Opposite Contraries (18 page)

On the other side of the wharf was a long, low, red-brick building which was the Hudson’s Bay trading store. It had small windows and long counters round the walls. They sold everything and had jars and blankets and boots and lanterns. There were always a lot of Indians squatting round the Hudson’s Bay store. Indians brought their canoes right up to plank landings here and there along the waterfront. Just across the little harbour was the Songhees Indian Reserve. There were a lot of great flat-roofed community buildings with earth floors and long holes in the roof for smoke to escape. Indians did not use chimneys, they had bonfires on the floor. Travelling tribes used to camp on the Reserve beach. There were always glowing beach fires and canoes drawn up and tents on the sand or over canoes. I loved
anything to do with Indians. The Reserve was a glory place for adventure to my imagination, but even had it not been cut off by water it was forbidden absolutely to children. But one could look across at it from Father’s store.

Father’s right-hand man was called Ross. He was tall and deaf and stupid. He had a square jaw and when he did say anything it was strained through a long moustache. He was all pepper and salt: clothes, hair, everything. He had a high desk and stool and was always writing in big books bound in grey leather and very substantial; they looked like Bibles and I don’t believe, even [if] they had not been Father’s business books, they could have lied or permitted anything false [to be] entered there. Mr. Ross had two high stools he could sit on, but he preferred to stand on one leg with the loose one turned around the one that was fixed. There were two plain chairs for visitors; only people who had big business came to Father’s store. Father sold only by the case or the barrel or the gross. The store was filled to the high ceiling with cases and bales lettered in straight black letters, and what was in them was all mystery, though I suppose the great leather books knew, and the letter press and the pigeonholes were full of letters about where they came from and where they were going. I think it would have taken a thousand me’s stood one on top of the other before the top of me would have reached them. The store was so deep; it was a long narrow walk between the boxes from the front door near the office to the back door that led into what Father called the yard, which was not a yard but a great rough shed with a high dirty window that let in only grey light, even on bright days. The yard was piled with empties, packing cases and straw. It was a thick place with a smell as grey as the light, and in the dimness you never
knew when you would meet green and yellow fireballs which were the eyes of Father’s cats. Father had dozens of cats to keep mice and rats away. He was very fond of his cats. Every morning he took a big bottle of milk to the store for the old mother and kitten cats. There were always kittens peeping out of straw packaging in the yard. They were shy creatures and never came up to the office. It was so dark back in the store that rats might be expected night and day, and Father expected his cats [to work]. Neither he nor Ross sat long by the big round stove in the office toasting themselves. Nor did he expect the cats to.

Father was a man who turned his corners square. Nothing rounded or slurred. There was something I forgot in the store office. On a long shelf below Father’s and Ross’s desks there were shelves, and on them stood glass jars filled with Father’s English candy samples. After Father had gout, Mother used to send him a little stone jar of hot soup at noon. We liked to go down with the soup because one of the jars would come down and we got one of the candies. Tiny hard candy that would sit under your tongue for the entire mile’s walk home. The candy was always hard and pure and English.

One day, Alice and I went with Father’s soup, and while he was showing Ross about shipping boxes, we stood on his desk and stole some square acid drops out of a bottle. We did it very quietly and stuck them in our pockets and started home in a hurry. There were no pavements in Victoria; the streets were dirt and the sidewalks wood, generally two planks carried over the biggest rocks and deepest holes by trestles. We hurried from the store, hoping Father would not reach for the acid drops bottle and notice how few were left in it. After we had passed the Customs House and were on the trestled walk, we
came to a large pot hole. I do not know if it was my idea or hers, but the candies came out of our pockets and went one by one not into our mouths but down the pot hole. There was really only one street in Victoria, Government. The shops were one storey high. I can only remember our stores. You went up sour, dirty stairs to R.B. Thompson, the dentist’s office. He had practised such a painful expression to seem sympathetic that [it] had become glued on his fat red face, and his nose had those lifted sides that mean bad smells. My pretty big sister took me to Dr. Thompson’s to have a tooth drawn and I bit him, and because of his initials being R.B., I labelled him Royal Beast, which my sister said was wicked.

Carts and buggies bumped along Government Street; the business part was only two blocks long, The shops I can remember were a dry goods called Brown & White’s, a stationer called Hillen, Mr Spencer’s who had a dry goods and clothing, all sorts. Mr. Goodacre’s butcher shop. Sanders’ grocery, the post office, a tobacco shop called Campbell’s Corners with two bulletins where men read the news. Besides this there were dozens of saloons. The doors had sort of slat pinafores just high enough to hide men’s bodies and faces but not their shoes and shins. They didn’t latch. Men pushed and they shot in and slapped noisily shut. I longed to see through these half doors but they shut too quickly and a smell of beer and sawdust came out that was horrid. It was strictly insisted that we always look the other way when passing a saloon. Perhaps that was the reason I wanted so hard to poke my head [in] and see what it was that these slat pinafores hid.

The naval base of Esquimalt was three miles out of Victoria. There were always men o’ war in Esquimalt harbour and there were always sailors coming out of the saloons. A few lesser
streets branched out of Government: Bastion Street, where the courthouse stood, and Fort Street, which had a few smaller shops, Clay’s cake shop and Tippin’s fruit, which had very shiny apples polished on Mr. Tippin’s trouser leg, and Mrs. Laidlaw’s hat shop and a lot more saloons — the Beehive, the Bellmont and the Hub etc. After one block, Fort Street turned residential. After she married, my sister had a house with a beautiful yellow plum tree, a black cherry tree [with] fruit that hung so high it only tantalized and could not be reached, and a verandah covered with a big vine. It was because my big sister married and went to live at the top of Fort Street and you had to go through town to visit her that I got my ambition and saw the other side of a saloon door. I went to see my sister and was to come home by myself, the first time I had ever come through town alone. I felt important but a little frightened.

Suddenly there was a tremendous shouting and dust and noise and barking of dogs. A great drove of cattle from the ranges in the upper country had landed at the wharf in front of Father’s store and were being driven over to Goodacre’s pastures and slaughterhouses at Cadboro Bay. The animals were wild from the range and mad with fear of having been shipped. Men on horseback bewildered them by shouting and cattle dogs kept at their heels. The steers tore every which way, racing on the plank sidewalks and slipping into open ditches. Their hooves thundered on the walks and in the street, dust clouds blinded everything. I was watching the dogs keeping the crazed cattle from entering people’s gates and into the store doors. They were almost upon me when I was caught up in the arms of a huge nigger man. “I’ll take care of you, li’l gal,” he said, and swerving backwards through the swinging doors carrying me with him, he sat me down on the bar among all
the shiny taps and bottles. And there I sat with my legs dangling and wondering which I wanted to see most — the bad inside of a saloon or the excitement of the frantic cattle.

When the cattle were past, I dashed home. “Where do you suppose I have been? With a nigger right inside a saloon. I sat among the bottles and saw the man polishing up the taps, but I hated the smell. I don’t like saloons.”

My sister Alice knew an awful lot. She was two years older than I. My sister Lizzie, two years older than Alice, thought she knew everything. My great big sister did know everything. Mother knew all about God, and Father knew all about earth. I knew more than baby Dick and yet I was always wondering.

There were a great many things to wonder about. Some of the wonderings started inside you, almost like a stomach ache. Others started in things which you saw or smelled or heard or felt or tasted. The wonder lived in them but rushed out and tapped and tapped until you let it inside your head, and when it got into your head it ran round and round until you asked a grown-up about it. Then the wonder stopped plaguing you.

Just before we were called in from the garden to go to bed, the flowers all looked nodding and heavy-loaded, the birds had called goodnight, and Bong, the China boy, had finished washing up [and] was starting for Chinatown, looking very nice in a cloth coat buttoned with tiny round buttons up one side and high up to
the throat. The shirt was split up both sides and hung like the tail of a shirt which was not tucked in. He had loose dark trousers, a soft round black felt hat and a long pigtail of black hair, with silk plaiting in the end and bound with a tight little cord of red silk. But the best of Bong was his Chinese shoes. They had a soft shuffle and no heels. The soles were an inch thick and white and the tips were embroidered. Bong’s face was pockmarked, his clothes lovely, and he was good right through and very punctual. And it was just when Bong came down the path and opened the gate, a strong high gate with a stiff iron catch and very tall poplar trees each side, that this wondrous noise began.

It was a strange sound and began in a little way, not like music but as little pieces of harsh noise, as if people were dragging sticks across little picket fences very quickly. More and more sticks rattled ’til it seemed as if millions and millions of people were dragging sticks over thousands of fences. “Listen, girls, what is that noise?” Alice said [she] did not hear anything special. Lizzie said, “It’s only spring noises, you silly.” First the noise seemed here, then there, then everywhere. Suddenly they would all stop, so suddenly it frightened you. Then all would rattle together again; such a tremendous racket that filled the world sometimes I thought they were quite close to me and sometimes the whole world was cram full of the racket except just where I stood.

I was glad to hear Edith call, “Bedtime, children.” I wanted [to pull] the covers over my head. We trooped in to kiss Father and Mother goodnight. Mother was sewing and Father reading the paper. The big lamp had just been lighted and a fire was burning in the grate. As Father turned the paper over, he said, “Spring is here. The British Columbia nightingales are turning up.”

“Where are they, Father?”

“In Beacon Hill Park.”

Edith said, “Come!”

[The sound came] in our dormer window very loud. Edith puffed out the candle. The noise seemed stronger still in the dark.

I asked, “Can we have the window shut, please?”

“Certainly not, you stuff little girl. It’s a mild spring night.”

“I want to shut out the noise.”

“Fiddlesticks. Go to sleep.”

I moved close to Alice. “Alice, what are nightingales?”

“Some sort of beast, I think.”

“They must be ’normous.” Alice’s “Umm” was sleep talk.

I tried to size nightingales in my mind by their noise. No matter how hard Dede pounded on our piano, it could not fill the night with noise like that. Nightingales must be bigger than pianos. Our cow was bigger than the piano, but even when her calf was taken away the moo-oo-s that made her sides go out and in were tiny compared [to] this noise. The ship’s band in the Queen’s birthday parade had died away when out of sight, even though it still played. The nightingales were beyond sight in the park but they were very loud. The cannon that banged at nine in Esquimalt so that people could set their watches right rattled the windows in Victoria but was over quick and was not so loud and tremendous [as] the noise of the British Columbia nightingales. To think the creatures were right were in Beacon Hill Park, lying in the swamp! Hidden by the bushes. Perhaps that was why we were never allowed to go there, and Lord it was boggy. I heard Father bolt the front door and then the grown-ups came upstairs.

“Mother!”

“Why aren’t you asleep, child?”

“Mother, what are nightingales?”

“Birds — go to sleep.”

“How big are they?”

“We do not have them in Victoria.”

“But Father said.”

“It is a joke out here to call the little [tree] frogs B.C. nightingales. Now go to sleep.”

“Good night. Oh, I am glad Mother.”

“Glad?”

“I thought British Columbia nightingales were enormous things that lived in the swampy part of Beacon Hill Park and I wasn’t ever going there again. But it’s only frog music.”

I shall call this story “Mother” because it’s all about Father. What Father did and said was the only thing that mattered to Mother. I wish I had known Mother before she was Mrs. Father. I cannot ever imagine her as Mrs. Mother because she died two years before Father, so we never knew her apart from him. And Auntie, who was not an aunt at all, came out from England a bride with her husband when Mother came out from England as a bride with Father. They came all the way round the Horn. This mock aunt said Mother was the sweetest little girl bride, eighteen years old. She had very dark hair and bright blue eyes and pink cheeks. She was small and Father was a tall, strong
man. He had a beard when I knew him, but that was not ’til long after, for I was number eight of his nine children.

Father did not like babies. They were little and red and he ignored them as being beneath his notice, so we were Mother’s babies only until we toddled around and looked with queer fright up into those grey eyes under straight dark brows and Mother primed us gently to say “Father.” No Dada shortcuts. Then Father accepted us. Only once did Father accept one of his children in its cradle. It was Lizzie, number six. Edith and Clara, numbers one and two, were succeeded by three little boys, about a year apart, who each up and died after a few weeks or months. Mother’s heart nearly broke. Those babes of hers meant so much, and she had to double parent them because Father did not help. And then another baby came, and Mother was so happy to have it snuggling in her arms, she did not mind that it was a girl. To Father, the new little girl was just “another,” ever thoughtless of the squirming pink bundle because it was not a Richard or Henry or Thomas come to carry on the Carr tribe name. “She’s like your family, Richard. That nose!” But Emily had grown so frail after her little boys died, to please her he bent and tweaked the child’s nose. It got to be a habit; when he passed the cradle, he tweaked the baby girl’s nose. But Lizzie grew up with an “unCarrish nose,” and when Mother said it was a pity, he was frigid and ignored the next three of us as we came along and left our noses alone. When, however, we were old enough to admire him, he took us one after the other as a pet, dropping the youngster above who [was by] then beginning to — well, to understand and fear the rigid sternness with which Father ruled his household. And [the] child ran back to Mother and gave her love, and Father reverence.