The Badger Riot

by J. A. Ricketts

  Elvis Presley, the American rock and roll idol, was all the rage. Amanda and her friends were no different than other teenagers all across North America as they oohed and aahed over him and his music. Television had recently come to Newfoundland and was broadening young people’s view of the world.

  And then, suddenly, in January of 1959, things changed. Many strangers were seen on Badger’s streets. Loggers from the outports poured into the town to support the union. The words “strike” and “IWA” were on everybody’s tongue. Reality hit, and even young people were jarred out of their safe little lives.

  School life wasn’t the same either. The principal, Mr. Summers, who was also the teacher for grades nine, ten and eleven, didn’t seem to notice if someone was shooting wads of paper with their slingshots or using their huge World History book to hit a person in front of them over the head. He often absented himself from the classroom, something he had never done before the strike occurred. The boys would go wild then, jumping over the seats, tormenting the girls, seeing who could swear the best – or worst – and everyone talked in a classroom where, at one time, it was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. Everyone shared news of the strike. The kids considered themselves experts on what was happening.

  February came, and the strike was becoming violent. The young girls saw overturned cars in the streets and angry men standing around fire barrels. However, no one ever bothered or threatened them, and they were allowed to walk freely about the town. Susan Foote and Madeline Sullivan had fathers who were on the picket lines. Susan hadn’t seen her father since the trashing of the woods camps on the seventh of February. He’d been carted off to jail with many others, but hadn’t come back home when the rest were released. Her mom said that he was sent off to a prison farm out in Salmonier, but Susan didn’t know why. No one ever explained things to kids.

  Amanda’s younger friend Madeline was part of the big Sullivan family. Her father, Phonse, and her Uncle Tom, even her Aunt Jennie were strikers too. Madeline was pretty sure the strikers would win their fight.

  As the town became more unruly, Rod had a mind to send Ruth in to St. John’s to stay with their daughter, Audrey. Since the episode in the camps almost a month ago, tension had become so bad that some Company personnel were afraid to let their kids go to school.

  Every Company employee and contractor who stayed in town had a police car parked outside their door. Ruth went out every now and then and offered them tea and buns. She was like that, kindhearted. Sure, all Badger was like that, or was like that at one time, before the strike. Now everyone was afraid of everyone else. Rod could understand the loggers’ position, but the town itself was paying a high price.

  They were having supper. It was the beginning of March and the evenings were starting to get longer, but you still needed the light on to eat supper. Rod’s father used to say that by the middle of March you could have your evening meal in the daylight. He would plan his winter around that event, every day getting a bit longer, a sign that winter was loosening its grip.

  Looking across the table at his wife, Rod said, “Ruth, why don’t you pack up and go in St. John’s for awhile? See Audrey and the girls. I’ll wire a message to have Richard meet the train.”

  Ruth got the teapot from the back of the stove. She’d cooked pea soup with dumplings for supper; it was one of her husband’s favourite meals, even though he always complained afterward that it made him gassy. They were finishing off with a bit of fruitcake and tea. “What about you, Rod? Will you be all right here in the house?”

  “My dear, don’t worry. I’ve lived here all my life. What can happen to hurt me in little old Badger?”

  Next day, Rod went off to the Canadian National Telegraph office and sent a telegram to Audrey.

  “Good many people leaving town, Rod,” said Alf Elliott, as he carefully counted the words of the telegram.

  “Yes b’y. Badger has become a rough place these days. When this strike is over, I wonder if it will go back to the quiet way it was.”

  “I wonders the same thing. That’s fifty-two cents, Rod my son. I’ll send one of my kids over with the reply, when it comes through.”

  “Thanks Alf, I’d appreciate it. I’m hoping to get Ruth out on the train tomorrow evening, if I can.”

  The telegram came back:

  ST. JOHN’S MARCH 5, 1959

  MR. ROD ANDERSON, BADGER, N.F.L.D.

  RUTH IS ALWAYS WELCOME STOP PLEASE ADVISE WHEN ARRIVING STOP

  RICHARD FAGAN

  Ruth was excited to be off to St. John’s by herself, even if she was worried about leaving her husband behind.

  22

  The old St. John’s railway station was a bleak place. Lining the walls, wooden seats offered hard invitations to the backside. Constable Richard Fagan chose to walk around as he waited for his mother-in-law to come in on the morning train.

  Others waiting to board the train or to meet someone eyed him warily. People were always on guard when they saw a police uniform, thinking that the officer might be there to pick up a prisoner or arrest someone.

  Richard had been on the night shift: eight hours of drunks, family squabbles, one robbery and one accident. He had told Audrey that he would go to the train station on his way home and pick up her mother. His wife and their two little daughters were at home waiting to see her.

  People began to stir and drift toward the back door of the waiting room. Through the window he could see the train easing its way into St. John’s station. Most railway stations had the tracks running by the main door, but in St. John’s the front looked like an imposing Victorian mansion, which Richard thought was the idea when they built it back in the 1890s. You came in through the front door and the train sneaked along the back where a door opened out on the platform.

  As he stepped outside he thought about faraway Port aux Basques where this train started, and all the little places in between, like Badger, where his in-laws lived which was his wife’s hometown. Richard never ceased to be amazed about the largeness of the island of Newfoundland.

  He saw Ruth being helped off the train by the conductor, and moved forward.

  “Good morning, Momma Ruth. Did you have a good trip?” Ruth reached out and hugged him. “Richard, how nice to see you. And you in your nice uniform too! Yes, the trip was fine. My first ever alone, you know. I had a sleeper and slept all the way from Gander to Whitbourne.”

  Richard installed Ruth in the front seat of his car and stowed her baggage in the trunk. “So this is the new car, Richard,” Ruth said, patting the dash in her affectionate way. “Audrey wrote about it.” She looked out the window at the miserable March weather – dirty snow on the ground and drizzly rain looking like it was about to turn to freezing. “When the summer comes, you all will be able to go for nice drives outside the city.”

  Richard drove on up Water Street and up over the Hill o’ Chips onto Duckworth, then past the Newfoundland Hotel and onto Kings Bridge Road.

  “How is Rod doing, Momma Ruth? I’ve been reading the papers about the loggers’ strike. Sounds like they’re having a rough time of it.” He turned left onto New Cove Road. Richard’s house was only a few doors down from his father’s. “Audrey reads me your letters. You said that the strikers beat up Rod’s woods camp. Will the company stand to the expense of cleaning it up and rebuilding?”

  “I suppose so, Richard. Everything is so uncertain with the A.N.D. Company these days. Rod sent me in here because it’s too dangerous in Badger right now. Hundreds of strangers roaming about the streets, Mounties everywhere, cars and buses overturned in the middle of town. Company personnel who are staying – and many have left – have police cars parked outside their doors. Rod says he’ll be all right, but I’m not sure if he will be.”

  At the house, Ruth got out and quickly went on up the walkway while her son-in-law got her suitcase. She had been here twice before. Richard and Audrey and their children had visited them in Badger too, but the distance was so great – four
hundred miles – that the families didn’t see each other often enough.

  Richard heard the excited squeals from the children before he got up the step. Ruth was on her knees and the children were hugging her. Everyone was laughing.

  Richard went on through to the bedroom to take off his uniform. He was dead tired and felt like he could sleep for a week. Audrey peeked in.

  “Breakfast, Richard?”

  “No, sweetheart, I’ll just go on to bed. We had a busy night last night.”

  “Mom and I are going to take the children up to your mother’s as soon as they’re fed and dressed. You’ll have a quiet house then. Later on, your mother is cooking supper for all of us.”

  Richard climbed into bed as Audrey closed the door. He thought about what she’d just said: “Your mother’s house.” Strictly speaking, Mama was his foster mother. Richard seldom thought about the life he’d lived before being adopted by the Abernathys, except when he had been preparing to marry Audrey and felt compelled to tell her about his unsettled past.

  When Richard awoke hours later it was mid-afternoon. The house was empty and quiet. He made himself some tea and sat staring out the window as he sipped it. The city was still grey and cold, but it hadn’t gotten the freezing rain that had been forecast. As he sat there in the silent house, gazing out the window, Richard’s mind started to drift back over the years that had brought him to this point in his life.

  He was jarred back to the present when the porch door opened. The tea had gone cold in the cup and the March evening had closed in outside the window.

  It was Papa. “Dickie, the family sent me over to wake you up, my son. You must have slept some sound; they were ringing the telephone and there was no answer.”

  “Sorry, Papa. I’ll come right away.” He grabbed his coat and hat from the rack and hurried out the door after his father.

  That evening, sitting in the Abernathy living room while the women cleaned the dishes, Levi told Richard about the Constabulary’s involvement in the strike. “Government has ordered fifty members out to Grand Falls to supplement the RCMP,” he said, keeping his voice low so the women in the kitchen wouldn’t hear him. “You know what we read in the Evening Telegram and the Daily News. The papers say that the A.N.D. Company is standing firm in its resolve not to acknowledge the IWA. And the Premier has condemned the union and decertified it outright. Here in St. John’s people are having a hard time understanding that because Joey Smallwood was once a union man himself. One time he walked across Newfoundland on the railway tracks to organize a railway union.”

  “So, what do you think?” Richard asked him. “Will our boys be much help to the RCMP?”

  “I suppose so, Dickie my son. Most likely it’s just for patrols to show a presence. Let’s keep quiet about it for now. Poor Ruth is worried enough about Rod as it is.”

  The embers snapped in the fireplace as the women’s voices drifted in from the kitchen. The two children were kneeling on the floor by the coffee table, colouring in the books Ruth had brought for them. In the middle of such domesticity, it was hard to think of desperate loggers standing outside in cold and snow fighting for what they believed to be their rights.

  The women joined the men then, and the little girls rushed to them with their coloured pages.

  Richard had to work another overnight shift. They bundled everyone up and walked off down the street to home. The children had their bath and went off to bed, and Ruth declared that she was tired too, so she went to bed as well.

  Audrey sat on the arm of Richard’s chair. “Richard, you’ve been quiet and moody all evening. What’s wrong? You don’t mind my mom being here, do you?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that, my dear. I just have a heavy feeling and I don’t know why. I got up from my sleep this afternoon and started thinking of us – you, me and the girls, Mama and Papa, Rod and Ruth. Then I got to remembering how we first met, and how fate played a heavy hand in us meeting again.”

  Audrey kissed him on top of the head. “Wasn’t that something, though? I always say if it wasn’t for a cat, a harmonica and a fiddle, we’d never be together.”

  Richard got up from the chair and turned to the darkness outside the window. “When the weather clears a bit, I think I’ll go down and visit my mother’s grave.”

  What brought on that thought? Audrey wondered, as she helped her husband with his jacket and watched him go out into the night.

  When Richard finished his shift the next morning, he headed down to the Anglican Church Cemetery on Forest Road. It was still overcast but not raining, with an easterly wind whipping down Quidi Vidi Lake. The paths were clear and the headstones and monuments were bare. Most of the plots were still covered with old winter snow dirty with soot from the numerous chimneys. Richard walked quickly along the path bordered by giant beech trees that looked forlorn and naked without their leaves.

  Richard read again the plain stone that marked the resting place of his mother’s poor crippled body: MARY ANN FAGAN, 1908-1944. Thirty-six years old. She had died when he was only sixteen. Then his unsettled mind went flying back over the years again to the 1930s when his mother had been discharged from St. Clare’s Hospital. The Welfare Department had installed her in a boarding house on Brazil Square. The Abernathys had never kept any details of his life from him. They believed that things should be done the right way. That was why he still had the Fagan name.

  Mama had told him it would be the proper thing to visit her. She coached him carefully. “Now Dickie,” she said gently, “I want you to go and see her. She is your real mother. I am your adopted mother. I love you as if you were always mine, but I want you to know your birth mother.”

  “Will I have to go and live with her? And leave you and Papa?” The young boy was terrified. He had only been with them a year. The tragic happenings that had brought him here were still fresh in his young mind.

  “No, my darling boy, no. You are with us forever.” Mama smoothed his hair back and kissed the top of his head.

  After that first meeting, and as he grew into his teens, with some prodding from Mama, Richard would go visit Mary Ann alone. But there seemed to be no feeling between mother and son. His mother, who had given birth to him, was a stranger and he was a stranger to her. Thinking about it, he supposed that, given the circumstances of his birth, it was not surprising that they had never formed a bond.

  As Richard stood in his uniform, fur cap and greatcoat, he hardly knew what he was doing, standing at the grave of the long-dead woman who had given him life. Why was he now filled with so much sadness and foreboding? He had a good life and a fine wife and family. He shrugged off the feeling as best he could and retraced his steps out of the cemetery. He looked forward to getting home after a long night.

  Mary and Alf Elliott were alone in the kitchen. Alf was preparing his pipe for his after-supper smoke as Mary did the dishes.

  “Mary maid, there’s something strange going on with the people of this town. I need to discuss this with someone and you’re the only one I can trust.” He opened his tobacco pouch and pinched out a portion of tobacco.

  Mary, standing by the cupboard wiping a plate, said, “You know I won’t say anything, Alf. It’s your job we have to think about, b’y. I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble.”

  “Many Badger people believe the propaganda that Joey’s been spouting over the radio for the past month. His rantings have turned the tide of opinion all across this province, you know. The churches have even come out in support of him now.” Alf applied a match to his pipe and sucked in to make it draw.

  “Since he made his first speech on radio last month, dozens of people have been sending telegrams to the Premier’s office, congratulating Mr. Smallwood, telling him he’s right and offering their support. Over a hundred messages in less than a month.” Alf drew deeply on his pipe and the smell of Amphora Pipe Tobacco wafted through the kitchen. “Since word came through today that the House of Assembly has decertified the IWA, I was even
busier. This afternoon I sent off forty messages to him.”

  Mary was still occupied with the dishes. “I s’pose it’s just the A.N.D. Company crowd and the business people, is it?”

  “Well yes, for the most part. But there were also messages from people who had no direct connection to any of it, who must just feel the need to put in their two cents worth.” Alf got up from his chair and walked across the kitchen to look out. It was snowing again this evening. It had been a hard winter for snow.

  “What surprises me is some people who have relatives in the union, and some union members too, are sending telegrams to Mr. Smallwood saying they know him to be right. That’s betrayal, Mary, and there’s not a damn thing that I can do about it.”

  Mary sat down on a kitchen chair with her dishtowel in her hands. “Alf, be careful. I know it seems wrong, but you can only take them telegrams over your counter and say nothing. Don’t forget you’re supposed to be neutral.” She twisted her dishtowel as she looked at her husband anxiously.

  Alf turned his back on the snowy scene outside the window. “And you know what else bothers me, Mary? Outside of my office, going about town, I meet the same people staunchly affirming their support for the IWA when, only the day before that, they’d sent Joey a telegram telling him that he was right in calling the IWA an unscrupulous foreign union.”

  He went over to the stove, removed the cover with the lifter, and knocked the half-smoked contents of his pipe into the flame. “My God, they know that I know. They do! Yet they look at me as if daring me to say something. I’m disgusted with it all, Mary. Disgusted.”

  “If you did decide to talk, who would you tell? Landon Ladd? Ralph? Who?” Mary stood up and faced him. “You can’t do it, Alf. There would be a backlash at us, your family, and you’d lose your job.”