Never Sleep Three in a Bed

by Max Braithwaite

  With everything gone from it, the old cement-block house looked pretty bare, like a person from whom somehow all personality, emotion and concern has been removed. Mother stood for a long, long time at the front, just looking. She’d been happy here, happier and more prosperous than she would ever be again. Three of her children had been born in the big wooden bed behind that front bedroom window. She’d lived through the war here, and almost died during the influenza epidemic at the end of it. She was crying when she got into the car. Our mother cried easily.

  So with the nine of us sticking out of that touring car in all directions, and Patsy complaining about his position on the floor, we started out. We got as far as MacDougal’s garage and stopped. “I’ll just have him check the oil before we start,” Dad said. “Won’t take but a minute.”

  Three hours later we were still there. At least the car was. Floyd MacDougal had found one or two other little things wrong. Like a hole in the radiator hose, and a blister on one of the tires as big as a baseball, and a maladjustment of the manifold. “She’ll be fit as a fiddle in a minute or two,” he told Dad happily. “You can stay here in the garage or do whatever you want.”

  Although Mother did her best to prevent it, Hub and I left the garage, took up with some evil companions who were going gopher snaring, and got our Sunday suits all wet and muddy. Patsy refused to leave the car and just sat on the back seat and barked, and that sound, along with Floyd MacDougal banging away with his hammer was enough, as Mother said, “to drive a body mad”.

  I won’t pretend that I can remember the details of the trip, but some episodes were so bizarre as to become part of Braithwaite folklore, and are told even to this day at one of our “family reunions”–which means any occasion when any group of the brothers and sisters numbering three or more are together, and have got into the sauce. Since family yarns of this nature tend to become amplified over the years, I can’t swear to the exact and complete truth of the episodes – as I can to the rest of this book – but they are nevertheless worth repeating.

  In the first place, after the old Russell finally dragged itself and us out of the garage and onto the hot, dusty road, I was hungry. Even at this early age my eating feats were memorable, it being pretty authentically recorded that on one Easter morning I single-handedly ate a dozen hard-boiled eggs, and one Shrove Tuesday, when the Wesley Church had a pancake supper for fifty cents a head, and all the young fry vied with each other, I ate forty-three-and-a-half pancakes. The good ladies of the Ladies’ Aid, who were in charge of the caper, were laying bets on the side as to how long it would be before I had to go to the washroom and throw up. Nobody won.

  The only other contest I ever won as a child also had to do with eating. At the Sunday School picnics they used to have races for all the boys and girls of different ages. And the prizes were wonderful–dollar watches, and jackknives, and water-pistols, and things like that. Once they even gave away a kite for first place, and oh Lord! how I wanted that kite. I wanted any of the prizes, in fact, and entered every race. I ran my chubby little heart out, but never managed better than fourth.

  Then, at one picnic, some superintendent–perhaps inspired by my continued vain attempts to run faster than anybody–decided to have an eating race. The idea was to eat a dry soda biscuit and then whistle, eat another and whistle again, until six crackers had been consumed. This is much harder to do than to say.

  But just as the other kids had the advantage over me in longer limbs and trimmer physiques, I had the advantage over them in eating. I was, you might say, in constant training. Naturally I won the race hands down, and joyfully looked forward to my prize. Now, by gawd, it was my turn. The Sunday School teacher approached me with a wide smile on his face, and one hand held behind his back. Then he made a little speech about my prowess as an eater, and even got a few laughs from the others. I didn’t care, just so long as he produced that watch or knife or flashlight, or maybe even kite. Then, with a flourish, he brought his hand from behind his back and in it was–the remains of the box of crackers!

  Where was I? Oh yes, in the Russell and hungry. Mother had put together an enormous lunch, big enough, as she said, “to feed a threshing gang”. It consisted of several loaves of sandwiches, a dozen or so of her famous home-made buns, pounds of cookies, and a couple of cakes. Well, it might have fed a threshing gang, but it didn’t go far with our bunch. I don’t know what it is with kids in a car, but if there’s food there, and they know it, they suffer the tortures of the damned until it’s all consumed. Mother’s lunch lasted us to Lanigan, a town about twenty-three miles due north of Nokomis. Then we were all hungry again.

  Dad ignored our anguished cries and sped right through Lanigan and on to Humboldt. He knew both of these towns well, since his legal business had taken him there more than once, and the roads were familiar. But north of Humboldt we went out into unknown country with many turns in the road. And each time Dad turned a corner Mother would say quietly, “Why did you turn there, Warner?”

  Dad never knew exactly why he had turned there, of course, and so he wouldn’t say anything. But the rest of us would. We would begin a full-scale debate on which way we should have turned. Soon it would develop into a shouting match, whereupon my oldest brother, Morley, would threaten to “reach out”, and the back seat would subside somewhat.

  To make matters worse we were leaving the mixed grass region and entering into the aspen grove region. Or, to say it more simply, we were leaving the bald-headed prairie, where there were practically no trees, and entering the semi-bush country, where small groves of aspens break up the monotony of grass. This makes for good farm country, but it’s harder for touring. The roads can no longer go straight, but are forced to occasionally wind around groves of trees and sloughs. It’s easier to get lost.

  Whenever we found ourselves completely lost, Dad would turn into a farmyard to ask directions, and we’d all pile out of the car to get a drink of water at the pump and stretch our legs. There was always a farm collie for Patsy to get into a barking match with, and in the midst of this racket, and with his kids shouting and running about all round him, Dad would try to get directions from a farmer who couldn’t speak English.

  Much of this area of Saskatchewan was settled by Ukrainians, Poles, Swedes, and other Europeans who had just recently come to Canada, and still couldn’t speak the language. So Dad would stand there while the farmer, gesticulating wildly, would try to explain, “Go dees way … and dat way … den dees way again.…” Finally Dad would give up and get us all back into the car.

  “I think I’ve got it now, Mother,” he’d say, backing the car through a flock of fleeing hens and, accompanied by the yapping collie, we would go bumping down the rutted driveway. Within ten miles we’d be lost again.

  Then we had the storm. Midsummer is tornado time, and the one we had on the twenty-seventh of June was a lulu. It was a hot day, and we’d put the top up to shade us from the sun. But that made it worse. Every time we stopped, the hot sultry air pressed down on the top of the car, and with no breeze at all to relieve it the nine Braithwaites were like birds in an oven.

  Suddenly Phyllis yelled, “Look at that cloud. It’s coming right at us!” And sure enough, rolling down the road in front was an enormous thunderhead. Then Hub yelled, “There’s another one coming up behind!”

  “Don’t be silly,” Doris told him “Clouds can’t travel in opposite directions.” But these two were. Tearing towards each other at a terrific speed. Then we heard the roar–like a hundred freight trains passing each other at full steam. The earth shook with it. Lightning split the clouds open, and a roar of thunder was added to the wind’s roar.

  Dad pulled quickly to the side of the road and stopped the car. “Hang on, everybody, it’s a tornado for sure. There’s not even time to put up the side-curtains.” He’d no sooner said it than the lightning and thunder came again, and the roar was deafening. We happened to be right beside a farm, and to the left we could see the soil fr
om the summer fallow twisting into air as though drawn up by a huge vacuum cleaner. Then, added to the roar of the thunder and wind and the sudden pelting rain on the canvas top, came the sickening sound of tearing timber. Before our eyes, the whole top of the big red barn took to the air.

  Nobody in our car cried out. We just sat there and stared. The great funnel of dust and debris passed on, the roar was gone. Then suddenly somebody shouted, “My God … they’re naked!” and pointed towards the farmyard. And there, running around in helpless confusion, were half a dozen hens, each with scarcely a feather left on its body. The wind had plucked them as clean as any farm-wife ever could.

  That was the storm. It cut a swath about ten yards wide across the field and through the farmyard. It did no damage whatsoever to the farm-house or granary or sheds or chicken-coop. Just the barn was in its path, and only the roof went with it. And where it went, nobody could see, for there was no trace of it anywhere. If that tornado had cut its swath a hundred yards to the left of where it actually passed, the old Russell and all its contents might well have disappeared as completely.

  Only one more incident in that trip is worthy of report, and that was the crossing of the South Saskatchewan River, near St. Louis. None of us children had ever seen a river in our lives and, although Dad had described the Ontario Thames to us, where he used to fish as a boy, we had no real idea what a big river was like. And Dad had explained to us about the ferry that would carry us across the river.

  “It’s something like a big boat that we can drive the car right onto,” he said.

  “What makes it go across the river?” somebody asked.

  “The current pushes on one side and a strong cable keeps the ferry from going downstream, so that it is carried across.”

  The only currants I was acquainted with were the red-currant bushes that grew near the fence back in Nokomis, and I can remember sitting there in the car pondering how they could ever carry a boat across a river. I had trouble with words like that. Once I was walking down the street with Dad in Nokomis, and he was talking to another man and he said, “Well, we’ll have to register him right away.” The word “register” caught my ear, and as I hurried along hanging onto Dad’s big hand I worried over this. To me, “register” meant the hot air register at home, and I had a horrible mental picture of the two of them stuffing this other poor unfortunate down a register.

  As we drew closer to the river there was less open prairie and more bush, and then we were there. Nothing anybody could have told us would have prepared us for that sight. There she was, the great South Saskatchewan, away below us at the bottom of a long, steep bank, winding like a great grey snake. And there, tugging at its cable on the shore, was the ferry, looking very small and fragile.

  The road down to it was terribly narrow, terribly steep, terribly winding and terribly rough. In places it had been bolstered up with logs. Dad put the Russell into low and down we crept, growling like a complaining hippo. For once the Braithwaite family was silent. Slowly the Russell bumped and swayed and jerked its way to the water’s edge and out onto the shaky ramp that led onto the ferry. At the other end of the ferry a logging chain was stretched from one side to the other, to prevent automobiles, we hoped, from running into the fast-flowing, muddy stream.

  The ferryman, who was brown and tattooed and wore a tattered yachting cap, turned a big wheel at the side of the ferry, steering it into the current, and with a creaking of pulleys the rickety craft began to move out into the stream. Then the river was all around us. We were afloat. Nothing under us but water. The bank of the river we’d left was getting farther away and the bank on the other side was still far distant. At that moment I felt sure that what I wanted to do with my life was run away to sea.

  Finally the ferry pulled into the other shore, the chain was lowered, the family loaded, and the Russell bumped its way ashore. And now it was put to its sternest test yet – the challenge of climbing the steep, rough, winding road up the river bank.

  Climbing hills was considered in those days to be the ultimate test of an automobile. A livery man at Watrous Lake, by the name of Telfer, had gained considerable fame because his Oldsmobile was reputed to be able to climb the steep bank from the lake up to the flat prairie in high gear. Nobody had actually seen him do it except the old man who cleaned up the public bathhouses. I remember as a five-year-old standing with some other kids while the old man gazed up the long hill, took his pipe from between his gums, and said with awe, “Yes, sir, Telfer can climb that ’ill in ‘igh!”

  But the Russell couldn’t climb the river bank in high. Or in intermediate. Or in low. It simply couldn’t climb it at all. It puffed and wheezed and groaned and literally blew its top. The radiator cap blew off and a jet of steam shot eight feet into the air. And then we had to go down to the river, fill a bottle with muddy water, and take it back to fill the radiator. After which we all got out and pushed, and the Russell strove mightily again, but there was no way it could get up that hill under its own power. We were stuck now for good. Doris said that we’d never get away from that dreary place, and that in years to come they’d find our skeletons, and tell all over the prairies how an entire family had perished on the river bank.

  Hub and I and Phyllis didn’t take it quite so badly. We located a great patch of Saskatoon berries and, although they weren’t yet fully ripe, stuffed ourselves with them. Then we went down to the shore and got our feet wet in the river and Hub, trying to step on a log, fell right in.

  Finally the ferry came back. This time its sole cargo was a farmer pulling a load of poplar poles with a team of oxen. Big brindle brutes, they were, the first we’d ever seen. Dad approached the man about pulling the Russell up the hill, but he wasn’t interested. But Morley, who had been standing nearby, stated to Dad in a loud voice that he bet those stupid oxen couldn’t pull the car anyway. That did it. The team was unhitched from the poplar poles and attached to the front end of the Russell. Then, with the car in low gear and the oxen straining and the rest of us pushing, we finally got the car moving. It was a frightful indignity for the Russell, however, and I don’t think the old girl ever really got over it. Being hauled out of mud-holes by horses was bad enough. But oxen, really!

  The rest of the trip to Prince Albert, a distance of about twenty miles, was uneventful. We were in bush country now – poplar, birch, some tamarack, and patches of spruce. About eight-thirty in the evening we reached the beautiful little city of about 5,000 people, perched on the north bank of the North Saskatchewan River, and a new life began for us all.

  7 Prince Albert—I Love You

  Many of the people who study such matters hold the view that the impressions one receives between the ages of six and twelve are the most vivid and lasting of all. That the environment of those years becomes your spiritual home for life.

  I believe it.

  Those were the years I spent in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and Prince Albert country became a part of me. Trees–long shadows cast by pine and spruce. The dry, harsh sound of the cicadas in the hot woods. Crunchy ground beneath. Sloughs, where blackbirds linger and hell-divers disappear and come up again a hundred feet away. Croaking frogs, glass jars with strings of jelly eggs waiting to hatch. Bare feet in the nettles. Dogs, rabbits, timid little snakes, bullies. Pinching cold of the north wind. Swooshing down icy hills on bob-sleds, with the wind ringing in your ears and the snow closing your eyes. That’s Prince Albert and boyhood.

  The place began as a trading post on the North Saskatchewan River, where intrepid Scottish and English and Irish empire-builders traded gaudy trinkets for glossy beaver pelts. And loaded these into voyageur canoes to be carried down-river, through the rapids, into Lake Winnipeg and thence, by way of the Hayes or Nelson rivers, to York Factory where they were loaded on sailing vessels and taken to London, to make top hats for dandies.

  Some of them made the longer canoe trip across Lake Winnipeg, through the Lake of the Woods-Rainy River route to the Great Lakes, and the
n down the Ottawa to Montreal. A canoe trip that took months.

  It was those same intrepid Britishers who so generously sowed their seed in the Indian maidens to produce a new race of frontiersmen called the Métis. And it was the Métis, skilled rivermen, guides, Red River Cart drivers, buffalo hunters, who were the first permanent settlers in the Prince Albert area. Many of their descendants were among Prince Albert’s most prominent citizens.

  Following the usual pattern, the traders were followed by the missionaries. In this case, James Nisbit from Scotland, who had been a Sunday School teacher at age thirteen and a Sunday School superintendent at age sixteen. In 1866 he, with his wife and child and some friends, trekked across the plains from Winnipeg. It took them forty days to make the trip, and there were no motels or hotels, or even towns, in which to spend the night. That was even tougher travelling than we did in the old Russell.

  Dad moved his family to Prince Albert full of high hopes. He had a partnership with an old Ontario school chum, S. J. Branion, the leading lawyer in the city, which was also the judicial centre for a very wide area. As befits a leading citizen, he bought–and took a mortgage on–the second largest house in town, which stood at the top of the Second Avenue hill at the corner of 21st Street. And when our bunch hit that house we nearly wrecked it there and then.

  I’ve moved into many different houses in my time, but the memory that sticks in my mind most vividly is that of our first night in the Prince Albert house. A number of circumstances accounted for our actions, I guess. First of all, we’d never seen a house like it. The Nokomis house had no running water, no electricity, no flush toilet, no porcelain bathtub, no hot-water radiators. The house in Prince Albert had all these things.