"The Great Electrical Revolution", reprinted from Ken Mitchell Country:

I was only a little guy in 1937, but I can remember Grandad being out of work. Nobody had any money to pay him, and as he said, there wasn’t much future in brick-laying as a charity. So mostly he just sat around in his suite above the hardware store, listening to his radio. We all listened to it when there was nothing else to do, which was most of the time, unless you happened to be going to school like me. Grandad stuck right there through it all—soap operas, weather reports, and quiz shows—unless he got a bit of cash from somewhere. Then he and Uncle Fred would go downtown to the beer parlour at the King William Hotel.

Grandad and Grandma came from the old country long before I was born. When they arrived in Moose Jaw, all they had was three children—Uncle Fred, Aunt Thecla, and my Dad; a trunk full of working clothes; and a twenty-six-pound post maul for putting up fences to keep “rogues” off Grandad’s land. Rogues meant Orangemen, cattle rustlers, capitalists, and Indians. All the way on the train from Montreal, he glared out the Pullman window at the endless flat, saying to his family:

“I came here for land, b’Christ, and none of ‘em’s goin’ to sly it on me.”

He had sworn to carve a mighty estate from the raw Saskatchewan prairie, although he had never so much as picked up a garden hoe in his life before leaving Dublin.

When he stepped off the train at the C.P.R. station in Moose Jaw, it looked like he was thinking of tearing it down and seeding the site to oats. It was two o’clock in the morning but he kept striding up and down the lobby of the station, dressed in his good wool suit with the vest, puffing his chest like a bantam rooster in a chicken run. My dad and Uncle Fred and Aunt Thecla sat on the trunk, while Grandma pleaded with him to go and find them a place to stay. (It was only later they realized he was afraid to step outside the station.) He finally quit strutting long enough to get a porter to carry their trunk to a hotel across the street.

The next morning they went to the government land office to secure their homestead. Then Grandad rented a democrat and took my Dad and Uncle Fred out to inspect the land they had come halfway around the world to find. Grandma and Aunt Thecla were told to stay in the hotel room and thank the Blessed Virgin for deliverance. They were still offering their prayers three hours later, when Grandad burst back into the room, his eyes wild and his face pale and quivering.

“Sweet Jesus Christ!” he shouted at them. “There’s too much of it! There’s just too damn much of it out there.” He ran around the room several times, knocking against the walls and moaning. “Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles!” He collapsed onto one of the beds, and lay staring at the ceiling.

“It’ud drive us witless in a week!” The two boys came in and told the story of the expedition. Grandad had started out fine, perhaps just a bit nervous. But the further they went from the town, the more agitated and wild-eyed he became. Soon he stopped urging the horse along and asked it to stop. They were barely five miles from town when they turned around and came back, with Uncle Fred driving. Grandad could only crouch on the floor of the democrat, trying to hide from the enormous sky, and whispering at Fred to go faster. He’d come four thousand miles to the wide open spaces—only to discover he suffered from agoraphobia.

That was his last excursion onto the open prairie. (He did make one special trip to Bulkhead in 1928 to fix Aunt Thecla’s chimney, but that was a family favour. Even then Uncle Fred had to drive him there in an enclosed Ford sedan in the middle of the night, with newspapers taped to the windows so he couldn’t see out.) He abandoned the dream of a country manor. There was nothing he could do but take up brick-laying again in Moose Jaw, where there were trees and tall buildings to protect him from the vastness. Maybe it was a fortunate turn of fate; certainly he prospered from then until the Depression hit, about the time I was born.

Yet—Grandad always felt guilty about not settling on the land. It was his conscience that prompted him to send my Dad to work at a cattle ranch in the hills, the day after he turned sixteen. He married Aunt Thecla off to a Lutheran farmer at Bulkhead who threshed about five hundred acres of wheat every fall. Uncle Fred was the eldest and an apprentice brick-layer, so he stayed in town and lived with Grandad and Grandma in the suite above the hardware store.

I don’t remember much about the cattle ranch my father eventually took over, except whirls of dust and skinny animals dragging themselves from one side of the range to the other. Finally there were no more cattle, and no money to buy more, and nothing to feed them if we did buy them, except wild fox-tail and Russian thistle. So we moved into Moose Jaw with Grandad and Grandma, and went on relief. It was better than the ranch, where there was nothing to do but watch tumbleweeds roll through the yard. We would have had to travel into town to collect our salted fish and government pork anyway. Grandad was happy to have us, because when my Dad went down to the railway yard to get our ration, he collected Grandad’s too. My Dad never complained about waiting in line for a handout, but Grandad would have starved to death first. “Damned government drives us all to the edge,” he’d say. “Then they want us to queue up for the God-damned swill they’re poisoning us with.”

That was when we spent so much time listening to Grandad’s radio, a great slab of black walnut cabinet he had swindled, so he thought, from a second-had dealer on River Street. An incandescent green bulb glowed in the centre of it when the tubes were warming up. There was a row of knobs with elaborate-looking initials and a dial with the names of cities like Tokyo, Madrid, and Chicago. Try as we might on long winter evenings to tune the needle in and hear a play in Japanese or Russian, all we ever got was CHMJ Moose Jaw, The Buckle of the Wheat Belt. Even so, I spent hours lying on the floor, tracing the floral patterns on the front of the speaker while I listened to another world of mystery and fascination.

When the time came that Grandad could find no more work, he set a kitchen chair in front of the radio and stayed there, not moving except to go to the King William with Uncle Fred. My Dad managed to get a job with the city, gravelling streets for forty cents a day. But things grew worse. The Moose Jaw Light and Power Company came around one day in the fall of 1937 and cut off our electricity for non-payment. It was hard on Grandad not to have his radio. Not only did he have nothing to do, but he had to spend all his time thinking about it. So he stared out the parlour window, which looked over the alley behind the hardware store. There was a view of the rear of the Rainbow Laundry, probably the dreariest vista in town.

That was what he was doing the day of his discovery just before Christmas. Uncle Fred and my Dad were arguing about who had caused the Depression—R.B. Bennett or the C.P.R. Suddenly Grandad turned from the window. There was a new and strange look on his face. “Where does that wire go?” he said.

“Wire?” said Uncle Fred, looking absent-mindedly around the room. He patted his pockets looking for a wire.

“What wire?” my Dad said.

Grandad nodded toward the window. “This wire running right past the window.” He pointed to a double strand of power line that ran from a pole in the back alley to the side of our building. It was a lead-in for the hardware store below.

“Holy Moses Cousin Harry. Isn’t that a sight now!” Grandad said, grinning crazily.

“You’re nuts!” Uncle Fred told him. “You’ll never get a tap off that line there. They’d find you out in nothing flat.”

Grandma, who always heard everything that was said, called from the kitchen: “Father, don’t you go and do some foolishness will have us all electrinated.”

“By Jayzuz,” he muttered. He never paid attention to anything she said. “Cut off my power, will they?”

That night, after I went to bed, I listened to him and Uncle Fred banging and scraping as they bored a hole through the parlour wall. My Dad wouldn’t have anything to do with it and took my mother to the free movie at the co-op. He said Grandad was descending to the level of the Moose Jaw Light and Power Company.

As it happened, Grandad was an experienced electrician. He had known for a long time how to jump a wire from one side of the meter to the other, to cheat the power company. I had often watched him under the meter, stretched out on tip-toe at the top of a broken stepladder, yelling at grandma to lift the God-damned Holy Candle higher so he could see what the Christ he was doing.

The next day, Grandad and Uncle Fred were acting like a couple of kids, snorting and giggling and jabbing each other in the ribs. They were eager for the King William beer parlour to open so they could go and tell their friends about Grandad’s revenge on the power company. There they spent the day like heroes, telling over and over how Grandad had spied the lead-in, and how they had bored the hole through the wall, and how justice had finally descended on the capitalist leeches. They came home for supper, but as soon as they ate they headed back to the King William. Everybody was buying them free beer.

Grandma didn’t think much of their efforts, though she claimed to enjoy the benefits of electrical power. The line came through the hole in the wall, across the parlour floor to the kitchen and the hall. Other cords were attached which led to the two bedroom. Grandma muttered in irritation when she had to sweep around the black tangle of wires and sockets. She had that quaint old-country belief that electricity leaked from every connection and with six of us living in the tiny suite, somebody was forever tripping on one of the cords and knocking things over.

But we lived with all that because Grandad was happy again. We might all have lived happily if Grandad and Uncle Fred could have kept silent about their revenge on the power company.

One night about a week later we were in the parlour listening to Fiber McGee and Molly when somebody knocked at the door. It was Mrs. Pizak, who lived next door in a tiny room.

“Goot evening,” she said, looking all around. “I see your power has turnt beck on.”

“Ha,” Grandad said. “We turned it on for ‘em. Damned rogues.”

“Come in and listen to the show with us,” Grandma said. Mrs. Pizak kept looking at the black wires running back and forth across the parlour, and at Grandad’s radio. You could tell she wasn’t listening to the show.

“Dey shut off my power, too,” she said. “I alvays like listen de Shut-In program. Now my radio isn’t vork.”

“Hmmm,” Grandad said, trying to hear Fibber and the Old-Timer. Grandma and my Dad watched him, not listening to the radio any more either. Finally he couldn’t stand it.

“All right, Fred,” he said. “Go and get the brace and bit.”

They bored a hole through one of the bedroom walls into Mrs. Pizak’s cubicle, and she was on Grandad’s power grid, too. It didn’t take long for everybody else in the block to find out about the free power. They all wanted to hook up. There were two floors of apartments above the hardware store, and soon the walls and ceiling of Grandad’s suite were as full of holes as a colander, with wires running in all directions. For the price of a bottle of whiskey, people could run their lights twenty-four hours a day if they wanted. By Christmas Day, even those neighbours who paid their bills had given notice to the power company. It was a tolerable Christmas in a bad year—and Grandad and Uncle Fred liked to take credit for it. Which everyone gave them. There was a lot of celebration up and down the halls, where they always showed up as guests of honour. A funny feeling ran through the block, like being in a state of siege, or a revolution, with Grandad and Uncle Fred leading it.

One late afternoon just before New Year’s, I was lying on the parlour floor, reading a second-hand Book of Knowledge I had gotten for Christmas. Grandma and my mother were knitting socks, and all three of us were half-listening to Major Bowes’ amateur show. From the corner of my eye, I though I saw Grandad’s radio move. I blinked and stared at it, but the big console just sat there quoting the Major’s tactful enthusiasm. I turned a page. Again, it seemed to move in a jerk.

“Grandma,” I said. “The radio—“ She looked up from her knitting, already not believing a word I might have to say. I gave up and glared at the offending machine. While I watched, it slid at least six inches across the parlour floor.

“Grandma!” I screamed. “The radio’s moving! All by itself!” She looked calmly at the radio, then the tangle of wires spread across the floor, and then out the parlour window.

“Larry-boy, you’d best run and fetch your grandfather. He’s over at McBride’s.” McBrides’ suite was along the gloomy hall a few doors. I sprinted the whole distance and pounded frantically at the door. Someone opened it the width of a crack. “Is my Grandad in there?” I squeaked.

Grandad stepped out into the hall with a glass in his hand, closing the door behind him. “What is it, Larry?”

“Grandma says for you to come quick. There’s something wrong with the radio!”

“My radio!” Like most small men, he had the energy of a race-horse. He started walking back up the hall, broke into a trot, then a steady gallop, holding his glass of whiskey out in front at arms length so it wouldn’t spill. He burst through the door and skidded to a stop in front of the radio, which sat there, perfectly normal except that it stood maybe a foot to the left of his chair.

“By the Holy Toenails of Moses—what is it?” Grandma looked up and jerked her chin ominously toward the window. Her quiet firmness usually managed to calm him, but now, in two fantastic bounds, Grandad stood glaring out the window.

“Larry,” he said, turning to me with a pale face, “fetch your Uncle Fred.” I tore off down the hall again to number eight and fetched Uncle Fred. When we entered the suite, the two women were still knitting. Grandma was doing her stitches calmly enough, but my mother’s needles clattered like telegraph keys, and she was throwing terrified glances around the room.

Grandad had not moved. “Have a gawk at this, will you Fred.”

Uncle Fred and I crowded around him to see out. There, on a pole only twenty feet from our parlour window, practically facing us eye-to-eye, was a lineman from the power company. He was replacing broken glass insulators; God knows why he was doing it in the dead of winter. He could not have noticed our home-made lead-in, or he would have been knocking at the door. We could only pray he wouldn’t look at the wire too closely. Once, he lifted his eyes toward the lighted window where we stood gaping out at him in the growing darkness. He grinned at us, and raised his hand in a salute. He must have thought we were admiring his work.

“Wave back!” Grandad ordered. The three of us waved frantically at the lineman, to make him think we appreciated his efforts, although Grandad was muttering some very ugly things about the man’s ancestry.

Finally, to our relief, the lineman finished his work and hot ready to come down the pole. He reached out his hand for support—and my heart stopped beating as his weight hung on the contraband wire. Behind me, I could hear the radio slide another foot across the parlour floor. The lineman stared at the wire he held. He tugged experimentally, his eyes following it up to the hole through our wall. He looked at Grandad and Uncle Fred and me standing there in the lit-up window, with our crazy horror-struck grins and our arms frozen above our heads in grotesque waves. Understanding spread slowly across his face.

He scrambled around to the opposite side of the pole and braced himself to give a mighty pull on the line. Simultaneously, Grandad leaped into action, grabbing the wire on our side of the wall. He wrapped it around his hands, and braced his feet against the baseboard. The lineman gave his first vicious yank, and it almost jerked Grandad smack against the wall. I remember thinking what a powerful man the lineman must be to do that to my Grandad.

“Fred, you feather-brained idiot!” he shouted. “Get over here and haul before the black-hearted son of a bitch pulls me through the wall.”

Uncle Fred ran to the wire just in time, as the man on the pole gave another, mightier heave. From the window, I could see him stiffen with rage and determination. The slender wire sawed back and forth through he hole in the wall for at least ten minutes, first one side, then the other, getting advantage. The curses on our side got very loud and bitter. I couldn’t hear the lineman, but I could see him—with his mouth twisted in an awful snarl, throwing absolutely terrible looks at me in the window, and heaving on the line. He was not praying to St. Jude.

Grandad’s cursing would subside periodically when grandma warned: “Now, now, father, not in front of the boy.” Then she would go back to her knitting and pretend the whole affair wasn’t happening, and Grandad’s blasphemies would soar to monumental heights.

That lineman must have been in extra-good condition, because our side quickly began to play out. Grandad yelled at Grandma and my mother, even at me, to throw ourselves on the line and help. But the women refused to leave their knitting, and they would not allow me to be corrupted. I didn’t want to leave my viewpoint at the window, anyway.

Grandad and Uncle Fred kept losing footage until the huge radio had scraped all the way across the floor and stood at their backs, hampering their efforts.

“Larry!” Grandad shouted. “Is he weakenin’ any?”

He wanted desperately for me to say yes, but it was useless. “It doesn’t look like it,” I said. Grandad burst out in a froth of curses I’d never heard before. A fresh attack on the line pulled his knuckles to the wall and barked them badly. He looked tired and beaten. All the slack in the line was taken up. He was against the wall, his head twisted, looking at me. A light flared in his eyes.

“All right, Fred,” he said. “If he wants the God-damned thing so bad–let him have it!” They both jumped back–and nothing happened.

I could see the lineman, completely unaware of his impending disaster, literally winding himself up for an all-out assault on our wire. I wanted, out of human kindness, to shout a warning at him. But it was too late. With an incredible backward lunge, he disappeared from sight behind the power pole.

A shattering explosion of wild noises blasted around us, like a bomb had fallen in grandad’s suite. Every electric appliance and light that Grandma owned flew into the parlour, bounding off the walls and smashing against each other. A table lamp from the bedroom caromed off Uncle Fred’s knee. The radio collided against the wall and was ripped off its wire. Sparking and flashing like lightning, all of Grandma’s things hurled themselves against the parlour walls, popping like a string of firecrackers as the cords went zipping through the hole. A silence fell–like a breath of air to a drowning man. The late afternoon darkness settled through the room.

“Sweet Jesus Christ!” Grandad said. Then there came a second uproar: a blood-curdling series of roars and shouting, as all our neighbours recovered from seeing their lamps, radios, irons, and toasters leap from their tables and collect in ruined piles of junk around the “free power” holes in their walls. Uncle Fred turned white as a sheet.

I looked out the window. The lineman sat at the foot of his pole, dazed. He looked up at me with one more hate-filled glare, then deliberately snipped our wire with a pair of cutters, taped the end and marched away into the night.

Grandad stood in the midst of the total darkness and the ruins of his home, trying to examine his beloved radio for damage. Grandma sat in her rocking chair, knitting socks and refusing to acknowledge the adventure.

It was Grandad who finally broke the silence. “Well! They’re lucky,” he said. “It’s just damned lucky for them they didn’t scratch my radio!”