The Badger Riot (16 page)

“About a thousand, I think. Why?”

“I'm just trying to imagine a place where everyone knows your name.”

The whistle blew. The conductor yelled. “All aboard for Port aux Basques and points between.” Audrey quickly squeezed his hand and gave him one of her unforgettable smiles. As the train pulled out of the station, she went out of his life again.

During the winter of 1954, they wrote to each other quite often, and when summer came, Audrey came back to St. John's to stay with friends.

Richard was in a dither of excitement. Mama told him to ask her for supper, but before he brought her he said, “Now Mama, no calling me Dickie, please. I want to be called Richard. I hate that Dickie business.”

They had a nice enough evening. Richard's foster parents liked Audrey, and he supposed she liked them. They didn't have much common ground, but they all tried. Audrey told them about her parents
and about the little town in Central Newfoundland. Papa Abernathy was interested in the pulp and paper industry and the dense forests of the interior. He was that kind of person; wanted to know about everything.

Once, Audrey slipped and called Mama Mrs. Fagan. She apologized and asked her how old Richard was when he came to live with them.

Mama said proudly, “Dickie was seven years old, twenty years ago this winter.”

Richard groaned to himself.
Stop with the Dickie!
He quickly changed the subject by jumping up and saying it was getting late and they needed to be going.

As they grew to know each other better, Richard asked Audrey how she felt about marriage. He hadn't declared himself to her as yet, but he wanted to sound her out.

Audrey said she was full of doubts.

“Richard, life is different in Badger. People are different. You have no idea. My family is very important to me. Perhaps you should make a trip out to Badger and meet them. After that, if you still want to, we'll discuss how I feel about marriage.”

So the next step was for Richard to go to Badger.

They planned their trip to Central Newfoundland. Papa's Studebaker would have to stay home. In 1954, the few roads there were in Newfoundland were unpaved, potholed and narrow, and when it rained there were many washouts. The best mode of transportation to the interior of the island was definitely by train.

From the old railway station in St. John's, it was a fifteen-hour trip to Badger. Richard had never been off the Avalon Peninsula before and being a city boy had no idea how big, empty and lonely the island could be.

After they crossed the isthmus of Avalon, the landscape changed dramatically: no more weird rock formations and desolate bogs.
Now there was heavy forest stretching unbroken for miles. Mountains and rivers and lakes wherever your eye looked. Richard was entranced. Audrey had seen it all dozens of times and pointed out things of interest.

And they had a fine day of it, laughing, talking and reading. Mama had packed a grand lunch basket: cold chicken, salad, ham sandwiches made with her own homemade bread, cookies and small cakes, bottles of ginger ale. They ate as they clickity-clacked along. Many others were doing the same thing, although some went to the dining car.

Audrey told him more about her family. Her father was a woods contractor, she said. She wasn't very knowledgeable about his work, saying that he operated a woods camp for the A.N.D. Company. She'd never been in a woods camp. Women weren't encouraged to do that. It was just the way things were.

The long summer evening came to a close and they rolled into Gander in darkness. When they got going once more, the conductor dimmed the lights and passengers settled down to doze as best they could.

Audrey slept on Richard's shoulder. He put his arm around her and drew her in close, resting his chin on the top of her head. He realized that, no matter what awaited him in Badger, or whether her parents liked him or not, Audrey was the person with whom he wanted to spend his life.

It was after midnight when the conductor walked through, calling, “Badger, next station.” The train came to a halt. Conductors slammed open the doors. Richard followed Audrey onto the platform.

Mr. Anderson was there to meet them. The two men shook hands, sizing each other up as men do. The word that came to Richard's mind was staunch – a staunch man. Rod Anderson was of medium height, solid, compact, clean-shaven, dressed in a summer shirt and pants. He looked like anyone you'd meet on the streets of St. John's. Richard thought,
What was I was expecting, a Paul Bunyan
–
type person with a bushy beard, an axe over his shoulder,
and a booming voice?
He felt somewhat ashamed to be thinking that way.

The house was nice, not as nice as his parents' home but nice just the same. It was late. Too late for cups of tea and talk. They all went upstairs to bed. Audrey's mother, Ruth, showed Richard the spare room, saying the bathroom was downstairs should he need it.

Next morning, Richard sat with Audrey and her parents for breakfast. He felt uncomfortable, as if he were under scrutiny. He supposed it was only natural, seeing as he was being viewed as a possible suitor for the Andersons' daughter.

He tried a little conversation. “Mr. Anderson, I am surprised to find that you have amenities like electricity, running water, indoor plumbing. In St. John's we always believed that the outports had nothing like that.”

Mr. Anderson chewed his bacon slowly. “First thing you have to remember, son, is that Badger isn't an outport. We are sixty miles from the ocean. Second, this is a Company town. We're here because of the stands of timber across the Exploits River that supply the pulp and paper industry. This is the centre for the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company's Badger woods division. Many Company personnel live here, from England and other foreign parts. It's necessary that they have good living conditions.”

“I never knew any of that, sir.”

“No reason why you should, son. Lots of stuff I don't know about St. John's, too. Before you go back, I'll take you across the Exploits – the River, we always calls it – and show you the woods operations.”

Audrey was impatient to get out and about and show him the town. “Come on, Richard, finish your breakfast. It's a beautiful day. Let's take a walk around town before it gets too hot.”

And it was hot. Audrey said that was the peculiar thing about living in Badger. Summers were very hot and winters were extremely cold. When she took him to the place where the three rivers met, Richard was amazed at the powerful waters. The only water he was used to was St. John's Harbour and Quidi Vidi Lake. The deep swift-flowing Exploits was a new experience.

Audrey's favourite spot, the great round hill, gave a panoramic view of the three rivers and the little town. The place had a magical, dream-like quality. “Beothuks used to be here,” she said, as though that explained everything. She pointed out a mountain in the distance. “Hodges Hill,” she said, “highest point of land for miles.”

They walked around the town in half an hour. Everyone knew Audrey and she knew them. People shook Richard's hand. What a different way of life! Richard couldn't imagine how people lived from day to day, month to month, year to year with no pavement, no Water Street stores, no city buses, no Bowring Park. But then, what right did he have to look down upon the little town of Badger?

When Cecil Nippard was ten years old his mother died from stomach cancer. She was only forty-two years old. That was in 1952. His strongest memory of her was that at every mealtime, day in and day out, all she ate was bread and tea. She said anything else gave her stomach pain. When she died, it came to Cecil's mind that maybe she'd starved to death.

His father didn't know what to do with his two young children: Cecil, ten, and Emily, eight. Then he found a woman from somewhere over around Herring Neck, married her, and brought her to live with them in Rodgers Cove, Gander Bay. He used to go in the lumberwoods when he wasn't fishing. The woman from Herring Neck was fierce cruel. With their father gone so much, Cecil and Emily grew up to hard work, beatings, being barred in the attic, going to bed hungry.

When he was fourteen, Cecil went to work in the woods cutting pulpwood with his father. He was glad to get away from the mean woman his father had married and felt sorry for Emily who was left behind, but he had other more important concerns. Father said he had to learn how to survive in a man's world. That was 1956. If there was one thing Cecil was good at, it was dates. He could remember every date of any event, big or small.

Cecil didn't have much luck with the woods camps. Within a week, he sank the blade of an axe into his leg. The blade was dirty
and the wound became infected. He was laid up in Badger, it being too far for him to go all the way home to Gander Bay.

That was when he met the Mi'kmaq lady, Missus Annie Drum. When they brought him down off Sandy with the leg all swelled up and red and throbbing like a son of a bitch, someone got him over to Missus Annie, who knew Indian cures, they said.

He lay on the daybed in her kitchen and watched the old woman set a match to a thick yellowish substance in a dish. It burned for a few seconds before she blew it out. While it was still hot she smeared the substance on a clean piece of cloth and bound it around his swollen leg.

Cecil was scared out of his mind. “What's that?” he asked.

She laid a kind hand on his fevered brow and spoke gently. “That, my son, is myrrh from the bladders on a fir tree. I cuts it off and squeezes out the sap.”

He limped up the road from the loggers' staff house three times a day, and she would dress the wound until all the pus and infection was gone. He tried to give her some money before he went back to the camps. She wouldn't take it, so he left a two-dollar bill on the table, under the tin of Carnation Milk.

A couple of months after that, at another camp, while watching a little tom-tit eating crumbs of bread from his hand, Cecil was hit by a falling tree. It knocked him out a cold junk. He was dizzy and stomach sick afterward. The foreman told him to go on down off Sandy, ending his stint as a logger for awhile. He was told to come back when he was older.

In the same year, the family moved from Gander Bay to Windsor. Father wanted to be closer to the woods, and his sister lived in Windsor. The bitch stepmother came too. In the six years since he'd married her, she had produced five other children. Emily's life wasn't much more than that of nursemaid for them all.

Father told Cecil that he would have to try the woods again when things started up the next spring. By then he should be old enough not to keep getting hurt, he said. He was disappointed in his
son because he didn't seem to be much good for any kind of work. The stepmother called him stupid, but his father always stopped short of saying that himself.

Pastor Damian thought long and deeply on what Jonathan had written him regarding conforming to society by taking a wife as was expected of him. He looked around Badger for someone who he thought would suit him. There were half a dozen young women who simpered over him, hoping to be noticed, but they all had flaws. One was too fat, another too skinny, another too beautiful – heaven forbid that his wife should outshine him in beauty. He didn't want a woman who was too smart or one that wasn't smart at all. After all, she had to be a pastor's wife and help with the congregation.

His housekeeper, Mrs. Adams, who did not live-in, but came to clean and cook three times a week, had a daughter, Virtue. Damian liked Virtue. She was the right age, a good Christian, and ordinary in her looks. He got to know her better when her mother broke her ankle and Virtue took over Damian's housekeeping.

Surprisingly, Virtue treated Damian differently than any other female ever had. His good looks didn't put her in awe as it did most women. She wasn't coy and wasn't what Damian considered foolish and romantic.

They took to walking along by the River on summer evenings.