How to Eat Stone Soup

1936 was your hungriest year. You had nowhere to go, so you went everywhere. You spent it wandering from city to town, through villages to farmland.  You reached the West Coast of the Dominion of Canada and returned to the East, following some rumour, some hope, in the opposite direction. You wandered for 6 years. You walked almost six thousand miles, twice. Jumping aboard train wagons was for younger men, more desperate men and there were thousands of them. The prairies stretched out endlessly before you and then ended. Mountain passes opened in April or May and closed in September. You walked from season into season. You patched the soles of your shoes with layers of newspaper or pieces of cardboard.

Those who were still in their warm houses watched you tramp through their neighbourhoods.  They kept their curtains drawn against the street and thought it was a kindness to you.  They did not want you to watch the family sit down to supper and feel alone.  They did not want you to watch them, bathed in the golden electric light that seeps out from behind coloured lampshades, and feel cold. They did not want you to see the hothouse flowers as their table centrepiece and feel anger.  They did not want you to have to watch the family sit down to eat their Sunday roast and feel violent.

Some impulse in their Christian souls told them to watch the tramp you had become through a part in the curtains. They always thought, but only sometimes said to the others:

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

You were tired from your journey, but you could not stop. Others had begun to call you a victim of the Depression. You just called it the Weariness. You had long forgotten your point of departure and your destination seemed more a fantasy with each step. What had you set out in search of? Was it work or a warm bed? Was it a new pair of shoes or a drop of whiskey? Was it always only your next meal?

You needed many things during your hungriest year, but when a gaze fell on you through the part in a pair of curtains, there was nothing you wanted more than to be invisible. What you found was some comfort in the distraction of watching someone else.

The first time you saw her you were sitting on the back porch of an unpainted house.  The yard backed out into the cemetery.  The widow with nine children who lived inside, to whom you were just a person without a job, had given you a bowl of boiled potatoes and you were trying to eat slowly to convince your stomach it really was full.

In the distance, you thought she was a man as she rode up the path on her bicycle. It was not natural, that amount of bulk on a figure. There was something strapped to her back.  Something heavy, you realised, as she dismounted and leaned the bike against the side of the house.  Teetering on her fur-topped boots (fur-topped boots in June!) she tried to walk up to the front door with a sack of potatoes tied to her back.

You were staring because you were not sure if the woman was truly there in the flesh, or if you were having some kind of spell.  She was dressed like your mother, when she was young, in the photograph she kept beside her bed.  When the lady with the potatoes strapped to her back turned around, you had only chewed your mouthful twice.  It hurt your throat when you swallowed in surprise.  There was not one wrinkle in the face you saw yet you knew she was not young.

Two of the widow's sons appeared and took the sack of potatoes off the woman's back.  You stretched your own shoulders and arched your back when you saw her burden lifted.  She became nimble on her fur-topped boots and mounted her bicycle.  This time, as she rode down the path, she looked like a boy.     

A stream ran behind the widow's house and wove through the cemetery.  For a time you soaked your feet in a cold shallow pool.  From the streambed you chose a dozen small red stones made smooth and round by the current.  You needed the stones for two reasons.  You wanted to mark your trail through the town.  If you accidentally walked down the same block of a wealthy neighbourhood twice, well, someone was always watching. Someone would suspect you were strolling up and down the street waiting for an opportunity to break into an empty house and rob it.  A policeman was sure to be called and you would have had to answer questions even though it had never come down to stealing.

The next day you lost your teeth someplace. 

You had only yourself to blame

You just could not wear them all the time.  As you travelled you lost weight and the thinner you were the more your dentures rubbed and irritated, slipped and slid. Your false teeth were uncomfortable, but at least they were teeth. You needed them for eating and for talking to people.  How would you ever get back on your feet without them?

It came down to stealing.

You affected a disguise for this new role.  Into your trousers pocket you put three stones and a few brass disks that never could have passed for dimes. Your pocket looked heavy and when you jangled the brass disks against the stones, you could have almost convinced yourself that your pocket was full of coins.

The secret, you believed, was to walk into the drug store with a sense of purpose, as if you knew exactly where what you wanted should be.  What you wanted, of course, was anything but a pair of medium-size drugstore dentures.  Trouble was, you did not know where to find the false teeth, the nickel novels, or even the razor blades.

You hoped the teeth would be deep in your pocket before the inevitable question was asked.  You rehearsed your response until your voice ran as clearly as the stream behind the widow's house.

“May I help you?” The chemist would ask.

“Yes, please,” you would reply with certainty. “Where might I find a shaving brush?”

While he led the way to the shaving brushes, you would prepare to examine them and be unhappy with the quality, with the selection and the cost of such things these days.

“Oh,” you would say with a hint of disappointment in your voice. “That isn't quite what I had in mind, but thank-you so much for your time.”

You walked into the drug store.  The bells on the door had not stopped ringing when you turned to nod to the clerk standing behind the counter.  Your perfect crime was foiled.  It was her.  She was standing behind the drug store counter.

"Hello.  How can I help you this morning?" she asked.

You opened your mouth, but--

A man of about fifty, wearing a white coat came down to the front of the store.  She stepped out from behind the counter and touched his face with the tips of her gloved fingers.

"Good-bye Archie.  I'll be home before the children."  Humming she made her way toward the door.

The bells were still ringing when her husband asked, "Is it a prescription you want filled?"

"That's not what I had in mind.  I'll have to come back later."

She walked up one set of steps to the front door, knocked and waited. When she found there was no one home, she climbed down the steps and went up again at the next house.  You were fascinated.  You only ever knocked on back doors.  Like you, she was never invited in.

"Mrs. Maclean," someone called her.  "You know we always like to support the YWCA and the Salvation Army, but times are hard for us too.  With the children getting so grown-up, I just don't see how we could..."

You knew there was a shortage of kindness. You thought the supply had been depleted sometime in 1935.

When she turned from the door, so civilly slammed in her face, you were afraid she had seen you stop to eavesdrop from the sidewalk and that she would think you were trying to follow her.  You ran.  You ran as fast as your shoes with the newspaper soles would carry you.  A stone flew out of your trouser pocket. It bounced down the sidewalk, making a spark each time it landed. You didn’t feel the least bit lighter.

You ran to the park and found an empty bench in the shade to catch your breath. You held your head in your hands.  You were hungry, but you had no means to eat with.  You could have returned to the widow's house, or at least to that part of town.  You could have gone there and from the back porch you could have asked for a bowl of soup or a glass of milk, but they might've had only bread with jam or potatoes.                         

Beggars can’t be choosers.

You were alone with your head in your hands and you heard someone humming pleasantly.

"Can you tell me," her voice said, and you looked up toward it.  "Can you tell me what time children finish school for the day?"

You opened your mouth to respond to her question.  This time you could make sound.

"'Bout four."

 "And would you be so kind as to tell me what time it is now?"

"'Bout two," you guessed as you had no watch.

"Then I have plenty of time to spend."

She sat down on the bench beside you and you covered your mouth so that she did not have to look at your lips caved in around your gums.

She took a paper bag from her overcoat and when it rustled in her hand, the smell of fruit from inside it hit you right in the face.  With the smell you thought you were going to die and go directly to heaven.

"Do you care for orange peel?" she asked and offered you the bag filled with thick and sun-bright peel.

You had never eaten orange peel before.                            

It had never come down to that.

You were hungry enough, but you had to shake your head by way of apology to her.  You moved your hands away from your mouth and she nodded with understanding. 

You regretted not being able to accept her orange peel, so you reached into your trousers pocket and found the one remaining red stone that you had taken from the bed of the stream.  You polished it between your palms and offered it to her.

"Oh!  No wonder you've lost your teeth," she said.  "What do you do with them?  Boil them up in soup?"  She giggled like a girl that middle-age woman.  Even though you didn't like to without your teeth, you smiled too.

You put the stone down on the bench between you and both of you examined it for a while.

"Well, I suppose I should get back to my collection," she said. 

You watched her leave the shade of the bench and leave the park in sunshine for the red brick neighbourhoods.

She had left her bag of orange peels on the bench and beside it was sitting a pair of false teeth, still wet under the shade.  The stone was gone.