This is a story about Cuthbert and me. It’s a hard story to tell and a harder one to believe.

Before I met Cuthbert, and before I could remember anything, my Mom and Dad were hit hard by that economic upheaval. The bank that held their life savings failed, and they lost everything.

Making the best of it, they sold their car and moved to a more central location, near the Broadway streetcar line. They rented a small house to shelter us, their four pre-school-aged children.

The house had two bedrooms, and the dining room was curtained off and became the third where my sister and our youngest brother slept until he started school. After that we three brothers shared the back bedroom. The front sitting room was saved for formal visits and my parents’ whist games. The kitchen was the real focus of the house — playing, cooking, eating, planning — it all happened there.  It was dominated by our wood-burning stove, the kitchen table and a long wooden box holding split firewood. Irreverently, we kids called it the “coffin.”

***

As 1933 rolled around and I was seven, I began to think and explore more widely. A weekly streetcar pass, with unlimited use, was 50 cents. When it was well worth it, my parents got one. On occasion I used it and explored every line to the end and back. Usually I had to walk, as to the doughnut factory along Broadway, to buy day-old doughnuts for 10 cents a dozen.

On one of my explorations, just around the corner on 10th Avenue, I saw a moving van.

After hurriedly eating my lunch that day I strolled nonchalantly, but full of curiosity, up 10th. The moving van had disappeared, but a group of big kids came along taking up the whole sidewalk. I stepped aside to let them pass and found myself face-to-face with Cuthbert. We looked enviously at the big kids who were barefoot.

“No child of mine will go without shoes!” Mothers’ voices rang in our minds, but we both wanted to go barefoot.

He was small, my size, and had the whitest skin I had ever seen. His hair was as gold as my dad’s pocket watch. And his eyes were a piercing blue. He was wearing long pants, which was unusual for boys at that time. I found out later it was to protect him from the sun.

***

On the Monday we walked to school together. All Cuthbert could talk about was ice-cream cones and how his Father would drive us to the store near Trout Lake. He would have vanilla, but I could have any flavour I wanted. That very day his Father was getting a new job so it would be soon.

The next day he didn’t answer my call and didn’t turn up in class. I was puzzled and disappointed, and lonely. I invented fantasies to explain his absence. My loneliness continued every day for weeks before I discovered what had happened from overhearing two strangers in the laneway discussing a news story about a boy.

Cuthbert’s Father didn’t get the job he tried for. He drove home and took his wife and son to a deserted shore of Trout Lake. He took a revolver he had kept since the Great War. He shot Cuthbert. He shot his wife. He slit his own wrists and bled to death.

I was told someone in our neighbourhood made a bid for the car and had trouble getting rid of the smell of death.

I can’t describe how stunned I was. I was numb. I was disgusted. That cold, lonely feeling carried on for some time. My parents had hidden the newspaper story from me to stave off bad news. At first they didn’t believe how deeply I was shaken. When they did, they formed a cocoon for me within the family and patiently waited until I had reinvented my life. Finally I had to accept his death and how it had happened. He was gone and I would never grow up with him.

One morning I was sitting with Dancer at my side and remembered how he and Cuthbert played. Dancer’s head rose up suddenly and he looked toward the corner of 10th, as if he was waiting for Cuthbert to appear. There was nothing there, but he started a long wail and his body trembled violently. He buried his face in my side.

And then I felt Cuthbert’s presence. First my left fist got a knock and then I didn’t hear, but felt his voice.

“I’m okay. I really am.”

And I felt his old twinkle.

“And don’t think of me as a bad smell.”

And then he was gone.

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