“How you feeling, Father?”
“Fine, son, fine,” he said, wiping his cheeks with the handkerchief. He smiled weakly, and after a few awkward seconds, dabbed his cheek again.
I smiled back. “What are you reading?”
He held up a thick orange leather book. “On Snowshoes to the Barren Grounds: Twenty-Eight Hundred Miles After Musk Ox and Wood Bison by Lieutenant Caspar Whitney, Royal Navy.”
“Is it good?”
“Can’t tell yet. I’m only on page fifty-seven.”
Father usually took at least a couple of hundred pages to decide whether he liked a book or not.
“Right now Lieutenant Caspar’s describing how he’s trying to prepare himself for Arctic camping by sleeping outside on a normal English winter night with only one blanket. He’s been at it a week, and so far he’s done more shivering than sleeping.”
“He must want to go to the Arctic pretty badly,” I said.
“It would sure be something exciting to do,” Father said with a faraway expression. “The farthest north I’ve ever been is Calgary and that was by train. I’d sure love to go somewhere someday on snowshoes.” He dabbed his eyes again.
Not very long ago my father had been the general manager of one of the biggest bicycle companies in Canada. He had travelled a lot and had made heaps of money. But he had also worried about things like the price of steel, the shortage of leather, and whether he should order more of something today or wait until next week in case the price per ton went up or down a few cents.
His decisions had been important because the lives of many people had depended on them. The bicycle business was quite competitive, and if someone like him made the wrong decision, people lost their jobs. If it rained a lot, people stopped buying bikes and workers were laid off. If the company made blue bikes and customers decided that year they wanted red, workers were laid off. Sometimes the company’s board of directors would tell Father to close a profitable factory because they had bought another one where people were willing to work for less money. Father’s real passion was designing things, and he hated the pressure of being responsible for making decisions that affected workers’ lives.
One day he started to cry. No reason. In the middle of a conversation with his production manager about laying people off, the tears gushed and he couldn’t stop them. He hid in his office and bawled for four hours. He came home by horse cab and cried throughout the night. He went back to work the next day, but the tears kept flowing. The board of directors became very concerned.
They told him, “Your services are no longer required.” And suddenly my father no longer made bicycles. With my father not working we soon had to leave our big home on Dunn Avenue in Parkdale and move to this tiny house. Eventually, Father found a job as a night watchman in a ten-floor warehouse on Spadina Avenue where he worked six nights a week with no time off on holidays. He still cried, but no one could see him except us, so he figured that was okay. He also got to read at work.
When he worked at the bicycle factory, he never had time to read, though he still brought home a new book every week. At least with the new job he was able to read. My mom didn’t really like the way the books took up most of the house, but she didn’t say anything because when Father read he stopped crying.
At the warehouse Father just had to stay awake in case someone tried to break in. To prove he didn’t sleep through his shift, he had to carry a clock apparatus on a long leather sling around his neck. On each floor of the warehouse there were two keys, each chained to the wall at opposite ends of the floor. Every hour my father had to walk through the entire building and punch each key into the clock. In the morning the warehouse owner looked at the clock to see what time each key had been punched. If there were any spaces on the time paper, my father would lose his job.
To stay awake all night, Father taught himself to read while he walked. He took the freight elevator to the top floor and punched the first key, then turned around and stepped toward the other side of the warehouse, reading as he strolled. When he bumped into the far side, he punched the other key and then went down a flight of stairs and began again. It worked most of the time, but occasionally he came home with a black eye or a bruised shin from bumping into things. Once he even fell down a fire escape. He returned home looking as if a horse had kicked him. “I got off lucky,” he had told Mom and me, holding up the book he was reading. “Look, not a scratch.”
“Father, I had an iceboat ride today,” I said now as I peeled off my sweater.
“Iceboats? They were invented by the Dutch, you know.”
Only my father would know something like that, I thought.
Before I could say anything else, Mom walked into the room. “Why does it smell like a forest in here?”
“Bertie had an iceboat ride today, Mildred.”
“Then why is he covered in pine needles and sap?”
“It’s a long story.” I told them what happened except for the porcupines.
“Well, your days as a newspaper boy are over,” my mom said as she scrubbed the pine tar off my face in the bathroom.
“We need the money, Ma,” I reminded her.
“Do not call me Ma. I’m your mother. We need money, yes, but we don’t need it if it’s going get you killed. Climbing a Christmas tree. Riding an iceboat. Well, I never!”
“But —” I began, but a soapy washcloth got jammed in my mouth.
“No buts. You’re not going back to that market. You’ll either end up hurt by those Kelly mutts or arrested by the police. Don’t worry. We’ll get by and something else will turn up.”
And something did turn up, but not a job. That night a small package wrapped in brown butcher’s paper arrived with a note. It said: “Merry Christmas. Tastes like chicken. L. Crane, Butcher and Purveyor of Fine Wild Game.”
“What on earth are they?” my mom asked when she opened the package. Inside were two freshly cleaned animal carcasses.
“Rabbits perhaps?” Father suggested.
“And it looks as if they’ve been tenderized already,” my mom said. “What a dear man.”
I nodded. If you ever needed to tenderize a porcupine, all you had to do was find the nearest Kelly.
Because Mom had destroyed dinner, I offered to cook the “rabbits.” I had become a much better cook than my mom just by watching the food vendors at work at the market. I cut up the porcupines into small pieces, dredged them in flour, salt, and pepper and then braised them with onions, preserved tomatoes, and dried rosemary the way I had watched Mrs. Giancarlo, an Italian cook, prepare leftover game from Mr. Crane’s stall.
I knew Mom was embarrassed that she couldn’t cook, but it wasn’t fair. Until my father had lost his job, my poor mother had never lifted a frying pan or sifted a cup of flour in her life. As the daughter of an Anglican minister, she had been trained by her mother and her finishing school to supervise servants. She knew exactly what went into beef bourguignon, but she couldn’t peel a carrot without doing herself harm. Her once beautiful ivory hands were now red from harsh soap, stove burns, and festering knife cuts, but she never complained. Her family in England still had no idea what had happened to us. “No need to worry them,” Mom always insisted. “Things will get better.”
The porcupines were delicious except that they tasted