Jimmy Jim

Jimmy Jim MacAulay (Photo by Lorna MacDougall)

 

1.

Today is Remembrance Day. It puts me in mind of a WWI veteran I was privileged to know. His name is Jimmy Jim MacAulay. He died in 1999 at the age of ninety-eight. He was a soldier, horseman, rumrunner, fish peddler, woodsman, Irish moss harvester, and a member of the French Legion of Honour. He had blue eyes, long ski-jump nose, narrow jutting chin, and wispy white hair, He was full of stories, enjoyed conversation, and had a ready laugh. He was tall, big-boned, broad-shouldered. How strong was he? Strong enough to lift the back end of our blue Chevette (with me in it!) and swing it clear of the snowdrift in which it was stuck. He dressed in wool – plaid shirts, wool pants, wool socks. He wore high, black rubber boots. He did things the old way. In the fall, he banked the trailer he lived in with seaweed; he ate potted meat; he drove a horse-and-cart; smoked a pipe.

2.

Jimmy Jim scraped his chair back from the table. “Jim will have his pie now,” he said. 

Lorna and I laughed. “Sorry, Jim. We haven’t got much in the line of desserts,” Lorna said. “How about a dish of strawberries?” 

Jim laughed. “No pie for Jim,” he said. “That’s okay. Strawberries aren’t hard to take. Jim forgot his manners.”

This was the first time we’d had Jim over for supper.

3.

We were in a bit of a pickle that’s for sure. We’d let two Clydesdales – a mare and her colt, both about the same size – out into a fenced field behind the shed where they were kept. These horses were handsome to look at, chestnut with cream-colored manes and tails, but once loosed in the yard they began trotting around real frisky-like, shaking their heads, snuffling their noses, showing no interest in allowing us to get anywhere near them. 

They were big, barrel-chested horses with enormous hooves and broad, muscly behinds. I’d estimate they each weighed about two thousand pounds. We watched them run around for a while. That’s why we’d let them out in the first place – so we could observe them, particularly the colt, which was for sale. My biggest fear was getting knocked down and trampled. It felt like being in a circus ring with a couple of stampeding elephants. 

We stayed in the center of the yard, and the horses trotted along the fence. After while, we decided we’d seen enough and we tried to shoo them back into the shed. We clapped our hands and yelled at them, “Hey, okay, let’s go, get back in there, c’mon, let’s go, get going” – all to no avail. They weren’t going back in. That’s the last thing those big critters wanted to do. They just got more skitterish and started galloping along the fence down into the far corner of the field. 

Jim went inside the shed and came out with a coil of rope, tied a lasso knot in it and walked down towards the horses. They were standing there, watching him approach. Suddenly, the colt bolted towards him. Jim calmly side-stepped him and kept walking towards the mare. Now he was talking to the mare, “Settle down there now, settle down, that’s the way.” He walked right up to her, took hold of her bridle, and led her along the fence and back inside the shed. He made it look pretty easy. But I had a feeling that catching that other one wouldn’t go as smooth, and I was right.

4. 

Relaxation on the back step, Jim’s aromatic pipe smoke, barn swallows dipping low over the stubble field, and the evening sun’s orange slanting rays mingle to dissolve the day’s anxieties. Jim needs an ole plug,” Jim says. He means an old horse. We’ve had this conversation before, Jim and I. He’s been horseless for about a month, ever since old Bob went lame and Jim sold him to the meat packers. Now Jim hankers for a replacement. He’s superstitious about being without one.

So it was, one Saturday in June, he and I drove up West to look for an ole plug. “Where up West?” I asked him, as we drove. 

“Profits Corner.” 

“Never heard of it.” 

“Don’t worry,” he said, “Jimmy knows.” And so I guess I just had to have faith he did know. But how could he? He hadn’t been up this way in decades. He used to harvest moss in Skinners Pond, he told me. Okay, I thought, I’ll go along with the gag. It’s a beautiful day for a drive. So we rolled along, Jim’s rangy, six-foot frame wedged into the Chevette’s tiny front seat, his eagle-like head alertly looking out at the passing countryside.

5. 

One day Jim’s dog Butch was hit by a car and crawled under our front step. I went in under and gently pulled him out. He was bleeding badly from the hind quarters. Lorna told Jim and the three of us took Butch into the vet in Charlottetown and got him stitched up. That’s how we came to know Jim. After that, every now and then, we’d invite him over for supper. He’d tell us stories. He was like a pump – story after story flowed out of him. 

He talked about what it was like as a kid in the orphanage in Charlottetown, getting his backside whipped with cat o’ nine tails. He told us about being in a trench in France and when the tarp was pulled back in the morning how the rats came tumbling in and all the soldiers pumped their legs up and down to squash them. I remember Jim chuckling when he finished that story and saying, “Jim nearly messed himself.” He often referred to himself in the third person. 

He talked about riding the rails West for the grain harvest, working for Captain Dick, hauling puncheons of rum off the boats and hiding them in the marsh at Covehead Harbour, breaking logjams on the Miramichi, working at the Saint John dry-dock, leaving the bootlegger’s full as an egg, crawling home between the potato drills in pitch darkness. I didn’t believe everything he said. It didn’t matter, really. His eyes sparkled, he laughed a lot. It was a pleasure just to hang out with him. 

6.

“Try in there,” Jim says, nodding at a big farmhouse and barn close to the road on our left. 

“Profits?” I ask.

 

Jim is chuckling: “We’ll see if old Jim’s memory is any good. Maybe old Jim dreamed it.”

I pulled into the yard. There was a long, low-slung, weather-beaten barn nearby. We got out of the car. A man in his mid-thirties came out the back door of the house and approached us. 

“Hi,” I say. “Know anybody who might want to sell a horse?”

 

The guy looked at me. He looked at Jim. Jim was looking at the dark, open door to the barn. He said to Jim: “I know you, don’t I?”

 

“I used to peddle fish up this way,” Jim said.

 

“Right enough,” the fellow said, smiling. “I remember you. I was just a kid. You had a beauty team of horses, flashy harness, and a rubber-wheeled cart, and you wore a long black leather coat.” 

I was visualizing this picture of Jim standing in this yard probably twenty years ago, and at the same time I was marveling at the man’s recall, and the glorious happenstance that put the two of them back in this same yard this morning. 

“I’ll show you our horses,” the fellow said. “I’m Robert Profit.”  

We followed Robert into the barn, into a horse-smelling, straw-stuffed world of empty stalls. We walked the length of the barn, along high-walled pens made of worn boards, side-by-side, both sides of the passageway, to the gold waterfall of light at the end. One occupant, in the second to last stall, a compact red-eyed, rough-haired stud, tried to kick his stall apart as we passed by. As we emerged into the sunlight, Robert reached up and lifted a metal pail from a nail, brought it down to his side, and strode out a ways from the barn into the field, which seemed vast as an ocean. He banged the pail hard with his open palm. He kept banging. Far in the distance, where the blue sky and the green field met, I could see black specks steadily growing in size, taking the shape of … horses. Then I felt their motion. Yes, felt it. The grassy ground beneath my feet was vibrating. They were getting close. Enormous! Giants! Beautiful black Percherons. Six of them. They were ponderously galloping straight toward us, jarring the earth, laying down a beat I could feel in my bones. They stopped maybe twenty feet in front of us, blowing, shaking, shining, rippling.

Robert stepped forward and patted the shoulder of one. “This here one weighs three thousand pounds. He likes his oats, don’t you, ole boy. This here’s their oat bucket.” Jim went right out amongst them, rubbing their sides, their noses. “Too much horse for Jim,” Jim said. “All Jim needs is an ole plug.” 

We said good-bye to Robert. He thought we might have some luck up by Skinner’s Pond. “Good to meet you ... again,” Robert said to Jim. They shook hands. “Take care,” Robert said. Back in the Chevette, the sweet leathery scent of the horses traveling with us, we continued our trip westward, the beat of heavy black hooves drumming in our ears.

7.

Some things Jimmy Jim told me:

Cubans mix dope with their tobacco to make cigars. 

Beet beer vanishes from the blood stream fifteen minutes after you drink it. 

Death by firing squad is death from a single bullet. Five of the six shooters fire blanks.

The rumrunner, who, at one time, owned Dalvay-by-the-Sea, was shot by the naval authorities on a dock in Halifax for servicing a German submarine. 

Whiskey fixes everything. 

8. 

Memory within memory, and all of it fading fast! This horse-buying trip up West with Jimmy Jim happened almost forty years ago and the stories he told me took place long before that. I’m a little hazy on how we ended up at the spot where we let the two Clydesdales out in the field. I’m not even sure of the name of the community. We’d stopped at various places and asked if anyone knew of any horses for sale. We ended up at this house with a shed out back containing the two Clydesdales. It might’ve been in St. Louis. Anyway, I remember the fellow who owned them taking us out to the shed. I believe he said the colt was for sale for $800. He said he and his family were going to a wedding, but that we were welcome to stick around and look at the horses and that, if we wanted to, we could let them out into the field to get a better look at them. And that’s how we ended up in that fix I mentioned earlier. Jim managed to get the mare back in the shed. But the colt was balking. He was enjoying his freedom and wasn’t in any hurry to give it up. Jim was still carrying the rope he’d found in the shed. The colt was down by the fence at the end of the field. Jim walked toward it. The colt eyed him, kicked out his back legs and took off, galloping along the fence as far as he could go, turned, and charged straight at Jim. Jim stepped a few feet to one side, and swung the rope above his head. As the colt drew abreast of him, he cast the loop over the colt’s head. The colt kept going, pulling Jim behind him. Jim leaned back, dug in his heels. Still, he was dragged. I ran over to them, yelling, “Whoa! Whoa!” The colt was slowing. Jim was pulling back on the rope with all he had. Finally, the colt stopped. Jim led him back to the shed, put him in his stall, shut the door, and fastened it. “Too much horse for Jim,” he said. 

9.

On the way home that day, Jim told me a story about the time he was harvesting Irish moss. I believe he said it was in Skinner’s Pond or in that area. It was after a bad storm and the sea was still running high. There was a large amount of moss floating out in the water. Trying to 

reach it, Jim, his horse, and the big metal basket that the horse was pulling behind it, were caught in a heavy undertow and were pulled out into deep, rough water. Jim hung on to the reins. The horse swam mightily, and even with Jim’s weight and the weight of the metal basket dragging it down, it managed to get close enough to shore for Jim to get his footing. After a long struggle, Jim reached the beach. But the horse got swept out again and drowned. “That horse saved ole Jimmy’s life,” Jim said. 

10. 

Jim died on April 19, 1999.  The headline of the piece in the Guardian read, “Island’s last WWI veteran dies at 98.” Ninety-eight! That would’ve made him eighty-one when we took that West Prince horse-buying trip. Eighty-one years of age, roping that skittish Clydesdale, hanging on tight, as it dragged him across the field!

A few summers ago, Lorna and I biked over to Corran Ban cemetery to see Jim’s grave. At first, we couldn’t find the marker. Then Lorna spotted it near the fence, in the shade of a green ash and a small-leafed linden: 

MACAULAY

Sir James Allen

May 17, 1900

April 19, 1999

Last Veteran of

First World War

Lest We Forget

Above his name, etched in the stone’s polished surface, was the image of a horse’s head.