Читать книгу Little Man - George Herbert Sallans - Страница 9

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"How," asked Daddy, "would you all like to go out West?"

It took some time for it to dawn on them. Away out west where Aunt Mary lived with Uncle Jim and Aunt Sadie?

The thought of Aunt Mary brought the memory of Grandma, and the idle wonder again, whether she now lived in the same house as Mama had gone to, since they both lived with God. It would, George estimated, be much bigger than the little plastered house they lived in here, with the parlour floor on a different level to the kitchen, as if it had been added as an afterthought.

"The p'airies! We're goin' to the p'airies! Yippee!" George turned a handspring in the room. "What are the p'airies like, Daddy?"

"Not the p'airies, Georgie. The prairies," Jean corrected. But it had no effect on George. Adventure beckoned him.

The prairies, he was told, were so wide and flat that you could see for miles through the crystal clear air, a vast change from the stingy, rocky hills where Daddy had wrested a living for his brood before they had lost their home and had come to this bayside town and a still leaner living.

George learned of the great esteem in which his modest, stern, hard-working father was held. The people of his church made up a big hamper for them, filled with food of all sorts. And the night they presented the hamper they also gave him other gifts, and they made speeches so long and so dull that George went to sleep in the middle of them, and learned next day that there were books for Jean and Harold and him.

Finally somehow the great day arrived, and they were in the railway coach with its long rows of cushioned seats, and George's dreams had come true at last. They were in a train! He eyed the car step and door with its fascinating frost-covered rail with a fearful longing. How he would love to stand out there when the train puffed away, and wave at them all. But they were to sit in the double seats that faced each other, and Daddy said to make themselves comfortable because they would be three days and nights in seats just like that.

Outside in the cold winter air a voice rang out: "Board!" The seat gave a lurch under him. The lights of the station began to move past; there was a slight vibration under them. George held his breath for one unbelieving moment, then jumped for the window.

The wheels on the rails set up a merry rhythmic song that soon became almost part of George, it sounded so natural. Then Daddy said they'd better have supper out of the hamper, and they spread out the big box on their knees.

"Where will we all sleep?" George asked. He wasn't at all sorry to learn they would sleep right in their seats. He had a secret feeling that if he left these friendly cushions he might wake up to find himself in bed in their little house.

Harold took George to the toilet at the end of the car, with the lofty condescension of an oldtimer who had spent his life on trains. George was entranced with the toilet, for when you pushed down a handle the noise of the wheels came roaring up, and they seemed to sing a song: "Over the bunk—over the bunk—over the bunk." Harold had almost to drag him out, after the two of them had tried saying it over with the wheels.

For once they had no family prayers, but Daddy read his Bible to himself for a while, his lips moving.

It was in the piping days of the great trek westward, back in the infant years of the century, and people thought nothing of sitting up in day coaches for the long trip to the promised land. And in this unending parade went the Battle family.

For long incredible days they ground along through the everlasting pine trees, and past the lonely little stations where people with fur caps and mackinaws stood round. Sometimes, if the snow had blown off the roof, you could see the name of the station painted there.

There was a man in the seat opposite them, whom people called Jake. The twinkle in his eye fascinated George. He had an endless repertoire of jokes. Some of them were fairly venerable, but George laughed at them till his sides ached.

"What are we stopped for now?" Harold would ask Jake, knowing what the answer would be. And Jake would say: "A cow on the track." Next stop Jake would wink at Harold and say, "By crackey, they caught up to that cow again."

Three times daily they brought out the great hamper with its munificence. It seemed bottomless, and even when they all ate their fill they seemed hardly to make a dent in it.

"You folks goin' to China?" Jake would ask, eyeing the hamper.

Two mornings of wakening, and George stared out at an amazing white tableland such as he had never seen or dreamed of. For miles and miles beyond their train window it sprawled, as level as a floor. Trees were sparse here, gone were the pines, gone the rocks and the lake. The air was clear as crystal, and in the far distance little farm houses stood out, dwarfed against the gigantic horizon that seemed to have no beginning and no end.

This at last was the p'airies toward which he yearned with all the fierceness of his nature. Here was their new world. For hours they travelled through it, yet always it seemed the same, a still and limitless vastness.

As the sun fell on that day they saw lights rising suddenly around them out of the white plains, blinking in the winter's loneliness; lights and more lights; buildings, forests of telegraph poles beyond all counting. Presently they rattled over open switches, past other trains, and crawled into the yards of the bawling, infant queen city of the West.

"Winnipeg!" The conductor yelled it as if it were a personal accomplishment. Strident, violent, vulgar young metropolis of a primitive empire. Meeting-place of Poles, Russian Galicians, Ukrainians, Germans, cheerful Swedes with their eternal disdain for the Norwegians, and Norwegians with an equal disdain for the Swedes. Scotsmen, Englishmen, Irishmen. Indians from the north, Yankees from the south, hired men from the little fruit farms of Annapolis Valley down by the Atlantic. Country boys from the rocky farms of eastern Ontario, railroad men from everywhere, labour union organizers from Chicago, corn raisers from Iowa, Negroes from the deep South. They were all there.

Rounders and bounders, crooks and politicians. School teachers just out of college with their text-books, their ideals and their sex inhibitions all wrapped together in their imitation leather bags. Preachers who would go out in the stark settlements and propagate the word of God at two hundred dollars a year plus the parish hospitality. Store clerks and stooges and stumblebums who had broken from the known way, and would get a homestead site for ten dollars and then buy a pre-emption for another handful of small change and grow rich. Men with money who would sink it in some far-away gamble and come up broke. Lucky men whose farms would be chosen for townsites, who would become famous names in the country from coast to coast, and whose daughters would be the favourite brides or the swank matrons of the society columns in a later day. They had all come here into this human spillway of the great West.

It was the age of Do. Not a man or woman in those days would have dreamed that, in a single generation, the blight of make-believe would drop on their new homes; that the son of the man who had ripped out his own living would roar for the state to support him. It was nation-building in the raw. The noisy and mighty days when nobody was afraid; the pioneer days when every man had a job or was good for nothing and admitted it.

They were the lush days when an agitator, no matter what his creed, was lumped enthusiastically and indiscriminately with a vague and nebulous outer fringe known as the I.W.W., and which most simple sons of the soil honestly thought meant I Won't Work.

They were the days when the only meaning the word relief had was when you bedded down the horses and oxen for the night, and stretched yourself out on a feather bed, if you owned one; or a straw bed if you didn't, to sleep until the alarm clock went off in the morning. Aye, that was relief!

Communities brought their Bibles and their prayers with them from the back concessions in the East, to invoke the Divine favour for the green shoots. Six days they worked, come rain or snow or fine weather. On the seventh they hitched up horses to their buggies with the rattling steel tires, and drove stiffly off to church in the little corner buildings that had once been painted white, that never, never had their windows opened, so as to keep their stale, musty and sanctified air intact from week to week.

There went the country preacher, who usually preached in three different churches miles apart, once each in morning, afternoon and evening. There went the godly to worship and the godless to gossip. Men unhitched their horses from their democrats, buggies, carts and even wagons and led them into the church sheds. In summer, for variety, the horses stood at hitching posts and lazily switched away the flies while their masters stood in clusters in their Sunday suits and their celluloid collars and dickies, and traded the week's news.

Then in the hard little pews they sat to listen or stood to join their voices in the robust impudence of the Wesleyan hymns. There they prayed for the golden wheat that had gone down into the ground, for the fat seed that was even now swelling boisterously and sending out tender shoots; for the green blankets that later painted the bare fields under the full ardour of summer. From the birth to the bearing of the season, and in turn there were these three prayers:

"O God, send down the rain from heaven."

"O God, who rulest the storms, send not the hail to our crops."

"O God, who hast mercifully sent the sun and the rain to warm and water our growing wheat, cause also the blight of frost to be kept away."

Aloud they prayed for their souls and for the intangible graces. But in their hearts they prayed in this manner for their wheat.

And toward the eve of the harvest the walls rang with the triumphant Sunday School song:

Bringing in the sheaves,

We shall come rejoicing,

Bringing in the sheaves.

Hymn books were closed and laid into their racks, and the little organ was still. The women adjusted their veils, and the men reached under the wooden seats for their hats while the preacher intoned the devout but taken-for-granted benediction:

"And now may the grace of God be with us all. Amen."

The Battle family bundled off their friendly train at last in distant Saskatchewan. Jake saw them to the platform, then climbed hastily back, for the train barely paused at this tiny place. "G'bye!" Jake yelled. "See you in church!"

George waved a brave hand, with tears in his eyes, and a fierce lonely longing in his heart to be back on the train. He felt helpless and bewildered on the snow-covered platform.

Then all at once a friendly voice thundered his name, and George looked up into a bearded, grinning face, atop an enormous frame that towered above Daddy.

"This is your Uncle Jim," Daddy said. George felt no more helpless and alone, for Uncle Jim Black was a fabled and famous character in his vivid imagination. Long had he worshipped him, even though he had never seen him. Uncle Jim was a romantic figure who strode through George's dreams in league boots, and now that he was here he fulfilled all George's ideals and visions of him.

"Hello there, old preacher!" said Uncle Jim. He laughed thunderously and threw back his piebald wombat overcoat from his gigantic frame. Uncle Jim had leather leggings that came to his knees, wore enormous overshoes on his feet, and stuffed into his leggings were overalls with a healthy stain of horse stable and grease all down the front of them. Above that he wore a coat of an old Sunday suit, and under the coat a sweater with a long row of buttons and an enormous rolled collar. He wore a heavy leather cap with fur-lined ear-pieces that came down around his head and had tie-strings to fasten under his chin, only they weren't tied. To George he was a man from Mars, a giant of Gulliver days, a man about whom everything was big.

"And how d'you like the wild and woolly west?" Uncle Jim asked George in a thunderclap of a voice, a great, guffawing voice that rang out to the skies, and made you think that Uncle Jim had a perpetual joke on somebody. He had a face that broke into a million wrinkles, and opened a cavernous gap in the centre of it when he laughed. George worshipped him instantly. Everyone did who knew him.

Uncle Jim bent his giant's frame and swished four or five bags into his arms. "Come on and we'll get in the sleigh and head for home," he bellowed, and strode off down the platform, with the Battle family straggling after him.

At the end of the platform a team of horses waited, hitched to a bobsleigh on which stood a long green box marked "Bain Wagon." Uncle Jim slung the bags up, and told them all to climb in. There were buffalo robes and blankets in the box and the floor of it was lined with wheat straw. A seat ran along part of one side, and across the front was another seat on folding springs.

Uncle Jim took the reins, whirled the horses around, and with a great jangling of bells they trotted down the street of the village and out into the country. Daddy sat on the spring seat with Uncle Jim, and Harold perched precariously but proudly between them. Jean sat on the side seat with robes wrapped around her. George stood by the side of the box, disdaining a seat. The horses' bells kept up a merry Jingle that added to his delirium of joy.

The long, white horizon, serene and patient, unfolded silently before them as they jogged toward it, and rolled stiffly away behind them. So, too, the hopes of a million men were held high, beckoning against the endless sky, holding wide the golden doors of the years into a new way of life.