IT BEGINS-
1967
Mabel stood in the doorway, looking at her son as he went through his room picking up one item, dropping it, and taking another to stuff into the sea bag. She shook her head, saying, “You never will have any rest in your ass, will you?”
“Nope.” Billy grinned at her.
After working at the Lunenburg Foundry, then parking cars in Halifax, and finally running his own B/A service station, he was ready to do some real travelling. He needed to see the world, not just slog at a job, as interesting as it might have been. “Just Go” was his calling. Here never lasted long, when Anywhere else called. Mabel wondered where he’d gotten the urge from.
His early years were normal as far as she knew; a childhood filled with boy-child skullduggery, bike-riding, hi-jinks, skinned knees, chores around their small property, with barns, a few cows, pigs and chickens. Putting up wood for the fall, the vegetable garden that always needed weeding. It was a normal country family life. Husband, Robie was the bread-winner, sometimes away, like to Newfoundland working, and the children pitched in as they should. That was just the way of it.
But Billy was restless. Always doing something; as an adolescent with his muskrat trapping enterprise to earn money selling the skins, and his jobs making hay in Upper Kingsburg for the Moshers and the Oxners. He’d quit school and gone to work at the Lunenburg Foundry, then gone to Halifax to work at a higher-paying job.
His latest venture, which for five years had kept him happily busy seven days a week running a B/A service station. This had taken her a bit by surprise. She’d never thought of her oldest son as a businessman before. The only time she remembered him slowing down was at the age of seven, when he’d come down the stairs complaining of a terrible pain in his abdomen, and Dr. Al was called. He came immediately to the house, to poke and prod at Billy’s abdomen, and determined it to be an acute case of appendicitis requiring immediate surgery. How to get there was a problem, as the family had no car. The hospital was in Bridgewater, twenty-two miles away.
The doctor was kind enough to drive him there, and Billy had never been so worried in his young life. It seemed so solemn and serious, and he might die, he thought! Instead, he’d spent seven days in a hospital bed, with his first battle scar emblazoned on his abdomen. Maybe he had bragging rights now, and he’d show it off to his friends. At the end of those seven days he was driven home again by the kindly doctor.
His mother had been given strict instructions not to allow Billy to climb the stairs, so his bed had been moved down to the living room. It was a novel idea at first. He could hold court there while he convalesced. Unfortunately, that convalescence was probably two and a half weeks too long for a seven year old boy. Three weeks later, a very relieved Billy was able to pile finally out of bed and climb the stairs back to his room.
Those three weeks were the last time Mabel saw him standing still. Now, he was getting set to sail around the world on a schooner.
CHAPTER ONE
1939
He was born on a chilly day in mid-October in Lower Kingsburg, Nova Scotia, the first child of Mabel, housewife and Robie Mossman, Grand Banks Dory Fisherman.
William Edwin Mossman’s first conscious memory was walking into an aunt’s kitchen while visiting; he, still a little tyke, age – somewhere between a toddler and pre-schooler. He was presented with a freshly baked biscuit and, after taking a few bites, looked at it critically. “Well? Do you like it?” His auntie asked. Billy looked at the treat he’d been given, raised his eyes to her and said, as children mostly do − in unfiltered honesty. “It’s hard-stock!” Short, and to the point, his young mind allowed no complement or criticism. Just the simple truth. It naturally was what it was.
He lived only a short while in the old, white house, one of only a few Lower Kingsburg homes that stood perched on the hills overlooking the Atlantic. By the time Billy was two, his parents had bought a four bedroom house in Upper Kingsburg, on an acreage large enough for a growing family. The ocean was still in sight. By this time he’d become big brother to a sister, Dianne.
*****
His fifth birthday was coming up and his mother said that there would be a party. There would even be prizes in the cake, she’d promised! He couldn’t imagine how that would work, but Mama had told him, with a twinkle in her eye, “Just you wait and see!”
A week later the children assembled around the kitchen table in a white clapboard house on Upper Kingsburg Road, bearing small gifts and large smiles. His little sister, Dianne was an eager party participant as well, and in the middle of it all sat a cake with candles and delicious-looking icing. While the candles painted a glow on the children’s faces, the singing began. Billy still couldn’t imagine what the surprise inside each slice of cake could be, but, whatever it was, it had to be small. The cake was cut and each child got a portion. Children forked into the slices with gusto. They’d all heard about the mysterious prizes well ahead of time.
“I got something!” a little boy yelled, pulling an object out of his mouth. He held it up for all to see; a shiny nickel. Real excitement shivered through the rest of the kids now, as they fervently dug their own pieces. More nickels emerged. One had a dime! Then another boy produced the famous Bluenose coin out of his slice! There was a palpable energy swirling around the birthday boy as they all imagined what an entire five, or even ten cents could buy!
A week later they were still talking about that special cake as they played in the side yard. Dianne boasted that she still had her nickel, and had stored it in her little piggy bank. The group included the Mossman sisters, no relation to them, and Yvonne and Donna. Aside from the talk about the cake, they were also keeping a close eye on the next door old lady.
Mrs. Warbach was an odd one. True to form, the children gave her a nickname – ‘Mrs. Tuddiman’. It seemed to fit the woman much better, at least to them. She always wore a long dress over which she tied an apron, and her grey hair was pinned tightly back in a thin little bun. Not one of them knew why, but, cranky, she regularly chased them away with her broom if they came too close to her door. Maybe she didn’t like children? They didn’t know and never asked. Even more peculiar though, were the chickens that always filled the back yard. Not that there was anything odd about chickens; that was the normal part. Mrs. Tuddiman's house had a couple of bedrooms facing that backyard full of chickens. It seemed one of those bedroom windows was left open permanently, and at night all the chickens entered through it and roosted inside, along with Mrs. Tuddiman in her bed, or so the children imagined at least.
Yes, Mrs. Tuddiman was a strange one.
*****
By the time he was seven he’d gained another brother, Gerald, and discovered the exciting game of hockey. The League still consisted of six teams, two of them Canadian; the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs. As was custom where Billy was growing up, one of the two Canadian teams were chosen to cheer for. Rivalries were started among neighbours, as some followed Toronto while others picked Montreal. Billy chose Toronto.
On game night, a number of families sat in a neighbour’s living room, the solitary owners of the only television in the neighbourhood, cheering on whoever was playing that evening. The game played underneath a snowy, black and white image, while someone usually adjusted the antenna in the attic to get a better reception. Father, Robie’s hockey hero was Gordie Howe, and whether or not Howe was playing that night, Robie would be muttering to a TV image almost obliterated with ‘snow’, “C’mon Gordie Howe!” as the sound of the crowd rose through the speakers.
Life continued at a slow pace in Lunenburg County. Robie no longer fished the Grand Banks, working on terra firma now for the Lunenburg Foundry instead. With his ongoing lung troubles he found it hard to breathe more often than he liked. The doctor had told him repeatedly that he should move to a dryer climate. The heavy damp air just didn’t do him any good. Robie stayed put. What would he possibly do in a place like Saskatchewan for work? He was a Maritimer. His father had been a Maritimer. His granddad, his great-granddad, going back as far as he could see − all of them had been Maritimers. He’d work it out somehow.
*****
Older now, Billy found himself taking on more and more of life’s little responsibilities. Some were not of his own choosing, nor were they “little”. There were a lot of things that needed tending; a barn, hay, a vegetable garden, some animals. In essence it was almost a small farm. But, this was just normal, Nova Scotian country life. It was also normal that Billy accumulated a few chores. Not surprisingly, he hated some of them, especially on Saturdays and holidays.
His worst chore was the vegetable garden. It was Saturday now, and he muttered and grumbled to himself as he dug the weeds out from around the carrots and beets. He knew his friends, Norman and Peter, the Mosher girls, Alfred, and even his little sister, Dianne, and brother Gerald were all at the beach already, having the time of their lives, while he slaved in the garden. He wondered if his younger brothers and sister would ever be called on to work. He couldn’t imagine the tiny, pink fingers of his new baby brother, Lynn stained with dark soil from digging in the garden.
By the time he was done, the afternoon had slid closer to evening, but he managed to get down to the beach to splash in the water for a while. The complaining about the chores continued as his friends listened sympathetically. This is where he’d rather be; Hirtle’s Beach, swimming like the rest of his many friends. For the moment it was the bane of his existence, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He promised himself then and there, while the remnants of dirt were still under his fingernails, and the feel of the soil was still fresh in his mind, when I’m all grown up, I’m never having no vegetable garden. No sir! That’s what the grocery store’s for, for Pete’s sake!
He made a grumbling complaint loud enough for Robie to hear. Daddy gave him a long look, and Billy almost thought he’d get a smack for his insolence. “Boy,” Daddy growled slowly, “you’re the first one to belly up to the table at meal-times. Now, go work for it!”
At the beginning of Monday afternoon his father was unexpectedly brought home by one of his co-workers. Robie struggled to breathe, and couldn’t continue working that day. The fog had been particularly thick in the morning. They left him with Mabel fussing over him. Slowly he recovered as the warm, drier air of his home helped clear out his air passages. By the afternoon he was feeling much better, and Mabel found his chair empty a few hours later. Wondering where he’d gone, she went outside to look. There, at the rear of the property she could see her husband on the tractor, pulling a small wagon around. What needed doing so badly that he couldn’t leave it alone was a mystery to her. She shook her head, muttering, “That man will be the death of himself.”
*****
Somehow or other the work ethic stuck to Billy. Very early every morning during lobster season, before school, he and his father could be seen making their way down to the shore towards their dory, hauled up on the skids greased with a cod oil substance called ‘gurrie’. Right next to that was the fish shack, inside of which was a barrel of foul-smelling bait. The bait bags for baiting the traps were filled from it, then loaded into the dory. Once it was launched, they’d row out to where Robie had set the traps.
Oftentimes the father could be heard coughing hard. Everyone knew that the man had breathing problems. The fog was so thick some days that Billy thought Daddy would choke on it. This morning it was foggy far out on the water, and they hurried a bit before it rolled in towards shore. Billy rowed from one pot to the other, while Daddy lifted them into the boat and remove whatever was inside. Most of the lobsters were nice and fat. They’d deliver a good price. As each lobster pot was emptied, Billy would re-bait the trap with a bait bag stuffed with gurrie. His hands quickly began to stink and, after throwing the trap back over for the next soak, Billy swished his hands in the freezing water, to wash the stench off. By the time a few traps had been dealt with, they were numb from the cold.
In total they set around twenty-five traps, which took about three hours just to pull, empty and re-set. Afterwards, Billy rushed to school, stopping at home to change his wet and smelly clothes for dry ones. It put him roughly fifteen minutes, or maybe more, late for school. The teacher had enough understanding to proceed with lessons for some of the younger students, and would wait until Billy got there for the older children’s lessons.
Billy took on more and more odd jobs to make some extra money. He’d even gotten into a kind of entrepreneurial spirit. Thirteen now, he began trapping mink and muskrat for their furs. He’d found a fur-trading company in Toronto, Ontario to take them. While he worked the traps or skinned what he caught, his mind often took him back to reflect on the first time Daddy had taken him hunting…
He’s about five, and Daddy is sitting beside him in the brush, the shotgun aimed at something Billy can’t see. Suddenly the shotgun goes off with a BANG! Daddy turns to him, and says, “Go get your rabbit!” There was a rabbit? He never saw one, but Daddy somehow did. What an amazing hunter his Daddy is, to be able to see invisible rabbits. The wonder of it all, and his awe of his amazing hunter-dad stays with him for a very long time.
The trapping was good money, but it also awakened the jokester in him. He had no use for the fur-less carcasses left over after he was done. Unbidden, the wheels in his head started turning. He’d just finished skinning the last of the critters he’d caught, and the carcasses, now divested of their fur gave him an idea. It was Hallowe’en, and pranks were already in the air. Billy, together with his cousins, George Fraser and Bobby Silver, had been messing around in the woods that bordered the backs of their properties. Pitted against his two older cousins they’d just finished their pissing contest; a regular occurrence among the three of them. As usual, George had won. He always did, and Billy wished he knew George’s secret.
Billy’s mind was already focused on the great gag that had begun percolating through his thoughts. He almost laughed out loud at his cleverness. He cornered George out of earshot of Bobby. “George, George listen up.” Billy whispered, excitedly, “I got a great joke, an’ I need your help.” At the word ‘joke’, Bobby was suddenly all ears.
“Me too, me too. I wanna help!” he exclaimed excitedly.
“Sure, you too. Listen up, both of you.” And Billy continued laying out his plan.
That evening, carrying a sack, he and the two boys ran down the hill to the little schoolhouse at the bottom of the Vinegar Hill. They managed to boost themselves up, and pry open one of the windows, awkwardly wormed their way through, and dropped to the floor inside the classroom with a thunk. Sh, sh, quiet!” Billy whispered. In the gloom they made their way over to the desk. “This one I think.” Billy said, pointing to the bottom drawer. “She doesn’t use this one hardly at all.” ‘She’ was Miss Beatrice Conrad, the teacher who presided over all of the pupils of the little schoolhouse they now stood in.
Slowly and quietly he opened the drawer. He wasn’t quite sure why he was being so careful. There was no one around to hear except them, but the deed called for quiet, so he was. From the bag they’d brought with them he produced three fresh muskrat carcasses, still just a bit bloody but drying fast. “Eeewww!” Bobby exclaimed, rearing back from the sight. George just smirked, as Billy dropped the offending things into the drawer and shoved them to the back. The three of them started to snicker nervously. “Let’s get outta here.” Billy gasped through nervous giggles. They quickly vacated the small building the same way they came, chortling as they went. Billy couldn’t wait to watch the teacher’s face.
As the school days wore on, Miss Conrad began to detect a foul odour, but could not find the source. No matter where she’d put her nose and sniff, she couldn’t for the life of her figure out where the putrid smell was coming from. With the stove going since early October, it was warm in the room, and every day the stink would get a little worse. All the windows were opened, but still the smell persisted. Finally, after a week she could no longer stand it. The schoolhouse was searched thoroughly from top to bottom. There, in her little-used desk drawer, she found some very ripe muskrat carcasses.
Teacher looked straight at Billy. Billy looked back at her with an innocent expression on his face, but there was no fooling her nor anyone else, for that matter. He’d forgotten one tiny little detail; it was common knowledge in the entire community that Billy trapped muskrat for pocket money. The obvious culprit sat right there in front of everyone looking innocent, but fooling no one. He got the strap and stood in the corner for a week, contemplating his errant ways.
But the jokester was now a permanent fixture in Billy’s makeup, and he decided to embrace the persona to the fullest. It just made life more fun was the excuse he gave himself. What was the harm? He walked out of the classroom on the last day of his punishment, and joined his cousins, George and Bobby in the school yard.
“Y’got any cigarettes left?” Bobby asked. The package they’d pilfered had only one left and, off the road out of sight, the three of them shared it as they planned the next heist. Bobby’s older, married sister, Verlene and her husband, Paul Mosher, a sailor still lived with them. Right now an entire fresh, ten-pack of bonded Players cigarettes, supplied by the navy, with one package already out of it, sat waiting on the top shelf of his closet for them. It was the ideal time to help themselves to their own private stash. Bobby’s brother-in-law was the unwitting supplier of the boys’ cigarettes. They only ever took one single package out of a ten-pack, otherwise he’d catch on to the fact that his cigarettes were mysteriously going missing.
Verlene and Aunt Peggy were busy in the yard, so the boys stole into the adults’ bedroom and made for the closet. George, the tallest of the three, reached up and pulled the cigarette box down, careful to note the exact positioning on the shelf so he could return it to the same spot. Billy already had the thin knitting needle handy. Carefully he poked a small hole in the bottom corner at the back of the long box, and pushed the entire row of cigarette packages forward with the needle, until the front one fell out into their hands. Smoothing the hole a bit with his finger after pulling the knitting needle out, he handed the box back to George, to return it to the shelf, exactly as it had sat. They were set for a while until Paul brought home a fresh box.
October came and went, and Billy had volunteered to help sell poppies for the Remembrance Day and Legion fund-raising. Earlier he’d passed several poppy batches on to his friends to sell as well, and he’d just finished collecting the proceeds. Now, along with his own results, he climbed on his bike to deliver everything to the man in charge of the Legion’s poppy sales, who Billy heard went by the odd name of Alcapone. Billy looked forward to visiting the Riverport garage that the man owned. It was the village’s hangout, with pinball machines to try his luck out on, if he had nickels in his pocket.
Alcapone was also a known bootlegger, who often hid liquor to be sold illegally in the trunks of other fishermen’s cars while they were stored in his garage’s yard when the Riverporters were out to sea. When the law came around on a random search, to catch him with bootlegged goods, they’d never find anything. If by chance one of them found liquor in the trunk of a car, there was plausible deniability.
Billy reached the garage and walked in, saw a few men sitting at a table talking. He looked around, not quite sure which man was the one he was looking for. “Is Alcapone here?” Billy asked the group.
One of them smirked and answered, “That’s me. I’m Alcapone.” Billy perked up and proudly handed him the proceeds he’d raised. “Here’s the money for the poppy sales.”
“Great! Thanks kid!” he said, still laughing a little. His mission complete, Billy left the garage and biked home. On the way, he stopped to talk to one of his friends.
“Where ya bin Billy?”
“Just comin’ back from giving the poppy money to Alcapone.” There was a palpable silence as the slightly older friend looked at him skeptically. “You didn’t call him that to his face, did you?”
”What else am I supposed to call him?” Billy asked. “That’s his name isn’t it?” The friend started laughing. “It’s a nickname! His real name is Lorne Rompkey! ‘Alcapone’ is actually the name of a gangster somewhere in the States!” At that point Billy realized why “Alcapone” had had that funny smirk about him, when he’d asked for him. Lorne Rompkey. A nickname? It had been used so often around the small community that Billy believed it was real.
Home again, he found his father busy in the kitchen. Mabel had taken a job at Highliner Seafoods, and she wasn’t home from work yet. As he came into the kitchen Daddy turned to him, thrusting an empty pot at him. “Help me get dinner ready, boy. Peel the potatoes.” Billy took the pot and began peeling. After what looked to him to be a fair amount in the pot, he showed Daddy. “Is this enough, d’y’think?”
Robie looked into the pot, and gave a shake of his head. “It’s enough for your brother, Lynn. Now peel for the rest of us.” It was good that they grew their own, and Billy had become quite familiar with the process of digging them up and now peeling them for supper.
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