The Badger Riot (28 page)

His mind went back to the day before his wedding. He had felt strongly that he should tell Audrey about his early life. It was always in the back of his mind, like a festering sore, never quite healing. She deserved to know the shame he felt, shame that no amount of love from the Abernathys could erase.

Audrey was a good woman. She had never pressed him for details of his adoption; she always called him Richard, even when Mama slipped. Yes, she deserved to know just who and what he was.

First he had taken her to Mundy Pond. The old house was still there. There were some miserable-looking kids scrabbling around the door. It could have been Richard and his brothers of twenty years ago. As he'd looked through the car window at the desolate scene, memories flooded through his mind. His throat was constricted with emotion and for a moment he couldn't speak. He coughed to clear the choking sensation from his throat.

“That house was my home until I was seven years old, Audrey. Perhaps when you hear what I'm going to tell you, you won't want to marry me. Well, here goes. Father wasn't much of a provider at the best of times. He worked at a meat shop downtown and drank most of his earnings. Our house in Mundy Pond was as poor as could be. Five of us kids slept in one bed by the stove with one scrawny blanket to cover us. The floor was just packed earth – no floorboards. My father never repaired the broken windows. They were stuffed with cardboard or rags to keep out the wind and rain.
We had an old stove that gave no heat, even if you were two feet away from it. There was no running water and no toilet.”

Audrey sat there, staring at the house, saying nothing.

Richard continued doggedly. “I was born into this world with tuberculosis. Did you ever hear tell of that? Well, it's true. Congenital tuberculosis. My mother had it while she carried me and I got it through her blood. They say there were only three hundred cases worldwide and ten of them were in Newfoundland.”

Audrey pulled her gaze from the house and looked at him with widened eyes. “You had TB?”

He nodded miserably. “I was told, years later, that immediately after my birth, Mother and I were taken to the Sanatorium. They separated us then. Infants had their own isolation unit. Mother wasn't allowed to see me or hold me or feed me for a year. I wonder about that now and then. Is that why my mother and I had no mother-son bond between us?”

Richard paused and looked out at the decrepit old house. “After I went with the Abernathys, I had to have a patch test every three months to check and see if the TB had come back. Then it was every six months. By the time I was fifteen, it was once a year. It never returned. I think that was due in part to my upbringing by the Abernathys. Good nourishing food, restful surroundings and a lot of love and care. I have been TB-free ever since I was released from the San at just a year old. I suppose those old cures really worked, or at least they did for the baby that I was.”

He waited for Audrey to say something, but she was silent.

“My mother's stint in the San with me as an infant threw the rest of the family into disarray. My brothers were left with no mother and a father who couldn't look after them. The Children's Aid packed them off to Mount Cashel. When I was one year old, they discharged Mother and me as cured. We came home to Mundy Pond and my brothers were sent home from the orphanage. Mother still wasn't very strong. Certainly not strong enough to care for all of us. Father was never there for her. When he wasn't working, he was off somewhere drunk. I don't know how my poor mother coped at that time.”

Richard stopped talking and put his head down on the steering wheel of the car. He hadn't wanted Audrey to see his tears.

She gently touched his arm. “Richard, that's enough. Let's go.”

He put the car in gear. “I want to take you somewhere else. I have to finish this story.”

They'd driven across town to the Anglican Cemetery and walked to his mother's grave.

Standing in the graveyard, Richard continued his story. “One evening, when I was seven, Father didn't come home after work. That happened quite often. We had no coal for the stove. We were cold and had no fire to cook supper. Mother said she would go out to buy a bag of coal. I was bundled up in scarves and sweaters to go with her. She left the other boys at home huddled on the bed, trying to keep warm from their body heat.

“It seemed to me, with my seven-year-old legs, that we walked a long time before we came to the place where they sold the coal. I tried to take it from her and carry it, but I was only a slight little fella and I couldn't lift it. Mother hoisted it on her shoulder and, taking my hand, began to walk back home. It took us even longer this time because of the heavy sack. Mother had to stop every now and then and put it down on the sidewalk. I tried to get the attention of some passersby, but they only brushed me aside and ignored Mother.

“It was a cold and windy night and there were patches of ice around. My boots weren't very good and I kept slipping. We had to cross Campbell Avenue to get to Mundy Pond. I slipped and fell down right in the middle of the street. It was a busy street with cars coming down over the hill from Pennywell Road. Mother tried to haul me to the side of the road and carry her coal at the same time.

“This big black car came speeding down the hill like a monster from a nightmare. I screamed. Mother screamed. But there was no time. I watched my mother being tossed over the bonnet of the car as though she were a rag doll. It swerved, narrowly missing me. I crouched, frozen with terror, on the coal sack.

“Traffic came to a halt. There were sirens and whistles, police
cars and an ambulance. I watched them load my mother on a stretcher and put her in the ambulance as I screamed for her not to leave me. A policeman hauled me up and asked me to show him where I lived. I was confused but managed to say Mundy Pond. I knew that. He took me over there and I pointed out the house.

“We went in. Father still wasn't there. My brothers were curled up together on the cold bed. I jumped up and curled with them, trembling and crying, seeking comfort from them. The policeman told them that their mother was in an accident. I remember how scared we were, huddled together, trying to be brave.

“The police sent in the welfare officers and they took us off to foster homes. I suppose they found Father in some beer parlour and told him, but I never knew. I never saw him again. They took Mother to St. Clare's Hospital. Her spine was broken, they said.

“My brothers were scattered here and there. No Mount Cashel for them this time. A couple of them were adopted on the mainland and I never saw them again. I was put with a real fine couple – the Abernathys – who gave me good warm clothes, a nice clean bed and lots of good, wholesome food. It was like heaven to me.

“I never went back to Mundy Pond again. I saw my mother a few years later. Father was dead by that time. Poor Mother. She was crippled and pitiful. Such a hard life. They put her in a boarding home on Brazil Square, and there she lived out her last few years.”

When Richard had finished his tale, he'd felt empty and light, light enough to float up over the cemetery and out over Quidi Vidi. All his worry and anguish was laid before Audrey to accept or not accept.

Sensible, wonderful Audrey had taken his arm. “Come on, Richard. We have a wedding to plan.”

The police special stopped at daylight. The contingent of Constabulary officers disembarked into the cold sulphur-tainted air of Grand Falls, so different from that of St. John's with its fog and
drizzle. The RCMP were there to usher them to buses before news of their arrival would spread.

The Grand Falls Armoury was cold, echoing, and devoid of comfort. Richard was physically sick with dread. He frequently had to visit the armoury washroom. Sometime during that day the thought came to him that the old Mi'kmaq man really might have been able to foretell the future and this is what he'd meant by not being able to stop time. Maybe he'd foreseen that Richard would soon be caught up in something over which he had no control. From the moment the Constabulary group had been called together in St. John's, Richard had felt that he was rolling along on a river of time and going so fast that there was no stopping it.

The constables stayed most of the day at the armoury, eventually being billeted out. Patrols were organized, and the Newfoundland Constabulary officers were dispatched to Badger where Constable Richard Fagan's wife had grown up, where his in-laws lived, where he had made a few friends, and where none of them knew that he was there. He was afraid that he'd meet Rod or Ralph, Alf or the Hatchers. What would they say to each other? Pulling his cap firmly down to his eyebrows and turning up his collar, he prayed no one would recognize him.

When Joey Smallwood decertified the loggers' union in early March, the strikers felt that the tide of opinion had truly turned against them. During the last two weeks of February, Joey had been on the radio almost every day. People began to believe him when he accused the IWA of being communists and white slave traders. Only the loggers, the strikers, knew the truth.

On instructions from Landon Ladd and his executive, the call went out to men from the west coast and to every bay in Newfoundland, to come to Badger to support the cause. This kept Ralph pretty busy. Somehow, he had become the accommodations man. The union rented another vacant house for the men to stay in,
but it still wasn't enough. Many of the Badger loggers let the out-oftowners sleep on their floors, wrapped in quilts.

Jennie and Tom were always together as they worked for the union's cause. Jennie was a superb organizer. Just the sight of her lugging a ten-gallon pot of steaming hot soup out to the picket line, followed by other women with ladles, bowls, buns and tea, was for Ralph a wonderful sight.

He sometimes went all day without thinking of her. Then, they'd meet somewhere. On the picket line or in someone's house. He'd look furtively at her rosy cheeks, her bright hair, her robust frame, and his heart would jump in his chest as it had done for twenty years.

Two days after Smallwood decertified the IWA, Ralph went over to meet the train. Fifty men were coming in from Trinity Bay. It took him until daylight to get them all bedded down. This brought the union supporters up to three hundred. The streets of Badger were crawling with men, who stood in clusters around the fire barrels, smoking, talking and watching for scabs. Landon Ladd had ordered no violence. They obeyed him, but it was hard. They were all discouraged and disheartened.

Once again, late in the night, Bill Hatcher snuck over to Rod Anderson's house after the police had gone back to their barracks in Grand Falls. Perhaps they'd been afraid to spend a night in Badger. Bill was a bundle of nerves and there was sweat on his forehead. Rod could see that this strike was getting to be too much for his friend, as it was for many others as well. His hand was shaking as he drank the drop of rum that Rod poured for him.

“Rod b'y, I think tomorrow is going to be the big day.”

“How do you mean?”