Wolf Willow, Page 31

  If is a big word in the history of a town like Whitemud. If it had happened to have its beginnings in a wet cycle rather than at the beginning of a cycle of drouth. If the war had not persuaded people, for mixed patriotism and profit, to plow up a lot of prairie that was either too dry or too far from a railroad to be decent wheat land. If cattlemen in and around the Cypress Hills had been able in some way to prevent the breaking up of the bench hay lands on which most of them depended for winter feed. If Pop Martin hadn’t quarreled with the CPR. If a series of natural catastrophes, including the flu epidemic and the spring flood of 1918, had not hit the town just when it could least stand discouragement. But there was a drouth, there was a war, the farmers did plow up too much submarginal land, the cattlemen did get caught without enough hay, Martin did have his row with the CPR, there were natural catastrophes. Year by year, through 1916, 1917, 1918, the Leader pumped harder at its leaky bellows, and one by one the resources on which it proposed to build the future went flat. As children, we knew the shrinking prospects of Whitemud not as they were, but for a certain salvage that boys could take out of even the resources on which their fathers went broke.

  Our oil was a dry hole, but its abandoned derrick made a splendid trapeze on which we could perform acrobatics to impress girls who pretended always to be unimpressed; and for a while, during a fall or two when someone cut the hay in the field down below, we had a lovely Freudian play-cycle going, alternating between the exposed and rigid derrick and dark tunnels under the haystack.

  The whitemud that was much in the town’s consciousness as a source of riches did not, during our years there, get dug very much. A few cars did go out to Medicine Hat, but almost as much came home with us by the pailful, to be wet to the right consistency and rolled between the palms and baked in the oven to make marbles. They were not very good marbles, being irregular and easily broken, but they had the great advantage of being in inexhaustible supply. A boy could be cleaned out at afternoon recess and be in business again by morning.

  From the fading cattle industry we derived much in the way of attitude and pose, but little in the way of economics beyond the dollar a month we could earn by driving the town herd to pasture in the morning and bringing it back at night. The cattle trains from ranches west of us in the Hills provided a game of collecting boxcar numbers and the names of exotic railroads, but from the immediate area of Whitemud, within little more than a year of our arrival, the cattle were gone because the range was gone into homesteads.

  From wheat we got certain fringe benefits. When we could sneak by the elevator man, the elevator bins were fine places to play in, a good deal like enormous clean sandpiles. We were constantly being warned about the danger of drowning in the grain, but we discovered early that only flax could really suck you down. In wheat we deliberately started avalanches and buried one another. We found also that wheat made a good substitute for gum if it was chewed hard until it formed a glutinous, sweet-tasting mass. Wheat for that purpose was always available, even when the year was bad and even when the elevator man was vigilant, for under the spouts by the tracks there was always a cone of spilled grain. We never went by the elevators without grabbing up a handful. Probably we lengthened our lives with the vitamins we unknowingly absorbed, and not even the word that it was healthful would have stopped our chewing it.

  Nothing, either, could have prevented us from hunting, fishing, trapping, and generally fulfilling ourselves as predators. I think there was not a boy who did not have a .22 by the time he was ten or eleven; my brother at ten was shooting a twelve-gauge shotgun, picking off cottontails and snowshoe hares, an occasional duck, an even more occasional grouse, which he sold to a lath-like woman who was anemic and had been told to eat wild game. Though she was a market, she gave us the creeps; we had seen her break a raw egg into a glass of beer and drink it down.

  Without anemia to justify us, we had our own savage feasts out in the willows, dining upon sage hen or rabbit broiled on sticks over the fire. When larger game failed we netted bull-frogs, or caught them on a fish hook baited with a scrap of red flannel, and hacked off their legs and roasted them. We stole old frying pans and cached them in our hideouts in the brush so that when occasion offered we could fry up a panful of chubs or a big intricately boned sucker. I remember one whole day below Martin’s dam when we waded the shallow clear water hunting for the tracks of clams in the sandy bottom; and the saltless, emetic chowder we cooked up and bravely ate; and the distorted little knob of a pearl that one of us found in a clam smashed open on a rock, and the instant dream of fortune it aroused, and the decimation that resulted as we employed against the clams the mass destruction that our fathers and grandfathers had employed against placer gravels and buffalo and virgin timber and free land. We had it in us to be as blindly destructive as any in the history of North America. Only our opportunities were limited.

  Occasionally a minor bonanza came our way. During the war the price of furs rose until a good slough muskrat brought three dollars in the hardware store, and even more if sent direct to one of the fur houses in St. Louis. The river rats were smaller and less valuable, but more within our reach, and the traps that in summer we used for gophers would serve for muskrats quite as well. From the time I was nine until I was nearly twelve, my brother and I trapped the river with a good deal of persistence, and when we bundled up our take one spring I remember that we had fifteen muskrats, nine ermine, one mink, and a beaver that we had mistakenly skinned closed instead of open so that he brought us next to nothing. But he was full of holes anyway, having been shot in the water when the spring flood washed him out of wherever he lived. As a miser remembers his hoard I remember those dried skins inside-out on their stretchers of shaped shingle and bent red osier, and the glove-like, excruciating opulence of pushing a hand up inside the fur. The money we made trapping, my mother put carefully away for the purchase of Victory Bonds to be a nest egg for our future. They may have helped win the war, but they never lasted until our future. Some family emergency swallowed them, which was just as well. It would have been inappropriate to take anything out of that country when we left it.

  Actually, our juvenile money-making resources were about as lean as those of our parents. In summer we could make some small change, if we happened to be in town, picking saskatoons, pin-cherries, or gooseberries for home-canning housewives. Picking gooseberries at ten cents a quart, even when the berries hang on the underside of the prickly stems in heavy rows, is not a way to get rich. The meagerness of our total earning power was an analogue of the ways our fathers worked and the rewards they got, and the expedient we were frequently put to—to crawl under the plank sidewalk in front of the hotel and search among the dirt and papers and tinfoil and old spit for coins that had fallen through the cracks—was an even more wistful analogue of their dreams of getting rich quick and easy.

  It is strange, after nearly half a century, to read the files of the Whitemud Leader and find in them scraps of my own life as unexpected as those I sometimes found on the dump. I discover, for instance, that my father was for a while a deputy sheruf—a sure sign that he must have been desperate, for he was naturally unsympathetic to the law. His spell of serving the enemy may explain two or three vaguely remembered times when he took me with him on all-day trips to the North Bench. I am sure he did not take me for my company, for he was never very fond of it. Probably he took me to open gates. Our mare Daisy was a hysteric (he had won her in a poker game, too), and could spook at a squeaky gate and pull old phlegmatic gelding Dick into a runaway in the twinkling of an eye. He was generally asleep when she spooked, and anything that happened suddenly to upset his slumbers unsettled his mind. Sometimes he fell asleep walking, and happening to break wind while plodding along, awoke wall-eyed and plunging as if someone had set off a firecracker under his tail.

  I discover too that when Joe Knight’s hotel burned down in 1916, it had in its basement seven hundred bushels of potatoes that belonged to us. That helps to expl
ain another stretch of hard times, harder than any we ever had, when Christmas dinner was bacon and potatoes and canned-saskatoon pie, and my brother and I fell silent and ashamed when on Christmas morning other kids came around to show off their presents. We had each got a pencil box and a pair of home-knit stockings and homemade shirts made out of the lining of an old coat of my mother’s. Lacking any other resources at all, she had sat up nights to make them, and sacrificed a coat she still wore. But we would never wear the shirts —they looked homemade. During that bad spell “Jew” Meyer stopped our credit, and for a while we literally had difficulty getting enough to eat. We blamed his Jewishness, naturally. After that miserable Christmas my father swore, and kept his oath, that Meyer would be the last of his creditors to get paid. As soon as he had recouped a little by helping to skin the well-heeled retired rancher in the hotel’s poker game, he went out of his way to pay off everybody but Meyer. Him he let wait for over a year, and only paid him then because Meyer, who was getting out, threatened to attach our house for payment of his debt.

  Meantime the town that Pop Martin had founded went on, in spite of hard times and isolation and wartime shortages, building itself into a future that no one yet had given up on. Most of what the Leader reported in 1916, 1917, and 1918 could have been interpreted as Progress, or preparation for Progress. Even the fifty-one below, eighty-mile-an-hour blizzard of 1916, which marooned teachers and children in the schoolhouse for a day and a night and part of the next day before my father and others could beat their way in on a long string of lariats and lead us home along that lifeline with our stocking caps pulled down over our faces and our hands up the sleeves of our mackinaws—even that had the exhilarating quality of shared and successfully passed trial that helps make a village a community. The same with the influenza epidemic: at no time in Whitemud’s history was it ever so united. On Hallowe‘en, 1918, I was assisting in a project aimed at installing Hazards’ backhouse on the steps of the hospital, which was three beds in an abandoned false-front restaurant building. We were interrupted by a buckboard which drove up with a patient; within an hour, in response to somber adjurations from the druggist, we were all distributing gauze flu masks and bottles of eucalyptus oil, which was supposed to be a protection. Before another two days had passed, all four rooms of the schoolhouse were filled with beds, and everyone in town had been enlisted, either as patient or victim or helper. A tenth of the town died, besides a lot of farmers who had crowded in to be near help. The cemetery was a less lonesome place thereafter, and the bonds between the survivors were stronger.

  But Whitemud was weaker, too. The war had already taken out of the district more than a hundred of the youngest and most vigorous men; now the flu bled us from the same vein, for it seemed to kill, by preference, the biggest and strongest. By the time spring finally came, there were a good many farms abandoned, a good many families leaving for the States. Every such defection lessened the town economically and psychologically, deepened its mistrust of the future, diluted its hope. And what it did to the town it did most particularly to Pop Martin, for he had loaned a lot of homesteaders money with their land as security, and now he found, when they gave up and quit, that most of them had never proved up on their land. They had no title, not even any equity, and he had no lien; he couldn’t even claim the land and put whitefaces back on it. Having become a promoter of the New Jerusalem, he had put himself at the mercy of agencies outside of the weather. The Leader might still welcome visitors from Shaunavon with ironic courtesy, pointing out that they lived out on the bald flats far from the swimming, picnic spots, and coasting hills that the fortunate citizens of Whitemud took for granted. But Shaunavon nevertheless was the division point, and could subsist on the railroad business that came to it, and we had not even that. As one bad year succeeded the next, Whitemud’s promise, and along with it Martin’s expectations, passed with a gust and a spatter, like a summer shower that hardly settles the dust.

  Corky Jones, who is the closest thing that country has to a local historian, has a theory that those who came there with the greatest resources went broke the fastest because they were deluded into extending themselves. I am not sure that the theory is entirely dependable—certainly Martin lasted a good deal longer than many others, including ourselves. But the country broke him just as surely as it broke the dirt farmer with 320 acres, a tarpaper shack, and a borrowed team and plow—broke him a leg or an arm at a time until he didn’t have a sound bone in him. I was a witness to one of the major blows, though it took us all a while to realize how major it was.

  Just north of the school yard, beyond the basketball standards and the lumpy region where for a couple of springs we had all hoed and raked at Victory Gardens that by June were withered rectangles of dust, the river ran in a straight smooth reach against the foot of the hills. Sometimes we caught a muskrat incautiously swimming up that stretch, and gave him a warm time. Thirty or forty boys with rocks, even if they are not accurate, have an effect like shrapnel. We used to scout the water at recess, hopeful of sport. And in very early spring the cutbank there was a good place from which to watch the ice go out.

  We were all there at recess one day at the end of April, 1917. The quiet little creek that we knew in summer was swollen out of all recognition. Its coffee-colored current, streaked with dirty foam and spinning in whirlpools, scoured nearly to the lip of the cutbank; on the far bank the tips of the flooded willows sawed like buggywhips in the stream. We had heard the ice booming and cracking all morning, but after such a winter as we had had, it was reluctant to let loose. Now it began to come, the edges of big thick cakes pushing through the surface, tipping and breaking and bumping. The glint and show and cover again of the ice was like a showing of teeth.

  We went along kicking sections of undermined clay off the cutbank, and throwing rocks at things that floated by, and just before the bell the word came from somewhere that the railroad bridge was in danger of going out. Instantly recess became a holiday. We lit out westward in a streaming mob, and as we went we were joined by men and women and all the happy dogs of Whitemud. As we passed the last house, Van Dam‘s, we could see the derrick, with little black figures on it. When we eased off to a walk to get our wind we could hear the big steady sound of the river. Then from up ahead the air came at us with a sound as rich and heavy as a smoke-ring: dynamite. ’We forgot the stitches in our sides and sprinted again.

  There was still room on the derrick. We squirmed and clambered until we were wedged in angles of the timbers near the top. For a good half mile the river spread out across the willows, clear to the edge of the hills beyond Carpenters‘, and clear downriver until it merged with the lake behind Martin’s dam. I could see the Carpenter corrals all flooded, and the glitter of water coming down the big coulee behind, and the sagged and dirty snow-banks still left in the shaded hollows of the Hills, and the Hills themselves, bare and picked-looking, with a big blue-china sky back of everything.

  Down below us, right at our feet, a section crew had derailed their speeder and were busy about something. The crowd down there edged back—edged back with its feet even while it leaned forward from the waist—and I saw the arm of one of the section crew swing and the stick of dynamite arch down into the ice backed up against the pilings of the bridge. I opened my mouth to be able to take the noise, but there was only a dull pop like a firecracker, and slivers of ice flew into the air and fell again. I thought I must be deaf. The boy next to me yelled something a foot from my face and I couldn’t understand what he said. Then it dawned on me that the whole world was throbbing with sound: rush and tumble and hiss of water, crack and knock of big ice pans three feet thick and twenty square that kept coming from upstream and tilting and stacking against the bridge, and grinding higher, and toppling with their weight of tons, and occasionally squeezing sideways between the pilings and swowsh ing into open water below. Another stick of dynamite arched out and fell and popped its harmless pop and threw up its chips of ice. From the south, blo
wing across hundreds of miles of drying grassland, spring leaned against us a soft, exciting wind.

  The bridge was tilted to the right, pushed by the ice jam that was now ten or fifteen feet high on the pilings. The rails across the open comb of the ties were bowed out of line. The leaning grew while I watched, the whole bridge bent downriver, the rails contorted themselves into an S curve. Everything upriver must have broken up, because the pans and cakes were coming hard and heavy, damming the water back until the level above the bridge was several feet higher than that below, and the dirty flood squirted and flowed through and between and over the ice and the straining piles.

  Just at the water level, at the upstream meeting of ice and bridge, a piling crumpled like a wet match. The bridge leaned more, cakes mounted up the sloping timbers. And suddenly it went. One of the rails snapped free and hummed out over the tormented web of wood and steel, and the air was crystallized with its gong-sound. We felt it in the roots of our teeth. In one ponderous, rotating motion the bridge bowed and went down, and the backed-up ice and water pushed over it and buried it in a wash of yellow foam, spit it up again and floated it, poles and ties and braces in a bound-together tangle, and wrenched it loose from its roots and washed it away downriver.

  Somebody above me stepped on my fingers, I kicked the boy below me accidentally in the head. We were all scrambling and falling off the derrick, hitting ground and running, racing the crest of ice and timbers to watch it go over the dam’s smooth spillway slope. But it didn’t go over. The snaggle of timbers caught in the weir, jammed between planks and pilings, and locked itself into a barricade behind which the ice again began to build up. It kept on building up all that afternoon, and the water kept rising. I saw Pop Martin standing with a group of men, watching it and not talking, a little man in a ranch Stetson with his vest open and the wind fluttering the Bull Durham tag in the pocket, but it did not occur to me then that the danger to the dam was any different to him than to me: an excitement.