Pure Spring (2 page)

Your mother took your twin brother Phil, who was not like you at all and was still howling and struggling, upstairs.

Your father, from under the bloody towel, said, “If you ever do anything like that again, I'll kill you!”

He never once mentioned it after that. And neither did you nor anybody else. But the scar was there to
remind everybody every minute, every hour, every day. Every day he shaved he saw it in the mirror.

Every time he looked at you he saw the scar in the mirror of your eyes.

2

I
'M SITTING
on a park bench right across the street from where we live, Grampa Rip and I — 511 Somerset Street West, Apartment 4.

There's still some snow on the ground but it's a warm spring day.

There's a gray man in a gray raincoat and a gray hat sitting two benches down. Across and down the street outside Smitty's Smoke Shop, Smitty is washing the winter off his window. On the right side of the park, in front of St. Elijah's Antiochian Orthodox Church, the priest is walking up and down in the spring sun squinting at his holy book. Nobody else around.

While I was talking to Mr. Mirsky at Pure Spring this morning, Mr. Mirsky's secretary, Anita, came in and told him he was wanted on the phone. He told her to give me an application form to fill out and then he told me I couldn't start work today because the drink truck was
already gone out and that I should come to work tomorrow at 7:00 A.M. in the morning and start to work.

Anita was shorter than I am, even with the high heels she had on. She was wearing a tight red skirt and a frilly white blouse and lots of lipstick and perfume. She waved her eyelashes at me and then got me an application form and sat me down at a table and gave me a pen.

“Fill this out and leave it with me and come in a little before 7:00 A.M. in the morning tomorrow and you'll be with Randy in truck number 15,” Anita said.

“Randy?” I said.

“Right choo are!” she said. “Randy!”

“Truck 15. Randy,” I said.

“Right choo are!” she said. And then she said, “And God help ya!”

Grampa Rip's not home. He's at McEvoy's Funeral Home on Kent Street near St. Patrick's Church. Every day (well, nearly every day) Grampa Rip gets all dressed up — long-sleeved white shirt, vest, watch and chain, suit jacket, nice pressed pants to match, tie and black fedora hat — and off to the funeral home he goes for most of the afternoon.

I was friends with Grampa Rip before I went to live with him. My hero, Buz Sawyer, asked me once if I wanted to go and help him move his grampa from his nice house on Bayswater Avenue to an apartment or rooms somewhere because his wife had died and left everything to the Catholic Church — the house, all the money, most
of the fancy furniture, everything — and so Grampa Rip was all of a sudden kind of poor and kicked out of where he was living.

My friend Billy Batson and I went with Buz in his convertible car to help his Grampa Rip Sawyer move.

The moving truck was called Bye Bye Moving. And written underneath in smaller letters it said
Let someone who cares handle your valuables.

“They won't be handling my valuables,” said Grampa Rip, “but they can move the furniture!” Buz laughed his head off and I laughed, too, and Billy Batson whispered to me what's so funny and I told him that when Grampa Rip said “my valuables” he meant what's hanging between his legs.

“SHAZAM!” said Billy Batson.

Billy Batson made me laugh. He had the same name as the boy in the comic books who can change into Captain Marvel.

In the comics, a homeless orphan called Billy Batson meets a wizard who gives him a magic word to say. The word is SHAZAM!

The homeless orphan Billy Batson says SHAZAM! and then there's a picture that says BOOM! and Billy changes into Captain Marvel who looks a lot like Fred MacMurray, the movie star, except for his clothes. Captain Marvel has a tight red suit on with a yellow belt, yellow cuffs, yellow boots and a white cape with yellow trim.

And on his chest is a yellow lightning bolt.

When my friend Billy got excited about something he'd
say the word SHAZAM! and shut his eyes and wait. Then, he said, his brain would swell up like Captain Marvel's chest.

Here's some of the stuff Grampa Rip had for us to move: the kitchen table with the huge wooden legs carved like giant bowling pins (takes two strong men to carry it); four heavy high-backed oak chairs with lions carved on the two back posts; a large brass bed; an enormous rocking chair with wooden eagles on the posts; a monster desk, higher than I can reach, with glass doors, a rolltop cover, eight drawers and dozens of cubbyholes with four different keys to lock the different doors and compartments (Grampa Rip calls it his secretariat — a small person could
live
in this desk); two very heavy high brass floor lamps with tassels hanging from the shades; three giant holy pictures with massive wood frames — one of Jesus' head wearing his crown of thorns with drops of blood on his forehead, his eyes turned up to heaven, another of the Pieta, the Virgin Mary, dressed in blue, with the dead body of Jesus on her lap, and another one of Jesus carrying his cross which is about the size of one of Grampa Rip's holy pictures through a crowd of spectators (one of these pictures could cover more than half a wall); a massive strongbox about the size of a small bed with iron reinforced corners and hinges big enough for Hercules and an ugly big padlock that weighs as much as a large rock (this box is always locked and weighs a ton).

The place we moved Grampa Rip to that time was a garage made over to be a kind of one-room house. It was
in the backyard of a house near Glebe Collegiate on a pretty rich street, Clemow Avenue. The lady was a friend of Grampa Rip's dead wife. You could tell Grampa didn't like her very much. She was standing on her back veranda telling the moving guys who came with the Bye Bye Moving truck to be careful with their truck backing it up.

“Look at the mouth on her,” Grampa Rip said. Her mouth was just a slit and she didn't seem to have any lips. “I wonder how she feeds herself...got a face on her like a mud pout...”

I wondered how — after we got all his stuff stuffed in the garage — there was going to be any room for Grampa Rip. How could he live here if there was hardly any room for his own self?

A few days later Buz told me his grampa was moving again but he couldn't help him this time because he was getting ready to go to Korea to maybe be a war hero and Billy Batson himself had moved out of Lowertown the day before and could I go over and help Grampa Rip.

When I got there the moving guys had most of his stuff back in the truck and Grampa Rip was having an argument with the Mud Pout about a lamp that was missing. Two of Grampa Rip's huge brass floor lamps were stored in her basement because there was no room in the garage for them, but only one lamp came out of the basement.

“Where's the second lamp?” Grampa was saying. “There were two lamps down there.”

“No,” she was saying,”You're losing your marbles, Rip. There was only
one
lamp stored down there...”

The moving guys, Frankie and Johnny, were standing there listening, their arms folded across their chests, their muscles bulging, smiling a little bit to themselves, wondering what was going to happen with Grampa Rip's lamp.

After Grampa and the Mud Pout argued back and forward for a while, Grampa suddenly says this: “All right then. Here's what we'll do. We'll be pullin' out now. I'm moving into a decent place, and in the meantime you can take that brass floor lamp that you're after just stealing from me in front of these witnesses here in broad daylight and you can shove it as far as it will go right up you know where!”

Frankie and Johnny were holding their sides laughing.

Then Grampa and I got on a streetcar and met the Bye Bye Moving truck over at his new place.

On the streetcar Grampa said, “That's the way
my
grampa, Grampa Hack Sawyer, used to talk. Crude but effective.”

The new place had two rooms and a sink and toilet at the back of an old house on Preston Street not too far from where I was this morning at the Pure Spring Bottling Company on Aberdeen Street.

By the time Frankie and Johnny got most of Grampa's stuff into the rooms there was a little crowd of neighbors watching. By the time they wheeled Grampa's secretariat down the laneway on a dolly the crowd was oohing and ahing. They were very excited about the size of Grampa Rip's furniture.

When we carried the holy pictures past there was some clapping.

It took the four of us to lift the strongbox.

“What've ya got in here, Mr. Sawyer?” says Johnny.

“Wouldn't you like to know, eh?” says Grampa Rip and gives me a wink.

But when we set down the box, the floor suddenly started to creak and we just got out the door in time, when the whole room caved in.

Grampa Rip had to go and stay at the YMCA for a while until he found another place. And he did find one.

And I was helping once again. Getting to know him.

“How much would you say one of these pictures weighs?” says Frankie as he and Johnny carried Jesus and his thorns up to the third floor of an apartment on King Edward Avenue near the synagogue.

“I hope you can stay here in this one,” I said to Grampa Rip. I said that because of the two long rows of beautiful elm trees that could be so pretty in the winter and so cool making shade in the summer. What a beautiful street King Edward Avenue is! What a boulevard!

Because the staircase was so narrow the secretariat got stuck and Frankie and Johnny had to take the banister off to get the big desk down again.

They were shaking their heads.

Maybe the Bye Bye Moving company would like to say bye bye to Grampa Rip.

They got the secretariat back outside.

They rigged a pulley on the balcony of the third floor
and tried to pull her up with ropes but the pulley gave way and the whole thing crashed back down on the lawn. The secretariat now had a big crack in it.

“You'll have to put this monster in storage, Mr. Sawyer,” says Frankie, or was it Johnny.

“I'm not living without my secretariat,” says Grampa Rip.

And so on to the next place a week or so later.

“We're sure gettin' to know your stuff real well, Mr. Sawyer,” says Frankie while we're bolting together the brass bed in Grampa's new place on York Street near York Street School.

“I wonder,” says Johnny, “how the lady over at Clemow Avenue is doing tryin' to put that brass lamp up where Mr. Sawyer told her to put it!”

But when the landlord looked at Grampa's stuff coming out of the Bye Bye Moving truck
(Let someone who cares handle your valuables)
, especially the three holy pictures, he didn't like it and changed his mind about Grampa.

“What's the trouble, Mr. Applebaum?” says Grampa.

“We don't go for that voodoo around here,” says Mr. Applebaum, “and anyway I forgot to tell you, the place is taken. I got some relatives from Poland coming.”

At last Grampa came here, Somerset Street, right across from where I'm sitting eating my roast pork and hot mustard sandwiches.

And now I'm living here with him.

He's really good to me. And I'm good to him.

I think, maybe, we love each other.

Dundonald Park is the name of the park I'm sitting in. The air is a bit chilly but the sun is warm on me. There are still patches of snow on the ground but there's grass showing. The trees have no buds yet but if you look at a whole tree, not just the branches and twigs, it looks like any minute now it's going to start to explode in slow motion with buds.

There's a robin. Is it a boy robin or a girl robin? Boys. Girls. Soon he'll, she'll pull a big fat worm out of the grass but not yet. He makes, she makes a beautiful sound like fat water dripping. Velvet.

There's Billy Finbarr, our paper boy, home from school for lunch. He gives me a wave. This afternoon he'll pick up his papers and fold each one into a tight roll, a “biscuit,” so he can go around his route and throw the papers at the houses from his bicycle.

At our apartment, though, he can't do that. He has to bring the paper upstairs and then throw it as hard as he can at our door. When we hear the thump, we know what it is. It's our paper.

There's part of the Ottawa
Evening Journal
newspaper on the bench beside me. It's open. There's an ad.

Toni Home Permanent
Which girl has the natural curl
And which girl has the TONI?

There's a picture of two girls. Which one?

A beautiful girl walks past on Somerset Street. I feel like shouting to her, “Are you the girl with the NATURAL CURL or are you the one with the TONI!”

But I wouldn't dare.

The Gray Man looks at her, too.

I see, across the street in our round bathroom window, Cheap, my cat. The four bathroom windows in our apartment building are all round like the portholes of a ship. I'll go over soon as I'm done this pork and hot mustard sandwich and get Cheap and take him for a ride on my bike. He likes to get in the basket. Sticks his face right into the wind. Thinks he's a dog. He'll get a snootful of spring air!

Underneath the Toni Home Permanent ad in the paper there's a beautiful picture of the movie star Esther Williams. She's in a new movie about bathing suits. She has very long legs. She's standing on her toes.

There's a lady with her kid walking up Somerset Street. She is giving the kid a candy. The candy falls in the dirt. The lady picks it up, licks off the dirt, gives it back to the kid's mouth. The kid, like a baby bird in a nest, opens up and in pops the candy,
Chirp! Chirp!
The Gray Man watches, too. Then he picks up his paper and reads. He looks up often over the paper.

Can Cheap see the Gray Man from his porthole window where he loves to sit?