Incident on Manhattan Avenue by Tom Bryan
832 Manhattan Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Identikit pastel three-bedroom bungalow, designed mainly for the urban overspill from the old ethnic neighbourhoods to provide housing for fathers returning from the European War. Their brides came from every country. My mother was Scottish, from Portobello.
Three cement steps lead up to the front door. Living room, hallway from the living room, two bedrooms off one side of the hallway and a bathroom and bedroom off the other side of the hallway. If you walk in the front door you can also walk in a straight line to the kitchen. There is a back door there, which leads down some wooden steps into the backyard. Also leading from the kitchen is a weather-beaten door down the wooden steps to the cellar, off-limits to a child.
My father went to work that day like he did every day, with his aluminium Canadian Tyre lunch pail, containing his sandwich and coffee thermos. He always put his cigarettes in his shirt pocket. I watched him roll them the night before on his special cigarette rolling machine, where he would line up the papers, put in the tobacco and pull a small handle. The cigarettes rolled down a plastic incline, where he scooped them up in his hand.
He has left for work. He is a motorcycle mechanic and takes a bus to work. He doesn’t yet own a car but did once have a motorcycle with a sidecar, which I never rode in. We eat our cornflakes and go back to our rooms to change out of our pyjamas into our play clothes. My mum will tidy the kitchen, get my younger brother sorted and begin her working day. I don’t remember going outside to play on that day but seem to remember being mostly in the living room. It was a dry sunny June day but I probably would have been outside in the backyard at some stage.
A sofa, two soft chairs, no TV just yet but probably a big radio in the corner. The living room does not have wall-to-wall carpeting. Instead the hardwood floor has a small carpet which is taped down underneath so it doesn’t slide. I remember the detail of the carpet because I have it right now in my study, as I type this. The carpet is important. It is about the size of a large bath towel. It is mainly red and gold, with a big green dragon in the middle. The carpet came into our Scottish family in the previous century from China, via Penicuik. The dragon is a Chinese symbol of good luck, but dragons must also be appeased. On winter days or days of summer rain, I would lie on my stomach on the carpet and imagine magic carpet rides or would just get absorbed in its patterns and whorls. I would drive my toy cars around the carpet, using its straight lines as roads. At some time that afternoon, I was in the living room. My older brother (six) was outside playing. My younger brother (only 17 months) was sleeping. My mother was in the kitchen.
When my father comes home from work, I always race to the unlocked front door to see him first. He hoists me up. He has his work clothes on and he is proud of his name, which says only ‘O.Bryan’ in a white oval label above his shirt pocket (the one on the right side, the left one has his homemade cigarettes) His name is sewn in green ink against a white background. He was born about the time the Wright brothers made their first flight so he was named after one of them, ‘Orville’- an unusual name and hard to say for a child of just three. He had a good singing voice. One refrain I still remember. ‘Tell me a story, tell me a story, tell me a story before I go to bed’.
That day my dad comes in, hoists me up but puts me down quickly, roughly. My mother rushes in. He has fallen, his lunch pail clattering to the hard floor. He has fallen near the dragon rug. He is curled up on the floor. My mother herds me down the hall and into my room. Shouting, crying, doors banging. I peer out the door into the living room full of men I later learned were fireman.
My father was dead at age 41, from heart failure. As a young boy on his Saskatchewan farm, he had contacted rheumatic fever which had in turn weakened his heart valves. The day he died, he had forgotten to take his vital medication. He had also helped push-start a workmate’s car, which may have strained his heart even further. I was too young to go to the funeral so stayed at my first cousin Carol’s house in Saskatchewan.
Orville W. Bryan was buried in the old Brookside Cemetery, near Winnipeg Airport. My mother bought the adjacent burial plot, planning to be buried next to him one day. It was also the beginning of our family’s long struggle for survival. My mother was cheated out of her savings by a confidence trickster, just before she got cancer. We were farmed out to helpful relatives, but with the unspoken threat of a Provincial orphanage looming. We had heard how grim those places could be. But we stayed together as a family and somehow survived.
A few weeks earlier our street, like every street in the British Empire, had celebrated the Coronation of a young Queen with a full and exciting life ahead of her.
Meanwhile our family had lost its own modest king, its own protector. My mother never remarried. She died of breast cancer at the age of 48, and had to be buried far away from Winnipeg. The burial plot next to my father’s grave still lies empty.
