The Rumrunners by Marty Gervais

Author:Marty Gervais
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2012-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

Housekeeper from LaSalle:On the Fringe

They had to watch for hijackers and one of those hijackers was Cecil Smith. There was a gang of them. I know ‘cause I lived across from them when I was five years old. I got punched in the nose many a time ‘cause I was a tomboy. Another group would bring the liquor to their homes, and they’d hide it in the barn or in the greenery. Then they’d make contact with the Americans to meet them at a given place, and they’d have to turn around and haul it from their home to there. So Cecil and the Brophy Gang – it wasn’t only just them, there was quite a few other gangs, you know what I mean – went where they were meeting and waylaid them on the roads and took the loads away from them. Oh, you don’t know the racket!

How they operated the roadhouses was – I can tell some tales out of school. These people are dead now. They used to pay off these Provincials. They didn’t go by names. The Provincial might call and say “number nine” and he’d hang up. You knew to get the heck out. You’d grab the stuff you had in the house and put it in the boat and get out in the middle of the river. That’s why the roadhouses were practically all on the river. You could get a meal in these places, and if you were known, you could get into the back room and get a drink.

Mushrat La Framboise was a real character. I think his name was Art. They called him Mushrat because he used to go muskrat hunting. Him and Pete his brother are both dead now. But anyway, Mushrat used to run up and down the river with his boat, and sometimes he was with a Mountie and sometimes he was with bootleggers. He was riding both sides of the fence. Muskrat meat was very, very lean, but they used to put on muskrat suppers up there, and if you wanted to put on a muskrat supper you got a hold of Mushrat and told him how many you needed. He went both sides, I was told. How could they run that way? They used to be able to do it, because they were in with this one officer, and they’d pay him off, not so much in money as in favours, you know what I mean. If he wanted a party, well, you gave him a party. Or else.

Another thing, too: I got acquainted with some people that lived around Wardsville (about sixty-five miles east of Windsor). There used to be a marsh there. In between Wardsville and Glencoe, on Highway 2 – see, it wasn’t paved then – and these young fellows that showed up in daytime, they’d bring a bunch of water there in barrels and they’d make a real mud hole and then at night, they’d hitch up their team and wait. The bootleggers would get stuck there and they’d pay them to haul them out.

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