Box Socials. W. Kinsella P.
only a diaper and a smile, and said he had to agree, ‘That boy is built like the box on Daddy’s dump truck.’ A dump truck that was soon to become Curly’s, because only a few months later, Black Darren McClintock pushed back from the table after a feed of partridge parts and fried turnips, unbuckled his belt and passed away.
The McClintocks held a family meeting, where it was decided that since Curly was the only one married, and since his father-in-law, Banker Gordonjensen, knew how to handle money, even if he didn’t have any anymore, that Curly should inherit the dump truck and the twice-weekly run to Edmonton to take the cream cans full of cream to the dairies, and bring back supplies from the grocery wholesalers to the towns in the Six Towns area.
‘Hiya, Truckbox,’ Curly McClintock and his brother said several times to the baby, who grinned back like he understood, as he walked face-first into a wall.
Alvin Olaf McClintock was blessed with the best, or if not exactly the best, the most noticeable qualities of both his parents; he was squat and bulldog-looking like his mother, and he had an affinity for grease and oil that even surpassed his fathers. One odd thing was that no one ever called Alvin Olaf McClintock Truckbox to his face. As he grew up squat and bulldog-looking and covered in grease, people would say, ‘Yonder goes Curly and Gunhilda’s boy, Truckbox Al.’
But if they met the boy coming out of the Fark General Store, or at a sportsday at Doreen Beach, they’d say, ‘Howdy, Al, how are you keepin’ these days?’ Truckbox Al would stare at the questioner like they’d asked him to write an essay on a subject unfamiliar to him, pull the visor of his oil-stained Allis-Chalmers Farm Equipment cap low over his wide, bulldog-looking face, and stalk away, swinging his right leg in a wide arc as he did so.
It wasn’t until Truckbox Al McClintock reached sixth or seventh grade in the one-room schoolhouse in New Oslo, where a teacher named Miss Quick had replaced Mr. Perry Wyandotte, after Mr. Perry Wyandotte had walked cross-country for eleven miles through stubble fields, cow pastures, and blueberry muskegs in order the catch the eastbound Western Trailways bus at Bjornsen’s Corner, leaving behind, forever, the Six Towns area, and the bulldog-faced Gordonjensen girl who would become Truckbox Al’s mother, that anyone noticed that beyond being bulldog-looking and oil-covered, Truckbox Al had quick wrists and a certain amount of eye-hand coordination that made him able to hit a baseball with great frequency, and further than a fair distance.
Actually it was Miss Quick who noticed, on a day when Truckbox Al McClintock hit both of the school’s baseballs over the side-by-side boys’ and girls’ outhouses, deep into a slough full of tall grass, bullrushes and swamp willow clumps, the baseballs, like the long departed Mr. Perry Wyandotte, never to be seen again. That evening, Miss Quick passed on what she had noticed concerning Truckbox Al’s hitting prowess to her brother-in-law, the infamous Flop Skalrud, who occasionally played third base for the New Oslo Blue Devils.
Miss Quick, though she had been teacher at the one-room schoolhouse in New Oslo for nearly fifteen years, and had been married for twelve of those fifteen years to Einar Skalrud, the infamous Flop Skalrud’s older brother, was still known as Miss Quick, not only at school, but everywhere else, something the women of the Six Towns area regarded as peculiar, abnormal, unnatural, and, some said, a crime against nature. Some, being primarily the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, Mrs. Edytha Rasmussen Bozniak, and her mother, Mrs. Irma Rasmussen.
So it didn’t come as any particular surprise to the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, Mrs. Irma Rasmussen, or her daughter, Mrs. Edytha Rasmussen Bozniak, that while Einar Skalrud was off working in a logging camp up near Whitecourt, the infamous Flop Skalrud, as my daddy called him, spent many an evening, after the children were safely in bed, at the home of his brother Einar, and his brother’s wife, Miss Quick.
‘We all know what Flop Skalrud is interested in,’ the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, said one evening as she was drinking tea at our kitchen table in our house at the end of Nine Pin Road.
There was a rumor, I had heard my mama say, unsubstantiated, but a rumor nevertheless, that the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, had intimate knowledge of what it was the infamous Flop Skalrud was interested in, and what it was made Flop Skalrud interesting, or infamous as my daddy referred to him, that knowledge having, according to the unsubstantiated rumor, not all been acquired after the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, had become a widow. Mama, of course didn’t mention that rumor to the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, and she delicately guided the conversation away from the infamous Flop Skalrud (the naming of, and what it was that made Flop Skalrud interesting, or infamous, I’ll get around to later) and his sister-in-law, Miss Quick, to the fact that she had heard my daddy and Earl J. Rasmussen discussing the possibility that Truckbox Al McClintock might have some genuine potential as a baseball player.
The area we lived in was vaguely known as the Six Towns, though that designation never showed up on a map, and almost everyone lived near a town, not in a town. The Six Towns, New Oslo, Sangudo, Fark, Venusberg, Magnolia, Doreen Beach, and Bjornsen’s Corner, which, if you count carefully, was seven, though Bjornsen’s Corner was just a place, not a town, or even a post office, so didn’t officially count, were all too small to be towns anyway; they were also too small to be villages, but any place that was officially named and had a post office wasn’t too small to be a hamlet.
So where we lived became known as the Six Towns area, an area made up of six hamlets, though each and every one of them called itself a town. Each of the six towns had a grocery store of varying degrees of splendor, where the grocer-postmaster and his family lived in the back, or in the case of Fark, upstairs, or in the case of Magnolia, next door. The grocery in Doreen Beach was brick with big glass windows in the front, and a cement walk, which as far as I can recall was the only concrete in the Six Towns, while the grocery in Venusberg was in a log cabin with no windows on the front side at all, while inside, coal-oil lamps burned all year round.
The Venusberg grocer-postmaster did have a glass window in his living quarters, which was a lean-to, more or less attached to the back of the store. The Swangards who owned the Venusberg store, were very old, and their personal smell, of liniment, pipe smoke, and herbal tea, permeated the whole store.
Each of the Six Towns also had a gas pump, but at the worst of the Depression only the ones in Fark, where Curly McClintock began his twice-weekly run to Edmonton, and New Oslo, where Curly McClintock finished his twice-weekly run to Edmonton, held gas. The remainder stood tall and skeletal, like weathered but empty thermometers; the glass got broken in some, so that rust and general dilapidation set in. By the time Truckbox Al got his big break, the economy had improved enough that gas was for sale everywhere in the Six Towns area except Venusberg and Magnolia.
Most of the Six Towns had, as well as a grocery store, a community hall, where occasional box socials and whist drives, community dances, or ethnic weddings, were held often enough that something happened at one of the community halls every second Saturday all year round. Even more occasionally, a farmer who had lived long enough to retire, moved to his favorite hamlet, in order to be close to the hustle and the bustle. Hamlets south and east of the Six Towns had elevators, and most of the towns that had elevators had the railroad, but there was no grain raised in the Six Towns area, mainly because the land was a kind of ash-gray and full of rocks, ranging from rice-gravel to some big as dump trucks.
So there were no elevators in any of the Six Towns, which weren’t big enough to be called towns anyway, and because there were no elevators, the railroad had been discontinued several years before I was born. Fark, and Venusberg, and Magnolia, and Doreen Beach had all, at one time, been on the railroad, and now, in all except Doreen Beach, where the station house had burned down, somebody lived in the station house, because railroad station houses were solid-built buildings, and became free housing once the railroad abandoned them, just as the railroad grade, once the ties and tracks had been hauled away, became a road of sorts.
Churches in the Six Towns area were few and far between, in fact the only town that had a church was New Oslo, and that had been built by Banker Gordonjensen with an eye to keeping