The Winter Helen Dropped By. W. Kinsella P.

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СКАЧАТЬ and we could tell she was anxious to get to wherever she was going. Mama packed her a big lunch with four meat sandwiches and a quarter of an apple pie, and Mama packed up a whole bundle more baby clothes and forced them on Helen. I gave Helen my picture book with the story of the three little kittens, and said ‘rat pie,’ as I gave it to her, and Helen said ‘rat pie,’ as she accepted it. And we all laughed like maniacs.

      Daddy and me and Benito Mussolini, my cowardly dog, all walked Helen as far as the barn, where Daddy sent me in to pick up another gift for Helen, which she accepted, and Daddy shook her hand and I hugged her, and she went on her way. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t keep big tears from rolling down my cheeks.

      ‘I know about how you feel,’ Daddy said. ‘You’ve had your first taste of being a parent. In spite of Helen being an adult, expecting a baby of her own, she was out of place and more or less helpless while she was with us. It’s awful easy to love someone who’s helpless.’

       Chapter Two

      The summer before the winter Helen dropped by was not named for one specific event, but for several, unlike the summer following the winter Helen dropped by, which was forever after known as the summer Jamie O’Day damn near drowned except in our family where it was simply the summer Jamie damn near drowned, though the season really was spring and there was ice in the water I damn near drowned in.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ