GROWING UP WITH JACKY

Chapter 3

I was walking up Sydney Street one Friday evening on my way to meet up with my friends at Peake’s Quay when I heard someone ask me for a smoke.  It was dark behind Saint Dunstan’s Basilica and I couldn’t see who it was, but I knew the voice was Jacky’s.  He was sitting with his back against the church foundation in the shadow of the street light with a beer bottle in his hand.  “Nice warm evenin’, eh!” said Jacky.  “I thought I’d sit here for awhile and watch the traffic go by, and maybe bum a cigarette or two.  You may as well sit down and we can pick up where we left off the last time.  I was thinkin’ about girls the other day, and how I got laid the first time in the Harbour,” he chuckled.  “But before I tell you that one, do you remember the time my older sister, Annette, came from Summerside with her boyfriend in that fancy convertible?  You were there that day at the old swimmin’ hole, weren’t ya’?”

Although real swimming for us meant the cold salt water of the Gulf, in June, before it warmed up, we swam in the creek at a place we called the swimming hole.  It wasn’t far from Joe and Eveline’s, up off the dirt road, and we always had a contest to see who’d be the first one in.  I usually won.  Although I was a clumsy athlete, I was a fish in the water and I wasn’t scared of the cold.  If I’m ever reincarnated, I’ll come back as an air-tight stove!  Annette had run away from the orphanage so many times the nuns finally gave up on her.  She was sixteen by then and staying with her boyfriend.  The two of them decided to drive to the Harbour one hot summer day, and they picked up Jacky before driving down the lane to the swimming hole.  Annette had her bathing suit in the car but she didn’t have it on.

I told my version of the story to Jacky. “The three of you walked up to the bank while we were splashing around and Annette went behind a bush to put on her bathing suit.  Well, that was all the provocation I needed, and curiosity got the better of me.  I knew how to get to where I could see her without being noticed, so I crawled through the bushes and saw her put on the two-piece suit.  I got an eyeful alright.  My God, I figured I was a man then; I’d seen the Promised Land!”

“Yeah”, said Jacky.  “Annette never was too shy.  That guy she was with was no good, but she liked his car.  They didn’t stay together after that summer, and she left for Toronto not long after.  I saw her there after I ran away from the Harbour, but I’ll tell you that story some other time”.

Jacky was a handsome guy, and most of the girls in the Harbour had a crush on him.  He had his new false front teeth, lots of muscles, he was good at sports, and he was a charmer.  As my cousin used to say: “He had IT!”

“As soon as I figured out school wasn’t for me I had to learn how to make some money”, said Jacky.  “You and your buddies picked bottles and sold smelts and rabbits but that wasn’t for me.  Eveline hated smelts and rabbits, and walkin’ through the ditches lookin’ for bottles was too much work.  Although I know the welfare paid Eveline good money to keep me, she never gave me a friggin’ cent.  I started hangin’ around the canteen to see if I could pick up a few quarters washin’ dishes and cleanin’ up after they closed on the weekend.  Then, one day, I was hangin’ around the Legion parking lot and up drives Big Gertie in her old half-ton truck.  She had a couple of part-time jobs, and one of them was janitor at the Legion.  She’d go there on Sunday mornins’ after the dance, and clean the tables and scrub the floor.  She saw me there and asked me if I wanted to help her.  I said I would if she paid me”, continued Jacky.  “The first few times I spent a couple of hours there pickin’ things up for her, and she paid me 50 cents.  That wasn’t bad.  A hell of a lot easier than pickin’ 50 bottles, eh!”

“Anyways, the third time I went she gave me a drink a beer”, said Jacky.  “I’d seen Gertie sneak a beer or two from the Legion fridge, so I said ‘Sure!’  Gertie seemed to think this was pretty cute, a fourteen-year-old orphan drinkin’ beer.  She told me not to tell anybody about it or she’d kick my arse.  I was scared of her, so I kept my mouth shut, I tell ya’”.

Big Gertie was something of a legend in the Harbour.  She’d grown up on a farm as an only child, with no brothers, and came by her name honestly.  She was big alright, big all over, and strong as an ox!  The French guys had given her a few choice nicknames, and although they teased her, none of them was brave enough to give her a try.  Gertie had somehow fallen in love with a man from down east who was ten years older than her.  They’d met at a church picnic.  He’d been in the Korean War, and her family had put the pressure on her to ‘land him’ because they were afraid she’d end up an old maid.  But her new husband, George, turned out to be a major disappointment.  Like Joe Plank, he had a drinking problem but, worst of all, he lost all interest in her after their daughter was born.  Deciding she couldn’t do without, Big Gertie turned her attention to the young guys in the Harbour, and because Jacky was good looking and available, she decided he’d be the next one!

“It was the fourth Sunday, I think, and Gertie had told me to clean out the closet.  She came in with a beer and locked the door behind her”, Jacky said with that grin.  “I thought, ‘Jesus, what did I do wrong now?’  Next friggin’ thing, she’s pressin’ up against me and has her hand on my crutch”, says Jacky.  “I was scared shitless when I saw the look in her eyes.  I thought she was gonna cut if off!  But then she steers me into a corner where there was an old chair, and sits me down and starts to take her pants off.  And then she takes her shirt off.  Holy Jesus, I’d never seen anythin’ like it!  She didn’t smell too good but she knew how to get me goin’, if ya’ know what I mean”, he said.  “We went at it pretty hard.  When she was done, she got up, got dressed and never said another word to me all mornin’.  She must have liked it because we did it every Sunday after that for a long time.”

“Speakin’ of Big Gertie”, he drawled.  “Do you remember the time she tackled the teacher at the English school on the steps of the Co-op.”

The poor unfortunate had come to the Harbour from Nova Scotia, fresh out of Teacher’s College, and it was his first time in a classroom.  Boy was he in for a surprise!  The English school had fallen on hard times, mostly because of a lack of students, and it would close soon after.  Without understanding the consequences of his action, young Mr. Scott had disciplined Gertie’s daughter for some minor infraction and had sent her home with a note. 

Jacky picked up the story.  “Gertie was wild!  There was no friggin’ way her daughter was in the wrong!  She knew Scott always called in at the Co-op for a few groceries on his way home, and she was layin’ for him.  You were there too with a bunch of us.  I’d heard about the note from Johnny, who always knew where there was goin’ to be trouble.  Anyways, the poor little bugger came out of the store with his books in one hand and his groceries in the other, and Gertie tackled him right there on the steps.  She went up one side of him and down the other, and he didn’t know what to say.  She finally stopped yellin’ at him, and then she decked him.  Right there on the steps of the Co-op!  With half the Harbour watchin’!”

I’d remembered the ruckus.  Nobody had moved an inch to protect the teacher, or to try to stop Big Gertie.  They knew better!  Poor Mr. Scott had picked himself up, gotten a few stitches over at Dr. Delaney’s, and staggered back to his rooming house.  And that’s the last we ever saw of him.  He left the Harbour the next morning.  “Yeah”, said Jacky, “She was somethin’ else that Gertie.  She taught me a few things all right!”

After I’d stopped laughing, I got up and asked Jacky if he’d like a bite to eat.  “I’d rather have a beer, if it’s all the same to you”, he answered.  So I walked over to Queen Street, ducked into a snack bar and ordered a sandwich, and then went over to the liquor store and picked up a six-pack.  I figured Jacky deserved the six-pack for entertaining me, and I knew by the look of him that he needed to get some solid food into his stomach.  One thing for sure, his stories were a hell of a lot more entertaining than anything I’d hear from a bunch of overfed civil servants in a bar down on the waterfront!

As I sat down, Jacky munched on the sandwich and took us down memory lane yet again.  “That summer after the first time I took Grade 7 was a good one, boy’, he said.  “I grew up a lot, but I guess that’s when I started headin’ down the wrong path too.  I didn’t just learn about women, I learned about drinkin’ too, and I had my first taste of dope.  There was always a bad crowd hangin’ around the Harbour during the summer.  Guys comin’ home from Toronto, guys who had quit school, the tourists, that sort of thing.  Eveline and Joe tried to keep me under control but, by that time, they had enough to worry about with their own kids.  Besides, they’d brought in a couple more foster children to replace Joey and Betty.  Eveline knew I had no place to go and that the welfare had to pay her until I was eighteen, as long as I stayed there.  So we made a deal.  She left me alone, and I didn’t bother her”.

“I went back to school in the fall but I really didn’t give a shit anymore.  The teacher kicked me out of class so many times that I gave up before Christmas.  Eveline said I’d have to find somethin’ to keep me out of the house so I started doin’ odd jobs for the farmers and the fishermen”, Jacky continued.  “I was fifteen.  Some days when I had money, I thought I had the world by the tail.  When I had no money, I was down in the dumps.  I figured I needed a plan.  So, I found out from one of the guys who was home for Christmas how I could get to Toronto.  I told Eveline I was going to see Annie, but that I’d be back.  She figured, I guess, that she might as well let me go because I’d go anyways.  So I hitched a ride to Toronto with this guy and got my first taste of the big city.  It didn’t take me long to find work there and it didn’t take me long to get inta trouble either”, he said.

“Annie was livin’ in this run-down place with this useless guy, and I ended up helpin’ with the rent and the groceries most of the time.  I soon figured I was no better off there than I was in the Harbour, so I headed back east in the spring to find work on a lobster boat.  It was the best job I ever had, and it sobered me up.  The captain was good to me, and he taught me how to work.  Once the lobster season was over, I got in with the bad summer crowd agin', and then I really hit bottom”, he said.  “All of you guys I used to hang around with were in high school and I didn’t even have Grade 7, for Christ’s sake!”

I remember Jacky’s last year in school.  By that time, I was in high school and he’d started to hang out with a bad crowd.  On a good day, he’d hang around with us, and on a bad day, when he was with the other guys, he’d side with them and treat us like ‘little shits’.  It was their name for us.  We still saw the good in Jacky but something had changed in him, so we just left him alone.  If he wanted to grow up quicker, there wasn’t much we could do about it.  That was his business.  If that’s what he wanted, then we didn’t feel sorry for him in the least.

“I hung around the Harbour ‘til I was eighteen and, just as I figured, Joe and Eveline kicked me out as soon as the welfare money stopped comin’.  I don’t hold a grudge against them because they never made on I was one of theirs.  We welfare kids knew our place, and that we were always second best.  It was the same with the others I knew from the orphanage.  At least I had a roof over my head and a couple of meals a day”, Jacky said with a sigh.  “Then I wandered into Charlottetown, and I been here ever since.  I had a few odd jobs along the way and I even worked for the federal government one time.  I bet you didn’t know that!”

“Yes sir, I was on the pogey one time, and the lady from UI said I’d qualified for job retrainin’.  Because I was bilingual, she told me I’d get to the front of the line in this new program.  Imagine, me, Jacky Barriault at the head of the line!” he said proudly.  “My job was to go to these job fairs and talk about my experience, and try to sell the job retrainin’ program to other people on UI.  I thought I’d died and gone to heaven!  But, it didn’t last.  The program ended, nobody hired me, and I was back on the street”, he said.  “And that’s where I been most of the past twenty five years, since you and I used to run the roads in the Harbour”.

I still had my Friday night date with my drinking buddies so I drained my beer and turned to Jacky: “How’d you like to come out to the Harbour with me sometime, take a drive around and see if we can hook up with some of the old gang?”  “I’d like that”, he said, “Take her easy, eh!”

GROWING UP WITH JACKY

Chapter 2

The next time I saw Jacky was at the Tim Horton’s downtown.  He was sitting at a table guarding a long-empty cup of Saturday morning coffee and looking brighter and more sober than I’d seen him in a long time.  “Can I buy you another one, Jacky?” I asked him.  As I sat down and slid the large double-double across the table to him, he said: “Remember school in Palmer’s Harbour?”  And away he went…

“I went to school up west because I had to.  Annie told me I had to go so I didn’t end up stupid like her and Black Tony.  But people made fun of us anyway, because we were so poor”, said Jacky with touch of anger in his voice.  “What I didn’t know was that my father’s family was related to the Provosts.  I met an old lady in Charlottetown a few years ago, and she told me that my grandmother Allain’s mother was a Provost.  That name didn’t mean anythin’ to me, but the woman told me that the Provosts were black people.  Then I understood.  Guess we know where the frizzy hair comes from, eh!”

“Anyways, I had a good teacher in the little school and I did pretty good.  I even came first in my class in Grade 3”, said Jacky.  “My mother couldn’t believe it, and she went right to the school with my report card to make sure I hadn’t cheated.  The teacher told her I could learn, and that I was one of the smartest in the school.  Imagine!” he said with a wry grin.  “Before I got through Grade 4 though, Annie had got sick and I had to spend more time lookin’ after things around home, and I kind of lost interest in school.” 

“So when I got to Palmer’s Harbour, I figured I’d get right back into it.  I’d passed Grade 4 in Summerside, and although I was a year older than the rest of the kids, I was kind of excited about Grade 5”, he said.  “Eveline marched us through the Harbour and up the hill to the school like we were a buncha air cadets, and she told the teacher she better take good care of us or she’d never hear the end of it.  That was a good way to start the year, eh!  Joey and me had brand new combination overalls on.  Except for the Pineaus who lived on a pig farm even farther out of the village than we did, we were the only ones with combination overalls.  Right then, I knew we were in trouble,” said Jacky.

I remembered the first day Eveline and her brood landed on the doorstep of the old two-room French school.  The two teachers, Mme. Bourgeois and Mlle. Poirier, were there to welcome all the kids, and me and the other Grade 5s were leaning against the fence when Eveline marched up to Mme. Bourgeois and said her piece.  We noticed right away that the three welfare kids carried their lunches in Crisco Shortening cans, while Joe and Eveline’s kids had brand new plastic lunch boxes like the rest of us.  We picked up on the difference in clothes, too.  As soon as Eveline had turned on her heel, Jean marched over to us, looking cocky as usual.

Jean was a year older than the rest of us, and because he’d flunked Grade 5 he was back for another year.  Being older, he figured he’d show us right away who was going to be boss.  “That damn kid from the welfare has the same name as me, ‘Jean’.  So now Eveline calls him ‘Jacky’.  I’m tired of havin’ a girl’s name so I’m changin’ mine to Johnny.  If any of you calls me Jean agin, I’ll knock your friggin’ teeth out,” he snarled.  “Oh boy”, I thought, this year’s getting off to a great start!

“I stayed close to Joey and Betty and made sure they got settled in alright, and I told Mlle. Poirier to let me know if they needed me for anythin’”, said Jacky.  “She was real nice, and she told me to go over to the grande école and find my desk.  At noon recess, I found the little ones.  It was a nice day and we sat out in the yard with our Crisco buckets.  We got out our sandwiches, and right away we saw ours were different.  Everybody except the Pineaus and us had peanut butter or jam on bought bread, and we had lobster paste or homemade bread.  Jesus, I thought, here we go again!” growled Jacky.  “Another reason to get teased, as if we didn’t have enough already!”

Things were no different in 1963 than they are today.  Kids are kids, and kids can be cruel, and that’s just the way it was.  After all, we were from the Harbour!  The kids who came to school on the bus were different, just like the Barriaults and the other kids from the welfare.  Three sisters had arrived the year before, sent by the welfare from the eastern end of the Island.  They’d been adopted by a nice couple who didn’t have children of their own.  I still remember the day they arrived because they’d moved in right next door.  The oldest one would hardly open her mouth to talk the first day, and I couldn’t get her to smile no matter how hard I tried.  It turned out she’d lost her front teeth.  Although we became friends, she never told me how she lost them.  She and her sisters were luckier than the Barriault kids.  Jacky had to wait a whole year before he got his rotten teeth pulled and false teeth put in their place.

“I was glad when it came time to play ball in the school yard”, Jacky continued.  “I couldn’t wait to get my hands on that nice new bat of Jean-Guy’s.  He and his brother always had the best of everythin’.  I never had a bat or glove of my own, but I’d seen them in Summerside when I watched the town kids play baseball through the fence at Queen Elizabeth Park.  They even let me play a couple of times when they were practicin’, and I got pretty good.”

“Anyways, the first day of school, I played outfield bare-handed, and I caught a long fly ball the first time we were in the field.  When my turn came to bat, I hit the first pitch over the fence right into Mrs. Cyril’s yard.  That friggin’ ball rolled all the way down to the brook, and they never found it!  I can still see Jean-Guy’s face as I rounded first base in my combination overalls.  He thought I was like the kids from the back settlement and I didn’t know how to play.  I sure showed him!” said Jacky proudly.

“Playin’ ball was my favourite part of school,” said Jacky.  “We never had enough money for hockey equipment, although Johnny had the best of everythin', so I borrowed skates and gave the girls a twirl on the pond any chance I got.  Once the girls at school found out I could play ball, I got a little more popular.  I guess maybe some of them might of felt sorry for me because I was an orphan and all, and I had to look after the little ones”, he said.  “In Grade 6, somethin’ in me woke up and, from then on, I got real interested in the girls!  I remember one time when we were playin’ kick-the-can over at Abel’s.  I was hidin’ in the long grass with Marie.  She was fourteen and she was keepin’ house at Mme. Bourgeois’.  I got my hand up under her shirt before she slapped me!” Jacky said with that big grin.  “I was hooked then, boy.”

“Once I hit thirteen, I didn’t have much interest in school any more.  Mme. Bourgeois tried her best but there were just too many things goin’ on in my head.  Eveline was gettin’ on my nerves more and more, and it was gettin’ harder for me to fit in at home.  I was gettin’ tired of doing all the shit jobs.  You wouldn’t believe this, but I had to empty the piss pots in the bécosse every mornin’ for the first year I was there until the government paid for Joe and Eveline to put in the bathroom.  I think it had somethin' to do with Joe bein' a veteran.  And then, Joey and Betty got adopted by those people in Kensington, and I was alone,” he lamented.  “I made it through Grade 5 and 6 OK, but by the time I got to Grade 7, I’d just about had it.  I didn’t want to go to the high school and I was gettin’ tired of havin’ no money.  I just wanted to get the hell out of the Harbour and be on my own for once.  Like Black Tony, I guess.”

By that time, the coffee was gone and I could see Jacky’s hands were beginning to shake.  He hadn’t had a drink yet and it was nearly eleven o’clock.  He told me that he had to go see a friend about a “little job”.  I didn’t ask what the job was, figuring it was best to just leave well enough alone.  He pushed back his chair, flashed that familiar grin at me and looked back as he walked toward the door: “See ya’ later, buddy!”

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.