Bewilderment

By Don Gutteridge

An inspiring story set in the time of the Great Depression, Bewilderment: A Novel of the Great Depression follows the story of a coal delivery man, Gabriel "Gabe" Goodfellow, who wants to lighten the hearts of the people in homes he visits. Poverty is felt everywhere and people are hopeless. So, he thinks that there can be some joy and inspiration by arranging for the carnival to visit the town. His intentions are pure and altruistic, but then he has to deal with family problems. Things get complicated when manipulative and greedy local politicians get involved. Will Gabe achieve his goal and put smiles on the faces of his townsfolk or will his project be arrested before it even becomes a reality? The prose is sprinkled with succinct and vivid descriptions of the city and some of the elements that readers can easily visualize. While the story is set in the 1930s, it is filled with realism and humanity and today's readers can easily relate to its message and the characters. Bewilderment is hugely inspiring and entertaining.
Gobi Jane for Readers' Favorite

Don Gutteridge was born in Sarnia and raised in the nearby village of Point Edward. He taught High School English for seven years, later becoming a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Western University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He is the author of seventy-one books: poetry, fiction and scholarly works in educational theory and practice. He has published twenty-two novels, including the twelve-volume Marc Edwards mystery series, and thirty-nine books of poetry, one of which, Coppermine, was short-listed for the 1973 Governor-General's Award. In 1970 he won the UWO President's Medal for the best periodical poem of that year, "Death at Quebec." To listen to interviews with the author, go to: http://thereandthen.podbean.com.
Don lives in London, Ontario.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Jan 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781649695208

Don Gutteridge

Don Gutteridge is the author of forty books: fiction, poetry and scholarly works. He taught high school for seven years and then joined the Faculty of Education at Western University in the Department of English Methods. He is now professor emeritus and lives in London, Ontario.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Gabe Goodfellow was precisely one block from his mother’s house (well, one block and a bit if you counted the tumbledown dwellings of Granny Crack and Sideways Slim that lay adrift in the wizened grass above the Marsh – and, strictly speaking, it was his house now, their house, the very house his mother had borne and raised him up in, and then left so abruptly, not even saying goodbye) when a voice something like his own whispered or perhaps – as if it were a long ways off and accustomed to being ignored – shouted its simple two-syllable query: Why not? Why not what? he wanted to ask the moment he stopped being startled. But, of course, he didn’t. Questions that had no predicate never lingered overly long in Gabe’s uncomplicated mind. What was the point?

What surprised him, though, and – if Blossom or anybody happening to pass nearby (no-one did) had thought to ask – quite annoyed him, was the fact that this voice in impudent imitation of his own should put its even more impudent query to him in the midst of his walking home from work. For this was the time of day, particularly since the funeral last summer, he most looked forward to as he made his noisy, dusty rounds of the village and its environs, and most looked backed upon while Rennie and Rosie bickered on both sides of him and Blossom clucked and fumed at them and held him at bay and then, much later when quiet reclaimed the house, drew back in her need to extort or relinquish blame and wordlessly punished them both with bewilderment. But here in this hiatus between the teeming docks behind him and the expectant house ahead of him where all the memories of all his life (so far) echoed out of the walls and wainscot unbidden – here he could walk at his own pace, every crack in the path or sidewalk so familiar it didn’t need noting, every porch and window-cranny so thoroughly known he was never certain whether he was seeing them as they swam benignly by or merely remembering them. Not that it mattered. One way or another they were part and parcel of the hum of his body as it carried him along the ancient river flats and the verges of the swamp towards the intimations of habitation. And every day, just as he and the hum touched the westernmost reach of Alexander Ave., he began to whistle. Not the friendly tootle he fetched up to greet his favourite customers or cheer them however briefly out of one sadness or another. No, the whistle here seemed without thought or intent, bright but tuneless, soaring without effort but happy not to be going anywhere, not to be needed or found wanting. And his lunch bucket swung to the selfsame beat.

Hence the impertinence of the question, any question, but especially why not? in the midst of his whistling between work and home. For no more than a second (two at the most) Gabe Goodfellow gave some thought as to the what so maddeningly omitted, came up with no answer, and was relieved to hear himself whistling once again. Widow Fulcher waved from the safety of a window curtain, her smile drooped in mute beseeching. But already he was veering away – whistled and hummed, as it were, southward along the fringe of the Marsh where it crept up to the backyards and gardens of the bravest houses in the village. Later on, in the spring, he would take this roundabout route home quite often just so he could watch the crocuses pop open like Christmas crackers along the quickened hedgerows or nod approval to the daffodils who’d long ago liberated themselves from captive beds to flutter eccentrically from odd arable islands in the swamps that otherwise oozed all the way to river and bay. Most of all he loved the deep contentment that settled within as week by week from May to September he passed the tended vegetable gardens and their orderly ranking, the willfulness of that green growing till it burst of its own exuberance. So contented would he be that by the time he approached his mother’s house (well, the Goodfellow place as the neighbours were kind enough to call it, though many no doubt conjured up images of ‘Major’ Goodfellow and the glorious dead), he would flush with shame. For such contentment – not wholly unlike this happy, tuneless whistling along the village edge in the middle of March – suggested in its own forcible way that he was, in the very haven of the home he had made of and for his family, not perfectly at ease.

Which proved a constant perplexity to him: for once he was arrived home he was most happy – honoured even – to be there. How often he just sat in his easy chair (the very one his dad had filled with his major presence and spun out story after story in a voice that rang with the terrible hilarity of the brothers Grimm) and stared at Blossom bent over the gas-range – her pink, puffed cheeks sweated with kettle-steam – coddling or ladling or stroking her stews with the same tender obsession her fingers once played upon him in the first, furtive moments of their coming together. It was a joy he had never, as child or young man, thought to have had and even now could scarcely believe it real, was frightened even of recalling it too vividly for fear it would vanish and mock him. Whatever happiness was, he would have proclaimed to anyone interested (if he had been the kind of man to say such things) that it was to be found somewhere in the nook and cradle of his mother’s house.

But this was March, not May or September. The grip of winter had weakened but not given way. Splotches of snow littered pallid lawns and clung to chill shadows along casement or stoop like soiled rags tossed aside and best forgotten. The Marsh, stretching riverward for almost a mile, was checkered by patches of piebald shale-ice where pussy-willow would eventually redden and fluff and marsh-lilies fling up flagrant in ponds bold with bullfrogs you could hear under your sleep as sonorous and iterative as your own unwilled breath. But there was nothing here now he wished to know or acknowledge or whistle through after a sunless day in the coal-barns and the choke of soot.

He was just about to pose a question of his own when his eye caught something sinuous in the distance, towards the far border of the Marsh where Blackleg Doyle minded his own business in the company of trottered creatures he preferred above all others, as had his father before him. It was not the sinuous mist he saw – that rose each winter evening out of boggy hollows here and there and hung above them like wraiths half-afraid of their own haunting. Nor was it the perpetual bone-blue smoke of the old hermit’s woodstove plainly visible above the curve in the bay where the grain elevator loomed ponderous and taunting against the westering light. What he saw was a mere tendril of smoke, tentative, as if finding the air a stranger here – in a place where no smoke ought to be. As he reached the back gate of the last of the respectable houses, it occurred to him, in the slight wincing of thought he allowed himself, that he was being lured, however circuitously, towards a diffidence of wood-smoke above the gloam of the bay on a dank late-winter evening in March of 1936.

Still, his hum continued to feed his whistle and his whistle went blithely on as if no question had ever been voiced or left rankling without predicate. Nonetheless he could not help but notice, inadvertently or otherwise, the double row of stakes bending across the Marsh and its sloughs – presumptuously blond in their newness and in the regularity of their aim: survey-stakes, he knew, for the spectacular bridge that would, it was said, soon conjoin two mighty nations (well, one perhaps somewhat mightier than the other, it was only fair to concede if pressed) and would haul both by the bootstraps out of the gumbo of the Great Depression. Such fevered tropes leapt unblushing from boosters on the radio and from the squalid headlines of the City Reporter , an organ that had cornered the market on bumptious optimism. The hum skidded, righted itself, then resumed its numbing airs.

Gabe did not turn east and south onto St. Clair Street as he ought to, as he fully expected to, as the rumble of hunger was urging him to. Instead, his feet had made their own path through the depleted grasses of Bayview Park, below its towering oaks now stark and speechless, past the dance pavilion forlorn and mourning the absence of music and the melodious months of summers gone. And there where Blackleg’s pasture should have presented itself unmolested to the sojourner’s view, where – as soon as the days lengthened and warmed – the pigman’s pink-skinned companions would romp and be obstreperously grateful, a reticent curl of wood-smoke now hovered, and below it the fire that forced it up into the open, and the man squatted beside it, tending it as if nothing else in the world mattered, at least not at this moment. If he heard Gabe’s whistling, the tender of fires gave no sign. Gabe stopped a few feet away, and briefly noted, in the fast-rising mist, a careworn, elderly caravan and a big-bellied dray horse tethered to a nearby willow branch.

Gabe waited.

Having stirred the fire to his satisfaction, the old fellow – for indeed he was very old, the layered skin above the bristle of his moustache looking as if it had been applied with a glazier’s putty knife – rocked back on his heels and lit his clay pipe with studious ritual. His vermilion vest, stained evidently with the happy fallout from a dozen vintage clarets, was conspicuous, and defining, as were the corduroy breeches. But his fingers, gnarled and slick as pine knots, held the match steady, and the glow from the perked-up campfire was companionably absorbed by his deep-set, Transylvanian eyes and then beamed back with a more intense, worldly blaze (and not a little amusement, the source of which was not readily fathomable). Without glancing up or relinquishing a puff on his pipe, he spoke: A goot evening, yah?

Gabe, taken aback and not quite ready to relinquish his own solitude, muttered something that could be taken for agreement.

You like a smoke? The old fellow turned his head slightly, his neck-skin bronzed and wattled in the firelight, but did not yet look up to take the measure of the interloper, or guest. He held out a withered tobacco pouch that could have been a dried pig’s bladder. Goot stuff. English.

By way of reply Gabe drew out his packet of Turret and his cigarette papers.

Ah, the old fellow said, and this time he stared directly at Gabe, not in the way stranger greets stranger – with a cautious smile inviting welcome and reciprocity yet not so reckless or indelible that it can’t be instantly denied – but rather with a grin that rippled every crease and lineament the years had bequeathed his antique visage. Sit, please. And he waved his guest to a nearby stump that had been sanded and glazed and apparently set out for some such purpose.

Gabe sat down, and began rolling himself a cigarette. Aware that he was being obliquely observed, he bungled an act that he often executed with one hand to the amazed squeals of his darling Rosie, so much so that by the time he licked the paper’s slick edge with the tip of his tongue, the whole thing was smudged with the soot of a long day’s labour. The old fellow grinned capaciously enough to display the stumps of two mildewed teeth, lit a dried reed in the fire and held it aloft for Gabe to catch a light. Gabe inhaled deeply, letting the rich smoke settle somewhere close to where the hum had last been heard.

Between puffs the old fellow said, Coal-man, eh?

Gabe nodded.

Good, honest work, eh? The twinkle in the eye that Gabe could see best, twinkled in several dimensions.

Gabe nodded assent. Just passin’ through? he said, noting the weathered wagon, the fire with its cooking tripod, and the quinsied breathing of the spavined dray.

The old fellow grinned, gave the fire a playful poke, and said, Seems we’re always passing through somehwere.

Gabe could see something painted on the water-logged slats of the caravan wall that might have been a name, but the mist, growing colder and denser by the minute, kept the letters from coalescing into words.

I’m Malkovic, the old fellow said, and in the same generous tone added: And that bag of bones and shit over there is Pancho. At the sound of his name the horse lifted its snout briefly out of the withered grass, blinked twice, and returned to its browsing.

I’m Gabe.

Like the angel.

Gabe smiled as politely as he could at the joke that had mercifully worn itself out by grade three. You come far today?

Twenty miles or so. Took us two hours to get across the river.

From the USA? On the car ferry that ran only when the ice-pack relented enough to make the risk bearable? And not today, for sure.

Where you headed?

Oh, here and there. South and east, mostly.

What’re you peddlin’?

Malkovic chuckled, removing his pipe to give full vent to this particular humour. You buyin’? he said at last. His expression darkened for a moment only – the glint of a wry skeptic tempered by wariness and other instinct. He stared hard at Gabe’s blackened, round, open face. We’re in the pleasure business, he said.

Gabe flicked his cigarette onto a patch of Blackleg’s front pasture and crushed it under his boot. You campin’ here overnight?

Hope to.

Nobody’ll bother ya here.

Expect not.

You been here before. Gabe was surprised that this was not a question.

We have. Malkovic knocked the ashes out of his pipe on the heel of his right boot without changing position. A while back. Not many places we ain’t been to, one time or another.

Gabe rose as if to take his leave.

You wanta have a little supper? The word ‘little’ came out as ‘lee-tul’ but the accent – though much like the ones you could hear any hour of the workday along the docks and switching-yards beside the River and after-hours in the shacks that ‘disgraced’ the perimeters of the village proper – was oddly eccentric.

As if in response to a cue or to some understanding that didn’t require the clumsiness of speech, a woman, shawled and peasant-skirted, slipped out of the fog, moved soundlessly across to the fire, and placed a kettle upon the tripod. For a second Gabe thought she had materialized out of the mist itself, so suddenly did she appear and seemed not in the least to notice either the old man or the dark intruder. But then, remembering who these people doubtlessly were, he realized she must have come down the little stoop of steps always attached to the front of their caravans.

Plenty of food, eh, Sophia? Malkovic said.

Sophia looked not at the old man but over at Gabe. Her eyes were two scorched acorns, and had done some dancing in their day. Even the babushka, cast-off army jacket and shapeless skirt were not apparel enough to cloak some grace of posture or liberty of gesture learned too early and practiced too often ever to be curtailed or self-suppressed. Under the fierceness of her welcome, Gabe kept his gaze on the ground.

You know this man, Papa?

He is called Gabe, her father said, giving the stew in the kettle a proprietorial sniff.

Gabe who?

Goodfellow, Gabe said, glancing up as he rose once more to go.

Sophia laughed, a female variant of Malkovic’s chortle. Amusement overtook her for a moment before she said, locking her own gaze onto his: "And are you?"

Flustered, Gabe found himself re-seated and peering over to the old fellow for help. It wasn’t the blush that flummoxed him (his permanently sooted face took care of that recurrent embarrassment) but rather the panic that suddenly began to beat with wordless urgency below the customary thump of the heart he feared only in the dread of those rare nights when he would waken to find the precious other half of his bed inexplicably empty.

I think he is, Papa Malkovic said, his twinkle softening.

A coal-man, Sophia said, appraising his hands as they writhed under her bold stare.

My daughter reads palms, Papa Malkovic said, and faces.

Sophia looked down at her father still squatted close to the stew. He is a friend of Blackleg’s, she announced with casual conviction. Then she turned her attention to the stew, giving it a lusty paddling with a wooden spoon. Several rings on several fingers winked even in the misty gloom of a March evening along the route that lay, however roundabout, between day-labour and home. Her hips asserted themselves against the woolly integument containing them.

And tea leaves, too, Papa Malkovic said.

The aroma of the stew, beginning to bubble in the scuttle-sized cauldron, floated upwards and hung in the dampness like a vague temptation. Sophia, fully squatted beside the fire with her brown face burnished and iridescent in its flickering glow, began to hum. From somewhere nearby – the sanctum of the fog-shrouded caravan itself or perhaps Blackleg’s distant shanty – there came a kind of music in accompaniment or in sympathy at least: a squeeze-box slightly out of breath or merely shredded by the fog as it deepened with the oncoming night.

I gotta be goin’, Gabe said, touching his cap. Good luck on your journey.

Papa Malkovic smiled but no humour made its way through. Good luck to you on your own, Gabriel Goodfellow.

Gabe tipped his cap again in Sophia Malkovic’s direction, turned slowly, and headed off towards the park and the village beyond it. But just before he did so, he was certain he saw the velvet flap which served as a curtain on the high back window of the caravan move ever so slightly to expose a pair of eyes that bore into his departure with something more telling than relief. But when he felt comfortable enough to peer back, the night-mist had curled itself around the rear of the Gypsies’ schooner, obscuring even the glow of the campfire. In doing so, however, it left barren a segment of the side wall of the exotic vehicle, and made momentarily visible the faded and once-florid inscription thereon. Gabe read:

THE BOHEMIAN AND INTERNATIONAL CARNIVAL

SIDESHOW AND WILD ANIMAL CIRCUS

Beneath this proclamation and to either side of it, a serpent of prodigious proportion and venomous intent wound and unwound itself. The mist closed over it so quickly that Gabe was not certain that he had not imagined it.

He began to walk briskly through the ghost-trees along the edge of the park. He could have closed his eyes and marched with unerring impunity, so well did he know this area of his boyhood meandering. Suddenly he stopped. Dead still. He listened, leaning deeply into the silence. The fog, now rolling in off the River and the Lake on a late-winter nor’-westerly, boiled around him. He scarcely noticed. From the ground off to his right, where he knew the clearing around the pavilion to be, he heard the high, unfettered cries of children driven by delight. Then the rhythmic bray of barkers and shills, and the organ-dance of a steam calliope. Something in him, lost but not irretrievable, moved towards the music, towards the siren song of the carousel, towards the heraldry of horses impossibly bright. Teddy was calling out to him, they were hand-in-hand again, inhaling the camphor of sawdust and onions, the Ferris wheel spinning its truth-or-dare above them like a colossal Catherine wheel on the Queen’s birthday.

For a long moment after the music and carnival cries had faded, Gabe Goodfellow stood at the edge of Bayview Park and could not think which way he was to go, was not sure even that he was anywhere between work and home, labour and ease, daylight and dusk. Teddy was gone, as so many were, riding the westward rails, their families scattered amidst those that God and Mr. King were kind enough to number among the employed or maiden aunts with a life’s savings dwindled but not quite used up.

In the end his feet made up their own mind, as feet often do, and he was once again headed south onto St. Clair and towards Alexander. He was all the way to the Monument – with its gaunt, austere entablature, its roll-call of battles whose names though unpronounceable etched themselves upon the eye, its crown a simple bust of the unknown soldier whose name though various was exactly known to those whose grief still sanctified remembrance – before he realized he was whistling. And as he wheeled west again onto Alexander and towards his mother’s house, he had already discovered the what that had been eluding him and that now constituted the perfect predicate to that disruptive question. He had even begun to formulate the answer he would offer to its impudence.

CHAPTER 2

"Car nival?" Blossom said as if he had just taken the Lord’s name in vain with the whole congregation agog. She gave the nearest pork chop an extra slap with the spatula, sending beads of grease flying onto her apron and over her already freckled forearms.

When I was a kid, we always had a carnival on the twenty-fourth, Gabe said, an’ then the fireworks afterwards.

Well, you ain’t been a kid for some time now, Blossom said, turning just far enough away from him to let him know there were more immediate demands on her necessarily limited attention. The aroma of pork chops and home fries with onions was making its own demands on Gabe’s concentration. For a moment he was content to breathe it in, and savour the brown, muscled forearms of his wife, supple as a matched pair of brook trout and twice as strong (the kind he and Teddy pulled out of the icy streams of Grey County every spring except the last one). Strange, when you thought about it, that her arms made the rest of her body all that much whiter under the moon-stroked sheets, and when they gripped or tensed as they needed to or not, how soft was their insistence, how reticent their purchase.

We ain’t had a carnival of any sort here since the Depression started, Gabe said.

Blossom gave him the look usually reserved for Rosie whenever she concluded she was far too consumptive to make it to the end of the block let alone the schoolyard three streets away. Maybe that’s got somethin’ to do with the Depression, she said more to the nicely crisping potatoes than anything else in the vicinity.

People need a bit of cheerin’ up, Gabe said.

The front door squealed open and slammed. Rosie, as was only too common of late, went straight up to her room.

That girl’s gonna need a talkin’ to.

I bet City folk’d come down here in droves, Gabe said. Carnivals’ve been banned there since twenty-nine.

She’s gettin’ about two sizes too big for her britches.

Suddenly Gabe wanted to put an end to the foolhardiness of talk. He wanted to slink up behind his wife, wrap both arms around her till her compliant breasts that had no shape of their own, acquiesced to the urgent bevelling of his coal-man’s grip, and then squeeze till she harrumphed, dug an elbow into the rib God ripped out to render Eve, and waggled her rump against him in a movement that was never entirely dismissive.

The talking carried right on.

We could make some money for the town, he said, an’ give the kids an’ grownups somethin’ to do together.

Gert Murphy may be her cousin, but that don’t make her fit company for your daughter, Blossom said. She turned the gas down under the chops and peered beneath the lid of a steaming pot that gasped once before it was throttled.

Gabe was about to say ‘They’re only kids’ but realized just in time that he had said the very same thing yesterday or the day before when Rosie had come in a half-hour late – her face beaming with the kind of bliss that didn’t come from homework done over Gert Murphy’s dining-room table.

Blossom began to set the table while Gabe watched. She gave no hint that she was being observed and appreciated, but still there was in every gesture the sense of a performance, infinitely rehearsed and lovingly repeated (this was Gabe’s particular opinion). How could such a capacious body – freighted with its fulcrum of bone and generous pendula of flesh – move so nimbly, dealing plate and cup and utensil with