Human Beans
by Ron Pumphrey

Since I was afraid of my bedridden Nan-Nan Pumphrey, yet loved the energetic Mom Fleming and my dear Aunt Kathleen, I spent most of my time at the Fleming house where for some reason I made friends easier than at Nan-Nan’s end of town. I could play around the dockyard when Mom and Kathleen weren’t looking.

Three experiences in Harbour Grace and, much later, another in a Bell Island deckhead made me forever fear heights.

I’m too old to be in my sister’s baby carriage, but I climb into it anyway until Aunt Kathleen orders me out and onto the street. But, I quite deliberately lean over the side, wondering about the feeling and consequence of falling out.

The carriage moves. I fall, landing on my face, in the gravel.

Aunt Kathleen screams in panic, grabs me up—me screeching in pain—and begins picking little stones out of my nose and cheeks and wiping off the blood. It takes me weeks to recover, during which time I’m called “imp” for the first time.

I discover that free-falling is a no-no.

Mary and I are out on the back gallery at Mom Fleming’s having our picture taken by Aunt Kathleen with a Kodak box camera with the familiar black strap fastened diagonally from one corner to the other, which her sister Nora sent her from New York. Acceding to my aunt’s request that I back up close to Mary so she could get us both in the picture, I retreat too hastily, and too far. Three or four palings are off the rear fence, where Kathleen every morning dumps the ashes in the ash pit some ten feet below. I trip into the lower rail which comes across my back instep, and, to the fitful cries of Aunt Kathleen, I—who know I am falling from a far worse height than a baby carriage—land smacko—flat on my back, the hard suddenness of it knocking the wind from me. I can’t breathe.

Gasping and kicking, I open my eyes and see Kathleen poised on the gallery, readying for the impossible jump.

Mom Fleming is crying as Kathleen bundles me in a blanket in the kitchen, and runs all the way up the street with me close to her breast, depositing me in the office of Dr. Strapp. The little, fat, round-faced doctor, black hair combed straight back, lies me down and strips me naked as my aunt paces, hovers over me, and weeps. “He’s blue from lack of oxygen. Lack of air. But he’ll be okay,” the doctor tells her, and stands me unsteadily on my feet, on his desk where he absently keeps flicking my dicky-bird while he tells her to tell my mother to “Have the laddie circumcised before too long, now, won’t you?” He addresses me as he puts me on the floor. “Ronnie, don’t ever go backin’ up anywhere, unless you know what’s there behind ya. Okay? Okay.”

It would be okay now forever, because I’d never lean over any wheeled vehicle or anything which could move and throw me out, and I’d never back up without looking behind me.

Ah, but—

Comes the frightful day when I pull a chair to a downward-sloping chute running through the wall, high up in Nan-Nan Pumphrey’s house. Peering down the chute, all I can see is the backyard with some potatoes and turnips growing, and the naked wharf down the drung, and, almost directly below me, a man swinging an axe over a log on a chopping block. Leaning forward into the squarish, wooden tunnel, I slip.

And I go down the greasy chute, my arms out front.

Zing!—my hands and head go through the end. The fatal plunge is short-circuited when my shoulders catch.

I look down, screeching, crying, for I am about to tumble helplessly to my death.

The wood-chopper looks up, the axe poised over his head. He lets the axe fall backward and runs, yelling, into the basement kitchen.

Soon there’s a gathering of chattering, frightened, and mournful people in the hall behind me, with someone trying to reach me with a fishing hook attached to a pole. Away down there on the ground below me, some men rush about, affixing the four corners of a fishnet to long planks which they are hoisting to catch me when I’d fall. It will still be quite a fall, and I hear one of the agitated men ask, “What if the net breaks? What if he misses it entirely?” Fortunately, I’m petrified. I can’t cry because, when I do, my body inches forward. Terror causes me to scream in a voice not mine. I stop bawling when it causes me to inch out farther. Above me and behind the open window, some crying, praying, admonishing woman is begging whomever is trying to fish me, not to get the hook into my skin. “Catch him by his clothing. Careful. Careful. Don’t pull on that pole unless you’re sure you haven’t got the hook in his belly, into his legs, or worse.”

I realize she’s Nan-Nan, up out of her sickbed.

Finally the hook catches inside the necktie acting as a belt around my pants. “Hold it taut,” someone yells. “Pull him slightly up while I crawls underneat’ ya and tries to lasso his laigs.”

A voice calls down to me: “Hold yer legs still, Ronnie, we’re gonna hog-tie you like the cowboys does in the picture shows.”

Now I’m standing safe on the floor inside that window chute, being cursed by those who love me and ogled by some who are disappointed not seeing a little boy fall so far and turn into jam on the ground.

Nan-Nan Pumphrey is crying as she holds me in her bed. She smells of Jeyes Fluid, a disinfectant used in the blue-and-gold chamber pot in the dark mahogany commode, over by the window overlooking the barren Pumphrey fishing premises. Aunt Kathleen bursts into the room, beside herself with anger and relief as she shakes me, while promising the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the Saints in Heaven, “When your father and mother comes home from the island, you’ll get yer comeuppance for sure, imp!”

The incident causes a lot of talk for a long, long time, with people chiding me. “You’re the little boy who fell down the chute, ain’t ya?” and “Me son, if ya’d falled all the way you’d be pushin’ up daisies now along wit’ yer relatives in the cemetery up dere at the foot o’ Saddle Hill,” and “You’re the laddie buck who wuz born wit’ a torn caul on yer face, weren’t ya? I kin see right off we’re gonna be hearin’ a lot of news about you yet, me son.”