‘Thank you, Miss — Mrs Hodgson.’
‘You may take out and return two books to the library on the same day.’ She smiled and replaced her glasses and reached for her fountain pen again. ‘Go on, hop to it!’
I quietly thanked her again and turned towards the door. I didn’t want to overdo it. As I reached the door, she said, ‘Don’t forget the dictionary! And look up prognostication while you’re at it.’
My mom was getting to love books as much as I did, and unknowingly we were educating ourselves – I was educating myself forwards and she was educating herself backwards because, as I said, she didn’t have books in her childhood. Not all of what we learned came from books, either. In winter, she’d cut sandwiches and fill the thermos with black tea, and we’d go to the museum for the day. It would take Mom all week to save the streetcar fare, but the museum was free. Sometimes we’d listen to experts lecturing on all kinds of interesting stuff.
We went to the Riverdale Zoo once, for a special treat. I liked the elephant, the lions and the bear, even the hippopotamus, and especially the monkeys. But they looked sad behind bars, cooped up in their tiny cages. I had hoped to see birds but they didn’t have any, except for sixteen pheasants and a young crane. When I thought about it later, I was pretty glad they didn’t. Wild birds in tiny cages would be horrible. Can you imagine an eagle or a buzzard in a cage?
Toronto has lots of lake birds – too many to mention. We’d been to Lake Ontario once on a school outing and I’d seen lots and lots: ducks, geese, swans, herons, ring-billed gulls, herring gulls and two Caspian terns. There were supposed to be bald eagles and ospreys, but we didn’t see any that day.
I liked birds a lot, not that there were many around Cabbagetown: some starlings, sparrows and doves, and occasionally you’d see a chimney swift. Once I saw a screech owl perched on a lamppost after a snowstorm. It just looked at me for ages, all hunched up, the feathers on its back disarranged. I didn’t know if it was cold or injured, but then after a while it let out an eerie cry and flew away. I was glad it was okay. Owls eat mice and there were plenty of those around, I can assure you.
On our weekend walks we’d sometimes wander along the banks of the Don River, which wasn’t all that far from our cottage, passing all the shut-down factories and industrial sites with their silent cranes and rusting metal. It looked like the world had come to an end. Once we heard this weird sound, like a wooden ratchet, but coming from a maple tree. We stopped and I looked up and saw a belted kingfisher, the only one I ever saw in Toronto. It was so strange; I don’t think there could have been many fish in such murky, polluted river water.
My mom talked fondly about how ‘the Don’ used to be, with all the factory women sharing stories about themselves and their kids and laughing a lot, and how, when the factory knock-off horns sounded along the riverbank, they’d all stream out like schoolgirls and she’d meet girlfriends working in other factories, and they’d find a spot beside the river to sit for a good old chinwag.
Mom and I had lots of good fun times together on the weekends. We’d usually leave the cottage as early as we could. In the summer we’d go to the parks in search of musicians and bands – we both loved music. There were often brass bands in the rotundas, and sometimes musicians playing other instruments. I knew what a fiddle looked like, but the first time I saw a cello I thought it was a violin that was just too big to lift. Massed bands would occasionally play in a park or as part of a veterans parade, and I’d get terribly excited and march on the spot to the beat of the drums. Violins could make me cry, but they were soft tears – not because I felt sad or anything, just because the sounds were so beautiful. For days afterwards I’d hear the music in my head as clear as anything. I’d learned to whistle when I was small, and could easily pick up a tune and whistle it, sometimes weeks later. My mom would say, ‘Jack, you have
the gift
.’
‘What’s the gift?’ I’d asked the first time she said this.
‘Your ear, you have a musical ear.’
‘Which one?’
She’d laughed. ‘It’s just that you can remember music right off, every bit of it.’
‘Can’t everyone?’
‘It’s very rare, I think.’
It was nice having a gift that was very rare, but all I knew was that I loved music and could recall and whistle it weeks or months after I’d first heard it.
My mom once mentioned it to my dad. ‘Must come from my side of the family,’ he’d grunted. ‘My Uncle Joe could play the banjo real great . . . killed in the war, poor bastard.’ He showed no further interest in my gift; I guess it was not what he wanted in a boy.
Once, when I’d shown him the aggie Mac had given me, he said it was a good one, then asked, ‘You any good at marbles?’
I told him I was seldom beaten.
‘That’s good,’ he replied. His praise was sweeter even than my mom’s praise for my whistling. She praised me through thick and thin, but he never did. Funny how when you receive too much approbation you cease to believe in it. My mom saw lots of praiseworthy things in me that I don’t suppose were so unusual in a child.
To avoid Dad we’d stay out of the house as much as we could manage at weekends. I confess I never thought that he might be lonely or feel neglected. In winter he’d spend Saturdays at the football or ice hockey and Sundays recovering from his bender. In summer the sport changed to lacrosse or baseball but the bender was the same. Luckily for us, he slept in on Saturday mornings, recovering from a whole week of hangovers and early starts, then again on Sunday mornings as a result of his binge at the game and afterwards at the tavern. I guess the Sunday-morning hangover must have been
really
bad. My mom said she’d often hear him throwing up during the night.
Like most of the men in Cabbagetown he was a sports nut. He’d leave for the game mid-morning, summer or winter, so he and his pals could buy cheap seats in the bleachers. As bottles of beer were too bulky to carry and could easily be spotted by the law, they’d each take a bottle of cheap whisky or bourbon made by Joe Rattlesnake, a local who kept a secret still in the yard of one of the abandoned factories along the banks of the Don River. His liquor was sometimes referred to as Rattlesnake Special, whether it was whisky or bourbon (the only difference was said to be the colour, and no one ever knew what was in the wash). It was even cheaper than the fortified ‘bum wine’ you could buy, and lord knows the alcohol content of Joe Rattlesnake’s distillate, but it could render you pretty motherless at the end of a long afternoon’s drinking. Dad and his pals would then retire to the tavern after the game for beer, which, mixed with hard liquor, made for an even nastier drunk than usual. As often as not it ended in the all-too-familiar Saturday-night wife- and child-bashings.
Those fathers who didn’t drink at the game would take one of their sons to the football or hockey game as a treat, for a birthday or something like that. My dad took me to a football game once, when I was seven. There was no special reason. Perhaps he wanted to look like a real father. The game at Varsity Stadium was between the Toronto Argonauts and the Ottawa Rough Riders, two teams in the Grey Cup competition. He even made me wear his precious Argonauts scarf, which fell to below my knees, even though I wrapped it around my neck three times. Taking me was a big sacrifice for him as it meant he couldn’t go back to the tavern to drink beer with his pals afterwards.
When the Argonauts scored, I yelled and threw my hands in the air, and I think that pleased him, but I knew I was never going to be like him or the other fans at the game. Sport – football, anyhow – just didn’t do a whole lot for me. I was not a bad skater, and I was pretty good at shinny, a rough-and-ready type of pond hockey, but that was about it. I played shinny when the pond in the industrial area near the Don River froze, skating in a pair of old skates from Mrs Sopworth at the Presbyterian Clothing Depot.
In truth, my dad seemed more interested in the breaks in the game than in the game itself. ‘Stay there. Don’t move, son,’ he’d say, while he and his pals left to join all the other men behind the bleachers with bottles in brown paper bags. While drinking at a game was against the law, the cops, in an unwritten agreement, turned a blind eye to the area directly behind the bleachers.
After the game, when we were in the middle of the crush leaving the stadium, Dad turned to heckle a group wearing the colours of the Rough Riders. They responded, and he and his pals suddenly lunged towards them through the dense shuffling mass, shoving people aside. The crowd quickly closed behind him, separating us, and moved forward, sweeping me along with it. Outside the stadium I waited for fifteen minutes but couldn’t see him. I could clearly imagine Dad and his pals involved in a drunken fight with the Ottawa supporters, and suddenly it seemed like a bad idea to hang around.
I was a pretty observant and independent kid, and on the way in the streetcar I’d taken in all the landmarks. It was a straightforward route down Bloor Street, so I wasn’t too worried. But I hadn’t anticipated the snowstorm that swept over the city, practically blinding me and changing everything. These severe blizzards were called Panhandle Hooks, and they came up from the Gulf of Mexico, usually in late December and January but seldom in November. Snow in Toronto isn’t usually that heavy but when a Panhandle Hook hits the city, watch out.
While Varsity Stadium hadn’t seemed a long way from the east side by streetcar, walking home proved quite a different matter. The streets were now deserted and I couldn’t identify any of the landmarks I’d seen on the way to the game. I struggled on through the blizzard for what must have been an hour, growing numb with cold. I figured it should have taken me less than that to get all the way home, but soon I couldn’t see from one streetlight to the next and somehow, I don’t know how, I lost the streetcar tracks in Bloor Street, and after that I quickly lost my way.
The shops were all shut, so I couldn’t ask for directions or shelter from the snow. It never occurred to me to knock on someone’s front door. I might have done so in Cabbagetown, but I didn’t dare knock at houses where there was only one family and a garden. Stupid, I suppose, but in those days everyone knew their place in the social hierarchy and mine certainly wasn’t at the front door of a big house. I eventually found a small tobacco kiosk and a fat bald man with an accent redirected me. ‘Ven you get lost, come back, I tell you some more za vey.’
Amazingly I was only about twenty minutes from Moss Park, next door to Cabbagetown where we lived. I can tell you now, I was stumbling with exhaustion and cold when I finally arrived home. My frantic mom burst into tears, running to embrace me, but my dad stepped directly in front of her, blocking her way. He was drunk of course, and in a towering rage. When she tried to pass him, he bumped her hard so that she crashed to the floor. She got to her knees, arms reaching for me, sobbing with relief that I’d come home safely. ‘Oh, Jack. Oh, my darling, you’re home!’ she cried.
‘Jesus Christ, where yer been ya miserable little bastard?’ my dad yelled, standing above me. ‘Look what ya done to yer mother!’
‘I got lost. It snowed real heavy,’ I said through chattering teeth.
‘Why the fuck didn’t ya wait fer me?’
‘I did, then I thought you were in a fight,’ I stammered, my teeth still chattering, now even more so from fear at his drunken rage.
‘C’mere!’ He reached out and grabbed me by the scarf, and yanked me violently so that I near lost my footing and found myself in the centre of the kitchen. ‘Git yer fuckin’ pants down!’ he barked.
My hands were frozen, and I had trouble removing his scarf and my overcoat, then unhitching my braces and dropping my pants. I watched fearfully as he removed his big leather belt. Holding the buckle, he wound it around his fist and snapped, ‘Bend!’ While I’d received my share of backhands from him, I’d never received a formal thrashing. Most of the guys who’d told me about their experiences said that it wasn’t too bad – six across the bum and sometimes you couldn’t sit comfortably the next day. But that was when your dad was sober. I was terrified. The leather belt he wielded was at least two inches wide and my knees were knocking, not, I assure you, from the cold.
‘Turn round, grab yer ankles!’ he commanded. I turned so my ass faced him, then bent, my stiff fingers disappearing into my crumpled pants to grasp my shins. I locked my knees so that they almost stopped shaking.
‘Please don’t, Harry!’ my mom begged him frantically. ‘Please don’t thrash my boy!’
‘Shurrup, woman!’ he commanded. ‘Teach the little shit a lesson!’
Still bending, I peered around my skinny legs to see him lift the belt above his shoulder. I braced myself, ready for what was coming to me, but suddenly my mom sprang at him, screaming and clawing at his neck and face. The lifted belt came down hard across her back, but I don’t think she even felt the blow as her nails raked across his face, opening it in four distinct furrows from just under his right eye, down his cheek and the side of his neck. She was in another chilblain fury but this time she had no pail of cayenne and piss as a weapon, only her nails. My father let fly with a straight left, his fist smashing into her face, and she sank to the floor, bleeding from the nose and mouth.
‘Now see what yer gorn and done to yer mother!’ my father growled. The scratches on his face had reddened but he seemed oblivious to them. ‘Next time you wait for me, if necessary, until the fucking second coming of Christ! Yer hear, boy?’ With this, he started lambasting me with the belt, going hell for leather across my ass and the backs of my legs. I started to scream and scream until I fell to the floor, unable to stand any longer. He whacked me one more time across my back, then I could hear him panting. I managed to crawl to my mother, and we huddled together on the kitchen floor, her blood dripping onto my best shirt, which I’d worn especially for the game, both of us howling our hearts out.