Going to Church in the Strawberry Patch

Trying to Grow Up In Spite of Myself

A Memoir by Tom Bessette

Copyright 2009 BessetteBooks

Chapter 2
Childhood and Timidity

I couldn’t even look at food, hardly. 
Only cereal; Cheerios or Frosted Flakes with sugar liberally covering, dissolving in milk, and not much of that.
The red dots covered me all over, a rash spread evenly, picking at them, sometimes bleeding.
Weeks passed and my muscles withered. My skin became thin and translucent,veins showing through, bones rising to the surface.
Came a morning when the skin wore away and my bones started to emerge.
 I stroked the polished wood, peeling away the edges of skin, worried lest I peel too far and my skin completely fall away.

I panic and run to my mother, crying.

Ok, so I was born November 16th 1955 in Cohoes, New York, in the Cohoes Hospital, right where Lincoln Avenue changed to Congress Street. The hospital was later torn and replaced by a Central Market which even later became a Price Chopper Supermarket.  The family lived in Waterford at that time in the big old rambling house owned by my Grandfather Odilas (Pip) along with several of my mother’s siblings and their assorted kids.  I was the youngest of our crowd and the story goes that when my parents brought me home squalling, my brother Pete, who was just shy of sixteen at the time, promptly went and hid in the tower closet.  I have always maintained that our relationship started on that bad note and went quickly downhill from there.

My parents were devout Catholics and part of their creed was to accept children willingly from God regardless of how inconvenient another mouth to feed might be.  The rhythm method was the accepted form of birth control, rarely practiced. I was six years younger than my brother Bob and always guessed that I wasn’t exactly planned for.  My parents had just sealed the deal of buying Pip’s old Cohoes homestead on Central Avenue and we moved there when I was about three weeks old, shortly before Christmas that year. 

I have a clear memory of my mother telling me, when I was about four years old, that I would have a baby brother or sister. I remember the day (vaguely, but it’s there) when she had to go to the hospital for the miscarriage.  She was thirty-eight when I was born so would have been forty-two or so then, so no wonder.  I have a feeling that she breathed a secret sigh of relief that day, though she never discussed it further, certainly not with me.

My mother, Marietta was a stay-at-home mom, as was the custom in our neighborhood and class in life, and my early formative years left no special impression on me. The early memories I do have center around dreams and fantasy. For one thing, I have a clear memory of all of us kids lining up in the kitchen for our weekly spankings, which my sisters amusedly tell me is a figment of my imagination.  In retrospect I do know that though my parents weren’t ‘New Age’ by any means, the term not then even coined, they were not corporal punishers, and I have no other specific memory of ever being hit at all, much less spanked.

Sue does tell a story, however, about being spanked for telling the truth. While they still lived in the big Waterford homestead,  the Fallons lived downstairs and dad considered Mr. Fallon to be a terrible driver and said so, in his thoughtless way, to everyone who happened by.  The Fallons, one day, invited Sue out for a drive to get an ice cream cone, a huge treat then, and dad said she couldn’t go.  When Mr. Fallon asked why, Sue innocently repeated word for word my father’s comments about his driving, whereupon Mr. Fallon rushed upstairs and gave dad hell.  Sue says she was confused for years about being punished for telling the truth, something politicians know all about, and so avoid like the plague.

I contracted the usual array of diseases including Chicken Pox, Measles and Mumps.  I have an absolutely clear memory of being so sick with the pox or measles that I couldn’t eat a thing and started to get so skinny the shape of my bones showed through.  Then there was the time that I got constipated and my mother gave me an enema.  Sue wrestled me onto the bed, a thick canvass sheet under me; mom advancing ominously with a large, red rubber bladder filled with water.  Sue held me down strongly, me screaming, crying, and twisting every which way, mom inserting the business end of the bladder into my business end, and squeezing.  Expanded, drum tight, press and gush. Yeah!

I had imaginary friends. My brothers and sisters were considerably older than I was, and not especially interested in being playmates. Before I was old enough to go wandering around the neighborhood alone, I had to make up my own friends.  There were three I remember, though my mother later claimed more, and one is very indistinct in my mind, probably not a completely developed personality (I’m sounding like Sybil here!).  The strong, tough, distant one was named Peter Waterford.  He was always in control, older, commanding, and not especially friendly.  He would always enthusiastically and forcefully suggest things to do, and then get distracted by something else, and never actually play with me.  It was pretty pathetic having an imaginary friend who wouldn’t spend time with me but there it is.

I liked Upside Down Boy a lot better.  He was kinda shy like me, not strong or confident, and he was always there for me and willing to follow me off on any adventure, true and blue.  He was disabled after all: he was permanently bent one hundred and eighty degrees at the waist so that his knees and head were at the same height, head upside down.  I had to speak for him, him being imaginary and all, and I’d always get terrible cramps doing so and my mother was worried about me for a long time, I was so sore.  She finally got the reason out of me one day, that I had to bend way over sideways to talk like Upside Down Boy, you see, and I’m not sure she was comforted by the knowledge.  Peter Waterford and Upside Down Boy were with me for years and provided their own modicums of torment and comfort in lonely times.

My other early memories are of my father and start when I was about four to five years old and able to start following him around, asking questions, and becoming somewhat more interesting to him.  He was not a diaper changer or a feeder and didn’t really know what to do with babies, as I saw for myself in later years when his grandchildren started being born.  He was, however, great with kids who could communicate and follow simple directions.

I understand from family lore that he was very much into sports and athleticism in general. Stories of him pushing Pete’s or Judy’s baby carriage up and down three flights of stairs when they lived on the Cohoes Island abound.  He would be off to play basketball in the summer or hockey in the winter with the neighbor teens and young adults, the latest child watching or nestling in the carriage parked at the side of the court or rink, properly dressed by my mother.

By the time I showed up, his sports days were waning as he was becoming more sedentary in his salesman’s job, and five kids worth of responsibility were curtailing his evening and weekend sporting activities. He started orchestrating more low key family activities, especially those that cost little or no money.  I do remember extended periods of imaginative meals and disappointing birthdays, now and then.

Every June, we would head out to the wild strawberry patches he knew so well, and we all learned to pick and tail the berries and put them in the pot, as opposed to eating them until we got sick.  We would go picking after supper and on Sunday afternoons; sometimes in fields along the canal in Waterford, sometimes in the hills beyond the tracks near our house.  A common and welcome cry would be “Monsterinos” and we would all rush to help whoever found them pick all we could.  Regular wild strawberries, though incredibly sweet and tasty, were pretty small and you had to pick, and tail, a lot to fill a saucepan.  Finding Monsterinos made your work much easier, and when your pan was filled, only then could you eat.  So, the quest for Monsterinos was incessant, often at the expense of perfectly sweet and tasty berries at hand.  We kids could easily squat to pick, remembering my mother’s stern warning not to come home with our clothes all strawberry stains, which were hard to get out.  My father was less concerned about her demands, however, and would simply plop down sitting in the middle of a patch, trying to miss ripe berries, but invariably plumping his broad keister on at least two or three craftily hidden, extra ripe berries.  Consequently, he always returned home with quarts of perfect berries and square inches of red and purple stains on the seat of his pants.  My mother would chew my father out about his derrière, yet again, and then boil the berries in a big stock pot with tons of sugar, and we would have exceptionally juicy strawberry… well I don’t know what to call it but we used it in strawberry shortcake, spread it on toast, poured it on pancakes and she baked it in pies and then froze the rest for the fall and winter.

Even after the older kids got bored with berry picking, I kept it up with dad well into my early teens.  My father made a huge mistake when I was thirteen.  One of his friend’s sons had moved to Malta and told my father that the commercial apple orchard across the street from his house was blessed with proper Monsterino patches under nearly every tree.  We investigated and found it was true and started picking there instead of keeping up with our traditional migrating patches.  Why not take the easy road, huh? Strawberry patches produce in cycle and you have to keep scouting year after year to be aware of when patches are producing and when not.  These apple orchard patches were fertilized and produced year after year so no scouting was necessary, and we got spoiled and lazy. A few years into this bounty and the owner put a stop to our picking for some reason that we never knew, and that was that.  We were strangers to our former patches and instead of re-scouting and rebuilding our relationship, strawberry picking ended with a thump. Just in the last few years have I been trying to find new patches, with minimal success; everything is posted or developed now, so there.

My father and I had stupid berry picking adventures when I was still preschool age.  He had scouted new patches along the Waterford shore of the river near the falls and also found a few really good ones up beyond the Waterford Rural Cemetery.  Many times I was the only one that was up to chasing off with him, and I know that that willingness, coupled with the older ones becoming less interested, is what created our special strong bond. As he was entering a stage of life when he wanted to spend real time with his kids, his older kids were starting to break away.  I was his little mouse, little boy.

Once when we were up near the falls, the patch we were picking in had a lot of real tall grass; at least it was tall to me who could hardly see three feet away on my tiptoes.  My father, ever the practical joker, wandered away without saying anything while I was engrossed with some Monsterinos.  After a while, becoming aware that I could not hear his usual humming (he hummed whenever employed in repetitive relaxing behavior) I sprang up to see where my daddy was.  I was happy to be with him but not very secure in my world, and I remember distinctly being very clingy, but only to him.  I immediately panicked when I couldn’t see him and started yelling through tears, “where are you daddy I can’t see you, where are you, daddy…DADDY!”  I knew for certain that he had left me for some reason, probably just forgot about me, I was so small, and was home already eating supper and nobody thought to ask about me and I was left in this field far from home all alone to die, Oh God!  I screamed and wandered forever, it seemed, until suddenly a big bear reared up right in front of me, roaring, and I peed my pants and collapsed in a heap crying and my father was picking me up saying, “It’s OK, I’m here, don’t cry, I wouldn’t leave you… why are you wet?”

Later, maybe that same year or maybe the year after, we were up beyond the cemetery on an early Sunday morning when we were supposed to be in church, a good fifteen minute walk from the car, and having a great Monsterino day, when dad decided it was time to head home so as to arrive consistent with coming from church.  We had taken great care in not getting stains on our pants and had been as successful in that regard as we were in finding Monsterinos.  I’m not sure how he intended explaining the berry crop, and never gave it a thought. 

When we got to the car after a long and exhausting walk, he couldn’t find his keys.  I watched him search each pocket, saying things in a frustrated voice that I hadn’t heard before: words with one, two and three and four syllables, some with a word I knew: ‘mother’, included in there, so I thought maybe my mother had found us out and snuck up and taken the keys or something. In fact, one of the words with mother in it also had a part that sounded like snuck, so this made perfect sense. Maybe she was hiding off a ways, laughing and laughing, though come to think of it, it was a far drive and how did she get here because she didn’t drive, and it wasn’t something she would ever do anyway.  I said that to dad and he said, “No Goddammit they must have fallen out of my Goddamn pocket and are lying somewhere in the berry patch for Christ’s sake, Jesus Kee Ko, Goddammit, Christ, we’ll never find them.”  Grumble, mumble, grrr, growl, grumble, mumble, mumble.

Dad decided that we had to go for help, and after another long exhausting walk with lots more cool new words, we got to my Uncle Bud and Aunt Lu’s place just as they were getting home from church.  Dad used their phone and called Berdar’s gas station and they sent a guy that was able to get us into the car and get it started, that is after we walked the long exhausting walk back to the car to meet him.  Dad said even more cool words with three and four syllables, still saying mother once in a while, though I don’t know as he really thought she was behind this.  We drove home and talked a lot about church and car keys and holes in pockets and the like and I don’t think my mother was surprised at anything we said. She just went quietly to her rocker on the back porch to read her book.  Next Sunday, during church, we went picking in the same area, and lo and behold, I saw a glint next to some Monsterinos and there were his keys, right next to a squashed strawberry plant, so it came out all right.  We didn’t tell mom.

Another regular outing was a trip to the canal.  We lived very near the eastern terminus of the Erie Canal, called the Barge Canal, and this was back when shipping by canal was still more common and economical than shipping by truck.  The Waterford Flight was a series of five locks bringing the canal from the level of the Hudson River up to the level of the Mohawk River above the Cohoes Falls and the power dams just below Halfmoon. My father was, and I became, fascinated with how the laden barges would be piloted by tugboat into the locks with inches to spare on all sides.  In that period, roughly 1959 through probably 1964 when we were doing this a few nights a week, our society was less litigious, and consequently there were no insurance inspired rules about what we could do.  I was jauntily stepping onto barges at four and five years old, hopping across the eight inches of lock water to skip around on the deck of an oil tanker barge, visiting the crew on the tug and often riding with them to the next lock in the series, either walking back to the car or hitching a ride back on a barge headed in the opposite direction. 

My father told of spending whole days on the canal and river, swimming out to passing barges and tugs, riding them twenty or thirty miles west on the canal, diving off to swim to, and board, another boat that was heading east, and getting back home by nightfall.  Even in the later years of the canal, when I was first seeing it, you would still see at least five or six barges go through the locks in an evening, and I felt there would be nothing more romantic than being a lock tender or a tugboat captain when I grew up. 

It was scary being on the high bridge over an empty lock, staring thirty or more feet down the canyon-like walls, watching these behemoth barges creep into the lock.  The gates are massive things and made a loud grating machinery sound as they were opening and closing.  I was scared of but drawn to the giant whirlpools that would form on the high water end as the locks were filling, knowing all too well that the water was being essentially sucked down through man sized tunnels from the up water end into the lock below, and I knew what would happen to me if I leaned too closely and fell in.  Needless to say, my father was never too much on hovering over his little boy, instead was always engaged in raucous banter with the lock tender and crew and I was always allowed to roam and lean and twitch with fear wherever and whenever I wanted.

The canal excursions were more plentiful than strawberry picking trips because the strawberries were only in season for about three weeks in June but the canal was open from April through November most years.  Canal season was also less vexing to my mother because our pants were much less likely to come home stained, and he rarely took me to the canal during church.

It is interesting to note that my mother rarely came with us on any of these family outings.  Mom was never an athletic or outdoor type, and we would often get home to find her in her rocker on the porch, working a crossword puzzle or reading a magazine or book.  I think she relished her times alone, the kids gone (including my father), no immediate household chores, no one wanting her for a few hours.  Other than stains and church habit issues, she never was opposed to my father taking off with one or more of us for any amount of time.

My father was expert in the mostly dry riverbed above the Cohoes Falls.  He had spent the days of his boyhood, when not riding barges, swimming and fishing in the spring fed waterholes that dotted the river bed.  There were two power dams erected above the falls that essentially cut off the flow of the river to the falls.  In high water times, when the water flowed in force over the top of the dams, you couldn’t go down there, but in summer when there was less rain there would only be the waterholes and a stream meandering around the slate bed above the falls.  We had to scale shaly, crumbling eighty foot cliffs on the Waterford side to get down to the riverbed, with only poison ivy vines to hold onto for support.  To this day I can grab poison ivy in my hand and suffer no ill effects.  I have always struggled, however with a strong fear of heights.  My father would hold on to the waist of my shorts and kind of drag me down the cliffs, me scrabbling to hold on wherever I could, he scrabbling and sliding himself.  We always made it, and I was always scared to death the whole way down.  He maintained that when he was a boy, he and his friends would have races scaling the ‘Point’ which was the steepest and most dangerous way to get down, and he was the record holder with a time of thirteen seconds.  I believe that thirteen seconds is exactly the time it would take to free fall from the top of the cliff to the shale riverbed below, falling to one’s death.

On the riverbed, he would tell me all about the age of the dams and how someday they would ‘bust’, meaning break, and allow the dammed up, pent up river to rush down over the falls, sweeping everything with it. Forty-five years later they still haven’t busted, but all the while we were wandering the riverbed I was highly nervous. 

There were named waterholes including the Baby Hole, the Second Hole, the Third Hole, the Bubble and the like, all spring fed with fresh clear water, which was interesting in that this was at a time when the river in general was as polluted as it would ever get with everything from raw sewage to industrial waste.  Most parents would have passed out thinking their kids were so much as touching river water with their big toe, but this water was cleaner than many Adirondack Lakes.

I learned to swim in the Baby Hole, so named because it was relatively small and shallow and only babies bothered to swim there.  It was about the size of a modern backyard swimming pool and it had a mossy underwater shelf to sit on, and as the main stream passed through there, you could let the current take you and slide you into the deeper end.  You had to be careful because if you gained enough momentum to go over the downstream lip of the hole, you would quickly and efficiently drift to the brink of and over the seventy foot high falls, perhaps landing in the deep pool at the bottom, and live.  So, part of learning to swim was learning to swim away from that bottom lip when it was approaching.  My father would often give me pointers and instruction on how to stay away from the lip, but just as often would be off exploring and I would avoid the lip on my own.

My father told a story that even at five years old I had a hard time believing.  On the riverbed at the top of the falls you can walk right to the brink and look down the sheer cliff to the giant pool below.  Dad claims it is well over a hundred feet deep and I believe that OK.  What seemed incredible was that he claimed to have jumped off there many times, falling the seventy foot height of the falls, cannonballing into the water.  He offered to show me anytime but I always begged him not to, knowing for sure he was making it up, as it was obvious to me that anyone would die horribly if they attempted it.  I also knew better than to tell mom because, well, dad and I just didn’t tell her adventurous things like picking Monsterinos during church and jumping off the falls.  She would get all worked up and we avoided that as a convenience issue.

Years later I mentioned it to Mom long after she would get upset and she said that it was, in fact, truth. She told of a time when they were still dating in 1938 and he had talked her and her sister Bert into climbing down to the brink of the falls with him, a show of young male bravado that they thought better of, but still went.  He was telling them the same story of his jumping in when Bert called him on it, telling him that nobody would do such a thing.  Dad took the bait and much to their horror, immediately stepped to the edge without another word and jumped out and down in a near perfect swan dive, then rotating and landing feet first in the water way down there, followed all the way down by the sound of their uncontrollable shrieking back at the top.  So, it was true.  I wonder how one decides to do such a thing for the first time.

In the summer before I turned six, my father decided it was time he and I climbed the falls.  I was silently worried as usual.  Very apprehensive.  In fact, I was scared shitless. My father would have not insisted I go if I had said no, but I wanted to be brave and always wanted to go with him; what if I said no and he decided he wouldn’t take me anywhere again?  I’d have to stay home with mom and pick up my room or set the table.  No, I bucked it up and went with dad. 

The cliffs below the falls are even higher than those above, close to one hundred fifty feet, but had even more poison ivy to hang on to so we made it down ok.  We planned to climb the relatively easy center, or ‘nose’ of the falls, so of course we had to swim about fifty yards across the big pool to get to the base.  I wasn’t swimming yet so my father kind of pushed me ahead, yanking me back up whenever I started to sink too far.  He would breaststroke, shove me ahead, I’d go under, he’d yank me up, breaststroke again, push me ahead again, I’d go under again… all the way across.  We stood at the bottom of the nose, the falls looming hugely to the little guy I was, dad saying, “Jesus Kee Ko I hope the dam doesn’t bust”; he couldn’t tell I peed my pants at that because we were already wet from swimming.  Phew! We climbed up pretty much using the same technique that we used to swim over.  He’d push me up a few feet, hold me there with a powerful arm while he scrabbled and slipped up a ways and yank me back up whenever I started to fall too precipitously, then push me up farther, holding me mostly by the seat of my pants, scrabble up again himself, grab me as I started to fall again, and in this way we made it up to the Bubble.

At the  brink of the nose of the falls, the stream winds a bit and then falls about twenty feet to a notch in the cliff of the falls where it has made a ten foot wide pothole called the Bubble Hole, fifty feet up from the bottom.  The water crashes around a bit here and then bubbles back up and spills out to fall the rest of the way.  Of course my father wanted to take a swim here so we did, and he kept having to catch me as I was bubbling up towards the spill way.  After about twenty minutes of that delicious fun, we were able to pretty easily, for him, scrabble and skitter up the last twenty feet or so to the brink of the falls, my vertigo calling me every step of the way.

At the top, he turned me around to enjoy the expansive view of the riverbed below the falls as it stretched away to a little boy’s infinity.  My knees were weak, my pants were wet and I was just starting to worry about the dam again when he gasped and said, “Jesus Kee Ko the dam busted, run.”  I started to run in the wrong direction, away from the dam, but there was only space, we being on the brink of the falls.  He grabbed me in time and forcibly turned me around. I wouldn’t look up because I was afraid to see the terrible wall of water rushing to wash us over the falls. I tried running off along the brink, and immediately fell into the stream heading towards the drop and the Bubble.  He got me in time again and picked me up whimpering, him laughing, saying, “I was only kidding, the dam’s not busted, I’m sorry, it’s OK, don’t cry, look: see, it’s still there.”  He put me down; I fell down, got back up, my arms and legs clattering like a skeleton. 

We walked the few yards up to the Baby Hole for a swim.  I had no control over my arms and was immediately swept over the lip and was floating placidly and efficiently back to the brink, towards the drop to the Bubble, when a rough hand yanked me back up and carried me back to the Point, it being the closest way up the bank.  He pushed me up, my skeleton still clattering away, holding on to poison ivy the best I could, scraping my scabby knees on sharp shale, sliding down a few feet whenever he let go to get a handhold.  We made it up, as we always did, proving as always that my childish fears were groundless.  It was Sunday; he got me home and cleaned up, pants changed and quieted down all before my mother got home.  I think we were supposed to be in church.  My mother asked me if we remembered the collection envelope. I said “sure.”  Dad said: “Let’s go swimming at he falls tomorrow, OK?”  Mom said, “Oh, Leo, are you sure it’s safe?”  He said, “Of course whaddya think anyway,” and I said, “It’s OK, mom, really, it’s real safe, I wanna go.”  Because if I stayed home she’d think I should sweep the floor or something. Or, go to church.

Going to church was something you were supposed to do when you were a Catholic as I was.  It was lucky we were Catholics too because the priests and nuns said that only Catholics could go to heaven and everybody else had to go to hell and burn up in the fire they kept going down there.  You had to go to church on Sunday to make sure you didn’t burn, and they encouraged you to go every day just to be on the safe side. My father made it easier, though, by often having our church at the Monsterino patches or on the riverbed. When we did go, I was always confused because the guy up front, Father Robitaille, talked weird and I couldn’t understand him all the time.  Sometimes he spoke in French, which I could understand OK, but other times he talked something my dad said was Latin, and I think I wasn’t the only one who had no idea what he was saying.  My understanding, though, what little I got from it, was that it was a good thing we were there because the rest of the people who weren’t there would burn in hell when they died. Oh, and give money.

Dad told me that there were people that weren’t Catholic and that always confused me; why would someone choose to go to hell instead of church.  The nuns told us in school about Protestants and Jews, all bad people that we better not go near in case their godlessness wore off on us and then we’d have to burn in hell too. Whatever they had was catchy, I guess. What were they thinking, especially when it was pretty clear that berry picking and swimming counted as church.  It was so easy!

I felt bad for Al Sebastian next door because he wasn’t Catholic, so he told me, but he was nice and let me eat the grapes that he grew near his garage. I told him too bad you have to burn in hell and he said he’d rather do that than go spit in church. Well, anyway, it sounded like he said spit.  So I guess it was true about him doomed to be burning in hell.  Too bad.

Al was my friend and would let me follow him around while he weeded and watered his tomatoes.  I think he grew stuff besides grapes and tomatoes but those are what I remember eating.  Evenings, I would squeeze between and through the lilac bushes between our yards and spend hours with him, filling old coffee cans with water from his basement sink and bringing them out to him to pour measured amounts at the base of his plants.  He always gave us the extras from his garden, knowing full well we could use them for our meals, and gave me extra grapes because I was such a good friend and helper.  He was a pretty good guy for someone so evil and destined to burn in hell for not being Catholic.

He had a brother named Charlie who dad said was something called a bookie.  I thought it was just that he read a lot.  He was younger than Al and wore fancy clothes: shiny pants and two-color shoes, and his hair was always slicked straight back.  Sometimes he had lots of money and would give all the neighborhood kids quarters and dollar bills for ice cream and candy at Fishers.  Other times he was crabby and asking Al for extra time for the rent. My father stayed pretty much away from him; if he went too close my mother would yell that he’d lose their grocery money, but I could never figure out what all that had to do with reading books anyway.

Al had a wife, at least for a while, because in the evenings after watering, I would join them at their basement door and they would sit side by side, not talking, just enjoying the breeze, while I told of Barges and Tugboats and Baby Holes and Monsterinos.  After a while his wife would no longer be there.  I didn’t want to ask Al because he never mentioned her even when she was around, so maybe he didn’t remember her or something.  I asked my parents and they said they didn’t know what happened to her; they asked around the neighborhood and no one seemed to know.  Judy said that because his tomatoes were suddenly getting big and ripe, it was obvious that Al had killed her and buried her in his garden and she was now being fertilizer.  Dad said maybe, mom said, “Oh, stop it!”  I tried to find out by asking Al if he was using any special fertilizer lately, and digging my little shovel deeper when weeding, worried about finding Mrs. Sebastian.  I had a clear vision of clunking my shovel against her leg, in amongst the roots and worms. I could see her brown high heeled shoe, half filled with dirt, encasing her partly rotted foot. I remember her as always being well dressed but never knew her name.  I asked dad and he said he didn’t know either and after a while I was convinced that there never had been a Mrs. Sebastian, that I had dreamed her just like the weekly spankings I remembered so clearly.  Judy kept saying, though, that she had existed and was buried in the garden.  He sure did get big tomatoes for a few years, there.

The Charlebois’ lived on the other side of Al from us.  Joan was about my age and we would play girlie stuff like House and Dolls when there were no other boys around to tease me.  About the time that Mrs. Sebastian went into the garden, Joan got a big German Shepard dog named Heidi that liked to smell around in Al’s garden.  Judy thought Heidi smelled Mrs. Sebastian but Al said no, she just liked to shit in his tomatoes.  He would say very loudly, “That dog shits like a man.”  He said it to everyone who wandered by and pretty soon Mr. Charlebois stopped talking to him and Joan couldn’t come into his yard anymore to eat grapes with me.  Al would scoop up the big turds with a shovel and fling them into Joan’s yard, which I thought was right, being that it really belonged to the Charlebois’ and Al shouldn’t keep it. For a while Mr. Charlebois would fling it back when Al wasn’t looking. I guess he wanted Al to have it or something. Must have been good shit.

Mr. Charlebois was way cool because he had a second faucet in his sink that was actually a beer tap.  He worked hard at being a plumber all day and needed his beer when he got home so he could face Mrs. Charlebois; at least that’s what my father said. I always pictured him standing with his back to her until the beer kicked in and he could turn around. There was something very sophisticated about drawing a cold beer at your kitchen sink, and I think my father secretly wished he had one too but didn’t know how to do it, so didn’t.  I think Mr. Charlebois invited him over once in a while and that satisfied him.

Mr. Miller was an interesting guy who rarely spoke and lived across the street and to the right of our house, next door to the old Washoline Soap Factory.  He was older than God; in fact in 1960 he was ninety years old; I think God was only about fifty-two at the time.  When he did speak, he always said he intended to make it to one hundred, and my dad said he thought he would.  He planted a large garden every year and supplied us with considerable numbers of tomatoes and cucumbers over the course of the summer.  He was popular with the kids because of his pears, though.  He had two pear trees out back and in late August and September you’d be walking by his yard and he’d be there, wordlessly holding a crumpled paper bag over the fence; you knew you were in for a treat then.  He made ninety-nine but died before he hit his hundredth birthday. The pears and vegetables stopped, just like that.  I was mad at God for a while because it would have been so easy to let him live a few more months before killing him off.

About crumpled paper bags, Francis Archambeault was an expert.  He would sit on the front stoop of his house on Lancaster Street and wave his crumpled paper bag at passersby.  He would squeeze the base of the bag into a handle of sorts, leaving the top open. I never was able to understand what its purpose was and his mother simply never spoke to anyone, ever, as far as I knew, so we couldn’t ask her.

He had Down Syndrome (my father called him a Mongoloid) and was well into his twenties when I was little.  He had a beard and was balding and his hair was graying. His mother would let him come into George Street Park and ride the horsie swings.  He talked funny, and though he was big and old looking, he talked as if he were even younger than us, and he was interested in the type of things we were.  To him, I was Tommy Beejay, the best he could do with my name. Boy, we would get those Horsie swings really moving, and the creaking chain sound they made remains one of my strong memories growing up. Hearing the chains from my yard told me somebody my age was in the park and I should go play. Francis had seen a few generations of kids and had stayed at the park, on the Horsie swings, as groups grew out of his age range.  One summer he never came to the park. He was gone. No announcement, no comments by anyone, just gone.  I no longer saw him as I passed his house on the way to the market, calling out Tommy Beejay and shaking his bag at me. My dad said it was for the best, whatever it was.

Our house was almost directly across the street from the old soap factory which had gone out of business a few years before I was born.  It was a big four story oblong brick building and was a magnet for all the kids in the neighborhood.  When I was still barely old enough to go outside on my own, I would watch the bigger kids throw rocks at the windows, and in time every one of them, every shard of glass, was burst through and lying on the floor inside.  The highest ones were the hardest to reach and lasted a few years.  They could have been broken sooner but all the mothers in the neighborhood would come storming out to the street at the first smash and tinkle and the big kids would high tail it down the ravine to keep from being identified as the perpetrators.  The next day the same kids would say, responsibly, to the adults, “Oh what a shame those bullies from such and such a street are coming down here and breaking the soap factory windows, what a shame, if we ever catch them we’ll kick the tar out of them, the bastards.” Stupid adults believed them, of course.

As my crowd got older we became the ones to defile the soap factory.  The windows had all been broken already, too bad, but we broke the doors and started exploring the old building.  Every wall, every surface, was covered with a thick grayish scum that my father said was soap scum just like you get in the tub when mom doesn’t wash it enough.  This was much thicker and ashier and didn’t smell like Bob’s socks so I knew it was different.  We would run and hide all through the building, even venturing up to the scary  fourth floor with the floorboards that were rotting through so that they would bend under you when you got too far away from the walls.  We would get braver and braver until one of the neighborhood mothers would start yelling for us to “come out of there, it’s filthy and dangerous,” like mothers are always doing because they’re not into adventurous things.

We weren’t much bothered by the mad mothers, but the thought of being caught by the police was something else again.  The big kids had told us all about how the police try hardest to catch little kids and throw them in jail with only bread and water forever and how you get so skinny your bones show through, and no candy!  Your parents couldn’t get you out either because once the police had you, they kept you forever.  Even parents said this when some kids were bad and the parents threatened that if you kept being bad the police would take you.  Goddamn cops, the bastards, Jesus Kee Ko.

So, Petie, Mortie and I were daring each other to go in the soap factory one summer after supper, and we teased each other so much that finally I mustered up the courage to be the one to go in.  We were especially concerned that night because the police cars had been cruising our street, something about a stick fight between older boys, and we just knew that giving them an excuse to throw some more kids in jail was pretty stupid.  But, I went in, worried about peeing my pants. Most kids I knew thought peeing in your pants was really embarrassing, but not so Petie Paulsen. He hated stopping what he was doing to go to the bathroom and usually spent most of his outside playing time with a wet stain in his crotch, he didn’t care. 

Anyway, I got all the way up to the scary fourth floor and was sagging on rotted, creaking floorboards when I heard the police siren start up.  It got closer and louder and Mortie started screaming at the top of his lungs, “Tom, the police are coming, get out of there, they’re gonna catch you and throw you in jail, Tom, come on, hurry, hurry, hurry,” his voice fading to a scratchy screech, as the siren got louder and louder.  I had scrambled and slipped and fallen down to the second floor, Mortie’s increasingly hoarse, ragged screams in my ears the whole way, when the cop car got to our block, slowed at he soap factory, siren wailing, me peeing my pants, and then it sped on by up the street. I near passed out with relief and staggered down the last flight and out the door. Mortie was breathless from his screaming, my mother was striding across the street saying, “Oh, Tom, that place is filthy and dangerous, why look at the soap scum all over you and what did you do in your pants, and get home and into the tub young man and wait until your father gets home.”  But, I escaped going to prison so I was OK. Dad never worried too much about peed pants anyway.

Mortie Hoess was my best friend and sworn enemy, and lived on the other side of the ravine.  He was a bit prissy, and at precisely 3PM on summer days his mom would yell out their second floor front window, “Mortieeee it’s time for your fizzieees,” and all the kids would echo her, “Mortieeeeeee it’s time for your fizzieees,” and he would turn red and go in for his medicine, or whatever the hell Fizzies were. We were both small and weak and shy and so could only beat up on each other when we disagreed, which we did at every opportunity. We never did any harm; we never threw punches, worried lest the other punch back and it would hurt.  We would push and struggle and clasp each other until we fell to the ground, rolling in dog poop and spiders and mud, the rest of the gang watching disinterestedly.  Mortie was fair and freckly and his mother didn’t let him wander too far out of sight.  He’d get scolded when he came in after one of our disagreements; his mom didn’t much like spiders and poop on his clothes I guess. I think she really didn’t like me because somehow he always got dirty when he was with me, I don’t know how. He always hummed when he ran, imitating a fast car I guess.  We would run together and come up with ever more creative and intricate humming and motor sounds to help us run faster.

He had a way cool big brother who was into all the popular surfing and hot rod music and he would tolerantly play his Beach Boys and Jan and Dean albums for us in their apartment, telling us what the words really meant.  It was from him that I first realized that the Stingray had beaten the 413 in Shut Down, a life changing revelation, you betcha. 

Mortie’s family moved away a few years later because his dad got transferred or something; actually I never really knew.  Mortie hummed over to say goodbye one day out of the blue, and they got in the car and left.  If I hadn’t seen all four of them in the car I might have been tempted to look in Al’s garden when they turned up missing, thinking that maybe Judy was on to something all along.

We had a back porch kind of hooked onto the side of our house.  My mom could open up a screen window in the rear of it and hang the laundry on the clothesline to dry and call me for lunch and supper.  You could hear her voice all the way over to George Street Park.  I was lucky that my mom didn’t know about fizzies, whatever they were; Mortie said they tasted terrible and the last thing I needed was being embarrassed in front of my friends like that. 

Anyway, the porch had no basement, just ground underneath with a kind of lattice work siding and completely open in the rear.  It was a perfect place for a clubhouse.  It became the place where all the area kids would hang out and we made sort of a gang, or club, and I got to be chief because I had the place and wouldn’t let them use it otherwise.  We scrounged chairs and upended buckets and washtubs for seating and invented this intricate pecking order of importance in the gang, I mean club.  The ground under the porch was mostly dry but if we had a whopper storm, a stream would flow down the center and the littlest kids would sit with their feet in the water, kind of like an initiation. 

From my kingly vantage at the high point under the stairs, I would direct our far flung activities, with the help and advice of whoever was in my good graces at the time, meaning whoever was tougher than me and demanding a say.  I would choose one tough after another to be my second in command, and they developed a kind of maneuvering play, ganging up on the latest trusted lieutenant to oust him in a coup, only to be ousted themselves a week (or a day) later.  I was above it all, using ownership (and the cool dad) to play them off of each other, staying above the fray.  They all probably hated me and would have beaten me to a pulp, but the lure of having a cool place to be a gang (I mean club) held them to a grudging respect.  We did have a constant realigning of chairs to maintain whatever the current pecking order might be.

Our activities became ever more extralegal (well, in the eyes of seven year olds anyway) and culminated in an act of cowardice and violence that I have been ashamed of ever since.  Paul Gallucci was weak like me, but without a cool dad and a place for a club. He had a sarcastic voice and the kind of attitude that made him get up, all bloody after having been stomped, to insult the stomper.  So, he was harassed by the toughs, my lieutenants, regularly.  Once, when we were seated in our pecking ordered chairs, Tommy Joyce spotted Gallucci in the park and suggested that the entire gang go and beat the piss out of him.  At first I said no, but the tough lieutenants started saying that if I was such a sissy, maybe they should quit the gang (club) and beat me and Gallucci.  Tommy Joyce called me the ‘Tin Can Man’, which I now realize was amazingly astute for a kid his age (and a dumb one at that). I quickly reversed myself, displaying my hollowness, and ‘explained’, and off went the gang, all fifteen or so, racing through the Indian Trail to the park to take care of the targeted kid.  I lagged behind and stopped, my conscience killing me; they were really going to hurt him and he was my friend, more so than any of the toughs who were my trusted lieutenants. 

My father was home, so I high tailed it up into the house and told him the story, including how I had let it happen.  He got that stormy look he’d get when he was about to be tough, and literally ran out of the house, through the Indian Trail and into the park to stop the stomping.  He quickly broke up the fight, sent the toughs off howling in pain, and picked Paul up and carried him to his house at the edge of the park.  He knew Paul’s parents; he was their insurance man.  He explained the situation and helped clean up blood, told them of my part in the affair and came home and put a permanent end to the gang headquarters under the porch.

I was actually relieved, although I lost my already shaky alliance with the toughs.  They caught me out a few times until dad spoke with their parents in turn, talking about delinquency and their kid’s probable need of large life insurance policies, and after that I was physically left alone, although the ‘Tin Can Man’ moniker lasted for at least three years.  Paul and I were no longer friends and I almost never saw him again.  I have always hated that weakness.  Not the physical weakness of a shy and un-athletic little kid but the moral weakness that allowed me to be an unwilling part of such a situation.

I lived with other weaknesses also, some of which have dogged me well into adulthood.  I don’t really know how I was before the falls climbing trip, but at least since then I have always had to deal with a pretty severe fear of heights.  I am one of those that fears heights as short as about two feet.  I was never able to cross the log over the stream as my friends were able to.  Anything that was at all in the air, especially narrow things, was a special problem.  A really embarrassing time was when I was probably 10 or so and we had headed up to my uncle’s house way up in Battenville, off in the hills of Washington County, with my father’s boss’s family for swimming.  We intended to swim in the Battenkill Creek right below where the paper mill dumped its effluent. The water there was good and green and cloudy and smelled strongly of sulphur.  I now find it interesting that we traveled an hour into the country to swim in polluted water when we had tons of polluted water so close to home. 

At any rate, to get from Uncle Paul’s house to the swimming shore, we had to cross one of those see through steel deck bridges.  The family we were with included two daughters, one my age and very pretty and one about 2 years younger and very sassy.  Everyone tramped off over the bridge without a care in the world and I stopped dead at the edge, unable to proceed.  My father tried everything to get me to step out onto the bridge, coaxing, threatening, cajoling and implying that I was a baby; the sassy daughter called me a baby and a sissy.  I was mortified but still unable to take even one step across.  My father, at length, picked me up bodily and carried my rigid body to the other side; I watched the water underneath with dread, completely clueless as to why my body just shut down at these times.  The pretty one wouldn’t even look at me and the sassy one teased me relentlessly.  I sat on the shore and didn’t swim, enveloped in a cocoon of shame.

I was afraid of just about everything that could be possibly life threatening or damaging.  The Ballargeons’ had an old garage out back of their house with a shed roof sloping down.  All the kids would quickly climb up to the 5 foot high edge of the roof and sit on the tarpaper, jumping off at some point to play another game.  It was understood by the crowd that I would need help climbing up and then would sit for what seemed like forever at the edge, getting up the nerve to jump down like everybody else.  After a while, they just stopped waiting and I would join them at some point well into the next game, weak kneed and defeated again.

Climbing trees was tedious and painful; I attempted to follow the other kids on gravity defying stunts but would invariably freeze up at some point and have to be rescued.  Gerry O’Halloran was bigger than me but even shyer and was usually following our progress from underneath.  He was, then, always available to reach up and grab me out of the tree and bring me to safety.  I would then repay him at some later date by joining in the fatty jokes and teasing him to tears with the other bullies. Stupid kids.

One summer, my father decided (or maybe mom decided for him) that the house needed painting.  As usual there was no need to interview contractors, he would do it himself.  He acquired an old rickety extension ladder and appointed me able helper as usual. I would clean paintbrushes after use and perform the very important task of steadying the ladder while he was aloft. He was using oil based paint so the brushes had to be soaked in turpentine for a while and then cleaned in turpentine and hot water in the soapstone sink in the cellar.  The paint was greasy and hard to get off and the turpentine reeked to the point of being overpowering.  I had to take numerous breaks to run outside for fresh air.

Our house was right next to the bank of the ravine and a narrow shaly path ran down the side between.  It ran at a slant, both downhill towards the back yard and also towards the brink of the ravine.  The house was two stories tall towards the rear and was raised up even higher by the walk out, drive in basement.  My father would take the telescoped ladder and plop it against the house on that side, and then slowly raise the extension to beyond its’ stated maximum length, sometimes leaving only one rung overlapped, so as to reach the eaves under the roof.  Since the path the ladder rested on was so uneven and slanting, he would find blocks of 2x4 lumber and various rocks to boost one or the other of the feet in an attempt to straighten out the ladder so it would rest evenly against the house.  He never got it right but would get it, as he would always say, “Close enough.” 

He’d then climb the ladder, a Lucky Strike dangling from his lips, smoke smiting his eyes, paint can and brush entwined in the fingers of his right hand, left hand holding the ladder rail.  While climbing, he’d mutter: “Goddamn thing, I hope it holds me, Jesus Kee Ko!” The ladder would sway and bend under his weight, the top would skitter sideways a foot or two because it was never really even, and he would croak “Hold it, Little Mouse,” and I would apply my whole strength to holding the ladder as steady as I could.  He’d get to the top, and lean dangerously out, dripping brush reaching, me wheedling, “Be careful daddy,” him answering, “I’m OK, Jesus Kee Ko, just don’t let it slip too much.”  He was thirty or forty feet up, sweating bullets; I was at the bottom, a complete wreck, trying my damnedest to hold the ladder still, it pulling me strongly in the opposite direction I was trying to make it go, the smell of turpentine and fear in my nostrils.  I would pray silently to Jesus, tears streaming, nose snuffling, begging him to please not let my daddy fall and break his neck, please, worried sick that everybody would know it was my fault he got hurt or killed falling off the ladder I was supposed to be holding.  Please, God!

As always, my worries were unfounded; dad would finish the section and scrabble back down the ladder, dangling paint bucket and dripping brush, the cigarette burnt to a nub. “Jesus Kee Ko, I thought I was a goner there, but you held it just enough,” he’d say to me.  Then, he’d bodily move the extended ladder a few feet to the side, re-prop the feet, again imperfectly, saying, “Jesus Kee Ko, this is a pain in my GODDAMN ass,” and we’d repeat the process.  The whole project took two weeks or so and I was on edge the whole time; my nighttime sleep was interrupted by dreams of sirens and emergency rooms and people looking at me with anger and accusation.

When I was still a young child, my father got sick with Rheumatic Fever. He had been feeling crummy for a few weeks and then his joints started to ache, wrists, elbows and knees red and swollen.  Sue tells of her vivid memories of him laying on the couch in the back room, moaning and trying to sleep it away.  Dr. Weiss would come to visit every day and give him shots, probably of penicillin.  I had a toy canon at the time and would stuff the cork in the hole at the end of the barrel and ‘shoot’ Dr. Weiss when he came in the back door off the porch. It was very possibly the first time any of us had seen dad sick and there was worry in the air. Mom assured us he’d get better, but it dragged on, keeping him out of work and on the couch moaning for a number of weeks. Since he was a salesman, his income dried up and we had a tough few months.  He talked little, slept fitfully, tossed and turned, and the moans were as scary as anything I had experienced.  Daddy was dying.  He wasn’t going to get better; he was the strong person in my life, my buddy, my friend, my leader.  He eventually got better, but in later years I understood that the episode had left him with damaged heart valves; he was still strong to us but not ever perfect again.

My fears and worries controlled my childhood.  They infiltrated my thoughts and dreams and, as a result, to this very day, I am always trying and learning things much later than others with the same backgrounds and abilities.  I learned to swim long after my buddies had mastered diving, I needed training wheels for at least two years after everyone else was doing wheelies and skidding around on their Stingrays, and I learned to defend myself only after I was well grown into a man, relying, often unsuccessfully, on verbal ability to avoid being beat up.  I worked hard on my chatter, learning to play verbal tricks to throw off a less intelligent assailant (aren’t assailants always less intelligent?).  Instead of playing sports, I talked of how stupid they were, instead of riding my bike, I boasted of my running speed, and instead of swimming, I talked of catching large fish.  I talked and talked, and didn’t do.  I was physically uncoordinated and clumsy, and mentally glib to the point of being that annoying kid who never put his money where his mouth was.

I was about to meet up with the nuns.