The Badger Riot (7 page)

Ralph never had much patience for schooling. He felt too confined in a classroom. The nuns gave him the heebie-jeebies. All those clothes: they wore long black dresses and black veils with white things on their foreheads. Looking at them made him sweat and long to be outside in the cool clean air. He was pretty sure that God never meant for humans to dress like that.

So he quit school. He and Vern and Tom Hillier just walked away from it halfway through the eleventh grade. Ralph, because he couldn't stand the nuns, Vern, because he thought he knew enough anyway, and Tom, because, at six foot six, he was too big to fit into the seats.

The young men wanted jobs in the lumberwoods. Grandfather had once told Ralph that it was called “lumberwoods” because of the lumber mill that was there at the turn of the century. Even though, since 1906, they had been cutting trees not for lumber, but
for pulp and paper. However, the name lumberwoods had stuck. Grandfather had said that all the flat land in Badger, along by the Exploits River, once had big, tall pine trees, hundreds of them, forty, fifty feet tall. A white man and his crew had come, raped the tall pines from the land, sawed them up and shipped the lumber out. Without the trees to strengthen the riverbanks, the waters of the great Exploits overflowed onto a sad and barren land.

It sickened Ralph to see what the men put up with for a pittance of a wage to help their families survive in poor villages all over Newfoundland. The lumber camps were filthy and damp and in them the men lived like rats. All those bodies packed in a small space was too much for him. Ralph preferred to sleep outdoors. If the weather was bad, he built a bough whiffen and crawled in. But Vern and Tom slept in the crowded bunkhouse and put up with it.

In the summertime, swarms of flies ate the men. They crawled into their eyes, their ears and their mouths. It drove them crazy. They rubbed all kinds of concoctions on themselves, including bear grease, urine and kerosene oil. The flies never bothered Ralph. He hummed a song of the People that came on the wind that blew over the Great Mound and the flies and swarming mosquitoes stayed away.

Vern begged Ralph to tell him the secret. “Look, Ralph, a whole pack of baccy for you. All you have to do is tell me what kind of tune you're humming under your breath there. Sounds like Hank Snow to me.”

Tom was there too. “Everything sounds like Hank Snow to you, Vern b'y. Don't pay any attention to him, Ralph. As for me, I likes the sound of it. Sort of calms me.”

“Shut the fuck up, Tom.” Vern hated Tom. Ralph knew it was because Jennie was casting him aside for Tom. As well, Ralph felt that Vern was also jealous of Tom's height while he stayed short.

Ralph laughed. “Tom, I guess if my humming could calm black-flies, it could calm anything or anyone,” he said. “And Vern, my son, if I told you, it wouldn't make a peck of difference. You're not Indian. You wouldn't get it.” Then, changing the subject: “So, which one of you fellas is taking out Jennie Sullivan these days?”

Tom turned as red as a beet. Mumbling that he had to file his saw, he shambled away. Vern, on the other hand, was furious. “Goddamn you, Ralph Drum. You fuckin' bastard, makin' me feel small in front of that big son of a bitch. Jennie haven't had nothin' to do with me in over a year, you knows that. I seen her makin' eyes at him, I did. I don't give a fuck, anyway. Lots of women down in Windsor that I could get if I wanted to.”

Unlike Tom, who was destined to be a super-logger, Ralph produced an average amount, not because he couldn't do more, but because there was something inside him that hated to see the tall trees, some hundreds of years old, fall to the ground like dead soldiers. He never voiced that thought to the boys. They'd never understand. To them, a tree was a tree, not a soldier.

Company officials put pressure on the contractors to produce as much pulpwood as they could in a season. In turn, the contractors pressured their foremen, and the foremen pushed the loggers. It seemed to Ralph that there was always a race to see who could cut the most. Tom went at it like there was no tomorrow. Pretty soon he would be the best cutter in the Badger division. Vern hated it; hated the forest; hated the camps; hated Tom; hated Ralph because he wouldn't tell him how to keep the flies away. He was longing to get away, but there was no place to go.

After three months of cutting logs, Ralph got sick of it. He made his way over to the west coast of the island where he had many Mi'kmaq cousins. He stayed there until the summer of 1947. Then he came back home and decided to try for a job on the drive.

The three rivers converging at Badger were well-known to Ralph and to every boy growing up in the small town. They had fished and canoed on Badger Brook, swum in Little Red Indian River and sometimes even dared the mighty Exploits. As a teenager, Ralph would sneak out in the springtime when the drive was on and the River was full of pulpwood and try jumping from log to log. This was a dangerous game, but when you're young, you don't think about danger. A stick of pulpwood was five feet long, at least four
inches thick, and as slippery as an eel. Sometimes he fell in and would swim under the logs and get to shore.

Tom hadn't gone around with Ralph and Vern much, due to religious issues with his parents, but when he did, he would try a log close to the shore. He used to say that balancing on the logs made him dizzy. Annie Drum, Ralph's Ma, said Tom probably had trouble with his ears. He had no balance. He'd slip off into the water every time. Vern had been too scared to jump logs, no matter how much Ralph called him chicken.

The River had always been Ralph's first love or, he thought,
my second love
. His first love – his love for the white woman Jennie – would always be a secret hidden deep inside him.

With pike pole and peavey, as the famous song said, he would join the other rivermen and work at moving the logs on their way to the Grand Falls mill. His drive boss would be Jennie's father, Ned Sullivan.

One day, in the summer of 1947, Jennie sat down at the base of the tall old pine tree on the bank of the River, pretending to be reading but actually hoping to see Tom come across on the cable boat. Ralph came by.

“Hello Jennie. Can I sit with you for a spell?”

“Yes, Ralph b'y, sit right here.” Jennie made room for him under the pine. “Where have you been? I haven't seen much of you since you left school.”

“I was over on the west coast for awhile, you know; had a job with Bowaters cutting wood on Glovers Island out in the middle of Grand Lake.” He lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke into the air. “But I'm never content until I'm back home in Badger.”

“Will you go up in the camps now? Vern says they're some state. He hates it, but Tom is happy enough; never complains.”

“Yeah, I know. I guess I'll try to get on as a cutter for now. I have my name in with your father for next spring to get on the drive. I figure I can do that pretty well. I've been on that River all my life, sure.” He laughed. “What about you, Jennie? Are you going to marry Vern or what?” Ralph had been away for quite a while and didn't know what was going on anymore. She saw him looking at her out of the corner of his eyes, as if he was anxious about it or something.

Jennie's quick anger flared. “No, Ralph, I am not going to marry Vern. I am not.” She jumped up. “Sure you are worse than Mam and Pap! I am sick of them trying to make a couple out of me and Vern.”

Ralph got up too. “I'm sorry. I only asked. I am actually glad you're not going to hitch yourself to Vern.”

That stopped her. She had thought he and Vern were buddies, and that he was questioning her on Vern's behalf. “You are? Why are you glad, for God's sakes?”

Ralph turned away and gazed out over the surface of the River. “You deserves someone better, Jennie,” he said softly.

Just then she caught sight of the cable boat. And there was Tom's red cap. Perhaps they'd walk up the road together. “Excuse me Ralph, I see Tom's getting off the boat.”

Ralph didn't reply. He smiled at her and walked down to the cable boat to help the men ashore. As Jennie followed, she thought,
Sometimes I just can't understand Ralph.

When Tom and Jennie made it known they were a steady couple, both sets of parents were dead set against it.

Mam was firm. “You'm not marrying no Protestant. No you're not! What about poor little Vern? Why can't you marry him?” And on and on she went. “What will the priest say? I'll never hold me head up at Mass again.”

Tom told Jennie that his mother, Suze, wasn't about to let her only child marry no black Catholic. Jennie had heard others say that Suze was a crousty woman. They said that she had no good words to say about anyone, that she never laughed, and that she hated music and dancing. “Carryin' on with foolishness” was what she called it. Tom's father, Albert, was different; he seemed to be a more tolerant man.

Tom didn't tell Jennie everything that his mother said to him after she learned the news. All he would say was, “Mother is very upset, Jennie, maid. Her religion is important to her. She got up in church the other night and told the whole congregation about us during her testimony. She said that the Devil was leading her son down a wicked path to leave his true Christian religion and worship idols. Then the pastor had me up to the altar and prayed over me.”

Good God Almighty
, Jennie thought.
Suze is worse than Mam, and I thought that Mam was bad
!

After weeks of fighting with his parents, Tom hit upon a plan. He told Jennie about it one evening as he was walking her up the track. “Jennie, I got it all figured out. We'll get you pregnant. Then the families will have to let us marry.”

Jennie stopped walking and looked up at him in open-mouthed astonishment.

Taking her hands in his, Tom said, “I know, I know Jennie that you wants to wait until we're married before you loses your cherry. But it's the easiest way. When everyone knows you're going to have a baby we will have to get married, and then they won't be so mad at us.”

Looking up into Tom's strong handsome face, Jennie tried to think things through. Ever since she was a young girl Mam had always told her what a precious gift her virginity would be to her husband. But when Tom put his strong arms around her and kissed her eager lips it took every ounce of strength for her not to lie down and let him have his way with her. But she wanted Tom to respect her, for the townspeople to respect her, and most of all, she didn't want to disappoint her parents.

Turning away from him, she continued to walk up the track. “No Tom, that's not the way. We'll have to think of something else.”

But Tom was insistent. “Come on. Let's plan for tomorrow night. Come on, Jennie. You knows I loves you and there'll never be anyone else for me. At least think it over.”

So Jennie did think it over all the next day at Plotsky's. As she wrote out a bill of sale for a pair of logans and a washboard, she thought,
I won't give in to Tom unless we're married and that's that.
But as she wrote out another receipt for a pound of bologna and a plug of tobacco, her mind tipped the other way.
Tom's right. We love each other, so there's no need for us to wait.
By closing time, she still hadn't made up her mind.

Jennie met Tom down by Coleman's Restaurant and they walked over to the Highroad Bridge that spanned the Badger River. Farther down, as they meandered along, there were A.N.D. Company sheds. There was no one around when Tom pulled her in by the back of one of the sheds. It was pitch-dark, but Jennie didn't need any light to feel Tom's arms and his strong body. She arched her neck as he trailed kisses down toward her breasts. It was so good she felt faint.

“Oh Glory be to God.” Tom's hot breath was down to her cleavage now. “I want you so bad. The smell of you is enough to send a man insane.” One of his hands crept up her leg to the smooth inner flesh of her thigh.