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And I imagine that the special character of the men who worked in the Foundry was going to change, as the processes of the work changed. They would become not so different from the men who worked in the factories, or at other jobs. Up until the time I’m talking about they had seemed stronger and rougher than those other workers; they had more pride and were perhaps more given to self-dramatization than men whose jobs were not so dirty or dangerous. They were too proud to ask for any protection from the hazards they had to undergo, and in fact, as my father had said, they disdained what protection was offered. They were said to be too proud to bother about a union.
Instead, they stole from the Foundry.
“Tell you a story about Geordie,” my father said, as we walked along. He was “doing a round” now, and had to punch clocks in various parts of the building. Then he would get down to shaking out his own floors. “Geordie likes to take a bit of lumber and whatnot home with him. A few crates or whatever. Anything he thinks might come in handy to fix the house or build a back shed. So the other night he had a load of stuff, and he went out after dark and put it in the back of his car so it’d be there when he went off work. And he didn’t know it, but Tom was in the office and just happened to be standing by the window and watching him. Tom hadn’t brought the car, his wife had the car, she’d gone somewhere, and Tom had just walked over to do a little work or pick up something he forgot. Well, he saw what Geordie was up to and he waited around till he saw him coming off work and then he stepped out and said, Hey. He said, hey, wonder if you could give me a lift home. The wife’s got the car, he said. So they got in Geordie’s car with the other fellows standing around spluttering and Geordie sweating buckets, and Tom never said a word. Sat there whistling while Geordie’s trying to get the key in the ignition. He let Geordie drive him home and never said a word. Never turned and looked in the back. Never intended to. Just let him sweat. And told it all over the place next day.”
It would be easy to make too much of this story and to suppose that between management and workers there was an easy familiarity, tolerance, even an appreciation of each other’s dilemmas. And there was some of that, but it didn’t mean there wasn’t also plenty of rancor and callousness and of course deceit. But jokes were important. The men who worked in the evenings would gather in my father’s little room, the caretaker’s room, in most weather-but outside the main door when the evenings were hot-and smoke and talk while they took their unauthorized break. They would tell about jokes that had been played recently and in years past. They talked about jokes played by and upon people now long dead. Sometimes they talked seriously as well. They argued about whether there were ghosts, and talked about who claimed to have seen one. They discussed money-who had it, who’d lost it, who’d expected it and not got it, and where people kept it. My father told me about these talks years later.
One night somebody asked, when is the best time in a man’s life?
Some said, it’s when you are a kid and can fool around all the time and go down to the river in the summer and play hockey on the road in the winter and that’s all you think about, fooling around and having a good time.
Or when you’re a young fellow going our and haven’t got any responsibilities.
Or when vou’re first married if you’re fond of your wife and a bit later, too, when the children are just little and ru
My father spoke up and said, “Now. I think maybe now.”
They asked him why.
He said because you weren’t old yet, with one thing or another collapsing on you, but old enough that you could see that a lot of things you might have wanted out of life you would never get. It was hard to explain how you could be happy in such a situation, but sometimes he thought you were.
When he was telling me about this he said, “I think it was the company I enjoyed. Up till then I’d been so much on my own. They weren’t maybe the cream of the crop, but those were some of the best fellows I ever met.”
He also told me that one night not long after he had started working at the Foundry he came off work around midnight and found that there was a great snowstorm in progress. The roads were full and the snow blowing so hard and fast that the snowplows would not get out till morning. He had to leave the car where it was-even if he got it shovelled out he couldn’t tackle the roads. He started to walk home. It was a distance of about two miles. The walking was heavy, in the freshly drifted snow, and the wind was coming against him from the west. He had done several floors that night, and he was just getting used to the work. He wore a heavy overcoat, an Army greatcoat, which one of our neighbors had given him, having no use for it when he got home from the war. My father did not often wear it either. Usually he wore a windbreaker. He must have put it on that night because the temperature had dropped even below the usual winter cold, and there was no heater in the car.
He felt dragged down, pushing against the storm, and about a quarter of a mile from home he found that he wasn’t moving. He was standing in the middle of a drift and he could not move his legs. He could hardly stand against the wind. He was worn out. He thought perhaps his heart was giving out. He thought of his death.
He would die leaving a sick crippled wife who could not even take care of herself, an old mother full of disappointment, a younger daughter whose health had always been delicate, an older girl who was strong and bright enough but who often seemed to be self-centered and mysteriously incompetent, a son who promised to be clever and reliable but who was still only a little boy. He would die in debt, and before he had even finished pulling down the pens. They would stand there-drooping wire on the cedar poles that he had cut in the Austins’ swamp in the summer of 1927-to show the ruin of his enterprise.
“Was that all you thought about?” I said when he told me this.
“Wasn’t that enough?” he said, and went on to tell me how he pulled one leg out of the snow, and then the other: he got out of that drift and then there were no more drifts quite so deep, and before long he was in the shelter of the windbreak of pine trees that he himself had planted the year that I was born. He got home.
But I had meant, didn’t he think of himself, of the boy who had trapped along the Blyth Creek, and who went into the store and asked for Signs Snow Paper, didn’t he struggle for his own self? I meant, was his life now something only other people had a use for?
My father always said he didn’t really grow up till he went to work in the Foundry. He never wanted to talk about the fox farm or the fur business, until he was old and could talk easily about almost anything. But my mother, walled in by increasing paralysis, was always eager to recall the Pine Tree Hotel, the friends and the money she had made there.
And my father, as it turned out, had another occupation waiting for him. I’m not talking about his raising turkeys, which came after the work at the Foundry and lasted till he was seventy or over, and which may have done damage to his heart, since he would find himself wrestling and hauling around fifty-and sixty-pound birds. It was after giving up such work that he took up writing. He began to write reminiscent pieces and to turn some of them into stories, which were published in an excellent though short-lived local magazine. And not long before his death he completed a novel about pioneer life, called The Macgregors.
He told me that writing it had surprised him. He was surprised that he could do such a thing, and surprised that doing it could make him so happy. Just as if there was a future in it for him.