The Badger Riot (22 page)

The Badger night was alive with sounds: groups of men running up and down the road, carrying torches, and shouting. In the distance, someone fired off a gun. The shot echoed on the frosty winter air. The glow of fire barrels could be seen here and there.

Later that night, after Ruth had gone upstairs to bed, there was another knock. This time it was Abe Miller, the A.N.D. Company transportation man.

“Rod, me son, they sez your camp got trashed.” He snarked snot into the back of his throat and spat into the snow. “They sez the strikers drove them poor buggers out in the snow.”

There's no point of going up there in the middle of a cold, dark,
February night,
Rod thought.
What's done is done.
“We'll wait for daylight,” he told Abe.

“Very good, I'll meet you by the River around seven.”

The next day dawned cold and windy, with a wind out of the northwest eddying the snow into drifts. As Abe and Rod approached the picket line down by the River, Rod could see several women standing around the fire barrel.

Ralph Drum nodded to them as they walked by. A couple of others said good morning. Rod and Abe got aboard the A.N.D. Company Bombardier snowmobile and went off across the frozen River and up the woods road. About halfway up, with the old Bombardier putt-putting along, they saw a line of strikers and Mounties straggling down.
The wind is right in their faces and the poor things look froze to death. Some of them have to have frostbite. The Mounties too,
Rod thought.
Well, old Jack Frost doesn't care if you're the law or the lawless when he wants to bite.

Abe would probably have offered them a ride if they'd been going the same way. He wasn't a bad fellow. Neither was Rod. They felt sorry the loggers who, after more than a month, had made no progress with their strike against the Company. But they had to look after their own jobs – Abe as the A.N.D. Company transportation man and Rod as an A.N.D. Company contractor.

The strikers had trashed the camp, all right. It was a miserable sight in the cold light of morning. Every window was broken out. The stovepipe was torn down from the roof. The door was yanked off its hinges and thrown down in the snow where it was quickly drifting over. Rod picked it up and stuck it by the side of the wall. He went inside and, even though he never spoke of his feelings on it to anyone afterward, he was terribly frightened by the destruction in front of him. The brutality and violence of the angry strikers was everywhere to be seen.

Abe was scared too. He stayed in the doorway with one eye on
his snowmobile, as if he thought someone was going to grab it. But there was no one about. The place was long deserted.

The doorway opened into the forepeak, which was in shambles. The foreman's time book was ripped to shreds. All the bottles of Gerald S. Doyle medicines – Witch Hazel, Friar's Balsam, Cough Syrup, Cod Liver Oil, Worm Powder – had been smashed. Someone had poured the cough syrup over the foreman's bunk.

Rod was reluctant to visit the cookhouse, but it was unavoidable. Every bit of food was dumped out – flour, sugar, beans, tea, yeast, molasses.
Name of God . . . we'll never get this cleaned up. 'Tis better to put a match to it and burn the whole camp down.

The bunkhouse was worse, if that was possible. The scabs had banked down the stove for the night and it was still hot. When the rampaging strikers arrived, they'd hauled the stovepipe off the old oil drum and stuffed the scabs' clothes down in it to burn. The stench of charred wool was heavy on the cold air of the bunkhouse.

Rod was sick to his heart with it all. What was going to become of them all? “Come on, Abe b'y, my eyes can't take no more.”

Cecil Nippard wasn't a member of the IWA, seeing as he wasn't working as a logger at the time. But his father was a logger and a union member. He was assigned the picket line down by Peterview, near Botwood.

One evening, while Cecil was hanging around the pool hall in Windsor wishing someone would give him some change to play pool, a station wagon pulled up and a guy asked him if he had worked in the woods at some time. “Would you like to have an easy job now that the loggers are on strike?”

“At what?” asked Cecil.

“Oh, the A.N.D. Company wants some men to go up in their camps to man them, sort of. Not much to it.”

The old bitch stepmother was acting up pretty badly these days with Father on the picket line and not much money coming in, so Cecil agreed, just to get away from her.

He was driven to Badger where he and others were trucked up on Sandy and into a deserted woods camp. The men came from all parts of Newfoundland. None knew much about the work since none of them were loggers. They were just fellows who weren't much good at any trade. One guy said, “They must've scraped the bottom of the barrel to get us.” Everyone thought that was a fine joke.

They made a half-hearted attempt to cut some wood. Cecil knew a bit about it, having been in the woods before, but some of the men were straight out of the fishing boats. The whole camp of forty men didn't cut a full cord for the whole week. The Company wanted to start the haul-off, getting the wood out to the riverbanks for the drive, but they weren't much good at that either. They'd stack the wood on the sleds wrong and it usually fell off before it got to the riverbank.

One night they were talking around the old oil drum stove. One of them said, “I s'pose you guys knows dey calls us scabs, what?”

Someone else piped up, “What's a scab? Is that like when your cut is gettin' better?”

A guy over in the corner said, “Geez boy, you're some stunned. We're the ones who didn't join the IWA.”

The men were quiet for a bit, thinking, working through it, wondering what being a scab might mean. They didn't think it meant anything good.

After three weeks up in the camp, they were raided by the real loggers, the union men. To the scabs they were like savages, not human beings at all. They were asleep when avenging strikers burst into the bunkhouse, screaming and yelling. They threw the scabs out of the bunks, refused them time to get their clothes, and pushed them out in the snow. It was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. All Cecil had on were his long johns and socks. He ran through the snowdrifts as fast as he could go, his legs and his heart pumping together with the terror. He didn't even feel the cold until afterward. There were a couple of strikers running behind him at first, but they gave up the chase after awhile.

At last, through the drifts of snow Cecil spied a trapper's tilt. He crawled in, buried himself in the old garbage and dead leaves, and fell asleep. Next thing he heard voices outside. It was the A.N.D. Company man with the Company's snowmobile picking up scabs here and there, and he had spied Cecil's tracks. He helped him outside, but Cecil was so cold and scared he could only shake and jibber at him. The Company man gave him an old blanket to cover his shoulders and got him aboard the snowmobile.

Back at Badger, the scabs were hidden in a back room of the A.N.D. Company offices. Clothing and footwear were scrounged up for them and they were offered another chance to go back to the camps or take their wages and go home. All of them, traumatized by what had happened, took their wages and left town.

Cecil went back to Windsor to his father's house. His clothes and his logans were gone and never seen again. Bitch-stepmother didn't know and didn't care where he'd gone. Emily wouldn't talk to him because she was too scared of the older woman. Father came home for a few days, but Cecil was afraid to tell him what he had been up to. After all, father was IWA. He'd be mad if he knew that his son was a scab, taking loggers' jobs.

It wasn't long after that, perhaps a month, when he met the taxi driver, Vern Crawford, who was recruiting scabs just as the first guy did, only this time it was to go up on the Millertown Dam. Cecil agreed to go along again.

Jennie had been at the River picket line all night, standing around the fire barrel with other women waiting for the men. At the beginning of the strike, when he made his speech in the town hall, Landon Ladd had decreed that the strike was a family affair and women could do picket duty too. The women had stood alongside the men ever since.

The strikers had gone across the River last night, headed for Rod Anderson's camp. The A.N.D. Company had been bringing in scabs to fill the camps to prove they could always get men to go to work. The strikers claimed that Rod's camp was full.

There was a gathering around the fire barrel. Someone threw more wood in; flankers flew up and disappeared into the dark cold sky. There were a dozen women and several men worrying and waiting. Ralph was there too, standing beside Jennie. She asked him, “How come you're not gone up there too, Ralph?”

He walked a short distance from the group around the barrel, nodding for her to follow.

“I was all set to go,” he said, “but Landon Ladd asked me if I would mind staying here. My brothers and cousins are gone, and I was raring to go too, but he said that if there were arrests he would rather I wasn't among them.”

During the past month, Jennie had often noticed how Landon Ladd depended on Ralph to help organize the men and the picket lines. Now, fear gripped her heart as she immediately
thought of Tom being in danger. “Are they going to be arrested, Ralph?”

“Jennie, keep what I am going to tell you quiet. There are spies everywhere, you know that. I received word awhile ago that the Mounties have gone up there too. And you know what that means. Someone's told them where our boys were headed.”

“Oh no . . .”

“Not a word, Jennie. Don't frighten the other women. It might not be right, after all.”

As the grey winter dawn came in the sky, Jennie walked over to the bank of the River. Across the frozen surface she could see the black outline of the trees and the clearing at the landing on the other side. The outline of the three A.N.D. Company fuel storage tanks stood black against the white snow. Jennie expected that this was where Tom and the others would emerge from the forest.

Behind her, the sound of motors broke the morning stillness. Jennie turned and saw two yellow buses pull up. Ralph went over. Several Mounties got out and talked to him. They pointed toward the landing across the River and she saw Ralph shake his head. He turned and walked toward her. He peered across in the early morning gloom as if he expected to see someone emerging from the forest. The sky was getting lighter by the minute. Jennie touched his sleeve. “Ralph, what is going on?”

“The information was true. The Mounties are waiting to arrest the men, Jennie. They're expecting them any minute.” Jennie turned away from him, seething inwardly.
It can't happen. I won't let it happen. My Tom can't go to jail. He can't.

Then she saw them – at first as a thin black line straggling out through the trees; then they stepped onto the ice and the long line became more visible.
Oh God.
With no thought for the consequences, Jennie ran toward them. That one – the tallest one – had to be Tom. Behind her, someone yelled “Stop!” Not Ralph's voice. It had to be one of the Mounties by the bus.

Up close, the strikers looked terrible: cold, exhausted, defeated. The Mounties that had been sent into the woods were a sorry sight
too. She could see icicles clinging to one guy's moustache. They were almost back to the Badger side of the bank. And there was Tom!

Jennie ran out on the ice and grabbed his arm. “Tom,” she said hurriedly, “the Mounties are waiting with buses to arrest all of you. Let's be fast. We can race down the riverbank and around the point. Pass the word. Some of you can get away.”

He nodded and spoke to another striker behind him.

They were across; the Mounties by the buses rushed forward to round up the men. Jennie started to run down the bank of the Exploits toward Pope's Point, waving for others to follow. A Mountie grabbed at Tom but he pushed him away and ran behind Jennie. A dozen or more scurried after them. They circled around Badger, past the trestle and Badger River, dodging through backyards. Some residents, the early risers, saw them. Some were startled. Others waved them onward.