Read Online Blue Moon by James King - Free Book Online

seemed to receive a strange pleasure from inciting my mother to violence. As if he were proving something about her to himself. His face would become suffused by a sickly sweet smirk. My mother suffered no fool gladly, and she was especially prone to being goaded by my father playing that role. In essence, that was their relationship: she was testy, and he took a malicious pleasure in making her more so.
    My parents were extremely indirect with each other. Mother knew full well that my father’s pay from the bus company was far more than it should have been—she both ordered and controlled the activity. He knew—in his capacity as janitor and security guard—the combination to the safe, and would, from time to time, remove huge amounts of tickets, and then sell them on his own improvised black market. The proceeds from these sales would then be deposited—usually in small change—at his two banks—a branch of the Bank of Toronto, the other a branch of the Canadian Bank of Commerce—which flanked the HSR offices at the corner of Wentworth and King Streets. Yet, this activity was merely hinted at in exchanges between my parents in front of me.
    â€œDonald, we are very short this week.”
    â€œYes, my love. I shall work on it.”
    â€œDon’t work on it—do it!”
    â€œLet me think about it.”
    â€œI’ve told you a hundred times not to think. Just do what you are told.”
    If my father kept quiet at this point, the matter would die a natural death. But sometimes he needled my mother.
    â€œHow do you propose I solve the problem, dearest? Our savings are very limited. I can only make so many withdrawals and our piggy bank will be empty.” This would be said in a loud swaggering voice, a glint of mischief entering his eye. He would wink at me, making me a co-conspirator.
    More and more, my mother’s anger was vented on my father. In the process, I became an uneasy bystander, a pawn in their bitter war. To be fair, Mother hardly had an easy time of it. Her domestic chores were vast and complicated. She hand-washed all the laundry before laboriously placing it on the clothesline to dry. She also maintained a vegetable garden, chicken coops and rabbit hutches in the back yard. When the laundry was thoroughly dry, she ironed it all—even the sheets.
    Briefly, she took a job at the Membery Mattress Company but quit when her legs could no longer bear the constant pumping on the foot pedal that powered her sewing machine (electrical power would have made the expenses of the company too heavy and thus uncompetitive). Before that, the sweat that poured down her face made it impossible for her to see, so blinded was she by the salt water that invaded her eyes. So, she had a towel draped over her shoulder, which she made constant use of.

    At the time she came across my father and myself
in flagrante,
Mother worked as a “tinflipper” at the Stelco steel works, one of the few well-paid jobs for females in the steel industry because women, unlike men, did not become bored inspecting both sides of a tin plate. The supposition of the captains of industry was that women, after centuries devoted to knitting and sewing, had quick eyes and patient hands. This stereotyping obviously did not lead to any other kind of preferment in the factory.
    My father had refused to walk through what he called the “gates of hell” at Dofasco and Stelco, the two big steel works, each giant accounting for thousands of immigrant jobs. These places—in his words—were “bloody, dangerous infernos.” He was especially frightened by what he had heard of what could happen during a “bottom pour,” when overhead cranes delivered the enormous ladles of burning, bubbling steel from the furnaces to the men who waited to guide the pour into huge moulds. The twenty dollars a week the men were paid for such work hardly kept them and their families above the