Читать книгу Faster Than Wind - Steve Pitt - Страница 7

For fifteen minutes the stall merchants complained long and bitterly to the police about the constant trouble newspaper boys caused. To the cops it was just one more paragraph in a long story. Nearly every day there was a complaint somewhere about newsies. We were just poor kids trying to make a living, but to established merchants we were one step lower than skunks raiding the garbage.

“Who’s going to pay for this mess?” the market manager demanded, pointing at the hundreds of broken Christmas ornaments.

“They knocked over my cheese wheels!”

“My tripe and trotters are ruined!” Mrs. Dunkle shrieked.

“I’ve got six feet of spruce stuck in my deep fryer!” Mrs. Dee cried.

I wasn’t going anywhere. One of the cops had me by the neck. At the very least I suspected I was going to spend Christmas Eve in jail. Several of the Kellys who hadn’t escaped the butchers would likely be joining me. None of us would have a silent, holy night.

“This lad here didn’t do anything!” Mr. Crane insisted.

A butcher named Graffman scowled. “Him? He started the whole thing!”

“He was running away from those Kelly thugs!” Mrs. Weekes, a flower stall vendor, added. “They’re always hurting people.”

“Bertie’s a good lad,” Mr. Crane said, pointing at me.

“He’s telling the truth, Jack,” Tommy said.

Jack seemed to give Tommy’s opinion considerable weight. He looked down at me like a bored cat clutching a rodent with his paw, trying to decide whether to let me go or bite my head off. “I hate newspaper kids,” he finally muttered.

“Royal George looks good for Boxing Day, Jack,” Tommy said quietly.

“What are the odds?” the cop asked.

“Three to one on Phelan’s IT.”

“So then why Royal George?”

“Phelan wins when the wind’s up. Royal George wins when the wind’s down.”

“You think it’ll be down?”

“Wind’s blowing strong from the west tonight,” Tommy said. “That usually means a lull for a day or two afterward. Three to one Royal George.”

Jack released a long, beery sigh. “What’s your name, boy?”

“Bertie McCross, sir.”

“McCross?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where do you go to school?”

“Parkdale Public, sir.”

Jack and the other policeman exchanged glances. The powerful hand gripping me let go of my collar, and my heels touched the floor for the first time in five minutes.

“Okay, McCross,” Jack said. “This is your first, last, and only warning. Stay out of my beat. Go peddle your papers in Parkdale.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And if I ever see you again, you’ll be getting a taste of this,” Jack said, smacking a lead-weighted nightstick hard against his hand.

“Yes, sir.”

“But the rest of you pikeys are going to lockup,” Jack growled. “If you’re lucky, you’ll get out by St. Valentine’s Day.”

The Kellys were frog-marched out between the cops and a posse of butchers. I scanned the crowd for Sean, but he was long gone. I noticed the blond girl again giving me one final look. Then what I had thought was a suit of armour suddenly moved. The metal suit turned out to be a woman in a silver dress. Her starched silk dress looked so much like sheets of metal that I fully expected to hear it squeak and clank as she hustled the beautiful blond girl away. My eyes followed them to the door, and when the young lady glanced back and smiled one last time, I felt blood rush to my face.

“You’d better go home, Bertie!” Mr. Crane suggested, suddenly smiling. He had seen me gazing at the young girl. His voice brought me back to reality.

As I thanked Mr. Crane and the flower lady for standing up for me, I saw Tommy and Ed heading out the south doors. I ran after them. “Hey!” I cried.

“Hey, yourself,” Ed answered.

“Thanks a lot. You saved me — twice.”

“You made the day ... different,” Tommy said.

“I always seem to do that for people whether I want to or not.”

Tommy laughed. “Yeah, you climb pretty good there, kid.”

“Hey, Tommy, we could use him,” Ed said.

“What?”

“For the race crew. Did you see the way he hanged on?”

“Hung on,” I said. I had my father’s unfortunate habit of correcting people’s bad English.

Tommy and Ed looked at me funny and then broke out laughing. “Well, he can sure climb, but he’d probably still be scared silly,” Tommy said.

“He just took on the whole Kelly clan and is still standing,” Ed said.

“You’re right. He might have some guts.”

I had no idea what they were talking about, but I wasn’t anxious to leave, with Sean and what was left of his gang likely still out there.

“What’s your name, anyway?” Tommy asked.

“Bertie.”

“Bert, you ever been on an iceboat?”

“No,” I told Tommy, “but before tonight I’d never climbed a Christmas tree, either.”

Tommy laughed. “He’s crazy.”

Ed grinned. “We need crazy.”

“You’re right.” Tommy put a hand on my shoulder.

“C’mon, Bertie, we’ve got something to show you.”

With Ed and Tommy as my escorts, we walked out the south door. The St. Lawrence Market used to sit right on the waterfront. Now much of the shoreline had been extended south with landfill, but a water canal had been left so that small boats from Lake Ontario could still sail up almost to the foot of the market to deliver their goods. At this time of year all the water between the Toronto shoreline and the islands was frozen solid. The silhouettes of several cabbage heads bobbed in the shadows as we walked south, crossed some railway tracks, slid down a steep bank, and strode out onto the frozen canal.

Parked in the ice channel was a large wooden contraption that looked as if a sailboat had collided with a horse sleigh. It was an iceboat. All my life I had seen them dashing across Toronto’s harbour at incredible speeds. My father had told me that with the right wind they were the fastest vehicles on earth. They certainly seemed to crash more than any other vehicles on earth. In the wintertime the newspapers were full of stories about races and crashes. Many people were injured every year. Sometimes someone even died.

“This is the Marinion,” Tommy said. “Want to take a ride?”

I was scared spitless, but with a shoreline full of Kellys still waiting for me, I said, “Love to.”

“Climb aboard,” Tommy urged.

“Where?” I asked.

“Up here,” Ed said, indicating a tiny triangular-shaped platform at the rear end of the boat.

“Can all three of us fit up there?”

“Are you kidding?” Ed said. “On a race day there’s five or more onboard.”

“You guys race?” I asked as I climbed into the box.

“Yep,” Tommy said. “Hang on!”

I felt the back end of the boat lift as Tommy and Ed picked up the vessel and flipped the rear runner so that a metal skate faced down onto the ice. Then they climbed aboard and began yanking ropes and spinning pulleys. A sail rose suddenly like a shark fin, and when the wind caught it, the boat started to move. We sailed out of the water channel and into the main harbour.

The Marinion increased speed rapidly until we were going as fast as a galloping horse. In the moonlight I thought I could see some shadowy Kellys riding double and triple on bicycles racing along the eastern shore in a vain attempt to keep up with us, but they were soon left behind.

Wind whistled in the rigging overhead, and the blades on the ice made a dull, roaring sound as the boat glided along. We were sailing southeast toward the Toronto Islands. The islands were actually a collection of sandbars that protected Toronto’s harbour from the big waves of Lake Ontario. Some people, like Tommy, lived on the islands year-long, but mostly they were deserted in the winter. It was because of the islands that Toronto’s harbour froze over, forming a perfect iceboat racetrack.

Sometimes the ride on the boat was so smooth I thought we had come to a halt except that objects on the ice suddenly whizzed past as if they had been fired out of a cannon. Other times we’d hit some rough ice and I’d feel my teeth rattle as the boat shuddered violently and I had to cling tightly to the platform to keep myself from being thrown off.

Bang!

Without warning the boat leaped off the ice and landed hard a dozen yards later.

“What the heck was that?” I asked.

Tommy shrugged. “Pressure crack. The wind and the currents cause the ice to shift. They cause a ridge to form and they’re hard to see at night. No worry unless the winds open the ice and we fall through a hole.”

“Can you swim?” Ed asked me.

“Yes.”

“Too bad,” Ed said. “That water’s so cold that if we fell in we’d be dead in less than a minute, anyway.” Both he and Tommy laughed.

Yes, I thought, crazy was definitely a good thing to be on this contraption.

The easternmost island, Ward’s, suddenly loomed very close. That meant we had crossed half a mile of ice in a matter of seconds. Tommy turned the tiller bar hard, and the boat swung with a spray of ice and creaking wood. The thick wooden beam that ran along the bottom of the sail swung straight at us like a huge baseball bat. It stopped just inches from my face. Tommy and Ed ducked without even appearing to think about it and began pulling ropes and readjusting the sail. In a few more seconds we were heading back toward the city.

“Switch sides, Bertie,” Ed said. “You’re slowing us down.”

Carefully, I ducked under the beam and sat on the opposite side of the boat.

“Where do you live?” Tommy asked.

“Over by the old fort. But the wind’s going the wrong way. We’ll never get there.”

“Not a problem,” Tommy said as he turned the craft west. Now the wind was almost against us.

The boat appeared to be moving even faster. We hit a few more pressure ridges, only this time we seemed to barely feel them. We just sailed over the gaps. The wind was hitting our sail from the left, making the left forward runner occasionally lift off the ice.

“Hang on and c’mon up,” Ed said as he stood and started moving forward on the boat.

“What?” I asked.

“C’mon. Let’s see what the old girl will do tonight.”

Following Ed’s lead, I stood. Just two feet below, the ice continued to roll past faster than a horse could run. Ed was already halfway up the boat. Looking from above, an iceboat was constructed like a cross. At the bottom of the cross was the small platform where Tommy, Ed, and I had been sitting. Where the platform ended, all there was to stand on was a wooden beam about ten inches wide. It led to the front where an even thinner crossbeam went out about ten feet on either side. That was where the mast also rose. The sail billowed out to the right. Clinging to a skinny rope, I inched forward one baby step at a time until I reached the crossbeam. Ed was already out on the left crossbeam, holding on to another skinny rope that ran from the boat’s left blade to the top of the mast. I felt as if I were the bravest guy in the world just getting as far forward as the mast.

Bang! We hit another pressure crack. My head bumped hard against the mast. I looked over my shoulder, expecting to see an empty space where Ed had been standing, but he was still there, leaning back with his legs flexed.

“C’mon, Bertie!” Ed called “Best ride in the country!”

I glanced down.

“Don’t look down,” Ed immediately said.

“Just grab the rope and step out!” Tommy called from behind.

My legs felt like jelly. As skinny as that main beam was, it seemed like a boardwalk compared to the crossbeam. But if Ed could do it, so could I. With my left hand I reached up and grabbed the rope that ran from the mast to the runner. With my left foot I groped about until I felt the side beam underneath me. Gingerly, I shifted my weight from my right leg to my left, then extended my right hand and grabbed the rope.

“That’s the way!” Ed said. “You’re a natural!” He nudged me in the ribs with his elbow “What a view, eh?”

“Yeah!” I said. From where Ed was standing he couldn’t see that both my eyes were closed.

“Nothing to it,” Ed murmured.

Until I stepped out, the left crossbeam had been bucking like an irritable bronco. Now the Marinion was running smoothly along the ice, and I could finally force myself to open my eyes. I saw that we were now about fifty yards from shore, running neck and neck with a westbound express train. I could see people in the passenger cars reading newspapers and talking while we overtook them and pulled ahead.

“Hang on!” Tommy yelled as the wind suddenly increased and the left runner hiked up again.

As the blade left the ice, Ed and I leaned back to keep the craft from tipping. It was the most terrifying experience of my life — and I never felt so happy. Memories of the Kellys, the cops, the whole rotten last year of my life seemed to peel away one layer at a time.

The light at the end of Queen’s Wharf seemed to race right at us. Tommy adjusted the sail, and the boat instantly slowed down. Twenty yards from shore he let the sail drop altogether, and we coasted gently to a stop.

“My legs feel wobbly,” I said as I stepped down onto the ice.

“Does that mean you don’t want to race then?” Ed asked.

“Heck, no!” I said. “I mean, yes! I want to race.”

“Then come to the foot of York Street on Boxing Day,” Tommy said. “We’ll be racing with my father, but he’s almost finished his new boat, the King Edward. As soon as he’s done, the Marinion will be mine and I’ll need my own crew.”

“I’ll see you on Boxing Day,” I promised.

“We’ll be looking for you,” Tommy said as he and Ed picked up the tail of the Marinion and turned the boat to face the lake again. They climbed aboard and dropped the sail. “Race starts at noon!” Tommy shouted as they faded into the darkness. “Come early and we’ll give you a sailing lesson.”

The ground felt suddenly strange under my feet as I walked up the wharf toward Bathurst Street. I turned left at Niagara Street and continued northwest along the silent roads. My neighbourhood was a jumble of failing businesses and dilapidated little houses full of overworked people. From a stockyard nearby I heard the sad lowing of doomed cattle. My home was a tiny red-and-yellow-brick cottage on Defoe Street that looked as if at one time it had been a farmhouse all on its own in the country, but now it was sandwiched between a Chinese laundry and a stable belonging to a knacker named Hacker who collected and disposed of dead livestock.

Because it was Christmas Eve, both the laundry and dead animal smells were absent for once as I trudged around the last corner. A light snow had fallen. No lights were visible from inside the house as I swept our three sagging wooden steps with a nearly bald broom. Then I took a minute to enjoy the rare fresh air and study the few stars that could penetrate the tangle of naked tree branches overhead. It was hard to believe that this was the same sky I once looked up at from the grand porch of our “good” house over in Parkdale.

After a last deep breath, I opened the front door and was nearly knocked over by the smell of something burning. Either the horsehair couch in the parlour was on fire or my mom was cooking again. The former was definitely preferable. Father sometimes let his pipe ashes fall onto the furniture, and my mom was probably the worst cook in Toronto, if not Canada. I had to step carefully. The hallway was dark and so crammed with oversize furniture that it was like crawling through a cavern without a torch. Groping with my hands, I finally found my way into the parlour.

“Evening, Bertie,” said a muffled voice from the corner. I could smell pipe tobacco. No other fire was visible, so I figured Mom must be destroying dinner.

If a visitor ever had to describe our front parlour, he would be hard-pressed to say whether the room was painted or papered, since every inch of wall space was covered by makeshift shelves straining under the weight of fine leather books. Nor could that same person likely tell what time of day he was visiting because the bay window looking out into the front yard was bricked up floor to ceiling with more books. Still more books rose like twisting stalagmites from the floor. Over the only piece of visible furniture in the room, Father’s wing chair, several huge stacks of books had collapsed together to form an arch. Father was sitting under the arch with a book open on his lap and a handkerchief in his right hand. He was already in uniform, his shoes perfectly polished, but his freshly shaved cheeks were wet with tears. Christmas Eve or not, he had to leave for work in two hours.

“How you feeling, Father?”

“Fine, son, fine,” he said, wiping his cheeks with the handkerchief. He smiled weakly, and after a few awkward seconds, dabbed his cheek again.

I smiled back. “What are you reading?”

He held up a thick orange leather book. “On Snowshoes to the Barren Grounds: Twenty-Eight Hundred Miles After Musk Ox and Wood Bison by Lieutenant Caspar Whitney, Royal Navy.”

“Is it good?”

“Can’t tell yet. I’m only on page fifty-seven.”

Father usually took at least a couple of hundred pages to decide whether he liked a book or not.

“Right now Lieutenant Caspar’s describing how he’s trying to prepare himself for Arctic camping by sleeping outside on a normal English winter night with only one blanket. He’s been at it a week, and so far he’s done more shivering than sleeping.”

“He must want to go to the Arctic pretty badly,” I said.

“It would sure be something exciting to do,” Father said with a faraway expression. “The farthest north I’ve ever been is Calgary and that was by train. I’d sure love to go somewhere someday on snowshoes.” He dabbed his eyes again.

Not very long ago my father had been the general manager of one of the biggest bicycle companies in Canada. He had travelled a lot and had made heaps of money. But he had also worried about things like the price of steel, the shortage of leather, and whether he should order more of something today or wait until next week in case the price per ton went up or down a few cents.

His decisions had been important because the lives of many people had depended on them. The bicycle business was quite competitive, and if someone like him made the wrong decision, people lost their jobs. If it rained a lot, people stopped buying bikes and workers were laid off. If the company made blue bikes and customers decided that year they wanted red, workers were laid off. Sometimes the company’s board of directors would tell Father to close a profitable factory because they had bought another one where people were willing to work for less money. Father’s real passion was designing things, and he hated the pressure of being responsible for making decisions that affected workers’ lives.

One day he started to cry. No reason. In the middle of a conversation with his production manager about laying people off, the tears gushed and he couldn’t stop them. He hid in his office and bawled for four hours. He came home by horse cab and cried throughout the night. He went back to work the next day, but the tears kept flowing. The board of directors became very concerned.

They told him, “Your services are no longer required.” And suddenly my father no longer made bicycles. With my father not working we soon had to leave our big home on Dunn Avenue in Parkdale and move to this tiny house. Eventually, Father found a job as a night watchman in a ten-floor warehouse on Spadina Avenue where he worked six nights a week with no time off on holidays. He still cried, but no one could see him except us, so he figured that was okay. He also got to read at work.

When he worked at the bicycle factory, he never had time to read, though he still brought home a new book every week. At least with the new job he was able to read. My mom didn’t really like the way the books took up most of the house, but she didn’t say anything because when Father read he stopped crying.

At the warehouse Father just had to stay awake in case someone tried to break in. To prove he didn’t sleep through his shift, he had to carry a clock apparatus on a long leather sling around his neck. On each floor of the warehouse there were two keys, each chained to the wall at opposite ends of the floor. Every hour my father had to walk through the entire building and punch each key into the clock. In the morning the warehouse owner looked at the clock to see what time each key had been punched. If there were any spaces on the time paper, my father would lose his job.

To stay awake all night, Father taught himself to read while he walked. He took the freight elevator to the top floor and punched the first key, then turned around and stepped toward the other side of the warehouse, reading as he strolled. When he bumped into the far side, he punched the other key and then went down a flight of stairs and began again. It worked most of the time, but occasionally he came home with a black eye or a bruised shin from bumping into things. Once he even fell down a fire escape. He returned home looking as if a horse had kicked him. “I got off lucky,” he had told Mom and me, holding up the book he was reading. “Look, not a scratch.”

“Father, I had an iceboat ride today,” I said now as I peeled off my sweater.

“Iceboats? They were invented by the Dutch, you know.”

Only my father would know something like that, I thought.

Before I could say anything else, Mom walked into the room. “Why does it smell like a forest in here?”

“Bertie had an iceboat ride today, Mildred.”

“Then why is he covered in pine needles and sap?”

“It’s a long story.” I told them what happened except for the porcupines.

“Well, your days as a newspaper boy are over,” my mom said as she scrubbed the pine tar off my face in the bathroom.

“We need the money, Ma,” I reminded her.

“Do not call me Ma. I’m your mother. We need money, yes, but we don’t need it if it’s going get you killed. Climbing a Christmas tree. Riding an iceboat. Well, I never!”

“But —” I began, but a soapy washcloth got jammed in my mouth.

“No buts. You’re not going back to that market. You’ll either end up hurt by those Kelly mutts or arrested by the police. Don’t worry. We’ll get by and something else will turn up.”

And something did turn up, but not a job. That night a small package wrapped in brown butcher’s paper arrived with a note. It said: “Merry Christmas. Tastes like chicken. L. Crane, Butcher and Purveyor of Fine Wild Game.”

“What on earth are they?” my mom asked when she opened the package. Inside were two freshly cleaned animal carcasses.

“Rabbits perhaps?” Father suggested.

“And it looks as if they’ve been tenderized already,” my mom said. “What a dear man.”

I nodded. If you ever needed to tenderize a porcupine, all you had to do was find the nearest Kelly.

Because Mom had destroyed dinner, I offered to cook the “rabbits.” I had become a much better cook than my mom just by watching the food vendors at work at the market. I cut up the porcupines into small pieces, dredged them in flour, salt, and pepper and then braised them with onions, preserved tomatoes, and dried rosemary the way I had watched Mrs. Giancarlo, an Italian cook, prepare leftover game from Mr. Crane’s stall.

I knew Mom was embarrassed that she couldn’t cook, but it wasn’t fair. Until my father had lost his job, my poor mother had never lifted a frying pan or sifted a cup of flour in her life. As the daughter of an Anglican minister, she had been trained by her mother and her finishing school to supervise servants. She knew exactly what went into beef bourguignon, but she couldn’t peel a carrot without doing herself harm. Her once beautiful ivory hands were now red from harsh soap, stove burns, and festering knife cuts, but she never complained. Her family in England still had no idea what had happened to us. “No need to worry them,” Mom always insisted. “Things will get better.”

The porcupines were delicious except that they tasted more like pork than chicken. I guess that was why French Canadians named them pin-pigs. We had a quiet Christmas Eve dinner. Afterward, Father read to us about Lieutenant Caspar shivering in his blanket. Then it was time for him to go to work and for us to go to bed.

That night I dreamed I was sailing alone across Toronto’s frozen bay on a huge iceboat that, instead of a mast, had a huge Christmas tree bending into the breeze. Porcupines and German sausages swung in the branches. And somewhere in the breeze a Christmas chorus of Kellys went “Aww-waww-waaaw!”