Eastern Passage (6 page)

To keep us until we had our house built, we had a borrowed tent under a clump of spruce trees, with an outdoor fireplace, and a table and a couple of benches knocked up from scrap lumber.

Two days after we had set up camp, a dump truck backed onto our property and tipped out a huge pile of naked yellow logs. It took
Fran and me a full day to sort out this pile of giant pick-up sticks and stack them so they would not warp out of shape under the summer sun.

Then we got down to work.

My tool kit was not much different from those of the first homesteaders in Albion Township. I had an axe, round-mouthed shovel, spade, pickaxe, sledgehammer, crosscut saw, and a kit of smaller carpentry tools. I had
no
power tools, not even a chainsaw, and no access to any source of power except our muscles and Lulu Belle.

The first major job was digging out the cellar. When outlined on the ground with sticks and string, it did not look as if it would be a very formidable problem, but once the sod had been stripped away and its third dimension laid bare, I found myself facing a Herculean task. I set to with pick and shovel, heaving the dirt into a wooden “dump box” I had built into Lulu Belle’s after-end. About a hundred shovelfuls were needed to fill this box, by which time I was very glad to get behind the steering wheel and bounce slowly across our hill to a ravine where I could dump the spoil.

Unloading was fun. Having backed Lulu to the lip of the ravine, I would hook one end of a logging chain to the box and the other to a stout old maple tree on the far side of the hollow. Then I would put Lulu into bull-low gear and four-wheel drive and inch her ahead until the box was pulled out of her rear compartment to spill its contents into the ravine.

As the cellar hole deepened, it became increasingly difficult to fling the dirt up into the box. By the time I had dug three feet down, I could no longer manage. The solution was to cut a ramp into the cellar wall and back Lulu down it. As the cellar grew deeper, the ramp had to be deepened and lengthened. Digging the cellar and the ramp required the removal of at least eighty tons of earth from a hole that, had it been filled with water, would have made a good-sized swimming pool.

—–

Spring came and went. The world around us flowered, and a multitude of birds sang, made love, and reared their young. But I was hardly aware of anything except the gaping pit into which Lulu every day backed a little farther, and I sank a little deeper.

Fran was game to help with the excavation but it required more strength than she had. So she kept “house,” got the meals, washed the few bits of clothing I bothered to wear, kept me supplied with tea or lemonade so I wouldn’t become completely dehydrated, and generally fetched and carried. When I could spare Lulu, Fran drove to Palgrave for the mail but mostly to hear another human voice (it belonged to our gossip of a postmistress, who also kept the village store). Occasionally Fran drove as far afield as Bolton, in search of essentials. Luxuries, such as beer and booze, were not to be had nearer than Toronto, except from bootleggers at prices we could not afford.

By mid-June, the pit was about five feet deep, and I was sweating in this hole one day when a visitor came calling. A potato farmer from a long lineage of potato farmers, he was one of those whose land had become so impoverished it would no longer feed him and his family so he was now moonlighting as Albion Township’s tax assessor. A scarecrow with a vacant stare, he did not introduce himself but silently regarded me and my excavation long enough to make me feel uneasy. Then he spat a gob of tobacco juice into the pit and in measured tones barely above the level of a whisper, told me, “Cain’t dig no grave on private property. ’Tain’t allowed. Them as is gone has got to go into the churchyard.”

I was amused at what I took to be a sally of local wit. I was less amused when, some months later, I got my first tax bill. It was for a sum about three times higher than that for any comparative property in Albion. The last laugh was surely his.

When the digging was finished, I became a mason. To assist me in providing concrete footings for the cellar walls, the fireplace, and the foundation pillars, Lulu metamorphosed into a combined sand, gravel,
and cement truck. Her rated carrying capacity was only 500 pounds, but she fetched much heavier loads of pit-run gravel from a farmer’s field three miles away, small mountains of bagged cement from Bolton, and 45-gallon drums (two at a time) of water scooped with a pail from a small stream running beneath a nearby concession road.

I had no motor-driven mixer so I cobbled a mixing trough from ancient planks taken from an abandoned barn. The machinery was me, a shovel, and a hoe. I carried the resultant slurry to where it was needed in a wheelbarrow or in twin buckets slung from a neck yoke.

One torrid July morning the unusual sound of a car climbing our hill gave me an excuse to take a break. I returned to camp half-naked, sweat-soaked and filmed with cement dust, to find Frances in animated conversation with a dark-haired youngish woman sporting the insignia of the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (the WRNS) in which Fran had served during the war.

Both seemed perturbed in my presence. In a low voice, Fran identified the stranger as having once been her Commanding Officer, but offered no explanation as to why this officer had tracked down a lowly “ranker” such as Fran had been.

The visitor was distinctly ill at ease, and when I suggested she might like to take potluck lunch with us, she hurriedly declined.

I had to leave them at that point for I had a mix of concrete on the go. When I returned to camp an hour later, the visitor was gone. Frances was sobbing in the tent and would not come out or talk to me.

She remained withdrawn and unreachable for several days. Then one evening she drove into Palgrave, where there was a public telephone. When she returned, she announced that she had decided to return to her parents and stay with them while taking a summer course toward the degree she had abandoned when we got married. I was gob-smacked, as Newfoundlanders say. I felt guilty now at having cut short her university career, although at
the time I had assumed
she
wanted to escape from the university as much as I did.

Next day I drove her to the city and left her at her parents’ home. We parted amicably, though almost as strangers. Neither of us could, or would, scale the wall that had so suddenly risen between us.

We saw very little of one another during much of the rest of the summer, although I did make three or four visits to the Thornhill home and on one occasion Fran’s parents brought her to our building site for a brief and uncomfortable visit. It was not a success. All four of us seemed enmeshed in a conspiracy of silence. Looking back on that summer now, I view the entire sorry contretemps as scenes from a confusing silent movie bereft even of explanatory subtitles. And so it must remain.

That summer was viciously hot. One August day the heat became so intolerable I abandoned my labours and fled to a swimming hole on a nearby tributary of the Humber River.

The pool was barely large enough for me and a school of small minnows called rainbow dace, but we shared it anyway. As they inquisitively nibbled at my bare skin, I downed several warm beers and tried to relax but I was too troubled for that. I could not –
would
not – accept the likelihood that my marriage had come unstuck and, worse still, that it might be
my own fault
. I felt guilty, and was angry about that. I was enormously frustrated, almost incapacitated, and helpless to rectify the situation.

Angrily flinging an empty beer bottle into the woods, and sending the dace fleeing in all directions, I stumbled out of the pond and went back to work. There was solace – of a sort – to be found in working my ass off, and I could see no other way to fill the void.

When the house foundation was more or less completed, it was time to put on a carpenter’s hat. I was a rank amateur at that trade, but the
gods were kind. Late in July two ex-soldiers bought the abandoned farm directly to the south. Lloyd Coombs and Ben Green were of my own age and both had been carpenters before the war. Having purchased a war-surplus army truck, an old tractor, and a newfangled chainsaw, they were setting themselves up as lumbermen-builders. Since we were all “vets,” we became friends and they were of great assistance to me in the days that followed. They gave me expert advice and were almost my only human contacts until early in September, when Fran’s parents brought her back to me.

She and I were smilingly polite to each other, but nothing was said about the shadowed weeks just passed. Those weeks never did reveal their secrets to me, remaining a disturbing and unsolved mystery to this day.

Shortly after Fran’s return, we began raising the log walls of our house. She made herself useful, uncomplainingly rolling logs to the site; holding them firm while I sawed and drilled; and, as the walls slowly rose, keeping me supplied with caulking cotton and the ten-inch nails that pinned the logs together. The blight upon our marriage seemed to dissipate through this shared labour. We became comrades – then lovers once again. Although it was evident we would have to work like the very devil if we were to have a roof over our heads before snow fell I began to feel we might actually pull it off.

We had little social life that autumn. Our few neighbours were generally a dour lot who may well have thought us unhinged for trying to establish ourselves in the wasteland they and their forebears had created. Relatives occasionally visited. One sultry day my father drove in, not to offer any physical or financial assistance but to deliver a homily. It was high time, he said, for me (and Frances too, if she wished) to enrol in the University of Toronto’s Library School. From there we could expect to graduate into useful and rewarding careers, as he and my mother had done after the First World War. His
advice was well meant so I did not take it amiss. I did, however, resent his parting shot that day, addressed to Fran.

“I should have warned you before that Farley is the roughest carpenter ever conceived. If two planks come within an inch of each other, he considers it a tight fit. I hope your cabin will hold together without too much putty.”

Raising the walls had been slow, tedious work. The roof went on more quickly, and by the end of September only two major tasks remained – water, and sewage disposal.

For the well I chose a site close to the house and began digging. At twelve feet, the bottom of my shaft was still bone dry and I was ready to call it quits. Each bucket of earth had to be hauled to the surface with a block and tackle hung from a wooden tripod with the loaded bucket swinging ponderously over me all the while. It was a singularly happy day when water began bubbling up beneath my feet and sent me scrambling up the rickety ladder. But there was no time to celebrate. The water was rising fast and, without cribbing, the surrounding earth would soon begin to slump into what would certainly become a huge and muddy crater. Lloyd, Ben, and I quickly manhandled into place the cylindrical wooden crib I had built and slid it down the hole. We didn’t have
running
water but it was water that could at least be carried into the house as needed.

For the toilet, I dug another pit over which I erected a sturdy privy made of freshly milled, sweet-smelling cedar. I lovingly crafted the seat from a piece of splinter-proof maple, sandpapered until it was, as Lloyd admiringly put it, “smooth as a baby’s bum.” As was the custom, I cut a crescent moon through the door so the occupant could see out and give warning of prior possession to other customers.

Some years later my privy gained fame of a sort when Pierre Berton, then a columnist for the
Toronto Star
, revealed that I had found some discarded store dummies and rescued two nude female half-models which were more or less intact but in need of tender loving care.

On September 13 I finished hanging the front door of a house that was basically an empty shell. There were three rooms: the kitchen-cum-bedroom; an even smaller one earmarked as a bathroom if and when we got running water but which meanwhile served as a carpentry shop; and a relatively spacious room, eighteen by twenty feet, dominated by the huge fireplace. This
was
truly our living room. We ate there; read there; listened to music on a tinny little battery radio; and, in one corner, I tried to write.

There was no electricity, no telephone, and no furnace. Though the fireplace provided more than enough heat, it consumed wood like a Mississippi steamboat. The kitchen boasted our only luxuries: a refrigerator that, improbably, kept things cool by burning propane gas, and a propane-fuelled cookstove. A great deal of work remained to be done, inside and out – but not just yet. We had run out of money so it was necessary for me to switch hats again. I dusted off my battered typewriter and tried to reconnect with Dudley Cloud, to whom I had last written in May and from whom I had heard nothing since.