Grand Change Read online

  He got turned around enough to butt his feet against a gatepost somehow and the heifer swapped ends in a wild fishtail as she snubbed up, switching her tail with her head low and her eyes mean. Joe tied the rope to the post and hunched with his hands on his knees, breathing heavy. Then he grabbed a hank of grass and attempted to rid his overalls of the dusted green manure he was dragged through. Eventually he shuffled up to the cow’s rear end and caught her tail. After a few swipes, and with a sharp twist or two, he got her headed in the right direction. Suddenly, she burst forward and Joe untied the rope on the fly. Away they went, the heifer at a steady trot, Joe loose-roping with his bowed legs churning in a hop, skip and jump. They were making pretty good time until the loose rope end got tangled around Joe’s legs—whumpf!—and down he went again. There was a windrow of loose clay running along the edge of the road and Joe, refusing to let go of the rope, got dragged through it head first, until the heifer barged under the hoop of the road grader and got the rope tangled up in the shear with her head snubbed into a pile of dirt. There must have been a half-bushel of clay down Joe’s overall bib. It took quite a bit of hand flapping, leg shaking and cursing to get things cleared away. I put my guitar down and offered to help.

  “Nope,” Joe said, “she’s good right where she’s at.” He hobbled down to Young Tom’s, still flapping at his pants and cursing, and he and Tom came back with the bull.

  Wally and I went to the exhibition that year, on our own for the first time. The Yodelling Cowboy came back again with the champion fiddler. They were playing in the coliseum where they held the stock shows, vaudeville acts and whatever.

  While we waited on the train-station platform on a bright August day with a sultry breeze, a couple of truck wagons clattered into the village sleepiness and an old truck rattled through. In a field next to the station, a horse-drawn sprayer blew a fog of mist along its extending booms, its pump pistons thump-sucking regular beats among the spray-hiss and the clumps of the horses’ footfalls. The diesel engine had been in for a while by then. We didn’t pay it much attention when it came square and quiet, emitting its heat waves and diesel stink: it just wasn’t a steam engine.

  We were the only passengers on the platform and among few in the coach car. An old lady and a young boy sat across the aisle from us. The lady had a straight back and it fit snug against the hard seat. The boy’s feet dangled about a foot from the floor and he wore a sailor suit with a pork pie hat, ribbons and all. They were eating fudge from a brown paper bag. Once in a while, the lady turned her face, which was shadowed by a black straw hat, and peered at us through rimless glasses in mid-munch.

  The conductor came, swaggering with the sway of the car, and stopped to punch our tickets, the halting snaps muted by wheel rumbles and the click-clack, click-clack of the coupling joints. “Where are you young whippersnappers going?” he said, his square, low-set hat brim half hiding his bemused look. We told him. “Be the last they’ll see of you two bucks.”

  Once we got over the excitement, mingled with a mild dose of fear, the feeling of being on our own for the first time, there was nothing to do but watch the scenery go by and put up with the stops, waits and shunts at flag stops and stations. By the time we got to the square city depot, with its slanting canopy, that dry stiffness had set in.

  We got directions from a shaggy old man with dirty porcupine quill whiskers set in a bloated face, his faded, bloodshot eyes peering out from beneath the brim of a rumbled slouch hat. He worked a tobacco cud a few times, spat into a cuspidor by the bench he sat on outside of the station and flung his arm sideways in a point. “Follow that street until you see the Ferris wheel,” he said in a gravely growl. “And if you don’t come back, write.”

  The grounds were just shaking up when we handed in our quarters at the entrance booth and stepped in. A roustabout in oil-stained jeans and a torn T-shirt,was testing the bell ringer, setting the peg a certain way and swinging the steel-bound wooden maul with grunts. We stood and watched the cube-like slide go up and down the long, flat pole until it finally dinged the saucer-like bell on top. Over by the stage for the girlie show demonstration, one of the girls stood in curlers and a housecoat, taking sucks at a cigarette veed between her fingers. Regardless of the caked-on makeup, which was wrinkled and down-slashed around her eyes and lips, her face was jaded and pale. Just above the board fence at the edge of the grounds, through the shadow of the towering grandstand, the necks and heads of racehorses, with their checkreins and blind bridles, sailed past in exercise, the quick, flat patter of their hoofbeats coming in staccato through the quiet.

  Wally tried his luck at catching a prize with one of those crane affairs in a glass cubical. He got his quarter stuck in the chute and he stuck his hand through a little open side door and jiggled it. Suddenly this big heavy jawed Italian came out of nowhere and grabbed his hand. “I got you; you go to jail,” the man said.

  I don’t think Wally wet his pants—maybe a few drops. We did a bit of spluttering to convince him of the facts, and he finally let us go with a warning and a black look.

  We staggered around the grounds then, taking in the usual midway scene for a while. We didn’t have much more than enough money for the train trip home, so we wound up sitting in the cool, deadened sanctity of the coliseum, watching the stock judging and waiting for the vaudeville acts, which were to be followed by the Yodelling Cowboy. The vaudeville acts came on and performed to the blare of horns and suspended snare-drum rolls with their punctuating bops: the jugglers, unicycle drivers and wire walkers; the bikini clad lady, with her whip and poodles that pranced, rolled drums and jumped through hoops; the clown, with a red nose ball and hair sprigging around a cracker box hat, who roared around in a little car that blew smoke and backfired.

  Finally, the Yodelling Cowboy came on. The fiddler didn’t look at all like I thought he would. I had him pictured as a stately man with slim hands with long fingers. When I saw this big, blocky man with ham-like hands and banana fingers walking around the stage before the show, sawing segments on a fiddle, I thought maybe he was a stagehand fooling around. But it was him, all right, and when he did his own hit tunes of sweet two-steps and compelling breakdowns—different, a cut above the rest—the strains filled the coliseum, captivating the audience. The staple songs of the Yodelling Cowboy and the lesser songs of the backup crew, augmented by country corn skits and jokes, paled before him, as far as I was concerned. The only thing I noticed about the guitar players was that they didn’t go up and down their guitar necks like Alban Gallant.

  Wally sat with his face in kind of a delirium, his mouth open and his eyes sticking out. A pretty blonde attendant was selling pictures of the band members at the stage at intermission and Wally bought one of the fiddler and got him to autograph it. He quietly took Wally’s picture from his squat on the stage’s lip.

  “Could you put that ‘To Wally’?”

  “Okay,” the fiddler said in a quiet, sincere voice.

  “I play the fiddle, too.”

  “Do you? How long have you been playing?”

  “Little over a year.”

  “Well, always nice to meet a fellow fiddler.”

  “I hope to be as good as you some day.”

  “I’m sure you will. I’ll remember your name. We’ll probably meet again. Good luck.” He shook Wally’s hand.

  Wally kept looking over his shoulder at him as we walked away and got tangled up in a pile of empty chairs.

  Things got kind of interesting after the show. Wally was hanging back, getting a last look at the fiddler and I guess I was, too, and we forgot that the train would be leaving around the end of the show, at six. By the time I noticed the watch nestled in the red hairs of a stout arm on my left, its hands said five after six. Wally’s mouth hung open when I pointed it out, and he gulped with that eye-bug of his.

  “Now what do we do?” he said.

  “Try to find som
eone from home and bum a ride, I guess.”

  The whole thing got kind of strange then. Tiredness was setting in with the lengthening shadows, and we’d had nothing to eat but a hot dog since noon. The muddle of laughter, screams, Crown and Anchor clinks and hawker calls, interspersed with the motor bursts of the rides, amidst the dust and smells, were beginning to blend together with a sultry gloom.

  Wally kicked a tent peg and snarled, “Of course there wouldn’t be anyone here we know. Of course not. Stupid trains. We should have stayed home.”

  “Well it was you that wanted to come and see your fiddler, and you that hung around mooning over him until it was too late,” I said.

  “I didn’t twist no arms. I didn’t twist no arms.”

  “Looks like we’ll be twisting thumbs.”

  “Huh? You mean hitchhike?” Wally gulped and went bug-eyed again. “I ain’t never done that.”

  “We’ll never learn younger,” I said.

  Wally curled his lip into a snarl and gave me a sidelong leer. Then his eyes bugged again and his mouth dropped. “Where do we go?” he said in a weak voice.

  We got directions and made our way toward the main road out of town. The streets appeared dirty and grey now. Loose papers and candy-bar wrappers skittered along the cracked and stained sidewalks in the sultry breeze. After a few miscues due to direction confusions, we finally got our thumbs up by the long, dirty-grey ribbon leading toward home. We stood between staying and bolting. After some of the terror subsided a bit, I started noticing that the oncoming drivers were giving us blank stares.

  Then a big red-headed guy stuck his head out of his car window, glared at us and hollered, “Get over on this side.”

  We crossed the street hoping for better, but the steady stream of cars went by in that moping parade. The long shadows quenched the sun’s last blazes, and everything fell into the dirty greyness of the sidewalks. The air grew sticky in the sultry breeze. I had that stranded feeling. Up ahead, three other young fellows, much like us, came onto the sidewalk and started thumbing, too, in a backpedal.

  “What are we going to do if we don’t get a ride?” Wally said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. With the cars going by in a relentless stream, and the drivers passively paying us no mind, what hope we had that wasn’t drowned by fear was rapidly fading.

  When a car finally swerved in and stopped, we stood gaping for a while, unsure of what to do. Then a girl with a pert face, framed by brown hair, stuck her head out the front passenger window and beckoned with a flutter of her hand. We ran then and scrambled and fumbled our way into the back seat of the medium-old car. There were two girls in the front seat, beside the driver, who was a conventional-looking sport with a brush cut.

  “Where are you boys going?” the outside girl said.

  We told her.

  “Not far from Summerside, right?” the guy said, watching for his chance to get back into traffic.

  We agreed.

  I could see him smirk in the mirror. “I’m an old bus driver.”

  “Not that old,” the middle girl said.

  “We’ll get youse close,” the guy said.

  We got underway again and I was just beginning to feel secure when I heard the outside girl picking at the guy in motherly tones: “Ah, come on, pick the poor little fellows up.”

  “What do you think I am, a bus driver?” the guy growled.

  “That’s what you just said,” the inside girl said.

  The guy grudgingly pulled over and the three other hitchhikers crowded in on us. But they didn’t go far.

  The driver guy lost his good humour for a while, but the girls, teasing and joking like two pigeons, brought it back. The middle one would break into a current country song now and then in a pleasant voice. They were all in their late teens or early twenties and you could tell by their light banter that they were either out for a joyride or headed for a dance.

  Home was about two miles from where they dropped us off. What a relief! To say the least. Wally gave a little dance and started jigging “The Flowers of Edinburgh.”

  I didn’t feel much like a wing-wang—too lank.

  “I’ll have that one down pretty soon,” Wally said. “Time we got at it again.” We hadn’t been playing that much, what with the work and fishing and one thing or another.

  Dan Coulter came visiting one evening, sober for once, about the only other happening worth mentioning that summer. He and The Old Man sat in the kitchen mulling things over, chewing tobacco and spitting into tin cans. Dan didn’t care too much for smoking; said it was bad for your constitution. It didn’t take them long to get into the roadwork, and they weren’t into that long before they were into change.

  Dan usually thought a few minutes about something —with those big, musing eyes of his fixed on something and his right eyebrow cocked—before he’d speak. Then he’d spit and out with it.

  “Things don’t look the same anymore,” The Boss said. “Don’t even feel the same anymore. Makes you wonder what’s going to become of the place.”

  Dan stared at the stove awhile before the spit came. “Not hard to figure some of it out. As far as the new road is concerned, it’s not so much about how it looks, but what it represents—what’s going to come with it. It’s representing progress, something neither of us is any ways used to, something we haven’t seen much of in our lifetime. And progress means change and you’re never sure where change will wind up taking you, especially if it comes quick, and it’s going to come quick and mostly because people want it. We might as well face it; nobody in their right mind is going to keep to the old ways if he can get out of it—too much like slavery.”

  “We had it a lot harder than they have today and it never killed us,” The Boss said. “Back in the Depression, I cut two team-loads of wood and hauled it out for forty cents a day. They already have it too easy. If they had to wear their socks five ways to keep a patch at the heel, or run beside a sleigh load of mud with nothing but coarse boots on their feet to keep them from freezing, , they’d have something to complain about. But we were happy enough then. It was enough to have a roof over your head and a bite to eat then.”

  The pause came, then the punk in Dan’s can. “Didn’t know any better then. Things are coming clearer now, though.”

  The Old Man put down his can and rose and lit the lamp.

  “Where’s Ella this evening?”

  “Over at Joe’s. Where do thinks it’s all going to wind up?” The Boss said, sitting back down and spitting into his can.

  “Tractors will come with whatever, and electricity probably, this and that, less work, more bills, more headaches, more time to get into hellery. All part of progress. Hard to say where it’ll go from there. One thing for sure: when progress comes, if you don’t change on your own, it’ll do the changing for you.”

  “What about you? You thinking about going tractor?”

  Dan Coulter spitooed his cud into his can, set the can on the floor and bent over, resting his forearms on his knees. “Not sure what I’ll do. Might be best to hang on as long as I can with what I got, then maybe sell out. I’m kind of like you: getting to be too old of a dog for new tricks.”

  There was a long pause. In a distant pasture, a cow lowed. The old house creaked. The Old Man spit his cud into his can and set it down.

  “Don’t seem too long ago since we were using the horsepowers,” The Boss said quietly, breaking the silence.

  “Never seen one of them for a while.”

  “I mind the day we got our engine. They were showing us how the thing worked, and Willard Wallace was over. They had the thing going and Willard thought he’d take a leak; he wasn’t watching where he was aiming—he’d been lifting a few—and he hit the spark plug.”

  “That would wake him up,” Dan Coulter said with a smirk

  “Yeh, let a ho
wl out of him. Danced around a bit. Old John Cane was around that day, too. ‘They’re no good,’ he said, ‘never take the place of the horsepower—sparks flying, burn the barn down.’ Now, it’s the tractor.”

  “Goes in cycles, I guess,” Dan Coulter said. “I guess the only fellow that saw it coming was Fred James; he’s been getting set for it for a while. You can’t fault him for it; he’s a good businessman, all part of progress. Good man, too. Mind when things went to pieces on me. Didn’t know how I’d get me grain in, and didn’t he send his whole crew in one day, put the grain up, never said so much as an I, yes, or no about getting paid back.”

  “No, and he never will. No. Nothing wrong with Fred James.”

  The two men fell silent. You could tell by the mood of things that they’d taken the subject as far as they could, either that or as far as they wanted to.

  Finally, Dan Coulter sighed and straightened in his chair. “She’s going,” he said in melancholy tones. “She’s going and that’s the way she goes.” He sighed again and worked his shoulders a few times to shake himself loose. “Wonder if I could get the lend of your scythe? Bunch of weeds growed up before me binder house, want to clear them away.”

  “Sure,” The Boss said, reaching for a carborundum lying on the radio shelf. “You’ll need this. It’s a bit dull. It’s out in the shop.”

  The two men went outside. Presently, I could hear their voices somewhat mute just outside the door:

  “Not too many of these around, either,” The Boss said.

  “Nope. They had their day, too. Thanks, Harv. We’ll be seeing you.”

  “Night, Dan. No hurry with that.”

  Prelude to

  The Last Set on Hook Road

  They finished the road grading when the grain was a patchwork of grey and gold and the chill of another harvest time was in the air. One day, the busy, shunting, roaring machines, billowing up dust and stink, were gone and the road lay a red open wound. Where it used to appear inconspicuous, part of the landscape, now it was high, wide and dominating. A wagon rig travelled it now in insignificance.