LITMIR.BIZ

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as I know the sun will rise tomorrow that if those good men discover that your brother-in-law has so little hope for the future of our fair town that he sought out opportunities for himself and his family elsewhere, they’d run him out of town and possibly the rest of your family too. That would not have aided the cause. Besides, I saw that new Russell outside this house today. You can’t tell me, Billy-boy, it is easy to afford an automobile like that.”

      After a time, Uncle William broke the silence. He took a step closer to Mr. Handle. “So what is the upshot of it all, Roger? With whom did you speak? What will they support?”

      “Let me tell you first the town fathers I spoke with. Not that it was easy to do this on the Lord’s Day but because they all know me so well and because they trust my political instincts, I was able to pry them from their pews and family dinners long enough to impart what I had to impart and extract what I had to extract.”

      “Yes,” Father said somewhat impatiently, “with whom did you speak?”

      “Don’t be so impatient, young man,” he replied. I realized that Mr. Handle had not the wherewithal to further abbreviate either Jethro or Doc and add the word “boy” to the appellation. Of course, the term “young man,” which consisted of more syllables than “Doc,” was no abbreviation at all. I concluded that Mr. Handle must be a very old man if Uncle William and Uncle James were boys to him, and Father was a young man. “I know what you want out of this. And it’s likely to be a long road, so you’d better be patient.”

      “In summary,” Mr. Handle said, speaking principally to Uncle William, “of the twelve, two will gladly now see the back of you, three are considering discrediting you, and two are sad you are leaving. Two may support Doc as your immediate successor. The others are on the fence. They, gentlemen, hold the balance of power. I will leave you and return in an hour or two’s time with their final resolution.”

      Within minutes, I was found and dispatched by my mother to retrieve my siblings and cousins. Though the mission would have required me to walk but two blocks, I got no further than the Turners’ driveway. There, I found my brother Jim sitting behind the wheel of the Turners’ new motor vehicle. Automobiles had begun to appear in Brampton in the early 1900s. The first made its entrance under the power of Lord Minto, the Governor General of Canada and his wife Lady Minto who drove to Brampton to inspect its famous greenhouses. But in 1907 there were still very few cars in Brampton. The Turner family was among the small group of automobile owners. Uncle William had promised to take us all for a ride in his newest vehicle later that day.

      Like all new technologies, the public was divided in its support for the new means of conveyance. Most members of my family were cautiously optimistic about their future acceptance. They believed that once motorized vehicles were built more reliably and once they were priced more affordably, they might become the predominant mode of transportation. Those in that group were certain that such conditions would never be met in their lifetime. But that group did not include my brother Jim. He was confident that the automobile would replace the horse and buggy within ten years. That group also did not include Aunt Lil who, naturally, took a different view. Though she was rarely a defender of tradition, Aunt Lil took a strong stand against the new means of transportation. She considered automobiles to be noisy, smelly, unsociable, and dangerous. She predicted that it would only be a few years before the contraptions were banned.

      The car in which Jim sat was not running, and after being assured that it would not actually go anywhere, I allowed him to pull me into it.

      “Wouldn’t it be exciting to own one of these, Jessie?” my brother mused.

      “I don’t know,” I replied. I didn’t like to take a position contrary to Jim, who I idolized, but I secretly fell into my Aunt Lil’s camp. Cars scared me. “I miss Daisy and Petunia.” Daisy and Petunia were the Turners’ two horses, both of whom had been moved out of the barn at the back of their house and sold to make way for the automobile.

      “The car eats a lot less hay than Daisy and Petunia do,” Jim said. “And we don’t have any horses that we would have to get rid of to make way for a car. Of course, it costs a lot of money, and I expect we will have to wait for the price to come down before Father can buy one. I saw this car, this Russell F, advertised in the Conservator last week. It cost $3,750. It’s the top of the line model made by the Canada Cycle and Motor Co. It has a forty horsepower engine and can sit seven people in these two bench seats.” He rubbed his hand over the dashboard. “The frame is pressed chrome steel. Isn’t it beautiful?” He didn’t seem to notice my lack of response as he went on.

      “Mark my words, Little One, in another ten years no one in Brampton will be riding in horse-drawn carriages. They’ll all be riding in automobiles. And they won’t look like this either.” I shuddered at his premonition regarding their full-scale adoption but nonetheless asked for an explanation regarding their future look.

      “Look at this car, Jessie,” he explained. “It is shaped to look exactly like a buggy. Two long, curved benches in the back with a long motor in front, very much resembling a carriage pulled by a horse. This,” he said, waving at the area in which we sat, “is not a carriage and that,” he added, pointing to the engine at the front, “is not a horse. There is no reason for the automobile to look this way except to make us all feel comfortable with the familiar shape. But the vehicle may look better and run more efficiently if it were shaped differently. Who knows,” he said wistfully, “maybe someday I will discover that better form.”

      “Do you know how to build an automobile?” I asked.

      “Well, I don’t know now but I could learn. There are hundreds of people across the world trying to build them. Some have figured it out.”

      I sat there running my hand along the various parts of the interior, enjoying my brother’s animated description of every component and instrument. It was only the hollering of my cousins from the street in front of the house that reminded me of the errand I was supposed to have run. Clearly, I wasn’t needed for that purpose.

      Ninety minutes later, our meal ended with a knock at the door. Uncle William, announcing that it was likely Mr. Handle, rose to retrieve him, and the children were excused. Aunt Charlotte, praising my civility, accepted my proposal to clear the table. It was an inaugural offer made for the true motive of hearing the outcome of Mr. Handle’s engagement—an offer I nearly recanted when I first took in the countenance of the man then being admitted to the dining room. It seemed impossible to me that the stranger with the young, child-like face was the man who had referred to my two uncles as boys and my father as a young man. However, upon viewing his tree-like legs and heavy shoes and hearing his greeting to those assembled, I slowly began to lift the empty plates.

      Neither the men nor the women made any attempt to move to the sitting room, and so Mr. Handle was invited to address the entire group seated at the dining room table. Whether this surprised him or not, I could not tell, but as political conversations in our family so often took place around such tables and hence involved the women as well as the men, it was not surprising from my perspective. Indeed, the discussion over the prior hour had primarily centred on the very matter at hand—Mother expressing her abject disbelief that anyone would consider Father unsuitable for the vacancy about to be created. She even suggested that the views of the town fathers be ignored, if necessary, in favour of a direct appeal to the electors. This notion received short shrift by Father, who declared that if the town fathers did not want him for the position, he did not want it.

      After declining Aunt Charlotte’s offer of dessert, Mr. Handle began, first apologizing for the delay in returning. “It took longer than I thought it would. The town fathers, while united on some matters,” he said, looking at that moment toward Father, “were quite divided on others.”

      Mr. Handle turned to Uncle William. “The upshot is that the group requires you to leave Brampton right away—before you change your mind. I think that some within the group see great opportunities for themselves if you exit politics quickly.”

      Turning toward Father, he said, “The group requires that there be a race for the mayoralty, even though there are only five months left in the term. They will

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