eh?”
“Yeah!” I said. From where Ed was standing he couldn’t see that both my eyes were closed.
“Nothing to it,” Ed murmured.
Until I stepped out, the left crossbeam had been bucking like an irritable bronco. Now the Marinion was running smoothly along the ice, and I could finally force myself to open my eyes. I saw that we were now about fifty yards from shore, running neck and neck with a westbound express train. I could see people in the passenger cars reading newspapers and talking while we overtook them and pulled ahead.
“Hang on!” Tommy yelled as the wind suddenly increased and the left runner hiked up again.
As the blade left the ice, Ed and I leaned back to keep the craft from tipping. It was the most terrifying experience of my life — and I never felt so happy. Memories of the Kellys, the cops, the whole rotten last year of my life seemed to peel away one layer at a time.
The light at the end of Queen’s Wharf seemed to race right at us. Tommy adjusted the sail, and the boat instantly slowed down. Twenty yards from shore he let the sail drop altogether, and we coasted gently to a stop.
“My legs feel wobbly,” I said as I stepped down onto the ice.
“Does that mean you don’t want to race then?” Ed asked.
“Heck, no!” I said. “I mean, yes! I want to race.”
“Then come to the foot of York Street on Boxing Day,” Tommy said. “We’ll be racing with my father, but he’s almost finished his new boat, the King Edward. As soon as he’s done, the Marinion will be mine and I’ll need my own crew.”
“I’ll see you on Boxing Day,” I promised.
“We’ll be looking for you,” Tommy said as he and Ed picked up the tail of the Marinion and turned the boat to face the lake again. They climbed aboard and dropped the sail. “Race starts at noon!” Tommy shouted as they faded into the darkness. “Come early and we’ll give you a sailing lesson.”
The ground felt suddenly strange under my feet as I walked up the wharf toward Bathurst Street. I turned left at Niagara Street and continued northwest along the silent roads. My neighbourhood was a jumble of failing businesses and dilapidated little houses full of overworked people. From a stockyard nearby I heard the sad lowing of doomed cattle. My home was a tiny red-and-yellow-brick cottage on Defoe Street that looked as if at one time it had been a farmhouse all on its own in the country, but now it was sandwiched between a Chinese laundry and a stable belonging to a knacker named Hacker who collected and disposed of dead livestock.
Because it was Christmas Eve, both the laundry and dead animal smells were absent for once as I trudged around the last corner. A light snow had fallen. No lights were visible from inside the house as I swept our three sagging wooden steps with a nearly bald broom. Then I took a minute to enjoy the rare fresh air and study the few stars that could penetrate the tangle of naked tree branches overhead. It was hard to believe that this was the same sky I once looked up at from the grand porch of our “good” house over in Parkdale.
After a last deep breath, I opened the front door and was nearly knocked over by the smell of something burning. Either the horsehair couch in the parlour was on fire or my mom was cooking again. The former was definitely preferable. Father sometimes let his pipe ashes fall onto the furniture, and my mom was probably the worst cook in Toronto, if not Canada. I had to step carefully. The hallway was dark and so crammed with oversize furniture that it was like crawling through a cavern without a torch. Groping with my hands, I finally found my way into the parlour.
“Evening, Bertie,” said a muffled voice from the corner. I could smell pipe tobacco. No other fire was visible, so I figured Mom must be destroying dinner.
If a visitor ever had to describe our front parlour, he would be hard-pressed to say whether the room was painted or papered, since every inch of wall space was covered by makeshift shelves straining under the weight of fine leather books. Nor could that same person likely tell what time of day he was visiting because the bay window looking out into the front yard was bricked up floor to ceiling with more books. Still more books rose like twisting stalagmites from the floor. Over the only piece of visible furniture in the room, Father’s wing chair, several huge stacks of books had collapsed together to form an arch. Father was sitting under the arch with a book open on his lap and a handkerchief in his right hand. He was already in uniform, his shoes perfectly polished, but his freshly shaved cheeks were wet with tears. Christmas Eve or not, he had to leave for work in two hours.
“How you feeling, Father?”
“Fine, son, fine,” he said, wiping his cheeks with the handkerchief. He smiled weakly, and after a few awkward seconds, dabbed his cheek again.
I smiled back. “What are you reading?”
He held up a thick orange leather book. “On Snowshoes to the Barren Grounds: Twenty-Eight Hundred Miles After Musk Ox and Wood Bison by Lieutenant Caspar Whitney, Royal Navy.”
“Is it good?”
“Can’t tell yet. I’m only on page fifty-seven.”
Father usually took at least a couple of hundred pages to decide whether he liked a book or not.
“Right now Lieutenant Caspar’s describing how he’s trying to prepare himself for Arctic camping by sleeping outside on a normal English winter night with only one blanket. He’s been at it a week, and so far he’s done more shivering than sleeping.”
“He must want to go to the Arctic pretty badly,” I said.
“It would sure be something exciting to do,” Father said with a faraway expression. “The farthest north I’ve ever been is Calgary and that was by train. I’d sure love to go somewhere someday on snowshoes.” He dabbed his eyes again.
Not very long ago my father had been the general manager of one of the biggest bicycle companies in Canada. He had travelled a lot and had made heaps of money. But he had also worried about things like the price of steel, the shortage of leather, and whether he should order more of something today or wait until next week in case the price per ton went up or down a few cents.
His decisions had been important because the lives of many people had depended on them. The bicycle business was quite competitive, and if someone like him made the wrong decision, people lost their jobs. If it rained a lot, people stopped buying bikes and workers were laid off. If the company made blue bikes and customers decided that year they wanted red, workers were laid off. Sometimes the company’s board of directors would tell Father to close a profitable factory because they had bought another one where people were willing to work for less money. Father’s real passion was designing things, and he hated the pressure of being responsible for making decisions that affected workers’ lives.
One day he started to cry. No reason. In the middle of a conversation with his production manager about laying people off, the tears gushed and he couldn’t stop them. He hid in his office and bawled for four hours. He came home by horse cab and cried throughout the night. He went back to work the next day, but the tears kept flowing. The board of directors became very concerned.
They told him, “Your services are no longer required.” And suddenly my father no longer made bicycles. With my father not working we soon had to leave our big home on Dunn Avenue in Parkdale and move to this tiny house. Eventually, Father found a job
