Box Socials. W. Kinsella P.
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position of lying on his back with oil dripping on his face. On this brilliant October day, Curly McClintock found himself lying on his back with oil dripping on his face in the driveway of Reverend Ibsen’s parsonage next to the Christ on the Cross Scandinavian Lutheran Church in New Oslo, Alberta, at a time when Banker Olaf Gordonjensen was marrying off his youngest and most bulldog-faced daughter, Gunhilda.
The youngest and most bulldog-faced daughter of the banker was being married off to the local schoolteacher, a Mr. Perry Wyandotte, all the way from Edmonton Normal School, who figured rightly that marrying the banker’s bulldog-faced daughter beat hell out of teaching forty-five hard-headed little Norwegians their ABCs for twenty dollars a month in a one-room schoolhouse, where before class each day he had to chop wood for the big, blue, pot-bellied stove that sat in the middle of the classroom.
Mr. Perry Wyandotte’s one vice was that he had brought with him from Edmonton a battery-powered radio from which he could, on clear nights, pick up KSL Salt Lake City, and other exotic radio stations, sometimes being able to hear Gene Austin croon ‘Ramona,’ or Jimmie Rodgers sing ‘Moonlight and Skies.’
It was while Mr. Perry Wyandotte was lying on his cot in the one-room teacherage, next to the one-room schoolhouse in New Oslo, the night before his wedding, that he heard on his radio that the stock market had crashed, and stockbrokers and bankers in various cities across the continent were leaping to their deaths just like they were lemmings driven by instinct, and the concrete below them was ocean water.
The news of the stock market crash hadn’t reached New Oslo yet. Banker Olaf Gordonjensen did have a telephone, one of only three in the Six Towns area, but local partridge hunters couldn’t resist the green glass insulators on the makeshift telephone poles, so the line was out of service fifty percent of the time all year ’round, and one hundred percent during hunting season, which late October was.
Three days after the wedding, Banker Olaf Gordonjensen found out he was, like everyone else in North America, more or less insolvent, and he came to understand why the young schoolteacher, Mr. Perry Wyandotte, had taken off cross-country rather than marry his bulldog-faced daughter.
There is a saying in and around New Oslo, actually it is a joke: ‘How do you stop a Norwegian wedding?’ is the question. ‘You can’t,’ is the answer. It loses a lot in translation. You’d have to be Norwegian to appreciate the nuances.
But on that brilliant October afternoon in 1929, when the bride, the youngest and most bulldog-faced daughter of Banker Olaf Gordonjensen, had been waiting at the Christ on the Cross Scandinavian Lutheran Church going on to four hours, and one of the Skalrud boys, Little Ole, who was probably but not certainly Flop Skalrud’s nephew, had just reported to Banker Gordonjensen that one of the Bjornsens (the guitar player in the Bjornsen Brothers Swinging Cowboy Musicmakers who played at barn dances, box socials, whist drives, sportsdays, and ethnic weddings) had seen Mr. Perry Wyandotte sneaking onto the eastbound Western Trailways bus that stopped once a day at Bjornsen’s Corner on the Edmonton-Jasper Highway.
It was about that time that Curly McClintock pulled himself out from under the Reverend Ibsen’s Model T Ford, a Model T Ford that refused to keep its oil pan on, and wiping the oil off his face and hands with his green Allis-Chalmers Farm Equipment cap, returned it to his head, backwards as always. Curly McClintock then dripped his way over to the steps of the Christ on the Cross Scandinavian Lutheran Church, where what was left of the wedding party, and the Reverend Ibsen, were enjoying the Indian summer sunshine.
‘She’s in A-1, tip-top shape, Reverend,’ Curly said, wiping the last drop of oil off his nose with his sleeve.
‘Thank you, young man,’ the Reverend Ibsen said.
‘Excuse me,’ said Gunhilda Gordonjensen, touching Curly’s sleeve, ‘but you wouldn’t be interested in getting married, would you?’
Curly wiped his face and forehead on his other sleeve, the one that the bulldog-faced banker’s daughter had just touched, while he eyed the people on the church step, especially the bulldog-faced Gordonjensen girl, as he tried to determine if they were making fun of him. He scuffed one of his oilstained boots on the brown October grass as he surveyed the solemn faces in front of him.
‘Who to?’ he said.
‘Me,’ replied Gunhilda Gordonjensen.
‘You the banker’s daughter?’
She nodded.
While Gunhilda Gordonjensen was proposing to Curly McClintock, the thoughts going through Curly’s mind concerned something his uncle, Red Andrew McClintock, manager and first base coach of the Fark Red Sox baseball team, often urged on his players, between innings or at their rare practices.
‘Want you boys to try as hard as a homely girl on her honeymoon,’ Red Andrew McClintock would say, as he slapped ground balls at the infield, or when he had the Fark Red Sox practicing rundowns between first and second base.
Curly McClintock, at twenty years of age, still wasn’t too sure what it was that a homely girl tried hard at on her honeymoon, but he knew when he looked at Banker Olaf Gordonjensen’s youngest and most bulldog-faced daughter, that he was staring at a homely girl. But dressed up in her cream-colored lace wedding dress, with the long sleeves that hid her muscles, her face screened by a little veil freckled with seed pearls, Gunhilda Gordonjensen looked less bulldoggish than she would ever look again, and, Curly recalled, Banker Gordonjensen owned an eight-room house with a cistern and indoor plumbing.
Only indoor plumbing Curly had ever seen was on the rare occasions when his father, Black Darren McClintock, allowed him to go along in the dump truck, on the twice-weekly jaunts to Edmonton for groceries, and then the only indoor plumbing he had encountered was in a tiny room at a truck stop on the edge of the city. A truck stop where the bowl and basin were so covered in grease and the smell was so strong Curly didn’t see a lot of improvement over the two-holer behind McClintock’s garage-house. The McClintock’s garage-house had at one time been the station house, when the railroad used to run by Fark, where the living room was now full of stripped-down motorcycles, and a couple of dozen generators sat around on the kitchen floor like patient cats waiting for supper.
Curly removed his oil-soaked Allis-Chalmers Farm Equipment cap, just long enough to turn it around and place it formally on his large, round head, crown forward, before he said, ‘By golly, let’s do it.’
Considering the circumstances of the marriage, Curly McClintock and Gunhilda Gordonjensen were said to have been as happy as any, and happier than most.
‘You can’t stop a Norwegian wedding,’ one of Gunhilda Gordonjensen’s aunts said, as Reverend Ibsen lined up Curly McClintock and Gunhilda Gordonjensen on the steps of the Christ on the Cross Scandinavian Lutheran Church.
Curly and Gunhilda McClintock (née Gordonjensen) borrowed Banker Gordonjensen’s open-topped touring car, and drove west on the Edmonton-Jasper Highway, stopping for the night at a town called Entwistle, at the Hide-A-Way Tourist Court, where they got a granary-sized tourist cabin all to themselves for two dollars, and where Curly sure enough discovered what it was a homely girl tried hard at on her honeymoon. Curly became quite fond of his discovery.
When Curly and Gunhilda got back from their honeymoon, having driven as far west on the Edmonton-Jasper Highway as Edson, where they stayed in a granary-sized cabin at the Bide-A-Wee Tourist Court for two dollars a night, they moved into Banker Gordonjensen’s eight-room house with a cistern and indoor plumbing, and learned that the banker, along with almost everybody else in North America, was more or less insolvent.
Alvin Olaf McClintock was born nine months after the night at the Hide-A-Way Tourist Court in Entwistle, Alberta, where Curly McClintock discovered what it was homely girls tried hard at on their honeymoon. And about two years later, as one of Curly’s brothers was watching Alvin Olaf toddle across the floor of the kitchen at Banker Gordonjensen’s eight-room house with a cistern and indoor plumbing, the baby wearing only a diaper and a smile, the brother said to Curly, ‘By golly, that baby’s built just like the box on Daddy’s dump truck.’
And