Memoir: Growing up in Leader and Calgary

 Growing up in Calgary in the 1950s

1. Sheldon Chumir beat me up

I knew Sheldon Chumir before he was a health clinic. Back in the day the Marda was not a Loop but a movie house that ran Saturday matinee serials. You had to drive a good while out of town to get to Midnapore or Bowness, and 33^rd St SW was the frontier, just this side of the 17^th Avenue drive-in.  That’s when I knew Sheldon.

Now, of course, our Sheldon is fondly remembered as a brilliant lawyer, a philanthropist, and as a provincial politician and Liberal leader who was a passionate defender of the individual citizen’s rights. Though I was away from Calgary during his adult years I certainly heard the stories of his good works and about the flood of public grief at his funeral. When the province stumbled through Ralph Klein’s callous premiership I often heard people regret that Sheldon was not around. A more responsible and intelligent alternative, he would have proved most royally.

When I knew Sheldon he was a kid two years older at the I. L. Peretz School on 13^th Avenue southeast when I was in Grades 3-5 in day school and 6-7 in night school. The Peretz is where Jewish families sent their kids for the traditional education in Yiddish language and literature. We’d spend mornings on the standard — English — curriculum, then afternoons on Jewish culture. (The Talmud Torah on posher 17^th Avenue offered the Hebrew curriculum instead. We were Old Country). 

But back to Sheldon.

He was bright, strong, gifted and determinedly individualistic even then. When we played scrub baseball before class and at recess Sheldon and Dave Horodetsky dominated the diamond. They were always belting homers into the auto parts junk yard next door, which we lesser mortals had to go retrieve. 

When I got to Central High School Sheldon was a running back on the senior football squad that won the provincial title. His high-stepping style maybe gave up a bit on speed but it secured him against any solitary tacklers. On any other team in Alberta he would have started but that year he backed up the indomitable Ross Christenson. So, for that matter, my AZA fraternity president Henry Mandin, eventually a medical professor at The University of Calgary, was the stellar back-up to our all-star quarterback, Tony Reed.

When I tried selling peanuts at the minor league baseball games Sheldon showed me the ropes. I couldn’t keep up so I quit. He gave me other advice. He kept a dictionary in the washroom at his home, he told me, so he could read a page a day. You need to have a good vocabulary, he advised. He also introduced me to the idea of reading newspapers beyond the comics and movie ads. Indeed the one Peretz School evening class that still sticks in my mind is the one when Sheldon persuaded our teacher, Aaron Eichler, to forgo his planned lesson and instead debate the political tensions around Formosa. The situation, we concluded, was hopeless.

He was a lively spirit, our Sheldon. At Peretz School the teachers respected his smarts but sensed an edge of danger. He would take chances. He could cross the lines. Who knew he’d make something of himself even if we had no idea what. In the event he was a Rhodes Scholar. 

But back to the day Sheldon beat me up. Well, maybe that’s a hyperbole (a word I may well have learned through Sheldon’s strategy). It wasn’t really a full-scale beating, just a drum of his fist upon my left shoulder for what I recall as an interminable time.  

He wasn’t mad at me.  

You see, as on everything else Sheldon was well ahead of me on the question of girls, their mysterious appeal and a guy’s need to attract their attention. He had taken some shine to my sister Ruthie, who was three years older and properly protective of her helpless brother. 

Ruthie played cool as she sat by the window next to me on the bus home from school, Sheldon across the aisle. But Sheldon discovered he could get a rise out of her if he punched my arm. For each whack I took Ruthie leaned over and gave Sheldon one back. So Sheldon kept it up.  He’d hit me and she’d hit him. Back then (I was around 13) I guess that passed for courtship. 

My arm healed. But there’s no salve for my regret to have missed Sheldon’s mature years in Calgary. Because he went off to the U of A and I to UAC, we only met at the odd university conference. I once ran into him on the street in Toronto, where he had some real estate business. He was the most impressive kid I knew through grade and high school. He fulfilled that promise despite his premature death. I salute him every time I pass the clinic or attend one of the human rights conferences that mark his bequest to Calgary. 

Or harvest a dictionary on the john.

2.  East Calgary in 1950 

Calgary would be good for my father’s health. That’s what our doctor in Leader, Saskatchewan, said. My father Sam was a rancher, the best. People always came to him to break the wildest horses and build a house or barn and fix plumbing and electricity and put in a 10-hour day on the fields before stoking back up on an onion and an old piece of brown bread. That’s what he did.

Then he “took sick,” as he would put it. It all started when he trapped a young coyote for my sister Ruthie to play with. The coyote had rabies and bit him. My dad would’ve died but for the new miracle drug -- penicillin -- that they tried, as an experiment, and it worked. But he was a broken man. He got blood poisoning, then various allergies -- especially to animals -- and he lost his sense of smell and taste. The specialists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester thought they’d ease his breathing by removing his nasal hairs but that just cleared the path for dust and he never breathed easily again. 

He gave up the farm and the dairy operation and worked in the family grocery store on the one-block downtown in Leader. If it wasn’t called Main Street it should have been because that’s all there was.      

My father’s health worsened in dry and dusty Leader. As he needed a higher altitude the Leader doctors recommended we move to either High River or Calgary. On that choice my patents quickly agreed. High River was a nice community -- like Leader, maybe even a little bigger. But the children were growing up and they needed to meet other Jewish kids. Soon they would be marrying and – by the wisdom of the day -- people should stick with their own. Calgary had a huge Jewish community. Maybe 60, 70 families. In Leader, for the High Holidays others Jews would come in from Maple Creek, Fox Valley, Burstall, so there would be the requisite minyan, ten adult men. In Leader the Jewish community centered on my dad and his brothers, Joe and Abe. His sister Sarah and her husband Morris Litwack had already moved to Calgary, two blocks from the orthodox shule, where there was a minyan every weekday morning even.

So for Calgary we left Leader in 1950. My Uncle Abe paid my father a share out of the brothers’ businesses, three thousand dollars, enough for a down payment on a house in Calgary. Sam went ahead to find one. He stayed at Sarah’s on 4th Avenue around 3^rd Street S.E. while he looked around. He found a good real estate agent, Larry Irvine, who found him a decent prospect. Larry didn’t think Mrs Gourlay would accept $12,000 for the big three-storey wood frame rooming house on the corner of 12th Ave and 3rd St SE. She was asking fifteen.

“Try her anyway,” Sam said. “What can you lose? I can’t go any more.” Mrs. Gourlay, a brisk Scottish woman who was tired of cleaning for a house full of bachelors and transients, had taken a liking to my parents. To Larry Irvine’s surprise, she accepted. We promised to let her brother-in-law rent the third-floor aerie for as long as he lived.

While my parents prepared the move, my mother left Ruthie and me with our grandmother in Regina. So my life in Calgary begins with my Aunt Reta putting us both on the train in Regina, with packed lunches of cheese sandwiches, cookies, apples, Cherry Blossoms and Orange Crush, and orders not to leave the station during the stopover in Swift Current. Ruthie was 11 so she would look after me. Uncle Is slipped us some Lulu and Blondie comics to make the miles move faster. 

In Calgary our parents met us at the train station in Uncle Morris’s car. This was exciting, to be in a car. Compared to my dad’s old half-ton, which he’d left in Leader, the old green Ford sedan seemed urban opulence. 

When we pulled up in front of our house we thought our folks were teasing us. It was a mansion -- a yellow frame three-storey house, with bright green trim on the windows and doors. The green sign beside the front door declared 337 12 Ave. E. It looked like a palace, especially when the rooms lit up the night.

"Are we really going to live here?” Ruthie asked. “Just us?" I was dumb.

“Of course,” Mum explained, but in Yiddish: “Avod’eh. But don’t get excited. It’s a rooming house. We’re not living alone here. We rent out rooms.”

 The house would be our living as well as our home. As Sam was too sick for a job we'd live off the rent. We’d all help in the cleaning and maintenance. 

On the main floor there was a two-room suite in the front, which was rented, and a three-room suite in the back, where we four would live. On the second floor there were six single rooms, a little room with a toilet and sink and another room with a bathtub. These facilities served the entire house. On the third floor two single rooms were tucked under the arch of the roof. In the basement we added two rooms beside the furnace and storage areas. Each of these "Light Housekeeping" rooms had a small sink, a hotplate, a cupboard, a table, a chair, and a bed. The two main floor suites also had fridges and stoves — but no bathrooms.

The large lot behind the house Dad planned to plant for our vegetables: onions, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, peas, radishes, turnips -- and horseradish for Passover. He could farm again. He talked about getting some chickens and geese and maybe a goat for milk, but Les, the plumber he befriended in the brick apartment building on the southeast corner, warned there were city bylaws against that. Mum had other objections: "We move to the city so you can get sick from animals? I haven't enough to do?"

They chose the Conservative shule because Mum had to sit with Dad in case he had an asthma attack and she had to give him a needle. In the Orthodox the genders sat separated. As usual Sam made friends quickly. Mr. Wainberg would sell him eggs and chickens wholesale and Mr. Ullman cheese. Even more than the economies this was welcome for confirming our newfound community. The real luxury was living in a Jewish settlement large enough to hold full services every week.

***

On our first morning in Calgary Ruthie and I rose early, dressed quietly and went exploring through the huge house. I was eight, she eleven. We ran up and down the dusty grey carpets, up and down the stairs, as if pacing out our empire, through the halls. We were delighted so many people were living with us. For Ruthie each room was another world --someone else’s life. Like a different movie was happening in each room. I thought now I’d always have someone to play with.

What I liked best was the back porch, behind our kitchen. Its wooden grid made the porch a stockade. Through it I could fire my finger or a stick rifle at attacking enemies. Five blocks south on 17^th was the real stockade, the high log fence that demarked the Stampede Grounds. I didn’t know John Ford at the time but it was into the John Ford West I fancied we’d moved. 

From the front stoop I’d could sit and watch the 12th Avenue traffic, especially the rattling streetcar that stopped right in front of the house.  It paused to and fro Ogden, the last streetcar in town. That was the most dramatic proof we’d moved into a different scale, a different world, from Leader. The streetcar was a lot faster and easier than walking. It had long wooden benches along the sides but most people stood, holding onto leather straps that hung down from the ceiling. I preferred to sit but the benches were so polished I kept sliding off, so I’d clutch a shiny pole.

Obviously, Calgary was more like Regina than like Leader. Now my daily life would be like my holidays. Maybe Calgary even had a Santa Clause!

***

In our three-room suite one was the kitchen. Dad ran a curtain down one end, to set off Ruthie’s bedroom. The kitchen was large enough for a cooking area and for the family to eat around our wooden table. In the living room we had our dining room set (for when we had guests or the Passover dinner and Mum brought out the good china and silverware), our Heintzman piano, and the large console radio that Uncle Is had built for us. Off the living room was the other bedroom, where Mum and Dad slept in the front and I had my bed behind another curtain. 

Though we used the toilet on the second floor, along with everyone else in the house, it was an improvement over the Leader outhouse. The brown oak seat and water-box for flushing was a real luxury compared to the trek outside, where the one-seater had a spike for the apple and orange wrappers and the old Eaton’s catalogue. But we still kept a chamber pot under each bed, which Dad emptied upstairs every morning when he awoke around six.

Our Calgary was East Calgary. Of course there was Mount Royal and the North Hill and the Belt Line and Killarney. But when I was eight my Calgary was what I could explore on foot. 

God knew where those rickety old streetcars and even the new trolley buses could shake your bones to. There was a bus we could take out to Bobba Clara, now that she’d moved from Regina to a duplex around 28th St SW. That was Killarney. But you couldn't walk there. And I couldn't be expected to find that on my own. My Calgary was East Calgary.

My worst agony was my haircut. Paying a barber fifty cents or a buck was foolish so Mum bought silver clippers for $1.98 and every other Sunday, the men sat on a kitchen chair under the light with a towel on their shoulders for Sophie’s trim. Sam’s was no trouble. After ten minutes it was over and he rose with what Mum had left him. 

But for me it was torture. The clippers caught my flesh, so I’d squirm and sweat, which made the clippers catch even worse. And me cry and wriggle and Mum shout I should sit still and me squirm and cry some more and Sam yell they should both be quiet so he could hear the news. 

Always the result was a haircut at which the kids would jeer the next day at school.

One Saturday Dad gave me a dollar because he’d passed a barber school where a boy could get a cut for a quarter. I walked up and down the given block, on both sides of the street, but failed to find a barber school. I went into the closest thing that looked like one, but it was a real barber. "Excuse me, how much do you charge for a little boy's haircut?"

"Seventy-five cents, sir."

I knew I shouldn’t spend that much on a haircut. On the other hand, it was too late to leave. I'd committed myself. The man called me "Sir." Besides. Just once, maybe?

When I explained Dad didn’t scold me but he looked disappointed. I felt even guiltier until the real haircut was overgrown and forgotten

But the kids teased anyway: “Look who went to the barber!”

  ***

One of our luxuries was a nightly stroll “downtown.” That meant a couple blocks down to 1^st Street, then north to 8^th Avenue and left for the lights and life of the city. There was so much to see, so much happening, all the time. Store windows to look in, cars and trucks and streetcars zipping back and forth. In that gauntlet of hotels and bars there were always some drunks stumbling about. So long as we were together, the drunks were funny. "Shicker is a goy," I learned early. Roughly: “If he’s drunk he must be a gentile.”

One evening, as we walked that gauntlet of beer parlours, I spotted a dollar, folded, on the sidewalk. I darted down and stuffed it in my pocket without breaking stride.

"Why can't you always move that fast?" Sam teased. 

My Dad’s favourite term for me was shver ayer-dicker. As Ayer means eggs, and shver heavy, the word denotes someone whose balls are so heavy he always moves slowly. The term is a poetic version of, say, “lumbering” (albeit gender exclusive, a consideration not yet in the air).

When we got home I took the bill out of my pocket and unfolded it. It was a five! How many comics would that buy at Jaffe's Used Books? Five cents each, six for a quarter, that makes.... But Mum insisted on banking it. Ruthie and I had our own bank accounts that we couldn’t draw from but we could feed with any cash gifts we got – or as now found. It was for our education.

The winter thaw led to heavy floods in Uncle Morris’s neighbourhood. The Herald ran front-page stories with dramatic pictures. I wanted to see a real flood, so I walked down to the icy river that now covered 1^st  and 2^nd Avenues. I walked further for a better look. Then a little further. Eventually I found myself standing on an ice floe. Imperceptibly, the earth had turned into river.

I was on a solid piece of ice, but I was not -- I knew instinctively -- safe, not like on dry land. Hoping to regain security I hopped onto another, then another, but none connected back to the shore. So I stopped and stood there as the floe moved down the river. Where was I going?

Then my floe seemed to shrink. Now I regretted never having learned to swim. With no practical alternative I started to cry. My ice was moving faster even as it shrank. I cried louder.

Suddenly I heard a man: "Hey, boy! Don't do anything. Just stand there. I'm coming."

From out of nowhere -- maybe from heaven or from walking along Third Avenue -- a man in a grey suit and gaberdine overcoat with a high black fur hat bounded over, leaping from floe to floe. When he got to the one next to me he leaned over and swept me away. He carried me against the current from floe to floe, then deposited me on the ground.

"Are you okay, son?"

"Yes, sir. Thanks a lot!"

"That's fine. But I don't think you should go out there again, do you?” 

Chilled and quaking, I mustered: "I don't think I will."

Boy, I thought, I could be dead. Drowned. Frozen.  Or floating out to some ocean.  

But who was that man? What man with a fur-trimmed overcoat and expensive fur hat walks along the river in East Calgary? He couldn't live here. He couldn't work here. Why was he here? Who was he? Superman? No, everybody knows Superman doesn't exist. And he never dresses like that! Not even when he’s Clark Kent.

He must have been an angel. There was no other logical explanation.

All the way home I rehearsed how I’d tell my family my dramatic story. But by the time I got home I knew he would never tell anyone. Not even Ruthie. If my parents ever found out they would never let me go anywhere on my own again. Not for at least ten years.

***

One summer Saturday I stayed home with Dad while Mum took Ruthie downtown. I thought it was too hot to go out. "Should I make you some of that Kool Aid?" "OK." So Dad made us a cold drink. We both drank it. When the women came home hot and tired, Dad poured them each a glass.

"Oh, puke! This is terrible." 

Mum’s response was no gentler: "Phooey!" She spat it into the sink.

"What's the matter?" Dad asked, puzzled. "It's from the fridge." 

"It tastes awful. What did you put in it?"

"Just water. And the powder. This powder, here. Like you always make."

Mum laughed. "That powder? You made a drink with that powder? That's not Kool Aid. That's cheese. Shvontz melommed, that's powdered cheese!"

"Daddy made a drink with powdered cheese? No wonder it tastes so bad."

"Couldn't you tell it was cheese?"

"No, how could I taste it? It felt cold, that's all I knew."

"And you, Moishe? You drank it and you didn't think something was wrong?"

"I thought it tasted funny."

"Why didn't you say?"

"I didn't want to hurt Daddy’s feelings."

3. School Days

Though our house stood kitty-corner from the sandstone Victoria School our parents had not abandoned the economical comforts of Leader to send their children to a public school. Jewish children came from all over the city to either the Peretz School (if they were among the Yiddishists) or the Talmud Torah (if their parents, more modern, preferred Hebrew). Sam and Sophie spoke, wrote and read Yiddish and ensured we did too. Our Hebrew was limited to prayers. And they were committed socialists, so their clear choice was the Peretz School, named after the great Leftist Yiddish writer Itzchak Lebel Peretz. The one-storey brick building would eventually end its days decades later as the CUPE union hall. But in its school days the classes were in the two rooms upstairs. The basement held separate boys’ and girls’ cloakrooms and a large auditorium where phys ed classes and community festivals were held. 

When I started Grade III and Ruthie Grade V we walked the four blocks to school together. The kids from the better neighbourhoods came by pooled taxis. That also set their social groupings. 

***

Having spoken Yiddish at home, Ruthie and I had strong vocabularies and practical grammar but we had a problem. We had learned the Yiddish of the first wave of immigrants, but the current Yiddish was inflected by modern Hebrew. The vocabulary and grammar were the same, but there were some major differences in pronunciation. For example, an “s” sound in certain words was now pronounced as a “t.” Thus our Shabb’es became the more modern shabat’. The sign we pronounced as "oo" was now pronounced as "aw." We adapted to this, but one day I had a humiliating slip. 

The class was taking turns reading aloud a classic poem called Zwei Breeder ("Two Brothers"), a variation on the Cain and Abel story. The devil prompts one brother to murder the other in order to steal his share of a treasure. The temptation includes the line: "Ein shtockh mit a nawdle, du host shoin ein krell" (One prick with a needle and you already have a pearl).

From my mother’s home tutoring in Leader I had mastered the skill of running my eye a phrase ahead of my voice, which – to my ominous pride – made me a fluent and dramatic reader. But the word for needle, "nawdle," lay in ambush. When I hit it at full dramatic speed and volume out came my family’s old pronunciation as -- "noodle." 

The class erupted in laughter. Stick him with a noodle – that was funny. I remember feeling humiliated. It wasn’t just the mistake. The moment seemed to coalesce all the shames I was carrying – our living in East Calgary, my not being able to go to school by cab, my lack of any friends, my cheap clothes, my father not being able to work, my mother cleaning up after itinerants and drunks, our family’s having to watch every nickel -- my sense I was once and forever an outsider. 

But when all those embarrassments had subsided I discovered something else. It felt good to get a laugh. 

***

As the Peretz day classes stopped with Grade V, after one year Ruthie started Victoria School, so I had to walk to school alone.  

The winters were harsh, like forty below. And had the radio weathermen known about the wind chill factor it would have felt colder still. The air sliced through the scarf Mum had firmly wrapped around my nose and mouth, leaving just a slit of eye between the toque under the parka and the scarf around it. 

Once I felt so cold and indignant that as I entered the schoolyard I decided it was too cold to walk to school that day. If I couldn’t go by cab I shouldn’t have to go. I turned and walked the four bitter blocks back home, starting to cry just before I entered: "It's too cold to go to school! I’m frozen! It hurts!" Mum blew my nose, thawed me out with a cup of hot chocolate, gave me tomato soup for lunch and sent me back for the afternoon classes.

On warmer winter days I’d lighten the walk by kicking a piece of ice along the sidewalk, soccer style, until it crumbled away, then start another. Here was the soccer hero single-handedly weaving his way to the game-winning goal. When I lost my balance and fell, I must have been fouled. The ref blew his whistle. The crowd hushed for the penalty shot. I always scored. 

Of course, that was never how it went in phys ed or in the schoolyard games at noon or recess. There I was hopelessly maladroit. But maybe -- just maybe -- if I played my fantasy games long enough they might someday come true. I would be able really to do what I imagined doing. Like all those scales I had to practice on the piano could lead me to play whole concertos like Oscar Levant in An American in Paris (Capitol Theatre, 1951). 

***

When my parents had saved up a couple of thousand dollars, they made a down payment on a small single family house on 17^th Ave. at 8^th St. S.W. But we couldn’t afford to live there. We would rent it out. A year later they bought another one, way out on 24^th St. SW, far out but at a very good price. The rents would pay out the mortgages and the taxes and leave a little extra each month to help with our living costs. When the rent finally paid off its mortgage it would be pure profit. “We should only live so long,” Sophie always added, “in health,” when she and Sam explained their economics to us. Meanwhile, we lived off the slender margin.

Of course, the houses often required repairs and whenever a tenant moved out, a heavy cleaning. My sister and I helped. We learned to show a vacant room or house to prospective tenants, to take rents and give receipts, to clean up after an overflowed toilet. I was less helpful to Dad on repair trips. For one thing, I couldn’t do any of the work he could and I had no interest in learning. His instruction found me bored and clumsy. 

Furthermore, I was on Mum’s orders not to let Dad work too hard, nor stay so long that he would get an attack. So as I perceived my duty I had to keep telling him that he had fixed the thing, that was enough, we should go home already. This confirmed Dad’s not unreasonable view that his only son was an incompetent lazy good-for-nothing. A loi-a-neetzlach. 

With that assessment I could hardly disagree. I dreaded having to help, to be exposed anew. If I could be good at school, which to my surprise I often was, why did I have to be good at this stuff, too? Long before I heard of La Fontaine I discovered: “It is impossible to please all the world and one's father.”  

***

  As East Calgary was a rough neighbourhood, our parents didn't want us hanging around the schoolyard. As in Leader we had to be home every day for cookies and milk at four o'clock. My only friends were Jewish twins, three blocks away, Morris and Susan Aisenman. At school Morris and I played tag. For a while we followed the Superman radio serial, from 4:30 to 4:45, then we'd phone each other to speculate on what was going to happen next. It felt grown up to have a friend to phone to talk things over.

One Saturday morning the twins came over to play. Mum had taken Ruthie shopping, so Dad made lunch. As we were eating the salad, we discovered a caterpillar in the lettuce. The twins seemed less upset than I was but Dad kept his usual ease.  

"Do you know what's worse than a worm in your apple?" he asked.

"No," said Susan, "What?"

"Half a worm."

The twins laughed. Their day had not been ruined by the caterpillar. 

***

In Calgary as in Leader Saturday was our bath night. Most of the tenants would be out so we  enjoyed the second-floor bathtub. First Ruthie bathed while Mum sat watch on a chair outside. After Ruthie ran back down to our suite, Mum bathed. Then it was my turn and after, Dad washed and dried me, I waited on the chair beside the tub, while he bathed. As if we still had to heat up the Leader water kettle by kettle we all bathed in the one water.

Mum had put a sign in the bathroom: "Please clean the tub after use." A yellow sponge and Old Dutch cleaner, a tube with a Dutch woman running around it, chasing herself chasing dirt, were conspicuously there. But we always found the tub dirty. Its daily cleaning was part of Sophie’s routine, after vacuuming the hallway carpets on all three floors. Only we seemed to clean the tub after as well as before using it. 

***

We went to the synagogue most Friday nights and on all religious holidays, walking the ten blocks to the Conservative shule. My main consolation was the Dilly Dilly ice cream shop on 17^th Ave. around 2^nd St. E. For five cents you got two huge scoops on a big cone. And the flavours! At the Leader drug store we had vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. In Regina Uncle Is sometimes brought home a three-layer brick called Neopolitan. But the Dilly Dilly served up maybe twenty flavours, like tutti-frutti, banana, pineapple, blueberry, pumpkin, even licorice that actually tasted like licorice. And coffee, a taste we children were of course forbidden. The hard part was choosing. Ruthie and I would each order two different flavours, then taste each other's. Mum would have a cone but Dad, never. It was a luxury, and he couldn’t taste the flavours anyway. For the same reason he always gave us his desserts at home.  

  The Dilly Dilly was also our reward for our twenty- block Saturday morning hikes to our piano lessons at the Ursuline Convent in Mount Royal. While Ruthie had her session I’d read the Bible comics. But these were different from the Bible comics Mum had ordered us from New York. The Ursuline comics were not about Abraham and Moses and David and Solomon. They were about Jesus and his miracles. The characters dressed the same, but this was a different Bible altogether. How could you even call it the Bible?

I never felt comfortable at the convent. The nuns seemed uniformly alien. Waiting for the music lesson was like waiting for the dentist. All the worse when the walls abound with agonized Jesuses, for eternity grimacing down at those painful scales. 

*** 

That Dilly Dilly was our only luxury. We never ate in restaurants or went out for a coffee because that was unnecessarily expensive. Dad was proud to pull months of daily use out of a single Wilkinson razor blade. Before and after each shave he would spin the blade around in an empty ex-cheese glass to sharpen it.

Sometimes Mum took Ruthie and me to the Saturday matinee at the Isis on 4^th St. W. I didn't like the romances and musicals here as much as my westerns, but when she took me she paid. For an extra dime the Isis gave each customer, even the kids, a dinner plate or matching cup and saucer, with a burgundy flower pattern and a golden rim. These pieces, along with the flowered glasses from our flavoured cream cheese, eventually replaced the everyday tableware we had brought from Leader. Such was the Calgary plenty. 

For groceries we would all go once a week to the Co-op four blocks away. The store offered fruit and vegetables at reduced prices when they started to turn and day-old bread and pastry at half price. With its annual payback the Co-op smacked of the old CCF government in Saskatchewan. Sam talked to the staff as if they were old friends so soon they were.

Dad had always voted CCF. He proudly remembered meeting (which may have meant only hearing in person) Tommy Douglas. I always figured that if I ever met Tommy Douglas I'd tell him I was Sam Yacowar’s son from Leader and Mr. Douglas would say: "Of course! Sam! How is he? Is he well yet? You give your dad my best regards, you hear, son?" But I never met Tommy Douglas.

***

In Calgary Mom was at last among her own. She joined the women's auxiliary at the Peretz School and the reading circle. She was highly respected for her Yiddish, her knowledge, and her friendly warmth. She befriended all the Peretz School teachers (to her son's unease), especially Lerrer Zaretsky, my teacher. 

Mr. Zaretsky was shorter than the students but an extremely cultured man, always elegantly dressed. He was fastidious about everything, including how delicately, when he coughed in class, he spat into his laundered hanky. Mr. Zaretsky avidly discussed the arts and Yiddishkeit with Mum. She often invited him over for dinner. The family teased her about her “beau’s” decorous attentions. 

One day in class Mr. Zaretsky enquired after Dad’s health (“Dein totte, zoi feelt er?”). This I reported over dinner:

“Lerrer Zaretsky asked about you today, Daddy.”

“That’s nice,” Dad said, ladling out the boiled chicken.

“Yeah, he said ‘Dein totte, er leibt noch?’” (“Your father, is he still alive?”)

My folks both erupted in laughter at my mistranslation. That’s how I discovered black humour.

4. The Movies

On one walk we approached a curious building, finished with half-logs. A western lettered sign declared it The Hitchin Post.

"That’s funny. What do you think it is?" Mum asked.

"I think it's where people get married," offered Ruthie, not an unwise surmise.

"Maybe it’s a movie," I said, spotting the posters. I felt like dancing in the street when that proved right. Not only had he I bested my older sister, but here was a theatre that specialized in westerns! Double features of westerns! Every day! Except Sunday, of course -- nothing would be open on Sundays.

I went there the next Saturday afternoon. For 10 cents I got two western features, plus trailers for the two films that started Monday for three days, then trailers for the next weekend's double features, plus a travelogue or a comic short, like a Pete Smith, plus a cartoon. I became a regular at The Hitchin Post. 

My life centered on movies. All week I planned what to see next Saturday afternoon. When  I came home, before dinner Saturday, I phoned all the theatres for what would be on the next week. I usually went alone. Admission was 10 cents, then 15, then 25. But always my weekly allowance -- Mum handled all the family finances -- provided one admission and a 10-cent candy bar.

My favourite theatres were the Hitchin Post and its sister houses, the Variety one block east and the Strand one block west. Each offered double features and shorts for the price of just one feature at the Palace or the Capital, both just west of First Street West. In high school my loyalty would shift there and to the posh new Uptown, even further west on Eighth, but I initially favoured the more generous haunts of East Calgary.

Once I was so enthralled at a Hitchin Post movie about Buffalo Bill, with Joel MacRae, that I sat through it three times. That meant also sitting through the forgettable second feature and all the supporting material twice.

When I returned home around 7 I was surprised at my family’s panic. "Where were you?" Mum was livid. "Why didn't you phone? We thought something happened! We called the hospitals! The police!"

I explained that this movie was really good. Especially when Buffalo Bill is an old man, maybe about to die, and he calls out to his audience, “God Bless You,” and a crippled little boy rises on his crutches and says, "God bless you too, Buffalo Bill." That was pretty good.

But Mum was not to be mollified. For my selfish thoughtlessness, I could not go to another movie for two weeks. If I were ever going to be late again, I would phone home first. I saw Mum’s point. I should learn to consider others and not just pursue my own pleasure. I sat down at the kitchen table and phoned the theatres to see what was going to be on in three weeks. None knew.

Then I had the Lux Radio Theatre. If I heard the movie on the radio then I wouldn't have to spend fifteen cents to go see it! As those films usually played the Capital and Palace, not my cheap East End cinemas, I’d save a quarter! City life was full of such bargains.

I took to collecting Screen Stories magazine. They told the whole story, with pictures and gossip, of seven or eight new Hollywood feature  films every month. And they, too, were Capitol and Palace films, so it was a lot cheaper to read them instead.

I read that Rod Cameron was born in Calgary, in a big brick apartment block on 2^nd Street East, on the northeast corner of 12^th Ave. That was one block away from our house. Imagine! A Hollywood star born a block away. The house was now dilapidated, and Rod Cameron was never one of my favourite actors, but still....

I much preferred Randolph Scott. With his big fleshy face Rod Cameron looked soft, like a ladies’ man (whatever that was). But Randolph Scott, he was tough, thin, wiry, a real man’s man (whatever that was). Seven Men from Now. Commanche Station. The Tall T. There was a hero. A man of strength and integrity, that’s who should have been born on my block. Randolph Scott was clearly what my dad would have been if he were still on the ranch and if he had not took sick.

That was how Dad put it whenever he told new tenants how a rancher ended up working a rooming house with his wife who was really a schoolteacher. “I took sick.” And if Dad were a Randolph Scott manque (whatever that was) that meant I might be too. 

 Nevertheless. Rod Cameron -- for all his softness and the fact he often played city men in suits -- was still a movie star. Born just one block away. Yvonne de Carlo was born in Vancouver. All I knew about Vancouver was that my Uncle Joe had moved his family there instead of to Calgary. Dumb. Even Rod Cameron was way better than Yvonne de Carlo. She was a girl.

***

I had several favourite movies. Like Smoky, where the wandering cowhand (Fred MacMurray) loves this wild horse he catches and trains, then loses. When he eventually finds him, broken, scrawny, abused, standing in the rain on a cold dark night, I cried.

Though I would have liked to be a cowboy, I couldn't even imagine breaking wild horses, like Dad. No, I’d probably be the fat cook who sat on the porch with a guitar singing "Jimmy Crack Corn and I don’t care." If I could ever play the guitar. I would always be Jingles, not Wild Bill.

In the film where Gene Autry sang about a strawberry roan -- Whatever that was, a horse maybe, or a dog -- in one scene the heroine -- Mona Friedman? -- appears against a backdrop of red and white flowers. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I felt a strange, aching desire. And a Freeman must be Jewish! How could I meet her?

I liked the Bowery Boys comedies and wished I had a gang like that in Calgary. I’d be Satch, the clown with the backward baseball hat. 

Of course, anything by Walt Disney was great. The nature films were educational; it was assuring to know that animals are just like people.

At the Hitchin Post I saw Hopalong Rosenbloom Rides Again, the funniest film I'd ever seen. It starred an ex-boxer, Slapsy Maxie Rosenbloom, and was full of silly gags. For example, when the narrator said "Night fell," there was a loud clang of falling pots and pans. This was even funnier than the Bowery Boys. It stepped outside its plot, like those Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road films, so I would recall it when I studied the Theatre of the Absurd and Brecht’s verfremdungseffeckt. But it began as my favourite comedy. 

When I wanted to see an “Adult” movie  -- which became increasingly often -- I had two options. I could stop a man approaching the box office, show my money, and ask to be taken in. Most men obliged; women always refused. Or I could ask Mum to take me. Usually I chose the former. 

But if no-one agreed I’d miss the film. So for must-see movies I asked Mum. If I pitched it as a matter of education, she’d always consent. She'd buy my ticket and Bridge Mixture and I could save my allowance for comics. That’s how I saw John Payne in Tripoli and the film that for years remained my all-time favourite, From Here to Eternity. 

I had to hold back my tears when Montgomery Clift (as Pruitt) plays taps for his murdered friend Maggio (Frank Sinatra). While others at school stuck on that beach lovemaking scene, I wished I had a friend that close, someone for whose funeral I could play taps, with a strong but quavering note. 

At school, some boys circulated the paperback, dog-eared at the good parts. I didn’t know what some of the words meant, that even some of the girls did, the words that weren’t in my dictionary. Maybe if I read the whole book I could figure them out. I already knew the importance of context. I tried to borrow it from the Central Library but it was kept on the top shelf of a locked cabinet and the librarian refused to give it to me. Even when I told her I was supposed to get it for my mother. And nobody was selling his copy to Jaffe’s!

***

One week there were two many good films for my Saturday coverage. In addition to the weekly Westerns there was a Jungle Jim movie at the Strand that I wanted to see. While Johnny Weissmuller was too fat for Tarzan, after Lex Barker, he was quite acceptable as the safari-suited Jungle Jim. So I told Mum my teacher said the whole class should go see this film because we were going to study Africa. So could I go to the afternoon show after school? I'd run so I'd be home in time for supper. Could I have the extra fifteen cents? I’d forgo the chocolate. With education the issue Mum agreed.

Two days later, when I returned home from school, Mum was waiting enraged. She had met my teacher shopping and asked about Africa. There was no such assignment. "Lie to me? [Whack] You lie to your mother? [Whack] Don’t you know how poor we are? [Whack] Your father and I slave to feed you and you lie for a farkakkte movie? [Whack]. I'll teach you to lie. [Whack]"   

The one-month ban from movies hurt even more than -- the next day at school -- my teacher’s admonishing glance. I knew Mum was right. I should not have lied to her and I should not have been so selfish at my family's expense.

5. The Widening World of Sports

My folks were painting our kitchen when Chris and Stella Kelln dropped by. His parents had farmed near Leader and were good friends. When his job with the CPR moved the young couple to Calgary, they rented a house on 3^rd Street East around 15^th Ave.

"It's Thanksgiving," Chris declared. "You can't work on Thanksgiving. We're having turkey, you’re coming, no excuses. We’ll eat around two."

Ruthie and I had never tasted turkey. Though there was nothing not kosher, that dish with all those trimmings seemed tantalizingly goyish. The stuffing had nuts and spices I’d never tasted. There was a red berry jam to eat with the meat. What a terrific idea: jam with meat! The dessert was a wonderful pumpkin pie, with your choice of vanilla or chocolate ice cream, but we got a little of each. The men had a bottle of beer with the meal. It was all so sophisticated.

Chris paid special attention to me. "You like hockey?" 

"I don't know."

"You ever go to a hockey game?" 

"No."

"Look, Sam. Why don't I take your boy to a hockey game on Sunday. You come too. It's a lot of fun. It's the Big Six League. They play in the Pavilion at the Stampede grounds. Just teams from around here, the towns. It's Sunday so they can only charge a silver collection. I always put in two bits, that would cover him too. I'd like to take him."

Dad saw my prayer and agreed. So Chris took me to the Sunday hockey games. Though I always said I didn't need anything, when Chris went for a coffee he always brought me back a hot dog or peanuts.

I loved the game. My favourite team was the Canmore Legionnaires. They had a pepperpot redhead named Phil Kotchonoski and an Andy Chakowski who were dynamite on blades. But just being in the stadium with other boys and men was a thrill.

Then Chris started taking me to the wrestling matches on Tuesday nights. This needed Mum’s special permission because it was a school night. But I begged. I promised to do all my homework before and not to be tired the next day. 

Her son was taking a major step away from her, from her values, with all those rough sports. But when Dad sided with me she gave in. Her son had to grow up.

  Chris never let Dad or me pay for anything. It was as if Dad had built up a credit that Chris was trying to repay. Treating me was the least he could do for his sick old friend. 

Years later Mum explained what favour Dad had done Chris, back in Leader. When Chris and Stella wanted to marry, his Protestant family were aghast because she was a Catholic. His parents would disown him. His cousins and brothers would break every bone in his body if he married “that Catlick hoor.” Dad, whom the Kellns esteemed, tried to talk sense into them.

   “Have you met her? Stella is a wonderful girl. Beautiful, she’s smart, a fine homemaker. You taste her pierogy? You should be honoured to get her in your family. What are you thinking? You’d break up your family because your son married a woman he loves? You’d rather he married someone he didn’t love? Then he’d be in hell or he’d have to fool around. That would make you happy? Chris is a good boy and he’s lucky to get a girl like Stella. Don’t forget, since her he stopped drinking. You should be proud.”

The Kellns never forgave Stan and they refused to acknowledge Stella. But bolstered by Dad’s support Chris married her -- a decision he never regretted.

***

In sports I could participate imaginatively in a world from which my clumsiness and weakness barred me. Dad, I was sure, would have excelled at any sport, if he’d ever had the time to play any. Sports also drew me into the outside world. I started to read the Herald every afternoon, not just the comics, but reports on the hockey teams in the Big Six and Western Hockey Leagues. I listened to the WHL Stampeder hockey games on the radio.

I would have sold my soul to go see a WHL game. But it was expensive. Maybe a buck, for a kid. So, I told himself, why pay when you can hear it for free on the radio? 

***

I became an avid wrestling fan. The matches almost always pitted an obviously evil man against a virtuous one. The good guy had the superior skills -- like George Gordienko from Winnipeg -- but the bad guy usually won -- by breaking the rules! If you can win by breaking the rules, who wouldn’t? The good guys, that’s who, so they usually lost and I’d go home angry and frustrated but excited and happy to have been there.

The referee could never enforce justice. His incompetence was especially apparent in a match between women wrestlers or when the midgets, like Little Beaver and Sky Low Low, came to town. But those matches were always funny anyway -- midgets and women pretending to fight like men! -- so it didn't matter much what happened. The tragic miscarriages of justice involved the normal men.

On rare occasions there would be a match -- always a preliminary -- between two good guys. Like George Gordienko vs. Pat McGill. This would be touted as a return to the classical glories of The Game. An exhibition of The Science of The Mat. It was usually boring. 

In those matches I’d wonder which good guy would be the favourite. For the ethnics involved, the choice was clear. The Italians would cheer for the Italian, the Ukrainians for the Ukrainian, and so on. Of course, there was never a Jewish wrestler. Never. Not between Jacob and Goldberg, not one. 

If there was no ethnic issue the choice of hero hung in the air. Usually the issue was only resolved when one stepped over the line and threw a punch. Until that moment, each wrestler battled not just his opponent but his own temptation to break the law. The first punch restored the normal dialectic.

I concluded from that, life itself must be a constant battle to resist that outlaw impulse. Good and evil make war even within a hero. You don’t need a villain to find evil, not when you can grab an advantage by breaking some rule. So when two good guys battled valiantly, eventually one would cross the line and become the villain -- until next week’s match against a bigger villain -- and make this victim the hero. It sure was easier to be good when you were up against an evil that was outside.

When a match pitted two villains against each other, the audience sided with the more local one. Though Al "Mr. Murder" Mills was everyone's most hated villain for months, he immediately became the hero when he faced Kenji Shibuya, with his dread Sleeper Hold. For Al Mills hailed from Camrose, Alberta, and the sinister Oriental from -- ostensibly Japan, though in fact from a no more mysterious east than Cleveland.

I especially appreciated wrestlers who had a specialty hold. It usually had a fancy name but was something very basic. Anyone could do it, but this one wrestler had developed it to a point where it distinguished him from all others. Pat McGill had his drop-kick, Legs Langevin his Javanese Stretch, Earl McCready (from Amulet, Saskatchewan!) his Rolling Cradle, and those two exotics, The Cardiff Giant and Shibuya, their Sleepers. 

The last such specialty I remember was Tex Mackenzie and his Bulldogger, but Tex always smiled when he talked about it, like he knew it was hokey. As this was on Ed Whalen's television show already, it was. But in the old days, when wrestling was pure, when it was on radio not TV, I liked the idea that somebody could distinguish himself by developing a simple signature hold. A personal specialty.

When Pat McGill sat his dazed opponent up high on the turnbuckle, then drop-kicked him off it, it proved not just skill but confidence. Had Pat missed his mark, he could have flown out of the old Victoria Pavilion onto 17^th Avenue! To the Dilly Dilly almost!

My favourite wrestler was Paul Baillargeon. Paul was a muscular, handsome young Quebecois from a family of wrestling brothers. All were weight-lifters converted to the sport. Younger Adrian had a brief career in the Calgary ring but never caught the local fancy. Older Jean would climb up a special telephone pole that had been rigged up in the arena. Strapped to his back was a platform carrying eight or ten men or a live horse. Battling in the ring he was less impressive.

Paul was the best wrestler. His specialty was the Giant Swing. It began as the harmless Full Nelson, but with Paul Baillargeon’s arm-strength it meant game over. With his arms up around the adversary's neck and shoulders, Paul would lift him and swing him around the ring, 360 or 720 or 1440 degrees, until -- quite disoriented -- the victim could be slammed to the mat for an easy pin.

One night Paul Baillargeon was matched for the world championship against the great Lou Thesz. Thesz travelled the globe, defending his belt every night in a different town, always accompanied by his manager, the legendary star of The Golden Age of Wrestling, Ed “Strangler” Lewis. When I saw the reverence accorded Mr. Lewis, I wondered how a Strangler could be a hero. Maybe he strangled the right people, he decided, bad people, who deserved to get strangled.

But there was a problem. Paul’s chance to win the world title in Calgary was on the usual Tuesday night. But this Tuesday was not like other Tuesdays. It was Pesach. 

No, dad insisted, I could not go to the wrestling match that week. I had to stay home for the seder. No, God wouldn’t understand. Well, He would understand, because He knows and understands everything, but He would not approve a boy from a good Jewish home skipping a seder for a wrestling match. No, not even a world championship. A Jew puts religious responsibilities first. Jehovah was more important than Paul Baillargeon. Besides, if I went to the wrestling match who would ask The Four Questions?

Okay, I thought, I’ll ask “How is this night different from all other nights?” but then I’ll add “Because this is the night my Paul can become World Champion and I couldn’t go!” 

Dad  proposed a Solomonic compromise that I accepted: Between sections of the seder Velvel could slip out to the kitchen radio for brief updatings on the match. 

In the event, right after the chicken soup with matzo-ball dumplings Paul Baillargeon proved the sacrificial goat. Lou Thesz squirmed out of Paul’s Full Nelson and took his championship belt on to the next night’s challenge in Edmonton.

    ***

Baillargeon's most epic confrontation was with the aforementioned villain, Al "Mr. Murder" Mills from Camrose. Mills and his younger brother, Tiny, an even larger hulk in black tights, were a vicious, no-holds-barred tag team. They were equally effective as solos, though Al was the more lethal. Al Mills was beating up on everyone. When Paul Baillargeon was contracted to put Mr. Murder in his place, it was as clear a collision of Good and Evil as you could find outside the Ursuline Bible comics.    

The two men fought it out weekly for over a month. In every match, Paul would take the upper hand. But Mr. Murder’s chicanery, sometimes involving help from his brother outside the ring (which was really against the law) or an oversight by the dumb referee, would turn the victory to Mills. When Mills punched Baillargeon bloody, I leaped out of his seat screaming in his thin voice: "Get dirty, Paul! Get dirty!" Stan smiled at his protege's passion -- but shared his frustration. 

I knew it was wrong to urge his virtuous hero to break the rules. But he was getting slaughtered. Sometimes you have to cross the line to defend yourself. Maybe some laws are not so inviolable after all. Of course, Paul could never quite get dirty. When he cocked his fist at Mills, the villain would cower until Baillargeon softened back into honest strategies. Then Mills would beat the hell out of him again.   

In his hero’s worst humiliation, Mills punched Baillargeon senseless, then picked him up, carried him to the corner, sat him on the turnbuckle, turned and walked away. Paul's white handsome face was a streaming red pulp. I never forgot that sight.

***

In 1953 Calgary had a murder. The victim was a woman named Hannah Middlestadt. The Herald reported that she was the sister-in-law of two wrestlers from Camrose, Alberta, Al Middlestadt, who worked under the name, Al "Mr. Murder" Mills, and his brother, aka Tiny Mills. Police were looking for clues to who might have murdered the woman.

So the evil Mills brothers had changed their name! Shortened from Middlestadt. My faith was shaken -- until mum assured me, No, trimming the name does not mean they’re necessarily Jewish. Other people also change their names, for other reasons. But still, there was the murder. 

"Dumb cops, what's the matter with them?" I seethed to myself. Sometimes to Dad. "Can't they see? It must have been Al Mills! Nobody else could have done it! Some family fight maybe and he went crazy, like in the ring. If he’s called Mr Murder he’s probably done it somewhere else already. What's the matter with them? Are the cops as blind as the damn referees?"

"Don't swear," Dad corrected softly.

I thought I should investigate the murder myself. Like the Bowery Boys would’ve. Maybe if I followed him after a match, Mills would lead him to some incriminating evidence. Iwould turn him in to the police and be a hero. Paul Baillargeon could return. 

But the detective’s mother wouldn’t let him. Wrestling was on a school night. If I didn’t come right home after the match she wouldn’t let me go at all.

The police never did charge Al “Mr Murder” Mills. In fact, in May, 1954, another man was hanged for the crime. But Mills got his comeuppance anyway. It was in the ring, from the living legend -- Stu Hart.

In those days Stu Hart was a preliminary wrestler. That is, fodder in the opening matches. He wrestled clean but he didn't have George Gordienko's flair. Or Lawrence O'Toole's handsome face (a moustache just like Errol Flynn’s). Every week journeyman Hart wrestled in the first or second bout. Sometimes he won, but usually he lost to some new villain, about to rise through the card. 

Then one week Hart refereed a main event, in which Al "Mr. Murder" Mills got out of hand, which was not unusual. He punched the referee, also not that unusual. But when the referee punched back, that was. Especially when Referee Hart -- his striped shirt ripped and reddened -- ran Al “Mr. Murder” Mills out of the ring all the way back to the dressing room. Mr Murder was scared of this referee!

The main event the next week pitted Al Mills against Stu Hart. Mr. Hart defeated Mr. Murder handily. Mills left town, his tail between his legs, and Velvel never heard anything about him again. The next week it was announced that Mr. Hart was going to manage the Calgary wrestling franchise.

"Boy," I thought, "it's a good thing Stu Hart won that one!" The very idea that Mr. Murder Mills might have taken over the local wrestling government made me shiver. How could I have lived with that? But what could I have done about it?

5)The Collector Begins

And not just the collector. Here I drop my first-person recollection and record my reminiscence through a persona. I reconstitute myself as a fictional figure, Velvel by name, sone of Shem and Rivka Schwarts with a sister Yehudit. 

Don’t ask why.

Well, if you must know. From here we slip into the novel I once wrote, based on my life, not unjustifiably unpublished. The title? The Mercy Killer. 

But that’s another story.

***

Living in a rooming house, Velvel — remember? — developed his own modest business. Whenever a tenant left, Velvel helped Rivka remove the garbage. His reward was all the pop and beer bottles and all the books, magazines and comics left behind. 

Pop bottles were worth a penny. The beer bottles paid twenty cents for a case of twelve. He piled the cases on the back porch until there were thirty or forty cases, then phoned the brewers' pick-up. As they usually came during school hours, Shem supervised the pickup and relayed the refund. 

The books, comics and magazines Velvel sold or swapped at Jaffe’s Used Books on 8^th Avenue between 1^st and 2^nd Street East. This was Calgary’s premium -- in fact, only -- used bookstore in those days, with a healthy range from junk to literature. 

Velvel usually ignored the walls of hard covers to forage the tables in the middle of the long room, piled high with comics, magazines and pocket books. Jaffe’s was Velvel’s favourite store. He would leave at 11 for his one o’clock movie on Saturdays just so he could spend an hour or so at Jaffe’s first.

These riches made Velvel an even more catholic reader. Woman tenants left behind True Story and Modern Romance. The men supplied horror and western comics and magazines like True Detective and Field and Stream. The hunting magazines never appealed to Velvel, but the sensationalist crime magazines opened windows onto the adult world.

He accumulated so many comics that when a trader from school came over, Velvel would bring out only one of his ten or twelve piles, to simplify the choice. As nobody at school traded magazines, Velvel assumed he had a more mature literary taste, so he developed that. He became intrigued by his odd Saturday Review Of Literature and Atlantic Monthly. He clipped out cartoons from The Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker. He was fascinated by the detail in the Norman Rockwell covers. Some people must live like that.

Often Velvel hastened the harvest by going around to the tenants in the early evening and asking if they had any comics or magazines he could borrow. Usually the tenants said he could keep them. Once he sold one pile, only to have the tenants, Alan and Adam, ask for them back. They had only lent them. Velvel apologized and repaid them with a selection of his own war comics and magazines that he knew they’d like. But that misunderstanding left him warier.

When Old Man Gourlay, the intellectual recluse who came with the house, died in his third floor aerie, his library comprised yellowing copies of nineteenth century poetry and novels. Browning, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope. Velvel swapped them at Jaffe's for a pile of ghoul comics.

***

One comic Velvel would never trade. He didn’t know why but one part always thrilled him, in a disturbing way. 

It was a Lone Ranger. Nobody had ever seen the hero without his mask. Not even his faithful companion, Tonto. But in one story the Lone Ranger is taken prisoner by some bad guys. While they ride off to rob a bank, they leave him tied hands and feet to a kitchen chair. They leave this beautiful woman to guard him. She has a bulging figure and long, thin legs -- they flash behind the slit in her long fringed skirt -- and waving red hair, redder than Red Ryder’s even and, of course, it’s way longer because she’s a girl. 

She teases the Lone Ranger and then she sits on his lap and he can’t move because he’s all tied up, his hands, his feet, so he just sits there. She starts to play with his face, rubbing him. Because he’s helpless, he can’t protect himself -- she takes off his mask. She looks at him. At his secret face. Nobody else has ever seen him like that and she does because he’s all tied up so he can’t stop her.

Every time Velvel read that comic he shivered when the beautiful bad woman steals that forbidden look at the Lone Ranger’s face.

Funny, when she looked at his face she got suddenly good. She put his mask back on him and untied his hands and feet and he rode off to stop her friends’ robbery. Just seeing his face changed her like that.

Velvel never traded that comic. But over the years somehow he lost it. Like years later he lost the tefillen on which his father tried to teach him his morning prayer and later still his prized double-page cartoon from Paul Krasner’s Realist that depicted the Disney cartoon characters in an orgy.

6) The Rooming House   

Almost as rewarding as this plunder was meeting the variety of people who passed through the house.

Lonely Sammy Hoffmann came to Rivka for advice on his love-life and problems at work. Later Shem hired him and his half-ton to help them move house. Sammy said he'd do it for nothing but Shem insisted on slipping him ten bucks for gas and his day's work. “Buy a case of beer!”

Other tenants paid Rivka a dollar each to study English with her one evening a week. The Schwartzes’ range of languages was much appreciated by the recent immigrants.

Adam and Alan, who shared a room in the basement, were young, well built men. Velvel preferred the handsome Alan, because he looked like Robert Wagner. The hard, blue-eyed Adam seemed frightening. Velvel could imagine a murderer looking like that. But Shem opined that Alan was a good for nothing and Adam had the better character. 

In fact, it was Adam who courted and won the visiting sister of Janet, who lived with her husband Barney in the front main-floor suite. The Schwartzes all went to the wedding, a small beery affair, in the front suite. The drinking went on past the usual 9 p.m. weekend curfew. 

“This one night, let them have a little extra,” Shem coaxed the irritated Rivka, when she urged him to go tell them it was time to send their drunken guests home. It was 10 o’clock, the children had to sleep. Velvel estimated how many empty beer bottles he would claim the next day. No fool, Barney took them back himself.

Cliff Atkins, who lived in the small room in the basement, came with the house and stayed till his younger daughter took him home to die. He was a large, ruddy, retired cattle-buyer who wore a shaggy brown buffalo coat year round and hung around the stockyards all day. He and Shem often reminisced about their cattle days. He bathed on the first of every month, no matter what day it was. His nose and eyes seemed in perpetual run.

One Saturday Velvel craved a Roy Rogers hardcover at Jaffe’s but didn’t have enough cash. As he started to run home he met Mr. Atkins in the street.

“Mr. Atkins. Remember me? I’m Velvel. Shem's son? We live in the same house? Can you lend me 25 cents? I need it for a book at Jaffe's. I'll pay you back tonight when I get home."

Mr. Atkins smiled and gave him the money. He was astonished when Velvel appeared at his door that very evening to repay him. “To tell you the truth, Shem, I never thought I’d see that money again,” he laughed the next day. “Your boy is a regular businessman.”

Velvel’s favourite tenant was Mr. Pulitzer. Having moved for a job, he rented a room while he arranged to move his family from Winnipeg. Mr. Pulitzer came down every evening to chat with Shem. He always brought Velvel a chocolate bar because he reminded him of his own son.

One night they played checkers. Velvel won the first game, then the second, then the third. When Yehudit walked by, Velvel crowed his triumphs. Mr. Pulitzer’s look changed imperceptibly and he swept the next six games.

“You know why I did that to you?” he asked the crestfallen Velvel. “You should learn. Never be too confident. You never know what can happen.”     

Mr. Walters was a delicate man from Poland a nationally ranked chess player. One Saturday night Mr. Walters came down to visit with Shem. He asked if either of the men played chess. 

"No," said Shem, "but Velvel plays a good game of checkers. Try him." 

To enliven the contest, the chess champion offered to play Velvel checkers for a dime a game. He was amazed when the boy beat him consistently. His bill rose steadily. 

Around nine the tide began to turn. Velvel’s eyes were drooping and he was making bad moves. Mr. Walters started to win. As Velvel was ready for bed, Shem insisted he return the rest of the winnings, over a dollar, to his opponent. “If he’d kept playing, you would have won it all back,” he insisted, over Mr. Walters' mild protest. When he offered to teach him chess, Velvel declined. He preferred the game he could win.

***

All the tenants liked Shem. Always at home, he was happy to stop what he was doing to talk with them. He could find something to say to anyone.

When Sammy Hoffmann bought his half-ton, he proudly showed it off to Shem. "That's not a truck," Shem joked, "It's a Ford!" In Leader Shem had always driven Chevies. Far from insulted, the lonely Sammy appreciated the camaraderie. Being teased by Shem was better than being praised by anyone else he knew. 

Not that the people in Sammy's life ever praised him. As Rivka had warned, his new girlfriend was only after him for his truck. When he wouldn’t let her brother drive it to Vancouver she dumped him.

***

Living five blocks away from the Stampede grounds, the family could exploit the Stampede. Each summer the Schwartzes opened the back fence to accommodate parking for 25 cents a day. They put collapsible canvas cots in the hallways on the first and second floors and charged three dollars a night. The house filled with cowboys, who only came in to use the bathroom and sleep. They moved Yehudit into Velvel’s bed and rented her kitchen "bedroom" out for five dollars a night. For Velvel they set out two rows of three dining room chairs, put a doubled quilt on them for a mattress and there was his bed, in the dining room. The following year he had outgrown this arrangement.

Rivka packed lunches and took the children to the Stampede on Thursday, when the grounds admission was free. There they collected pop and beer bottles. What with the food samples and craft exhibitions they enjoyed a full day and supplemented their allowance handily. Shem never went to the Stampede. He would have liked to see the livestock but he knew the smell and dust would be unbearable. 

Every night the family went out in their back yard for the fireworks. "How much would all that cost?" Shem marvelled. "Twenty, maybe thirty dollars? For what? For smoke. Noise and smoke. It's crazy." But the kids like it, he had to admit. "And it's free."

***

The family's chief entertainment was the radio. Shem liked the Friday night country music show on CFCN. "Let's swing open the old hen-house door," the announcer would begin, and the fiddlers would break out the music Shem remembered dancing to at the Burstall and Leader hoedowns. Sometimes he'd grab Rivka or Yehudit and swing through a polka or a schottische until he'd lose his breath and fall into his chair coughing and gasping. Rivka would scold him for his excess. Sometimes she'd have to give him a shot of cortisone. But Shem would have his dance.

Every night they listened to the radio. The Great Gildersleeve or Fibber McGee and Molly or I Was a Communist for the FBI, with Dana Andrews himself. Velvel's favourites were Wayne and Shuster and an odd British series he stumbled onto on CFAC, Take it From Here. Both shows lived on puns, which became Velvel's favourite form of humour. He read Bennett Cerf joke books and skimmed Reader's Digest. Oh, why hadn't he known about puns during that awful Noodle affair? He could have pretended he meant it as a joke.

On schoolday mornings, while Rivka slept in a little before her hard days, Shem made breakfast and they listened to Clarence Mack's "Toast and Marmalade" on CFAC. Before Clarence Mack became an alderman, his morning radio show gave the time and news capsules and weather reports and music. In fact, the show provided the Schwartzes' favourite music selection. As well as hit parade songs, like "The Tennessee Waltz" and "How Much is That Doggie in the Window?" Mr. Mack often played Mickey Katz parodies. "Schlemiel of Fortune." "Don't Let the Schmaltz Get in Your Eyes." "Pesach in Portugal." "How Much is That Pickle in the Window?" 

Could Mr. Mack be Jewish? They didn't know him from shule and Orthodox of course he wouldn’t be. He doesn't have a Jewish name. But many Jews changed their names or had them changed by impatient government officials when they first immigrated. A Mack could be anything from Maslowsky to Manischewitz. Regardless, his Mickey Katz songs over breakfast made the Schwartzes feel Jews were welcome in Calgary. Their momma loshen was on the radio!

Velvel was enchanted by the word ‘marmalade.’ Toast and marmalade sounded ... exotic, goyish. The Schwartzes never had marmalade. Their brown toast always bore a film of Empress strawberry jam, from a large tin that was so heavy they just left it in the middle of the table. Velvel didn’t taste marmalade until he had his first teaching job, when he went straight to the thick-cut -- but never with the golliwog label! 

*** 

It wasn’t just tenants the Schwartzes had to clean up after. Once the Koehlers, old friends still farming outside Leader, dropped in for an afternoon visit, on holiday, passing through. Fortunately, Rivka had baked a strudel that morning, rich in crushed walnuts, cinnamon and poppy seed, so she served that with tea.

Mr. Koehler excused himself and was directed upstairs to the house toilet. When he returned he said he was sorry but they really had to leave, to get back on their schedule. With his wife nodding enthusiastic agreement, he congratulated the Schwartzes on their obvious success and wished them continued good fortune and health. As soon as they were out the front door Shem hobbled briskly upstairs for the leak he had needed the last half hour.

When he entered the room he noticed the aroma. It worsened when he flushed. Curious, he raised the water-box lid and peered in. There rising with the replenished water were the pieces of a considerable turd. Shem got an old tobacco tin from the basement to scoop out the water-box.

“I suppose they never used a real toilet before,” he explained over dinner. “Heinz didn’t know what to do.”

“Oh, you! You always trust too much. What’s there not to know? You lift the lid, there’s a seat, you sit on it. What’s to know?”

“Maybe he lifted the wrong lid first and thought that’s where you have to sit. Otherwise why would he do his business in the box?”

“To give us the geet oig, that’s why.” Romanians believe in the evil eye, the malignant power of others’ envy. “They’re both jealous of us, what little we have here, so they made us clean up their dreck.”

  “I think he just didn’t know any better.”

“You think! You always give people more credit than they deserve.”

“Isn’t that better?”

***

At Peretz School Velvel studied Yiddish and Jewish history in the mornings and the public school curriculum afternoons. Though they spent only half the time on the public school subjects, there was no sign that Peretz students were disadvantaged when they moved on after Grade V. But Yehudit had problems when she switched to Victoria School, kiddy-corner from their house. 

"You can't blame the Peretz School for that," Rivka insisted. "Now you're crazy for boys, you don't have room in your head for school."

Her marks were still decent but she felt (what came to be known as) peer pressure. Her growing tensions with her mother erupted on the subject of stockings. Rivka insisted that Yehudit wear her dark brown woollen stockings every day from the first sign of fall until the entrenchment of spring. 

Yehudit objected: "Nobody wears stockings like this. Not even the old teachers. I look stupid in them."

"But you need them. You'll catch cold. I should have to wait on you hand and foot? I don’t have enough to do?" 

"I won't get sick if I wear what everyone else is wearing. I hate those stockings. They itch. Everyone laughs at me."

Shem quietly suggested maybe they could get some of those lighter coloured stockings: "What are they? You know. Nylon, yeah. Why not buy a couple of those? Girls wear those. Teachers too. They should be warm enough."

 "You have to take her side, what else? Do you know what nylons cost? I can't afford nylons for me to dress up nice, so we should buy her nylons for school? How long will they last? Ten minutes? She needs her woollens."

"Well, you can't make me. If you make me wear woollen stockings I'll take them off before I even cross the street and I'll throw them away and go bare-legged. You can't stop me."

"Alright, wear your fardoomte sockies. Wear what you want. But when you get sick don't expect me to look after you. You make your bed, you lie in it!"

No such happy compromise when the issue was no longer leg wear but gentile boys. Shkootzim.

***

Yehudit always remembered and prepared for the special occasions, like their parents' birthdays. On these Velvel was usually caught wanting.

To Shem his birthday and Father’s Day meant nothing. It was like the desserts he would always pass to his children to share. "I can't taste it anyway, so let them enjoy." What did he need a birthday for? Or a card? Not to mention a present. What did he need another tie for? Or socks? "You should just be good children, that's all I ask" -- for his birthday or anything else. “Zye a mentsch.”

Their mother held a different view: "Look at your sister. See what a lovely card she made? And you? You didn't even remember. Your own mother, and you don't remember! A farschluggene birthday you can't remember! When you're sick who cleans your vomit? Who wiped your dreck when you were a baby? Who still has to blow your nose? And for your own mother's birthday you can't make even a card?"

Every year Velvel forgot and every year he would be crying and apologizing and hastily making a loving card. 

"Sure, now, when I remind you, then you have a mother!"

One year he remembered his mother's birthday was approaching. In fact, she reminded him. He tried to think of what to buy her. At the Co-Op he priced the chocolate covered Maraschino cherries she kept in her bedside cupboard, but he hadn't saved any money. 

He supposed he could make a card. But he hated mawkish sentiment, like that song “Ein breivelle den mamman.” Or "Mein Yiddische Momma," that his mother loved playing on their 78 rpm phonograph. Jan Peerce. (In 1969, when Peerce’s son Larry directed the film of Goodbye, Columbus, Velvel regretted it wasn’t Portnoy’s Complaint instead. For poetic justice.)

Of course he loved his parents. But it's so embarrassing to have to say it all the time like that. Why couldn't they just assume it? He could say it once: Until further notice. Why couldn’t they accept that?

Then -- a sign from the heavens. Noch besser: an actual gift. As he was walking home from Peretz School along 12th Avenue, when he passed the bus stop at 2nd Street he noticed a package on the concrete window ledge of the brick corner building. Velvel watched. After all the people standing there got on the next bus the package remained.

It looked like a book. Great. She loved to read. She was always complaining she didn't have the time to read all she wanted to.

Velvel looked around. No-one was watching. He walked over to the ledge and stood there, as if idly waiting for the bus. No-one noticed. He casually picked up the package as if he had just rested it there for a moment. He walked off with it, slow at first, then quickening. The last half-block home he ran.

The package was in nice plain brown paper with clean, white string, so he didn't want to spoil the gift-wrap. He just wrote on it, "To my dearest Mother, with all my Love, Happy Birthday, from your son, Velvel Schwartz." He hid it under his mattress for two days.

“Mum’s birthday is tomorrow. Do you want me to help you make her a card?”

“Nah. I got her a present!” He wouldn’t lie.

The next morning he produced it with a flourish when Yehudit brought in her birthday breakfast in bed. Rivka opened Yehudit's present first. She praised the lovely card she’d made and thanked her for the Maraschino chocolates and her considerate breakfast. “I’ll open the chocolates later. That’s very nice.”

Then she turned to Velvel's present. "Oh. It looks like a book. How thoughtful." She read the dedication aloud and said "That's very nice, Velvel. If only you meant it."

She carefully pulled the scotch tape off the wrapper, then opened it. She looked at the book jacket, then opened it and ruffled through a few pages. She turned pale, then livid.

"What's this? What kind of book is this? This is a book you buy for your mother? What, did you steal this? All I do for you and you have to steal? You can't think and buy me a little something decent? A son you think you are? A thief, a selfish schvontz, that's what you are! A goniff!"

Shem looked away and left the room quickly. Velvel, flabbergasted, began to apologize, though for what he was not sure. When she threw down the book he picked it up and looked at it for the first time. It was an astrologer's manual, with tables for the casting of horoscopes. To them it was a meaningless jumble of numbers and strange signs. To him… thge same.

"I thought you'd be interested in that," he said, "I'm sorry. So I was wrong. It's the idea that counts, isn't it? I thought you'd be interested." 

Better to plead stupidity than to admit he'd found his mother her present.   

***

After three years Velvel had to transfer to Victoria, too. He was anxious, maybe he’d have to work harder, maybe his marks wouldn't be as good, maybe he should stop the piano lessons.

Anyway, how could classical music ever be useful to him? He envisioned playing pop at parties, with girls draped over the piano, like when Hoagy Carmichael played in the movies. Or he would play "The Tennessee Waltz" while Roz, the porcelain beauty in school on whom he had an unrequited crush, would sing. Even if someone else took her home, she would fondly remember their duet. Or he’d play boogie-woogie and she'd get so excited dancing that she'd let him walk her home and carry her goody-bag for her. 

But classical? When did a pretty girl ever ask for classical at a birthday party?

***

Though he hated to admit it, his mother was right about the boys in that school. They were roughnecks. Nobody beat him up, because he tended to stay off by himself. Sometimes he'd play tag with jis Jewish friend Harvey, but he had no-one else.

One recess a bug-eyed goof named Wayne ran up from behind and ran his finger up Velvel’s bum. Then he zig-zagged around the playground staring at his finger and calling "Aye, aye, bone!" Velvel didn't know what that meant, but he felt funny. He pulled out his pants and tried to hide against the wall. He hoped nobody saw what had happened.

***

Even after switching to Victoria, Velvel and Yehudit continued going to Peretz School for night-classes Tuesday and Thursday, 4:30 to 6. They resented this encroachment upon Yehudit’s socializing and Velvel’s management of his comics and magazine collection.

“Why can’t we be like the other kids and play after school?”

“You’re not like the other kids. You’re Jewish. Never forget that. God knows they won’t!” 

When the Tivoli ran Olivier's Hamlet and brought in a one-screening opera film series -- Rigoletto, Aida, The Marriage of Figaro -- Rivka took the kids even though they had to skip their Peretz nightclass, it was a schoolday evening, and it was a very long walk from home, some 15 blocks each way. Velvel didn't really enjoy these films but he knew he was seeing stuff that was important. Sitting through it would make him a better person.  

***

Velvel’s biggest problem at Victoria School was his name. In Leader and at Peretz School he was Velvel and nobody bothered about it. But at Victoria School, it made him a target. On his first day of school, when everyone in the class stood up to introduce himself, the class clowns tore into him immediately.

"Velveeta" was the opening snicker. That was inflected into "Cheese-head" and in the playground at recess, "Chiz-head." Velvel didn't know what that meant or why it was so amusing to the other boys. Others liked Valve or Valvoline, which inflected into Vaseline provoked as many snickers as Chiz-head. An older boy’s “Vulva,” at first delighted only himself, then the others laughed along to seem in the know. The "Velvel" having declared open season on him, he was next targeted for "Schwartz." "Warts" was popular, until the contagious wit of "Shit-Shorts." 

Velvel concluded that he would not be comfortable going through life called Velveeta Shit-Shorts. "I have to change my name," he confided to Yehudit, hoping for her support when he raised the issue with their parents. Yehudit proved more than sympathetic: "Actually, I've changed my name already."

"What? Really? You did? How?"

"It was no big deal. When I first registered, I said I had two names, one Jewish and one English. My Jewish name is Yehudit and my English name is Judith. I told my friends they can call me Judy but if they ever see me with my parents they should call me Yehudit. So it's fine."

"Judy. Wow! I have a big sister named Judy? Boy!" ‘Judy’ was almost as nice a name as ‘Dale’. For a girl. Or ‘Mona.’

"So you can do the same. What do you want to be called?"

"I don't know. I haven't thought about it. Anything but Velvel."

"Well, think. Is there a name you like?"

It came to him in a flash. "Yeah! Paco. I want to be Paco."

"Paco? What's a Paco? Where did you get that?" 

"Some movie. There was this big handsome Mexican named Paco. Rory Calhoun. I wish I could look like Rory Calhoun. He has black hair, too, but he's so white! So at least now maybe I can be Paco. Velvel can stay my Yiddish name, like at home and I suppose at shule, but everywhere else I could be Paco. Paco Schwartz. That sounds good."       

"I don't think so. You need a name that you can say is an English version of your real name. You can’t just pull any old name out of a hat."

"So what's a Velvel? Don't say Valve or Velveeta, either."

Yehudit smiled along. "How about Wolf? That's what Velvel means, anyway. Wolf is a dashing name. You could be a mysterious, romantic loner. Like Heathcliff. It suits you too because you're dark. I like that. Wolf. Wolf and Judith Schwartz. Maybe we can go to New York or Hollywood as Wolf and his elegant model sister Judith Black."

"We'd be in all the magazines. We'd be so handsome and glamorous."

"So what do you say, Wolf?"

“That’s me! From now on I am -- ta ra -- Wolf! So, what do I have to do?"

"Tomorrow you go to your teacher and you say you're really sorry, but you made a mistake when you registered. You should have given your English name, which is Wolf, and would they please change the records. They should have your English name." 

"What about Mum and Dad?"

"Oh, we'll worry about that when we have to. Don't worry. Just make sure you tell your teacher that your name is Wolf, not Paco, or she won’t believe you. Wolf."

The next day before class Velvel went up to Mrs. Stearn and apologized for his mistake at registration. Could she please fix it for him. Having heard some of the teasing, Mrs. Stearn understood more than she let on. She promised to correct the records. At the start of class she announced: 

"Some of us are luckier than others. Some of us are born with two cultures, with two languages, and therefore with two names. People who can speak more than one language are to be admired. We have someone like that in our class. You have all been calling him Velvel and that's his name, in his other language. It’s a very nice, distinctive name. But he also has an English name. The English word for Velvel is Wolf. So from now on, because we all speak English here, we'll know Velvel as -- Wolf. OK? Now, Wolf, how would you like to start reading aloud today's story. And I think it would be better if you read it to us in English, not in your other language. So the rest of us can understand it."

Velvel smiled at her joke. He could have run up to her and kissed her. Instead he began to read "The Lady or the Tiger?" with flawless pronunciation and vigour. 

***

The first report card brought the name problem to a head.

"What's this?" Rivka asked. "Judith? Wolf? Who's Judith and Wolf? What's going on?"

"It was one of the teachers' idea, I don’t remember which one" Yehudit said. Velvel thought she must have practised this. "She said that now that we're in the English school system we should use the English form of our names. Otherwise the other kids will say we think we're better than them and beat us up all the time."

"Yeah. And she said Wolf is English for Velvel. It is, isn't it?"

"Well, I don't know about this. We'll see what your father says. I don’t like it. Why should you hide who you are? What next? We should have a Christmas tree? You'll marry goyim?"

Shem thought it made sense: "You have to fit in. To have friends. To make your way in this world. Judith, Yehudit, Rita Hayworth, whatever you're called, you'll always be the little girl I love. And you, Velvel, Wolf, Schlemiel, you'll always be a shver-ayer-dicker, so what's the difference? Be a Wolf gezinterheit, just be a mentsch."

"But if your highnesses don't mind, can we still call your highnesses Velvel and Yehudit?"

"Of course," Yehudit responded quickly, "Here we talk Yiddish and that's our Yiddish names. We'll always have that. Toomid."  

7. Flashback

Velvel’s earliest memories were from back in his Leader days. In particular,  his pissing contests with his father in the coal room in the basement when he was four years old. That’s his earliest memory. 

That would be in the early 1940s, when the Schwartzes still lived in Leader in southwest Saskatchewan, just above and -- as the crow would read the map -- to the left of the Cypress Hills.

Once or twice a month, depending on the season, a rattling half-ton in peeling green pulled up beside the house with the coal for the furnace and the kitchen stove. The driver, a strapping blond German in his mid 20s, wearing black denim coveralls blackened further by his duty, hopped out, attached his wooden chute to the side of the truck, raised the flap on the side and poked the coal loose to rumble down the chute, through the window down into the coal room. Sometimes the hunks would jam in the hole, like memories vying to get out. Then he would hack and chip till the tumble resumed. He'd clamber up onto the truck to shovel out the last layer. The townsfolk knew to get their money's worth. A truckload meant a truckload.

Anywhere in the house, when you heard the rumbling coal you’d think the earth was splitting. If you were anywhere in the dirt basement you'd cough and choke from the thick dust and your eyes would tear up against the grit. 

Then came the contest. As soon as the goy drove off Shem would lead Velvel down to the coal room. Velvel would scamper up the fresh black mountain to close the window, then slip the window hook into the eye screwed into the frame. In Leader people didn’t lock their doors or windows for security sake. Velvel locked the window so it wouldn’t blow open and break. That was his job. 

Then, standing side by side, the men in the family, Shem and Velvel, would pull out their dinkys and see who could piss the furthest. Then the highest. In the winter cold the coal would hiss back at the piss, like a snake provoked in the prairie brush. Of course, there was no prize but pride. Sometimes Shem let his son win: "You're the big pisher." "I won, I won," Velvel would shriek up the stairs. 

Yehudit couldn’t do that and she was three years older.

***

Yehudit and Velvel shared a bedroom upstairs in the one and a half storey white siding home. She took her Big Sister role very seriously. She shared her Jane Arden paper dolls with her little brother. She protected him against the Schultz boys across the street. She reminded him of their parents' laws when he was about to break them. And of their looming birthdays: then she'd help him make a card. 

She explained the mysteries of the world. Like how to whistle through a pod from their towering five-foot caragana hedge. You'd pull the thread off the spine, open it, shuck out the seeds with your thumb, close it and blow. She could even whistle through pursed lips, but when he tried that his pucker always went wet and slurred. He would always envy people who could whistle through their fingers. The Vice-President (Academic) at his second-last university, for example, at least twice a term she'd use it to call her rambunctious deans to order. “Beats hell out of a gavel,” she’d remark as her assistant set up her laptop for minutes.

***

Friday night was the Schwartzes' movie night. The yellowing clapboard theatre showed a family program every Friday and Saturday evening. Matinees would have interfered with chores. The theatre ran trailers for the Wednesday-Thursday films, too, but those were for grown-ups. They were about gangsters and soldiers at war and their girlfriends. 

One trailer was about juvenile delinquents. Young boys just a little older than Velvel ran away from home. They rode the rails and joined gangs and had fights. They even stole things. In one shot a boy was so hungry he ate a worm. It wiggled as he lowered it to his mouth. He must have missed his mother.

Rivka took the kids by herself because Shem wasn't interested in movies. Besides, there were better ways to spend the 25 cents, plus the extra 25 for coffee and pie if the 6 o'clock show was sold out and they had to wait at the Chinaman’s for the 8. "No, you go," he'd say, "Let the kids have a good time. What do I need a movie for?" He'd rather stay home and listen to the news on the radio. Especially the news from Europe. Later, from the new Israel.

Rivka preferred to take them Friday. "Shabbes should always be special"  -- and that began Friday sundown. Besides, Saturday was bath night. Shem would haul the long grey tin tub off the back porch into the kitchen. They filled it once with pots of hot water off the stove and then all bathed, Velvel and Yehudit together, then Rivka, then Shem, replacing a pailful with kettles of hot water as the eve wore on.

***

As the only Jews in Leader, Shem’s and his two brothers’ families struggled to maintain their Judaism. Full services were held only on the High Holidays and on Simchas Torah, when the other Jewish families would drive in from Burstall, Prelate, Fox Valley, Maple Creek, to make the minyan. Services were usually held at Shem's older brother Jacob's house, because it had a long living room and a bedroom upstairs big enough for all the coats.  

Occasionally some neighbouring families came in for a shabbes service. Velvel would be the tenth man required for the ceremony, even though he was far from 13. At least that's what Shem said when Velvel whined that he had to sleep in. "You can't, we need you. You're the tenth man. If you’re not there, God won't listen to us."

Every Friday night, in the kitchen Rivka and Yehudit draped clean dish-towels over their heads and blessed the candles. Shem gave the blessings over the wine and the bread. Then the family had a nice roast chicken dinner. They spread Rivka’s gleaming koiletsch with a white marbled margarine that was never completely coloured by the little packet that came with it, to pass for butter. There would be a fresh apple pie or strudel for dessert, but no ice cream, not with chicken. Rivka stretched the dietary law to admit the children’s glass of milk, but that was for calcium, necessary, not a luxury like dessert. Shem did the dishes so they could be on time for the movie. 

Velvel loved the movies. Especially cartoons -- all of which he called Mickey Mouses, after his first fabricated hero. In cartoons anything could happen. There were no fixed laws of gravity or matter or time. He was puzzled when he saw Bill and Coo, a live-action film with an all-bird cast. It seemed like a cartoon because it didn’t have people or a realistic setting. But those were real birds, not drawn. The colours were pale, like in real life, and it was so long and so quiet, like real life. He preferred his Mickey Mouses. Maybe they weren’t as real but they were more natural.

***

Saturday morning Yehudit and Velvel rose early and -- still in their pyjamas -- re-enacted the romance of the night before. 

"No, Carver. I shall never marry you. My heart belongs to another. Poor in station, alas, but rich with virtue and my love."

"Lorna, I have returned. Carver, you rotten bad guy, take that! And that!" Velvel flung himself on the bed, punching the pillow.

“Oh, John Ridd, take me in your arms. I am yours.” 

Years later, Velvel would score points with his first-year English class by alluding to Lorna Doone and her older sister, Nothin’. By then he would also be teaching courses on Ingmar Bergman and Canadian Regional Cinema. Who would ever have thought, he mused, his career would grow from those erev-shabbes movies in Leader?

Young Velvel liked the westerns best -- and  sword fight movies and comedy, even if it was just a scene or two in some dumb love story or musical. They were Yehudit’s favourites. She would sing and dance and force Velvel to re-enact the -- still chaste, then -- love scenes.

Saturdays and Sundays the kids had to let their parents sleep in. So they stayed in their room and acted the latest movie or read their Big Little Books until they heard their mother rattling the pancake pan in the kitchen. 

***

Twice a year the shoichet came to Leader to kill the Jewish families’ chickens by proper ritual. Shem would do it between these visits but when the specialist came they always hired him and insisted he stay for dinner. They welcomed this connection to Judaism.

The man was strange: untrimmed grey beard flaring down to his vest, strong accent, leather hands, brown nails, almost black. The dark speckles on his skin could have been bloodstains, worn so deep they would never wash out. Though the children tried not to be afraid of him, they wouldn’t laugh at anything lest he think it was at him. Of course, with their parents there, they were safe. But what if he returned in his black Ford coupe when everyone was asleep?

The man had magic ways about him. When he cut off a chicken's head it would run around in circles without it. For hours.

The Schwartzes did not restrict themselves to kosher food. Usually they ate what they raised or what they brought home from the store. Once a year the brothers ordered a big shipment from the Chicago Kosher Meat Company in Winnipeg. The big brown boxes produced a cornucopia of salamis, wieners, halvah, ichor, pickled herring. The day the box came the Schwartzes had the year's best dinner. 

Rivka kept a separate set of dinnerware, cutlery and pans for the Passover. She also had separate settings for milk and for meat. These symbols were especially important for the only Jews in an all-German community. The kids had to know. Jews have to remember because there will always be others who would never forget.

***

After he turned five Velvel sometimes went to the movies by himself if the subject was not appealing to the girls. One evening Velvel approached the cashier, unloaded his fist, and waited for the ticket. She didn't give it to him.

"You're short,” she said. 

“What?”

“You’re short.”

“I can’t help it. I’m a kid.”

The lady was unmoved: “I mean you don’t have enough money there. You need another dime."

He turned his pockets inside out -- first his pants, then his jacket, pants, jacket, with increasing urgency -- but he couldn't find the extra coin. He retrieved his nickel from the cashier and stepped out of the line-up. People were smiling at his distress. He would not cry. He fled, looking neither right nor left. He didn’t want to know who had seen him shamed. 

Velvel was heart-broken. Apart from missing the new Roy Rogers -- with Gabby Hayes, who was much funnier than Smiley Burnett -- in losing a valuable dime he had betrayed his family. "Dimes don't grow on trees," his father would say. Velvel couldn't argue with that.

He walked home slowly, probing the grass edges of the path for the gleam from his lost coin. He cried when he told his parents why he was home so early. 

"Velvel, let that be the biggest loss you ever have in your life," his mother told him, trying not to smile at his inordinate grief. 

"Next time you should be more careful," Shem advised, before returning to the radio.

“I know,” Velvel said, between his sobs. “Dimes don’t grow on trees.”

Saturday morning Velvel walked back and forth between his house and the theatre, renewing his futility. 

***

When Velvel was sent home the first day of school he cried because he was afraid he had done something wrong. His mother would scold him.

"What's the matter? What happened?"

"They said I have to wait till next year."

"Why? What did you do?"

"They said how old are you. I said I'm half past five. They said I had to go home till I was six."   

So Velvel stayed home with his mother and read his books under the table while she worked in the kitchen. After she had cleaned and cooked for the day and put in the baking, she took him through the Grade I textbook.

In September, after the first day they moved him into Grade II. That meant he sat one row closer to the window, two away from the blackboard wall. He did his own work quickly, then listened to what the teacher told the Grade I students on one side and the Grade III students on the other. 

Though school was fun he would rather stay home. Kids couldn't tease him when he was at home. He wouldn't be excluded from their games when he was at home. He wouldn't embarrass himself when he was home. At home he would read, play with his marbles, smell his mother's cooking, and listen with her to the afternoon soap operas. Even in junior high school Velvel sometimes claimed a sore throat or tummy ache so he could catch up with the people who lived in the radio. 

Like The Happy Gang. Knock Knock. "Who's there?" “It's The Happy Gang." "Come on in!" Wouldn't they be fun to live with? 

And the soap operas. Pepper Young's Family. Ma Perkins. Some governor's wife named Laura. Whatever a governor was, he was important. Velvel’s favourites were Cheechee and Papa David in Life Can Be Beautiful. They sounded like his family, only without the yelling. When he first saw S.Z. "Cuddles" Zackall in a movie he recognized the voice immediately: his Papa David! For Velvel the real star of Casablanca was Rick’s fussy, worried waiter. Papa David.

***

Every Halloween Rivka dressed Velvel up as a woman. With oranges for a bosom and her own lipstick and rouge, he became her fetching miniature. Yehudit could be a fairy princess, a witch, anything she wanted, but Velvel had to be a woman. At first he didn't mind that. "You're such a beautiful little girl," everyone said, "Isn’t she cute!" But he grew into other wishes. "Can't I be a pirate? Or a cowboy?"

On Velvel's fourth Halloween that buxom little girl got as far as the fifth house -- the home of Mrs. Bormann, president of the Home and School Association. Velvel knew that gave her some vague power. Thereto she added the authority of having her hair done -- whatever that meant -- every Friday afternoon in Rose Weiss’s front parlour.

Noel Bormann was in his grade, right across the aisle. Velvel wondered how a boy could get a name like Noel. At Christmas, when everyone sang "Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel," Velvel stared at Noel Bormann and wondered what it felt like to have everyone singing your name. But how could Noel Bormann be King of Israel? He wasn’t Jewish! He never made a minyan. Why not sing "Velvel, Velvel, Velvel, Velvel"? How does one become King of Israel anyway? Who makes you? 

That Halloween Mrs. Bormann said she wanted the Beautiful Little Girl to sing before she got her black and orange candy kisses. Velvel tried to think of a song but they were gone. He felt a warm wet patch grow down his leg and saw a puddle escape at his feet. He began to cry, as if he were the victim of a terrible prank. Maybe her son's! Yes, somehow Noel did this to him.

Mrs. Bormann laughed and told Velvel it was okay. Such a beautiful girl deserved a double helping of candies. Perhaps it was time for Yehudit to take him home, please give her regards to their mother and she hoped their father was feeling better.

***  

Shem was a farmer, a rancher, a jack of all trades. He broke the toughest horses for other ranches. If anyone needed help to fix a tractor or a combine or on some plumbing or wiring, they'd ask Shem. 

Not that he was educated; he was smart. His mother, Bobba Baila, told Velvel and Yehudit that their father had been a wild boy back in the Old Country. (It was never Russia. Russia was where the pogroms were. The Old Country was where her memories lived.) 

Bobba Baila was a stooped, frail, pointy-chinned and whiskered woman who wore layers of dresses and aprons and sweaters from the Eaton’s catalogue. Her face had furrows so deep Velvel thought he could hide his marbles in them. At least the little cat’s eyes. She could have been a witch - if she weren’t so nice to them all the time. She snuck the children sour candies in her room, across the hall from theirs, and in a loud whisper confided her tales. Like how Shem as a boy hated school. 

"What did he need school for?” she said, in her indomitable Yiddish. “He wanted to work the fields instead. Who needs school? Don't tell your mother this. It's our secret. (Here, take another one, but don't tell your mother. She told me she doesn't want you to eat candies. But never mind, your Bobba Baila says they're good for you. Take. Take.) Your father, when the teacher came to drag him back to school, by the ear he dragged him, he ran away and hid under the bathtub in the back. Who needs school? We needed a worker more than someone to read books. Don't tell your mother. She doesn't understand. She reads books."

Oh, Shem could read and write and do figures all right. He had a good head for languages, too: Yiddish, prayer Hebrew, German, Russian, and he could get by in Ukrainian and Polish. Within five years he spoke English like a native. So, too, Rivka spoke Romanian, Yiddish, German, French. She learned flawless English in her first year at the country school. In fact, one year after she left her high school, she was through Normal School and back in Piapot as the teacher in her old schoolhouse. In the Old Country such language skill was normal. You meet people, you learn to talk with them.

But Shem's main sense was in his hands. Give him a machine and he could figure out, by manual intuition, how to take it apart and put it together again right. He was also the best dancer in the territory. The kazatzke he did like a Cossack. A lot of girls were heartbroken when he brought in a wife from the Herzl colony, a school teacher. 

But they had to admit: they made a nice couple, as opposites do. Shem stood five-eleven and wiry, 135 pounds, with a square jaw and an easy smile and twinkling black eyes. Whatever he said, he stated confidently, as if there were no other way. Rivka was six inches shorter, pretty and plump. As Velvel learned later, she was not just “zaftig” but “Rubensian.” They made a striking couple, Shem with his iron frame and Rivka carved out of soft curves and arcs. She liked to dance, too, though more sedately than Shem. 

But the girls resented her. Why did she get him? What’s so special about her? They were good enough for him before, why not now?

Shem had always been a ladies' man. At least, before he married. Even after, Rivka caught glances between Shem and Gertie, the girl who lived with them for a while to help with the kids and the cleaning. When Rivka was in the hospital or when she visited her mother in Regina, she was never certain she could be sure. 

***

With its almost all-German community, Leader was originally named Prussia. The name was changed after the First World War. 

"How did you feel when I was born?” Velvel asked his mother years later, when he was in high school. “I mean, bringing another Jewish kid into the world when the war was on and there you were, surrounded by Germans?"

"We weren’t worried. We wouldn’t lose. God would never let that. Besides, in Leader everybody was our friend. Everybody loved your father."

Once one of the German sparks referred to Shem as "der Yude." The boy's father wheeled around and kicked his son full in the stomach. As the boy fell, doubled over, his father corrected him: "Das ist nicht ‘der Yude.’ Das ist der Shem."

***

Shem, his mother, his two brothers and his sister fled the Odessa pogroms in 1912. The family homesteaded through the dust years, around Burstall. Shem worked all day -- "Like a horse. For supper, he's happy you give him a raw onion, a piece of brown bread, some drippings, that’s enough." That's how his mother advised her new daughter: “A tzibelleh, a shtickle broit, a bissel schmaltz, dos ist genoog.” "So don't you start feeding him fancy food or ideas," was what she meant. But Rivka heard: “It's time someone started caring for him.”

***

Shem spoiled Yehudit rotten, Rivka complained. He once rode all the way from town with an ice cream cone for her. By the time he got home what was left was caked with dirt and flies. Rivka wouldn't let her eat it. Yehudit cried. Shem went out to do some work in the barn.

Once Eaton’s by mistake sent Yehudit the blue felt winter boots from the catalogue, not the red Rivka had ordered. Yehudit cried for them to be exchanged but her mother refused: "The blue’s as warm as the red. What do you want from me!" Shem went out to the living room radio. Rivka and Yehudit continued to argue in the kitchen. 

“Listen, boots are boots,” Shem finally called back. “If she wants red boots, why not send them back? They cost the same, get her what she wants.”

“Thank you very much! I have enough to do here without sending the princess’s boots back every month.”

Yehudit had her father’s love of animals. She played with chickens, geese, birds, snakes, anything that lived. At her insistence they got a dog, Skippy. The white mongrel had a black splotch on his hip like a paint stain. If a stranger approached the children Skippy growled him off. A smart dog, he learned everything but to stay away from Shem. Skippy didn’t know from allergies.

***

Velvel could never remember living on the ranch. When he was one year old the family moved into Leader because Shem couldn't work the ranch anymore. 

The trouble began when Shem, riding the line on Shorty, caught a small coyote for Yehudit. He thought she’d keep it as a pet. The coyote had rabies. When it bit his hand Shem dropped it and it ran off into the scrub, trailing its snare. Within minutes Shem felt the fever and shivers. 

He was lying on his saddle when Shorty loped back to the ranch. Rushed to the Prelate hospital, Shem was given that brand new wonder drug, penicillin. The experiment saved his life.

But he was never the same man again. He couldn't breathe easily. He developed asthma. He lost all sense of smell and taste. He became allergic to animals. Now the man who loved animals had to stay away from them. The man who used to do everything found he could do less and less before succumbing to an attack, gasping for breath, choking on dust.

Rivka sent the children to her mother and took Shem to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. There the doctors thought they could ease his breathing by removing his nasal hairs. The effect was to leave him defenceless against all the pollutants in the air, dust and smaller. The rest of Shem's life was a struggle for breath and a choking rage against his debility. For twenty-five years that was his life.  

Once a powerhouse, now it was hard for Shem to do anything. He gave the farmhouse to a young couple for working the land. He moved his family into Leader and joined his brothers. Mordecai ran the hardware on the corner. Shem and Jacob ran the grocery and general store four doors down. The brothers owned the dairy farm just outside Leader but hired a young German couple to run it. When Fritz was laid up with a broken leg Shem delivered the milk to the whole town.

One winter morning Shem woke Velvel up at five. Velvel couldn't get the sand out of his eyes and he hated to leave his warm bed, but he had agreed to help his father deliver the milk that morning. It was a privilege to do something his sister wasn't. Boy would he tease her later. It was so cold his breath froze on his cheeks. But the black bull rug with red flannel lining made him feel snug, as the two Percherons -- a gray and a dappled -- pulled the sleigh through the black dawn. By habit the horses paused at each house while Shem ran the milk to the door. By the time the townsfolk brought it in, the paper cap would be two inches above the bottle on a frozen column of cream.

Even this delivery proved too much for Shem’s weakening condition. When he worked in the store, he had to be careful talking, joking. Getting excited could bring on a coughing fit. He'd cough so hard he thought he’d crack a rib. He spat into the sawdust on the floor.

Rivka taught the children to be extra good when their daddy was home. If they aggravated him he would not be able to breathe. If their misbehaviour killed him, they could never forgive themselves.

***

On branding day the family drove out to their old ranch, where all the neighbours were coming together to brand their new calves. Shem insisted on riding out for some strays. If he didn’t get too close he should be able to breathe. When he wasn't back by three, Nick, the tenant, rode out to look for him. 

Nick found Shem in the brush. Shorty had reared at a rattlesnake and fallen on Shem's leg. The snake whipped away, as scared as the horse. When the horse shook himself back to his feet, Shem stuck twisted in the stirrup. Shem managed by his steady voice to calm Shorty down and make him stand rock still. Had he galloped off Shem would have had a crushed skull in minutes. Shorty waited while Shem lay on the ground, his right leg broken clean through. Through his pain Shem talked the horse still.

When Nick rode up Shem had to steady Shorty anew, lest he spook. Nick freed Shem's foot carefully, then propped him up against some rocks so he could see around him and cut him a thick branch in case of snakes or coyotes. Then he rode back pell mell for the half-ton. With Rivka beside him chewing her lip and praying aloud, he drove out, loaded Shem into the back, and drove straight to the Prelate hospital.

A few days later Shem came home with a cast on his leg and a crutch. In his better moments he would still dance with Rivka, hopping, spinning her around. But even after the cast came off he limped. His pained leg was another reminder that Shem was no longer the man he used to be.

***    

From the profits of one cattle sale the children were each given a horse, an investment for their later education. 

By family lore Yehudit could ride before she could walk. In the family album there's a picture of the two-year old smiling atop a horse. Velvel remembers -- not sitting on his horse -- embarrassment that his horse was named Dinky. Yehudit’s “Blacky” was much better. During a comics trade he asked Yehudit: "Want to trade horses?"

"No. Don't be silly."

"Okay, how about just the horse-names? You could call your horse Dinky. That's a nice name. And I'll call mine Blacky. Blacky is better for a boy’s horse anyway."

True, in the cowboy movies Blacky was always the bad guy, but for Velvel’s horse even that was better than Dinky.

"Don't be stupid. Why should I?"

"Cause I'm younger than you. And smaller."

"That doesn't matter. I'll trade you this Archie for that one."

"I'll give you the Archie and these three Supermans if you'll trade horses too.”

“No.”

“Okay. Just their names?"

"No."

"All those and my four Wonder Womans?"

"No."

"All those and my two Lash Larues?" 

She held fast even when he offered to throw in the Classics Illustrated Ivanhoe. Yehudit identified with this Rebecca more than with the one from Sunnybrook Farm. She lived up to a more adventurous life.

*** 

Once the kids saw a garter snake whip through the grass. While Velvel cowered, Yehudit caught it by the tail, chopped off its head with a hoe, then hanged the body on the fence. It kept squirming.

"A snake can live without its head," she pronounced. "until sunset."

"How does it know when to stop?"

"It sees the sun go down, silly."

"Oh."

"Do you know why it's called a garter snake?"

"No. Why?"

"In some parts of the world the women wear the baby snakes on their stockings, to hold them up. Like garters. Men wear them on their sleeves."

"Don't they bite?"

"Not when they're tied up like that. Anyway, they train them. Skippy doesn't bite us, does he?"

"No, that’s right."

They planned to watch it squirm to the end. But after Rivka called them in for supper they forgot about the snake. The next morning they found it hanging there, dry as a ribbon. They tied it into a circle and buried it in the back yard under a mound of dull brown pebbles.

***  

Velvel needed glasses for his astigmatism. On their next visit to Regina Rivka took him to the eye doctor. The drops were administered by the doctor's assistant, a busty girl with raven hair and thick, red lips. She smelled so nice that Velvel felt dizzy when she leaned over him with the eye-dropper.

Her smell fascinated him. Until that moment his favourite smells had been chocolate and anything boiled with cabbage -- wieners, kolbassa, salami, whatever. But this smell overwhelmed him. He wanted to burrow his face into it. 

The woman said to his mother (but Velvel thought she wanted him to hear this, too): "Your son has beautiful dark eyes. He's going to be a real ladykiller."

Walking back to Bobba Sonya’s, his small hand firm in his mother's fur mitt, Velvel asked: "What's a ladykiller, Mummy?"

"Never mind. She was trying to distract you from the drops." Under her breath, she added "Koorveh!"

Velvel wasn't sure he wanted to be a ladykiller. But she said it like it was good. When a lady was killed, did her body run around without her head until sunset?

***

All the families raised their own chickens in the back yard. The babies were adorable bundles of yellow fluff, with sweet chirps. But grown chickens were such meeskeits. They move silly and make stupid noises. "How can such cute babies grow into such ugly grown-ups? Why would God do that?” 

*** 

Velvel did not adjust well to school. He was an excellent student but he often wet his pants. Maybe he wouldn't go at recess because of a lineup at the outhouse or the bullies were hanging out there. Sometimes he didn't raise his hand in time to ask to go. Or it would come all of a sudden. He would try to hold it in but it slipped out. 

Or he thought if he let it out slowly nobody would notice. But always it was the same. After an instant of profound relief he'd feel a warm wet patch grow down his pants. It would spread and quickly turn cold and sticky. Then: the telltale smell and an expanding puddle on the floor around his desk-leg.

Velvel tried to look innocent. Even surprised, as if the accusing puddle belonged to someone else. But everyone knew. They could trace the puddle up the darkened leg of his light oak desk chair. They would point and giggle and he would be sent home. The next day he pretended nothing had happened.

Noel Bormann never wet his pants. Not even when he was a baby, Velvel figured. That's because everyone sings his name at Christmas.

***

With his illness, Shem’s temper shortened. One evening Velvel wouldn't stop pestering Yehudit, despite Shem’s scolding. "This is the last time," Shem finally yelled at him. "If you noodge her once more, I'm going to take off my belt and let you have it on your naked tookches."

The threat stopped Velvel in his tracks. Briefly. "He doesn't really mean it," he assured himself. This was a game, the two men in the family testing but trusting each other not to go too far. 

Velvel gave his sister another tweak. Shem shot to his feet, grabbed Velvel, pulled down his son's pants, whipped off his own belt and thrashed him once, twice, thrice, on his bare bum. "Now are you happy? I warned you!"

Velvel shrieked. His mother and Yehudit looked away. This was between him and his father. Velvel tried to pull up his pants as he stumbled up to the children’s bedroom without looking at anyone. There he finished his crying. He knew that the belt hurt less than knowing that his sister and mother had seen him hit bare-assed. How could he ever face them again?

A half hour later some neighbours dropped in for bridge. As their greetings drifted upstairs, Velvel heard his father: "I don't think Velvel will be down. He wouldn't listen so I pulled down his pants and let him have a few with my belt. Sometimes he doesn't know when to stop."

"Kids," the guests agreed, laughing. 

"You didn't have to tell them," Velvel thought, as he burrowed his salty face into his wet pillow. "They're not family. They’re strangers. I'll never forgive you for telling them. Never. I'm never coming downstairs again!" 

Breakfast proceeded as if nothing had happened.

***

Velvel had his tonsils removed at the new Leader hospital. Rivka sat vigil by her son’s hospital bed all night long. When he came out of the anaesthetic, his first word was "Daddy!" Rivka often teased Velvel about that. 

***

When Shem was working, the family discipline was left to Rivka. Before taking the children shopping once, she sternly warned them:

"Do you want something to eat before we go? You won’t get anything there. We're not going as beggars. I don't want you to ask for food at the store. If you're hungry I'll give you something now. Do you want some milk and cookies? A banana? You won’t say you're hungry when we get to the store, understand? Do you want something now? I’m telling you: You won’t get anything there."

“I’m not hungry, Mummy.”

“Me too.”

"OK. Go use the potty before we go."

Ten minutes into their visit at the store, however, Velvel began to whine. "I'm hungry, Mummy. Can I have something to eat?"

"No. You should have eaten before we came. Wait till we get home."

"But I'm hungry now. I can't wait. Can't I just have a chocolate bar?”

"No, I told you. No."

"A wiener?" Velvel liked to sit in one of the tilted fruit crates under the front counter and eat a raw wiener. If you asked him, a wiener was as good as candy.

"No. Wait till we get home."

"What's the matter?" said Aunt Channa. Jacob’s wife often helped out in the store, now that her two kids were in high school. "He's only a boy. Give him a wiener. What’s a wiener?"

"No, Channa. It’s not the wiener; it’s the principle. I told him before we left he should eat if he was hungry. He shouldn’t come here like a beggar."

Bolstered by his aunt's support, Velvel persisted. "Just a wiener, Mummy? I'm hungry now!"

Velvel knew he shouldn’t ask for food. He remembered his mother’s warning. He wasn’t even hungry, not at first. Then he got the idea of tasting something. He had to ask. When his mother denied him, he had to insist. And once he’d thought of the wiener he had a definite need for it.    

Rivka grabbed his arm, spun him around, and gave him two sharp slaps to the bottom. "Next time I tell you, you listen!"

Aunt Channa strode to the dry goods section of the store. She hated to see anyone cry, but she would not interfere in another mother's discipline. Rivka was maybe a little strict but probably right about most things. She was a teacher. 

Velvel never asked his mother for food in the family store again. 

But when she wasn’t there his father or uncle always gave him a wiener. He’d sit in the box and nibble the wiener like it was a licorice cigar while the men loomed over him and talked about the crops and how bad they needed rain. The storekeepers needed the rain as much as the farmers did, if they wanted their accounts to be paid. The rain settled not just the dust but everyone’s bills. 

***

Dinky died within two years. He and Blacky had been pasturing together. When a coyote spooked him, he ran blindly away, stepped into a rut and toppled to the ground leaving his right forehoof twisted under him. Unable to get up on it, he lay there, whimpering.

When Nick found him he immediately saw the leg was hopeless so he rode into town. Shem followed him back in his green half ton. When he came over to the fallen horse Dinky turned and whinnied at him, welcoming, as if he knew what was necessary and was glad Shem had come to do it. He returned to his truck for the rifle, loaded it, walked back to Dinky, patted him warmly on his long sweating neck, then took a Granny Smith out of his jacket pocket. Dinky lapped it out of his hand and it was gone in three chews. Then the horse rested. Shem put the gun barrel to Dinky's head and with his eyes clenched he shot him.

Velvel noticed his parents’ whispering and glancing at him while Rivka mashed the potatoes. What had he done? “After dinner,” Shem said. “Why spoil his food?” His parents exchanged sombre glances throughout the meal.

After dinner Shem called Velvel over and lifted him onto his lap in his green plush chair by the radio in the living room. He turned down the volume and told him: "Velvel, I have some bad news. Your Dinky is dead. He broke his leg today and I had to shoot him."

"What?"

"Dinky broke his leg. He hurt bad. There was nothing to do for him. I had to shoot him. To stop his pain. I'm sorry."

"He's in heaven with God," Rivka added from the matching sofa, where she was knitting Velvel a pink pullover. "When a horse is hurt all you can do is put him out of his misery."

“What’s ‘misery’?”

“Suffering. Pain. When you’re feeling awful, with no hope, that’s when you’re in misery,” she explained.

"Why did you do that?" Velvel abruptly turned back to his father.

"I had to, son. He was finished."

"I loved Dinky. He was my horse."

"Velvel, we know that," Rivka interposed. "Your Daddy loved him, too. He wanted to stop Dinky's pain."

"So you shot him? Why?"

"That's what you have to do when a horse is suffering."

"You killed my Dinky. I'm mad at you! I don't like you anymore!"

Velvel was surprised how angry he felt. But he did not climb out of his father’s lap. He couldn't stop: "I loved my Dinky and you killed him. I'm mad at you!”

"If you love your horse and he's hurt," Rivka added, as methodically as stitch one purl two, "if you can't fix him, then you have to stop his suffering. You should thank Daddy for doing that."  

"I want my Dinky!"

"You should be glad Daddy did that for him. It wasn't easy. Your father loves horses. You know that. He loved Dinky. It was a terrible thing but he had to do it. Even though he didn’t want to, he did it. You should thank him."

"Why didn't you fix him? He could have been fixed. You didn't have to kill him!"

The more Velvel expressed his anger the more he felt bound to it. He could not back away now.

"No, I couldn't. I wish I could. A horse's leg is so thin, and a horse is so heavy, when it breaks it can never mend. The best you can do for him is finish him."

"If he was your horse you wouldn't kill him. You killed him because he was my horse. If I get sick will you shoot me too?"

"No, son. I would never hurt you. If you ever get sick we'll do everything we can to make you well. But a horse is different. Doctors and hospitals can't cure horses like people. Not when a horse breaks a leg."

"Yehudit still has Blacky! Can I get another horse?"

"No, Velvel," Rivka said quickly, before Shem might promise one. "We can't afford to buy another horse now. But that’s a good point. Maybe we should treat this as a family loss, not just yours. Maybe it would be more fair if you both shared the loss. Now you can both share Blacky."

"Fifty fifty?"

"Is that okay with you, Yehudit?"

Yehudit, eager to give her little brother a way out of his red-faced anger, obliged. Two years later when they sold Blacky the money was split evenly between the two kids' bank accounts, so they would be able to go to Saskatoon for university.

***

   For summer holidays Rivka took both children to Regina, to visit her family. Her younger sister and brother, in their twenties, still lived with their parents in a big house at 30 Angus Crescent. 

"Why is it called Angus, Mummy? There aren't any cows there!"

"Maybe there used to be."

Rivka's father Moishe was a tall, sage, warm man, with a walrus moustache, who travelled the Jewish farms drumming up financial support for the State of Israel. He died before Velvel turned four. Rivka’s mother Sonya was a gregarious woman whose passions were bingo and smoking. Calm, protected, she always looked younger than her age, unscratched by want or loss. She promised to give her grandchildren all the money and toys they wanted -- as soon as the oil was discovered back on her old homestead. She knew it was there and had only to be discovered. With all that oil in neighbour Alberta, it was only a matter of time.

"I don't like sweet," she would say, as she poured five spoons of sugar into her glass of tea, which she drank without stirring. 

Shem teased her about her pretensions. She took his insults with good humour and continued in her manner.

"Don't you like Bobba Sonya, Daddy?" Velvel asked him once, after some particularly spirited teasing.

"Don't be a fool. Of course I love her. She's your mother's mother. She's just used to having everything done for her. She's Romanian! What I don't like is selfishness. People should live for each other, not themselves. They should give, not take. You know what I hate more than anything? Lies and selfishness. I hate that. But you, don't you ever make fun of your bobba, understand? You're a child, you have to respect her. I'm a man, I can have my little fun with her. That's all, she knows it’s only a little fun."

***

When the children were sent on the train to Regina alone Uncle Hymie and Aunt Rochelle, Rivka’s brother and sister, would really spoil them. They took them to Wascana Park and gave them candies, comics, ice cream, anything they seemed to want. They always had a Revel when they strolled, anywhere, even just around the block. The trick was to eat the chocolate before the splinters fell off and to get all the ice cream before it dripped on your hand.

The best Regina holidays were at Christmas. The Eaton's store had magical window displays, complex mechanical tableaux with lifelike figures. On the toys floor, Velvel stood in line with Rivka and Yehudit, then climbed up on Santa's lap and thanked him for the free candy cane. He didn't have to tell Santa he was Jewish, Rivka assured him, Santa didn't care. This part of Christmas was for all children and had nothing to do with der yoizel. 

On the train Velvel thought the world was whizzing by him and he was the still center of the universe.

On the way to Regina the conductor -- a thin, grey-haired man in a stiff blue uniform and braided cap, who always gave Velvel and Yehudit wrapped toffees from his pocket -- would walk up and down the aisle calling out the names of the towns where they would pause for passengers. Prelate--Sceptre--Lemsford--Portreeve--Lancer--Abbey--Shackleton--Cabri-- then finally Swift Current. Velvel learned the litany. But only the names of the towns out of Leader. After Swift Current and on the way home from Regina Velvel’s mind was so full of what he had seen and done that he didn’t notice the names hurtling by.

In Swift Current, during the four-hour wait between trains, Rivka always took the kids downtown to a movie. One was about a boy whose hair turned green and everyone hated him for being different. There Velvel saw his first Jiggs and Maggie movie and marvelled that people who were in the comics could have another life in movies. Though he liked the Blondie and Dagwood movies, they weren't as good as the real Blondie and Dagwood, the ones in the comics.    

***

Shem fashioned several dolls for Yehudit with straw bodies and whittled heads. He built her doll furniture. For Velvel he carved a very fine wooden pistol. That was after Rivka vetoed the BB gun he’d brought from the store.

"A gun? You’re crazy! He's too young. He'll shoot his eye out, then what will we do? A gun? For a six-year-old boy a gun? Gottenew!" 

"If he learns how to use it he won't put his eyes out. I had a rifle when I was five. And I still have both eyes for you!" 

His hug and kiss failed to soften Rivka. The gun went back to the store and Shem carved Velvel’s little pistol.

Shem built them a fortress of tires in the back yard. The tires were of different sizes -- at the bottom, from a tractor, then some truck, and the top one from a car.  The treads were worn down but the lips formed steps for climbing in and out. The fort had the reassuring smell of rubber. There Velvel re-enacted his western and war movie scenes. Sometimes he and Yehudit huddled there, fending off the enemy hordes. 

***  

Velvel had no friends at school, clearly because Rivka required both children come straight home at 4 for milk and cookies. Missing that dose might incur some terrible disease. Maybe if, once or twice maybe, he could stay around the schoolyard, some of the other boys might become his friends. After school was when friendships were struck, the groupings that excluded him at recess. 

Rivka believed that, too. That’s why she wanted both children home right after school. Those shkootzim were all roughnecks. "What will you learn from a shaigetz? That's all I need."

On Tuesdays after school Miss MacDonald came over to give both kids their piano lessons. They had to practice every day.

Mostly Velvel and Yehudit played with their Uncle Mordecai’s kids, Bonnie and Bernie. Bonnie was Velvel's age and Bernie three years younger. They played with dolls and they played tag and marbles outside. 

Velvel's favourite game was Doctor. He was always the doctor, Yehudit the nurse and Bonnie the patient who had to take off all her clothes. Before they would let Bonnie play with them, she had to promise she wouldn't tell her parents. She always promised. She always told.

Uncle Mordecai took Velvel aside: "Doctor, that's not a nice game, Velvelleh, don't play it anymore, ok?"

"But it's fun!" 

"Bonnie doesn't like playing that game."

"But she says she does. She always wants to play with us."

"She wants to play with you, but not that game."

"She says it’s okay."

"She says that because she wants to play with you. But she doesn't like that game."

"But she says!"

"Do you want me to be your friend?" 

This was Uncle Mordecai’s trump card. He was a very nice man, who always had new jokes, something for everyone. His hardware store introduced Velvel to the wonderful wide world of View Master reels. "Yes."

"Well, if you stop playing that game with my Bonnie, then you can be my friend. If you don't, that will make me very sad because I won't be able to be your friend any more. So. What do you say?"

Every time Velvel would promise his friend, Uncle Mordecai. But when Bonnie came over to play, the temptation proved too great to resist.

"Can I play with you guys," Bonnie would ask, warily.

"Sure. We're going to play Doctor."

"Can't we play something else?"

"We don't want to. You can come back when we play Grocer if you like. Maybe tomorrow we'll play Grocer. Today we're playing Doctor."

"Can I be the doctor?"

"No, silly, I'm the doctor. You have to be a boy to be the doctor, everybody knows that. Yehudit is the nurse. You can be the rich and beautiful patient. If you want to play with us today."

"Well. OK."   

Anyway, his mother always hoped he would grow up to be a doctor. Maybe the one who would find the miracle cure for his father. "If I have to wait for him to stop my misery…," Shem’s voice tailed off in humorous despair.

***

Though Velvel was fascinated with the difference between girls and boys, he had no idea about sex. That continuing education began late one afternoon, when Velvel and Yehudit were playing in their tire fort. Gottfried, the older Schultz tough from across the street, sped by on his bike. 

Three months earlier Gottfried and his brother had killed the Schwartzes' cat. Yehudit found it, with a bizarre grin on its face, hanging from a tree. She cried for two hours and couldn't eat supper.

Now, as Gottfried biked by he yelled out to the Schwartz children, "I'm going to get your cousin Bonnie tonight and I'm going to pull down her pants and I'm going to screw her up!"   

At supper Velvel asked: "Mummy, what does 'screw her up' mean?"

Shem guffawed. Velvel felt the flush of pride he'd get whenever something he said was well received. But his mother drew him up short.

"Velvel! I don't want you Ever to even Think words like that! It's Filthy. Where did you Hear such a thing?"

"Gottfried said it today. He said he was going to get Bonnie and screw her up. Oh, and do something with her pants."

Rivka made some rudimentary remarks about marriage and honour and God's precious gift of love and reproduction. Shem kept eating, red-faced from not laughing, his head lowered into his brisket and tsimmes. Rivka said Gottfried didn't know what he was talking about.

"I'm sure Bonnie won't have anything to do with him either. He's a schmutzig brat. I don't want to see you with him. Fardummte shaigetz!"

That night, after the children had gone to bed, Shem and Rivka had their most violent row: raised voices. Velvel and Yehudit crept out of bed and huddled at the top of the stairs to listen. "You shouldn't have laughed like that," Rivka scolded her husband. "We don't want them to think that they can talk dirty. And it's not funny!"

"So I laughed. I couldn't help it. Listen, it's not the end of the world. You can't hide them from all that. They have to learn."

"I know what you and your brothers think is funny. I was in the store, I heard, when that poor Indian woman came in for tobacco. So she didn’t know how to say ‘Vogue’! I heard you and your brothers. It was disgusting. I don't want my children thinking and talking like that."

"What's Vogue?" Velvel whispered to Yehudit.

"Shush. They'll hear us." Clearly she didn't know either. 

***

For some reason Terrence, at 10 three years older, took a sudden interest in Velvel. Terence had his own tree house where he brought Velvel when he didn't have a girl coming up. He entertained visitors with his nudist magazines. 

"This is not really what they look like naked, you know. In real life these girls, when they get old, they have hair right here and under here, but you're not supposed to show it so they shave it off for the pictures."

Even some girls ten or eleven came up to visit. Velvel was flattered by the older boy's friendship. Terence told Velvel to send Yehudit up sometime. Velvel said she said no but he hadn't asked her. Terence was his friend, not hers.

  ***

Bobba Baila got so sick she stayed in her room for three weeks, not even coming down to eat. Rivka sent the children up to read to her when she wasn’t sleeping. As they exercised their Yiddish they gladdened the old woman. When her condition worsened the children were told not to bother her at all. Rivka took up her meals, emptied her bedpan, and sponged her every afternoon. One morning, when Rivka carried up the tea and toast she found her mother-in-law dead. 

Everyone from town came in to say how sorry they were. She was a fine woman, even though they didn't get to know her. She had not learned a word of English. They brought cakes and cookies. Uncle Mordecai and Aunt Lottie brought over a pot roast with potatoes and carrots. Mrs. Bormann brought over a box of chocolates, the good ones, with a rainbow on the black box and a map inside that revealed the fillings. 

While their parents visited, the kids played in the yard with Yehudit and Velvel. Even some of the bullies played there briefly before one of them remembered the gophers and they ran off to the town’s border to shoot them.

No more sour candies, Velvel feared. Bobba Baila is gone. "Where?" 

"To heaven," Rivka told him. 

"Why?"

"Because. Because God loves her. That's life."

"Is she with Dinky?"

"No, Velvel. Horses have their heaven and people have theirs."

"Why?"

"So horses don't have to keep carrying people when they're dead," Yehudit explained impatiently.

"Can we go see her?"

"You can't travel to heaven," Rivka shot back, before Yehudit could pre-empt her again. "We'll see her when we die. After we die."

"When will we die?"

"When God wants us to. When and how we die, that God decides. God will call us. When he takes you to heaven you'll see Bobba Baila again."

"I miss Bobba Baila, Mummy."

"I know, dear. We all do." 

"Can't we go see her now?"

"No, now God wants us to live. When he wants us to come up to Him He'll take us. Until then, we have to live and be good."

"I miss her. I want to see her again. She always gave me candies."

"I know, dear. We all miss her. But we'll remember her. You can remember she loved you both very much. You were her favourite einicklech. She always wanted you to be good. Always."

"OK, Mummy."

"Be extra nice to Daddy today. He just lost his mama."

"We all die someday," Shem told his kids, as they snuggled, one on each knee, to console him. Lying in his solid lap made them feel better. "All that matters is that you live as good people. What’s important is how you live before you die."   

***

Velvel's next theology lesson came when he was sitting on the porcelain potty in his parents' bedroom before Rivka took him shopping.

"Is God always watching me, Mummy?"

"Yes, He is. But don't bother me with that now. We have to go. Hurry up and make."

"Is God watching me when I'm on the potty?"

"Yes, make already! So we can go. Anyway, you shouldn't talk about God on the potty."

"Why?"

"Because God is holy. You should talk about Him only in places that are clean. On the potty you shouldn't even think about God."

"What’ll happen if I do?"

"He'll punish you. And if you don't hurry up and make, then I will! Now make already!"

"I'm trying, Mummy!"

For the next two weeks whenever Velvel sat on the potty he tried not to think of God. As he was largely unsuccessful, he wondered how he would be punished.