Eavesdroppings - Bob Green

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specks. The real stuff would cure arthritis, gout, gallstones, and most ladies’ ailments too sensitive to mention. It wasn’t supposed to be ingested internally, he said, as it might terminate all of your problems.

      Ladies making purchases from the Colonel didn’t notice the four-foot live blue racer snake he had draped around his neck until it looked them in the eye. Their screams attracted more customers. The Colonel lived rent-free with several pet snakes right across the street from his outlet in a cozy little one-room packing crate nestled between Wilson’s Discount Oil Depot, the Canadian National Railways tracks, and a Chinese laundry that later became Kirkham’s Appliance Store.

      When the Colonel died of undisclosed causes, he left his secret formula to Ben Sossin, who arranged the funeral and bought the headstone. Orders for Blue Racer Liniment increased, however, and George Schaller mixed it by the gallon. Ben cut the price from $1 a bottle to 50 cents and sold it by the case.

      The names of the four principal streets enclosing downtown Galt’s business section were dictated by ego and political hierarchy. Main Street, of course, was hands-off to avoid expensive and tedious litigation between the village’s founding fathers as to who was number one. Water Street, aptly named because it ran beside the Grand River, caused no dispute because no one wanted his name on a street that flooded every year. William Dickson, who arrived in 1816 with Absalom Shade, laid claim to Dickson Street because it flooded only halfway and ran up past the municipal offices. Shade, a carpenter by trade, built every important building and so had the village, Shade’s Mills, named after him. However, John Galt, better connected politically, had the village renamed after him in 1825, and poor Shade had to settle for Shade Street, which ran from the top of Main Street to a cow pasture later to become Soper Park.

      The whole region, including Galt, Preston, and Hespeler, was later inexplicably renamed after a British Austin automobile called the Cambridge.

      Ainslie Street, flooded only now and then, cut from north to south through the heart of the village and was named after a transient lawyer who happened to be delivering mail. Adam Ainslie was returning to Hamilton from Waterloo where he had gone to deliver some mail to friends who had accompanied him on a ship from Gibraltar. He had walked to Waterloo from Hamilton through Beverly Swamp where travellers had been known to disappear.

      At the junction of two muddy paths called Hunter’s Corner, now the savage and virtually impassable intersection of Water Street, Dundas Street, Hespeler Road, and Coronation Boulevard, Ainslie refuelled at Hunter’s Tavern. He asked Hunter where he might buy a pair of dry socks and was directed down a narrow mucky path from where at a point now covered with Galt Collegiate Institute students’ cigarette butts, he caught his first glimpse of the Grand River shimmering in the moonlight.

      Ainslie slogged down the path until he reached the intersection of Main and Water streets. At the northeast end of the bridge he entered Absalom Shade’s White Store (cash only) and bought from a clerk named Harris, after whom Harris Street would be named, the dry socks. Harris advised Ainslie that he might change his socks in the lounge of the Galt Hotel, run by a fellow named Barlow, predecessor of a cartage company and a future member of the provincial legislature. At the hotel Ainslie changed his socks before a roaring fire and chatted with a pleasant man named Thomas Rich, after whom Rich Avenue would someday be named.

      Adam Ainslie was so taken by the hospitality of the village that he decided to stay and have a street named after himself. It helped that he became head of the local militia.

      In the 1930s and 1940s small-town streets were illuminated mainly by 250-watt bulbs every 100 feet or so on hydro poles. The bare bulbs were screwed under corrugated metal reflectors that were painted white on the underside and resembled straw hats. The flickering twenty-five-cycle current allowed wan circles of light under the bulbs and dark shadowy spaces in between where a person might stand unseen.

      Children loved to play games in these checkered spaces of light and dark: hide-and-seek, kick the can, et cetera. And because the streets were as safe as the unlocked churches, parents trying to listen to their radios over the noise of children wrestling in the living room would say, “It’s dark now. Why don’t you kids run outside and play until it’s time for bed?”

      The long nights of autumn when the sun set before seven allowed the boys on Lowrey Avenue and Chalmers Street to prowl the town before bedtime. Sometimes we stuck close to home and goaded selected fleet-footed men into chasing us. We did this simply by tapping on their front doors.

      Art Snutch was always good for a wild chase. He terrified us and we loved it. Art lived in a tiny red brick house across from Dykeman’s Variety Store on the corner of Lowrey and Pollock. One tap on his door and he was on top of us, legs scissoring in the air, hollering, “I’ll tan your hides!” He was tall, thin, and bandy-legged and could run like a deer. Ivan McQueen, who lived half a block away beside Lincoln Avenue Church, occasionally joined Snutch in the chase. Ivan, a bit paunchy and not as fleet as Art, had an ominous bass voice that threatened us from the sky. One night Art and Ivan crashed together in the dark, fell down, and limped home, holding their heads. We knew better than to laugh.

      Weekend nights and a later curfew led us across town to Victoria Park and on to the spring beside the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks in Barrie’s Cut. There was a campsite there, where during the Depression men in search of work dropped from freight trains to rest for a night and share a can of beans. We reached the campsite by following a scrub-lined path that led from the top of Victoria Park to the tracks. As soon as we saw the firelight through the brambles, we dropped to our hands and knees and, like Indians, stalked the campsite until we heard the voices and smelled cigarette smoke. There was laughter and singing and sometimes a harmonica. All the men at the campsite were off westbound freights upgrade. The eastbound freights were too fast to get on or off.

      Invariably, while we lurked in the grass, a westbound freight would come blasting up the grade, double-headed by steam engines with different-size drive wheels and nervous out-of-synch exhausts. After the long, doleful whistle at Blenheim Road, the cannonading exhausts blotted out all other sounds. One of us, startled by a rabbit bounding by and sensing heavier steps, would leap up and run, touching off a general panic that sent everyone racing back down the trail, shrieking and leaping over the fallen until, back in the park, we slumped gasping to the ground close to the deer enclosure where everything seemed safe.

      Grenfell Davenport would say, “That was a close one. Anyone missing?”

      The deer enclosure was Percy Hill’s pet. He was superintendent of the Galt Parks Board in the 1940s. The enclosure extended hundreds of feet into the hardwoods from the duck pond and allowed visitors to watch deer run in close to natural surroundings. The duck pond hosted a variety of tamed birds that shrieked, squawked, and honked everyone out of their beds within earshot at dawn each day. There were also platoons of multi-coloured rabbits that took leave to visit gardens for blocks around. Percy loved animals and nature.

      Most Saturday mornings he sat in the Morris chair in my parents’ kitchen and discussed begonias and peat moss with my dad who had a little greenhouse leaning on the garage. Pop sold him geranium slippings.

      Percy was tall, slim, soft-spoken, and gentle and gave much thought to the ways of the universe, but God help anyone who crossed him up. One morning he sat in the Morris chair with our cat purring in his lap and recounted with relish the fate of people who stole firewood.

      He and the men who tended Victoria Park trimmed dead wood and burnt it in their own fireplaces. They stacked the wood at the end of the service lane behind the deer pens and took it home at their leisure. Every time they got a nice pile together, however, someone stole it. Percy, figuring the thieves came in the dead of night, rigged a trap

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