Free St. Patrick's Bed (Ashland, 3) by Terence M. Green Page B

house on Maxwell Avenue. When I was a kid we could still see some of the harps that he had carved into the side of the garage. He was born in Toronto in 1862. His father, Sam Sutton, was born in Dublin in 1842. Once, in the early 1930s, he raised the Irish flag on a pole from that garage. Someone complained. The police came and made him take it down.
    Among my father's things I also found a receipt, dated October 21, 1899: Received from Mr. Thomas Sutton, the sum of $951.46, payment in full for 81 Duke Street, Toronto . . . signed, Annie Russell, Executrix. Duke Street no longer exists. It's been blended into Adelaide Street. The house is long gone too.
    Da, son of Sam Sutton of Dublin, both illiterate laborers, had managed to accumulate enough cash to buy a house, something even I couldn't do. He gave us all a leg up, a small start. It was a beginning. We stood on his shoulders.
    In the photo, my brother Ron's hands are resting on his great-grandfather's. Ron told me once that Da used to take him out on Sunday afternoons for a walk, a ride on the streetcar, then to a playground. This would have been around 1937. Ron would have been about five years old. Inevitably, they would visit a bootlegger and Da would have a drink. When they got home, Nanny would be suspicious and grill Ron with questions. He'd always answer that he didn't know where they went. Sitting in the corner of the kitchen, Da would beam, a twinkle in his eye, say That's my boy, That's my boy. We'll go for walks and rides to the playground every Sunday.
    Da, Thomas Sutton, was a widower from 1930 until he died in 1944. He lived at Maxwell Avenue for those fourteen years. I think he needed that drink on Sunday afternoons.
    Ron died May 23, 1993, age sixty.
     
    It was 5 a.m. I had no idea what Bobby Swiss did for a living, what time he got up, where he went, if he even went anywhere. I wanted to be sure that I didn't miss him.
    Coffee, orange juice, muffin, and strawberry yogurt in the Hampton Inn lobby, another coffee to go, then back onto 675 South. Within twenty minutes, I was in my car, parked on Galewood, watching the house where he lived. The steam from my coffee made a crescent on the windshield. The paper cup warmed my hands. I squinted into the summer sun, rising in the east, behind the house.
     
    At six-thirty, he came out. I knew it was him. He wore jeans, a white T-shirt, had a cigarette in his mouth. Tall, strong, his hair shoulder-length, brown, combed back behind his ears. He hadn't shaved. The rhythm of his body, the way he walked: I realized who I was seeing. I was seeing Adam.
    He got into the '87 Olds parked in the driveway. When it pulled out, I saw the license plate: jesusrox. I started up my car, followed the early morning exhaust cloud north on Galewood.
    Galewood curved west, became Bingham. At Woodman Drive—Wright Brothers Parkway—he turned left, driving along the perimeter of a classic factory, the Delco Plant: acres of parking behind wire fencing, thousands of cars. Smokestacks, gray vats, electrical transformers.
    He turned right, into the entrance driveway—a long, wide road leading into the grounds—stopped at the gatehouse, said something, then was gone. I pulled over at the foot of the entranceway, sat for a minute more, then drove away.
     
     
    II
     
    Dad attended grade school at St. Paul's Catholic Elementary School on Sackville, near Parliament and Queen. Born in 1904, he was there from 1910 to 1918—eight years that were the extent of his formal education. At age fourteen, he went to work.
    He told me the Christian Brothers taught him. The boys and girls were in separate classes, played on separate sides of the school grounds at recess. He said Brother Jerome, his eighth-grade teacher, could plunk an eraser off a kid's head from thirty feet, a trick that was held in high esteem by his students. No one complained to their parents. If they did, they got whapped again. You must have deserved it, they were told.
    He was