Never Sleep Three in a Bed

by Max Braithwaite

  After Boys’ Parliament was over, one of the Boys’ Club leaders asked me to take over a Trail Ranger group and I agreed. My trouble was that I agreed to things much too easily. I needed a Trail Ranger group like I needed a half-ton weight on my back. Besides my junior matric classes (and they were tough, no spares at all), I worked after school and on Saturdays as a boys’ sales organizer for the Pictorial Review magazine, I played hockey about twice a week, and I wrote and acted in skits whenever I could get the chance. It’s easy to see why I got into very little devilment; I didn’t have the time.

  But oh, that Trail Ranger group! I wake up screaming when I dream of it. Teaching kids in Sunday School or having them in groups is hell on earth. You have all the annoyance and worry of a school teacher, but no power to exert discipline. The kids obey you or don’t, as the whim takes them. They play tricks on you, badger you, con you and abuse you in any way their nasty little minds can devise.

  Besides this, I had absolutely no talent for Trail Ranger teaching. I’d been an indifferent member of the Wesley Church group in Prince Albert, and had failed to win one single badge. I’d been too busy playing tricks, badgering, conning and abusing my leader. Such is poetic justice.

  Two things stand out amidst all the other horrors of that summer. One of them happened on a pleasant June evening when I arrived home at about 8 o’clock. I’d taken a group of my reluctant magazine salesmen out on a “mop up”. That is, there were some magazines left over at the end of the month and they had to be sold. This was “hard sell” in earnest. Instead of sending the kids out on their own, I’d pick out five or six of my best boys and go with them. Up and down the streets we’d go, calling at every house, until the last magazine had been sold. It was foot-wearying, nerve-wracking work.

  When I finally arrived home tired, hungry, sweaty and mad, I was alarmed to see a dozen kids sitting on our front lawn, each clutching a small bundle of wieners or marshmallows. “Hi, Max,” they shouted. “You promised to take us on a hike tonight! We waited at the church but you didn’t come. Can we go now?” What could I do? The river bank was only a block away and, after all, one can’t break one’s word to kids.

  My second frightful memory is as follows. Because of my work, I was often late arriving at the church hall Thursday evenings. The kids were always there ahead of me, putting in their time at breaking chairs, writing on the walls, jumping over tables. One cold winter night I opened the door to have my nostrils attacked by the foulest smell on earth. I couldn’t figure it. So acrid, so pungent, so terrible. There was something about it faintly familiar, but it escaped me. It filled the church hall then, and for many days and weeks to come. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find it still lingers nostalgically in the corners and under the platform.

  “What in the world is that?” I asked as soon as I got in.

  The group were all seated in a circle, quiet and attentive, a sure indication that something very wicked had been perpetrated. Nobody spoke.

  “Well, what is it?” I repeated. And then, for some reason, I added, “It smells as though somebody wet down the hot air register!”

  That did it. Faces that had been getting redder and redder through keeping such a delicious secret burst forth in mirth. I couldn’t help but join them. The humour of the situation grew so strongly on me that I completely lost control of myself. I howled with laughter. I clutched my sides and moaned with glee. I rolled on the floor helpless with giggling.

  The next Sunday morning the smell was still strong upon our meeting hall, and the place was packed with grinning boys. It was a record turnout. Ninety-eight-point-four per cent against the previous high of seventy-two-point-nine. The word had circulated through the kid grapevine, and nobody wanted to miss the fun. The superintendent never batted an eye throughout the whole proceedings, which he cut a little short, and afterwards he told me that maybe with all my other duties perhaps I should give up the Trail Ranger group. I agreed.

  16 The Man to Hire

  The best thing that happened to me when I was seventeen was that I went harvesting. And the best thing about that was that I got to know my brother Morley.

  Morley was rarely home. Oh, in Prince Albert I remember him being with us for a while in the winter, but he got back to Nokomis as soon as he could to work on a farm. In Saskatoon, he occasionally showed up in the winter and drove a delivery rig for the Hudson’s Bay Company department store, but he’d be gone again come seeding time.

  Whenever I think of a prairie wheat farmer I think of Morley, for he was as good a prototype as you’ll ever find. Religious, practical, and straight-forward, with a loud, resonant laugh, he loved to tell stories, he loved horses, and he loved the land. Everything about farming was a joy to Morley, even milking cows. Long after he stopped raising his own food he still kept a cow–just for the fun of milking her.

  Aside from all this, Morley could fart better than any man I ever knew. All the Braithwaite boys were good farters, but Morley was the best. “A farting horse will never tire; a farting man is the man to hire,” he would say, and he believed it. It was his boast, and he wasn’t given to idle boasts, that he once stopped a six-horse team by farting at them.

  I don’t know the anatomical explanation for farting, but I know that it can’t possibly do any harm to the practitioner’s health. His social standing perhaps, his love life maybe, but not his health. It can, however, contribute tremendously to sibling discord. I remember one winter in Saskatoon when Hub was working at Bob Gordon’s fruit store and eating as much fruit as he could hold. All night he released the vilest farts of all time. I was sleeping with him, and I know.

  He was playful about it, too. “Heads under cover place!” he would shout, after releasing a putrilaginous sneaker, and then he would yank the covers up over both our heads. Whereupon I would let out a pitiful scream, “Ma–Hub’s making smells again!”

  After which I’d leap out of bed, pull all the covers off, shake them violently, and throw open the window to the thirty-below-zero cold. It didn’t do any good. The vileness of those fruit-farts would seep up through the folds of the covers all night long, and haunt my every dream.

  But back to Morley and farming. As soon as a Braithwaite boy was ready for the harvesting, Morley was waiting on a farm somewhere in the Nokomis area to give us our ordeal by pitchfork. First, there was a couple of weeks of stooking, followed by pitching bundles. You earned the fabulous sum of four dollars a day, and board, and you came home hard as nails, and full of wild tales about the things you’d done and the people you’d met.

  It was a sort of coming-of-age thing, like puberty rites among the Watusi, or a belated bar-mitzva. After going harvesting you were a man. Hub went, and was reported to be “better than most grown men” in the harvest field.

  So, late in August, I packed my belongings into a cardboard suitcase, and set off for Nokomis. It meant that I would miss at least a month of Grade Twelve, but I was confident I could make up for it. Besides I needed the money so badly for clothing and books that I absolutely had to go, whether I could make up the time or not.

  I arrived in Nokomis and looked around fondly. It was the first time that I’d seen it since leaving there twelve years before. It had changed some, but the old stone house was still there. And the school we’d all dashed away from, to see our first aeroplane, looked much the same. The Chinese restaurant hadn’t changed much either, but the little building on Main Street, where Dad had his office and where I used to go for nickels, was gone.

  It’s a peculiar thing. I’ve been back to the old town many times since that spring day in 1919 when we drove out of it in the Russell and, of course, there have been many changes. But, to this day, the only picture of Nokomis that comes into my mind is the one that was impressed upon it when I was six years old. Whenever I think of the town, that memory, and that alone, is what I see. The back lanes where we played run-sheep-run in the autumn dusk, the vacant lot where we played prisoner’s base. The ditch beside the railroa
d track, called “Shunkies”, where we swam nude and showed off for the passenger trains roaring by.

  Morley met me at the station with the pick-up truck, and we drove down the dusty road between the fields of ripening grain to the farm of Wick Thompson. It was a good farm. The immense frame house was painted white, and the huge barn a bright red. Numerous well-painted granaries and other out-buildings were scattered about the yard, including a bunkhouse which was to be my home for the next month.

  There is a smell in a bunkhouse that is like none other. It’s composed of dust, dry straw (the mattresses are stuffed with it), body-odour, horse-manure from the men’s boots, horse-sweat, and another smell which I can only describe as the essence of the oh-so-dry prairie in the fall.

  There were half a dozen others sleeping in the bunkhouse, mostly transients. The other harvesters, like Cap McLaren and Bowser Jardine, were Nokomis residents who took holidays every autumn from their jobs in town so that they could work in the harvest. They loved it, and they were good. The professionals of the trade, you might say. They could handle a fork with the same skill and dexterity as a painter handles a brush. They never seemed to be working hard, but they got an incredible amount done. And they drove me almost crazy.

  “We’re going to begin cutting tomorrow morning,” Morley informed me. “You’ll go with Blooming ’Arry. He’s around here somewhere. Probably reading. He’s always reading. Anyway, I’ll call you in the morning.”

  He did. At four o’clock.

  “Rise and shine. Rise and shine!” he shouted, rattling the wooden door of the bunkhouse. “Time to get up!”

  It was pitch-dark and cold. I groped my way into my clothing and out into the frosty, damp morning, down the path towards the house where a pale yellow light was showing. Inside, the house was warm and smelled of frying pork and eggs and hot bread. Breakfast was ready.

  Morley was already at the table with a couple of others, while Mrs. Thompson and her daughter, Marion, hurried back and forth from stove to table, fetching plates of eggs and pork and fried potatoes and toast and cups of scalding hot tea.

  Hunched over his food, paying no attention to anyone, was Blooming ’Arry. He was an Englishman, and that meant he’d had a rough time on the prairies since his arrival there as a young man, forty years before. For just about the favourite sport of prairie dwellers in the Twenties–and maybe still, for all I know–was Englishman-baiting. They were fair game because they talked funny. They dropped their “h’s” or added them onto words where they didn’t belong, so that they were usually greeted by some local comedian with “ ’Ellow ’Arry, ’ave you ’eard of the ’orrible things that are ’appening?” After which, everybody would burst into loud guffaws and slap their knees, while the Englishman would grin good-naturedly, and wonder why that was so funny.

  They also had a peculiar way with “a’s”, and another good laugh was “I hawf to lawf to see the cawf go down the pawth to tyke a bawth on Sunday awfternoon.”

  I have never been in a small town or on a prairie farm where there wasn’t at least one wag who could imitate the resident Englishman to perfection.

  Blooming ’Arry–whose name was Harry Bloomington–had long since ceased to be visibly annoyed by this foolish teasing, and had closed more and more into himself. Whatever hopes and schemes he’d had when he first came to this “golden land of opportunity”, as the early brochures had described it, had long since been blighted by plain bad luck. Gradually, I pieced together his story. He’d been a gentleman’s gentleman in London, and had come to Saskatchewan on a buffalo hunting expedition in 1879, when Saskatchewan was still part of the District of Assiniboine. Seduced by the offer of free land, he left his employer, took up a homestead, and remained to fight it out with wind, drought, early frost, grasshoppers, blizzards, and loneliness. And he had lost.

  He’d put up a good fight for a while, though, building himself a sod hut, surviving off the collection and sale of buffalo bones, which he hauled thirty miles to the railway at Lumsden by ox-cart. It was rumoured that he’d once been married to a half-breed girl, and that there were children, but they had all died of smallpox around the turn of the century. Since then, Harry had been a drifter, a hired man, working wherever he happened to be needed, carrying in his little pack all his belongings. And it was one of the items in that pack that enabled me to get closer to Harry than anyone had been in years.

  On that first morning, I ate only a little breakfast, since I wasn’t very hungry. Besides, it didn’t appear appetizing. I’d never had fried potatoes for breakfast before, and the idea didn’t seem right somehow–potatoes were for dinner. “Better eat up,” Morley warned. “Lunch is a long time away.” How right he was!

  After breakfast, when a rosy glow was showing in the east, I walked with Harry, our shadows long before us, out into a field behind the barn. Wick Thompson, Cap McLaren and Morley were already in the field cutting the grain with binders. I can still see them following each other down that long, long field, each binder pulled by four horses, cutting the tall, almost ripe grain, binding it into sheaves and dumping the sheaves out in rows as they went. Our job was to follow them on foot and stand the sheaves up in stooks so that they would further ripen and withstand any rain that might come before threshing time.

  Harry didn’t bother to give me any instruction, but by watching him I soon caught on to how it was done. He walked over to the first sheaf, which was between three and four feet long, picked it up and tucked it under his right arm. Then he picked up another and bounced it up under his left arm. Then he went into a sort of squatting position, jammed the butt end of the sheaves hard into the stubble and leaned the heads together. There they stood as he piled other sheaves around them until he had a little teepee of eight or ten sheaves. Then he moved on to the next pile of sheaves, and built the next stook in line with the first, so as to make a straight row.

  It looked ridiculously simple. I picked up a sheaf with my gloved hand, grunted at its weight, got it up under my arm, picked up another and squatted to stand them up. They fell over. I picked them up again and jammed them harder into the stubble. They fell over again, sliding off each other like a couple of drunk companions. The next time I picked them up by the binder twine that bound them together and it slid off the butt end, spreading the straw about me. It took me about four more tries to get two sheaves to stand up by themselves, and to build a very ragged-looking stook that looked as though it might topple over at any moment. Beside Harry’s neat, firm stooks it looked disgraceful.

  Then and there I began that part of my education that commences outside of school. Like most high school seniors, I was insufferably arrogant and self-assured. Why an old bum like Blooming ’Arry could never teach me anything. Not very likely! What I hadn’t realized until then was that Harry was a skilled workman, and I wasn’t. Everything he did, he did well, with dexterity and speed. In the harvest field it didn’t matter a tinker’s damn how much history or literature a man knew; it was how well he could do the job in hand that counted. I was to learn this lesson many times before I went back to Saskatoon.

  There was a rhythm to the way Harry worked, I soon discovered. Every move used the amount of energy required for it and no more. He never took an unnecessary step, or moved an arm where it didn’t need to go. His squat, gnarled, lean figure functioned like a machine.

  And, like a well-oiled machine, Harry never stopped–sheaf after sheaf, stook after stook, row after row down that flat field that stretched endlessly before us. On and on he went. Since we each took the next pile of sheaves available, he never left me behind, but he surely did tire me out. When it seemed that we’d been working about six hours, when my back was aching and I was so hungry that my stomach thought my throat was cut, and the sun was riding so high that I thought it must be just about noon, I ventured to ask Harry the time. He hauled a huge turnip of a watch from the bib pocket of his overalls, peered at it and grunted, “Ten past eight.”

  “What? I thought you s
aid ten past eight.”

  “That’s what I did say.” He held the big watch up for me to see.

  “Is it right?”

  “Never been wrong in thirty years.”

  “But it seems so much later. Can’t we sit down and have a rest?”

  “We don’t get paid for sitting.”

  “But I’m as dry as a board. I’ve got to have a drink.”

  “There’ll be a jug at the end of the field. Come on, let’s get going.”

  He began again to pick up the sheaves in that precise, neat way that I had come to hate, and stand them up into those perfect stooks. Well no gawd-damned sixty-year-old Englishman was going to make a monkey out of me. So I creaked to my aching feet and went doggedly to work as everything became a blur of bending, lifting, piling. Four hours more of this before lunch. How could I stand it?

  Finally we reached the end of the field and Harry stopped long enough to dig down into the deep grass and produce a glass jug, full of yellowish water. He unscrewed the top and handed it to me. I tipped it up and took a long, long pull of the worst-tasting water on earth. The wells of southern Saskatchewan are deep, and the earth is filled with numerous salts. So the water in many places has a sulphury, salty taste which is not improved by sitting in the sun all morning, sparsely sheltered by long dry grass. Just the same, I took a good swig every time we reached the end of the field.

  “Better be careful with that,” Harry advised. “It’s physic.”

  (I found out what he meant later that afternoon when I could barely get a stook up fast enough to squat down behind it.)

  Finally, when I had given up on lunch entirely, I saw a cloud of dust coming towards us over the dry stubble field. It turned out to be the pick-up truck, driven by Marion Thompson. She wheeled up beside us, jumped out and announced, “Lunch time!” Then she produced a huge basket of food and a blanket from the back of the truck, and set them down on the stubble. She looked so nice and fresh and pretty in her skirt and sweater that all my fatigue vanished.