Grand Change Read online

  When I finally got going, after poking for the sleigh through two feet of snow and shovelling out, I pretty well had to break the road all over again. The snow was piled up at our gateway so bad, I had to cut our fence fifty yards from our gateway, work my way around the heaviest part and cut the Calder fence to get onto the road.

  It was quite a job getting the manure out—all the weaving and meandering around drifts—and there was just one patch of the snake-like pile visible. I had to take a guess and fork off where I thought the end would be. It took me all day.

  On the way to the village next day, where the sleigh road ran along a ways with the railroad, you could see the blocks of snow flying from shovel heads, coming seemingly out of the white in their quick shoot and drop from the railroad cutting. The pass of a locomotive was identified only by its slanting smoke billow, rising to mingle with the drifting snow in its cold ground sweep. At the crossing, you could see the ledges tiering the solid white walls of the cutting, where men bent, rammed their shovels, straightened and hurled the snow to the next level, their shovels sweeps followed by white, powdery swirls, adding to the coldness of the scene.

  The storm left, but the cold hung around. That hit home the hardest when we got back to school. The stove was hot enough. Its heat waves rose up the vertical pipe and waggled a cobweb hanging just past the elbow on the wire-hung vertical pipe running to the safe in the wall. Those near it sat in their sweaters with sweaty hands. But those in far comers sat leg-locked, breathing out white puffs, in their coats, overshoes and mitts.

  Going to the outhouse was an experience. Except for a crust of snuffed-in snow by the door and the light shaft slanting from the small, square open window, it was dark, for starters. Working off your pants and getting your underwear flap properly gapped in the cold exposure wasn’t too pleasant either. I’m not even going to mention too much about having to touch down on the hole, except that the elements and individual endurance definitely played a part in the sitting time. They played an even bigger part in the hand wash at the icicle-bearded pump in the yard with a tin cup hanging from its nose.

  The cold snap hung on until well after Tom Dougal’s death: the second major happening that winter.

  Tom’s property frontage was on both sides of the road, running from our line and Joe Mason’s down to the brook. His farmstead buildings were about fifty yards in from the road on Joe’s side. He and his wife, Ethel, lived with young Tom, his son, and his wife, Ruth. The rest of his children, three boys and three girls, were all married and living away. Young Tom had pretty much taken over the farm. He was a dead ringer for his dad: stout and slightly paunchy, with a block head, bushy hair and eyebrows, and a kindly slant to his eyes.

  Old Tom was the best I ever heard at telling a story or a yarn. I’ll never forget the evening Wally Mason and I had dropped in a couple of years back and Tom was in the right mood. When Ethel let us in, he was in the middle of lighting his crooked stem pipe with a lighted splinter; his eyes, peering from under his bushy eyebrows, growing bigger with each draw on the pipe bit, each cheek-denting pull hauling a ragged flame into the packed bowl, until a huge puff of smoke came and wiped it out.

  The cold of a crisp winter evening clung to our clothes and our numb fingers. We found a seat by the stove, purring its warmth in tune with the tick-tock of the grandfather clock on the wall. We mentioned the cold.

  Tom let out another belch of smoke that hung wave-like in the air, a bushy eyebrow cocked and he was off:

  “Cold! Why, you don’t know what cold is. Now, out in western Canada, back before the big war, it got so cold one night I set a kettle of boiling water outside on the doorstep, and it froze so fast I had hot ice. Yeh, two hundred and ten below zero. Went to kick the cat out the door and froze me foot, just like that, quick as a wink. They dang near had to cut off me big toe. It’s never been right since. Yeh, why I seen a rabbit take a hop and freeze right in mid-air and he hung right there until the first cheenook wind came along and thawed things out.”

  “What’s a cheenook wind?” I said.

  There was silence for a moment. Tom took a few quick drags on his pipe, his stubby fingers pressing into the pipe bowl between puffs. The bushy eyebrow cocked again and Tom’s voice took on a mysterious monotone.

  “Nothing can thaw things out like a cheenook wind. One winter there was thirty feet of snow, flat level, and it colder than a witch’s breath. I mind I was coming from town one day in a two-horse bobsleigh. All of a sudden, this warm wind began to blow out of nowhere. Well, sir, it melted the snow so fast, only the front bobs were on snow. The hind ones were in mud and not twenty yards behind, there was me dog choking in dust. That’s the winter we ran out of hay and had to put sunglasses on the cows so they’d eat the snow. Yeh.”

  Through the whole story, Tom’s face, smoke hanging at his bushy eyebrows, was completely sober, completely serious. You could swear he believed every word.

  Old Tom had got religion the past year. Some said it was because he’d been sick. He’d quit smoking and chewing and taking a nip at Christmas and special occasions. He never did swear; always a good living man, great neighbour.

  We got word at the general store on a Saturday afternoon. I was standing by the post office section at the front end of the long counter, looking out through the high, wide window by the glass-panelled door.

  A dusty beam of late afternoon sun, slanting through the window on the west side, was cutting at the shoulder of the pasteboard cigarette girl sitting in the far side of the window space. Its sharp glow was silhouetting the molasses lassie in the near side. Partly obscured by the signs, the faces of two tethered horses hung, their large eyes shadowed by the leather flaps of their blind bridles, white puffs curling from their nostrils, steam streaks weaving from their buffalo-covered backs. Now and then, through the spaces of unobstructed view, beyond the horses, glimpses of brightly clad children flashed, the jugs of their peak caps flopping wing-like at the sides of their small reddened faces, their mittened hands arcing, flinging tightly packed snowballs. I was waiting for The Boss while Frank Brown, the storekeeper—perched on a ladder, picking goods from the shelves, which tiered almost from the floor to the ceiling on the side wall—was working our grocery list. At the stove, at the back of the long alley-like room, John Avery and Pete White were bantering with the one known as Trader Sam. Sam had recently jig-skipped in around the door, his feet hitting the floor with the door’s slam, his arms held out in stage fashion. There were chuckles as the short man ambled to the stove with his bloated overall pant legs stuffed into his short rubber boots and his pulled-up coat collars joining with his cap peak to frame a fat face with a pointed nose, quick eyes and a quick lip.

  “That’s right, boys,” Sam was saying. “I’d trade anything but me wife.”

  “You’d trade her, too, if she had the heaves,” John Avery said.

  “Now you know me better than that, John,” Sam said. “I never traded a heaving horse in me life.”

  “I never knew you to trade a horse that didn’t have the heaves,” Pete White said.

  “Well, Pete, right now I got the best horse I ever had or seen and he ain’t got no heaves.”

  “Has he got any speed?” Pete said.

  “Now you see him and now you don’t, and he can haul, too. I had him hauling logs the other day and one of the sleigh bunks caught on a stump and didn’t he break both traces and it never took a fizz out of him. Now I wouldn’t lie to you. He just whipped out of there like nobody’s business.”

  “I’m not surprised, with the kind of harness you got,” John said.

  “Now, John, there ain’t nothing wrong with my…”

  The bell over the door jangled and Joe Mason stepped in. The soberness of his demeanour grabbed our attention.

  “Old Tom’s gone, boys,” Joe said. “Passed away about an hour ago.”

  The stark reality hitting ho
me seemed to freeze the room in that greyness.

  Old Tom had been especially bad for the past few weeks. When I’d been forking off a sleigh-load of manure in the field earlier that morning, I’d noticed the doctor’s rig at Tom’s door. The Old Man and I had been planning to drop in on the way home.

  “Young Tom asked me to look after getting the grave dug,” Joe Mason said. “I got Jim and Alban and Charlie. Dan will probably come.”

  “I’ll be there,” The Boss said.

  “You come up short, let me know,” Sam said.

  “The same here,” John Avery said.

  Joe nodded. “I guess we’ll get at her early tomorrow. We’re going to need picks and crowbars.”

  They had to pick and crowbar their way through four and a half feet of ground, frozen solid, and a foot and a half of brick clay to get the grave dug.

  Old Tom had passed away quietly. After the work of the undertaker, he lay with a peaceful look in the cushioned coffin in the Dougal living room, amidst the sickly sweet smell that surrounds all biers. Friends and relatives came softly into the room to shake hands with the family and take their last look by the coffin. Most didn’t wait around for long, but long enough for respect; when they spoke, it was in hushed tones.

  It was cold in the church the day of the funeral. The wood stove there could not force the chill from much farther than the nearest pews. The nail heads in the walls, void of insulation, were white with frost.

  At the singing of “Shall We Gather at the River,” to the wheeze and drone of a pump organ, the minister actually dropped his hymnal to blow on his fingers.

  Ethel, wrinkled and grey, stood with a peaceful acceptance that showed mostly on her face, which was speckled by a black veil. Her children, now solid men and prim ladies, held the hands of their children. The peaceful look of acceptance rested on their faces as well. At the close of the hymn, the minister could not resist hiding his hands behind the pulpit to rub them warm. Then, opening his worn Bible, he read:

  “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but hath everlasting life.”

  The preacher’s words, somewhat stiffened by the chill in his lips, rose and fell in resounding echo. When the reading was through, he paused for a moment to study the people sitting rigid in their pews. Then he began his eulogy:

  “We all know what kind of man Tom was: honest, upright, charitable and hard-working. But he was more than that. He was a man who sought after the things of God.

  “I visited Tom a few days before his death. I can still see him sitting in his old rocker, talking of life, its joys, labour and brevity, and what life really is. And this is pretty much what he had to say:

  ‘I worked hard, long as I can remember. I worked hard. I made this property what is with what God gave me. I cleared the land in the back field with a horse and stumper and I hauled mud in the cold of winter and spread it on the land with a shovel. I work in the fields from sun up to sun down. I took my rest on the Sabbath, and took my family to church. I earned what I got by the sweat of my brow and I did my best to teach my children what was right, and to have respect for their fellow man.

  ‘Now my time grows short. That’s how life is and I will soon meet my maker; I will meet him prepared. But it wasn’t the things I mentioned that prepared me. It wasn’t the way I worked, or what I taught, or how honest I was. For with all the right things I did, there was still sin.

  ‘But not long ago, I discovered that Jesus died for sinners, me included, and I sought forgiveness from God through him. For it was his death on the cross that saves, not anything I could do.

  ‘That’s the secret to life: being ready to meet your maker. This land, my family, and the health to enjoy both are marvellous gifts; they’re from the hand of God. But the greatest gift of all is eternal life in heaven, for nothing else lasts.’”

  There was no way they could get the road open for the motor hearse; they had to use the sleigh hearse hauled by a jet-black horse, with its long windows and curtains and its coach-like seat on the front, where the undertaker and his assistant sat.

  At the grave, the icy wind blew; its mourn seemed in tune with the chill of death. The ground drift of powdery snow swept over the green blanket on the mound of clay, blowing in our faces and flapping our coat tails as we sang “Abide With Me” through chattering teeth. The wind blew the clay as it fell from the minister’s hand, scattering it across the coffin at “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” A body was commended to the earth and a soul was commended to God.

  The Boss took it harder than he let on. He and Old Tom had been through a lot together. They had stuck by each other through a lot of cold, hard times, the kind of times that knit men’s souls together. You couldn’t call The Boss religious. He had his own reverential fear of God; he’d listen to the hellfire preaching on the radio on Sunday mornings, badger me to go to church, but he was no churchgoer himself. But when Old Tom changed to religion, and neighbourly attitudes changed, too, there was no difference as far as The Old Man was concerned. They had their arguments about the Bible and whatnot, but The Boss respected Old Tom’s beliefs; and I guess if he could tell it, since Old Tom took up religion, he’d been getting soft toward it himself.

  On the way home from the funeral, when we turned from the trail angling down across John Cobly’s field and headed for the bridge at the creek, one heavy tear streaked down The Old Man’s face and froze at his jaw. And there was a reverential sadness in his voice that spoke of memories, nostalgia and loss when he said, “God never made a better man than Tom Dougal.”

  The hockey team won the cup that year for the first and last time: the third major happening that winter. Formed within the district and surrounding areas, their individual skills nurtured on frozen ponds, the team always gave a solid effort. But they’d had nothing of the spectacular to give them the edge until Charlie Wallace began to mature, and that winter he peaked.

  Due to the inevitable two-week flu, being caught up in my guitar and practising now and then with Wally Mason, I missed most of the games up to the cup-winner. If King hadn’t thrown a shoe, and The Boss hadn’t sent me down to the Wallaces’ to get him shod, I probably would have missed it, too.

  I knew I was going at a good time when, after skirting the spring hole in Dan Coulter’s field and topping the sharp rise at the end of the gap through his woods, I could see the grey-blue smoke rising from the mill toward an overcast sky.

  If Alf had been working at some weird gadget, I probably would have had to wait awhile before he got to me. Turned out he was shaping a brace for a plow, just finishing off when I got there. He paused in mid-swing, looking at me when he spoke, his large eyes staring white through the sweat-streaked soot and smoke on his face, his brow furrowed as if to keep the eyes open, the veins on his hands bulging worm-like through sweaty grit.

  “Bring him in,” he said, reaching for the square, basket-like tool box that was hanging on a peg on the wall. I unhitched King and led him into the small, low-ceilinged shop, his hooves clomping on the worn and pitted floor planks.

  For Alf’s size, short and slightly humped, with oil-can shoulders and not a lot of meat on him, he did a credible job at blacksmithing. I held King’s halter and watched as Alf butted rear ends with the horse and tucked his right hind foot between his thighs. Working deft and quick, he cleared the frog with the curved knife, trimmed the hoof with the tong-like cutters, rasped it all smooth and lay on a blank shoe to gauge.

  “How long have you been blacksmithing?” I said.

  Alf dropped the horse’s foot and, with a pair of tongs, stuffed the shoe into the glowing crack in the crusted coals in the forage, then pumped the forage handle. The hot light blazed; blue-grey smoke puffed from the coals and billowed up through the square hole in the roof peak; ragged blue-grey waves hovered over the flop-mouthed bag of coal hunched by
the disorderly pile of scrap metal; blue-grey fingers pointed at the square rods of cork steel reclining against the rough, open-studded wall and the row of blank horseshoes hooked on a wire between two studs; a blue-grey halo hung over the horned anvil sitting squat on its block.

  “Shoed my first horse when I was fifteen,” he finally said. “Picked it up watching Gabe Grant in town. Got Gabe to let me try a horse. Got kicked against the wall right off, but Gabe let me at it, teaching me as I went along.”

  Alf had taken the shoe from the forge and was talking between heavy hammer blows at the anvil as he bent the shoe tips into sharpened ells. He stuffed the shoe back into the coals, round end first, and with a length of cork steel.

  “Persuaded the old man to buy me the gear from the catalogue.” Alf concentrated on cutting off a wedge of white hot cork on the hardy, hammering it into the shoe round with a loud pop, then hammering it sharp, before he spoke again. “Yep, shoed a lot of horses since then; only thing I like better than inventing.” He rammed the shoe into a cask of water and was engulfed in a cloud of acrid steam that mingled with the smells of burnt coal, hot metal, smoke and horse.

  With the horse’s foot tucked between his thighs again, Alf nailed on the shoe, driving the flat-headed nails through the hoof with whacks of the toy-like hammer and nubbing them. He finished with a final rasp dressing, with the foot resting on a tripod-like rest.

  “That’ll do him,” Alf said. He swiped a dipper of water from a bucket and drank heavily with twin drools.

  I held a two-dollar bill out to him while he took a fig of twist from his pocket and bit off a junk. He worked the cud for a bit, studying the floor. Finally, he spat a squirt of tobacco juice, eyed me sideways and said, “Tell you what. I’m thinking of building a wood sleigh. You keep the money and tell Harv to keep an eye out for a decent maple stick with the right curve for runners—he should have something in his woods—and we’ll call her square.”