Never Sleep Three in a Bed

by Max Braithwaite

  The names were called off–Helen Rath, Alan Bird, Dwight Whitworth–down the line it went. The pile began to diminish. Hubert Braithwaite, Morley Braithwaite–all the rest of the family. Each kid came back to his seat grinning and shaking his parcel. There were tinker-toys, sleds, Parcheesi games and snakes-and-ladders. Still I waited, but my grin was getting a little forced. Finally the bag was empty, and my name had never been called. There were kids all around me who I knew had been little stinkers. And they’d got presents. How could I have been that bad? My shame and humiliation was complete.

  Just as we were about to leave the church, Watcherling came smirking down the aisle to greet my parents. He stood in front of us and smiled toothily. I’m sure he didn’t know I’d been left out. Then he placed his big sweaty hand on my tow head and said what he shouldn’t have. “Didn’t I tell you Santa would reward good little boys?” It was then I let him have it in the shins with my hard-toed boots.

  Years later I learned that it had all come about because of a ridiculous mix-up between my parents – each thought the other was taking care of it. We had a jolly laugh about it then. But at the time they couldn’t explain it to me, because the whole present thing was based on a lie–a cruel, needless lie.

  There must be better ways of getting a six-year-old to be good.

  4 School

  I started school in the fall of 1918 and it was a disaster.

  The Nokomis school stood on the edge of town and was a two-storey, frame building with two rooms upstairs and two downstairs. It was what they called a “continuation school”, which meant that all the grades were there, from Grade One to as high as you wanted to go. I could see it across the field from my attic window, and I looked forward to that first day with terror.

  Of course my older brothers had prepared me for the sacrifice.

  “That Primary teacher is a holy terror,” Morley said, frowning and shaking his head.

  “She sure is,” another smart alec added. “Got a strap in her desk drawer two feet long and four inches wide. We can hear the smack of it clear up in our room.”

  “And you’ll have to watch yourself. Can’t talk, can’t leave the room without asking, can’t do hardly anything.”

  Hub, who was already in Grade Three, but would be in the same room as myself, added his own bit of advice. “You’ll have to watch that weak bladder of yours, or Miss Williams will kill you.”

  My weak bladder was a great embarrassment to me, and a great annoyance to Hub. We slept together and often, in the middle of the night as I lay cuddled against him spoon-fashion, I’d dream that I was outside peeing against a fence. Then I’d feel the scalding liquid on my thighs and belly and hear Hub’s furious, “God damn it, Fat, you’ve done it again! Hey, Ma!” The shout would ring through the house, compounding my shame. “Fat’s peed the bed again. I’m soaked!” It was a terrible affliction, and the more I tried to cure it the more nervous I got, and the more I peed the bed.

  “Now stop that, you boys,” Mother warned, “or I’ll take a stick to you.” She didn’t want anything to interfere with getting me out of the house. She had Denny to look after, and it was much easier to do without me there. So she dressed me up in my best clothes–stiff, clumsy-laced boots, long black stockings held up with elastic garters, pants buckled at the knee, a clean jersey and a peaked cap on my head. I looked good enough to eat, she said.

  The boys watched this with disgust. They were to take me to school, and hated the idea. As soon as we got outside into the crisp September sunshine and they got me started along the winding path that led across the field to school, they beat it as fast as they could go. I stumbled along through the pigweed and ripening goldenrod, bawling and swearing with rage and frustration. Then I tripped over a rut and fell, and tore the knee of my stocking. That did it. I galloped home, frightening the sparrows and blackbirds with my howls.

  Mother had a small conference with the boys at noon, and so they dragged me off to school after lunch, and conveyed me as far as the schoolyard gate. There they left me, alone and frightened, watching the millions of screeching, chasing, squabbling kids that filled the yard. I was safe from bullying, though. Morley was one of the biggest kids in the school, and he saw to it that nobody messed with his little brother. He might badger me a bit himself–that was his privilege. But he wasn’t about to let anyone else dare try it.

  Finally the big bell in the cupola on the roof rang, and I followed that screeching mob into the school, leaving behind forever the carefree life. There were three grades in the Primary room and the beginners were on the outside row next the windows, sitting in double seats far too big for us. My seat-mate was a big, tousle-headed farm boy by the name of Rudolph Lampe, but everybody called him “Noodles”. He wore overalls and immense boots, and drove to school in a buggy. He was ripe with the smell of horse.

  The teacher was small and pretty, but that didn’t fool me. I knew that her trim frame housed a demon. I tried to make myself invisible by squirching down in my seat but because I’d missed the morning indoctrination she singled me out.

  “Will the new boy please stand and tell us his name.”

  I’d been rehearsed in this by my mother who insisted I give all my names. Mother had a thing about names; each of her eight children were endowed with three, making a total of some twenty-four in all. She loved the sound of names, making sure that each combination had a good ring to it.

  But I hated mine. Why couldn’t I have one simple one like other kids–Bill, or Pete, or Alan.

  “Come on,” she urged. “Don’t be shy. Tell us your name.”

  So I stood up and shouted defiantly for all the world to hear–“John Victor Maxwell Braithwaite!” My gawd, what a handle! Even now it embarrasses me to say it. There was a loud guffaw from the back seat of the last row on the other side of the room, where Hub sat with a noisy cohort. “We all call him Fat,” he apologized to the class. And from that time forward all the rest of them did, too.

  The teacher gave me a slate and some little wooden bright-coloured pegs and a round stick of plasticine, with an Eddy’s match box to keep it in, and a piece of tattered oilcloth to protect the scurfy surface of the desk, and a green primer with pictures of apples in it. She then left us to our own devices, while she tried to teach some reading to the Grade Threes.

  Soon I began to get that familiar feeling. I was being too soon cooped up. The natural thing for me to do was to step behind the barn or into the trees, or just let it go. But now I needed permission, and permission was hard to get.

  The harassed teacher was busy at the other side of the room and, for some reason, there had been a raft of hand-raising on our side. There were the snappers who, with a quick twist of the wrist, could bring their fingers together with a loud crack. There were the puffers who heaved and gasped as they waved their hands, like a steam locomotive on a grade. There were the jumpers who leaped half out of their seats as their hands shot up. And then there was me who, with my dread of drawing attention, would raise my hand tentatively, then jerk it down again when I saw the teacher look my way.

  So it was that by the time I got Miss Williams’ attention my need was monumental and her patience was gone.

  “Well?” she snapped.

  “Please may I leave the room?”

  “I said no one else can leave the room. It’s almost recess time.”

  The next time my hand went up more frantically.

  “No, I told you … no more leaving the room.”

  “But.…”

  It was no use. She wouldn’t even look. Then up went the hand of big, quiet, stolid Noodles.

  “I suppose,” the teacher barked, “that you want to leave the room, too.”

  “Please no.” He had moved over so far to his side that another inch would have put him on the floor. He pointed to the seat between us … where an amber puddle was spreading closer and closer to him. “I want that Max should leave the room.”

  School had its compensations, t
hough. I soon discovered that I was pretty quick to learn, and this gave me status. I was in a new pecking order now, not one governed by age or sex or rotundity, but by ability. It was good to get praised by the teacher and get little stars pasted on my slate for getting my number work right. I could memorize like the mischief and, since much of our learning was by rote, it gave me little trouble. “Tom Tinker has a dog. Tom Tinker said: ‘I love my dog and my dog loves me. I fed my dog under a hollow tree. My dog says bow-wow.’ ” “Betty Pringle had a cat. Betty Pringle said.…” But why go on? I’m sure I’ve demonstrated my superiority.

  Besides, I came to love Miss Williams. She was so pretty and she moved so gracefully and pouted her mouth so bewitchingly when she leaned close to me to inspect the work on my slate. I’d have died for Miss Williams. In my fantasies I was forever rescuing her from ruffians, and being hurt, and smiling bravely without complaint.

  She was one of the few teachers who understood Hub’s lack of spelling ability. Oh it annoyed and bewildered her, but she didn’t berate or humiliate him. It wasn’t until we moved to Prince Albert that the teachers began their concerted efforts to destroy him.

  It was also in Grade One that the little serpent of sex began to stir. It was directed towards Marion Murphy who sat in the seat ahead, and whose long, dark curls draped over my desk. Did I dare to touch her, to feel her softness?

  Of course I couldn’t play with Marion at recess, because the boys were restricted to one side of the school playground, and the girls to the other. But I enticed her into our big yard at home, and here she came with flashing eyes and dimpled smile. Oh the soft firm arms, and the girl smell. The eternal female, coaxing yet distant, coy, mysterious, frustrating, exciting. I taught her the games that small boys teach small girls. We built our house in the currant bushes, far from prying eyes, and taught each other the innocent secrets of life.

  The idyll ended, though, when I got her into trouble. It was the scandal of the neighbourhood, and her parents forbade her to ever come into our yard again.

  It was once more my stomach that got me into the trouble, and my passion for apples. Each autumn, big round barrels of apples arrived from Dad’s district in Ontario. What a harvest! There was a barrel of cooking apples and a barrel of eating apples. I favoured the cooking apples for the obvious reason that they were bigger. They were harder, too, of course, but my appetite ran to quantity rather than quality.

  Since there were so many of us, and since Mother liked to have a few apples left for pies, and to polish up for Christmas, she was forced to limit the family to one apple each a day. I don’t know how the others stood it, but one apple a day was just an aggravation to me. And so it was my practice to sneak into the cellar where they were stored and steal them.

  To accomplish this, I used the coal chute, a square wooden attachment which led into the dark, damp cellar, and down which the big lumps of Alberta coal were slid to be burned in the furnace. I would pry off the lid of the coal chute, slide down, land with a thump on the pile of coal, and then find my way, by smell mostly, to the apple barrels.

  As the level of apples went down in the barrel, the more difficult it was for me to get them out. I’d reach as far as I could over the rim and sometimes my feet would completely leave the floor. But oh! the smell! Like all the apple orchards in the world condensed into one small space. I would feel around in that pungent darkness until I got hold of the biggest apple and then squirm my way out again, up through the coal chute and into the barn, or some such secluded place, to munch on it. Heaven.

  Well, one day in late November when we already had winter clothes on, I figured that I’d pressed my luck a little far, and maybe a substitute thief would do the job better. So, by whatever means children use to con other children into doing their dirty work, I persuaded Marion to go down the coal chute for me. This was fine, except that she happened to be dressed in a brand new red overcoat, with buttoned leggings to match, and a new red bonnet. It was very cute, until she started down that coal chute. Then she noticed what was happening to it and began to cry. I shouted down something about stop acting like a stupid girl and making so much racket.

  This only brought on more racket, which was now rising to a scream. I reached down the coal chute to rescue her–caught hold of her hand and began to pull, but somehow she got stuck. A girl caught in a coal chute, I soon discovered, is just about noisier than a girl caught anywhere else. I could see that things were rapidly reaching a climax, and that any minute my mother would be heading for the cellar to catch the thief.

  I panicked and lit out of there as fast as I could go.

  After that, Marion Murphy rarely played “London Bridge is Falling Down” with me. In fact, she wouldn’t play anything, and she designated me–when she talked to me at all–as “you nasty boy”. So my first love affair was ended before it ever could be consummated.

  My scholastic career was interrupted shortly after it began with the arrival of the terrible influenza. The disease began in the trenches, came home with the soldiers, and spread so quickly across Canada that many believed it was carried by the winds. Whole families were struck down, doctors worked themselves to death, men in the cities wore masks to ward off the malignant curse, housewives kept indoors and away from their neighbours.

  Our entire family got it, including Dad’s youngest brother, Victor, who had come west to make his fortune and was staying with us until something turned up. We were all in bed, laid so low that the town policeman, Constable McGraw, had to come and milk the cow, feed the hens, slop the pigs and kill chickens so that Mother could drag herself from bed and make broth for the rest of us.

  The treatment was simple. Keep the fever down with aspirin and castor oil, and try to avoid the killing pneumonia that often followed. For some reason that nobody has ever been able to explain, the disease hit young adults the hardest, and carried off many a father or mother–or both–from growing families. Mother and Dad were the right age for destruction, but they were too tough. Their forebears had lived through the terrible plagues that killed thousands of Irish immigrants on their way to this country, and deep within them was the strength to fight the flu.

  I remember my own bout of flu well. I was deathly sick, burning up with fever one moment, shuddering with terrible chills the next. The walls of the bedroom would draw far, far off, leaving me in the centre of a great hall, filled with strange and terrible echoes. Then they’d close in on top of me, rushing at me, squeezing my chest, strangling me, until I twisted and screamed, fighting for breath.

  Old Doc Brown, father of young Doc Brown who’d fetched me, was pressed into service, as was many another retired doctor. I remember him sitting on the edge of my bed, an unfamiliar wrinkled-faced, white-haired figure, a bottle of castor oil in one hand (the cure for everything in our household) and an immense spoon, ten times as large as my mouth, in the other. And me lying there with my lips clamped shut and my eyes staring in terror.

  “Come on, Max,” he said. “Take this and the next time I come I’ll bring you a bag of chocolates.”

  I took it (God, I can still taste the horror of it!) and he did bring the chocolates. Two weeks later, he was dead of pneumonia, brought on by the flu, which had been brought on by overwork. Many a good doctor died that winter from fatigue, and we hadn’t any to spare.

  That was the same year we burned the Kaiser in Nokomis–“Kaiser Bill went up the hill to take a look at France. Kaiser Bill came down the hill with a bullet in his pants.” An effigy of the old rascal hung in the front of the harness-maker’s store, beside a new set of harness and the pelt of an immense wolf that somebody had shot on the plains. Complete with moustache and peaked cap it was. Walking past it, and gazing upon it with my six-year-old eyes, I was never one hundred per cent sure whether it was a real man or not. And when, after the shooting had stopped, and the town was celebrating our “glorious victory”, this effigy was burned on a great pile of lumber–I still wasn’t sure.

  The burning t
ook place on a field beside the tennis court. (The lumber had been salvaged from the blowing-down of the skating rink.) I stood there, clutching Dad’s hand, squinting against the brightness of the flames, and the black smoke curling up into the blacker night. And the flames licked up around the Kaiser’s head and I was terrified for him.

  “Papa, why are they burning him?” I asked.

  “Because he was a wicked man. He started the war!”

  Standing close to me, and also clutching his father’s hand, was my close friend Cyril Redpath. He’s dead now; fell off a freight train years later while running away from the cops. What happened to him? I don’t know. I only know that when I played with him in Nokomis we were equally culpable. Together we roamed the streets of Nokomis and the immediate countryside. Tagged after the bigger kids when they snared gophers and played run-sheep-run up and down the dark alleys at night. Watched them swimming in Shunkies, a ditch beside the railway track where the water stayed until late in July. All the white bodies diving in and out, plastering each other with mud, and ducking behind the stacked snow-fences, in order to hide their nakedness from passengers in the CNR Transcontinental as it roared by.

  There is one adventure we had that I’ll never forget, because it was the only time in my life that I had too much to eat. Cyril’s father ran the general store down on Main Street. A wonderful place–with bins of cookies, jars of candies, barrels of crackers, and stacked bags of flour. There were dry goods there, too. Rubber boots and overalls and ladies’ button shoes, and men’s straw hats, I remember. And in the back, pungent-smelling harness hung on pegs.