The Winter Helen Dropped By

The summer before the winter Helen dropped by was known in some circles as the summer Earl J. Rasmussen and the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, officially tied the knot, and then officially retied it in a reconstituted wedding, and in other circles as the summer my daddy took on the bureaucracy to straighten out the life of Lousy Louise Kortgaard.

Both of those events had their beginnings, I believe, at the Fourth of July Picnic and Sports Day at Doreen Beach, it being the turn of Doreen Beach to host the annual Fourth of July Picnic and Sports Day, Fark having hosted it the year before, and Sangudo being scheduled to host it the next summer. The Fourth of July Picnic and Sports Day was the high point of the social season in the Six Towns Area, a fact often pointed out by the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, our poet-in-residence, and Mrs. Edytha Rasmussen Bozniak who, as Mama frequently said, was lurking in the wings waiting to become the person of artistic integrity in the Six Towns Area, should the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, ever falter. Mama said marriage to Earl J. Rasmussen, who lived alone in the hills with about six hundred sheep, would be considered by many to be faltering.

The Fourth of July, while admittedly an American holiday, was what was celebrated in the Six Towns Area of Alberta. The first of July was celebrated in Canada as Dominion Day, but, Daddy pointed out, and so did people like Earl J. Rasmussen and Bandy Wicker, both of whom had emigrated from the United States, and Wasyl Lakusta and Deaf Danielson and Adolph Badke, who had emigrated respectively from Ukraine, Norway, and Germany, that everyone had come to Canada to be free, which they were, but they resented that Canada wasn’t really an independent country, and each and every one of them resented that the King of England was officially the head of state in Canada, and that Canadians sang ‘God Save the King’ at official celebrations, and didn’t have a real flag but one with the English flag, the Union Jack, sitting in its corner and some kind of gold lion or griffon that made it just reek of royalty, something every one of them immigrants had come to North America to get away from. So no one much objected when the official celebration in the Six Towns Area took place on the Fourth of July. Loretta Cake, who lived in an abandoned cabin near to Doreen Beach with about a hundred cats, said something about it being unpatriotic, and so did a family named Baskerville lived up Glenevis way. He had been a major in the British Army and walked around wearing a monocle and hired Indians to work his land because he described himself as a gentleman farmer. But it was generally agreed that English people didn’t know how to have a good time, and that was the deciding factor.

‘If the English was running the celebration,’ my daddy said, ‘we’d all have roast mutton, give a hip-hip-hurrah for the King of England, and go to bed early.’

Earl J. Rasmussen said he didn’t see a thing wrong with folks eating mutton, and if more did why he’d make a better living.

Daddy said, ‘Mutton tastes like wool,’ and that Earl J. Rasmussen should have settled in England where people eat sheep, wool and all.

One of the many highlights of the Fourth of July Picnic and Sports Day was the fireworks display, which came at dusk. The fireworks had to be ordered, something that was usually done in March or April, or whenever the annual spring flood of Jamie O’Day Creek, which my daddy had named after me, receded sufficiently for either Daddy or Earl J. Rasmussen or Bandy Wicker to ride horseback as far as Fark and accompany Curly McClintock in his inherited dump truck, along with Curly’s son, Truckbox Al McClintock, who once almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League, riding shotgun, to Edmonton where the fireworks were ordered at the Acme Novelty and Carnival Supplies store, on 114th Street, just north of Jasper Avenue.

Acme Novelty and Carnival Supplies store also rented merry-go-rounds and carnival games of skill, like over-and-under and ring toss and the one with cement milk bottles and soggy baseballs and a genuine roulette wheel that had once spun in front of the crowned heads of Europe. Acme was owned by a Mr. Prosserstein, who, it was rumored, was Jewish, though no one from the Six Towns Area, even my daddy, who had traveled widely, had to the best of their recollections ever encountered anybody who was Jewish. Mr. Prosserstein did drive a sharp bargain, they said, but not an unfair one, and he was dark complected, Daddy said, and did speak with an unfamiliar accent, and was disinclined to work on Saturdays, all of which considerations pointed to the likelihood that he was Jewish.

The widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, whose only knowledge of Jews came from a play by William Shakespeare, pointed out that Seventh Day Adventists didn’t work on Saturdays either, and that maybe Mr. Prosserstein was a Seventh Day Adventist. She suggested that they carry a roast beef sandwich with them and offer it to Mr. Prosserstein, and if he turned it down why it would prove he was a Seventh Day Adventist, because Seventh Day Adventists were vegetarians.

Daddy said that a roast pork sandwich would be equally enlightening, because if Mr. Prosserstein refused, it would prove he was Jewish because Jews didn’t eat pork.

Mama said that the only thing a refusal of either beef or pork would prove was that Mr. Prosserstein wasn’t hungry, and what did it matter if he was Jewish or Seventh Day Adventist anyway?

Nobody could answer Mama that and the subject got dropped.

Daddy told me Mr. Prosserstein had offered in strict confidence that for a small extra fee he could line them up with a freak show consisting of a bearded lady, a fat man, and a strong man who could lift a plowhorse off the ground with only one hand, or for an even larger fee he could supply dancing girls along with their own tent and a saxophone player. The men of the community called a Farmers Union meeting in our kitchen in order to discuss the dancing girls, but it was decided that the opposition from the women of the Six Towns Area would be too strong if the offer were brought into the open, and if the show were presented surreptitiously, it was agreed that reprisals by the women of the Six Towns Area would be too loud and too lengthy for the small amount of pleasure derived.

Several times a year, whenever the subject of fireworks came up, Bandy Wicker would have to tell the story of how in his home town of Odessa, Texas, the Fourth of July fireworks display once took on a certain air of tragedy.

‘My cousin Verdell had come home especially for the Fourth of July celebrations,’ Bandy Wicker said. ‘Cousin Verdell, he’d been working way out in Deaf Smith County, doing something simple enough for his mind to grasp. Cousin Verdell was kind of like a turkey, you had to keep his nose pointed down during a rainstorm, or he’d have stared at the sky until he drowned.

‘What happened,’ Bandy Wicker went on, ‘was that the mayor of Odessa, Texas, touched a match to the fuse of the rocket held in place by the length of sewer pipe, and a whole passel of people prepared to ooooh and aaaah at Old Glory lighting up the night-time sky for a guaranteed thirty seconds.

‘People waited and waited, and the mayor walked back and made sure the fuse of the rocket in the upright sewer pipe was burning. We all gathered around the rocket when it appeared that the fuse had burned itself both out and off. No one studied the problem more closely than Cousin Verdell, who was leaning directly over top of the rocket and peering down at goodness knows what.

‘It was about this time the rocket decided to fire itself off, an unfortunate occurrence because Cousin Verdell was still standing directly above the rocket, as if it had some mystical significance. The rocket, filled with Old Glory, including forty-eight silver stars, one for each state, terminated Cousin Verdell, instantly.

‘While there was a certain degree of tragedy involved in Cousin Verdell’s being called to his reward, it was agreed that he had lived longer than anyone that dumb had a right to.’

My daddy would always top Bandy Wicker’s fireworks stories with his baseball stories. My daddy had a million baseball stories. ‘Folks around Doreen Beach,’ he’d start off, ‘were not noted for their baseball prowess. For several years there were only eight men in the Doreen Beach district who could play any kind of baseball. To show the lengths folks around Doreen Beach would go to to field a team, one Sunday when there had been a Holy Roller church service at Doreen Beach Community Hall, the ballplayers hid Brother Bickerstaff’s horse until he agreed to be their ninth player, while on another occasion a group of men rode over to Loretta Cake’s cabin, where she lives with about a hundred cats, with the intention of convincing her to stand in right field as the ninth body on the Doreen Beach White Sox baseball team.’

Loretta Cake, who was at best considered eccentric and at worst somewhat mad, confided to Mama on one of the infrequent occasions when she dropped by our house leading eight square-jawed tom cats on leashes and dressed to resemble a middle-aged Englishwoman playing Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, that she harbored secret rape fantasies, a confession that embarrassed my mama no end, and, Loretta Cake went on, she felt that her secret fantasies were about to be fulfilled when she peeked out her window of a Sunday morning and saw several young men on horseback, wearing mackinaws and slouch hats, resembling for all the world the Dalton gang.

I thought Loretta Cake’s confession to be somewhat humorous, hearing it scrunched up in my favorite listening place between the wood box and the cook stove, as I didn’t understand the implications, rape not being a dinner-table topic of conversation in our household, or any household in the Six Towns Area, except possibly that of Loretta Cake and her cats.

The reason I didn’t understand the implication was because, the summer before, one of the Osbaldson boys from around New Oslo had planted five acres of rape, which grew the most beautiful yellow color I had ever seen, looking for all the world like a five-acre canary squatting in the midst of the Osbaldson boys’ green grazing land.

I thought Loretta Cake’s rape fantasies humorous on two levels, one being that Loretta Cake, even if she did go around dressed like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, should have secret fantasies about a field of yellow grain; and two, that Loretta Cake’s secret fantasies about a field of yellow grain should embarrass my mama.

I did not have the sense to keep my mouth shut, so of a Sunday morning on our way to a Sports Day and Picnic at New Oslo, as we were passing by the Osbaldson boys’ five-acre-canary-sized field I suggested I pick a bouquet of the rape to present to Loretta Cake when she appeared at the New Oslo Sports Day and Picnic.

Across the buggy seat, Mama and Daddy exchanged some of the strangest looks I ever saw them exchange in their entire life together, before Daddy explained to me that the word rape had more than one meaning. By the time he finished I wasn’t sure exactly what the other meaning was, except that I had no call to know of it until I was at least twenty-one and living on my own.

My wanting to take a bouquet of rape to Loretta Cake found its way into letters to Mama and Daddy’s relatives in Montana, South Carolina, and South Dakota, and the ears of the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, which was the same as broadcasting the story on CJCA in Edmonton, the radio station most available in the Six Towns Area to those of us who owned radios.

The story passed through the crowd at the New Oslo Sports Day and Picnic even quicker than pinkeye, and I got my hair rumpled and my cheek tweaked for most of the afternoon and evening, though no one ever mentioned to Loretta Cake, who was there, big as life and twice as ugly, Daddy said, why everyone was rumpling Jamie O’Day’s hair and tweaking Jamie O’Day’s cheek, for a secret is a secret, and Loretta Cake’s secret rape fantasies were safe with everyone in the Six Towns Area.

Even though the proposition by the Doreen Beach White Sox did not match her secret fantasy, Loretta Cake agreed to accompany the Doreen Beach baseball club and to sit behind the saddle of the handsomest ballplayer, who, she said, bore a startling resemblance to the outlaw Wade Dalton. Just as she was mounting the horse it stepped on the tail of one of her cats, and the screech the cat set off made the handsomest ballplayer’s horse rear and throw Loretta Cake onto her posterior and the handsomest ballplayer onto his neck, both on the ground.

The handsomest ballplayer, who bore a striking resemblance to the outlaw Wade Dalton, was a Kortgaard, one of Lousy Louise Kortgaard’s big brothers, and he lay unconscious for some time before being carried to the ball field draped over the back of his horse, while Loretta Cake, cuddling one of her cats, sat in the saddle. His teammates propped the unconscious Kortgaard up on a stack of blankets at third base and began the first game of the tournament against an all-Indian team from the reserve at Lac Ste. Anne.

However, after there was only one out and two runs in, the umpire visited third base, waved his mask and then his cap and then his bare hand in front of the unconscious Kortgaard’s face and, getting no reaction, declared the unconscious Kortgaard ineligible and suggested that someone should send a message to Curly McClintock over at New Oslo to head for Doreen Beach and cart the unconscious Kortgaard to the hospital, forty miles away in Stony Plain. Even with Loretta Cake and her cat in right field, the Doreen Beach White Sox had only eight players and were required to forfeit the game, thus cutting short Loretta Cake’s career as a right fielder.

On the Saturday before the Sunday when the Fourth of July celebrations were to be held at Doreen Beach, Daddy and I accompanied Curly and Truckbox Al McClintock to Edmonton in Curly’s inherited dump truck in order to pick up the fireworks from Mr. Prosserstein at the Acme Novelty and Carnival Supplies store. The cab of the dump truck smelled of grease and exhaust fumes, and the four of us sat ankle-deep in mufflers, crankshaft parts, and expired plugs, points, and condensers. Curly McClintock, who was slow moving and slow thinking, and who, Daddy said, was built so close to the ground his knuckles dragged, had created a son in his own image, except that Truckbox Al’s facial features resembled his mama, the youngest and most bulldog-faced Gordonjensen girl. My own daddy in his bib-overalls, black mackinaw sweater my mama had knitted him, and tweed cap, certainly appeared large to me, though my daddy preferred burly to describe his physical build.

The Acme Novelty and Carnival Supplies store was exactly as I had imagined heaven, full to the eyeballs, as Daddy put it, of every geegaw known to man and a few that weren’t. There were fake false teeth that wound up with a key and chattered when set on a table; a whole section with nothing but stuffed toys, another with nothing but box games, and a jewelry section with genuine diamond rings for as little as five dollars each.

I was allowed to carry one of the two boxes of fireworks to the truck, and while the box was large and had the name ‘Acme Novelty and Carnival Supplies’ stenciled on its side, it didn’t weigh but ten pounds at maximum. I had somehow always thought of fireworks as being heavy.

At the baseball tournament at Doreen Beach, there were four teams: New Oslo Blue Devils with Truckbox Al McClintock playing right field and wielding a big bat, the all-Indian team from the reserve at Lac Ste. Anne – the Indians from Lac Ste. Anne were always able to raise a team, Daddy said, because they had about two thousand people on the reserve, whereas the communities in the Six Towns Area often had difficulty coming up with nine live, or semi-live, players – the Sangudo Mustangs, and Doreen Beach, who, since they were the host team, had made a monumental effort to come up with a full contingent, which they did, without even having to call on Loretta Cake. The unconscious Kortgaard, having eventually recovered from landing on his neck in Loretta Cake’s front yard, had gotten himself married to the second-oldest Venusberg Yaremko girl, who was built like a brick backhouse and who, when viewed from the side, had a startling resemblance to a pig, a statement made in all kindness, my mama said, because, swear on a stack of Bibles, it was true. Now, the second-oldest Venusberg Yaremko girl was taller than the unconscious Kortgaard whether standing up or lying prone, and probably also stronger, for she had once punched out one of the Dwerynchuk twins, either Wasyl or Bohdan, no one was sure which, after a dance and box social at New Oslo, where raisin wine, dandelion wine, homemade beer, and good old bring-on-blindness, logging-boot-to-the-side-of-the-head home brew had been consumed, a good deal of it by the second-oldest Venusberg Yaremko girl, who, it was said with some admiration, could drink like a man.

Outside the New Oslo Community Hall, next door to the Christ on the Cross Scandinavian Lutheran Church, the second-oldest Venusberg Yaremko girl had worked through the stages of name calling, shoving, fist-fighting, and genuine altercation, finally kayoing one of the Dwerynchuk twins, either Wasyl or Bohdan, with a punch, Daddy said, like Joe Louis used to knock out Max Schmelling.

Well, the long and the short of it was that the second-oldest Venusberg Yaremko girl, wife of the unconscious Kortgaard, became permanent right fielder for the Doreen Beach White Sox, and, over a period of two years, they entered seven consecutive sports-day baseball tournaments until one October their pitcher lost his pitching arm in a threshing machine and set the Doreen Beach White Sox to rebuilding.

My daddy admitted there was a certain reluctance to accept a team permanently composed of men and women, though the precedent had long ago been set, and no one ever complained. Mrs. Bear Lundquist, who was sixty-two years old and though she wasn’t arthritic moved like she was, had played first base for the Sangudo Mustangs for more years than most of the players had been alive, plus Mrs. Bear Lundquist was inclined to bring homemade apple pie to each tournament she played in, enough for both the Sangudo Mustangs and their opponents, and while she was a passable hitter, a lifetime .240 average my daddy said, she was also known to keep her fancy work in the big old trapper glove she wore at first base and was known to knit and purl a few stitches while a pitching change was being made. One time with a runner on first, after fielding a one-hopper, Mrs. Bear Lundquist threw her ball of crocheting yarn to the second baseman instead of the baseball.

‘What the heck’s that?’ the second baseman bawled.

‘Pink variegated,’ Mrs. Bear Lundquist replied. ‘Ain’t it just the prettiest shade you ever seen?’

However, the second-oldest Venusberg Yaremko girl was a different matter. ‘Except,’ Daddy said, when him and several friends were gathered out by the corral, ‘that she lacks the one piece of equipment that makes Flop Skaalrud famous, she is a man through and through.’

‘A batting average of .302,’ said Earl J. Rasmussen, ‘and she fields third base like a twelve-foot chicken-wire fence.’

‘I reckon she can pee against the hen house wall with the best of us,’ said Bandy Wicker, that being the highest praise anyone was ever apt to receive from Bandy Wicker. The others present said they had to agree, and with that acknowledgement the second-oldest Venusberg Yaremko girl was accepted as a regular player at sports days, picnics, tournaments, and Fourth of July celebrations in the Six Towns Area.

The fireworks were shot off from the outfield at Doreen Beach, before the Bjornsen Bros. Swinging Cowboy Musicmakers set up in the community hall to play for the dance, which would be interrupted by a box social.

Of course it wasn’t really dark enough to shoot off fireworks, but what with the baseball games being over (the Doreen Beach White Sox won the tournament with an extra-inning 12–11 win over the all-Indian team from the reserve at Lac Ste. Anne), and with the three-legged, the sack, and the wheelbarrow races, having been run, and two tubs of vanilla ice cream Curly McClintock had trucked out from Edmonton that very morning all scooped onto cones and eaten up, there was nothing left but to watch the fireworks and get to the dancing, so with children bawling and whining and squalling, and being tired and dirty-faced, fretful and downright testy, it was no wonder the mothers convinced Bandy Wicker to begin setting off the fireworks while it was barely dusk.

While both Daddy and Bandy Wicker described the rockets of their youth as shooting upward with a whiz and whirr through the blue-black nighttime sky, sending up spumes of red, green, blue, or silver stars that hung in the sky, burning out slowly and leaving behind their images in smoke wavering like moon shadows, the rockets at Doreen Beach on the night of the Fourth of July would fire off with a certain whiz and whirr, but when they got up in the sky there would be a loud bang and a few sickly-looking stars would dribble toward the earth, none of them lasting much longer than your run-of-the-mill firefly. The crowd was prepared to ooooh and aaaah at the spectacular bursts of color in the night-time sky, but the sound that emanated as the few sickly-looking stars dribbled toward the ground was more like a groan.

Bandy Wicker, who, in spite of his propensity to self-injury, had been formally entrusted to light the rockets in the outfield of the Doreen Beach baseball grounds, blamed the poor performance on the fact that the fireworks had been manufactured in China, rather than Juarez, Mexico. He said that if Mexican fireworks were inferior it was possible to take revenge on the Ortega Bros. Fireworks Company of Juarez, Mexico, but he didn’t see no way we could take revenge on a company in China whose name wasn’t even printed in English on the rockets.

Bandy Wicker also wanted to know if we had got a guarantee from Mr. Prosserstein of the Acme Novelty and Carnival Supplies store that our money would be refunded if the rockets didn’t fire off properly.

My daddy, who was pushing the little wire legs of the rockets into the ground so they would be properly pointed at the sky and not at the crowd congregated on the bleachers behind home plate, hmmmed a little, stalling for time, hoping some of the rockets would fire off beautiful bursts of colored stars and forestall further criticism. After a few more rockets had succeeded only in making a large bang and dribbling a few sickly-looking stars toward the ground, Daddy hawed a little, as well as hmmming.

‘Guess next time we’ll have to send a real man to do the job,’ said Bandy Wicker, lighting a couple more rockets, one of which set off with a whiz and whirr, and one of which didn’t.

What folks didn’t notice was that the few sickly-looking stars that dribbled toward the ground carried a certain amount of firepower, and that most of the sickly-looking stars dribbling to earth behind the bleachers tended to set the grass a-smouldering. So little rain had fallen that Brother Bickerstaff of the Holy, Holy, Holy, Foursquare Church of Edson, Alberta, had held a holy roller religious service that very morning in the Doreen Beach Community Hall to extract rain from the high, dry, blue Alberta sky by means of prayer.

Folks did not notice the smoldering grass, or the little fringe of burning grass that crept toward the bleachers, and toward the Doreen Beach Community Hall, and toward the Doreen Beach General Store, and toward the one and only house in Doreen Beach, the residence of Torval Osbaldson and his wife, Tillie, retired farmers who had moved to Doreen Beach to enjoy the hustle and bustle of town life in their declining years. And folks did not notice the fire creeping toward Slow Andy McMahon, all three hundred and some pounds of him, where he sat with his back against a large cottonwood tree, dozing fitfully and eating from several boxes of prepackaged McGavin’s Bakery donuts, and a four-pound tin of Shirriff’s orange marmalade, ‘No Pectin Added,’ which I’m sure eased the minds of anyone in the Six Towns Area who knew what pectin was.