Waking Nanabijou. Jim Poling, Sr.

room where she sat on the edge of her bed, saddened by the agony of not being able to help her only child.

      A year or so later, there was another pregnancy. This one was successful and brought Mary Jane into our lives. I was ten and a half and didn’t know what to make of it all, but I didn’t have much time to think about it because another shock followed close behind. My father arrived home from work one day and announced we were moving. It seemed inconceivable. Dawson Street was the centre of our lives. We knew every person in every house up and down the Dawson and College Street blocks. The children played together and the adults watched out for all the children. People walking the streets stopped and talked and patted us kids on the head. I walked every day to St. Andrew’s School where my mother had gone. Coming and going, I stopped at 331 Van Norman Street where Grandma Poling took something fresh from the oven and gave me pop bottles to trade for candy at Archie’s corner store and soda fountain at the bottom of the hill.

      We were not going far. The new place was up over Prospect Hill, not much more than a kilometre west of 402 Dawson Street, but out of the immediate neighbourhood. I would still go to St. Andrew’s, although it would be a longer walk and not through the old neighbourhood.

      The new neighbourhood was a miserable place. The house was a squat, square bungalow on Pine Street, on the edge of the northwest residential areas. It was dark, damp, and cramped. My parents and the two girls and my grandmother squeezed into three tiny bedrooms on the main floor while I descended to a homemade room in a corner of the musty basement where natural light never reached. Living there after 402 Dawson Street was a shock.

      Why we left the elegant comfort of 402 Dawson Street for that backwater shack was a mystery. Perhaps it was a matter of money. Isidore’s pension left with his death. My grandmother required more and stronger drugs. There were no drug plans, and my father’s income was less regular as he quit the transit company and took up selling life insurance for Metropolitan Life. It was a painful uprooting for Veronica. Her homes had mostly been in the Dawson-Peter Streets neighbourhood and moving up, over, and beyond the Prospect Street Hill was not progress.

      Not only was the housing rougher, but so were some of the neighbourhood kids. I met a couple of boys my age and during one visit to their house listened curiously as their father instructed them in the best ways to convince girls to have sex, a term I didn’t quite understand yet. Worst of all from Veronica’s perspective, there was water directly across the street. Not the clean, clear water that blessed so much of the Port Arthur area. It was a swamp, a real swamp with bullfrogs, snakes, reeds, and a gagging stench of wet rot. Malevolent mists shrouded it every evening after dark.

      I set to work building a raft to explore the swamp. This set me up for a confrontation with Veronica, who banned me from going anywhere near this little northern Everglades. She soon realized that with caring for her mother and the two girls she couldn’t keep an eye on me all the time. Her next best effort was to see about having the swamp drained. She called the city and made a fuss, but apparently the land was private. She called the health department, and one day I saw a worker arrive with high rubber boots. He stood at the edge of the swamp and lobbed some kind of disinfectant hand grenades at it.

      Pine Street was depressing. I exhausted myself walking back and forth to the old neighbourhood, coming home to collapse in my room in the hole downstairs. Everything seemed to go wrong at that place. I built a rabbit hutch but one of the rabbits grew so huge, it broke out and spent the next two weeks eating everything in sight in our neighbour’s garden. Then some of my friends visited from Dawson Street, bringing a couple sets of new boxing gloves. We boxed ourselves silly, with me taking a pummelling from which I began bleeding profusely from the nose and mouth. Some parents finally came out and stopped the bleeding, but the incident left me with a delicate nose that bled regularly for decades afterwards.

      Even Christmas was an unhappy time on Pine Street. I prayed and begged for a pair of hockey skates for Christmas. I had seen them in the window of Laprade’s sporting goods store downtown. They were the newest style with tendon guards that were actually part of the skate, not sewn-on attachments. They were the best skates a boy could have, and I knew that because Edgar Laprade, who was a Port Arthur hero playing for the New York Rangers in the National Hockey League, wore them.

      Christmas morning came with much anticipation. Veronica watched nervously as I opened the box. Skates! Then came the realization that these skates had no tendon guards, were the old-fashioned style, and to my absolute horror had instep straps and buckles for support. They were baby skates! I overheard Veronica talking with my father that night about how they had made a terrible mistake in picking those skates. I was devastated.

      Veronica was not apologetic with me. She was practical and mentioned offhand one day that she had heard that Laprade’s sold special tendon guards that a shoemaker could attach to the back of the skates. If I saved money from selling newspapers and collecting pop bottles, I might be able to buy a pair. I went to Laprade’s and saw them. They were tall tendon guards and you could see the protrusions of the protective bone inserts. They were fine though and I saved and bought them, had a shoemaker sew them on, and then I took a knife and cut off the support straps and buckles and had myself a reasonable set of real hockey player skates.

      Veronica knew I was hurting in other ways from life on Pine Street. The kids in the neighbourhood were different, and I had a hard time fitting in. I often went alone into the bush beyond the swamp where I staked out a trapline for rabbits. She tried to occupy my time with chores then showed me how to plant a vegetable garden out back. No one would expect a garden to be a priority for an eleven-year-old boy, but life on Pine Street was so bleak that radishes and beets and green onions, all things that I had lovingly planted and nurtured throughout the spring, became a consuming interest that summer.

      One evening at dusk, I was harvesting the fruits of my labour when I saw my parents walk toward me from the end of the driveway. My mother was carrying that blanket again and smiling. My heart sank. She’d gone somewhere and got yet another kid, I thought. I prayed it would at least be a brother. When she reached the edge of the lawn, she knelt and put the blanket on the grass. She lifted a fold and from it spilled a black shadow that was all ears and paws. It was a cocker spaniel puppy, and she tumbled into the garden and ran up my knees and onto my chest and began licking my face. It was the beginning of a long, loving friendship. We called her Dixie.