Back in the 1930s, when Winnipeg was known as the Chicago of the North, my grandparents Rosie and Roy Zehen owned a small bakery in the prairie town of Hartplatz, two hours drive distant. Hartplatz was populated by Russian Mennonite emigrants who had arrived from the late 1870s to the 1920s.
My grandfather Roy was tall, with a prognathic jaw and a high forehead. His strong will and energetic philosophical departure from mainstream religious conservatism had placed him apart in the town. He and his contrary-minded cronies were known as the “Pepsi Cola gemeinde,” based on their habit of not meeting in a church or a home, but in one of two restaurants in Hartplatz.
Grandma Rosie, on the other hand, was devout. She attended a Mennonite church faithfully, having chosen one of the eight available. The Zehens were not the only strong-willed individuals in the community. The fault in Rosie’s stars was her independent nature, and her German Baptist background, seen by Mennonite leaders of the time to be a lesser calling to the Word. Also tall, athletic, attractive, and outspoken, Rosie was hard to ignore.
Roy’s first wife had died suddenly of tuberculosis. Rosie was nineteen years his junior, and she married him at the age of seventeen. This pairing was not scandalous or uncommon for that place and time. But the age difference combined with her rustic background and non-Mennonite roots, and with Roy’s sometimes abrasive personality, to make the couple stand out.
At family gatherings, it was expected that Grandma Rosie or Grandpa Roy would narrate a version of the sewing machine story, which concerned an eventful trip to Winnipeg not long after they were married. As a favoured grandchild, it was my responsibility to listen carefully to this and other tales, to continue their telling in years to come. The story of the fifty-dollar sewing machine went like this.
***
It was late fall, and Rosie and Roy had bakery business to attend to in Winnipeg. They took advantage of the trip to shop at Hudson’s Bay Company and Eaton’s Department Store, down in the basement where the clearance items were sold.
Having finished this leg, they were going to buy bread bags, wax paper rolls, cupcake liners, and other paper goods they used at the bakery. With Rosie in the lead, her sensible shoes clacking on the cobbled bricks, they searched for the yellow Crown Zellerbach Paper Company sign above the dingy doorways lining the alley.
Rosie strode forcefully for six or seven steps, then paused to look down at the address. It was written in a neat hand on a scrap of cardboard cut from an old hatbox into serviceable index cards. Her beige Melton overcoat flapped open as she marched ahead, then fell back in place as she slowed to search for the correct entrance. The alley was dim, deep in the shade of surrounding multi-story buildings, as evening turned to night.
Roy brought up the rear, his reading glasses pushed up high on his forehead, as he squinted at the doorways. He ploughed along, lugging two large paper bags he grasped by the twill handles, the sacks overflowing with practical supplies for their business. He was weary, and a faint limp from a bad knee foreshadowed the cane he would later employ.
Roy stopped, set down the heavy bags, produced a white linen hanky from his inside breast pocket, and wiped his forehead. In so doing, he accidentally brushed off his glasses. They clattered as they fell onto the cobblestones. Rosie, hearing the noise, glanced back. She saw him bend double to reach for the glasses with one hand, while steadying the bags with the other.
As Roy retrieved his glasses and straightened up, a boy of perhaps nineteen ran into the alley. The boy snatched one of the shopping bags, his thin hand snaking into the loops of the handles and jerking the bag away.
“Hey!” Roy shouted, as he scrambled to put his glasses on.
At almost the same time, a bigger boy came up behind him. Without breaking stride, the accomplice reached down for the other bag, then put his shoulder solidly into Roy’s back, knocking him down. The pale bottoms of Roy’s leather shoe soles flashed briefly, and his breath came out violently when he hit the pavement.
“Oof!” Rosie heard, as she watched the hit-and-run.
The first boy ran awkwardly, lugging the heavy bag with both hands. He turned down an adjoining alley that was only as wide as a horse cart. His footfalls slapped hollowly down the narrow trail. The second thief slung the shopping bag over his shoulder. It thumped against his back, as he ran to catch up.
Rosie ran to Roy. Instead of helping him up, she threw her large black purse in his lap and shouted.
“I’ll follow them, come quick!” She ran with surprising speed in pursuit.
Rosie rounded the corner to see a jumble of packing crates, garbage cans, empty welding cylinders, loose trash, and random clutter. The two thieves were trying to scale a tall wire-link fence at the end of the alley.
As Rosie slowed to a walk, she saw the husky boy try to fling one of the bags over the fence. It flew up, lost velocity, and began a slow-motion pinwheel that emptied the contents at his feet. The empty paper bag snagged and hung on the fence, as if to mock him.
He stared down at the assorted baking goods, heavy cotton aprons, and cake pans. Foil-wrapped bricks of Fleishmann’s yeast and lard showed corners beveled off and white innards spilling out. He glanced at his partner in crime.
“Screw it.”
The thin boy looked at the worthless loot, then peeked into his bag. He dropped and kicked it like a rugby ball as it landed. He hitched his pants up and wheeled to face Rosie, who had now come up to them. She stood with her hands on her hips, her breath labored.
“What?” the skinny one said as he strode brazenly by her.
She watched him warily as he passed, his head turned to make a grinning face at his partner.
Just then, Roy came around the corner holding Rosie’s purse, which he dropped next to the wall. He crouched like a wrestler, and his eyes open wide in anticipation. He took in the scene. Rosie stood amid their scattered bakery purchases. The heavy thief passed her to leave the alley. The skinny one was a stride’s length in front of Roy, his head still turned.
As the boy’s scrawny face came around, it met Roy’s fist, squarely and with force. The birdlike nose was laid flat, and streams of dark blood and snot squirted onto his denim jacket. Roy struck a second time, resulting in a sickly, muffled, cracking noise. The back of Roy’s hand described a flat plane through his wrist and forearm. All of the power of the short, straight, right-hand blow channeled into the target. The thief was unconscious before he hit the ground.
The burly boy stopped short in disbelief. He stood in shock for a beat, then growled.
“Sonofabitch.”
He skipped back a half-step and prepared to lunge ahead toward Roy. Like a high jumper starting his run at the bar, the thug’s foot came back. Just as he pushed forward, Rosie kicked at his ankle. She caught his lower shin in the curve of her instep. He fell forward heavily, skinning his palms on the cobblestones, his chin striking, skin splitting.
Before he could get up, Roy was atop the broad back, pulling one arm up behind him, a foot planted firmly on his shoulder. Grabbing the sleeve with both hands, Roy pulled up until something tore. The prone figure screamed, and Roy released the arm, which dropped heavily and lay as if detached. The boy sobbed, then let loose with a fury of oaths. Spit flew from his lips and blood dripped from his chin.
Rosie calmly retrieved her purse, while Roy stooped to gather their goods. As Rosie joined him, plucking the bag from its snag on the fence, a short man with a chef’s hat came out of one of the buildings abutting the alley. He held a large round cooking pan in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other. The cook began to scrape oily scraps and sludge out of the pan into a gutter near the curb. With a start, he noticed the thief, cursing softly now and holding one arm with the other as he struggled to get up.
The pale face was a gory collage of dirt and blood. The cook was puzzled, seeing in the same frame the skinny thief, his head laid back like a slaughtered hog. Plus, there was an older couple, dressed in their Sunday best, and industriously picking up clean white aprons and tins of baking powder as if harvesting a garden.
The cook backed into the doorway behind him. Bewildered, he struck the pan with the spoon. The steel pan rang like a bell at ringside.
Roy heard the clang, followed by the sound of the door slamming shut and the thick click of a deadbolt. He glanced up at the noise, then at Rosie.
“Spode!”
“I’m hurrying!” she said, stuffing bricks of lard into an overflowing bag.
Walking quickly toward streetlights, the couple made for the main thoroughfare, Portage Avenue. Neither said a word until they reached the safety of the wide street. Trolley cars pulled by, and shop lights brightened the night.
“I didn’t know you could fight so,” Rosie said. “I thought Mennonites were more peaceful. Turn the other cheek,” she said, staring at him as if she had never seen him before.
“Self-defense. Why did you chase after them?”
“I knew they would throw the bags away once they saw what was in them. They want to sell what they steal, and aprons don’t give nuscht.”
They were quiet, as Rosie studied the trolley schedule on the sign in the shelter.
“Number five,” she said.
“We used to fight in the yard behind my father’s shoe shop in Stuartburn,” Roy said, “me and my brothers. One year, a stranger came to town and put up a boxing ring at the fairgrounds. He was an Englander. It was a raised platform with ropes looped around the sides. But it wasn’t a ring at all, it was a square. The floor was padded so when you fell it didn’t hurt. The ropes that went around were wrapped in tape. He rang the bell and counted three minutes on a stopwatch. The fighters punched each other until the bell rang again.”
“I never heard about that,” Rosie said.
“The Englander came to the fairgrounds a couple of weeks before fair day. He taught us how to fight. He showed how to punch so it wouldn’t break your hands, and so it cut the other guy.” He held up his fist and made a twisting motion. “He taught us how to take a punch so it wouldn’t hurt or knock you down. He showed how to set your feet, and how to make the other guy miss you, and lots of other things. Some dirty stuff too.”
Roy paused, stretching his back and letting his eyes drift up towards the lights in the tall buildings across Portage Avenue. His breath fogged, as the clear night chilled.
“Us guys, we were the Stuartburn Boxing Club. He gave us boxing gloves to use—laedah fusthaunch.”
“Leather mitts?”
“Joh, joh. We met there and had practice fights called sparring a couple of nights a week.”
“What did your father think of that?”
“He never knew. We snuck.”
Rosie ventured a wry smile.
“When fair day came, the Englander had us fight with soft helmets on our heads and big gloves. We fought like wild dogs, but no one got bad hurt. Then, at night when all the people came, he had a real big guy there who was supposed to be a champion fighter from England, only he was too old to be champ any more. He would fight any man. You paid a dollar, and if you made it for three minutes, you got from the Englander ten dollars. If you knocked him down, you got twenty. If you knocked him out, fifty bucks!”
“Like, knock him out of the ring?”
“Nay, nay. Like, conked out, asleep. That’s called a knock-out.”
The number five trolly arrived and they boarded. Rosie stared at her husband. How did he look so long ago, before their May-September courtship?
“How old were you then?” she said. They settled into a bench, their backs against the shiny wood slats.
“Fifteen. To fight the big champ, there weren’t no helmets and his gloves were small. The guy who fought him before me hit him a couple of good ones. That was Big Abe, remember him?” he said, rubbing at his swollen ring finger knuckle.
“Big as a quarter horse.” She nodded in reply.
“Joh. Abe hit him in the head, and the champ backed off. When Abe came forward to hit him again, that Englander he hit him in the groin, low down,” Roy nodded, stern-faced and gesturing down towards his lap to make the message clear. “Then he stepped on Abe’s foot and hit him hard in the stomach with an uppercut, like this.”
Roy hopped up in the trolley, braced his right foot, and struck. His knobby fist came up fast, like he was lifting an empty pail he thought was full. He sat and gazed straight ahead, as the trolley rocked them gently.
“Seeing Abe and how the champ hit him down there, that taught me something. I was ready when it was my turn to fight.”
The muffled ding of the trolley call bell made him grin, and he turned to Rosie.
“Round Two!”
“Today, I’m glad you could fight.”
“Me too. It was good you tripped that big guy. He was too strong for me. Like a bull.”
“Mmm,” Rosie murmured, thinking back to how good it felt to topple the fearsome man.
“That was dirty, though, what I did to that guy’s arm,” Roy said.
“He asked for it.”
“Should we call the police or a doctor or something?”
“Nay! They found their way there, they can find their way out.”
“Next time we come here to the stadt, Rosie, let’s not go in that dark alley no more. We can go in by the front, joh?”
“Joh.” The trolley turned north up Main Street and she leaned into his arm as the car tracked through the turn. Glancing back at him, she took a hanky from her jacket sleeve and wiped a smudge from his eyebrow, dirt from the skirmish. He winked.
“Sonofabitch!”
Rosie guffawed and bumped him with her shoulder, hugging his arm.
“Oh, bah nay, Roy, shush!”
They rode quietly for a few blocks smiling, and then she shifted in her place and cocked her head.
“Roy… Roy, what happened when it was your turn to fight the big champ at the fair?”
He studied a brick hotel’s garish blinking sign, then glanced at her and raised his eyebrows up and down quickly.
“You know that fancy sewing machine in father’s old shoe shop? The one he used to stitch leather.”
“Joh.”
“Well, it cost fifty bucks.”
“The Sewing Machine” is published on TOEWS.IR by special permission of the author, Mitchell Toews, who holds the copyright.