My daddy was down to only a few dollars and one change of clothes, his baseball uniform. He studied the ads in the Edmonton Bulletin, but there were no ads for South Carolinians who built fine houses, but what he did see was an ad for a mining engineer at a coal mine a few miles north of Edmonton, and using his father-in-law’s name he applied and was immediately accepted. He signed on at a salary about five times as high as he earned building fine houses in Butte, Montana, and accepted the job on the condition he be assigned a talented assistant. The mine owners were delighted, they reported that the assistant mining engineer knew everything there was to know about coal mining but he didn’t have his papers. If the assistant mining engineer had his papers, they said, they would have promoted him to mining engineer and hired an assistant instead of hiring an experienced man like my daddy.
Daddy, who admitted to being mildly claustrophobic, said he had no desire, in spite of the excellent pay, to go down in a mine. He managed to work for three months, in which he earned more than he would have in a year as a carpenter, without ever going down in the mine. His talented assistant was indeed talented, so that Daddy had only to sign his name to an occasional document and he spent his days in his office, playing cribbage with the janitor. When he resigned after three months, supposedly to accept a position with an emerald mine in the country of Colombia, he signed the necessary papers to certify his talented assistant as a genuine mining engineer.
When he got his first paycheck from the mine, Daddy, instead of returning to Butte, sent Mama the train fare to visit him. It was Mama who talked him into resigning before he got found out. They rented a little house in Edmonton, and in spring Daddy found work building fine houses and in the fall they bought the house they were living in and decided to stay in Alberta for a while.
Things had turned out just as Daddy expected them to. Daddy, much to Mama’s eternal consternation, always expected things to turn out well. When Brother Pettigrew’s Divine Light Baseball Mission went bankrupt, Daddy never even considered that he wouldn’t find a job, either building fine houses or working as a mining engineer; it never occurred to him that it was odd for two people from South Carolina, via South Dakota and Montana, to wind up in Edmonton, Alberta, and it never occurred to him to anticipate the Depression, or to accept Relief when the Depression crashed down. It never seemed odd to him to sell his house in the city of Edmonton and buy a useless and stony quarter section of land in the general vicinity of a town called Fark, the naming of which I’ll get around to later, where he and Mama, and eventually me would ride out the Depression.
‘He was never any better a ball player than he thought he was,’ Mama said one afternoon as she was darning socks by the light of the south window. ‘I married your daddy because he was a nice, cheerful man who never expected to bat less than 400, never expected to lose a game, and certainly never expected a Depression.’
Until shortly before John ‘The Raja of Renfrew’ Ducey scheduled that exhibition baseball game, most of us in the Six Towns area had seen but one real live American soldier close up. Those who lived near the Edmonton-Jasper Highway had seen an occasional truck or Jeep carrying American soldiers who were maybe off to build the Alaska Highway, but more likely just sightseeing, and Bjornsen’s Corner never did have a gas pump, so even if they needed gas they had to drive on to a town called Wildwood, a long ways west of the Six Towns area.
Curly McClintock and his son, Truckbox Al McClintock, had both seen, on their twice-weekly jaunts to Edmonton in the dump truck, the long convoys of camouflage-brindle trucks and Jeeps heading west on the Edmonton-Jasper Highway, toward the Whitecourt turnoff, a turnoff which, in seven or eight days, would take them to where the rest of the American troops were building the Alaska Highway.
Curly McClintock and his son, Truckbox Al McClintock, both attempted to describe what they had seen, but both were slow-talking, and slow-thinking, and covered in an inordinate amount of grease and oil, and whenever anyone asked them a question they both looked as if they’d been asked to write an essay on a subject unfamiliar to them, so the residents of the Six Towns area never got a proper description of the convoys of camouflage-brindle trucks and Jeeps, let alone of the American soldiers who manned the camouflage-brindle trucks and Jeeps.
One afternoon an American soldier, driving a camouflage-brindle, two-ton army truck, and carrying a dispatch pouch full of supposedly vital information, completely and cleanly missed the Whitecourt turnoff, and might have carried on until he traveled all the way to Jasper, and got stopped by the mountains, except that the camouflage-brindle, two-ton truck developed engine trouble and stopped dead in the center of the road, within spitting distance of Bjornsen’s Corner.
The lone American soldier pushed the camouflage-brindle, two-ton truck off to the side of the road, then stood with his hands on his hips and stared all around him. What he saw to the left of the Edmonton-Jasper Highway was a lot of muskeg sprinkled with twisty tamarack trees, while what he saw to the right of the Edmonton-Jasper Highway was a lot of prairie covered in red clover, and a big, white farmhouse with green shutters, sitting well back in a grove of cottonwoods.
The lone American soldier walked the quarter mile to the big white farmhouse with green shutters, which belonged to Sven Bjornsen, of the Bjornsen Bros. Swinging Cowboy Musicmakers, clutching the dispatch pouch which contained supposedly vital information, and once he made himself understood, which wasn’t easy, because he came from South Carolina, and the Bjornsens came from Norway, and what each of them called English didn’t sound like English to the other one, he was able to use Sven Bjornsen’s telephone, one of only two in the Six Towns area since Curly and Gunhilda McClintock allowed their telephone to be cut off for non-payment, to call the United States Army in Edmonton and let them know approximately where he was.
Approximately, because when the lone American soldier asked where he was, Sven Bjornsen said very authoritatively, ‘You’re at Bjornsen’s Corner, Alberta, Canada.’
Sven Bjornsen said that so authoritatively that the lone American soldier believed him, and the United States Army believed the lone American soldier when he gave that as his location. Finding the lone American soldier proved to be quite difficult for the United States Army, because, when they copied down the information the lone American soldier gave them, they didn’t know that (a) the lone American soldier had missed the Whitecourt turnoff and was many miles west of where he was supposed to be, and (b) that as far as map makers were concerned, there was no such place as Bjornsen’s Corner, Alberta, Canada.
The lone American soldier then tinkered with his camouflage-brindle, two-ton truck, enough so that he could call back the United States Army in Edmonton, the first time Sven Bjornsen’s phone had been used for two long distance calls in one day, and tell them what he thought was wrong with it, and the United States Army in Edmonton told him to hold tight and another camouflage-brindle, two-ton truck would be sent to Bjornsen’s Corner with replacement parts, only, they added, the parts had to come from someplace like Michigan or Minnesota, so he should hold tight for a few days.
When the lone American soldier asked about the dispatch pouch containing supposedly vital information, the party he was conversing with said he was a mechanic and that wasn’t his department and what difference could it make if a few pieces of paper were a few days late getting to Alaska, and the lone American soldier said he had to agree.
That lone American soldier was an amiable sort, and the first night he was at Bjornsen’s Corner, he sat right in with the Bjornsen Bros. Swinging Cowboy Musicmakers, played the spoons like he was a regular musician, and sang Jimmie Rodgers’s songs in a high, sweet voice, like they were meant to be sung.