Wolf Willow, Page 35

  The local pride so noticeable in the early files of the Leader, the peppy competitiveness of the Board of Trade, has evidently grown tired. There is no longer a town baseball or rugby team to play for the town’s honor against Shaunavon. Now and then one is organized, but shortly dwindles away for lack of interest. Even the swimming hole, which on a spring Sunday in my time used to have the whole town and a lot of outside visitors either in it or lined up on the cutbank watching, is obviously used now almost exclusively by the children. A Tattooed Man could make his appearance, as he once did to us, without drawing a crowd or a gasp. It wouldn’t be worth his while to show up, now, but in my time he was a sensation. He appeared one Sunday morning coming down to the footbridge. His arms and legs were covered with designs, his body was ringed with blue and white stripes. Some of the ladies on the cutbank grew terrified that he was all tattoo, that he wore only ink. While the whole town watched with hung jaw he lowered himself from the footbridge into water shoulder deep and launched into a dignified, froglike breast-stroke down around the bend under the editor’s high board. Like people on a ship moving to the opposite rail to watch some passing sight, the crowd moved up along the cutbank; you could almost feel the ground list under their weight. Then it listed back, and here came the Tattooed Man breast-stroking upriver again. The jitter of splashing and diving boys parted to let him through. As he mounted the footbridge men craned and ladies averted their eyes. Disappointingly, his blue and white stripes turned out to be cotton. When he walked up the dugway to the bath-house, about forty of us followed and watched him dress: we wanted to see how far his pictures extended. We saw, but he was not communicative otherwise. He covered his art work and stepped to the door, and only then pulled down the whole right side of his face in a wink. We adored him; he had us behind him as the Pied Piper had rats, and when he climbed into his buggy tied in front of the hotel, and smacked the lines on the team’s rumps and started off toward South Fork, we watched him out of sight as we might have watched the departing Quetzalcoatl.

  He was a nine-day wonder, as notable as the albino traveling salesman who sported among us and palpitated girlish hearts tor a day. We followed him into the bath house too—we wanted to see if his pubic hair was as white as the hair on his head. It was.

  Alas, these marvels now would go unnoticed. There is nobody but a rabble of children at the river. Aquatic sports, I learn, are no longer organized. Nobody now tries to set town records down the stretch between footbridge and high board, nobody tries to walk a greased pole braced out from the cutbank. There is an annual school sports day, but it is an outing rather than an athletic event, and nobody trains or practices for it.

  The wheat-mining economy might explain this summer apathy, for many of the boys and young men are off living in tents or trailers or farm shacks during the crop season. But in winter it is not much different, I hear. Neither the hockey team nor the basketball team enlists much enthusiasm, and neither has a coach. Only one sport does get people out, and that is the one that no one would ever have predicted would have a future: curling.

  I remember the first curling ever attempted in Whitemud. Some Scotchmen flooded a shed next to the livery stable and undertook to teach the town a real game. The rink was forty feet shorter than regulation, but the reception for some reason was enthusiastic, and curling did not dwindle like golf, tennis, baseball, rugby, even hockey. It grew. By now Whitemud has rinks with waiting rooms and twenty sheets, it has men‘s, women’s, and students’ curling clubs, it has club competitions and bonspiels from New Year to the spring thaw. And why that should be—why that odd game, a cross between bocci ball and sweeping the front porch, should catch on when every other imported game curled up and died—is one of the mysteries. It is more expensive in its facilities and equipment than most sports, it has none of the vigorous exercise or the exhilaration of body contact that a tough frontier town should like. I can understand why this softer generation prefers indoor rinks to our old system of shoveling off a stretch of bumpy river ice and skating with a big bonfire to warm up by. But I should have expected the youth of Whitemud to be whipping a puck up and down those indoor rinks, instead of sliding a chunk of tombstone with a handle on it down the ice. while someone else performs witchcraft with a big besom to steer or hurry or impede it. Recruiters for the professional hockey leagues needn’t come to Whitemud.

  From all the obvious symptoms, it would be as hard to find any cultural stir in my old town as to find any vigorous games. Dead, dead, dead, says the mind contemplating the town’s life. Dead in the poolroom, dead in the licensed premises of the hotel, where the Mountie comes in periodically to check up and to count empties, dead in the lace-curtained parlors, slack-jawed in feed store and elevator, vacant-faced before the flickering screen of the Pastime Theater, where boys and girls still tend, as in my time, to sit on different sides of the house, and where the aisle seats on both sides are double width for patrons especially broad in the beam. A dull, dull little town where nothing passes but the wind, a town so starved for excitement that a man’s misfortune in losing his false teeth in the river can enliven a whole winter’s poolroom and hardware-store conversation.

  There is still no library in Whitemud, though now any six families may form a reading society and borrow as many as thirty books at a time from the Provincial Library in Saskatoon. That is an acceptable way of making books serve the largest possible public. The trouble is, the initiative comes from Saskatoon, a university town, and not from Whitemud. Moreover, there are few reading circles, and within the reading circles few young people. By and large, these borrow cultural collapse from the United States, and read comic books.

  Books a bare minimum. Music about the same. And here, as in so many other intellectual and cultural matters, the town can show less than it could have when it was two years old. In 1915 there were several good garden-variety musicians who could conduct the band and orchestra and give lessons to boys and girls whose mothers thought them worth a cultural investment. (My mother was one. One year she inherited a thousand dollars from an Iowa uncle and promptly, despite the fact that we were hard up, invested more than half of it in a mail-order piano. For perhaps half a year my brother and I made half-hearted assaults on the mysteries of music, but in the end the only achievement was my mother’s. She eavesdropped on our lessons, learned them much faster than we did, and eventually worked out perhaps a dozen popular songs, a bar at a time, from the sheet music. In the deprived little hole that Whitemud was in 1917, aspiration could burn as hot as in Florence or Siena. I wonder if it could now.)

  In those early years, when the town gave a dance it could choose among three local dance orchestras. Now, Corky Jones tells me, it has not even one. Neither does it have a band, and the occasional child who really wants to study music has difficulty finding teachers or knowing how to proceed. Among the several distinctions of Corky Jones was a certain craftsmanly knack which for a time he indulged by making violins. He made several, one of which his brother used to play over the BBC Third Program, and another of which a métis fiddler used to borrow with enthusiasm. But Corky couldn’t sell any of his violins in Whitemud, and so he finally gave the last two to two boys, brothers, who were anxious to learn to play. They did learn, a little, and as soon as they could make bearable noises they put the homemade fiddles aside and invested in shiny store-bought ones from T. Eaton.

  Someone always brings the life of the mind into towns like Whitemud; the dream of the founders is often the dream of the full life as well as the dream of material success. But it can seldom maintain itself—certainly cannot without some sort of academy or college to keep renewing it. Without an academy, by a sort of cultural Gresham’s Law, lower tastes drive out higher. During the pioneering years there are nearly always people of intelligence and education whose skills are at the service of the community, and whose eyes are sharp for the talented young to whom skill might be passed on. In early Whitemud, any children who could sing, recite, or play an instrume
nt were dragooned for town entertainments, and so were the people who taught them, for such a town’s amusements have to be homemade, and such a town’s parents watch their children hopefully and with pride for manifestations of genius. As a town, Whitemud responded to what it thought culture with a hungry and unanimous Yea. At first.

  I remember when the Chautauqua came. Its first manifestation was a lady named Miss Magowan who came through in May, 1917, and did a hard sell on the Board of Trade. Having agreed to guarantee a three-day Chautauqua in the fall, the Board felt its ambition quickened, and it in turn did a hard sell on the town. It was asserted that no parent dared deny his child this educational treat. The four rooms of school competed to see which could first reach a hundred per-cent sale of season tickets. Bull-headed parents without cultural impulses were put under such pressure that few could resist. The whole town was sold, and any farmer who came in for supplies was lucky to get away without season tickets for his whole family.

  Then one fall morning a passion of excitement. A special car was shunted onto the siding by the elevators. Roustabouts swarmed out, a main tent went up, three smaller ones joined it, and by afternoon we were there, making agonized choices, for two or three things went on at once, and we couldn’t see them all. There was a Harry Lauder imitator, a basso, a singing couple, an orchestra, a band, a theatrical troupe, a whole faculty of lecturers. The musical highlight was generally held to be the basso, who sang “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep” so far down that he vibrated the folding chairs, and whose success so smote the local basso with envy that it was three weeks before the ladies could persuade him to come back to singing in the choir. The dramatic pièce de résistance was The School for Scandal, the first play that many of us had ever seen. The heavier intellectuals enjoyed the lectures, before which we children sat impressed and fidgety. I remember that one was concerned with How We See Colors, but I don’t remember what the man said.

  All in all, a monumental three days. We were all excused from school for the duration of Chautauqua, and we all agreed that not even the Cooper Brothers Circus was any better, and certainly not half so educational.

  As I poke around through Whitemud, following the old ditchbank paths under the unfamiliar shade of big cottonwoods, and circling old Millionaire Row and curving with the river down along to Poverty Flat and so back up to the Catholic church at the end of Main Street, I wonder if any such cultural unanimity could be generated in this established town. The old-timers have lost any expectations they may once have had that Whitemud would become a sun-kissed prairie Athens, and the second generation, which is mine, is ninety per cent dispersed, and releasing whatever intellectual and cultural potential it has into other communities. The stickers who really built the town, and wore out their lives in the process, are still there, reinforced by other stick. ers who have moved in from prairie farms. The town now has a high school, and the level of education of those who grow up and stay there is undoubtedly higher than in my time. But only a limited number can make a living in Whitemud, and those who go hunting wider opportunities are nearly always the brightest and most energetic, as well as the most restless. Time acts like a great slow cream separator.

  There is neither training nor a dependable audience for any of the arts in Whitemud, no way for any sort of intellectual or artist to make a living or even have adequate expression as an amateur. Not yet; maybe never. For unless a town like this acquires an academy or college—which by definition would itself have to be second or third rate—it is certain to remain a stagnant peasant society, a seedbed whose transplants will have to mature elsewhere. Now that the brief improbable dream has faded, what is left is a dead little country town which, thanks to radio, mail-order catalogs, and the other forms of communication, has not even the hope of an eventual Balkan color. Its distinguished sons, if any, will be able to contribute to their home town only an occasional visit and a free performance-to a full house, for pride in its sons remains even though the town cannot keep or use the boys it is proud of.

  These are not particularly happy conclusions for me, for I like this town; it lives too compellingly in me for me to be indifferent to its subsidence into apathy. And that is why I feel a real and personal pleasure when I think I detect a few signs of native growth. The continued experimentation with methods of dry farming and the continued inventiveness with gang machinery and the continued development of harder and quicker-maturing varieties of wheat do not center in the Whitemuds of the Plains region, but they affect the Whitemuds and may be fed from them. Likewise the evolving economic and political structure. Beginning with an individualism that on occasion was so complete as to be irritable, settlers soon enough found the semi-arid Plains a place where no man and no family could do it alone. I have seen those who tried—red-necked Swedes and Norwegians half crazy with hard work and loneliness who came riding or driving down to our shack on the prairie and could hardly bring themselves to leave again, who left with tears in their eyes for the glorious companionship of a day or an afternoon and a farm wife who could give them butter or a few eggs, and who, when their English failed, could talk with them in Norwegian. That singlehanded assault on the wilderness might have worked in wooded country with plenty of water and game; nothing even approaching it should have been attempted on the Plains. So what began in individual effort remained—if it remained—to cooperate. The progress from the formation of the Grain Growers Association in 1915, and the gradual evolution of cooperative elevators, buying clubs, and banks, went its inevitable course to political flowering in a society militantly cooperative, even socialist. It is so because the country tolerated settlement on no other terms.

  That is adaptation, human and institutional flexibility in the face of inflexible conditions, and is as truly a part of a forming native culture as the mobility of the suitcase farmers. There are a few other signs of life, too, and it surprises me, when I look into them, how many of them owe something to Corky Jones. If a community really is like a pile of kindling, inert and heatless until some accident of history or some great man touches it with fire, then Corky, in his humble and unpretentious way, is a sort of light-bringer. In more heroic dimensions and more heroic times, lives such as his get transformed into myth. He is no Prometheus, surely, and no Orpheus bringing music out of the Rhodopaeian mountains. But Saskatchewan gave him a Good Citizen award in 1955, the jubilee year, and it had cause.

  He is nobody important—an old-timer who lives in a little three-room house near the center of town and probably never made two hundred dollars a month in his life. But he has had all his life the best of all possible attitudes in a pioneer: he has never scorned learning, he has always been willing to try importing it, but when the imported varieties don’t seem to take root he has hunted for native varieties that will.

  He was the son of a doctor on the Isle of Wight. His father took care of Queen Victoria when she visited the island, and Corky’s boyhood advantages were somewhat greater than those of the average Whitemud pioneer. But he abandoned them at eighteen and sailed for Canada and arrived in Maple Creek wanting to be a cowboy, in 1898. He was a cowboy, according to his wish, working for Dan Pollack, for Fisher and Martin, and finally for himself, with a ranch on Chimney Coulee almost exactly where Cowie’s cabins and the métis village and the first Mountie post had stood. When the homesteading of the bench lands brought the application of fence-in herd law, he gave up his ranch to run a livery stable in Whitemud, and when the automobile began to shade out the livery-stable business he and a partner operated the town’s first electric plant.

  As one of the oldest citizens, antedating the town itself by sixteen years, Corky knows more about what has happened in the valley than anyone else around. What is more, he cares what has happened, and not many do. He is a mild and thinking man, with a built-in, patient curiosity. By a lucky accident his ranch on Chimney Coulee happened to contain all the archaeological relics in those parts. Seeing the old foundations under the grass, Corky measured them. He foun
d a cemetery with six graves. Inquiring around, he located an old métis named Jean Laframboise who had lived there when a young man, and had known Fathers Lestanc and de Corby. (De Corby is less well documented than Lestane—Corky’s is the only reference I have found to him.) Laframboise showed Corky how the métis built their villages in long shed-like buildings fourteen feet wide and thirty to forty long, partitioned into family cells every ten or twelve feet, with a stone fireplace and chimney in each partition. So Corky knew, when the rest of the town was content to guess, what had made those lines of chimneys along the coulee. He had a knack for knowing. Living his life, he picked up things. When Indians held powwows nearby, he listened in, talked with them, went down after they left to examine the blue and yellow streamers and the packages and plugs of tobacco they had tied to the chokecherry bushes for the departed. He dug up and read Cowie’s Company of Adventurers, he pumped passing Cree for stories of fights and massacres, he knew the whole history of the Mounties in the region.

  None of his history-gathering had any particular purpose—he just wanted to know. He made violins to see if he could; he learned to play them a little because that seemed the natural next step. And when, riding through the hills, he saw petrified bones of great beasts weathered out of the soft rock, he began to collect them, just as for a long time he had collected arrowheads and medicine bags and spears and warclubs and other Indian artifacts. Having the bones around, he could not be content until he got books and learned what they might be. Whatever the defects of his education, he knew the indispensable first step: how to go about learning. Today his collection of dinosaur and Tertiary mammal bones fills the whole basement of the school. It was created entirely by Corky, but it contains several unique specimens and it enlists the respectful attention of every trained paleontologist who comes to dig in the rich fossil beds of the Cypress Hills.