the river forest.
Mothers worry too much and Veronica’s cajoling and stories of danger could not keep me away. There was too much water, too much lure of water, for any mother to keep her children away from it. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, and there was much she didn’t see. Like the day our terrier, Trixie, and I were carried away by the spring-swollen creek. An ice jam saved us from being swept into the arms of Nanabijou, but when we returned home soaking wet and shivering, Veronica made me promise I would never go near the creek again. It was a promise that would be broken many times.
Our home then was the LaFrances’ two-storey red-brick house at 402 Dawson Street at the northeast corner of College Street. They had moved to the new place, three blocks over from 63 Peter Street, the year before Veronica and Ray married.
We originally had lived in the top storey of 331 Van Norman Street, then on Rockwood Avenue in our own tiny bungalow. Veronica used to tie me to the fence there so I could watch all the comings and goings in safety, but we didn’t stay in the little wartime house very long. Things had not been going well over at 402 Dawson Street where Louise and Isidore had become empty nesters. Louise was stricken with arthritis. The pain in her joints worsened, then began to twist her fingers and legs. Walking became difficult and it was soon obvious that she was a victim of the most crippling type of arthritis. Within a year of so of my birth, she rose from her bed only with great difficulty and we moved into 402 Dawson Street, so my mother could help her father care for her.
This marked the end of Veronica’s sheltered and somewhat pampered life. What had once been a life of a majority of joy would be transformed into a string of heartbreaks. Caring for her bedridden mother made for long, hard days and sleepless nights when the pain had Louise crying in the night. Worse was watching the searing pain suck the power out of such a strong, independent woman.
Still, life at 402 Dawson Street was close to as good as it got in the 1940s. For us kids, the neighbourhood was a quiet pool at which to rest before starting the serious part of life’s journey. Dawson Street, once a dirt trail but now an asphalt stream lined with stone curbs and sidewalks that held the roadway back from double-storey houses, tumbled over the Port Arthur hillsides toward the Big Lake. Middle-class working people lived along Dawson Street. My grandparent’s house was not large, but it sat prominently on the northwest corner as one of the nicer places on the street. It was two storeys but tightly designed and looked larger than it was because of the semi-mansard roof that eliminated the typical “A” peak at the front. Its red brick and red mortar gave it a solid protective look.
The neighbourhood was typical of less busy times. Most of the houses were two or two and a half storeys, with the lower levels made of brick and the upper levels cedar or clapboard. All had porches — some open, some closed — for sitting out and watching weather or the kids at play. Grass medians separated the concrete sidewalks from the asphalt road, curbed with black granite rocks. There were no driveways and anyone who owned a car parked it at the rear of their house accessed by the back alley.
There was a telephone pole at the corner in the front of our house and every kid in the neighbourhood had put his or her face to it and covered their eyes while counting down the time to hide in a game of hide-and-seek. I can still feel my face pressed against that pole, nostrils inhaling the bittersweet scent of cedar and creosote, fingers tracing the bite marks of linemen’s spikes in the dry roughness of the wood.
Along the College Street side of the house, there was a white and green fence with a side gate. The fence had a sculpted look because its boards were deliberately cut uneven at the top. At the rear of the property, the fence connected with a white and green clapboard garage with double barn-style doors. Inside was the black early 1940s Chevrolet that Isidore kept spotless for family Sunday drives.
The most interesting feature of 402 Dawson Street was a side portico, an enclosed bricked porch area with country church-style windows along the side and front. It served as an entranceway to the house and a place to sit and look out at the street out of the weather. It was a great place for Trixie and me to hide when we were in trouble, like after our near drowning at the creek.
The McVicar Creek incident was the last great adventure for Trixie. Not long after, she was strolling across the street in front of 402 Dawson Street when a speeding car smacked her. My dad and I bundled her into a blanket and took her down to a vet who operated out of a rough board shack on the Port Arthur waterfront. It was a dark, foul place that smelled of dogs and whisky and mange medicine. The old vet laid Trixie on a kitchen table and put her back together with some rough stitches, but she was blind after that. I remember the mixture of pride and sadness I felt watching her stumble around my grandfather’s house, walking into walls and falling down stairs. I was proud of her courage but saddened by the pathetic images of her trying to exist without sight. None of us, Veronica especially, could stand to watch her and soon we returned her to the old vet, and she didn’t come back home ever again. It was a heartbreaking time, but it taught me a lot about life and my mother — someone with an uncanny understanding of animals.
Not long after the McVicar Creek incident, there was another dangerous meeting with water. A bunch of us kids were sliding on the rapidly shrinking snow on Prospect Hill. God made this hill for kids. Bald as a bowling ball, the hill and surrounding field covered a huge area bordered by Dawson Street on the north, Prospect Avenue on the east, High Street on the west, and Prospect Public School on the south. It was a sliding hill extraordinaire in the winter. We learned to ski and toboggan there and in summer ranged through it with our bikes, pretending we were army patrols going through the mountains. It was the site of plenty of broken bones, black eyes, and bleeding noses. If you got a good slide from the top, your toboggan would zoom across Prospect Avenue into someone’s hedge. Biking down the hill was sheer madness.
The hill’s greatest danger appeared only in spring. Beside Dawson Street was a deep depression in the side of the hill and it filled with runoff water, occasionally to a depth of six feet or more. It froze and thawed and refroze in spring. Older kids, like us eight-year-olds, knew instinctively to stay away from that hole. Nobody told us about it. It was just something you knew from being out in the neighbourhood. My sister Barbara, then five years old and three years my junior, had not been blessed with the instinct. She decided to walk on it and plunged through. The rest of us kids were sliding nearby and heard her scream.
The ice was so rotten that she had gone through on the first footfall, right at the edge. She was screaming and crying as I skidded down the bank and grabbed her hand. She pulled, I slipped, and we were both thrashing in the mushy ice water together, clawing at the bank for leverage. I managed a handhold and dragged us out as the other kids arrived and made a chain of hands.
As I pulled Barb up the hill and along the street home, kids scattered everywhere to shout news of the miraculous rescue. I was a neighbourhood hero, and kids everywhere sang my praises, for at least a day or two, all except Barbara. She was unimpressed that I had so daringly risked my life to save hers. Her lack of gratitude was inexplicable. She seemed to labour under the misconception that I was assigned to look after her and that by calling her scaredy-cat and shooing her off because she was afraid to slide on the steepest part of the hill, I in fact had created the problem.
Fame is fleeting and mine slipped away swiftly. Before the year was out, I was no longer the hero of the Prospect Hill. A combination of circumstances led me into another incident that earned me the name Fire Bug.
The grass was high, brown, and dry along the hill that fell off the Dawson Street cliffs and into McVicar Creek. We were playing in our pueblos as usual when I made an incredible discovery. I found in the rocks a perfectly good, unused wooden match. One of those stick matches about two and a half inches long with a fat red head topped with a white cap. Sometimes the heads were blue and white, but the ones my parents kept for the old stove were red and hidden away in a sturdy cardboard box with red birds printed on the cover.
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