In the Fall

This article was originally published in the Autumn 2017 edition of Folklore Magazine.

Kamsack, circa mid-1950s. A quiet town except for Main Street on Saturday night. Gravelled residential streets. No cars parked in front of the houses. A woman, purse in the crook of her arm, walking back from Main Street, shopping bag in hand. A fifty-year-old town, old enough for its sidewalks to be lined with trees and Caragana hedges. Most homeowners didn't bother cultivating a lawn, at least not in our neighbourhoods. Instead, one might see a dirt path from the alley through a yard, past the garden and house to the street—the natural pathways that we used to navigate from one street to another. Most people didn't mind if we "cut through" their yards.

Because television would not arrive until 1958 when Yorkton CKOS started broadcasting, we spent most of our days outside. I remember the milkman, Mr. McKay, delivering Co-op milk from a horse-drawn wagon, bottles rattling against metal. His horse, Babe, a chestnut draught-horse, knew the route as well as the milkman who often gave us a short ride down the block. I remember our neighbour, Mrs. Lazar, hanging out the wash, singing Doris Day's popular song "Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be," her optimistic voice still drifting through my memory. Rows of tractor tires stacked six or eight high behind Paul's Tire Shop, the mountains of sand and gravel in the town's maintenance yard, vacant lots—all unfenced and unguarded—were our playgrounds. Our dogs too, never on a leash, came with us, often dashing off on their own following some scent. For a dog, sometimes for us as well, the alleys were thick with odours.

Photo by Brenda Carson.

It seems, in memory, an ideal time. Many people think of it as a time of moral and political innocence that was no longer possible after, say, the Kennedy assassination. But memories are illusions. They are, like Hollywood movies, fiction "based on a true story." We want a better story than reality offers; we desire myths. Mr. McKay and Mrs. Lazar were part of the world at large that had just experienced World War II. They were part of a greater population that feared hydrogen bomb testing in the Philippine Sea. They were caught up in the Western world's fear of Communism. From our childish perspective, the world seemed safe enough, but even we knew that older kids could ruin any game we were enjoying. Innocence is always lost, even among seven-year-old boys in a small prairie town in the 1950s.

In the Fall, after the gardens had been harvested (the same gardens we had raided just weeks earlier—such quiet, creeping raiders we were!), it was common for adults to rake into piles the dried leaves and vines and burn them—little bonfires there in the backyards, small sacrifices to the gods of the harvest. Once the refuse piles were safely lit, the adults would go about their business leaving the refuse to smoulder unattended.

So, of course, such fires drew me and my friend Wayne and several other seven-year-old companions to watch the leaves burn down to embers. Occasionally we added a neglected twig or corn stalk to watch it heat up and explode into flame and transform into smoke and ash.  The world could not have been any more elemental. Boys watching fire.

Fire of burning dried leaves. Photo by Thu_Truong_VN

And while watching, the most impulsive one among us separated himself from the boys circling the ashes and stood behind Wayne. Then he pushed him. Wayne instinctively held back, falling to his knees to stop his forward movement. He arose quickly, but the hot ashes had already burned through his pant legs to the skin. Frightened, he ran down the alley and I ran beside him. As flames wrapped around his legs I could do nothing but run with him, perhaps vaguely aware that if he fell I could run on and find an adult‒mothers were almost always at home.

It was only half a block and perhaps only two minutes. It was not history, barely folklore, but our lives were changed though Wayne's burns, serious enough at the time, did not physically handicap him. History has larger examples of burning men, but none are any more revealing of man's nature. The bond that formed between Wayne and me on that day and other days brought out a sense of humanity which eventually, in my adulthood, expressed itself in words, fragmented remnants of a moment in time, the incomplete record of my growth, our growth.

The piece that follows is from a growing collection tentatively titled In the Village (author's note: The first two sections have since been revised and published in A Kind of Beauty, 2020, Smoke Ridge Books).

In The Village

in the village newborns were left for dead,

left for wolves to carry them off, birthing

myth and story in the minds of men

and the minds of wolves, images

of suckling survivors, of pups seeking fire,

of sating bloodlust, lone wanderers fearful

of their own shifting flesh, one becoming

the other, like shadows losing shape

*

he was the first to arise from the cinders of childhood,

the first burning man we knew, the first we knew

that a man could burn, could transform

by his flight our recklessness

into a reckoning which shaped us‒

the slow-footed, the fleet,

the guilty and falsely accused,

those who would be swift to no purpose,

those who would sleep and those

who would awaken wide-eyed

in a village alley, helpless as lepers

*

godspeed the boy who took flight

godspeed the boy to a home

godspeed the boy who threw flames at the wind

*

on the saskatchewan prairie, on a village porch,

this occurred between lawless boys

on a hot afternoon:

one raised his shod foot on a platform of wood

to tend his binding, to challenge with small fingers

the intricate lacing, too complex for boys apart...

a child's struggle, child's anguish

(not christ's raw cry that scattered

animals from the fire)

but anguish contained, held

beneath an intimate world of muscle and skin‒

half-closed eye, grim mouth, taut chin‒

neither sacrifice nor salvation

for the watcher trembling in recognition

that beneath elusive shifting flesh

a willful mind spoke its passage

Photo by Alex Zotov.

Garry Radison.

GARRY RADISON is the author of five books of poetry. His poetic works have been described as “achingly honest...his unique voice, spare and muscular...resonates with the hard-earned truths of negotiating an unquiet peace with his prairie world.” (Hagios Press) The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix said his poems are “like guideposts in a vast desert.”

He is the author of five books of non-fiction including Defending Frog Lake: An Analysis of the Frog Lake Massacre, Wandering Spirit: Plains Cree War Chief, his companion volume to Fine Day: Plains Cree Warrior, Shaman & Elder. Both books are his attempt to bring to life the history of the west from the point of view of the people who lived there.

Born and raised in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, he now lives in Calgary, AB.

“people stories” shares articles from Folklore Magazine, a publication of the Saskatchewan History & Folklore Society. Four issues per year for only $25.00! Click below to learn more about the Magazine and to find out how to get your story into the blog!