Egbert Dolittle sat with his back against a fence rail staring at a mailbox sitting atop a skewed post across the dirt road. The road didn't have a name because it only had a single farm that ran from where he sat all the way to Cage Creek Road.
Two farms had once shared that nameless road.
Egbert studied the mailbox like it was a sculpture from bygone years, and in a way it was. The mailbox had a large dent in one side that squeezed its middle, turning its rounded top into a peaked one where the big dent was.
Hit by a bat, Egbert thought, by some selfish kid out for a bit of destructive fun.
He searched his childhood memory for a time when he'd done something like that. The only meanness he recalled with any cohesive recollection was the time he grew sick of his mama's rusty brown rooster chasing after him every day and pecking the backs of his ankles instead of rutting with the white chickens which was his job.
It seemed that every morning when he set out for his chores before school, that dang rooster would drop what he was doing and torment him like Egbert owed him money. Egbert couldn't remember ever doing anything to the rooster that would cause him to make a mortal enemy of him, but there he was every morning making his home-life a living hell.
Then came the day both rooster and boy would come to regret. When instead of running, Egbert turned and booted that rooster as hard as he could. Egbert felt the satisfying thump of his boot on the rooster's belly and the shocking squawk it made as it fluttered like a feathered football across the yard to land in a tangle of wings and taloned yellow legs. When Egbert looked down he saw the smudge of blood on the toe of his boot, and when he looked up he saw the rooster hobbling pathetically on one leg toward the safety of the henhouse. That was the moment he felt the sickness of shame that would linger in the pit of his stomach through the ensuing years.
The rooster spent most of his time that week cowered in the henhouse until his right leg healed up enough to carry his weight, but he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
"Serves you right." Egbert would tell the rooster on mornings to try to make that sick guilt feeling go away but it never did.
Egbert wondered if the kid who bashed in the side of the mailbox felt any remorse. He doubted it. It seemed the world had got mean-natured when the clock ticked over from 1929 to 1930.
Egbert took a long draw of water from the war surplus canteen Mister Otto supplied to all the men at the Relief Camp. It was warm and stale but wet his mouth and washed some of the dried spit away.
He'd been working with a Relief Camp crew digging potatoes for a farmer named Al Munro who he once knew as a friend, but now passed Egbert silently with his eyes fixed on the dirt in front of his boots whenever their paths crossed.
"Hey, Egbert!" Al used to call out to him across the road before the depression hit.
"Hey, yourself, Al!" Egbert would call back, and sometimes invited him over for iced tea on hot afternoons, coffee in the colder weather after harvest. Sometimes they even shared a couple beers at the end of a long day's work. But now a storm cloud of forgetfulness seemed to hover over Al's head as he avoided making eye contact with Egbert.
The bent mailbox across the road had caught his eye for two reasons.
One was that he saw that deep inside it past the big dent was a bird's nest. He didn't know what manner of bird built it, but the nest looked fairly new and well structured, so he imagined it was built just this past spring and the new family had departed to live in the woods. At least the mailbox was some use after suffering its injury.
The other reason he noticed the mailbox was that it was once his. Its bright red paint had faded to dull brown and all that remained of the name Dolittle once painted in bright green was the letters D, L, and the two Ts.
He remembered his wife Alice teasing him the day he painted their name on the new mailbox, saying it looked like christmas.
"We own this farm now, Alice." he told her back then, "Every day is christmas from here on out."
That was thirteen years ago, back when the twenties roared, the Great War was a fading memory, and banks were so flush with cash they were begging people to come borrow some. Sure the bank owned half of his farm back then, but with access to Cage Creek through the small pipeline Egbert laid under the main road, the Dolittle farm did well.
Egbert diversified his farm by planting half his acreage in table grapes and the other half divided equally between melons, squash, and blackberries that were already growing wild in that corner of his acreage and only had to be encouraged to expand their territory.
Everything he grew he was able to sell.
Alice increased their profits on the grapes by producing a brand of grape jelly with 'Dolittle's Pure Grape Jelly' stamped on the lids that was locally popular.
Stores in Arawana, Penticton, and Summerland scooped up his harvested crops and all of Alice's jelly. To make it easier to sell his produce, Egbert had bought himself a used stake-side truck to provide free delivery, making him an invaluable resource to store owners.
The Dolittles earned enough to carry them with ease through the non-productive winters, making a good year-round living while paying down their mortgage as the rich growing seasons rolled past each year in the 1920s.
Because success perfumed the air of their marriage, Alice and Egbert sped together toward their dreams by adding a daughter in 1922, and in 1924 were gifted a second. Annie and Lucille had joined the unstoppable Dolittle train, and by 1928 Annie had started school, happily bouncing to town on the passenger seat while Egbert drove her to town and picked her up after school each day. Lucille was happy because she had Alice all to herself on school days.
The Dolittle farmhouse was an overfilled container of love, hope, and, dreams for the future. Alice spoke often of having another child for she wanted to give him a son.
"Daughters aren't so bad." Egbert would tell his wife, "They smell better than boys."
On Monday evening, October 28, 1929 while doing the books, Egbert calculated they owed slightly less than a quarter of their initial mortgage.
The next day was Black Tuesday.
News out of New York and Toronto screamed catastrophe, but for a time the stock market crash and the prolonged drought on the prairies left Arawana untouched.
But each month when Egbert went to the bank to make his mortgage payment, he noticed the serious muted conversations and the lack of the usual friendly greeting. It appeared his own bank, so distant from the big stock markets, was sinking under the pall of what some were calling a recession and others a depression.
Egbert read in the papers that banks in the United States were failing, unable to pay out money evaporated from peoples's savings accounts because of the crash. He never read about a Canadian bank failing, but because the United States was Canada's biggest trading partner, the effects of US failures reached deep into Canada's economy. Its cold fingers even scratching their way into the Okanagan Valley.
The bank raised Egbert's mortgage rate at the same time stores offered him less for his produce. Even Alice's grape jelly soon dropped so low in what it could fetch that it cost her more to make it than she could earn by selling it.
After harvest time in 1930, Egbert had to take a job at Simpson's sawmill working the green chain, grading and sorting lumber just to keep up on his mortgage payments. By spring he was rising before the sun to tend the farm by lantern light, then working ten hours sorting lumber for Simpson. Some nights he could barely stay awake to drive home to a dinner of grape jelly sandwiches.
The Dolittle farm no longer smelled of success, it started to stink of failure and despair. Egbert and Alice did their best to keep things light for the girls, but could feel their love for each other creaking like a loose floorboard under the strain.
Through 1931 they eked by as best they could, selling most of their produce to the distribution companies who paid a tenth of what Egbert could get before the crash. He made a bit more selling to Gilbert Fruit and Vegetables, but they couldn't take much to sell under the awnings of their shack on Main Street, so Egbert would top them up on his way to work at the sawmill each morning.
1932 was the death-knell for the Dolittle finances when Randolph Waldo Simpson, cut the wages for all his sawmill workers from fifty cents an hour to a flat rate of three dollars a day. Three dollars for ten hours of back-breaking work. Thirty cents an hour could barely feed a man's family, never mind make a dent in a mortgage payment, so in desperate anger the men walked out and set up a picket line.
Simpson put ads in all the newspapers, and flyers in all the churches and soup kitchens advertising his thirty cents an hour and replaced his workers with scabs. The strikers stood firm on the line and wouldn't let the scabs into the mill, beating them with sticks if they tried to force their way through. It was the first time Egbert had ever done violence to another man.
Simpson retaliated by hiring a squad of gun thugs up from Vancouver who faced off against the strikers, each sporting short messenger's shotguns. The strikers armed themselves with torches, threatening to burn the mill to the ground.
That was the day Chief Ardolf was shot in the hip by one of the trigger-happy gun thugs, and it set off a riot in town. Windows were smashed, garbage cans upended, mailboxes set afire until the RCMP mounted squad was called in to restore order.
The next week the bank called in the Dolittle mortgage, saying no man who rioted in his home town deserved a mortgage or the farm it was liened against. Egbert begged the bank manager, pleading that he never broke a window or set fire to anything.
"You were part of a strike. You hit Bob Fletcher on the head with a picket sign when he tried to go to work to feed his family." the bank manager said, "You're nothing but a communist agitator."
Despondent, Egbert drove home to find Alice and the girl's bags packed.
"My mama sent us train fare to Vernon." Alice said, "We're moving in with her. My papa says you're welcome to come after you sell the farm if you can hold your temper."
"It'll go to auction." Egbert told her, "Pennies on the dollar. The bank'll take it all."
"I can't help that, Egbert. I'll not have my girls raised in poverty."
Though it broke his heart, he drove them to the station and watched the train take his family away.
He watched from the nameless road the day of the bank auction and saw his farm, his dream, go to the highest bidder for less than a tenth of its worth. The man who bought it was Al Munro, his one time friend and neighbour.
"Back to work!" called the work gang boss.
Egbert capped his canteen and stopped looking at his old mailbox. He climbed to his feet and picked up his shovel, making his way with the other men back to the furrows of ripe potatoes and took up on the row where he left off.
Egbert got the job because he'd been a farmer and knew how to dig potatoes. You had to come at them from the bottom of the furrow, kicking the spade deep under the mounded rows and prying upwards until the clusters of spuds broke the surface. The men behind him had to crawl along between the furrows and pull the spuds loose from the roots and push them into the sack they dragged along as Egbert moved to the next plant and kicked his shovel deep once more.
It was mindless tiring work, but it was work. He sent half of what he earned each week to Alice in Vernon. He'd be damned if he'd be a slacker when it came to supporting his girls.
The day laboured on until the sun began to set and the field was cleared. Egbert hoisted his shovel onto his shoulder and walked with the others to start the long trek down Cage Creek Road to the Relief Camp. Back to a lumpy cot and stew so thin it would shame soup, a stale bun to sop it up.
And there before him was Al Munro, counting the men and paying the crew boss in cash for their day's work. As Egbert drew near, Al shifted his eyes to the ground.
"You can't even look at me, you gnawing rat, can you?" Egbert growled at his one time friend.
"I got nothin' to say to you." Al mumbled.
"You stole everything I had." Egbert growled, "You and the bank. Now I'm using a spud wrench for your benefit."
"I didn't start this depression. I didn't cause your troubles. I just look out for my family like all good men do." Al said.
Egbert wanted to unshoulder his shovel and blast Al in the side of the head with it. He could feel himself do it and wondered if Al would finally look at him if he did.
Instead, he walked on with the other men toward Cage Creek Road thinking about that old lamed rooster.
Aaron D McClelland
Penticton, BC
