The Badger Riot (36 page)

Gladys Sharpe, who lives across from the church, rushes out with a blanket.

“I seen who did it! I seen who did it!” she screams hysterically. She sees me and points her finger. “There's Pastor Genge. He was looking through the window of the church. He saw it too.”

An officer leads her aside quickly, talking to her.

The RCMP are shooing people off the snowbanks, telling them to go home.

A way is cleared and officers lift the unconscious constable aboard a van. The doors close and they make their way back down Church Road.

I stand there, amid the ruins of loggers' dreams and
Constabulary pride, and stare down at the pool of blood at my feet. I think about Jesus, my personal Saviour, and about the free will of mankind. I think about the evil that stalks among people, an evil ready to be let loose wherever man allows it.

Someone touches my arm. It's the policeman who took Mrs. Sharpe aside to talk with her.

“Excuse me, Pastor. Mrs. Sharpe says she saw you at the church window. We'll need a statement.”

“Come on, Amanda, let's go.” Madeline jumps down off the snowbank.

She gives me her hand to help me climb down, but I am too upset to care anymore about being proper in my darn straight skirt. I sit on the snow and slide down on my backside, feeling my nylons tear and the snow cut the backs of my bare legs. Then I see them.

“Oh, look, Madeline, the Mounties are on the way up now. We can't get back down the road. Let's cross the road and go in behind the church and get out on the railway track.” I grab my two brothers by the hoods of their parkas and Madeline keeps a tight hold on Melanie.

We scurry across the road.

A policeman sees us, but he only says, “Get on home now, kids. Go on with you, now.”

We're behind the church, heading for the railway tracks when an adult figure looms out of the darkness behind a shed. We scream, but it's only Melanie's father, Mr. Crawford. She launches herself into his arms, crying to break her little heart. Perhaps I am mistaken, but it sure sounds to me like Mr. Crawford is crying too.

He says over and over, “Melanie, Melanie, are you okay? Are you okay?” Then he realizes who we are. “Your father is looking for you,” he says to me. “Go on down the track and you'll meet him on the side road, I'm sure. Go on now.”

We hurry down the track. There's Dad! My brothers race to meet him screaming, “Dad, Dad! We saw someone hit a policeman.”

He was choking her. The cop had her neck in the crook of his arm and he looked like he was squeezing the life out of my Jennie. Jesus, what am I saying? She's not mine. To her I am just good old Ralph, her friend from childhood. The feelings and the frustration that I had kept carefully locked up inside of me all those years suddenly burst. A red mist came in front of my eyes.

I struck that policeman to make him let go of Jennie, but I think I struck to kill too. And when I did, my ten-year-old dream washed over me. There he was, the black-cloaked figure of death – or, in this case, a black-coated cop – and the danger to Jennie was very real.

Jennie was still alive, so that part of the dream was right. I did protect her, but perhaps I killed the policeman. Were they right? Was it natural for an Indian to kill a white man?

But I should have stayed. I deserted my friends.

I was soon over by the big hill, out of breath from running. Then I heard shouts behind me and turned around. Dozens of our men were racing over the same road, some toward the hill, and some toward the River. What was going on? Why were they all leaving? Had the police triumphed? What had happened?

I scooted across the grounds of the convent and came out by Church Road. It was full-dark now, the night air filled with strange sounds. I stood in under the tall old trees to catch my breath. I thought of the running strikers and I knew that, somehow, the picket line had been broken. Should I go back up
the road? Or should I follow the men that I'd seen streaming toward the River?

Then I spied Tom, hurrying along, all by himself, with his long, loose strides. My nerves were raw, and my voice seemed unnatural, like a hiss. “Hey, Tom.”

In his haste, he wasn't paying any attention.

“Tom,” I repeated, and this time he stopped.

“Where'd you pop from, Ralph? You're like a ghost, always creepin' me out, b'y.”

I grabbed hold of his arm. “Why are you running away, Tom? What's going on? Where's Jennie? What's happened up the road?”

“A policeman is down, Ralph. You must've seen it. You were there too, though, come to think of it, I lost sight of you after the police waded in. Anyway, he was hit on the head; blood all over the snow. The men got such a fright when they saw it that they scattered. I made Jennie run away too. The police are like devils up there now, chasing our boys down, clubbing them, putting them in the wagon.” Tom shook his big head. “I'm never going back to jail, Ralph, no matter what. Come on, let's get off the road.”

We went back across the Catholic property and over the hill to the River. There were people and police everywhere. Others were running along with us. We seemed to gravitate to the River for some reason, as if it was at the centre of all our troubles.

There were about forty of us. A couple of the organizers were there. “Boys, it would be much appreciated if any of you know places where we can hide some of our men for tonight.” From Badger there was Tom and me, Bill Hatcher and a few others. The rest were strangers from out of town. We all agreed, anxious to help our union brothers.

I stepped forward. “We'll take ten for now. I know some places to hide them. We might be back for more later. Everyone lay low and out of sight.”

Tom and I started off down the riverbank with the men following us. Tom was using the same route that was taken by the strikers back in February, when they came down off Sandy after
trashing the camp. It kept us close to the rivers and in the trees until we put some distance between the police and us.

Sometime during that dark cold night under the railway station platform, I awoke to shouts and lights.

It was the Mounties. “This is the police! Up and outta there! Up and out now!” They shone their big flashlights in, scaring me half to death. I raised my head a little and I could see the other bundled-up bodies all around me, packed in like rats.

The Mounties yelled at us to crawl out, and to do it fast. I was one of the first to be hauled up by the scruff of me collar.

“What's your name?” a Mountie barked at me.

“Cec . . . Cecil Nippard, sir.”

Oh my, I was some scared. I was shivering and shaking with the cold and fright. There were thirty-six of us. I had them counted as they came out, one by one. I always like to count things, even people. It helps to make me calm. Earlier in the evening, when we were up there by the church in the taxi and the strikers were all around us, I counted two hundred and thirty-six men. Then I pissed in me pants and lost count. I hated to lose count.

Many of the guys under the station stand were tramps or hobos or something, living on the rails. There was this one man, especially. They said he had no legs. He was in the war, what my father called World War Two, a veteran whose legs had been shot off and who was shell-shocked. He walked around with stilts under his pants legs, making him about seven feet tall. I had seen him around many times. He used to be at the Windsor station too. His height, and the creaking sound from his stilts, hidden under his long pants legs, scared me so much that I couldn't look at him full-on, only from the corners of my eyes.

They hauled him out too, poor feller. Two cops sat him up on the platform. He looked some pitiful without his stilts. Watching him, I realized that he didn't scare me anymore. He wasn't some strange
giant at all, just a man with no legs. And he certainly wasn't a logger. Everyone knew that, even the police. They even seemed to treat him with some respect. More than they did any of us, that's for sure.

At the pool hall, the men used to discuss World War Two and I would listen. Someone said that it had ended in Europe on May 8, 1945. They called it VE Day and I knew, right away, that was five thousand and fifty-seven days, almost fourteen years ago. I didn't have to pause and think about leap years, because somehow I always counted them in, even though I didn't know I had until someone told me. Stuff like that has always stayed in my mind. Dates are important things. And they'd talk about the war veterans that had become hobos. They lived on the rails, from boxcar to boxcar, place to place. Many of them suffered war trauma, were shell-shocked and were lost in their minds, where the battles of the war went on forever. I never forgot what they said, maybe because, sometimes, I felt that I was lost in my mind too.

Some of the men tried to make a run for it, but the police weren't having that. They gave chase, knocked the men down in the snow, clubbed them with their big ugly sticks. I was shit-baked; afraid to even blink, let alone move. The Mountie who had hauled me out from under the station came back to me again. “Well, buddy, what are you at tonight? Hiding from the law, are you? Are you a striker or what?”

“No . . . no, sir.” I could hardly get the words out of me mouth, I was so cold and scared. “I works for the A.N.D. Company.”

“Yeah?” he sneered. “A likely story. Who you think is going to believe that?”

Another Mountie came over. “I know him. He's that foolish young fellow from Windsor. One of them skeets that hangs around the pool hall. He'd sell his mother for money to play a game of pool. They say he's real good at it too. No one can beat him.”

“Whatever he is, champion or not, get him into the truck.” The Mounties all laughed.

Oh my, oh my. I wanted to speak up, to say that I had no mother,
and, if I did, I certainly wouldn't sell her for any amount of money. I wanted to say I'd love her and stay with her and be her good boy forever. But I couldn't form the words; I couldn't get them past my lips. I wanted to cry so bad, but only sissies cried.

The ones that the Mounties knew by sight as hobos were left to go back to sleep in under the station. They even helped the legless man off the platform so that he could scrabble in under, pulling his stilts in after him.

But twenty of us were herded aboard an open stake-bodied truck and off down over the road to Grand Falls. The dark night was freezing cold. In the open truck, even though we were strangers to each other, we huddled together for warmth. And no one tried to kick or punch me or call me stupid Cecil.

The guy huddled down next to me really was a striker. “What a fuckin' night this turned out to be. We're guilty of nothing, nothing, I tell you, except standing on a picket line for our rights, and now they're hauling us off to jail.” Two or three others mumbled in agreement.

I didn't know much about that part of the goings-on, not being a member of the IWA union and having never stood on a picket line.

When we arrived in Grand Falls the strikers were sent off to jail. The rest of us were let go and some were ordered to leave town. Coming on toward daylight one of the Mounties dropped me off at me father's house.