Aunty Rosie was our mother’s cousin. She was older than Mother, but they were close friends, going back to the old country where they had grown up together. Aunty Rosie was plump and she was cheerful. She loved flowers. She was superstitious too. She got married, later in life, to an older bachelor named Rudolf Raeder. We never called him Uncle Rudolf; we called him Uncle Raeder. It was always Aunty Rosie and Uncle Raeder. Uncle Raeder had been an underground coal miner in Drumheller, Alberta for part of his life. He often talked to our dad, in German, about his coal mining experiences.
They were possibly in their late fifties, I’m not sure, when they purchased a quarter-section farm two miles northwest of Holden, Alberta, about ten miles from our farm. They didn’t have any children, but they had somehow adopted, or taken in, a boy named Willy. Willy’s family had broken up, I think, and the children (at least some of the younger ones) had been farmed out, or temporarily given to friends or well-meaning people in the area. Willy’s brother Stirling was taken in by the Rudolf Steinwand family, one mile east of our farm. Stirling was older than me, probably my sisters’ age. He was older than Willy too.
Stirling walked the mile from the Steinwand farm to our corner, where he caught a ride with the four of us in the buggy or cutter. Then he could ride the next two miles to West Bruce School, the school we attended in the 1940s.
My oldest sister was in charge of driving Goldie, the gentle horse that our father had chosen as our school horse. But Trudy let Stirling drive as soon as we picked him up at our corner. I remember him standing tall and slender in front of us, holding the reins, while we sat together on the seat or huddled close together under the blanket in the cutter. Sometimes, if it was really cold, there was a big stone on the floor that Mother had put in the oven overnight, wrapped in a towel to help keep our feet warm. But Stirling stood outside, driving the horse.
Stirling could yodel like Wilf Carter, which he did sometimes. And Stirling could whistle songs or whistle like birds or just really loud. I liked Stirling.
We had been invited for Sunday dinner at Aunty Rosie’s. It was early summer, probably late June. The year was 1946, I think. Dad had a 1941 Ford car. Trudy would have been 12, Alice nine, I was six and Ben was five. I think we went to church first because we were wearing our Sunday clothes. Maybe it was at the Free Methodist Church in Bruce where Mother and Dad had been married in 1933.
We were all wearing our Sunday clothes, I remember that.
We got to Aunty Rosie’s place and they were all outside to meet us—Aunty Rosie, Uncle Raeder and Willy. Ben and I didn’t know Willy at all. He was about ten. He was wearing homemade blue-jean overalls that Aunty Rosie had made. Just like the Sunday clothes that we were wearing, made by our mother on the treadle Singer sewing machine in our living room.
There were two draft horses close to the barn with their heads over the fence looking at us when we got out of the car. There were quite a few chickens inside a fence beside a chicken house. The barn was small with a gable roof.
Dad and Mother greeted Aunty Rosie and Uncle Raeder warmly. Aunty Rosie and Mother hugged each other and Aunty Rosie hugged my sisters too. She patted Ben and me on our heads; she probably said how we were growing.
Dad and Uncle Raeder and Willy were walking to the
horses that had their heads over the fence. Ben and I
followed them.
Dad called one horse Flora. She was a big chocolate-
coloured mare with white stockings and a white blaze on
her face. He put his arm around her neck and scratched
her face with his other hand. It looked like they were old
friends. (I found out years later that Dad had sold or given
Uncle Raeder an older team of horses when they had
purchased their farm.) The other horse, Minnie, was black
with a white star on her forehead.
We went into Aunty Rosie’s and Uncle Raeder’s cream-
coloured house with white trim. It was one-and-a-half
stories with upstairs dormer windows. There were lots of
flowers along the path to the house.
We went up some stairs into the house, more stairs than
our house had on our farm. I remember there was a cellar
trap-door in the centre of the kitchen. When we came into
the dining/living room, I thought I saw another cellar door
there. I wondered why there were two cellar doors when
there was only one at our farmhouse. Were there possibly
two cellars in this house?
I don’t remember what the meal was, but likely it was
chicken. Every farm had some chickens and chicken was
always good for company on a Sunday. (Years later, when
Aunty Rosie and Uncle Raeder retired to a small house in
Holden, I heard Uncle Raeder tell Dad if a farmer’s wife
made chicken soup, either the chicken or the farmer was
sick!) Aunty Rosie kept a good-sized flock of chickens at
their farm.
Anyhow, I’m sure the meal and the dessert, possibly
rhubarb pie, were very good. Ben and I sat on one side,
Willy was on the other. We looked at each other, but never said anything. Right after dessert, Willy slipped away from the table. No one even noticed, but I did. A minute or two later he was standing quietly in the corner of the room. He was trying to get the attention of Benny and me, motioning c’mon with his hand and nodding his head to the outside. It didn’t take us long to figure out that Willy wanted us to go outside with him.
Quietly, Benny and I left the table together. We didn’t say “Thank you for the nice dinner, Aunty Rosie,” or even “Excuse me, please.” We just got up and left.
Outside, Willy talked to us for the first time.
“C’mon,” he said.“Let’s go! There’s lots to see! Do you have pigeons at your farm?”
We shook our heads and followed him to the barn. There were a few pigeons on the roof, some were white. The gable end of the barn was away from the house.
Willy pointed up to the hayloft door.
“See those boxes? They’re for the pigeons!”
There were two wooden apple boxes, on their sides, nailed to the wall of the barn, one on each side of the hayloft door. Each box was divided in half, making four nesting compartments. There were two narrow board perches on the sides of each box.
“I’ll show you the nests! One has babies, the other has eggs. Pigeons have two eggs. They’re white. Help me get the ladder.”
A homemade wooden ladder, with poplar poles for the sides hung on spikes on the long side of the barn.
“It’s pretty heavy, but I can get it off,” he said. “Get over to the end and grab it when I get it off the nails.”
We did. Willy was quite a bit taller than Ben or me. He
could lift and get one end of the ladder over the nail.
“I can do it by myself,” he said. “I’ve done it before when
he’s not around. I’m not supposed to do it without him, but
they can’t see what we’re doing from the house.”
We got the ladder up towards the boxes. A white pigeon
flew out when the ladder scraped up the wall of the barn.
Willy scrambled up the ladder.
“Yup,” he called down, “She’s still sitting on the eggs, and
the two babies are a lot bigger than they were a few days
ago.”
We took turns, cautiously, slowly climbing up the ladder,
having a look and slowly coming back down.
“Don’t need to worry,” he said. “I’m holding the ladder,
it won’t fall down. Nobody holds it for me when I’m by
myself. And we can’t take too long or the eggs won’t hatch
if the mother doesn’t sit on them soon—that’s what he told
me.”
We took down the ladder and man-handled it back onto
the nails on the side of the barn.
“Follow me,” he said.
There was a thick shelter belt of caragana trees on the
north and west sides of the house. They had probably
been planted there by the original homesteader. They were
thick and overgrown and clawed at our clothes, our arms,
legs and faces as we followed Willy through the tangled
undergrowth.
“There’s different kinds of birds in here,” he said. “I can
show you their empty nests because the babies are gone
now. They’ve already hatched and grown up and left the
nest.”
He made his way through, showing us a few empty nests lower down and pointing at some higher up on limbs too small to climb.
We emerged out of the trees and crawled through a fence. I caught my shirt on a barb and it tore a perfect right angle hole in the sleeve close to my shoulder. We were in a pasture. A few cows were grazing not far away.
“You guys seen a crow’s nest? There’s one in a tree in that bush over there. It’s easy to climb. I’ll show it to you.”
We ran to the bush and he climbed up a poplar tree close beside the one with a large round collection of small branches and twigs about 12 feet up. Soon he was high enough to look into the crow’s nest.
“See, it’s easy,” he said. “But they’re gone now, maybe two weeks or so. Baby crows make a lot of noise when they get bigger and the mother and father really got mad at me when I climbed this tree. But they didn’t attack me! They had four eggs and they had four babies. Crows’ eggs are kind of green with brown spots.”
He came down. “Climb up and have a look. It’s easy. And if you can reach far enough, feel the inside of the nest. Just feel how soft it is.”
We took turns, climbed up and looked inside the nest, but we didn’t reach out to feel how soft it was.
“Ever seen a magpie nest?” he asked after we were back on the ground. “Magpies make a different nest than crows do. It’s like a crow’s nest with a roof on top. It’s got a round hole on one side for the door. I can show you guys one. It’s not too far away.”
We made our way across the pasture through a clump of poplar trees, across more pasture to another group of trees.
“It’s up there,” he pointed. Even higher than the crow’s
nest was a very large, round, covered nest with a hole on
one side, just as he said. It almost surrounded the trunk of
the tree.
“Can’t climb this tree, not enough branches,” he said.
“Besides, how can you look inside if you’re climbing up
from underneath? And there’s no other tree close enough
to climb up either. But isn’t it a big nest? I think they had
four babies. They’re gone now too.”
We walked back toward the farmyard.
“If we go on the outside of the caraganas,” he said, “they
won’t be able to see us. We’ll go around to the big slough
by the road. There are a lot of birds in there—red-wing
blackbirds mostly, and ducks and mud hens. I know where
some of the nests are. I can show them to you.”
We got closer to the slough where there were a lot of old,
brown, last year’s cattails, with even browner, fuzzy tops.
“I’ll show you the duck’s nest first. Ducks make their
nests not too close to the water, but close enough so that
the little babies can walk to the water right after they’ve
hatched.”
The duck’s nest was just outside the big circle of cattails
that grew closer to the water, hidden in a thick growth of
old coarse grass.
“This nest was a Mallard duck. Mallard ducks are big.
They are brown if they’re female, and if they’re male they
have shiny green heads with a white circle underneath
the green. This nest had 12 eggs and they all hatched. See,
there’s still a few egg shells left around the nest. The nest
has feathers in it from the mother duck. The feathers help
keep the eggs warm. I saw the little babies swimming with
their mother right after they hatched, maybe the next day.
They’re sort of yellow and brown and black and really little. They know how to swim right away. They’re cute. Maybe we’ll see them swimming around in the water, but maybe not.”
We walked farther around and got closer to the water. The ground was getting really soft.
“Now I’ll show you a mud hen’s nest. Mud hens are black with a little white; they’re smaller than Mallard ducks. Mud hens run on top of the water and flap their wings when they start to take off. Here it is, closer to the water right by the old cattails. You’d never see it. I found it because I came so close that the mother flew off the nest! That’s how I found it. But that’s how I found the duck nest too. She flew off the nest when I came too close. This nest had seven eggs, but they all hatched too. But there aren’t any egg shells left around the nest. Maybe something ate the egg shells. Mud hen eggs are smaller than duck eggs.”
“C’mon, I’ll show you red-wing blackbird nests, but it’s going to get wetter where we’re going!”
The red-wing blackbirds had been singing their unusual song when we were still a long ways from the slough. Now there were a lot of red-wing blackbirds and all-black blackbirds around us. They were making a lot more noise as we got closer—angry noise. It was getting wetter too! The ground was soft and wet and our shoes were sinking as we walked. Muddy water started coming over our Sunday shoes and into our socks. Willy didn’t have rubber boots on either and the water was coming over his shoes too, but he still kept on walking and talking.
“The ones with the red wings are the males; the ones that are all black are the females. Actually the females aren’t really black. They’re almost brown—not like the shiny black on the males. Just take a look, you’ll see.”
There were blackbirds everywhere, flying, squawking, screaming at us. They were so close we could see their eyes—black with small yellow circles in the middle, when they landed on the cattails all around us.
“Here’s a nest!” called Willy. “Right here in the cattails above the water. Hey look! This one’s still got baby blackbirds inside it! Look, they’re pretty big, they’ve got a lot of feathers already. Are there three or are there four?”
Benny and I peered into the nest that was somehow attached to two or three cattail stalks. The baby blackbirds didn’t move. Their heads circled the nest and their bodies filled it. I counted, there were four of them.
Just then we heard voices coming from the farmyard. “You-hoo, you-hoo! Boys! You-hoo!”
“Walter, Benny! You hoo! We have to go home!”
The voices belonged to Aunty Rosie and our mother. “Shucks,” said Willy. “There are a lot of blackbird nests we still could’ve found. Shucks!”
We slogged out of the wet cattail mud and onto the dry grass. We shuffled our feet in the grass, trying to get the mud off our shoes. It didn’t want to come off. Our feet inside the shoes made a funny noise as we walked slowly back. Squansh, squansh, squansh, squansh. No one said anything. “Time to go home,” said Dad.
“Did you have a nice time with Willy?” asked Mother. She was looking at Benny and me. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Get in the car,” she said slowly and quietly.
We didn’t say goodbye to Willy or Aunty Rosie or Uncle Raeder. We got into the back seat beside Trudy and Alice who were already there. I sat down on the seat behind Dad and Benny stood on the centre hump in the middle like he always did. Dad turned the car around and Mother and Dad and the girls waved goodbye to the Raeders and Willy.
Partway down the long driveway, Mother turned around and looked carefully at Benny and me. I looked at Benny. He looked messy and dirty. Then I realized that I looked the same as Benny, except my shirt was torn too.
It was my Sunday shirt. We had been wearing our Sunday clothes.
I looked back at Mother. She had a strange look on her face and her lips seemed to quiver a little. It looked like she was going to cry, but she didn’t say anything.
We never saw Willy again.
It had sure been a fun afternoon.
EPILOGUE:
We don’t know what happened to Willy, or to Stirling. When they were about 15 or 16, they ran away together from their foster homes. We heard stories that they worked in logging or lumber camps somewhere in B.C. I was at both Uncle Raeder and Aunty Rosie’s funerals; Willy wasn’t there.
I hope they both did well in their lives.