For Bonnie Annie Laurie (1938)
by Lynn H. Nelson
Sometimes, in the warm evenings of Summer after planting and before harvest and especially
on Thursdays, neighbors would often walk or ride over to my grandparent's just to socialize. The
women would gather inside to drink tea, knit and crochet, and talk about who was and who
should be thinking about getting married, who was expecting, who was going to become a
grandmother, and such womenfolk things. As the evening drew on sometimes one of them would
start talking about the home and family she had left and, soon enough, everyone was dabbing at
her eyes and remembering the things she had left behind her. One of the things that my
grandmother had left behind her was music. She played the piano very well and had a fine though
soft voice. Grandfather knew how much she missed real music in her life since he could hear her
singing to herself even while she bent herself to tasks that one would have thought were beyond
such a delicate woman. Early in the Winter and without telling her, Grandfather had ordered a
piano and sheet music sent up from Chicago as well as a fine hand-cranked Victrola with a big
tulip-shaped loudspeaker, along with a hundred phonograph records of music he thought that she
would like. I remember these things so clearly . . .
One of the many good things about Lawnsdale School is that Miss Bell was quite gracious in
letting her students be absent when they were needed elsewhere—just as long, of course, as they
made up all of the work that they had missed and were ready, immediately upon their return, to
present a full report to the school of where they had been and what they had seen and done.
Grandfather asked Miss Bell to excuse my being absent Monday, and Tuesday also, if we
happened not to be able to return in time for that day's school. There had been another freeze on
Saturday, and the ground was hard on Sunday when we set off in the great green Studebaker
wagon with Skip and Celery pulling for Loon Lake. Loon Lake was only some fifteen miles
away, but between our home and the town lay the obstacle of Ratfoot Hill, a long straight pull
that led to the summit on the other side of which was a short steep decline with a hairpin curve in
the middle of it. In the Spring's mud and Winter's snows, it was almost impassable, but the
weather was kind to us. It stayed cold enough that the ground did not thaw and become slippery,
and all the signs pointed to a week of continued clear, cold weather. Skip and Celery, who geared
up every time they saw the long grade up Ratfoot Hill, made the crest without drawing a heavy
breath, and Bomp rode the brake all the way down the other side. By noon, we were pulling into
Loon Lake.
I don't believe that I could properly describe Loon Lake as I saw it as a child. The resident
population was only sixty-four, but it included a dentist and doctor with a small clinic, a Mountie
station, a hotel on the low ridge overlooking the lake, a blacksmith/farrier/equipment forger who
doubled as the livery stable manager, a milliner/dress maker with absurdly inappropriate
headgear bedecked with egret and ostrich feathers on view in her window, a banker and his bank
with bars on its windows, a tavern owner and his snug tavern, with its big hearth, conveniently
located next to the hotel's restaurant, a postmaster with a real post office where one could buy
books, magazines, newspapers from all over and not too old, a bulletin board with all sorts of
pictures, announcements, proclamations, and notes that people left offering things for sale,
announcing that they were breaking up their farm and going home, or had just arrived and needed
to buy equipment cheap, birth and wedding announcements, obituaries and all sorts of other news
and notices. Loon Lake didn't have a newspaper and, even if it had one, it would have been
almost impossible to deliver for much of the year, so the post-office bulletin board was a required
stop for everyone coming into town, and they were expected to recite all of its contents to all
their neighbors when they returned home.
As important as the post-office was, there was no doubt that Jeannot's General Store was the
heart and soul of Loon Lake, and that all of the other shops and stores lived only by the trade that
the store brought in. Both Indians and whites came with their furs and, when the harvest had
come in, lines of wagons converged on Jeannot's storage bins to deposit their grain and collect
their cash or pay off the tabs they had accumulated since the last harvest. The store itself was, at
least to my eyes, as big as a warehouse, and it was jammed with all sorts of goods—piles of soft
white woolen blankets with the distinctive Hudson Bay Company's colored stripes on one end;
ribbons, rolls of twine and great length of chain; blocks of salt, cans of grease, and cases of
bottles of Sloan's liniment; anvils, sledge hammers and tongs; fragile glass chimneys for
kerosene lamps, lanterns, and boxes of fat citronella candles; pails, buckets and cans of all sizes,
long festoons of traps hanging from the ceiling, seines and all sizes of fish and grappling hooks;
hundred-pound bags of sugar, flower-patterned sacks of flour, oatmeal, and barley, and tea chests
with all sorts of colorful and exotic pictures; bolts of cloth piled atop each other, burlap sacking,
mattress ticking and small papers of pins and needles; rolls of barbed wire, hinges both large and
small, pulleys and grindstones; horse bits, wagon wheels and rows of boots and high-top shoes,
boxes and boxes of nails, screws, and bolts, still more boxes of waxed wooden matches, tins of
kerosene, and large blocks of paraffin; bottles, jars and crocks of all shapes and sizes; yellow
slickers, denim work shirts, overalls and thick plaid coats; axes, lightning rods and knives of all
sorts; hatchets and ratchets, pulleys and windlasses, and so many other things that I felt dizzy just
looking at them. I had seen Marshall Fields, Wiebolt's, Goldblatt's, Sear's and Roebuck's, The
Fair Store, The Boston Store and others, but I had never seen anything like Jeannot's, a jammed
jumble of everything it took to settle a frontier or build a civilization. Just in case he had
forgotten anything, Mr. Jeannot kept a big pile of Sear's and Roebuck's catalogues by his front
door, and each customer took the latest wish book with him as he left the store, something with
which to plan, to dream, and to entertain oneself during the Winter when civilization could seem
far, far away, and, finally, something to add a bit of decoration and comfort to what might
otherwise be a cold and dreary privy.
Before we had left for Loon Lake, Grandfather had collected
orders for supplies from all of our neighbors, and he went over
the list, name by name, with Mr. Jeannot until he was assured that
all of the goods would be ready to be loaded on our wagon when we
returned and were ready to head home. When this chore was finally
done, he unhitched the team behind Jeannot's and we walked the
team over to the liveryman's to be put up for the next couple of
days. As we walked away down the single street of the town, I
asked Bomp if the lake flooded. He said that it never did and why
did I ask. I didn't understand why the wooden sidewalks were
built so far above the dirt street, and he explained to me that
some towns rolled up their sidewalks at sundown, but that the
stores of Loon Lake simply lifted theirs up like the drawbridges
of castles in olden days and, with their storefronts covered with
thick wooden walls through which there were no doors to defend,
the proprietors could sleep soundly and without concern that the
town might be attacked by a pack of kinkajous. I knew that he was
fibbing about the kinkajous because everybody knows that
kinkajous are solitary, but, having seen shop-owners in Chicago
draw and lock steel gratings across the front of their stores, I
was prepared to believe what he had said about the drawbridges.
It was only several years later that I realized that the
"sidewalks" of Loon Lake had actually been a long line of docks
for loading and unloading the wagons that pulled up in front of
its shops and stores.
It was only a short walk to the "station," and the "bus" was
ready to begin its drive south to St Walburg by the time we got
there. It wasn't really a bus, of course, but a small heavy-duty
truck with its bed covered with tightly stretched canvas
something like a covered wagon. Under the canvas, there were
wooden bench along each side of the truck bed, and there were
several men already sitting there, smoking and with their feet
stretched out on the packs and bedrolls they had piled between
the benches. When my grandfather lifted me in, the men busied
themselves rearranging their duffel so that I could lie down, and
Grandfather unrolled my very own quilt from our bedroll and
covered me up while the driver tied down the back flaps securely
and we were left in twilight although it was still only mid-
afternoon. The driver then started the motor, and we were on our
way.
I gather that the company that had built the railway to St.
Walburg had planned on continuing it the thirty miles northward
to Loon Lake and possibly yet another twenty miles to the village
of Goodsoil, north of which there was nothing until one reached
Lake Athabasca and Great Slave Lake far, far to the north. But
the big depression had come along and the railroad stopped at St.
Walburg. There was only the preliminary grade and the first layer
of ballast stretching up to Loon Lake. The stones for the ballast
were large and uneven, and so one could not travel it either
quickly or comfortably, and it was impossible for horses and
wagons. But trucks could handle it, and it was the highway that
linked our districts to the rest of the world. If it had not been
for that road, Jeannot could not have bought our wheat, furs and
other things, load them into big grain trucks, sell them at a
profit to the brokers at the railhead in St Walburg, and use the
profit to buy all of the things he needed to keep his store
jammed pack, and upon which we depended to be able to work and
to survive.
It must have been a painful ride for Grandfather and the other
men on the hard wooden benches, but it was soft and warm in the
nest they had built for me in their baggage, and I felt secure
under my very own quilt. When Grandfather woke me, it was
evening, we were at the team yards at St. Walburg, and our room
at the Railway Hotel was waiting for us. I remember only flashes
of the next day, but those flashes are still bight and clear. It
was still dark when the lady rapped on our door and told us that
breakfast would be ready soon and that the train was due in an
hour. When we went downstairs, some of the men from the truck and
others whom I had never seen before were seated around a large
dining table, and the lady started bringing in platter after
platter of breakfast. There were waffles, French toast, and
pancakes; thick rashers of bacon, pork chops, big gut-encased
links of pork sausage and even a few kippers in case they should
be an Englishman in the crowd; eggs—fried, soft-boiled, curried
and scrambled; potatoes fried with onions in bacon grease, onion
soup with a thick crust of melted cheese and thick pea soup with
the tips of pieces of salt pork poking above the surface like
icebergs in a green sea; syrup, fresh butter and treacle to go
with the fresh rolls and bread, big pots of milk, tea and—I
was almost giddy with the smell of it—coffee. My tea-drinking
grandparents seemed unaware that my parents, father being
Swedish, were inveterate coffee-drinkers and that I had been
weaned on milk and sugar with a bit of coffee added or that the
proportion of coffee to milk had increased as I grew older. The
lady quickly understood when I asked her if I could have coffee,
and I soon had a large mug of coffee-tanned milk and sugar in
front of me.
Everyone was reaching and grabbing for whatever they wanted, and
were chewing and talking at the same time. I was far too little
to reach and grab, but—without breaking stride in their own
reaching and grabbing, the men around me, as well as the lady
doing the serving, managed to keep my plate heaping. Sometimes,
even now, sixty years later, when I am drowsing, the delicious
smells and tastes of that breakfast return to me, together with
the sound of the chatter and laughter of the men about the table.
Then it was time to go to the team yard so that Grandfather could
watch the crane that lifted his precious piano and set it down
gently in a giant grain truck. Grandfather climbed up and made
sure that the inside of the piano was well stuffed and the ropes
were quite secure, and then began to check Jeannot's goods off
the bills of lading as they went into the wagon.
The thirty miles to Loon Lake seemed to take forever, and it was
clear that I would not only miss school Tuesday, but Wednesday
too. It was already well into the afternoon by the time we
reached Loon Lake, and, by the time that the store goods had been
unloaded, and the piano, Victrola, records and sheet music safely
stowed in our waiting wagon, the sun was well down toward the
horizon. Grandfather went to the restaurant while I kept watch
over our precious cargo, and he came back shortly with some thick
beef sandwiches—actually venison, but I was so hungry that it
made no difference to me—sweet pickles and pickled onions.
Grandfather held that it is given that a person could get by easily on
bread and water if only he had a few pickled onions thrown in,
and I've found that there's a lot of truth in that, even if he
did exaggerate a bit.
It was time for bed, and Grandfather undid the bedroll and
settled himself underneath the canvas, figuring that the canvas
would keep the load dry and that his own body heat would keep the
piano and Victrola from getting too cold and cracking. I took my
quilt and went over to the livery stables to sleep in the stall
with Skip and Celery. The stableman had told Grandfather that
our horses had been quite restless while we were gone and that
one of them—it must have been Celery—had kicked a slat out
of the back of their stall. Horses are funny creatures. Skip and
Celery were big draft horses of a particularly stubborn sort that
people called "hammer-heads," and Grandfather had bought them
cheaply because their owner considered them "intractable." But
the two of them had taken to Grandfather at once and would have
followed him around the farm like a pair of faithful dogs if he
had let them. I was excessively fond of them both, and the first
time that grandmother had found that I had snuck out of bed to go
to the barn to sleep and had ended up in their stall, she was
distraught. After some thinking, though, both she and Grandfather
realized that horses are often high-strung and can become nervous
and frightened in the dark, and that some horses fare much better
if they have a companion, such as a dog or cat with them. Grandfather
said that Skip and Celery seemed to have decided that I was as
good as a dog—they were so big that they made Nick nervous,
and he much preferred to sleep in the stall of Old Rose, our
placid milch cow. So I had their permission to sleep in their
stall whenever they seemed to be getting skittish, provided that
I tell them first and not go sneaking out of the house again. And
so I lay down in the sweet hay and slept soundly except for a
couple of times when one or the other of them put a velvet nose
on my cheek and whinnied softly in my ear.
We got an early start the next morning so that we wouldn't have
to hurry. The piano, Victrola, and our neighbor's goods made a
good load, and Grandfather never was one to drive his animals.
When we got to that steep climb at Ratfoot Hill, Skip and Celery—incensed as usual that a mere hill should have gotten in their
way—made it almost halfway up to the hairpin before they
started blowing with the effort. Grandfather pushed as hard as he
could on the brake lever while I put chocks under all four wheels
and he called out time and again for me to be careful. After he
had checked all of the chocks and tied the pole up and back onto
the wagon, he unlocked the brake, and unhitched the team. He took
out the long length of strong cable he had brought and tied it
securely to the evener. He then walked the team up the hill to
the hairpin, where there was a big post—or maybe the trunk of
an old tree—firmly set in the ground. He hooked the pulley that he
was carrying to the ring on an iron circle that seemed to have
been forged just for the purpose of slipping to the base of the
post where it was fastened by nails as big a railway spike. He
then slipped the end of the cable through the pulley, through
each of the end rings on the team's traces, and then tied it back
onto itself so that it formed a triangle that would compensate
for either one of the horses getting a step or two on the other.
When he had thoroughly inspected the entire arrangement and
tested each knot, he started Skip and Celery back down the hill.
I gathered up the chucks and followed the wagon as it slowly
rolled upwards, replacing them when Grandfather called for me to
do so.
He repeated the entire process once more, and the wagon was
standing beside another post at the crest of Ratfoot Hill. On the
long downhill side, it was merely a matter of his riding the
brake and my tossing some water on it when it began to smoke. It
was an easy drive home and the sun was still high up in its
track when we reached the foot of the hill. Grandfather, however,
chose to travel by the roundabout route, crossing the corduroy
road over the marshes at the southern end of the lake and
stopping at each house for the folks to pick up what they had
wanted from Loon Lake. The first stop was the Pankratz's, and,
after their supplies were unloaded, Christina hurried off to lure
Grandmother—who was somehow under the impression that we had
gone to Loon Lake for a couple of days to have a new wheel put on
the Studebaker and for the dentist to fix my front teeth (which
had been protruding at an extreme angle since I had tied a rope
to a tree and tried to imitate the ladies I had seen swing by
their teeth at the Barnum and Bailey Circus at Armory in
Chicago). Grandfather had simply pushed them back into place once
we had gotten underway and Grandmother was none the wiser.
At Heinbecker's, Robinson's, Travis's, and Hunt's, the man of the
house came out to accompany us as we made the circuit of the
lake, crossed on the corduroy bridge at its north end, and
approached our cabin from a totally unexpected direction. It
turned out that there was really no need for such a strategy
since the house was empty. Christina had been persuasive in
telling Grandmother that her son, Ian, had a bad cough and needed
help. He did need Grandmother's help, actually, but that's
another story. It didn't take long to get the piano in the house
since Grandfather had the foresight to have laid in some strong
planks for a long ramp up the front steps before we had left. It
was close to sundown when Grandmother returned, smelling of some
homemade medication in which licorice and creosote seemed to
have played a large part. Although the inside of the house was
already dark, Grandfather had not lit any of the lamps.
Grandmother came in by the kitchen door, as she had since the
kitchen was finished, and lit the lamp on the table by the
kitchen door. As soon as she did, Grandfather lowered the needle
onto a spinning phonograph record, and the room was filled with
the sound of Harry Lauder singing "Annie Laurie." I probably
forgot to tell you that, although I called her "Donnie," my grandmother's real
and maiden name was Annie Laurie MacFader and that she was at
least as Scottish as her name.
I can close my eyes and see her still as she stood in the door to
the kitchen with a lamp in her hand and looked at the piano,
Victrola, and Grandfather. She was a tiny woman, and fragile as
only a diabetic in the days before insulin could be fragile, but
as tough as only a person who stays alive only though the
strictest self control can be. In the light of the lamp she held,
I could see a tear glistening down her cheek—the only time I
ever knew her to cry. Grandfather always found it difficult to
express affection, much less love, in words, and so he waved his
hand with a careless gesture and said that he thought that we
needed a bit of music in the house, which was just another of his
fibs because anyone who had ever hear him sing knew that he was
completely tone-deaf. Grandmother didn't say a word, but went up
to him, took his big hand in her small one, and kissed it.
I wasn't old enough to be either sensitive or tactful, but I did
know that something was making me very uncomfortable, so I picked
up my quilt and slipped out to Skip and Celery's stall. The music
from the house was still playing when I finally went to sleep.
Lynn Nelson lived on a farm fourteen miles north of Loon Lake in northern Saskatchewan in 1938; he was seven years old. 061304
