The CTR Anthology Read online

  Hobo: The day of the funeral, in fact when nobody was at home because they were all at the funeral, I saw a man go up the walk of that house and stand there, pretending to ring the doorbell. He looked around and didn’t see me, and then he took the black wreath off that front door and slipped it under his coat and walked away. I followed him on my bike, and he went over a couple of blocks and into a house, and then he came out with a hammer and a nail, and he hung that wreath on his own front door. I told my dad and he checked and found out that that man’s wife died the night before.

  Young man: I was walking back after trying to find some sort of work, and I saw a woman get out of this big car and stuff a lot of letters into a mailbox. I walked up to it, propped open the slot with a chunk of ice, lit my hankie with a wooden match and, when it was going good, I stuffed it into the mailbox and walked away. Nobody saw me do it. I didn’t feel any better. I was just as cold and hungry as ever. But I had dropped a blazing hankie in among His Majesty’s mail, and that is a serious federal offence, and I could have gone to the penitentiary for a long time. Why did I do it? To this day I really don’t know.

  Song:

  Take me somewhere far away from this madness,

  To a place where the sun stays as well as the moon;

  Bright jewelled eyes laugh at my madness,

  This no-promise living it still makes her blue.

  Oh the sadness of parting we all know in our hearts,

  The absence of touching that seldom seems to show in the dark,

  And all these deep water feelings still spinning me silently upward …

  SCENE TWENTY-SEVEN: THE RELIEF HOME

  Young girl: We were in what was called a “relief house,” everybody was destitute, and your examiner or inspector or relief officer or whatever he was called usually came about every six months. Not so with Mum.

  Farm wife (Mum): Joan.

  Young girl (Joan): Yes, Mum.

  Mum: You take your homework to the library and stay for about an hour and a half.

  Joan: Our relief officer came every month and sometimes every two or three weeks.

  Mum: Joan.

  Joan: Yes, Mum.

  Mum: Here’s a nickel for the show. You can sit through it twice.

  Joan: He was short and had a belly and, oh God!, he was enough to put a woman off men for life. When I’d come home from school or when my sister Eva would come back from looking for a job, he’d be there. It got so he’d be there a lot.

  Mum: Eva.

  Strong woman (Eva): Yes, Mum.

  Mum: Take Joan with you, please.

  Eva: But, Mum –

  Mum: Please.

  Joan: When I needed a winter coat and galoshes, he signed the chit without a word, and we got other things too. A special allowance of milk, I think, and lots of clothes, and extra food, and this man arranged so that Eva and I could go to a Fresh-Air Camp at the Lake.

  Song:

  Oh the sadness of parting we all know in our hearts,

  And the absence of touching that seldom seems to show in the dark …

  Eva: Joan?

  Joan: Yes.

  Eva: You asleep?

  Joan: Are you?

  Eva: Joan?

  Joan: Yes.

  Eva: I’m a grown woman now.

  Joan: Sixteen ain’t grown.

  Eva: It’s enough, Joan?

  Joan: Yes.

  Eva: Why don’t he try for me?

  Joan: Do you want him to?

  Eva: I’d do it.

  Joan: He smells.

  Eva: I’d do it, though.

  Joan: Why?

  Eva: To help Mum; give her a rest.

  Joan: We ought to write a letter.

  Eva: Who to?

  Joan: To the relief people. To tell them what that man’s doing because what he’s doing is again the law and it’s wrong.

  Eva: So’s what we’re doing.

  Joan: What are we doing?

  Eva: If what he’s doing is against the law then taking his stuff, that’s against the law.

  Joan: Is it wrong?

  Eva: It’s right, but it’s against the law.

  Song:

  Take me somewhere far away from his madness,

  To a place where the sun stays as well as the moon,

  A place where the sun stays as well as the moon,

  A place where the sun stays as well as the moon. …

  SCENE TWENTY-EIGHT: FRONTYARD AUCTION

  Song:

  Come to the auction sale,

  You cannot possibly fail

  To find a bargain

  When a man’s life is sold

  For 25 cents, a box of books

  He never did get to read.

  Hobo: Ever hear of front yard auctions? I don’t think they’re legal now.

  Song: Come to the auction sale …

  Hobo: When a family was evicted, the landlord had the right to sell their possessions to get his back rent and, boy, some of those landlords didn’t have any scruples. It was murder.

  Young man: That night a bunch of the boys went around to this man’s house on the edge of town, a big house with trees all around and when he came to the door nobody said anything. They just grabbed him and dragged him down his driveway to where the tar was. Hot, but not burning hot. And they tore off his clothes, and over him from head to foot went that tar. By the way, nobody was drunk, not one. I said tar and feathering, but it was really tar and gravelling. One lad put a rope around this bastard’s feet and another under his arms and they rolled him back and forth, pulled him up and down in the loose gravel and dust of his own lane. You never, never saw such a mess! Then I got down on one knee and said real close to this bastard’s face: don’t you raise that widow’s rent one red cent. He never did.

  Salesman: No, we never thought of the poor people. The reliefers. We’d see them on these make-work jobs, cleaning up back lanes, digging dandelions, hauling coal. I never thought to pity them or help them. Far as I knew, nobody did. They were just there. I can’t remember ever asking myself what made such poverty, such conditions. I was up and they were down. No, I can’t really say that I had a social conscience. Of course, you must realize that such a phrase had not even been invented then.

  Song:

  Think of all the money made in lumber,

  Think of all the tears that once were shed,

  Think of who got gold and count the number,

  Of people whose own lives they never led.

  When the union’s strong – it won’t take long –

  We ride the tide of time;

  I don’t want to hear your lie,

  Oh no, no, no, no,

  I don’t want to hear your lie.

  SCENE TWENTY-NINE: THE RELIEF CAMP

  Quiet man: I am one who is clothed and fed and housed by the Government. I am wondering what the world is doing. I am one apart and I am one of many.

  Hobo: These federal camps were voluntary, you didn’t have to go, but if you didn’t like starving and being hammered about by every cop from Kingston, Ontario, to Vancouver Island, you went. A lot did.

  Farmer: Across the country, most mostly in the West, there were 10 or 15,000 men in these camps.

  Young man: I read once that they figured about 200,000 men were in them, all told, in five years.

  Salesman: That’s 200,000 young men who were really pissed off at society, the Government, the politicians, the army way of doing things.

  Quiet man: Who am I? My name is William George Rundle. I am a university graduate. On all sides of me are men from every walk of life. The creeds and beliefs and religions of all the nations, all the professions, all the trades, all the labouring classes are gathered here. We are complete.

  Hobo: They had turned the running of these camps over to the Department of National Defence and, while the guys in charge weren’t army, they had been in the last war. And let me tell you, a guy who has been a captain or a sergeant-major has a hell of a time forgetting he w
as a captain or a sergeant-major.

  Farmer: We were paid 20 cents a day. 20 cents a day. I’ve told this to people today and they always say, “You mean 20 cents an hour, don’t you?” and I’d say no, 20 goddamned cents a goddamned day!

  Young man: There was one guy in charge at that Hope camp who used to call us slaves. “OK, slaves, off your arses! We’re going to cut trail today!” he’d say, and that was really what we were.

  Salesman: The 20 cents a day was an insult. It was the worst part of it. But you forget that quickly. I only think of it four or five times a day now.

  Quiet man: In our tent city set off in the Saskatchewan prairie, we are a community to ourselves. We could cook, we could tailor, we could teach, we could fashion our own tools, we could design our own power plant and we could build it. And we do none of these things. We sit in the prairie, unused, alone, hidden.

  Hobo: It was the monotony, the jail of it all.

  Farmer: It was a jail. What else could you call it? Sure, all the fresh air and sunshine you could stand, but no women, no music, no streets, no people, no place to buy anything, no sound of streetcars or kids playing.

  Quiet man: We rise and work and eat and receive hospital treatment and retire to the sound of the bugle. Is it an irony in our camp that the Last Post is played instead of Lights Out? The last note floats high into the air and dies in the hills. The prairie folds over us. Every man lies awake and stares into the night. Oh God, what next?

  SCENE THIRTY: NASTURTIUMS

  Strong woman: I see a rutted road between two hills, leading to a cattle gate into a barnyard littered with rusting equipment. There is a house, un-painted the way they always were, and a barn whose boards have bleached in the sun. But on the sheltered side of the house, there were the nasturtiums. Blazing with colour. That’s the farm at Crestwynd in Saskatchewan which was home to my sister and her husband, three nephews and two nieces until my sister died of tuberculosis. From overwork. She died years ahead of her time. And when she went, the nasturtiums didn’t get tended and watered again and the dust moved in and buried what was left and the family just moved out and left that whole section of land to the grasshoppers.

  Song:

  Well the grasshoppers had nothing left to eat,

  So the buggers ate the cushions off the tractor seat.

  Mother tried hard but couldn’t understand

  How a good God could lay such a curse on the land.

  Well the dry dust blew all the hoppers away

  And I’ll never forget that dirty day

  The duststorm left a gopher in the sky,

  Still digging a hole in the clouds so dry.

  Yup some went crazy, were bound to go,

  While others stayed home with the radio.

  SCENE THIRTY-ONE: GO NORTH! THE MOSQUITOES

  Salesman: Northern Alberta! Free land! Rich land! Land so rich it’ll grow country gravel!

  Hobo: Of course it was good land. It still is good land. But, what kind of sappy government, or the land agents in it, would tell people to go up into that country?

  Salesman: Farmers! Immigrants! Why stick around on burnt-out prairie farms? In Northern Alberta there is deep loam and sunshine and rain when you need it! Good land! Free land!

  All: Go North!

  Hobo: Mister, that was pretty powerful bait. In the land office a clerk just looked at the wife and me –

  Balladeer: Alberta.

  Hobo: Yes.

  Balladeer: Land?

  Quiet woman: Yes.

  Balladeer: It’s not my job to tell you to turn around and go back home please, because where your home is ain’t no more, probably. So here it is: Northern Alberta. All this area was taken up long ago. All this is open. Take your pick.

  Hobo: Now I ask you: how the heck are you going to pick out a farm by pointing and saying “there”? But that’s the way it seemed to be done.

  Balladeer: OK, I’ll give you a break. A fellow was in here yesterday and he’s packing and leaving this area. He’s leaving a house and a barn and you might find a few pieces of equipment he didn’t unload.

  Hobo: We’ll take it.

  Balladeer: She’s yours.

  Quiet woman: Why’d that man leave his homestead?

  Balladeer: Wasn’t tough enough. Didn’t have enough money. Didn’t know how to farm that kind of country. Just lost heart. A few other reasons. Do you want it?

  Quiet woman: Looks like your dad is back from town. All right, set the table.

  Hobo: You better get young Jim and the girls and the whole family, for it’s time we held a council of war. Now, foreclosure is coming on awful quickly and the government says there’s good land up north, so …

  Quiet woman: … We’d better go.

  Young man: Can’t be rougher than here.

  Quiet man: Well, I’ve really got to like this district … it’s my life … So we head north. How?

  Hobo: Wagon travel.

  Song:

  Mama said we can’t stay no more

  Got to leave the land, close and lock the door,

  Leave our friends, pack and move away

  Maybe we can all come back some day.

  Sally, Ray and June rode in the cab

  Me and Arthur huddled in the back …

  Hobo: If you were charitable you could call these Goddamn things roads! Freeze in winter, and in summer … muskeg.

  Song:

  The only time I heard my mama cry,

  The only time since my daddy died,

  As we drove away in the pouring rain

  Oh sad and sorry day to be pushed to move away …

  Quiet woman: Another wagon up ahead –

  Young man: They’ve pulled off the road –

  Hobo: Howdy, can we give you a hand?

  Farmer: No, we’ve quit, had enough. Sell you the whole outfit – horses and all – for $10.

  Hobo: Well, I’m afraid the team is in no better shape than ours.

  Farmer: Well, go ahead. It’s not the muskeg that gets you, but the critters that live in it.

  Hobo: Goddamn mosquitoes!

  Farmer: They’re God’s punishment.

  Song:

  My dad had said when I leave this earth

  This farm is ours you know we give it birth;

  Please never let this old place come to harm

  John, keep the land son, for Lord’s sake keep the farm …

  Young man: They’re having the blood sucked right out of them, Dad.

  Quiet woman: They’re too thin.

  Hobo: Can’t afford to give them grain.

  Quiet woman: We’ve already dumped off the cream separator, a chest of drawers, a few sacks of coal and other things …

  Young man: All the mosquitoes in the world are always right where we are.

  Hobo: Don’t worry. They’re as bad a few hundred yards away. Whoa Daisy!

  Young man: You crazy bitch … she’s gone insane.

  Hobo: Black with skeeters and red with blood. We’re not going to make it. The horses just don’t have it in them.

  Quiet woman: We can camp here a few days. There’s pea vine and vetch for fodder and that creek over there is probably boiling with hungry jack-fish.

  Farmer: Smudge fires for the horses, boys –

  Young man: We’ll slather then with mud to protect ’em too; feed them up with some oats – they’ll be OK.

  Quiet woman: They’re not diseased. Just loss of blood and not enough to eat.

  Hobo: No, mother, I just figure both them horses have decided to die. Lost the will to live, and it’s the mosquitoes doing it.

  Farmer: How do you know?

  Hobo: ’Cause it ain’t difficult to feel the same way.

  Song:

  The only time I heard my daddy cry,

  The only time since his own daddy died –

  Quiet woman: The breeze is up now, Dad, it’ll blow the insects away and make it easier. We’ll go on.

  Hobo: Well, it’s three days they’v
e had the mud, the smoke, and the wind; and most of our grain. Time to move.

  Young man: But they’re still down.

  Hobo: I’m gonna boot your Goddamn rumps from here to the Great Slave Lake, but you’re gonna get movin. Daisy! … Christ, she’s dead.

  Young man: So’s the gelding.

  Quiet woman: On the same day. It’s like being stranded on a rock in the ocean, a bare rock, and watching the last ship in the world sail away.

  Hobo: Old girl, that ends it. We come into this world with nothing and at 44 years old, you’re back to nothing.

  Quiet woman: We’ll pack some pots, pans, food, clothes and the rifle and leave the whole kit and kaboodle at the side of the road.

  Song:

  The Sheriff’s men had a paper law

  Signed and sealed by our own banker’s claw,

  Said that we, we had to move along,

  Mama needed help, she didn’t feel too strong,

  And all the children’s sadness it just seemed so wrong.

  Salesman: Jesus Christ, you been walking 17 days? God you were way off the main road. Miles off, shooting off to a place nobody goes.

  Hobo: My fault, should’ve read the sun.

  Balladeer: If you’d waited ’till winter, some lumberjacks with sleighs would have come along.

  Hobo: You mean that was a logging road?

  Farmer: No farm land up that way at all.

  Salesman: I suppose you can’t find that a laugh.

  Hobo: No, I lost two good horses and all my patience finding out. But I’ll tell ya from now on, I’ll kill every mosquito that lands within half a mile of me. I’m pure hell on skeeters.

  Song:

  The only time I heard my mama cry,

  The only time since my daddy died,

  As we drove away in the pouring rain

  Oh sad and sorry day to be pushed to move away …

  Farmer: Me? I’m a Métis: French-Canadian grandfather, Cree-woman grandmother. I’m half-breed: my kids, my grandchildren, all born shit. Everybody north of Prince Albert is Métis. Portuguese on the railway gangs, they’re darker than we are but they don’t take this shit. Yah, the Dirty 30s. Indians, they hate us; white guys, they hate us. Those days everybody had to have somebody to hate, and we were it. Same today. Us? We didn’t hate nobody. Same today. So I hope those Red Power guys sure beat the shit out of those government guys, the bunch of rotten bastards!