The Badger Riot (13 page)

As a result, Alf got into the habit of taking his Hawkeye with him almost everywhere he went. People were used to seeing him with its leather case slung over his shoulder. It was easy to use outdoors. All he had to do was aim and click. For pictures indoors he had to screw on the flash attachment and put in a flashbulb.

With his gammy leg, he limped all around town taking pictures
of scenic spots. The rivers were beautiful in any season. The view from the large round hill was wonderful. He made up a set of postcards and they sold well.

Out in the little goat house, he'd develop and print, cut, and frame his snapshots of history that he hoped would last for years to come. He could have made a full-time living out of it, but it remained a hobby.

By the spring of 1952, with Pap, Phonse and Ralph out on the drive, Jennie found herself missing Tom more and more. It gnawed at her insides: the not knowing, not seeing. Then, when Mam wasn't around, one of her sisters whispered to her that Tom had quit the Buchans mines, had come back down to Badger and was on the drive. That was weird, she thought. Tom had long had a balance problem, so he certainly wouldn't be out jumping from log to log. Neither could he swim, a carefully guarded secret that he'd only told his wife. So what on earth was he doing? And why had he come down from Buchans? Jennie longed to know.

She asked Phonse once, on the sly, if he saw Tom around anywhere. “Jennie maid,” Phonse said, “to tell you the truth, he asked me about you the other day, asked how you were feeling. You know he worked in Buchans mine all winter? He missed home, he said, so now he's wongin' on the drive.”

Jennie was astonished. “Wongin'? Tom is wongin'?”

To people who didn't live near logging operations,
wonger
and
wongin'
were strange words, certainly not found in any dictionary. It all had to do with the drive, described very well in the song
The Badger Drive.
The logs were fed into various brooks and streams that flowed into the great Exploits River. Along the way there were hundreds of men who worked to coax the logs along and keep them from getting jammed up.

In anticipation of the logs reaching the River, a movable cook camp was established to feed the drivers and see to their sleeping
arrangements. The logistics of moving and setting up again were carried out by the wongers. There was a wongin' boss too; he supervised the operation, including the five or six riverboats that carried the food and the men's belongings.

It was the wonger's job to pitch the sleeping tents and the cook tent on the riverbank, to be ready for the men coming ashore in the evenings to eat their supper – mostly bread, beans, lassy buns, and tea steeped in kettles called sluts – then they hunkered down to sleep. Next morning, each driver rolled up his clothes bag and set it on the riverbank for a wonger to collect. Then he was fed his breakfast – bread, tea, and beans – and went out for a day on the moving logs. The wonger-cook made up his bread dough and put it in a big warm iron pot to rise. Beans were put to soak in another pot to soften up for the supper meal. The wonger-helpers packed up everything, loaded it aboard the boats, and the convoy moved off down the River. The cook boat carried the iron pots with the bread rising and the beans soaking.

The drivers usually made only three or four miles in the run of a day. Sometimes they would stay in the same spot for a couple of days, until word came for them to move on downriver. It was slow work. The wongers, too, had to keep an eye out for the moving pulpwood. Whenever they reached a designated spot, everything was unpacked. The iron pots were buried in a firepit to bake the bread and cook the beans, and the sluts were filled to boil over another fire. After a number of years they got small stoves, but some wonger-cooks liked the firepits the best. More even heat, they said. In the evening, the men came ashore once more and the same routine started again.

The drive went on during the Newfoundland springtime, which was cold and wet in any year. The men were wet all day long from mishaps in the River and from the rain. At night they lay down in wet clothes, side by side in the tents. They slept in their canvas breeches and the seasoned men used to warn the new guys to keep their legs straight during the night, since the breeches would dry out and be stiff as a board the next morning. At night, you'd hear fellows saying to each other, “Now, b'ys, keep dem legs straight
tonight. You don't want to look like a crippled old man in the morning.” Pap and Phonse always complained that they were never dry or warm from the time the drive started until it finished.

Ralph was different from all of them. He didn't wear the canvas breeches. Cold didn't bother him, wet didn't bother him. Ralph was as one with the River.

This was off-season for cutters. Many of them were cross-trained to work on the drive as well, but Tom had never done it. He had a fear of the deep, fast-running River, perhaps stemming from his boyhood when he'd try to follow Ralph on the logs and usually end up getting wet.

When Phonse told Jennie that Tom was wonging, she knew it was for a reason. She hoped it was for the same reason that she'd thought he went to the Buchans mines: to earn extra money to build their house. Jennie prayed to God, Protestant and Catholic,
Please God, let the house be for me. Please God, if he ever loved me, let him come and get me.

But the days went by and no word from Tom. No word from Suze or Mr. Albert either.

Mam said one day, “In a small town like this, you'd think that they would drop in to see how their daughter-in-law was doing. I always thought Mr. Albert liked us. But I guess old Suze has him firm under her thumb and has threatened him to stay away from us.”

Jennie was too proud to go and seek out her husband. She felt that too much had happened in between to heal the breach. And, because she hadn't gone back to work at Plotsky's, she wasn't part of the hustle and bustle of loggers coming and going.

Jennie was given to crying spells. The doctor said that she had low iron, but Mam had a different opinion.

“Jennie,” Mam said to her one evening as they washed up the supper dishes, “there's nothing wrong with you now except you're pining for that big Protestant galoot in on Halls Bay Road.” She vigorously scrubbed the cooking pot with steel wool. “What you needs, my maid, is a change of scenery.”

Rod Anderson's yearning for the sea lessened with time. Ruth's love helped heal the resentment inside him. He became tamer, less morose, but still, from long habit, he kept many things inside him.

Their daughter, Audrey, was born in 1936. If Eli had hoped for a boy to carry on in Rod's footsteps, he never said a word. And it didn't matter to Rod. He loved his little girl and was thankful she was strong and healthy. Soon the old man was holding her, letting her grasp his finger, and calling her Poppie's girl. One day he brought home a pram he had bought from one of the A.N.D. Company management for five dollars. It was the Cadillac of prams, woven with a combination of light and dark brown wicker and lined with flowery cotton. He said the man had told him it was made in England.

“Come see what I got for Poppie's girl,” he cooed gently as he lifted his little six-month-old granddaughter and put her inside.

Even though Rod had married Ruth in the Catholic Church in Buchans, he didn't “turn” to her religion. Eli and Rod faithfully attended the United Church. Many years before, Eli had purchased a pew – a common practice among the more affluent Protestants. Every Sunday morning the two, father and son, so similar in appearance, marched up the aisle and claimed their own special place.

When Audrey came along, Eli spoke privately to Rod. They were walking home from church. “Me son, I wants with all me heart and
soul to have that little maid raised up in the Protestant religion, as you were and as I was. Do you think you can talk to Ruth and come to an agreement without too much fuss?”

Rod understood his father's thoughts because he'd been having the same ones himself. “Yes, Pop, I agree with you. The Andersons have always been United Church. I don't have anything against the Catholic Church, but I think I'd like to see little Audrey raised as a Protestant.” They had reached the gate of their home. “Let me deal with it, Pop. Say no more for now.”

So it was that little Audrey was baptized, went to Sunday school and then to grade school, all in the Protestant religion. Eli never knew how Rod worked it out with Ruth and he didn't ask. There was a period, however, when the air in their house was tense and the cooking wasn't as good, so he knew that Ruth hadn't been entirely happy about it.

When Audrey was four years old, Eli Anderson decided to retire. “Now Rod, me son, you knows everything I can learn you. I'll be here if you wants advice, and don't be afraid to ask me, but I am never crossing the River again. I'm finished with the woods.” Rod was twenty-five years old.

In 1942 the SS
Caribou
was sunk by a German torpedo with a great loss of lives. Rod thought of his dream and what Melv's spirit had told him so many years ago. On the day of the sinking, Rod walked over by the River in the quiet evening gloom. If it was true about the loon being his spirit guide, he felt that the loon's call would let him know that Melv was reinforcing his message of years ago. There was no call.
Maybe it's their migration time,
Rod reasoned, as the practical side of him took over.

Eli lived to be seventy years old. One night, he died in his sleep, of natural causes, the doctor said. Rod was really on his own now. The old man was gone.

In 1953, Audrey finished her schooling at seventeen and went
away to St. John's to work. Her mother's relatives helped Audrey get a summer job at Government House. In the fall she studied for a third-grade teaching certificate. At Christmas of that year, she came home to Badger to teach in the Protestant school. Over the winter, Audrey corresponded with a young St. John's man, whom she had met quite by accident, she said. When school let out for the summer, she went back to the city.

Bridey Sullivan's cousin Margaret, one of the Aylwards from Stock Cove, was in-service in St. John's. Bridey wrote to her and asked if it was possible to get her daughter Jennie a job. Margaret wrote back and said for Jennie to come on in and she'd be waiting for her at the station.

Jennie didn't know what to do. She talked to Ralph. “B'y, I really don't want to go. All I wish is to be with Tom. No, don't say it. Don't!” she said, as Ralph started to interrupt. “You want to go and talk to Tom and tell him that I'm going away. I say no! Tom has to realize that if he comes in a package with his mother, I want no part of it.”

Ralph laughed, threw his hands in the air, wished her well, and walked away.

On a mauzy May evening in 1952, Jennie walked down the track to the railway station to get the train. Pap carried her suitcase and her sisters trailed along behind. Halfway to the station they met Ralph coming up. “I came to see if you needed help with your suitcase,” he said, taking it from Pap's hand.