” and then Ralph says the same to me a day or two later, over the phone from some place with a name like Carrot Creek.
Ralph paved the laneway, and years ago, just after Dad moved out, he tore down the house my great-grandfather had built way back when the barn held cattle. He replaced the house with a sprawling one-storey: three bathrooms, four bedrooms, and now, only him to sleep there. The barn made way for the aluminum drive shed for the Winnebago he and Grandma were going to buy, but it sits mostly empty now, always locked. The whole property looks modern except for the doghouse, which Ralph says Grandma insisted on buying for summers, when Lucy lived outside. The rusty tin roof makes me think he got it second-hand, and probably at the Currie Township Dump. This eyesore must not count.
The dog barks as we drive in and pulls her chain taut from its steel stake. Mom nudges the car along the laneway. As we round the loop that circles the drive shed, we see the metallic green nose of Dad’s Cutlass peeking out from behind. It’s still strange to see the car anywhere but on our lawn — after selling the truck, Dad and Richard spent a whole year of weekends redoing the muscle car’s brakes, suspension, exhaust and finally the stubborn wires and fuses they tested one at a time, trying to make the turn signals work. I was pulled away from my homework a few times to learn something important, like how an alternator works, but really all I learned was how to hand Dad tools and pretend I didn’t hear him swearing under his breath.
What’s stranger still is that it’s after six — nearly dusk. That car should be at the Ritter plant. The shed door squeals on its runners and Dad steps out in his work blues, cradling his favourite gun, a banged-up Winchester .270. When I was little he would tell me stories about shooting squirrels and rabbits and raccoons, then selling their pelts on the Reserve. Mom’s told me since that he was selling them to buy liquor, that he was hunting without a licence, and that he traded an expensive, brand-new and legal .22 for this over-calibred rifle he keeps dead-bolted in the grey steel cabinet in Ralph’s shed plus a forty of rye — the bottle that rode shotgun the night he drove out to fight Ralph. She’s never said where the rifle was then, but she’s never let Dad keep it at home.