She's No Angel: A Series of Short Stories

By Edward John Izrael

Using our imagination as we travel through each page, lets travel with Edward John Izrael's journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450210409

Edward John Izrael

"EDWARD IZRAEL(1947-2000) GREW UP IN GLENCOE, ONTARIO WHERE HE WROTE TEEN RELATED COLUMNS FOR THE "BOTHWELL TIMES." "GLELNCOE TRANSCRIPT." AND, "THE LONDON FREE PRESS." IN ONTARIO, CANADA. HE WON THE LFP NEWSPAPER EDITORIAL AWARD IN THE MID 1960'S BEFORE, GRADUATING FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO IN 1968. HE TAUGHT SCHOOL IN ST. CATHARINES, ONTARIO AND, LANGLEY, BRITISH COLOMBIA WHERE HE CONCENTRATED ON DRAMA AND, MUSIC, WITH PRESENTATIONS INCLUDING: "THE SOUND OF MUSIC," "FIDDLER ON THE ROOF." MY FAIR LADY," AND "ANYTHING GOES. HIS INTEREST IN WRITING HAS PRODUCED THREE PLAYS AND, A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES. BOTH NOW AVAILABLE IN BOOK FORM.

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She’s No Angel

A Series Of Short Stories

Edward John Izrael

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Bloomington

She’s no angel

a series of short stories

Copyright © 2010 by Edward John Izrael

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-1146-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-1040-9 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010901524

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 2/2/2010

Contents

A Boy’s First Tractor

Lucy and the Weed

The Study Of Light

Through The Onion Fields

Colibri

Judy In Disguise

The Grandmother

Curtain

Reunion

The Ice-Babies

The Rifle

Curtain

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

The Ice Voyage

A Boy’s First Tractor

There is only one picture in the family photo album with the tractor in it. I am driving, or at least behind the wheel. The photo is well composed, anchored on the right by the windbreak of dark spruce trees, the tractor in the center coming toward the viewer so that it looks much larger and more powerful than it was. Its exhaust stack and left headlight are precisely at the aesthetically pleasing golden first third of the picture but then, at the very edge, on the bottom left, is a droll, rustic touch, a small building with a sloped roof, that does not detract from the rest of the photo but that anyone in the family would recognize immediately as the old outhouse.

The photograph is badly out of focus. Who took it and exactly when is a mystery or at least a good guess left to the mercy of even blurrier family memories. Black and white with a crimped white border, it was definitely taken in the fifties. I am gripping the steering wheel a little too hard and my knees are bent, my feet back under the tractor seat, rather than stretched out to the clutch and brake pedals. I look tensed and anxious, perhaps afraid of the tractor. These last clues narrow it down to the late 50's, or more precisely in family chronology, after the death of my father.

It was an Allis Chalmers Model B with a 3 3/8 inch bore four cylinder engine, equipped with hydraulics and wide set front wheels adjustable to 40 to 52 inches tread making it especially suitable for cultivation but a good, all purpose farm tractor with a maximum drawbar pull of 1,474 pounds. The F.O.B. factory price in 1940 was $518. This much I learned just last year from The Encyclopedia of American Tractors, matching the drawing in the book detail for detail with the blurry family photo. Our Allis Chalmers was delivered direct to the farm from a dealer, my mother tells me, in the spring of 1953 or perhaps 1954 but when exactly and for how much is gone. That I remember nothing about its arrival is disturbing and significant. I was obviously at school but, why is there no vivid coming-home- from-school-to-something-new memory, stainless and unchanged in line with the arrival of the new chicks from the hatchery every March or the white enamel Frigidaire in the kitchen? It was the farm's first tractor. Our two gentle Belgian horses were still in the barn, tired and old, and probably leaned out over their Dutch doors to watch the shiny new delivery with delight or, more likely, sad eyed prescience that their day had come and gone. All I have is a vague, hazy vision of the tractor sitting in the shed, cold, complicated, uninteresting, smelling of oil mixed with dirt, another piece of machinery along with the plough and springtooth harrow.

To start with, it was like no other tractor for miles around. Everybody else had a Farmall, Fordson, Massey-Ferguson or, if you had the money, the impressive John Deere that we all knew and revered from the exciting John Deere nights held once a year at the old town hall complete with movies and door prizes that nobody you knew ever won. The tractors in these movies and all other tractors, it seemed to me, were tall, dignified machines, painted manly, workman-like colours – dark green or gray with red trim like the squat, feisty little Ford-Ferguson. The Allis Chalmers Model B was low and homey and orange- Persian orange to be exact.

It seems that back then Harry C. Merritt, one of Allis Chalmers' vice presidents, decades ahead of his marketing time, had convinced his company that tractors needed sex appeal and, while others thought Merritt crazy and Persian orange vulgar, sales figures soon more than supported Merritt's theory making the tractor one of the top sellers of its time. But, neither sales figures or sex appeal matter to a seven year old farm boy learning how to enter the tough world of man and machines. The only reason I can think of now as to why the tractor's arrival is a missing memory is that I must have hated the Persian orange Allis Chalmers on sight.

The early to mid-Fifties were the eve of the big machinery era that would change farming and, maybe, some would say, North American life, forever. In 1954 many farmers were still mowing and stooking their wheat and oats and then harvesting the grain via co-operative threshing bees. A behemoth Rumley or Belleville thresher, towed by a big tractor, would trundle up the road one day in late July and, after much manoeuvering through narrow gates and lanes, past chicken coops and sheds, park itself at a strategic spot in the barnyard. Out in the fields, each of four to six local farmers, working in pairs, would pass through the rows of stooks loading them onto a wagon, then drive up tot he thresher in the barnyard and manually fork the sheaves into the machine's conveyor mouth. The thresher magically separated grain from stalk, blowing kernels down a spout to be caught in the box of another wagon or an old pick- up truck, while the chaff and straw were shot out and away falling into a neat, golden stack. It was a full day's work or even two, if the farmer had a large crop, and then, the next day, the operation would move up the road to the next farm and start again with the same four or five farmers and their wagons and the ever hungry thresher.

I don't know how old I as the summer of the very last threshing, seven, eight at the oldest. I don't even know if I remember the last one or several of them merged into one image, a composite of quick, indelible sensations – the terrible din of the thresher and its thousand moving parts all run by a single belt attached to a tractor; the sun warm, fresh grain running through your fingers; the fragrant new haystack, tall and golden, shimmering in the July heat with enough alpine adventures to last a year. And the smells- dust, wheat, the lightly sour but robust, unmistakably masculine smell of sweat still clinging to the farmers in spite of the wash up at the pump as they sat down to the big noon meal in the kitchen. To this day, the taste of fresh store bought sliced ham and ripe tomatoes still warm from the garden takes me back instantly to this initiation of men earning a living through unrelenting physical labor.

Somewhere, back there in all those sensations and memories, I, my dad and the orange Allis Chalmers tractor meld into what is really my only remaining memory of son and father together. The formula is an old and simple one. Wherever men come together, for pleasure or business, nature or necessity- the pool hall, the field, the urinal or the threshing bee – there will be camaraderie but also virile comparison and competition, male pride. For the farmers, it centered on two things – crops and machinery. With the other tractors and wagons lined up on the field, our Persian Orange Allis Chalmers was not impressive, in my mind, anyway. As for my father, whether he was proud or ashamed, humble or indifferent about the tractor, I can't say. The epitome of immigrant frugality, survivor of the Depression and mid European displacement, he would have said, I'm sure, Persian orange or Doukhobor pink, it was the best he could do for the money he had. I don't remember any disputes with the other boys who came along to the threshings but I'm sure I never thought the Allis Chalmers was much to brag about let alone defend in an out and out fist fight.

One day this all changed. My father and I went to the dark, clanging dungeon of the blacksmith in town and came home with two metal C shaped brackets, no different, I thought, from hundreds of clevis's and hitches and now broken, now repaired bits and pieces of machinery that made a farm run. But, my father took the C shaped brackets and bolted the bottom leg of the first bracket onto the clutch pedal of the Allis Chalmers, the second onto its brake pedal. Then, he got behind the wheel, started up the tractor and told me to climb up as he slipped out of the seat and let me take the wheel. To my surprise, I could now reach the pedals via the C brackets which worked like blocks on a tricycle. The next time my Dad and I drove onto the grain fields of a threshing bee, he let me actually drive the Allis Chalmers, now the biggest, proudest, most virile machine in the district. I couldn't have driven much except in a straight line, stopping and starting probably while stooks were loaded onto the wagon, my dad and I a threshing gang team now. Maybe not even that much. What I do remember, clearly, is the surprise of the sweating, tired men and then their smiles, a hearty laugh, as they called me Johnny after my father, a rite of passage, an initiation, a nod of approval that would last me a lifetime.

The last year of my father's life was not a good one, not for him or the family. Our life changed dramatically and irreversibly on a Sunday night, Mother's Day, ironically enough, with his death, catapulting my mother into the womanhood of the second half of this century. A thirty-six year old European woman who had cooked, cleaned, taken care of children, worked in the field and then gotten up the next day to do it all over again, she learned in a matter of months how to manage the farm's livestock, crops, finances, drive the old Pontiac into town, wheel and deal with not always honest grain co-ops and hatchery managers, plough, disc, harrow, cultivate and harvest the stubborn hundred acre farm with two children and an orange Allis Chalmers. It was the education meant for me that I never got. Out of fear, perhaps, for my safety, or, more likely, my future, she would not let me drive the tractor. My brief moment of glory with the Persian orange Allis Chalmers sealed over into memory.

I was nine when my father died. This year, the year of the new millennium, I turned the same age my father was when he died. School, leaving the farm and moving into town, university, the big city, the duties of a job, mortgages, family, cars, plans for retirement – the acceleration of time defies photograph and memory. From threshing machines and tractors to a world of four by fours and cell phones is a huge distance and yet in the immense scheme of time it is nothing more than the quick journey from boyhood to middle age, the few inches between a boy's foot and the pedal of a tractor, the distance a boy cannot cross without a boost from his father.

Lucy and the Weed

Her name was Lucy and she was an angel, not the pink skin, winglets and gossamer cherub you see on Valentine's cards but a real angel – kind, gentle but with a straight, honest eye and the determined grip of a professional wrestler. So maybe she wasn't exactly a messenger from God but somebody sent her. She saved my life. I know that for a fact.

I don't remember all the details of our sessions. It's been a while. But then, I think maybe that's how angels work, a couple of short, sharp shocks to put you back on the right road then a local anaesthetic of amnesia so you forget the details. That way nobody gets too hysterical. That was certainly how the therapy worked, a little pain, some remembering, some forgetting, all wound up together. Yeah, therapy. Angel or nurse, whatever she was, there's no other word for what she did to get me over my addiction.

Interesting what you do remember: the September afternoon, leaves crisp and coloured covering the sidewalk as I walked home from school; the crackle of the cellophane coming off the bright red pack of du Mauriers; the cool, sophisticated way I placed the pack on the kitchen table a week later, a queasy, light headed week later spent learning to be a cool, sophisticated smoker; the breezy, almost enthusiastic way my mother accepted the fact that I'd decided to become a smoker, no lecture, no motherly moaning about early death or the inevitable carnal sins that would follow, poolrooms and bee parlours. But then, she was a relatively new smoker herself at that point, a liberated women. All I was doing was accepting my heritage. I'd grown up in a European tradition where real men smoked – my father, my grandfather, my uncles. I still remember the old, white haired stryko sitting at our kitchen table one day not long after I'd started smoking. He looked at me and nodded. Back in the old country, there was the odd man who never took a drink, but the man who didn't smoke – that was rare. I had finally passed into manhood.

I had been a late bloomer – no sneaked puffs behind the barn, no purloined, slightly bent Export A to be bartered or shared in the guys' bathroom. There had been no glamour or adventure and certainly no mystery in a smoking during my childhood. Dad had rolled his own. Daily Mail tobacco from the pouch with the jaunty airplane in a bright blue sky, the flimsy papers in the gay, yellow Zigzag packet, the smart snap and smell of the Zippo lighter, it was a routine as sharply familiar and clean and masculine as a Hemingway story. But then, within minutes, that unfiltered, roll your own of Dad's would turn into a soggy, stinking mess hanging disgustingly from his lower hip, removed only when it was time for another one or, more likely, a solid round of hoarse, deep throated coughing and a final thick, yellowish hork on the ground.

Then there was my aunt and uncle's tobacco farm. This was a little closer to the adventure and excitement that smoking would come to represent, the basic premise of every Players billboard. My mother had worked in tobacco, as they said, when she emigrated from Europe, first as a half hander than a tier. After my father died, she earned extra money every summer working the month long harvest at my uncle's farm. On the weekends, my sister and I would do along with her, getting up before dawn, driving to my aunt and uncle's and then hanging around the whole day watching the primers gather armfuls of the large, lush green tobacco leaves, sending them to the kilns in boats, narrow, two runner sleds that my older cousin would haul from the fields behind a perky little Ford-Ferguson tractor that I loved to ride on and thought was the greatest machine ever invented. The kilns were small, two storey barns, used to cure the tobacco. In front of one of these was a long wide tying table with two teams of workers, each made up of three women – two handing leaves from the table to the third woman, the tier, my mother, who deftly grasped each bunch of three leaves from the leaf handers, encircled them with a continuous, unbroken line of string and then twisted the bunch tightly and securely against a flat stick about one meter long At the end of the day, the stack of neatly laid out sticks, 1200 of them, each with its load of some thirty bunches of tobacco leaves, would be hoisted and carefully racked into the kiln for curing. It was a dirty, wet, sometimes painful, grueling day's work, interrupted only once in the day for lunch, except we called it dinner. A hot steaming meal – meat, potatoes, lots of vegetables, with coffee and tea, even on the hottest of summer days. It was consumed in an eyewink of fifteen or twenty minutes by the ravenous gang of workers, still sweaty and smelly from the tobacco, only their hands clean, scrubbed up outside with homemade lye soap, the fastest way to take off the black tar that accumulated from the hundreds of leaves handled in the process of getting leaf to stick, a disgusting black muck you would not see or hear about again until you emptied an ashtray. In the last few precious minutes of dinner, before they went back to the field and the tying table, the gang sat back and smoked, the clean white cigarettes in their hands somehow unconnected to the morning's labour.

In the evening, my Uncle Julius would turn on the propane heater in whatever kiln had been filled with harvested leaves that day and begin the process of curing. Five, sometimes six days later, the pungent green leaves emerged from the dark kiln like chrysalids turned to butterflies, golden, sweet smelling, a gift from the god of the summer sun. Months later, in mid-winter, the tobacco would be taken out of the barn where it had been stored and brought