Despite the fact that your father is whatever is the opposite of a poet, there in the kitchen, when I looked at Tilda, when I really took her in, too much beauty is why I looked away. I'm certain you can understand this.
We had a nice birthday party for Tilda that autumn. Her eighteenth birthday, November 4. (My eighteenth was October 11 and passed without me telling anyone.) It was attended by three of her high school friends, Constance, Donald, Cornelia Tell and me. Cornelia provided the cake. There was gramophone and radio music all evening. I had one dance with Tilda and one with my aunt. No one else asked me, and I didn't ask anyone else.
My apprenticeship in sleds and toboggans went methodically. One week my uncle instructed me in how to test the pliability and strength of plywood, how to measure and cut it. The next week I learned to construct a cargo box and fit iron runners. The following week we went step by step in completing a seven-foot-long trapper's sled, including the metal and leather dog harness. The days were given over to the use of steel bridges, brackets, hitch crosspieces, clevis bolts, various types of sandpaper, the application of glues and linseed oil, and so on. I also learned about the clerical aspects of the business, invoices, correspondence, bills to pay.
A month or so after I started in the business, my uncle allowed me to work solo on a three-board toboggan with wrappers and hitch, along with a cargo box and standard handles. It had been ordered by a man living in Heart's Desire, Newfoundland. "I sold him a sled last year," my uncle said. "He's expecting quality work again. My reputation's based on quality work, Wyatt." In order to give my fullest attention to this toboggan — that is, to prevent Uncle Donald from giving me pointers every minute — I decided to work on it after supper and late into the night, and kept it under a tarpaulin outside the shed during the day. Difficult as it may have been for him, my uncle, much to his credit, took the hint. I finished the toboggan in two weeks, and I mean fourteen full days, because I worked on Sundays, too.
At seven A.M. the following Monday, I unveiled my toboggan. I stood there while my uncle inspected it top to bottom, testing every joint, running his hands over the wood to detect splinters or rough spots of any sort, tilting it to examine more closely the linseed flush and how evenly the shellac had been applied. "Yesterday," he finally said, "I saw some children sledding in back of the church. Snow's always nicely packed on the slope there. I'll take this toboggan over there right now and try it out, eh? If it can hold me, who's practically a walrus compared to those boys, how bad can the world be? But if it splits and I fly through the air and crack open my skull, Wyatt, you're to look after your aunt Constance, understand?"
"I understand," I said.
"I don't have a last will and testament," he said, "except what I've told my wife in pillow talk, and that's not open to discussion."
I waited a good hour and a half in the shed, mostly smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio kept on a high shelf, and when my uncle returned, he said, "It's fine." We went directly back to work on two sleds ordered by a family from MacLeod Settlement in Nova Scotia. Their letter had mentioned that there were twin girls, age seven, so could Mr. Hillyer please somehow differentiate the sleds in some way that didn't interfere with his design, "to avoid the girls' bickering"? The letter suggested that my uncle paint a board on one sled black or red. After an hour or so of working on these sleds, my uncle slid a log into the woodstove and said, "Wyatt, I've been wanting to ask you something."
"Go right ahead, Uncle Donald."
"At the time you left Halifax, what was the mood in the city? About the war, I mean. Your aunt complains that I'm becoming more and more agitated by the day. Truth is, she only knows the half of just how agitated I am."
I looked at a few of the headlines from the Halifax Mail that were tacked on the wall over the workbench:
UNHAPPY CHRISTMAS DAY FOR GERMAN TROOPS
TIDE OF BATTLE TURNS HEAVILY AGAINST HITLER
IN ALL-NIGHT BATTLE,
ALLIED TROOPS FIGHT FOR THEIR LIVES
AXIS U-BOAT "WOLF PACK"
ATTACK CONVOY; 11 SHIPS LOST
"There's a restaurant, the Green Lantern," I said. "People like to call it the Green Latrine. It's along a block of brothels, and nearby's the Orpheum Theatre. Every night the place is crowded as a pigeon coop. Lots of military. Lots of music and dancing. Anyway, there's this fellow named H. B. Jefferson — have you heard of him?"
"The newspaperman," my uncle said, "who was appointed wartime press censor."
"That's him. That's H. B. Jefferson. His voice is very recognizable. He's always on the radio using that American slogan 'Loose lips sink ships.' Warning there might be German spies listening in all the time, so if you have a husband or wife in the military, you shouldn't repeat anything they've told you, you know, just daily on the street corner."
"Sure, sure," my uncle said.
"Well, one night H. B. Jefferson steps out with his wife, Lennie, to the Green Lantern. People are shouting and laughing and drinking and dancing, the place is jumping. I was there that night with some friends of mine. In fact, we had a table right next to H. B. Jefferson's, and some sailors and their wives or girlfriends had a table on the other side of H. B. Jefferson's. Suddenly a sailor recognizes Jefferson's voice — his radio voice. And this sailor'd had quite a bit to drink, that wasn't hard to tell. And he stands up on his chair and busts a beer bottle on the table and points at H. B. Jefferson and shouts, 'Hey — hey, everyone! That right there's Mr. H. B. Jefferson — right there! Say, Mr. H. B. Jefferson, what do you know that you're not telling all these fine people in this fine establishment?' Then some other sailors got that fellow right out the door."
"What's the point, Wyatt?"
"On the one hand, maybe more than ever, the war's made people let off steam, drinking, dancing. Brothels. Over to Rigolo's Pub. The Green Lantern. The Night Owl. Drink and dance and get crazy every night they possibly can."
"On the other hand?" my uncle said. He had stopped working and was listening closely.
"On the other hand, the whole time people have their stomachs twisted in knots worrying that there's some terrible news they don't yet know about. Like there's a terrible secret about to be told them. And see, at the Green Lantern that night? There was a moment where I really thought some of those sailors were going to drag H. B. Jefferson into an alley and kick him senseless till he told them what he knew and they didn't know yet."
"You couldn't really blame them if they did, eh?" my uncle said.
"No, not really, I guess not," I said. "But H. B. Jefferson's got a tough job, I'd say."
"Certainly he does," my uncle said. "But don't forget, there's human nature. I remember being in an English village during the last war. My buddies and I were beat to hell and hadn't slept in days. We were put up in a farmhouse. The farmer told us that his neighbors had shot a collaborator of some sort. He didn't go into detail. But in a nutshell, he was talking about how suspicion got cranked up so high, his very own neighbors, some he'd known his whole life, were all at wits' end. And I'll never forget what he said. He said, 'My neighbors, they got wind of a saboteur in their midst and started to look at everybody in a different light, for all I know even their cows and sheep.' What I'm saying is, as a wartime censor, H. B. Jefferson's walking a fine line."