Sport At The Movie

By

Chris Decker

There were posters all over town. On the post office; the general store; the church bulletin board and the shed on the government wharf. I ran from poster to poster and read them all:

SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON

starring

JOHN WAYNE

Playing tonight at the school

8:00 O’clock

Adults: 50 cents

Children: 25 cents

Sport sensed my excitement and started to bark and wag his tail. Sport was was a sled dog. In 1953 when he and I had the summer off, we became the best of friends. We were inseparable. We swam in the salmon hole. We ran on the dusty roads. We lay in the grass and watched the fluffy clouds float across the sky.

People hardly ever spoke of one of us without naming the other; Timmy and Sport. Sport and Timmy.

The movie was in Technicolor! The only three shows I had seen before were in black and white.

Sport and I took off for home. Mrs. Newell, our neighbor, was visiting when I burst in with the news. She was just as anxious to see the movie as I was. Although money was tight, it didn't take a lot of effort for us to convince mother to come up with the fifty cents for her and the twenty-five for me.

At age ten I wasn’t too excited about sitting with two old women at the picture show. But it was inevitable. Sometimes sacrifices cannot be avoided.

Sport followed us up the road toward the school. We tried to drive him back several times.

“Go back, Sport! Go on home!”

He’d droop his tail and turn back until our backs were turned, then he’d quickly catch up to us again, wagging his tail as if he hadn't seen us in months.

Abraham Basha became a legend in Northern Newfoundland in the forties and fifties when the ocean was our only highway. Every spring as soon as the ice was gone from the shores and navigation had resumed, he would load his projector, his portable generator and a selection of movies onto his forty foot boat and visit the outports on the peninsula.

The generator was running outside the school when we arrived. It was a portable rig, so light that three or four men could lift it. A yellow and green lamp cord ran from the generator to an open window.

As the women were paying the admission, Sport rubbed up against my legs. I tried to ignore him.

He was confidently following us into the building when a yell from Basha stopped us in our tracks.

"No dogs allowed!"

Mrs. Newell turned around quick as a flash and snapped, "if that's the case, give us back our money. If the dog is not allowed, we're not allowed!"

Mrs. Newell and Mr. Basha locked eyes. It was the longest thirty seconds of my life. In half a minute the meaning of ambivalence was stamped on my brain forever. On the one hand I wanted Sport to come into the building because if we left him outside someone might kick him or throw rocks at him. On the other hand I desperately wanted to see the movie. I would probably risk Sport’s well being in favour of the movie. If Mrs. Newell had not been there, there would have been no contest. Mother would simply have sent me home with Sport and I would have missed the first part of the movie. I probably would have had to sit in the back because all the good seats in the front would be taken by the time I got back.

Basha blinked first. He looked at the money in his hand. Mother’s half dollar, the twenty cent piece and the small five cents were Newfoundland coins. Newfoundland had been in Confederation just over three years and Newfoundland money was still in circulation. Mrs. Newell’s fifty cent piece was Canadian. Basha appeared to be of two minds as well, as his stare went back and forth from the money in his hand to the beast on the floor.

“All right then,” he groaned, “but make sure he doesn’t bark!”

It was a two room school with a removable wall between the class-rooms. The wall was taken down for weddings, church socials, The Loyal Orange Lodge fund raisers and other important events , including movies. Especially movies.

Desks were stacked three tier high along both sides of the class-rooms. Chairs were arranged in rows on each side with an aisle down the middle. A large white screen covered the front wall.

The projector was in the back, precariously perched on top of a tier of desks.

The yellow and green lamp cord wound its way from the window across the floor to the projector on top of the desks. A join in the electrical cord was wrapped with black electrical tape. A fifty watt bulb, screwed into a pig tail, hung from the ceiling, flooding the double class room with light.

The first three rows were taken. We had to settle for the forth row. Sport sat on the floor at the end of our row.

“You’d better sit next to him, Timmy. And for God’s sake, keep him quiet,” Mrs. Newell whispered. She had a lot on the line.

I reached down and smoothed the back of his head. He stretched out, put his head on his front paws and closed his eyes.

Basha unscrewed the bulb from the socket and the building went dark.

The Donald Duck cartoon evoked peals of laughter from the people of my generation in the audience. After the cartoon, Oliver and Stanley, baby-sitting their sons, who were smaller versions of the fathers, got everyone laughing. Donald Duck and the Brats were in black and white and I wondered would the main show really be in color.

I didn't have long to wonder because as soon as the shorts were over the main feature began and the U.S. Cavalry thundered across the screen in blazing colour. Deafening music kept time with the clopping of the horses’ hooves. Trumpets blasting. Flags waving. A cloud of dust a mile high. The solders wearing dark blue tunics and grey riding britches with yellow stripes up the legs. They all had yellow bandanas around their necks. Knee high black leather boots. And there was a black dog with a white spot between his eyes. He looked something like Sport.

The commotion on the screen roused Sport and he sat up and started to growl. I cuffed his ears and whispered to him to be quiet. He lay back down.

The movie was about an old colonel, who really didn’t look old at all, who was due to retire from the army any day now. There was also an attractive woman and a yellow ribbon. Every time the woman appeared on the screen she was wearing the yellow ribbon and the music played and voices sang, ‘she wore a yellow ribbon’. Apparently she wore the yellow ribbon because she loved one of the soldiers. As far as I was concerned she kept getting in the way of all the good parts in the movie like the shooting and the fighting. I think she was only an excuse for them to sing about the yellow ribbon.

The colonel was determined to capture a rambunctious group of Indians and drive them back to their reservation.

Under the cover of night he led the soldiers to the Indian camp. The colonel and the soldiers were acting as if it were stone dark and they were having a difficult time seeing where they were going. Yet the audience could see everything. To me it looked like broad daylight.

The Indians weren’t very smart when they set up their camp. They pitched their tents in the bottom of a long valley. All the colonel had to do was lead his soldiers along on the top of the ridge and pounce on them and wipe them out like fish in a barrel.

The soldiers tried to keep quiet as they took their positions along the top of the ridge. All of a sudden the dog on the screen barked! The colonel quickly leaned down from his saddle and calmed the dog down. Fortunately the Indians did not hear the bark.

But Sport did!

He sprang to his feet, ears cocked, tail straight, the hair on his back bristling. His fangs exposed.

I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and tried to pin him to the floor. I was left with two handfuls of fur as he bolted after the dog on the screen.

Six feet from the screen he became airborne. For a second he was a kaleidoscope of colors suspended in the smoke filled beam of light from the projector. The bottom of the screen was a couple feet off the floor. The dog in the movie was about a foot from the bottom of the screen. Sport’s aim was perfect. But instead of grabbing the dog by the throat, Sport’s teeth slammed into solid wood. He bounced off the wall and landed on the broad of his back with his legs kicking.

While attempting to upright himself he rolled over several times and got tangled up in the legs of the desks that were stacked along the wall. Desks came tumbling down on top of people below. Patrons jumped from their seats and scrambled into the aisle where the light from the projector cast their shadows on the screen and inserted them into the charging cavalry.

Shouts came from the back of the building, “Sit down! Sit down! You’re blocking the view!”

Sport made another charge. This time he fastened his teeth into the hem of the screen, ripped it off the wall and bolted toward the back of the school dragging the sheet behind him.

With the screen gone, the movie was projected on the dark green wooden wall over a map of Newfoundland that had a small insert of Labrador, near Flower’s Cove, in the upper left hand corner.

Sport headed straight for the desks that the projector was perched on. Basha saw the impending collision and grabbed the projector in his arms. When Sport side swiped the desks they came tumbling down and knocked Basha off his feet. Although he landed upside down he still clung to his precious projector which, from the new vantage point, projected the movie unto the white ceiling. People in the audience immediately tilted their heads back and watched John Wayne, on the ceiling, waving his sword and leading the charge against the Indians.

Sport plunged through the open window. His hind leg got tangled in the cord and pulled the plug from the projector leaving the theatre in total darkness. I scrambled through the window behind him.

Mrs. Newell was waiting outside.

“Timmy, over here! Grab the brute and let’s get the hell out of here before we’re all shot.”

Mother did not use such profane language. Instead she marched defiantly down the aisle and out the main door complaining, aloud enough for all to hear, that Basha had no business allowing dogs into the building.

We were almost home before she even acknowledged that she knew Mrs. Newell or me, let alone Sport.

Next day we learned that Basha got the projector going again. Someone went somewhere and came back with a bed sheet.

Mrs. Newell, mother and I didn’t see the end of the movie and nobody was in any rush to tell us how it ended.

A couple days later I cornered a six year old who I had noticed sitting in the front row and somewhat offhandedly asked him how the movie had ended. He told me that the Indians turned on the soldiers and scalped them all.

I told mother and Mrs. Newell but they said that didn’t sound quite right. Mrs. Newell suggested that since there was a conspiracy of silence, she would make up an ending.

According to Mrs. Newell, the cavalry swept down into the Indian camp; captured the Indians and drove them back to their reservation. The colonel retired from the army and the woman with the yellow ribbon married her soldier and lived happily ever after.

More than half a century has slipped by like a dream. Sport is long gone. Mrs. Newell and mother have passed away. Last night I watched SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON on Turner Classical Movies. Mrs. Newell was right.

END