mama gave up her job at an art gallery in Charleston, located on Calhoun Street, not far from the statue of John C. Calhoun, who, she said, was famous for a number of things, the oddest being that he was supposed to be the true father of Abraham Lincoln, and caught a train which in several days would deliver her to Butte, Montana.
As the train was traveling across South Dakota, where Mama said the prairie was like green ocean in every direction and the tall buffalo grass swayed down as the train passed just like a wind sweeping over water, the track gave way and the engine plowed off through the tall, green buffalo grass, more-or-less parallel to the direction it had been running in, until it bogged down with its wheels buried in the prairie. The derailment had been so gentle that most of the passengers didn’t realize what had happened, Mama said. The crew were very polite and they suggested that the passengers might like to have a picnic out on the sunny prairie while they waited for a repair crew to arrive, and as the passengers sat in little groups on the grass the white-coated waiters from the dining car passed among them handing out sandwiches and cool drinks.
Daddy, who after the First World War had traveled about considerably, playing baseball in Florida and California, though I could never establish who he played for, or who with, or for how long, had been living in a town almost in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, playing baseball on weekends and working for the railroad during the week. Daddy was on the crew sent to put the train back on the track.
Daddy readily admitted that he didn’t know a whole lot about putting a train back on the track, his paramount skills being to charge in from third base and field bunts barehanded, and hammer a double down the right field line about every third time he came to bat, but his eyes sure did recognize a beautiful girl when he saw one, and his ears sure did recognize a Charleston, S.C., drawl when he heard one, and by the time the train was back on the track, Daddy had decided to spend the last of his ready cash to buy a one-way ticket from wherever on the plains of South Dakota they were, to Butte, Montana, which he did, and Daddy and Mama were married four months later, and Daddy decided to settle down forever and apprenticed himself to a man who built fine houses for the mine owners, doctors and lawyers of Butte, Montana.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, Daddy had in his veins what he described as wandering blood, and, three years later, when a barnstorming baseball team passed through Butte, Montana, a team called Brother Pettigrew’s Divine Light Baseball Mission, combining, Brother Pettigrew said, the two Gods of rural North America, the mysterious and sometimes troubling one in the sky and baseball, a team whose third baseman was arrested for Disturbing the Peace in Butte, Montana, by kicking out the window of his hotel room at three A.M. and singing ‘Amazing Grace’ in an off-key, but very loud voice, a charge that would have gotten him nothing but a two-dollar fine and a lecture about disturbing the peace, except an eagle-eyed deputy leafed through a stack of Wanted Posters and discovered that the third baseman was wanted in Orlando, Florida, for Bank Robbery and Assault with a Deadly Weapon, which, my daddy said, could well have been his loud, off-key singing voice.
My daddy was called in to repair the splintered window sash, and next afternoon found himself on his way to Bozeman, Montana, where Brother Pettigrew’s Divine Light Baseball Mission was scheduled to play a game against the team from Bozeman Bible College.
Daddy toured with Brother Pettigrew’s Divine Light Baseball Mission for about three months; the team traveled in a circle through Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, then moved up into Canada. They played in Medicine Hat, Alberta; they played in Lethbridge; they played in Calgary; they played in Red Deer; they played in Edmonton; well, not exactly played in Edmonton. There had been a slight misunderstanding, and they had been booked into a softball park and scheduled against a women’s softball team. They agreed to make certain adjustments and play the game anyway, but only eleven spectators showed up and the game was canceled. The bus wouldn’t start so the players, and Brother Pettigrew, had to take a streetcar to their hotel, and when they got up in the morning they discovered that Brother Pettigrew had absconded owing each and every one of them a full two months’ wages. To add insult to injury, though it was barely Labor Day, three inches of wet snow had fallen during the night.
My daddy was down to only a few dollars and one change of clothes, his baseball uniform. He studied the ads in the Edmonton Bulletin, but there were no ads for South Carolinians who built fine houses, but what he did see was an ad for a mining engineer at a coal mine a few miles north of Edmonton, and using his father-in-law’s name he applied and was immediately accepted. He signed on at a salary about five times as high as he earned building fine houses in Butte, Montana, and accepted the job on the condition he be assigned a talented assistant. The mine owners were delighted, they reported that the assistant mining engineer knew everything there was to know about coal mining but he didn’t have his papers. If the assistant mining engineer had his papers, they said, they would have promoted him to mining engineer and hired an assistant instead of hiring an experienced man like my daddy.
Daddy, who admitted to being mildly claustrophobic, said he had no desire, in spite of the excellent pay, to go down in a mine. He managed to work for three months, in which he earned more than he would have in a year as a carpenter, without ever going down in the mine. His talented assistant was indeed talented, so that Daddy had only to sign his name to an occasional document and he spent his days in his office, playing cribbage with the janitor. When he resigned after three months, supposedly to accept a position with an emerald mine in the country of Colombia, he signed the necessary papers to certify his talented assistant as a genuine mining engineer.
When he got his first paycheck from the mine, Daddy, instead of returning to Butte, sent Mama the train fare to visit him. It was Mama who talked him into resigning before he got found out. They rented a little house in Edmonton, and in spring Daddy found work building fine houses and in the fall they bought the house they were living in and decided to stay in Alberta for a while.
Things had turned out just as Daddy expected them to. Daddy, much to Mama’s eternal consternation, always expected things to turn out well. When Brother Pettigrew’s Divine Light Baseball Mission went bankrupt, Daddy never even considered that he wouldn’t find a job, either building fine houses or working as a mining engineer; it never occurred to him that it was odd for two people from South Carolina, via South Dakota and Montana, to wind up in Edmonton, Alberta, and it never occurred to him to anticipate the Depression, or to accept Relief when the Depression crashed down. It never seemed odd to him to sell his house in the city of Edmonton and buy a useless and stony quarter section of land in the general vicinity of a town called Fark, the naming of which I’ll get around to later, where he and Mama, and eventually me would ride out the Depression.
‘He was never any better a ball player than he thought he was,’ Mama said one afternoon as she was darning socks by the light of the south window. ‘I married your daddy because he was a nice, cheerful man who never expected to bat less than 400, never expected to lose a game, and certainly never expected a Depression.’
Until shortly before John ‘The Raja of Renfrew’ Ducey scheduled that exhibition baseball game, most of us in the Six Towns area had seen but one real live American soldier close up. Those who lived near the Edmonton-Jasper Highway had seen an occasional truck or Jeep carrying American soldiers who were maybe off to build the Alaska Highway, but more likely just sightseeing, and Bjornsen’s Corner never did have a gas pump, so even if they needed gas they had to drive on to a town called Wildwood, a long ways west of the Six Towns area.
Curly McClintock and his son, Truckbox Al McClintock, had both seen, on their twice-weekly jaunts to Edmonton in the dump truck, the long convoys of camouflage-brindle trucks and Jeeps heading west on the Edmonton-Jasper Highway, toward the Whitecourt turnoff, a turnoff which, in seven or eight days, would take them to where the rest of the American troops were building the Alaska Highway.
Curly
