boy’s eyes softened, and he smiled. “You know, it’s the same car they drove in the Starsky and Hutch TV show. Except, of course, it’s not the same colour.” He was gushing with pride now.
“That’s impressive. It’s the kind of car you’ll want to keep forever.”
The boy nodded.
“C’mon, Nathan,” said the kid riding shotgun. I gotta get home.”
The blond boy turned to Eddy. “Well, see ya.”
“Right, see you,” Eddy said. “And drive carefully, Nathan. You don’t want anything to happen to that car of yours.” Eddy turned and went inside to pay for her gas.
The boy waved and said something like “Have a nice day, ma’am.”
“Eddy, that’s the kid who almost pushed us off the road,” I said when she got into the car. “Why didn’t you tell him off?”
“I could’ve done that. And then he’d just have given some smart-aleck response and tore off full of emotion. That would only have made matters worse, Peggy. I wanted to diffuse the situation. I want those boys to get home safely.”
“Well, they’re jerks, if you ask me.”
“Might look like that. But I’ll bet when they get home for dinner tonight they’ll kiss their mothers, wash up the dishes afterward, and then go up to their rooms with their little league baseball trophies and stamp collections and do homework.”
Eddy and I drove on through tunnels and along steep river embankments and passed fields covered in alfalfa. We also went through lots of little towns in less time than it took to blink an eye. But tiny as they were, every one of them had a little cemetery enclosed by a white picket fence.
Soon the droning of the pavement and the gentle jostling of the truck lulled me to sleep. I dozed on and off for hours, dreaming about horseshoes wedged inside skulls, scruffy miners duking it out, and oddly enough, plums and stinky diapers. But the dream that woke me up with the boiling mercury again was the one in which a silver Gran Torino spun its wheels across burials in Golden’s cemetery.
“Eddy, I heard it was a teenager who was caught vandalizing historic sites and digging up graves in Golden. That’s gotta rile you up, right?” Who wouldn’t agree the kid was some kind of low-life who lived under a rock?
“The world is made up of billions of people who all have different personalities, experiences, and opinions, Peggy. And I suppose there’s got to be just as many reasons why some are driven to destructive behaviour.”
“C’mon, Eddy, what kind of an answer is that? Admit it. Anyone who goes around pushing over tombstones, or writing on monuments, or busting open a casket to steal someone’s valuables has got to be worse than rotting sewage, right?”
“You have such a colourful way of putting things, Peggy. But actually I don’t look at it that way. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you realize that not everyone who does a bad thing is a bad person. Now I agree there needs to be a consequence for those who vandalize sites or break the law in any way, but I tend to want to punish the act or the behaviour and not the person.”
“Oh, please! That’s such a grown-up response. Don’t you ever want to take a person like that and pull out all their nose hairs?”
Eddy laughed. “Well, Peggy, like I said, things are never as cut and dried as they seem. For example, take the man who steals to feed his starving children.”
“Eddy, we were talking about people who vandalize sites and stuff.”
“Yes, well, when it comes to the individual responsible for vandalizing the old Pioneer Cemetery in Golden, I’m going to reserve my opinion until I know more about the whole matter.” Eddy laughed when I shook my head. “You know, this isn’t the first time that cemetery was vandalized.”
That made me sit up. “Yeah, I kind of remember now that Aunt Norma wrote something about that, but I don’t know the whole story.”
“Right, well, a long time ago the town’s only homeless guy, old Billy Pearson, got thirsty one day — and not for milk, if you know what I mean. Billy didn’t have any money, but it so happened he was one of the few people who knew about the abandoned Pioneer Cemetery. He found one of the graves and dug down until he came to the casket, smashed in the top, and removed the skull. Then he took it to the pub, set it on the bar, and asked, ‘Will this get me a beer or two?’ Well, the bartender gave him a beer just to keep him busy until he could get the RCMP to come.”
“Did they put Billy in jail or fine him?”
“Aw, no … Billy was a simple-minded old fellow, a real character. He was the kind of guy everyone in a small town looked out for. He was charged with a misdemeanour and made to promise he’d never do it again, that’s all.”
I had to scratch my head at that one. I mean, where I came from, digging up someone’s grave was a crime.
“Unfortunately, a while later, some teens found the old cemetery, too, and made a real mess of things. The town decided they’d better get some help, so a crew of archaeologists came and excavated a large portion of the cemetery.”
I was in the middle of figuring out what I wanted to say to those subhuman teenagers when Eddy let out a yell that made me nearly jump out the window.
“Yahoo! It’s the Last Spike!”
I stared at her and wondered if her tightly wound hair had cut off the circulation to her brain.
“Sorry if I startled you. It’s just that we’re coming up to one of the neatest little pieces of Canadian history. I’ll show you.”
We pulled off the highway and entered a parking lot with a sign that read: WELCOME TO LAST SPIKE PROVINCIAL PARK, CRAIGELLACHIE, B.C. For the next twenty minutes Eddy told me the history of the building of the railway across Canada.
“It was an amazing accomplishment,” she explained. “It took thousands of labourers to build it — men who came from Italy, England, Ireland, United States, and China. Unfortunately, a lot of people suffered because of the railway, too. The Chinese were exploited and paid only half of what the Europeans got. The First Nations were forced to give up land. And the thousands of men who lost their lives or limbs were never compensated for their sacrifices.”
I remembered seeing a picture in social studies of the day they hammered in the Last Spike and completed Canada’s first cross-country railway — the Canadian Pacific. What I never understood was why they let some old guy named Donald A. Smith be the one to go down in history by driving in that Last Spike, especially when it took tens of thousands of men fifteen years to build the railway.
We stayed at Last Spike Park until we finished off our sandwiches and apple slices. Then we were back on the road again. It wasn’t long before the light began to fade. As it got darker, stars appeared. At first there were just a few, but soon there were thousands … maybe millions of them. The only time I’d seen anything remotely like it was at the Vancouver Planetarium where Harold, the big star projector, lit up the domed ceiling to make it look like a night sky. When you lived in the city, you only got to see the brightest stars, those few still visible despite the harsh light pollution coming from office towers, street lamps, and the orangey glow of greenhouses growing tomatoes in the winter. But no
