needed to talk to someone he could trust, someone he could count on to tell him the truth, someone who could let him know whether he should carry on trying to fit in or whether he should drop the whole thing once and for all. That was when he decided to call on Clem McCrum, who had once told him to come see him if ever he could help and who had treated him well when he worked on the Amick the summer after the fire.
Chapter 6
THE RUPTURE
1
Tired of being polite to the wealthy tourists who shopped on the Amick, Clem quit his job in the spring of 1931, bought a dozen cows, and started up a small dairy operation on his farm. The sign on his laneway read as follows:
ROCKFACE DAIRY
RAW MILK FOR SALE
BRING YOUR OWN JUGS
Although the sale of unpasteurized milk was illegal, Clem was soon swamped with business from people who said his milk was frothier than pasteurized milk, from mothers who claimed it was full of vitamins to chefs at the big hotels around the lakes who maintained that it made their pastries, cakes, and mashed potatoes taste better. Inspectors from the District Health Board paid him a visit and were displeased to find chickens drifting in from the outside through the open door to the dairy, shitting on the floor, hopping up to grip the rims of the pails of milk with their dirty feet, plunging their heads up to their necks in the liquid, raising their beaks appreciatively and swallowing their fill.
Clem brushed aside the complaints. “When I was a kid growing up around here, we drank raw milk all the time and nobody got sick.”
“But times have changed, Mr. McCrum,” the inspectors said. “You must clean up your dairy and pasteurize your milk or we’ll put you out of business.”
To obey the letter but not the spirit of the law, Clem put up a new sign on the gate.
ROCKFACE DAIRY
RAW MILK FOR PET CONSUMPTION
BRING YOUR OWN JUGS
His business grew bigger. And as the years went by, he became more and more eccentric, refusing to shave, cut his hair, or take baths on the grounds that someone who sold raw, natural milk should himself be a raw, natural man. Occasionally, to establish a closer connection to nature in all its glory, he would walk naked through the village during violent summer storms and let the warm driving rain purify his body. He stopped washing his clothes and wore the same ragged pair of overalls held up by a single brace until they disintegrated and fell off his body. He gave up drinking whiskey, saying it was produced in factories and thus unnatural, and he made and drank his own homebrew out of dandelions and chokecherries. When Stella came to see him in the summers, they would drink too much and stagger downtown, shouting and quarrelling with each other and with anyone they met, making a public spectacle of themselves before curling up and sleeping off their drunks on the steps of the Presbyterian church.
In the end, however, the people in the village turned against him. In the past, when Clem got drunk and lurched his way through the village, everyone used to laugh and say “That’s just good old Clem having a good time. He means no harm,” and they would stop and joke and laugh with him. When they looked out their windows during thunderstorms and saw him walking naked, they laughed as well. When he fell asleep on the side of the road one winter during a heavy snowstorm after drinking too much and a snowplough buried him alive and he wasn’t rescued until the next day, he became somewhat of a local hero. People would point at him and tell their friends, “That’s the guy who had so much alcohol in his blood, he didn’t freeze to death when he spent the night in a snowbank.”
Now nobody laughed. “That man is a menace,” tourists from Millionaires’ Row told the leading citizens. “When we park our motorboats at the government wharf, he’s always there drunk and making rude comments. When we tell him to grow up and leave us alone, he becomes angry and you never know if he’s going to hit you. He doesn’t even care if there are children present when he sings his dirty songs.”
The constable took Clem aside and tried to reason with him. “You know, Clem, we go back a long way. You used to raise hell when you were a kid, but I thought those days were long over. I’d really be sorry if I had to arrest you. So for your own good, if you gotta get drunk, for God’s sake do it at home and sleep it off in your own bed, otherwise I’ll have to take you in. And put some clothes on if you gotta be out and about in the thunder and lightning. You’re not a pretty sight.”
But Clem just laughed, and he laughed harder when he was arrested and hauled up before the magistrate and fined ten dollars for public intoxication. The wife he had left years earlier resurfaced and told everyone that the day he had walked out on her was the happiest day in her life. She had always thought, she said, there was something wrong with his head, and his wandering around in his birthday suit just proved it. She spoke to her blood relatives, who were also Clem’s blood relatives, and turned them against him. Clem’s own father, infuriated at his son’s public drunkenness and his general lack of decorum, and embarrassed that a member of his family would run after an unruly Indian widow, let it be known that after much prayer and reflection, he had cut him out of his will. Clem carried on as before.
Having noted that Clem’s popularity in the community had fallen, and confident there would be no outcry if they took firm measures, the members of the Muskoka District Health Board found the courage to force him to shut down his dairy business, but he just branched out into hog farming. However, his pigs burrowed under the fences he put up around his pigpens and were always escaping and running through the village, grunting and squealing and uprooting vegetable gardens and frightening children and old women. The magistrate fined him five dollars for violating village ordinances, but after Clem handed over the money, he went home and defiantly opened the gate to the enclosure and let his swine roam the village as before.
“I got the money to pay the fines,” he told anyone who would listen.
That was when the village council decided that enough was enough. It just so happened that the old village dump, which had served the needs of the community and surrounding summer resorts for the previous fifty years, was spilling over with garbage and swarming with rats and other vermin. A new one had been urgently needed for years, but each time officials proposed a new dumpsite, the people who lived in the vicinity came with their friends to meetings of the council to complain and no action was ever taken. Clem’s isolation within the community, however, gave the council the opportunity it needed. It expropriated the necessary land from his holdings, built a garbage dump behind his house, and constructed a road that passed less than twenty feet from his front door to reach it.
As the council had foreseen, no one, not even Clem’s father, protested its action. To ensure everyone knew where the new facility was located, municipal workers erected a ten-by-fifteen-foot sign at the entrance to the new road that helpfully pointed out that new dump was open twenty-four hours a day to accept “Household, Institutional and Construction Waste of all Kinds.” Clem, they expected, would be so disgusted by the sights and sounds of garbage trucks passing by his house that he would give up and leave the village, never to return. That, at least, was the council’s hope.
Clem poured himself a tumblerful of dandelion wine and offered one to Oscar.
“Thanks, Clem, but I don’t think your father and the Huxleys would want me to start drinking.”
Clem listened to his story with a deepening frown.
