Pure Spring Read online

  PURE SPRING

  BRIAN DOYLE

  Pure Spring

  Copyright © 2007 by Brian Doyle

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801, Toronto, Ontario M5V 2K4

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

  1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Ontario Arts Council.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Doyle, Brian

  Pure Spring / by Brian Doyle.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-774-6 (bound). – ISBN-10: 0-88899-774-4 (bound).

  ISBN-13: 0-88899-775-3 (pbk.) – ISBN-10: 0-88899-775-2 (pbk.)

  1. Pure Spring Company – Juvenile fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS8557.O87P87 2007 jC813’.54 C2006-905940-3

  Cover photography by Tim Fuller

  Design by Michael Solomon

  Printed and bound in Canada

  To Shelley Tanaka

  Like all great editors, she can make

  just about anybody look good.

  Contents

  1. Dump the Lie

  What Happened — One

  2. How to Know Grampa Rip

  3. Rising to Gerty

  4. Spy

  5. Sap’s Running

  What Happened — Two

  6. Wedding Pictures

  7. Exploding Trees

  8. Honee Orange and Tulips

  What Happened — Three

  9. Nine Pages

  10. Gerty and the Pork Hock

  11. Not the Time

  12. This Time

  13. Everything Reminds

  What Happened — Four

  14. Moths and Flames

  15. Sandy and Strawberry

  16. The Plan

  What Happened — Five

  17. Running Away with Gerty

  18. Goodbye, Mr. Mirsky

  What Happened — Six

  19. Big Now

  Dramatis Personae

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Dump the Lie

  “NAME?”

  “Martin.”

  “Gotta last name?”

  “O’Boy.”

  “O’Boy?”

  “O’Boy. Martin O’Boy.”

  “People call you Boy? Boy O’Boy?”

  “Sometimes. But I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No. No, I don’t.” Am I being rude?

  “Why? Why don’t you like it? It’s a nickname. All kids should have nicknames. I always wanted a nickname when I was young. But nobody would tag one on me. Come over here...”

  If he asks me again I can tell him that I don’t like it because I think they’re making fun when they call me that.

  He’s got a nice face, Mr. Mirsky has. Kind, soft eyes, large nose and forehead. Granny always used to say that a large forehead showed you were very smart. Lots of brains in there, lots of room...

  I go around the desk where he’s sitting and he stands up. He puts his hands on my shoulders and then he squeezes my arms.

  “You’re big enough. Should be strong enough to lift crates of soft drinks on to a truck. Why did you come to Pure Spring for a job?”

  Funny, but I don’t feel very big. Not big at all. Small, in fact.

  “I like the trucks. The shape of them. The color. And I like the drinks. Specially Honee Orange.”

  He likes what I just said. His eyes are smiling now. He’s proud.

  “Now, you have to be sixteen years of age. Are you sixteen? It’s against the law for me to hire people who are under sixteen. You don’t want to get me in trouble, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well? Are you sixteen or over? What’s the answer?”

  My dead granny told me never to lie. Lying poisons your soul, she said. She also told me that I was too beautiful to be a boy and my curly blond hair and large blue eyes will be a curse I’ll have to live with the rest of my life.

  But now I’m going to lie. I’m not sixteen. I only maybe look sixteen because I’m big for my age and I guess I’m pretty strong. I have my birth certificate right here in my wallet in my pocket.

  I put my hand in my pocket and hold on to my wallet.I don’t want my birth certificate to jump out on to Mr. Mirsky’s desk while I’m telling my lie.

  Grampa Rip got me this pocket-sized birth certificate when I first came to live with him. He said that if ever I forgot who I was all I had to do was look in my wallet and there the answer would be.

  He knew that sometimes I’d get so scared I’d lose myself and I’d become nobody, a blank.

  Me and my cat Cheap live with Grampa Rip. Cheap has only one ear. My father bought him for ten cents for my birthday a few years ago as a joke. Ten cents. Cheap. Really funny.

  Well, he won’t be making jokes like that any more. Or any kind of jokes.

  Grampa Rip is pretty smart sometimes. Especially when he got all the information about me and got me my birth certificate. Very smart. But sometimes his brain goes away — far, far away — and he’s not smart any more. That’s when I have to take care of him. Make sure he’s all right. Our old neighbor, my hero Buz Sawyer, suggested that I go and live with his grandfather Rip Sawyer for two reasons. One, so’s I’d have a place to live, and two, so’s I could take care of Grampa Rip when his mind went away.

  Back to Granny again.

  She also told me that people want to believe somebody who has a beautiful face. That’s why some movie actors can tell you anything and you’ll believe it.

  “What’s the answer?” Mr. Mirsky says.

  I dump the lie into his kind face.

  “Yes,” I lie, “I’m sixteen.”

  “When is your birthday?”

  “When they dropped the atomic bomb and killed all the people. August 6.”

  He’s looking at me.

  “You didn’t take that personally, did you? The bomb. All the people who died?”

  “I hated it,” I say.

  “So you’ll be seventeen on August 6,” he says.

  I don’t answer. Is silence a lie, too?

  I know he likes me. I don’t let the shame of my lie show in my shameful eyes.

  He blinks his kind eyes. “I don’t suppose you have any proof of age with you? Birth certificate or something?”

  “No, sir,” I lie again, squeezing my wallet, squeezing it until it bends in my pocket. Squeezing my name, my date of birth. Squeezing myself.

  “No, I didn’t think so. Hardly anybody has that kind of proof at your age...I think you are honest, Martin O’Boy. You’re hired, hired as a helper. You know, we’re honest here at Pure Spring, too. We are a trusted company. We are a proud company. We have good relationships with our customers in the Ottawa area. And our drivers are honest. They don’t steal from the customers. And our helpers, too. They are honest. Like you, Martin O’Boy. You will be a helper. You, of course, will not steal drinks to drink free from the truck.

  “We have, though, I should tell you, a special privilege for a helper that even the driver doesn’t have. The helper may have one free drink of his choice. You’ll probably choose Honee Orange to drink, to wash down y
our lunch. I see you have your lunch with you. That brown bag?”

  “Yes. That’s my lunch.”

  “And may I ask, my young friend, who made that lunch for you?”

  “I made it.”

  “Your mother didn’t make it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Your father, then?”

  “No, sir. Not my father.”

  “Who, then? Who do you live with?”

  “Grampa Rip.”

  “Is he your mother’s father, Grampa Rip? Or is he your father’s father?”

  “He’s Buz’s grandfather.”

  “Who’s Buz?”

  “My hero neighbor. He’s gone back to war again. In Korea this time. The Korean War. He’s a pilot. He flies airplanes. He’s my hero.”

  “Wait a minute. Grampa Rip. Is his last name Sawyer? Rip Sawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know him. I know Rip Sawyer. A fine and cultured gentleman. He used to work for my father when he first started this business. Took care of my father’s horses, wagons and sleighs. Ottawa. Everybody knows everybody in Ottawa and the Ottawa Valley. Wonderful thing, that!”

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  “I guess you don’t go to school. It’s April 1. School isn’t out until June.”

  “No, I don’t go to school.”

  “Did you quit school?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Why did you quit?”

  “I couldn’t go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I got sick.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Something happened.”

  What Happened • One

  YOU WERE up to your father’s shoulder now. He said you were growing like a weed. You didn’t like it when he said that. A weed. You didn’t like anything your father said. A weed is a thing you don’t want. That you don’t like. It’s something you pull out by the roots and throw out of the garden because it’s sucking all the good things that the good plants in the garden want.

  “Don’t be so touchy,” your father said. “It’s just an expression. Unless you think you are a weed. If you are, then you could pull yourself out of the garden and toss yourself over the fence right now!”

  Your granny always told you to pay attention to people’s words, the way they choose to say things. The words that people say can show a lot about those people. You can find out a lot that way. A lot about what they think. A lot about what they don’t say with their tongues out loud but they say inside with their brains. Behind the words they say out loud.

  You looked at the scar between his eyes while you were discussing weeds.

  The time he was full of beer and was shaking your twin brother Phil to get him to stop howling and your mother was shrieking and Phil’s head was going to fly off and you picked the ketchup bottle off the table and hit your father right between the eyes with it.

  You threw it as hard as you could, like you’d throw a baseball. The bottle turned in the air once and then the heavy bottom of it hit him square between the eyes.

  The blood spurted straight out of your father’s forehead like the stream you see in pictures of those fountains where they have the statues of those cute little boys pissing up and over and down in a nice rainbow arc.

  The glass in those ketchup bottles is very thick and that ketchup bottle was very heavy.

  Your father stumbled into the kitchen and after a while came back, silent, with a blood-soaked towel around his head.

  Your mother took your twin brother Phil, who was not like you at all and was still howling and struggling, upstairs.

  Your father, from under the bloody towel, said, “If you ever do anything like that again, I’ll kill you!”

  He never once mentioned it after that. And neither did you nor anybody else. But the scar was there to remind everybody every minute, every hour, every day. Every day he shaved he saw it in the mirror.

  Every time he looked at you he saw the scar in the mirror of your eyes.

  2

  How to Know Grampa Rip

  I’M SITTING on a park bench right across the street from where we live, Grampa Rip and I — 511 Somerset Street West, Apartment 4.

  There’s still some snow on the ground but it’s a warm spring day.

  There’s a gray man in a gray raincoat and a gray hat sitting two benches down. Across and down the street outside Smitty’s Smoke Shop, Smitty is washing the winter off his window. On the right side of the park, in front of St. Elijah’s Antiochian Orthodox Church, the priest is walking up and down in the spring sun squinting at his holy book. Nobody else around.

  While I was talking to Mr. Mirsky at Pure Spring this morning, Mr. Mirsky’s secretary, Anita, came in and told him he was wanted on the phone. He told her to give me an application form to fill out and then he told me I couldn’t start work today because the drink truck was already gone out and that I should come to work tomorrow at 7:00 A.M. in the morning and start to work.

  Anita was shorter than I am, even with the high heels she had on. She was wearing a tight red skirt and a frilly white blouse and lots of lipstick and perfume. She waved her eyelashes at me and then got me an application form and sat me down at a table and gave me a pen.

  “Fill this out and leave it with me and come in a little before 7:00 A.M. in the morning tomorrow and you’ll be with Randy in truck number 15,” Anita said.

  “Randy?” I said.

  “Right choo are!” she said. “Randy!”

  “Truck 15. Randy,” I said.

  “Right choo are!” she said. And then she said, “And God help ya!”

  Grampa Rip’s not home. He’s at McEvoy’s Funeral Home on Kent Street near St. Patrick’s Church. Every day (well, nearly every day) Grampa Rip gets all dressed up — long-sleeved white shirt, vest, watch and chain, suit jacket, nice pressed pants to match, tie and black fedora hat — and off to the funeral home he goes for most of the afternoon.

  I was friends with Grampa Rip before I went to live with him. My hero, Buz Sawyer, asked me once if I wanted to go and help him move his grampa from his nice house on Bayswater Avenue to an apartment or rooms somewhere because his wife had died and left everything to the Catholic Church — the house, all the money, most of the fancy furniture, everything — and so Grampa Rip was all of a sudden kind of poor and kicked out of where he was living.

  My friend Billy Batson and I went with Buz in his convertible car to help his Grampa Rip Sawyer move.

  The moving truck was called Bye Bye Moving. And written underneath in smaller letters it said Let someone who cares handle your valuables.

  “They won’t be handling my valuables,” said Grampa Rip, “but they can move the furniture!” Buz laughed his head off and I laughed, too, and Billy Batson whispered to me what’s so funny and I told him that when Grampa Rip said “my valuables” he meant what’s hanging between his legs.

  “SHAZAM!” said Billy Batson.

  Billy Batson made me laugh. He had the same name as the boy in the comic books who can change into Captain Marvel.

  In the comics, a homeless orphan called Billy Batson meets a wizard who gives him a magic word to say. The word is SHAZAM!

  The homeless orphan Billy Batson says SHAZAM! and then there’s a picture that says BOOM! and Billy changes into Captain Marvel who looks a lot like Fred MacMurray, the movie star, except for his clothes. Captain Marvel has a tight red suit on with a yellow belt, yellow cuffs, yellow boots and a white cape with yellow trim.

  And on his chest is a yellow lightning bolt.

  When my friend Billy got excited about something he’d say the word SHAZAM! and shut his eyes and wait. Then, he said, his brain would swell up like Captain Marvel’s chest.

  Here’s some of the stuff Grampa Rip had for us to move: the kitchen table with the huge wooden legs carved like giant bowling pins (takes
two strong men to carry it); four heavy high-backed oak chairs with lions carved on the two back posts; a large brass bed; an enormous rocking chair with wooden eagles on the posts; a monster desk, higher than I can reach, with glass doors, a rolltop cover, eight drawers and dozens of cubbyholes with four different keys to lock the different doors and compartments (Grampa Rip calls it his secretariat — a small person could live in this desk); two very heavy high brass floor lamps with tassels hanging from the shades; three giant holy pictures with massive wood frames — one of Jesus’ head wearing his crown of thorns with drops of blood on his forehead, his eyes turned up to heaven, another of the Pieta, the Virgin Mary, dressed in blue, with the dead body of Jesus on her lap, and another one of Jesus carrying his cross which is about the size of one of Grampa Rip’s holy pictures through a crowd of spectators (one of these pictures could cover more than half a wall); a massive strongbox about the size of a small bed with iron reinforced corners and hinges big enough for Hercules and an ugly big padlock that weighs as much as a large rock (this box is always locked and weighs a ton).

  The place we moved Grampa Rip to that time was a garage made over to be a kind of one-room house. It was in the backyard of a house near Glebe Collegiate on a pretty rich street, Clemow Avenue. The lady was a friend of Grampa Rip’s dead wife. You could tell Grampa didn’t like her very much. She was standing on her back veranda telling the moving guys who came with the Bye Bye Moving truck to be careful with their truck backing it up.

  “Look at the mouth on her,” Grampa Rip said. Her mouth was just a slit and she didn’t seem to have any lips. “I wonder how she feeds herself...got a face on her like a mud pout...”

  I wondered how — after we got all his stuff stuffed in the garage — there was going to be any room for Grampa Rip. How could he live here if there was hardly any room for his own self?

  A few days later Buz told me his grampa was moving again but he couldn’t help him this time because he was getting ready to go to Korea to maybe be a war hero and Billy Batson himself had moved out of Lowertown the day before and could I go over and help Grampa Rip.