My Father's Age

A cot for Hilt. A chair or stool for Allen. 1. Circuses Allen: Every Saturday morning my brother and I were stuck in the back seat of the old Chev when my parents drove the twenty miles into town to buy groceries. Hilt: You two knock it off or you'll find yourselves walking home! Allen: When we passed Sunny Brae and drove over the little bridge at Hall's Creek, I would look out the back seat windows at what was left of the old stadium. It was just a shell, round and grey--it had arches. There had been a tire long before I was born. Hilt: I wasn't much older than you when the whole thing went up in flames. Allen: It was a ruin as glamorous to me as the Coliseum in the Encyclopedia. Whenever Dad spoke about playing hockey when he was a kid- Hilt: With rolled up newspapers for shin pads--none of that fancy equipment like you kids have today. Allen: I imagined those games taking place in that stadium, my father playing hockey like a gladiator in ancient Rome. Before I was rive, my father's boyhood was far away and glamorous. Close by the stadium were the fields where the circuses of my father's boyhood set up their big tents. Hilt: Circus had its own train back then. We boys'd run down to the tracks just to see her come in. Allen: The only black man that my father ever talked about came to town with the circus. Dad and his friends were watching the big top go up-- Hilt: There were lions and elephants--all kinds of animals--and that fella was right in the middle of it all, pounding in those tent pegs with a mallet as big as you are. Boys he was big--must have been six and a half feet tall and he had shoulders on him like a bear. Allen: There was an ancient city ordinance prohibiting Negroes from being in town after sunset. Did they make an exception for him? Did the circus people hide him after dark? Did he have to sleep in the woods? Hilt: He just walloped those pegs in--boys-oh-boys, like sticks into butter! Allen: I don't know the first rime I heard this story-- Hilt: Me and the boys watched him from the distance. His arms were like Popeye the sailorman's--as big around as your waist! Allen: That black man was more exotic to me than the elephants, than the lions in cages, than the ladies on horseback. I had never heard my father speak of anyone or anything with such awe. Hilt: Boys-oh-boys, he was one enormous coon. Allen: I was taken to my own circus one miserably hot and muggy summer afternoon when I was four or rive. I remember being confused and frightened because a fat lady sat on me in the bleachers then she said something mean--she was a stranger and then suddenly she was mad at me because she had crushed the wind out of me. There were acrobats and trapeze artists and wild animals but mostly I remember that It was too hot and it was out by the new overpass and not near the stadium and that somehow this was wrong and I was not being allowed to see the circus of my father. Somehow I had failed him again. In my father's circus, elephants trumpeted in the air with the silhouette of the old stadium behind them. When I think of that picture, it is raining violently, animals are straining at their ropes, the air is filled with cries and confusion, and standing huge and in the midst of it all is the only black man I ever heard my father tell a story about. He slams down that mallet over and over bringing order to the chaos. When he is finished, the circus is in place. 2. Margarine Allen: There was a butter lobby in New Brunswick when I was a kid. …

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