Final Fire Read online

  1956

  Fred is the biggest guy in my grade six class. He shaves ’cause he’s also the oldest, this being his third try at getting to grade seven. Fred doesn’t do English, math or social studies: he spends all day slouching in the back row by the windows making what he calls “art shit.” For months his creative project has involved drawing in nipples, underarm and pubic hair on little white bisque-fired nude girlie figurines. Fred took the money he got stealing hubcaps and bought a whole box of these beauties down at the gas station on the bad part of the main street. In every corner of Room 6C you could hear the scratching of his 2H pencil on the little clay crotches. Our skinny spinster teacher said nothing. She was afraid of Fred.

  But Fred was no one-note Johnny. On various fetes and holidays he’d switch media and make coloured drawings. For Halloween he drew a pumpkin framed by crossed swords dripping blood. He did the swords with a ruler. For Remembrance Day the dripping crossed swords framed a blood-red poppy. There was even more red at Christmas where the swords crossed a yule tree they must have cut down. For Valentine’s both heart and swords dribbled blood. If you were an art person you might have called Fred a primitive serialist.

  Fred never did get out of grade six on account of the fact that he got Lottie Gamble’s panties down by the back wall of the Methodist church across from our school. The day our year ended I ran into Fred pushing an occupied baby carriage into the pool hall. Then I saw Lottie come looking for him. She’d put on a lot of weight. She looked tired. She’d also flunked out of grade six. This was the same year that the Toronto Star did a front-page story on Ontario’s teen pregnancy epidemic and named our town.

  ***

  The muskrats are raising a family under my new docks. All night I can hear those relentless rodents chewing tunnels in the foam billets that keep the docks afloat. Drinking early morning coffee on the rocks I watch the busy little bastards swim into my small harbour with their groceries. I want to evil-eye them to oblivion. The principle of peaceful coexistence is being severely stress-tested.

  Early on a sweet Sunday morning I carry my first espresso in a glass cup out to the high domed rock that guards the harbour entrance. Within seconds of sitting down a muskrat comes paddling in from the inlet. As it follows the shore I spot a mink snaking along the rocks in parallel. Once the muskrat gets within a couple of meters of the water’s edge the tiny mink vaults into the air, lands on the muskrat’s shoulders and rips its throat open. The savagery of the attack is numbing. The morning’s music is gone.

  1955

  Every year there was a town parade. I forget now exactly what it was celebrating but I think it was for the incorporation of the town in the mid-19th century. Members of all the service clubs marched — the Kiwanis; Odd Fellows; all the wild animal orders like Lions, Elks, Moose; as well as the elite that owned their own businesses, the Rotarians. Some people sorta knew how to play instruments so there was a marching band but for kids the best part was on account of the town having a mental hospital hidden away behind trees down near the lake. Every kid in school knew somebody with a parent who worked there. Stories were told about how many patients died getting shock treatments administered by somebody’s dad and how those who survived it were sort of hollowed out in the head. You’d see them wandering around town looking vacant and confused. Since this was pretty scary we all looked forward to the town parade where a few of the better-known out- and ex-patients would amble in the parade dressed in clown suits. It made people watching from the curb laugh. All that was some half a century ago and it seems that now people have made some progress in attitudes but probably not enough.

  The great thing about going to school in a small town was that there really wasn’t all that much stratigraphy. You knew everybody from the guy who lived in an earth hut cut into the railway embankment at the north edge of town to your school buddy whose dad was the mayor. Kids like models and life in this town was a good model of how the bigger world worked. That too was scary.

  School 1957

  Three grubby fourteen-year-olds crouch breathing hard in the dusty dark. We’ve crawled under our new high school’s stage, struck a match and are now unscrewing a vertical grate beneath the wings of the proscenium. Four large screws fall and it’s free as are we after years of heavy discipline in junior school. Our little trio shared a proud history of detentions, the slap of the strap and are now like small pack animals fleeing a cage. We’re beginning high school. We steal, swear, swagger and smash. We cheat, snigger, torture and tease. We get caught, punished, escape and repeat. We’re proud of our recidivism. The adult world is all darkness and anger — big shoes, stiff bodies, dark suits and shadowy hats.

  During this first fall of grown-up school we have been in constant trouble. Our homeroom teacher has had numerous closed-door sessions with the principal so the secretaries watch us anxiously. We push on, explorers in an expanding universe. This grate was our far shore — a New World. We slid it aside and slipped into the mysteries beyond leaving a trail of spent kitchen matches as we slithered through the concrete service tunnels beneath steam pipes and bundled BX cables.

  A few hundred feet in we hit a secondary tunnel branching off to the left. As it was faintly illuminated from its ceiling some dozen yards ahead we decided to investigate. A thin rim of light fell from what was obviously an access hatch giving to the world above. We huddled in the faint gray light beneath it holding out collective breaths. You could hear voices. The loudest was that of Terrible Taft, the school’s principal. A scrape of chair legs on the hatch above our heads revealed a scary truth — we were directly beneath the big man’s office desk. You could hear every word the enemy uttered.

  In this war between students and staff we soon became the chief intelligence officers. We made our moves in the bright world above and then retreated underground to listen as the enemy laid its counterterrorism plans. That fall we scored victory upon victory, our schemes and exploits ever more daring and the administration’s ever more desperate. Our status in our tiny world was rising. Even girls looked at us with admiration. We became a triad — the Gang of Three.

  So the Christmas term ended in triumph. Not only had we saved our skinny asses repeatedly but were able to dispense largesse to older criminals and save theirs. Lofty footballers and track stars from the stratospheric heights of grades twelve and thirteen became clients of the three sages of a dawning information age. We were invaluable. We were heroes. We felt invincible.

  In early January our triad shambled up the hill and back to school in the lambent light of an Ontario winter. The Terror Trio had no chance to reconvene until the first week’s end. We loitered about after the first Friday’s gym assembly and then snuck beneath the stage as janitors put away chairs. We gathered outside the grate and lit a match. It revealed a grim truth. Each screw had been replaced with a weld. Our triad had been ratted out. We were now nobodies.

  ***

  I round a bend four miles down the river and spot the heads of three moose protruding from alders on the bank. When they see me all three withdraw. After I cut the motor the three heads re-emerge, dark, sleek and healthy. We regard each other for a dozen heartbeats before they calmly shamble off into the bush.

  1957

  The Terrible Triad is slouched in adjacent seats for our classics class. While our teacher conducts a declension drill we busily draw jock straps and pushup bras on the statuary in our Living Latin textbooks. We pass notes with crude Latin jokes — Semper ubi sub ubi — Always wear underwear. Snigger, snigger. Miss Wilson catches this and asks our member Pete to translate a Latin passage. He shambles to his feet and says, “Jeez, I dunno. It’s all Greek to me.” The class laughs. He gets a detention. Sandy and I snigger helplessly. We get detentions. Class dismissed.

  ***

  2011

  This river run is another screw-up. I’ve just gotten up on plane in the skiff when I go crashing over a submerged deadhead — those sneaky buggers th
at lowly slide downstream like sleeping manatees. They hide just beneath the surface in the tea-coloured water, feeding on motor skegs and propellers, pitching our boats into the banks. Their message is that this is canoe and kayak country, a land for the slow and watchful not the noisy and rushed. I tilt the outboard motor, grab some pliers from the bilge and rebend the prop blades into something more like a pinwheel than a closed fist. I restart and resume the trip down leaving an oily moiré on the water. I see no animals but I know they watch and wait. They’re always there, alert, patient, quiet.

  1958

  The Triad — me, Sandy and Pudgy Pete Pen-hooker — are prying a board off the high wooden fence surrounding the huge, abandoned leather tanning factory on the main street of town. Once inside the boarded-up block we’ll creep around, peeking through windows at shadowy machinery and spooky tangles of plumbing and cables hanging in mysterious, soot-gray light.

  We’re putting off our real mission — the terror walk across The Pit. The northern half of the site was occupied by an enormous waste reservoir planked over with rotting 2x10 timbers. If you peered down between the boards you could just make out the viscous black liquid filling the block-long toxic lake that was rumoured to be bottomless. You’d gotta prove yourself by nonchalantly ambling hundreds of feet across the pit’s decaying wooden cover all the way to the far end. Otherwise you’re a pansy scaredy-cat.

  We’d tied each other to tracks, run around the woods shooting each other with pellet guns and rolled used four-foot heavy equipment tires downhill through the downtown four-corners at night but nothing was as scary as falling through the dark into a vast poison pit. This was a recurring trial. Twice my foot broke through crumbling planks and I’d had to casually extract my leg and saunter on. I’d made it!

  Does anyone today parking their minivan in the lot of a big chain grocery store now on that site have any notion of what is below the tidy, painted parking spaces?

  Directly across main street was another 19th century dark, satanic mill. The Malleable Iron & Brass Works was still operating in the 1950s. Mr. Nichols, the bald and pudgy choirmaster of the Anglican church, was office manager and bookkeeper of what the townies called the Buckle Factory. I knew him not only from choir practice but also because this mill was on my paper route. After I’d delivered the local Thomson broadsheet to inmates of the county jail I’d drag my canvas news bag up the stone steps of the mill office building and hand Mr. Nichols and his pair of desiccated female assistants their newspapers.

  If fussy old Nichols had any business on the factory floor he’s occasionally let me tag along as he made his way through the blackened halls of the mill’s many wings. Even by the standards of small-town 1950s the place was astonishingly archaic. Long drive shafts hung from cast iron bearings in the ceilings. Big iron pulleys drove leather belts looping down to machinery on the oil- and grease-soaked dirt floors. Dark men in blackened bib overalls ran spinning, reciprocating machines. Fires in the melting heaths supplied the lighting. Our job, on the way home from school, was to break that factory’s windows.

  Pete, Sandy and I wade through the grain fields down to Highway 401 to meet CN steam locomotive 5031 where the tracks cross the big road. The engineer and fireman know us so they wait until we climb aboard for the ride back into town. This spur line runs through fields up to a big lumberyard where they drop a load, pick up some grain and chuff back to the city. There are never much more than a half-dozen cars to the train but there was always a caboose with a cast-iron stove. The caboose cupola was a favourite place to ride and feel big. Sometimes we got to drive the locomotive when it was deep in the fields and nobody could see.

  One summer a long strange train crept up our spur line. You could spot its lurid cars far out in the yellow fields long before we could read the big red banners painted on their sides. The whole foreign outfit came to a clanking stop only two blocks from my house and a door opened on one of the long silver cars. A wrinkly trunk snaked out of the darkness inside. Shit, there was a jeezly elephant in there! A ramp was dropped and another elephant and another and another and more club-footed down onto the cinder road. Soon a long line of elephants, trunk to tail, were lumbering down Highway 2 toward the small city where they still make cars and pickups.

  ***

  This night, as restless waters grumble outside, I have a dream. I’m walking along Bloor Street in Toronto carrying a bear cub. No one pays us any attention as I try to find something for it to eat. A woman stops me and suggests a can of cat food. I continue to walk, and walk, and walk — Bloor is a very long street and the cub is heavy. I fail to find food. The dream gradually fades.

  Next morning after coffee I pull on a sweater and jacket and descend to my aluminum skiff. The engine hard-starts in the morning cold. I reverse out of my little harbour, twist the shift and accelerate up the inlet toward the river mouth. I’ve left a few things in my van six miles upstream on the Reserve.

  Once on the river I round the first big bend and spot a bear cub high in a north bank tree. I cut the motor and glide toward it. As I close on the tree I realize that there’s not one bear but three. The overburdened tree protests. Three pairs of bright black eyes stare. The middle cub begins to descend, scrambling over its kin, grounding and disappearing into the alders. The lower one follows while the topmost cub visibly debates — freeze and wait? Ignore and eat? Flee? Reluctant and resentful, it gradually descends and shambles off into the mysterious bush. My boat drifts back the way it came.

  1957

  My entire troop is lined up in our public school gym. As a patrol leader I’ve been told to stand before them all in my best uniform. My shirt is stiff with badges — I’ve even got the bronze and silver Arrowheads. I should be exemplary but I’m up here as a bad example. We’d gone camping the week before. I’d filled my canteen with my homemade apple wine. I’d kindly shared it with the boys in my tent. I got caught.

  It was now only a decade since the Second World War’s end that most old soldiers only wanted to forget. Deprived of command, a few martinets had moved over to scouting and one of them stood before me now, red-faced and trembling with virtuous rage. Scouting had been my father’s idea — his understanding of boyhood. I thought it ridiculous — the animal hooting of cubs, the paramilitary ranks, all the parades and marching and those minor military men who loved bossing boys.

  My crime is announced. I brought booze on a camping trip. Rrrrrip. My silver Arrowhead is torn off my shoulder by raging-red-face. I smirk. I gave fermented apple cider to twelve-year-olds. Rrrrrip. My bronze is gone. I don’t repent or apologize. Rrrrrip. My leader’s stripes are torn away. Now I’m free.

  ***

  I’ve cut the motor and drift alone, slowly spinning, down the river. I’m trying to learn the patience of plants.

  1955

  “Smelly Telly, stinking Star, Globe and Mail ’s the best by far.”

  A dozen grubby 12-year-olds slouch in the shadows as vans from Toronto enter the backside of town’s main commercial block to drop off the day’s big city newspapers. We are divided into tribes based on the paper delivered. Bundles are broken into routes, stuffed in cotton shoulder bags and dumped in the heavy steel carriers on our handlebars. The carriers disappear into the December darkness. It’s collection day — hours of slogging through slush, ringing doorbells and waiting in the damp chill to collect payment from delinquent customers. There are many deadbeats.

  Tonight I’m the last one out. I sit under the only streetlight — surrounded by pickups, old Chevys and garbage cans — gawking at photographs of distant wars, movie stars, hockey goals and car crashes. Someday I’ll see these things for real and make the pictures.

  ***

  Last night a flock of jays flirted around my island for an hour before moving on. This morning the only bird is a big black crow stiff-legging from log to log at the water’s edge.

  1959

  Our fall term French exam is being held in th
e school gym where beige desks are ranked in long rows on a beige floor between beige walls. I’m hanging with a small group of panicked crammers outside the entrance doors. At the nine o’clock bell the staff march us in and I distractedly stuff my declension cram-sheet into my back pocket and shuffle up to a desk near the stage. The big doors close with an echo.

  Teachers patrol the rows distributing exams. The room falls silent and we’re ordered to begin. We have two hours. Pens scratch, paper rustles and shoes scuffle — we’re fighting for our lives. Just past the halfway mark I hear a footfall at my back and feel a hand slip into my back pocket. The forgotten cram-sheet is withdrawn and shoved under my face. I’m marched out of the room by my old Latin teacher. Court is The Principal’s Office.

  Terrible Taft is triumphant as is the Latin teacher who crosses her arms in smug victory. They’d never been able to nail our trio but one is better than none. They will have their revenge and they do. When our graded exams are returned before Christmas each of mine — French, Latin, history, geography, algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics, even health — is defaced with a fist-sized crimson zero.