W. Kinsella - The Winter Helen Dropped By

The Fourth of July, while admittedly an American holiday, was what was celebrated in the Six Towns Area of Alberta. The first of July was celebrated in Canada as Dominion Day, but, Daddy pointed out, and so did people like Earl J. Rasmussen and Bandy Wicker, both of whom had emigrated from the United States, and Wasyl Lakusta and Deaf Danielson and Adolph Badke, who had emigrated respectively from Ukraine, Norway, and Germany, that everyone had come to Canada to be free, which they were, but they resented that Canada wasn’t really an independent country, and each and every one of them resented that the King of England was officially the head of state in Canada, and that Canadians sang ‘God Save the King’ at official celebrations, and didn’t have a real flag but one with the English flag, the Union Jack, sitting in its corner and some kind of gold lion or griffon that made it just reek of royalty, something every one of them immigrants had come to North America to get away from. So no one much objected when the official celebration in the Six Towns Area took place on the Fourth of July. Loretta Cake, who lived in an abandoned cabin near to Doreen Beach with about a hundred cats, said something about it being unpatriotic, and so did a family named Baskerville lived up Glenevis way. He had been a major in the British Army and walked around wearing a monocle and hired Indians to work his land because he described himself as a gentleman farmer. But it was generally agreed that English people didn’t know how to have a good time, and that was the deciding factor.

‘If the English was running the celebration,’ my daddy said, ‘we’d all have roast mutton, give a hip-hip-hurrah for the King of England, and go to bed early.’

Earl J. Rasmussen said he didn’t see a thing wrong with folks eating mutton, and if more did why he’d make a better living.

Daddy said, ‘Mutton tastes like wool,’ and that Earl J. Rasmussen should have settled in England where people eat sheep, wool and all.

One of the many highlights of the Fourth of July Picnic and Sports Day was the fireworks display, which came at dusk. The fireworks had to be ordered, something that was usually done in March or April, or whenever the annual spring flood of Jamie O’Day Creek, which my daddy had named after me, receded sufficiently for either Daddy or Earl J. Rasmussen or Bandy Wicker to ride horseback as far as Fark and accompany Curly McClintock in his inherited dump truck, along with Curly’s son, Truckbox Al McClintock, who once almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League, riding shotgun, to Edmonton where the fireworks were ordered at the Acme Novelty and Carnival Supplies store, on 114th Street, just north of Jasper Avenue.

Acme Novelty and Carnival Supplies store also rented merry-go-rounds and carnival games of skill, like over-and-under and ring toss and the one with cement milk bottles and soggy baseballs and a genuine roulette wheel that had once spun in front of the crowned heads of Europe. Acme was owned by a Mr. Prosserstein, who, it was rumored, was Jewish, though no one from the Six Towns Area, even my daddy, who had traveled widely, had to the best of their recollections ever encountered anybody who was Jewish. Mr. Prosserstein did drive a sharp bargain, they said, but not an unfair one, and he was dark complected, Daddy said, and did speak with an unfamiliar accent, and was disinclined to work on Saturdays, all of which considerations pointed to the likelihood that he was Jewish.

The widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, whose only knowledge of Jews came from a play by William Shakespeare, pointed out that Seventh Day Adventists didn’t work on Saturdays either, and that maybe Mr. Prosserstein was a Seventh Day Adventist. She suggested that they carry a roast beef sandwich with them and offer it to Mr. Prosserstein, and if he turned it down why it would prove he was a Seventh Day Adventist, because Seventh Day Adventists were vegetarians.

Daddy said that a roast pork sandwich would be equally enlightening, because if Mr. Prosserstein refused, it would prove he was Jewish because Jews didn’t eat pork.

Mama said that the only thing a refusal of either beef or pork would prove was that Mr. Prosserstein wasn’t hungry, and what did it matter if he was Jewish or Seventh Day Adventist anyway?

Nobody could answer Mama that and the subject got dropped.

Daddy told me Mr. Prosserstein had offered in strict confidence that for a small extra fee he could line them up with a freak show consisting of a bearded lady, a fat man, and a strong man who could lift a plowhorse off the ground with only one hand, or for an even larger fee he could supply dancing girls along with their own tent and a saxophone player. The men of the community called a Farmers Union meeting in our kitchen in order to discuss the dancing girls, but it was decided that the opposition from the women of the Six Towns Area would be too strong if the offer were brought into the open, and if the show were presented surreptitiously, it was agreed that reprisals by the women of the Six Towns Area would be too loud and too lengthy for the small amount of pleasure derived.

Several times a year, whenever the subject of fireworks came up, Bandy Wicker would have to tell the story of how in his home town of Odessa, Texas, the Fourth of July fireworks display once took on a certain air of tragedy.

‘My cousin Verdell had come home especially for the Fourth of July celebrations,’ Bandy Wicker said. ‘Cousin Verdell, he’d been working way out in Deaf Smith County, doing something simple enough for his mind to grasp. Cousin Verdell was kind of like a turkey, you had to keep his nose pointed down during a rainstorm, or he’d have stared at the sky until he drowned.

‘What happened,’ Bandy Wicker went on, ‘was that the mayor of Odessa, Texas, touched a match to the fuse of the rocket held in place by the length of sewer pipe, and a whole passel of people prepared to ooooh and aaaah at Old Glory lighting up the night-time sky for a guaranteed thirty seconds.

‘People waited and waited, and the mayor walked back and made sure the fuse of the rocket in the upright sewer pipe was burning. We all gathered around the rocket when it appeared that the fuse had burned itself both out and off. No one studied the problem more closely than Cousin Verdell, who was leaning directly over top of the rocket and peering down at goodness knows what.

‘It was about this time the rocket decided to fire itself off, an unfortunate occurrence because Cousin Verdell was still standing directly above the rocket, as if it had some mystical significance. The rocket, filled with Old Glory, including forty-eight silver stars, one for each state, terminated Cousin Verdell, instantly.

‘While there was a certain degree of tragedy involved in Cousin Verdell’s being called to his reward, it was agreed that he had lived longer than anyone that dumb had a right to.’

My daddy would always top Bandy Wicker’s fireworks stories with his baseball stories. My daddy had a million baseball stories. ‘Folks around Doreen Beach,’ he’d start off, ‘were not noted for their baseball prowess. For several years there were only eight men in the Doreen Beach district who could play any kind of baseball. To show the lengths folks around Doreen Beach would go to to field a team, one Sunday when there had been a Holy Roller church service at Doreen Beach Community Hall, the ballplayers hid Brother Bickerstaff’s horse until he agreed to be their ninth player, while on another occasion a group of men rode over to Loretta Cake’s cabin, where she lives with about a hundred cats, with the intention of convincing her to stand in right field as the ninth body on the Doreen Beach White Sox baseball team.’