GROWING UP WITH JACKY

This is my first attempt at writing fiction.  The subject is one that fascinated me when I was a young boy: the presence in my community of children who were placed with families temporarily by what was then called ‘The Welfare’.  I don’t suppose this subject would have been of much interest to my contemporaries, most of whom belonged to large families themselves.  But, for me, an only child, it was. 

This story came into my head about ten years ago when I noticed a guy I’d grown up with striding along the sidewalk in Charlottetown.  As I thought about it more, I reflected on what I’d witnessed of the experiences of children in foster homes.  Some were treated very well, like full-fledged members of the family but, for others, it must have been hell.
 Palmer’s Harbour is, of course, a fictional community on the Island’s north shore.  It may remind some readers of my home community, but it’s not.  Some of the characters in the story, including the story teller, are made up, and some are real.  But, there’s a lot of truth to what’s described in the anecdotes, the funny ones and the sad ones.

Chapter 1

“I remember hearin’ a crow callin’ like it was a long way off or flyin’ high in the air”, he said.  “You know that feelin’ you get when your brain is tellin’ you it’s gonna to hurt to wake up and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.  It took me awhile to figure out I was lyin’ on the bare ground.  And then, I realized I had my arms around somethin’ that felt like a post, maybe a pole.  I cracked an eye open and shut it right away because the light hurt like hell.  Then I think I passed out agin’ for a minute or two until the traffic on the Avenue woke me up for good.” 

Jacky was telling me this as we sat next to one another at Confederation Landing.  It was the July long weekend, and I’d just gone down for a walk to see the sights and listen to some free music.  I’d seen Jacky splayed out on a park bench, his left hand hanging over the cast iron arm, holding a clear plastic bottle of a pale red liquid that looked like cream soda, his frayed straw hat hanging down over his face to keep the sun off.  I hadn’t seen him for at least six months, so I sat down beside him and listened as he told me the story of how he’d greeted Canada Day.

“How ya’ doin’?” he said, “Long time no see!”  It was Jacky’s standard salutation.  And then he went on with his story.  “The last thing I remember is sittin’ in an apartment at Brown’s Court.  I don’t know whose apartment it was or how I got in.  Christ, I didn’t even know the people.  I’d had a lot of this here red stuff to drink before I got there, and I guess I had some more of somethin’.  I must have tried to walk home, but I guess I got lost.  Anyways, it musta been ten o’clock this morning, and here I was lying on the friggin’ ground with my arms around a big light pole on the soccer field at UPEI!  Jesus, my head was just a poundin’”, he said.  “So I picked myself up, looked around to make sure the campus cops weren’t watchin’, and walked over to the trail.  I sat down on the side of the ditch for a little while to get my bearings.  As soon as I got here, I met my friend and bummed this off him”, he said showing me the bottle.  “This stuff takes the edge off”.

Jacky and I had grown up in Palmer’s Harbour, a village on the north shore.  For a few years anyway.  It was a nice little community, not rich but not poor, mostly Acadians with some English, and a great place to be a kid.  The place had been settled in the late 1800’s, during the shipbuilding boom, and every little creek that could float a decent-sized boat had its own shipyard.  The original settlers were ‘West Countrymen’ from England, tradesmen who had been brought to the Island by James Yeo of Port Hill.  The story goes that a few of them got tired of working for Yeo and went out on their own.  One of them, George Palmer, decided to build his own shipyard on the north side of the Island.  It was during the dying days of the shipbuilding boom, and after it went bust, many of the English families moved away.  The Acadians, my ancestors, had always been there, in the background, minding their own business, fishing their traps and nets, and having big families…

“I remember the day you landed in the Harbour”, I told Jacky.  “I was ten and you were eleven.  You were walking down from your house to the Co-op strung out single file behind Eveline, on the wrong side of the road.  She turned around and yelled at you every twenty steps or so, but you didn’t seem to hear!  A few of us were leaning against the rail on the bridge.  And we watched you go by, with our meanest sneers on our faces, to let you know you weren’t welcome.  Joe and Eveline hadn’t been in the Harbour that long themselves, and we hadn’t let their kids into our gang yet.”  “I remember it like it was yesterday”, said Jacky.  “There was me, my little brother Joey and my little sister Betty.  The woman from the welfare dropped us off at Joe and Eveline’s with nothin’ but a cardboard box with our clothes, and each a sandwich.  The woman told us to behave, and then she got in her car and left, the dust flyin’ behind her.”

“Eveline was goin’ to the Co-op and she didn’t want to leave us home alone on our first day I guess”, he said.  “So she told us to walk behind her and look out for the cars, ‘And keep your mouth shut and your hands in your pockets when we get to the store’, she told us.  My little brother and sister were terrified.  It was the first time we’d been away from the others and we were all scared and lonesome for the orphanage.”

“Joe and Eveline had five kids of their own, and the ten of us lived in a small house on a clay road just outside the village”, Jacky reminded me.  “My brother, my sister and me all slept in the same bed.” 

Joe LeBlanc was called ‘Joe Plank’.  I had learned from the men in the barber shop that he got the nickname because he was tall and skinny as a youngster.  His father and grandfather were also called Joe, so he got the nickname ‘Plank’ because it was easier to say than ‘Joe à Joe à Joe’.  Joe had been to war with the Canadian Army and had come home with a few pieces of shrapnel in his back and a bad drinking problem.  Eveline was an ambitious woman who’d only wanted two kids but somehow ended up with three too many, and she saw foster children as a way to make a little money.  But, her own always came first.  The Barriault trio were the first of many to come to Percival Harbour from the orphanage in Summerside.

Joe and Eveline’s kids were called Helen, Nicole, Jean, Rhéal and Elvis.  "Eveline wasn’t expectin' the last one but since she’d fallen head over heels for Elvis Presley, she called the poor little bugger Elvis”, Jacky chuckled, as I glanced at him across the park bench.  “Jean was the oldest boy and he was the same age as me.  Since we both had the same first name, Eveline decided I’d be called Jackie, at least that’s how she spelled it, j-a-c-k-i-e”, said Jacky.  “But I changed it to Jacky with a ‘y’ because I didn’t want nobody gettin’ me mixed up with no girl”, he laughed.  “Life with Eveline was hard enough as it was.  She treated us like shit, and Joe was usually too drunk or chicken to do anythin’ about it if we complained”.

Jacky and his two younger siblings had been sent to Palmer’s Harbour by the orphanage in Summerside, after spending about six months there.  The six children were away from their mother, Annie, but at least they were together.  It wasn’t easy to find foster homes for any older children, let alone a family of six.  The oldest, Annette, was a teenager, next came Lorne and Agnes, and the two youngest were five and six.  “Annette was the wild one”, said Jacky.  “She didn’t like the nuns or the women from the welfare and she didn’t want anybody tellin’ her what to do.  She ended up in trouble with the cops in Summerside, and then she got pregnant.  I think she’s in Toronto now.  That’s where she was last I saw her.” 

Jacky told me that the two youngest ended up going to a good family in Kensington about a year after they’d come to Palmer’s Harbour.  “I see them sometimes and they’re doin’ real good”, he tells me.  “Back then Joey, Betty and me were bound and determined we’d stick together, whatever happened, and we were glad when the nuns told us the woman from the welfare had found a place for the three of us.”  I never knew Joanne and Agnes, and Jacky didn’t talk about them.

“My father’s name was Antoine Barriault but everybody called him ‘Black Tony’”, Jacky continued.  “He was from up west, near Tignish, and he left home young to go to work in construction in Charlottetown.  I guess he was the black sheep.  He met my mother there at a dance at the Legion.  She was keepin’ house for some rich family in Brighton, and he charmed her right out of her drawers, as they say.  Anyways, she got pregnant and they had to get married.  They moved back up west and bought a little house”.

“Black Tony wasn’t much good at bein’ a father but he sure could make kids.  My mother, Annie, was pregnant six times in eight years, and she was wore out by the time she was thirty.  She had to look after us alone most of the time because he was either on a drunk or workin’ somewheres.  Somehow, along the way, he picked up a trade.  They say he was the best cement finisher Forbes and Sloat Construction ever had!  The trick was to find him, sober him up, and keep him that way long enough to finish the job”, Jacky tells me.  “He worked on the Confederation Centre, you know.  Some other guy screwed up the cement floor in Memorial Hall so bad they had to jackhammer it all up.  The foreman sent some men out to look for Tony and they found him passed out right over there, right where Founder’s Hall is.  Anyways, they got him sobered up and he did the job right.  There should be a plaque for him at that damn Centre.  There’s one there for everybody else!” Jacky snorted.

“One old lady told me once that my father would only come home to see Annie a few times a year.  The women used to watch Annie’s belly, and count the months after Black Tony came passin’ through to see if he’d got her pregnant agin.  I don’t remember him very much and I haven’t seen him in a while.  I don’t even know where he is”, said Jacky.  “Since I was the oldest boy, I had to help Annie with the chores, bring in the wood, and try and keep the old house from fallin’ apart.  Annette helped my mother look after the little ones.  Tony would always leave money on the kitchen counter by the pump when he left, and he always left in the middle of the night without tellin’ us where he was goin’ or when he’d be back.  It was an awful way to live, at least I thought so, until the welfare came and took us.”

Jacky continued his story but the bottle was nearly empty and I knew he was nearing the end of today’s chapter.  “Annie had got sick and she wasn’t gettin’ any better.  One day, the ambulance came to get her.  We didn’t know how bad sick she was and I don’t think she did either.  Tony wasn’t around, and the same time the ambulance came into our yard, there was another car with the priest and the woman from the welfare.  We tried not to cry, and Annette and I held the little ones as the ambulance drove away.  Then, the priest and the woman from the welfare sat us down at the kitchen table and told us we couldn’t stay in the house alone.  They said we had to go to the orphanage in Summerside, and wait until they found us a foster home.  It was the worst day of my life, until then at least”, Jacky said.  “We never saw our mother again, and Eveline never even told us when the welfare let her know Annie had died.  Maybe she didn’t want to buy us good clothes to go to the funeral.”

By that time, the music had stopped, and the crowd was clearing out of the oval in front of the stage.  Jacky’s bottle was almost empty.  “You wouldn’t believe what’s in this: moonshine and the juice from a bottle of maraschino cherries”, said Jacky.  “I get the juice from the guy at the pub on

Sydney Street

.  He saves it for me and leaves it out on the back step.  My buddy makes the best shine this side of Pleasant Grove, and the juice makes her go down better, boy.”  With that, we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways, me to my spacious four-bedroom home and Jacky to God knows where.