Never Sleep Three in a Bed Read online

  An M&S Paperback from McClelland & Stewart Inc.

  Copyright © 1971 by Max Braithwaite

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher - or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Canadian Reprography Collective - is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Braithwaite, Max, 1911-

  Never sleep three in a bed

  First published 1969.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-648-6

  I. Title.

  PS8503.R34N48 1988 C813’ .54 C88-095210-5

  PR9199.3.B735N48 1988

  SELECTED TITLES BY MAX BRAITHWAITE

  It’s the Family Way

  The Night We Stole the Mountie’s Car

  Why Shoot the Teacher

  Never Sleep Three in a Bed

  A Privilege and a Pleasure

  Lusty Winter

  McGruber’s Folly

  The Commodore’s Barge Is Alongside

  Max: The Best of Braithwaite

  All the Way Home

  McClelland & Stewart Inc.

  The Canadian Publishers

  481 University Avenue

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5G 2E9

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1 Nokomis – “Best in the West”

  2 The Brothers and Sisters

  3 Fire – Robbery – and the Beating of a Tender Heart

  4 School

  5 Hallowe’en Horrors

  6 No Road Maps, No Road Signs, No Roads

  7 Prince Albert, I Love You

  8 Chums

  9 Never Sleep Three in a Bed

  10 Saskatoon – the Big Time

  11 River-Bank Follies

  12 Masturbation is the Thief of Time

  13 The One-Hundred-Yard Schlemozzle

  14 To Tread the Boards

  15 To Increase in Wisdom and Stature

  16 The Man to Hire

  17 The End of the World

  TO MOTHER,

  whose indomitable spirit, strength, love and humour

  pulled us through the bad time.

  TO DAD,

  who made the whole family possible.

  TO MY FOUR BROTHERS AND THREE SISTERS,

  who have been so much a part of my life.

  1 Nokomis—“Best in the West”

  Whenever I hear talk of the population explosion, the desperate need for birth-control or the pill, I am troubled. I look away and cough and scratch my rump, and try to switch the conversation to Vietnam or something equally uncontroversial. For I happen to be the sixth in a family of eight children, and had my parents been wiser, or more cautious, or better informed on family planning, I should never have been born at all. And I should have hated that.

  My mother has since admitted to me that she looked forward to my coming with something less than jubilation. She’d had five already within a period of seven years, and had been hoping for a few years off. But what was the poor woman to do? She loved her husband, and a body can’t be careful all the time. Nevertheless, once I arrived she loved me and cared for me, and I’m grateful for it.

  Our family wasn’t a big one as families went during the first quarter of the century, just a comfortable size. Ten at the table for each meal is a good round number, and five boys and three girls is a fair and equitable balance of the sexes. I’ve heard my sister Doris dispute this when she was in a snit over something “those boys” had done or said, but then she might be considered prejudiced.

  I was born in the middle of the night in the dead of winter, in the midst of a real cold snap. Doc Brown, who had to drag himself out of bed, pull on his fur cap and buffalo-hide coat and mitts, and trudge the three blocks to our house through the snapping cold, is reported to have grumbled, “Don’t see why those damned Braithwaite kids can’t be born in the summer. All but one’s been a winter baby!”

  When he got upstairs to the cold front bedroom, where my mother lay gasping in the big wooden bed, and pulled me from the warmth of her body I naturally began to howl. I continued to howl, too, almost constantly they say, so as almost to drive my mother mad. The truth was, of course, that I was hungry, and there wasn’t enough nourishment in my tired mother’s breasts to satisfy me. After all, the care of five small children, along with the chores of fetching water, carrying coal, stoking fires, feeding chickens, washing by hand, baking bread and preserving crab-apples had taken something out of her. Bottle-feeding being on the long list of Methodist sins I continued to hunger and howl.

  That howling, as a matter of fact, almost brought me to a premature end. When Mother was well enough to travel, Father, who was a rising young lawyer in the fastest-growing town in the fastest-growing province in the West, decided to take her, and what kids couldn’t be left behind, on the C.P.R. to the West Coast. The other kids weren’t that much trouble, but I was a holy terror. The mountain air made me hungrier, and I bawled louder. Day and night I bawled, without let-up, single-lungedly ruining the trip for a Pullman car full of tourists. My poor mother was so distracted that as she stood by the railing of the ferry-boat carrying us across Georgia Strait my sister Doris heard her mutter, “Hush, you little demon, or I’ve a good mind to drop you overboard.” Doris, a sober seven-year-old, who took her duties as eldest girl seriously, was in such a panic for the rest of the trip that she refused to leave Mother’s side, lest she really did carry out this horrible threat. Come to think of it, I probably owe my life to Doris.

  The effect of my early hunger left a life-long mark upon me. For no sooner was I able to reach for food, or find it, or steal it, than I began cramming it into my mouth as though there would never be any more. As a natural consequence I became fat, and portliness has been the key to my personality development ever since.

  Each of us in this life has his own division of people. The black power advocate sees all humans as black or white. The communist sees them as rich or poor. The feminist sees the world as made up of mean men and good women; the WASP sees them as pure and impure; the French Canadian as exploiter and exploitee, and so on.

  Well, the fat man sees the world as divided into two classes–lean and stout. The lean resent the stout, scoff at them, humiliate them and, I’m sure if they were able, would pass discriminatory laws against them. They also assume that each pudgy person yearns to be slim, which is of course absolute nonsense. All the fat person wants is to be accepted as a person, to be treated as an individual, to be greeted by old acquaintances with a simple, “Hello there, fellow, how’s tricks?” instead of, “Putting on a little lard there around the middle aren’t you, old boy?”

  Thus, early in life, I learned to regard all skinny persons as natural enemies, out to get me. There is nothing paranoid in this, you understand. Nevertheless, it does seem odd that every teacher, doctor, scoutmaster, policeman, producer, director, editor or publisher with whom I’ve had to deal in my entire life has had a lean and hungry look, and has been definitely dangerous.

  Early on, my brother Hub tagged me with the nickname “Fat”, and after that I was forced to lick every new kid that called me by that opprobrious label. Thus, what might well have been an individual with a gentle, loving, out-going nature was transformed into a vicious, mean, thin-skinned wretch, ever quick to take offence, and to snap suspiciously even at the hand extended in friendship.

  And it all began at my mother’s breast
.

  The house in which I was born was large and square, and stood on the edge of the town of Nokomis, Saskatchewan. It was made of cement blocks, but for some reason has always been referred to by the family as the “old stone house”. It was built as a hospital, when the town was first established in 1905, by two civic-minded ladies from Chicago. According to a historical booklet, the corner-stone was laid with a short religious service, and the band of the Royal Templars provided “open air entertainment.” While the Grand Trunk Railway was being built the hospital did a good business in broken bones, crushed feet, squeezed-off hands and frost-bite, but after the railway was finished trade fell off, the good ladies returned to Chicago, and Dad bought the house for his expanding family. “The way kids keep getting sick,” he’s reported to have said, “a hospital will be just the thing.”

  The house was surrounded by a yard about an acre in size. Part of it was lawn, surrounded by box-elder trees which we called Manitoba maples, and part of it garden with currant bushes, with whose lush fruit I stuffed myself every season. The rest was taken up with barn, chicken-coop, pig-pen and, of course, a two-holer off to the side, painted a discreet brown and partly hidden by trees. Behind the barn, a wheat field stretched to the horizon, without a hill or tree or stone to break its flatness.

  That yard was ever full of life. Long-legged grasshoppers leaped in the grass, chickweed and pigweed that covered the area between house and barn. Big busy chickens roamed at will, chasing the grasshoppers and pecking viciously at unwary toads. One of my earliest recollections is of the big bronze rooster, lifting his head high, cocking his beady eye, and then tearing across the barnyard to jump a hen amidst flying feathers and fearful squawking. How he knew which one was ready I never figured, but I never tired of watching his torrid dash to fulfilment. No nonsense there. He showed those hens which was the dominant sex, all right.

  Cats were forever having kittens in the soft hay of the barn. Bitches had pups, sows had litters, cows had calves, mares had colts. No need to show us self-conscious little films of male frogs clutching females, and releasing their sperm on the emerging eggs. Raw sex was all about us, natural and constant.

  Inside the barn was the domain of Kate and Harry, two lean, shaggy work-horses that Father had acquired through some kind of deal. He kept them, I suppose, because of the always imminent prospect that he would move to a farm. Farms were everything in Saskatchewan then. Like oil became in Alberta later. If you didn’t have a farm, and weren’t getting in on those big wheat prices, you were a sloven indeed. Father did actually try farming a little later, with results so disastrous as to still make us squirm. After paying top prices for the ploughing, cultivating and seeding, he watched his wheat grow to a bumper crop that was completely wiped out by frost before he ever put a binder into it.

  There was another horse in that barn, too, a driver named Old Tom, whom my older brothers described as a “kidney stallion”. I never knew exactly what that meant, but it seems Old Tom was neither completely stud nor gelding, and could get very excited over a mare in the proper mood.

  Old Tom distinguished himself in my memory by walking one hot day into the middle of the slough behind the barn, and lying down in it. A stupid thing to do, but I suppose that’s the price one pays for being half-and-half. Anyway, when he’d cooled off sufficiently and tried to get up, he couldn’t. I stood with a group of my elders, listening to their joking remarks about his helpless wallowings, and I was scared. Tom was our friend, just as Old Girlie, the cat, was our friend, and Patsy, the dog, and for that matter the other members of our family. And here he was in danger of death. Death, that horror that haunts all little boys. He might actually die. Surely people should be more distressed by the prospect. There should be more urgency, more panic. They shouldn’t just stand there, hands in pockets, joking.

  I’ll never forget what happened next, either. Somebody threw a rope over Old Tom’s head and hitched Kate and Harry to the other end of it. The team pulled, and Tom’s neck began to stretch. I can see it now–stretching and stretching–until I was sure his head would come from his body. Then with a mighty effort he scrambled from the ooze to his feet, walked out of the slough under his own power, and commenced nibbling the grass at the edge.

  Thus a boy learns the facts of life. I remember the day two strange, dark men came to visit Kate’s colt. They told me to beat it, and closed the barn door tight. I peeked through a knot-hole into the dusty dankness, and made out one man sitting on the colt’s head while the other did terrible things to its other end. Then they went to the pig-pen and performed the same operation on the spunky young boars. They weren’t quiet as the colt had been, and their horrible, heart-broken squeals rang in my head for days.

  In the barn, also, lived a red cow with a crumpled horn. Her name was Old Rosie. She was remarkable in that she never freshened. It’s a known fact that a cow should have a calf once a year, in order to keep her mammary glands functioning for the benefit of humans. Not so Old Rosie. She never had a calf, either while we lived in Nokomis or after we moved to Prince Albert, but still she continued to give a pailful of milk each day. Farmers would come for miles to see her. They’d stand beside the stall, scratching their rumps and shaking their heads. “It just ain’t possible,” they’d say.

  Of all my friends in Nokomis, Old Rosie was not among my favourites. Oh, I liked to stand and watch Morley milk her, meanwhile shooting long streams of warm milk into the pink mouths of lurking kittens. I liked to listen to him swear at her when she switched her tail in his face until he finally got mad enough to tie it to her hind leg. But she butted me in the forehead once, and would make little runs at me when Hub was taking her out to be tethered behind the barn. Besides, despite my gluttonous appetite for other foods, I was never able to drink milk.

  There were three hundred and seventy-four people living in Nokomis when I arrived there, and none had been in the community more than six years. There hadn’t been any community six years earlier, just the flat prairie and the grass and the gophers. Thus, everything in the village was brand-new. The wooden sidewalks, the little trim brick-red station, the four grain elevators along the tracks, the houses, the stores, the trees–all new.

  The people were new, too. A community without an old-timer. All the adults were there from choice, having sought out this little part of the world for reasons best known to themselves. Some, to get away from bad situations at home; others, lured by garish posters that promised free homesteads in a land “where none need call another master and where the wealth of the soil is for the hardy to take”.

  But mostly they came because they were restless. Tired of the same old faces and rules, wanting something different. The same reasons that have always goaded men to travel and explore and experiment. They came to Saskatchewan because it was there–and new–and unknown.

  From the United States they came, from Ontario, the British Isles, Germany, Central Europe. It was a duke’s mixture of races, cultures and languages. My earliest recollections are of people speaking strange tongues. They had no time for racial or religious bigotry–that would come later. My father, for instance, who’d been a staunch member of the Orange Lodge in Ontario, as had been his father and grandfathers before him, put his uniform with the great orange sash away in a box and left it there. We kids would get it out and play with it, wondering idly what it was all about.

  The people of Nokomis were enthusiastic about their new community, too, and had great faith in its future. For wasn’t it situated in the middle of the best black-soil region in the West? And wasn’t it located exactly three hundred and eighty-five miles west of Winnipeg, the “Gateway to the West”? Not three hundred and seventy-five miles like Tate, or three hundred and ninety-five like Venn, those two neighbours who foolishly thought they would become the great metropolises of the West. And wasn’t this the perfect place for a town–flat and smooth, without even a hill to mar its beauty? Plenty of underground water there, too. The real estate people guaran
teed it. You’d have to dig deep, maybe, and it might taste like epsom salts when you got it, but it was there all right.

  Dad and Mother had come west like the others, seeking and escaping. Mother’s father, James Copeland, was a young red-bearded Irishman, from County Armagh, with itchy feet. He emigrated to Ontario, and in the town of Winchester met and married a likely Irish girl by the name of Arabell Timmins. Further west they went to Dundalk, in Grey County, and established a farm. But the western winds were blowing word of wider plains and richer soil than the swamp and gravel around Dundalk. So James packed his family on one of the first trains going west, and stayed with her as far as the rails went. This was the Summerberry area, in the District of Assiniboia (now southern Saskatchewan). They raised eleven children, did James and Arabell Copeland, never lost a one, and they all grew up to have numerous children of their own.

  Mary, my mother, was just an infant when the family moved west, and remembered little of the trip. She grew up working hard on the farm, a pert ragamuffin of a girl, with a lively wit and a serene Methodist conviction that God would watch over her and hers, if she were good. God had led her to the prairies, she believed, to meet Warner and, after she met him, the aggravating winds, the mean winters, the parched summers and the cruel times didn’t matter at all.

  I realize that in this mother-debunking age I’ll be put down as a square if I say anything good about mine. So I’ll just let the facts speak for themselves. She raised eight kids and never lost one of them. None of us was ever in jail, in a divorce court, or on a psychiatrist’s couch. She knew no child-psychology, had never heard of Gessel et al, and never used the word “relate” or “aggression” or “inhibition” in her life. When a kid was good, she rewarded him with love and smiles; when a kid was bad or saucy, she whacked him. Simple justice. If she happened to whack the wrong kid–well, she’d make up for it next time.

  She made us do plenty of things we didn’t want to do, filled us with guilt feelings about not attending Sunday School, swearing or drinking, and being sinful with girls. She even scared the devil out of us with stories of goblins that came after little boys who didn’t say their prayers. She had a strong conviction that she was right, because wasn’t God on her side, and wasn’t He always right? Most important of all, she had the indomitable spirit of motherhood. She just wouldn’t give up. Not ever. When times got tough, she got tougher. Yes, she had to humiliate herself sometimes, lying to bill collectors, and working like a dog calsomining rooms after each roomer left, but she kept us at a good address, and never let us forget what was “decent”.