Cousin Charlie

When I was about five years old I remember one time we visited my Cousin Charlie, he was really my mother’s first cousin, but we all called him Cousin Charlie; and we liked him a lot. Being my mother’s cousin meant that he was of my mother’s age, he was an adult, except that he wasn’t. Charlie looked like an adult, was as big or bigger than any of the other adults, but he talked just like my sister and me, he had things that we would have liked to have had.

Charlie lived with his mother and father across the river , which to someone on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls meant that he lived in the States . We lived within walking distance of the Falls and of the Rainbow Bridge between Niagara Falls, New York and Niagara Falls, Ontario; Mr. Logan who lived on our block but worked at Carborundum in Niagara Falls, New York, usually walked to work, a long walk but it was during the war.

I can remember walking with my mother across the bridge to visit her relatives, my sister was with us in the baby carriage; it was a cream colored carriage with a deep well underneath that was handy when coming back from the States. My dad was away in the army, most of the men were away, had been away for a long time; Canada was in the war from the second day, it was a long war for Canadians.

I can remember that we would bring back meat and sugar in the bin under my sister in the carriage; smuggling was never considered a crime or a sin to anyone living on the border, it was just a thing you did and tried not to get caught doing. During the war we had rationing, the Americans didn’t, we brought some stuff home because we needed it.

I remember one time when Charlie let us play with his record player, he had this portable that we set on the floor where we played a record that had a picture imprinted into the plastic, a western picture of cactus and mountain and a horse. There was one song on each side, the one I remember was “Stone Cold Dead in the Marketplace”, we played that over and over until someone begged us to stop, or bribed us with cookies. Charlie sat with Caryl and me while we played, he enjoyed it as much as we did; a great big, balding guy who like what we liked, talked like we talked–we thought he was perfect.

We outgrew our fascination with Charlie, we still liked him because he was always really friendly, but he didn’t talk like us anymore, we were becoming older, Charlie was staying the same, his things were just the same kind of things he had when we were real little. We took clues from our parents and relatives that Charlie was to be treated in a special way.

One family story was of the time that Charlie had a job at the Johns Manville plant that made roofing materials; they made those black roles of roofing paper impregnated with asphalt and covered with crushed stone. On Charlie’s first day at the plant the foreman took him to the production line where a belt of heavy paper saturated with hot asphalt passed under a machine that spread the crushed stone onto it; the foreman took a shovel, from a pile of crushed stone he filled the bin of the machine, Charlie watched him do that, said yes he understood. The foreman went on his way. A while later the man returned to see the hot asphalt roll becoming a solid cooling log of asphalt paper rolling up at the end of his machine, the crushed rock that kept the layers from sticking together wasn’t there; the molten asphalt covered paper was passing under an empty hopper. The foreman pointed to the machine and asked Charlie if he realized that it was empty, that the paper was being wound into useless, solid logs; yes Charlie knew that that was happening, it had been going on since the crushed stone ran out, Charlie was wondering when the foreman would be coming back to shovel in more stone. That was his job at Johns Manville.

There were other stories, some humerus, some not: he was placed in a special state home, but climbed out of the window and walked home because he missed his mother, my mother’s aunt. Charlie wanted to know if the light in the fridge really went out when you closed the door, so he cleared everything out, climbed in and pulled the door shut, with a click. Because all the food was sitting on the floor and the kitchen table his mother figured out what had happened, she got him out of there. This was the time when refrigerators didn’t have magnets to hold the doors closed, they had big locks that clicked shut, the kind of thing that caused many inquisitive children to die. Charlie was lucky.

Then there were other stories; like the time he chased his mother around the basement with an ax until she picked up a shovel and faced him down, his mother was just a tiny woman, we always thought that she was really brave, because Charlie was big, bigger than my dad, any dad, Charlie had become huge.

Charlie’s dad died, his mother was getting old, Charlie was still at home, would always be at home; his mother asked everyone in the family to consider taking care of Charlie when she died, Charlie would not stay in the State Home; by this time he was well over three-hundred pounds and stood about six-three, and there were those fits when he would be dangerous. No one would agree to take care of Charlie, even with the promise of inheriting my aunt’s house and life insurance, there was no one but she who could control, take care of him, no one loved him as his mother loved and accepted him.

Charlie died on a Christmas, his mother said at his coffin that she’d soon join him, she died on that New Year’s Day.

I still remember playing that silly cowboy song over and over “Stone Cold Dead in the Marketplace” and wondering just how they got that picture molded into that record.