Ceilings, Floors, Windows, Doors
Collected Stories 2010
By Robert Adair Wilson
Copyright 2012 Robert Adair Wilson - Cover by Leslie Slova Wilson
Published by Robert Adair Wilson at Smashwords
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Feuilles de Noyer
At the Saturday flea market Harry bought a coffee and doughnut from an elderly Native woman who looked at him from behind broken eyeglasses. Between her rotten teeth rested a home-rolled cigarette. He ate and drank slowly and then made his way back to the controlled crossing at the highway with a small paper bag of other purchases. He crossed nimbly enough and slowly climbed the gentle wheelchair ramp to his apartment, swung his arm down to the aluminum bar and entered. His wife was waiting for him in the kitchen of their suite.
“Your sister called about twenty minutes after you went to bed last night . . . said she’d call again later.” He hadn’t thought of or heard from Elaine in months.
~
It was July 1962 and it was hot. Harry was halfway through his twelfth year and yearning for excitement when this summer brought him a half sister from his mother’s previous marriage. Unlike any of the girls his own age, she was at once energetic, sophisticated, and full of a penchant to tease him about his lack of a girlfriend. Her almost twenty-two years of living was a challenge to him as he had always been the elder, the leader. Elaine told everyone horrendous stories of her care for him when he was just a baby and she made it her business to burn his comic book collection telling him to ‘Get a life!’
The heat hung over the islands like a long-running movie everyone had tired of. The sun crawled, panting and straining, across the back of every head. Cooling rains streaked the horizon with shafts of gray. A short distance to the east, heavy clouds like dust motes under a bed had backed up against the coastal mountains, their first hurdle to the interior. But on the island all things baked and cringed. Lush velvety mosses once inches thick now clung to glaciated bedrock outcroppings as consistent and durable as rough, yellow-brown mortar. It looked as if someone had carelessly splashed custard everywhere. Any small spring run-off creeks had long since dried up. In the meadows their chatter had been replaced with the cricket’s song.
Far from the black and white Tudor-style farmhouse in the midst of a hillside orchard under the low-hanging branches of a walnut tree, Elaine and Harry were lying in sun-splattered shade. The faint scent of walnut leaves gathered around their heads. Her visit, part of a planned separation and escape from her husband, had made the summer exciting and almost magical. It would always live in his memory.
She brought three small daughters with her but she was little more than a child herself in bearing and outlook. She had been in Germany with a husband stationed on a four-year tour of duty. Her daughters had each started school at three years of age in a ‘real’ kindergarten. Her time spent in Germany had been generally unhappy except for the hours spent in the Hoffbrau house or pub with servicemen who seemed to provide sympathy or some form of caring, particularly the single or unattached ones. When her husband left the service and they returned to Canada, a more permanent and noticeable rift developed. Elaine finally fled Alberta and the small town granary they managed for the Co-op in what she called “a hail of mental and physical abuse” to live with their mother on the Gulf Islands of B.C.
Harry watched her profile from close beside her. Her head bent forward as if sloped down from the neck, a trait inherited from their mother who carried her head as if she were leaning into battle like a mountain goat with a set of finely honed, piecing horns on the crown. Her hair was reddish blonde and cut close to her scalp. It matched her eyebrows in its silken sparseness. Behind unattractive, black, square-framed glasses she squinted from tiny eyes coloured the same grey-green of the walnut leaves that wrapped and drooped around their heads like clothing, cool, dark and heavy, hung in a closet. Harry had never been so near to someone of the opposite sex before. And Elaine had totally entranced him with her wild and juvenile spirit. Harry felt excitement and a magnetic attraction he could not understand or explain toward this seemingly newfound stranger. Nothing ever bothered Elaine; she seemed simple, free and happy then and it seemed that reality, no matter what its harsh lessons might be, could have no effect on her.
They rested on their elbows and to relieve the tension he felt Harry rolled to his side and made an exaggerated swipe at a large black ant that had dropped from the leaves above to stalk his thin forearm. Elaine watched the corner of the old farmhouse and patio intently for the appearance of her and Harry’s adopted brother, Walter.
“Shhh, he’ll hear you,” she hissed but Harry knew there was no danger of that. Anyway, it was time for the game to come to an end. They had outdistanced him in the woods and hills around the farm. Harry knew that meant Walter would have stopped or more likely gone off on a separate adventure. To keep up this loping pace was idiocy in the face of a summer furnace and Walter understood that, at least. Elaine’s eyes made a sweep of the open, descending orchard below then, accentuated with a frown, they turned back to the patio corner.
“Come on, let’s climb up in these branches quick. That way, when he comes around that corner there’ll be nothing of us to see. I‘ll bet he has a fit right there.” She pushed herself up to the trunk and began clutching at the branches, trying to find a toehold with her sneakers.
“No!” He said it quickly and surprised himself at the authority in his voice. “Dad warned us never to climb in these trees. The branches are really old and brittle. They’re liable to break easily.” It sounded like a lame excuse but it might work.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Hawry!” She mimicked Walter’s speech impediment. “Are you going to worry about something like that at a time like this? Come on, I’m going before old fuzzy-lugs gets here.” “He’s not deaf, you know. He’s just retarded . . . I mean . . . slow.” They weren’t supposed to use the other word. It was too similar to the taunts of “Tardhead, Tardhead” that Walter met at school. Harry could hear his own words and realized he probably sounded like his father. He wondered if she understood what he meant; that it was time to stop playing at Walter’s expense. This was nothing more than an entertainment to her and Walter was to continue the chase or ‘game’ for as long as she wanted; everyone was.
~
Elaine called back a week later. By then everything she had to say was known. She had never taken any real interest in anyone else’s thoughts, opinions or feelings. They would only get in her way. No one was expected to act or react but simply to play along. The game was high now and the chase had moved right out into the open. There was no time for hesitation or regrouping. All things had been set in motion and were to proceed to their appointed ends with no delay: Elaine would marry Peter, their mother’s fiancé. In the previous year Peter and their mother had set a wedding date but a month prior to it, she had suffered the last in a series of heart attacks and died.
Elaine informed Harry of the spartan practicality of her and Peter’s arrangement. He was very old and lonely and desperately needed her companionship. She had discussed the arrangements at length with Peter.
“... And you needn’t worry about any expenses again. Use your money from work to travel and enjoy life, if you must insist on continuing to work.”
“I go where I like when I like, Peter. I always have and I always will. Understood?”
“Oh, but of course, my dear … just please come back to me.”
“And I will not be involved in any cooking; I’ve had enough of that to last me.”
“Of course not, my dear … I’m perfectly capable of making myself a sandwich or whatever when I’m hungry.”
Many would have thought it better for Peter to remain with his resources intact but if their advice was available to him it was ignored. This was probably the case as ‘ignored’ and ‘ignorant’ so often go hand in hand. As it was, he had traded away all he had for the privilege of making a sandwich for himself at a counter in a house he had paid for and received absolutely no interest in. As their mother would have said, “Elaine has once again landed with her bum in a bucket of butter!”
Two weeks later she was back on the phone again. “Well, aren’t you coming to my wedding?” She would not let go, not for a minute.
“No, I’ll be quite busy and I can’t make a trip like that on a weekend anyway.” Harry felt he was always in the position of making lame excuses to Elaine. There was silence on the other end of the line and he decided to wait her out; it was her call. Finally there was a dry, “Oh, I see” as she cleared her throat in falsetto.
Harry had refused to write to her even though she kept phoning and asking for a letter. She offered to pay the airfare down for the wedding but he refused. Fear of flying, he told her. The date came and passed and she went through with the ceremony. Many family members had been willing to lay money against it ever happening; an event that brought a whole new meaning to the expression ‘my old man.’ At the reception the eighty-four year-old groom sat propped up in a chair with cushions. To anyone who came near him he cackled, “I thought I was going to get the mother but I ended up with the daughter!”
“When are you coming down . . . when are you coming down? In the summer?” She was quite drunk. “I swear, Harry, they’re dropping like flies down here. Cousin Sam died the evening after our wedding. Terry’s flown in from Brussels for his mother’s funeral. He’s here now, I’m having the wake!”
She obviously had a full house and a load on and Harry wondered but no, no word about old Peter at all. Harry thought it must be that flea market syndrome again; she got what she could or wanted from Peter and now it was time to pass him on. Samantha’s son came on the line, “Hi, Harry, long time no see.”
“Congratulations on becoming Irish, Terry.” “What d’ya mean . . . oh, yeah, all this. I just dropped in last night for a couple of drinks and we drank until five this morning. That’s when ‘Lainy got this whole damn wake idea; she’s incredible.” Any excuse for what is going down in liquid form, thought Harry.
“We were shocked to hear about Samantha.”
“Yeah, well you know, they were so worried about her lungs nobody paid any attention to her old ticker. It was a heart attack but it was a real good death. I’ll have to get back here in the next few years and we’ll get together and kill a bottle of Chivas. Right now I better get ‘Lainy back on the phone so I’ll know where she is. So long and take care of yourself.”
“Well . . . so, when are you coming down this summer?” Harry could hear Terry yelling at her from the background, “ah, dammit, ’Lainy, you said you were going to put the coffee on.”
“I don’t know. We had a change of holiday plans to sometime in August. The last three weeks, I think, and I’m signed up to give a course from the eighteenth to the twenty-second.”
“Oh, come on now, I know you’re just pulling you’re old sister’s knee-cap.” He thought someone should be pulling her nightcap . . . away from her.
“Come on down, eh? Somebody has to keep an eye on Walter. With the way his ‘sexploits’ are going, he’s doing his damnedest to become the first AIDS poster person. I can imagine him dressed up as some tragic figure like, maybe, Hamlet doing an awareness commercial, pausing to ponder deeply while gazing at a skull held before him then exclaiming, “Aye, there’s the wub!’” She giggled and dropped the receiver. She was drunk and bobbing in a giddy, desperate wave.
“Look, I really don’t know what our plans may be until we get a little closer to the actual time. Maybe we’ll take a week and go out to the island. Do some camping and see how the old home place is looking.”
“Well, Gawd, Harry, that sounds ridiculous. There hasn’t been any connection to the island since all the property was sold off. Besides, who wants to rough it out there in that awful summer heat?”
“Did you get the package I sent you?” “It came in the mail yesterday. What is it? A belated wedding gift from my long, lost baby ‘brudder’?” She aped Walter’s terminology. “Open it later when you get a chance. And I hope you enjoy it.”
An hour later, Harry imagined Elaine poised before her spa of hot fragrant bath water. She would shuffle over pink imitation marble tiles and slide into insistent Jacuzzi jets under a wide skylight that revealed a slash of bright blue afternoon sky. With senses slowly slipping under Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, she would set down her fourth scotch and soda and twist the top off a bottle of shampoo labeled ‘Feuilles de Noyer’—Harry’s gift, a flea market bargain. And soon the strong scent of heavy walnut leaves would wrap around her head. He wondered if she would even notice.
Stories From Grandmother's Knee
I - When Christmas and Grandmother Were Young
On Sunday mornings Grandmother likes to sit in the living room in her favourite wingback chair. With her feet on overstuffed cushions in front of a roaring December fire, she listens to Bing Crosby croon "White Christmas" from an old record collection. The rest of the family goes to church while Grandmother "catches up on her rest" and dreams about Christmases just like the ones she used to know. When Shawn has the flu he stays home with his Grandmother. They sit snuggled and buttered in the glow of lamplight and Christmas decorations with embroidery and knitting billowing out from her chair, and Grandmother tells stories of Christmases long ago on the Gulf Islands. She remembers the first Christmas after she and Grandfather had moved from Ontario. She was returning to the island after a visit to Victoria with Shawn's father, a small, restless boy.
The ferry trip from the Black Ball Terminal to Port Washington's wharf was terrifying. "No fleet of B C ferries in those days," says Grandmother. The day was already darkening as they boarded the "Lady Rose" bobbing like an anxious tugboat at the dock. The captain gazed out from the glassy wheelhouse "perched like a peanut on an orange" as Grandmother puts it. A deep wooden stairwell led below deck to the only seating area, a snack counter with an icebox behind it. The whole area was decorated in red and green tinseled garlands, cedar and balsam boughs, and a tiny tree with six lights. Soon after starting out the icebox was sliding from side to side "like a carnival ride gone berserk," cackles Grandmother. Waves and cold, wind-whipped water crashed above decks and cascaded down the narrow passage. "As the decorations flooded around us, I hauled your father upstairs to the railing where our heads cleared quickly in the brisk cold wind." The storm seemed to lessen as the ship slipped into the small bay of a nearby island. Holding a piece of fancy work up to her eye, Grandmother sets her jaw, saying, "We soon learned to ride out winter storms in the Christmas season.”
At Christmas time when Grandmother was young, the most exciting places to be on the island were the square, two-room schoolhouse and the community hall. The children spent weeks practicing their parts in carol singing and plays. "Everyone took part, even the older lanky boys whose voices were breaking," says Grandmother peering solemnly over glasses that Shawn says make her eyes look like they are hanging down. There was no Christmas concert at the school. Everything was practiced and prepared for an island concert at the community hall. On that magic night everyone played, sang, and danced in the presence of a twenty-foot fir tree cut fresh from the forest and dressed up in yards and yards of strung popcorn and every possible kind of glitter. Santa visited with oranges and a present for every boy and girl with his and her name right on them! The gifts were handmade arts and crafts from all the parents. "Your father never figured out how it was possible for Santa to know all the names," and Grandmother shakes her head and smiles with the corners of a mouth that could keep secrets.
Grandmother told Shawn of special events that had happened out at the island home during the winter holidays. The sights and smells of the Christmas season would often bring back many pleasant memories – the bright colourful lights, the aroma of eggnog and hot mincemeat pie, the peppermint tang of a piece of candy cane, the pungent smell of pitch from evergreens and bowls of almonds, filberts and walnuts waiting for the cracker. “Each year your father got well into the spirit leading to Christmas Day and the annual evening concert at the community hall was always a frenzied success,” said Grandmother as her voice raised and sounded like it wanted to break into song. “Each year we would make the forage down to the government wharf to meet the Christmas ship visiting outlying ports along the coast. Every child assembled was tossed a package secured with a rubber band containing three comic books, a Mandarin orange and a half-pound of rock-hard ribbon candy. And each year I made sure your father would be content with reading the comics and eating the oranges in front of a blazing fireplace where I would burn the candy, ‘Bad for your teeth,’ I always told him but he did have a few pieces before the scorching” and Grandmother’s eyes twinkled over Shawn.
“After church we would spend the day selecting and trimming the tree, a thick bushy balsam from the nearby woods. The living room would be heavy with the forest smell. I would haul out my cherished and secreted collection of ornaments. These were not the plastic and rubber gewgaws you see today,” said Grandmother, wagging her finger back and forth. “Oh no, these were ancient and ageless and, for your father’s young sake, most were unbreakable. There were paper bells wrapped in silver foil, miniature wooden churches with real steeples and cellophane windows simulating stained glass and red, blue and silver birds resembling cardinals or jays each with a metal clasp for a perch and a fan of long, slender, stiff wire bristles for tail feathers. The ones your father found the most simple and intriguing were the ‘icicles’. These were not the icicles made of stringy strands of aluminum you see in stores now – thin wispy strands that flinch at sudden drafts and gravitate toward the static television screen. These were cast in sturdy, twisted, beveled metal and coated in bright colours and as they moved with a draught they would appear to be spinning,” and Grandmother reached above Shawn’s head in mid-air to caress and spin each icicle on its own. “Hung with invisible wires, they would bob and twist on the tree catching and reflecting glows and sparkles. All these ornaments were wrapped in waxed paper and padding and I cautioned your father severely to be careful. I would often say to him, ‘These decorations are all remembrances of the happy Christmases we had in Regina and I don’t want them damaged or ‘roughhoused’ in any way’”. Grandmother beamed broadly and said, “The tree was finished and looked as beautiful a sight as it had ever looked in years past.”
Grandmother lowers her voice and puts her head down close beside Shawn’s and continues, “Late one afternoon a few days later, I received a telephone call. Sandy Duncan, an eighty-two year old ‘free spirit’, shall we say, had decided he was a burden to his family. He had made his way down to the government wharf in the midst of a December storm. He had fashioned a makeshift shelter under the dock and he was determined to remain inside a cardboard crate with a single blanket,” and Shawn sees Grandmother is shaking her head slowly from side to side and she has opened her hands, spreading the fingers wide apart. “He was convinced with a thermos of hot coffee and some private talk to return home with me. I piled him and his suitcase into the old yellow ’48 Fargo and said I had to call home and let everyone know we were on our way. I drove slowly with extra caution on the winding island road,” she said with an exaggerated wink to Shawn.
“When I got him back to our place Sandy was ushered into the living room to the roaring fireplace. There stood our Christmas tree or what looked like our Christmas tree. It was balsam and in the same place but it was completely unadorned! I said, ‘Well, here we are. And just as I promised you, Sandy, it’s time to put you to work helping decorate the tree’. “At this point I told your father to help your Grandfather get the ornaments. They went out to the side of the house where, through the French doors of a back bedroom, Grandfather had hastily shoved the first tree. Quickly cutting another, he placed it in the appointed spot. We set up a relay of stripping the old tree and supplying Sandy with armfuls of ornaments carried around the back of the house through the kitchen and into the living room. Many of the old ornaments were lost or destroyed but I made only one remark: ‘It was time we got some new remembrances for Christmas’”, and Shawn notices a peaceful, faraway look in Grandmother’s eyes. "Helping me with the baking was nearly the best part of Christmas for your father," Grandmother says, her voice rising with laughter. "He got more flour on himself than on the floor!" There were all kinds of foods to eat at the hall and Grandmother was busy for many weeks ahead baking mince pies, tarts, shortbread, cookies and Christmas cake. The smell of Christmas was in the air as Grandmother washed and prepared raisins, currants, candied cherries, dates and mixed peel. "And I mustn't forget the walnuts," says Grandmother. "We had our own two huge trees down in the orchard and walnuts found their way into nearly everything I baked. They were worth the stains we got from gathering and shucking them." Grandmother sifted together cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves then she creamed in shortening, brown sugar and syrup. She mixed in three eggs; one at a time, beating after each and gradually added fruit, flour and grape juice. Grandmother mixed it all well with her hands, as if she were kneading bread, then she lined her two largest cake tins with three layers of well-oiled brown paper and baked it all in what she called a slow oven. Plum puddings were made and packed away in Blue Ribbon coffee tins "to get ripe" Grandmother says with a wink and a sparkle in her eyes.
Always at Christmas Grandmother gave many pairs of mittens and socks she knitted for everyone in the family. And there would be sweaters, mufflers, and comforters, too. Her finest work was embroidery on pillowcases, slipcovers and wall hangings that sometimes she would have framed. It must have taken many hours but everything she did said 'Grandmother's Love' for every year thereafter.
"But nowadays, people buy everything at a store, even gifts," Grandmother sighs and her eyes glance away, as though she expects them to meet with those of an unfriendly stranger. "They say it saves them time for more important things and is cheaper." That must be true if Grandmother says so, thinks Shawn, but then he wonders why she still bothers to do all the special baking at Christmas and why everyone is so happy with all the fancy work she knits and embroiders. And he thinks maybe it is all so special because it reminds them of a time when Grandmother and Christmas were young.
II - Blackberry Picking With Kerosene
An undiscerning eye may have missed them but there they were out on a hot dusty gravel road at the height of an August heat wave, just the two of them, a boy and his Grandmother. It was that time of humid physical closeness through all and each earthen pore in so pervading a wet warmth from the August sun baking the low windless hollow in every field and fence break between pastures. Deep fine dust in ruts and banks thrown up on the gravel road would puff through bare toes onto feet and shins, warm and soft as talcum powder or flour from a dark drawer recessed bin in a cool summer kitchen. The heavy smothering veil of heat was only cut by the cricket’s chirping from the depths of rock piles and cicadas whining in the green leas. They prattled and rattled along with their Nabob Coffee tins threaded with strings to allow hanging from the neck to free both hands for picking and an old steel rake and a pair of secateurs for beating a path into the midst of the most ferocious of brambles. Their hands held all the signs of picking from the purple stains on all fingers and thumbs all the way up to elbows and forearms that were unmercifully shredded by the relentless thorns. The boy and his grandmother both felt the same dull ache in their arms where several wounds had been inflicted and some didn’t even ache anymore; they had been poisoned and paralyzed by some drug from the berry vines.
They were almost finished picking enough of the tantalizing sweet fruit to make pies for the evening meal’s dessert and the boy looked at his Grandmother’s hands pulling and plucking clusters of berries just above his reach silhouetted in the lowering afternoon sun. A ladybug still clung tenaciously to his shirtfront slowly flittering its way across his chest and he marveled at its bright orange and black spotted body. Somewhere above them a red-tailed hawk made passes in lazy circles, its shadow cast occasionally as it passed in front of the sun.
“Grandma, where did those come from?” he asked, pointing up to some brown patches on the back of his Grandmother’s hands. “Those weren’t there before, were they? Are they from the berries?” he asked, quickly checking the backs of his own hands.
His Grandmother darted a glance at him and then at her hands. “It’s nothing,” she said, “just age spots; you won’t get any like these for many, many years to come.”
“Did Grandpa have them? I don’t remember …” he asked turning his head on an inquisitive angle relishing the opportunity to have a talk with his Grandmother. Shawn and his Grandmother loved to talk and when they did, she did most of the talking and he did most of the listening, which was as it should be, she said, as she knew a lot more to talk about and she had already listened enough and he had to ‘catch up in his listening’ as she put it.
“Oh, yes, your Grandfather had many; you were just too young to notice, is all’” and she thought of how such a long short time had stood between Shawn and his Grandfather. “Your Grandfather would pick with me and it was great fun. We would take a ladder to get the really high berries and sometimes he would shove the ladder right into the patch and then he would walk up the ladder and crush down the vines to make a path into the inside of the vines. We would have tunnels running all through the vines like lots of paths and caves. And one time your Grandfather got the idea to use kerosene to burn a pathway into the berry patch. That worked pretty well. But then your Father had seen that and tried the same thing. That idea worked out fine for him until the fire got away on him and raced across the pasture to the henhouse. Your Grandfather and I had gone to Victoria to get supplies. That meant an all-day trip. Your Father was older than you are now – about thirteen, almost fourteen then, anyway old enough to be left alone. He and his brother decided to berry pick with kerosene. We didn’t have any hoses or even a good water supply then. Most of our water was stored in a big cistern, a concrete tank we used for saving rain water in the summer time. They had to get buckets and brooms and run back and forth getting more and more water to use to soak the brooms and try to beat out the flames before all the chickens went up in smoke!”
Shawn watches as his Grandmother places both her hands on her hips underneath her canvas apron and he sees a dark frown cross her face, darker than any hawk’s shadow, as she stares intently at nothing in particular. Then she shakes her head, makes a clucking sound and continues.
“My best kitchen brooms were destroyed. Grandfather and I got home late that night after all the kafuffle. We didn’t find out what had happened until the next morning when we went up the hill to feed the chickens. Your Dad couldn’t even find his running shoes; he had run right out of them fighting the fire.”
“Weren’t they scared?” asked Shawn, his eyes big and mouth even bigger.
“Darned right they were scared and for good reason,” said his Grandmother, almost forgetting whom she was talking to, “but soon they were too tired to be scared anymore. When you think of what could have happened … if the fire had gotten away on them. They must have watched in horror as it crept closer and closer to the claptrap chicken house that was made out of flimsy sheets of plywood that had been used to build the concrete form for the cistern.”
“Would all the chickens die?” asked Shawn. “Wouldn’t they be able to run away or fly away?”
“The chickens?” his Grandmother asked, incredulously, “Oh, no, that wasn’t it,” said his Grandmother. “The real danger was that the forest was right behind the chicken house. If that fire had gotten into that salal and those huge fir trees, well then, they would be evacuating the whole island with Navy ships like they almost had to do in 1956 when you were just a baby. Look it up, if you don’t believe me, and just for the record, you’re giving the chickens far more credit for self-preservation than they have coming.”
Shawn trudged alongside his Grandmother making a storm of talc-like dust rise from the winding country road, eagerly wanting to keep the conversation going.
“Did anything else dangerous ever happen?” Shawn wanted to know.
“Well, yes, but that was mainly an accident having to do with your Father. One time I had him out helping me get plums in the orchard and he was about your age that time; not much older than you are now.”
The idea of his Father being his age intrigued Shawn and in a secret tone of awe he asked, “What happened?”
“We had our pails and I was going to make plum chutney, a kind of spicy sauce cooked with plums, onions and spices, because we had so many blue plums; some people call them prune plums or Italian plums.” Shawn’s Grandmother always wanted him to have all the information she knew, just to be clear.
“We went up in the orchard behind the house and there was a big field we had to cross to get there. Your Father ran on ahead and was playing, sliding in the tall smooth grass in the field when all of a sudden he let out a yowl that you’d think he had been scalded! I caught up to him and there he was, lying on his side, blood all down his left hand and arm right to the elbow. He had slid in the grass, hit his knee as he went down a small hill and caught his hand in some chicken wire that lay half buried in the dirt. The wire had cut into his ring finger, that’s the one beside the baby finger or what some people call the small finger, on your left hand and it cut right down to the bone. I had to get the wire out of his finger before he could stand up and all the time he was screaming. Then when he stood up, he fell over. I thought he fainted because of loss of blood; that happens to some people. But it turned out that he had broken and exposed the kneecap on his right leg. The bone was sticking out and we had to call the water taxi to get him over to the hospital at Ganges on Saltspring Island. He was crying so much the only way I got him to stop was to show him that if he had slid a few more feet down the hill, he would have crashed through some old boards and fallen in an abandoned well hole that had been dug and left partly covered many years before.”
Shawn was silent as his Grandmother collected the berry pails and he followed her back up to the farmhouse deep in thought. In the kitchen they dumped the berries into a large colander and washed them off “to get rid of any bugs and bird poop” as his Grandmother put it. She had already made the pastry for the pies and she mixed the berries with cornstarch and some tapioca for thickening. Then she and Shawn popped them in the oven of the wood stove.
Grandmother sent Shawn out to the kitchen garden where he dug up fresh carrots, beets and potatoes while she roasted a hen his father had ceremoniously beheaded the day before up on the chopping block, an old tree stump behind the hen house. Dinner smells filled the farmhouse and dinner was ready at exactly the same time it always was ready every evening on the farm.
During dinner, Shawn sat and ate very quietly which was unusual for him. Every once in a while he would look up to his Father with what appeared to be a face full of awe, wonder and respect until finally his Dad asked him what he had done that day with his Grandmother.
“We went blackberry picking and we talked a lot; we had a real good talk,” Shawn replied.
“And was that lots of fun?” his Dad asked.
“I guess so,” said Shawn, “but you know what I’d really like to do sometime?”
“What’s that?” his Dad asked.
“Sometime I’d like to go berry picking with kerosene and then plum picking with you and find that caved-in well.” said Shawn.
Shawn’s father quickly glanced daggers at Grandmother and she beamed a broad smile to her son that revealed supreme satisfaction in a memory as long as the ages and said, “Oh, yes, we had a real good talk and I must say, our boy here is really catching up in his listening.”
III - Billy Goats and Log Jockeys
When Shawn was a very little boy he loved spending time with his grandmother. Her hair was layered in white, gray and charcoal strands that lay overlapped and in different lengths to give an overall wispy aura to her face. Crow’s feet stretched out from the sides of each eye as though they were carved deeply by a sharp tool in sculptor’s clay. Below each eye a discoloured pouch of flesh sagged but even these continued the well-worn wrinkle lines down either side of the face as if so many tears had flowed eventually forming ancient deltas in the river mouths down her cheeks. Two large dark blotchy patches of sun-altered skin colour on the right side were the only islands in this stream on her face. The flesh and skin on each side of her face gathered and hung off the jaws, bracketing her chin lying between two thin drawn lips. Her eyes were clear and bright; tow focused slate-gray discs that shone with an inner light. Her nose still held the fleshy unblemished fullness of a youth not yet gone wrong.
Grandmother would always be there for him ready with stories and conversation that made him feel like a grown up person. Together they would cuddle in grandmother’s enormous armchair and, with what seemed to Shawn a magical ability, grandmother would pull stories from everywhere around her. Some of the times she would reach behind her head or below the arms of the chair and say, “Well, let’s see what we have here.” Other times she would dip her hands into her knitting basket that was always beside her or simply pull stories from out of the air or so it seemed to Shawn. On one occasion late on a summer’s evening Shawn found grandmother dozing in the last rays of the setting sun and as he climbed into a space beside her on the chair’s cushion he noticed she was wearing a brooch that had the word “SERVICE” written on it. Of course he asked, “Grandma, what is that?” and grandmother who wasn’t really dozing at all replied, “That’s another story, my boy.” Shawn snuggled in and put his head on her arm ready for the entertainment.
“I got that pin after I worked for twenty years at R.H. Williams Furniture store in Regina, Saskatchewan. I sold pianos.”
“You sold pianos?” asked Shawn, “but I didn’t know anybody owned pianos.” To Shawn the only pianos that existed were three, one in the United Church, one at the schoolhouse and one in the Port Washington Community Hall. “Oh, yes, I sold pianos and I lived in Regina and London, Ontario, before I married your grandfather and after that we lived in Vancouver on the big mainland for awhile before we moved out here to the island.”
“Why did you move out here?” asked Shawn still curious about the pianos but more curious about getting beyond them.
“Your grandfather had a job offer to be caretaker at Beauty Rest Lodge and we moved here and at first we lived in the caretaker’s house across the road from the lodge. Soon afterward the lodge closed for the winter season and we couldn’t stay in the caretaker’s quarters so we moved to a house called Windy Ridge. Well, it was both on a ridge and terribly windy; very cold in the winter so very soon we moved again to a house overlooking Navy Channel called Willowdene. I loved it there; it was both a terrifying and magical place to be after coming from the prairies. I used to complain that there was so much scenery you couldn’t see anything and your grandfather would say, “But in Regina you could see forever but there was nothing there to see. We would have bought that house but there was no money and it was sold out from under us. Then we bought the old farmhouse and acreage here where we are now. But I so loved living at Willowdene that I wrote a story for the local newspaper, The Gulf Islands Driftwood.”
Shawn’s grandmother reached down into her knitting basket and pulled up a handful of real papers and peering over her glasses at Shawn she said, “Listen to the magic of this” and she read the following to him:
‘A Rainy Day on Pender Island'
Daylight revealed the steady fall of rain, not the splashing tempestuous downpour, but the soft misty rain that is as persistent and seemingly endless as time itself. During the night, the oaken barrels hopefully placed in the event it might rain, were filled to overflowing. Here and there the wooded slopes present an advance showing of autumn colors, and though we are preparing to bid summer farewell, the trees plants and foliage are lifting their arms in joy at this new lease on life. The drought had lasted many weeks.’
“What’s a ‘drought’?” asked Shawn. Grandmother explains, “That’s when it doesn’t rain for a long, long time and the moss you like to play on in the hills gets so dry and stiff it becomes as hard and yellow like the plaster we put on the cast you had on your leg last year.”
“Oh,” said Shawn and he reached down and rubbed the kneecap he had broken the year before. Grandmother continued reading her story.
‘On the neighboring island, the clouds may be seen trailing down the mountainsides, suggestive of the ethereal garments of a lost soul seeking refuge and peace. Nearby, the gray sullen channel carries clumps of driftwood, on which are perched those proud scavengers, the seagulls. With their prim gray and white plumage, they remind one of so many Quaker-ladies, bent on an excursion. Occasionally an intruding tugboat interrupts their course, which is immediately resumed on its passing. Foghorns sound their lonesome warning in a sepulchral tone, as the various boats ply their way along the narrow rocky channels of the Gulf Islands.
The day with its drip, drip, drip at the eaves, presages the vanguard of winter. And together with the ruddy roaring fire in the huge stone fireplace, which, while exuding warmth and comfort to the inner man, arouses the hibernating instinct. One has the desire, even the urge to pull up a blanket of this soft gray mist, and, forsaking the mundane affairs of everyday living, seek solace in sleep. Sleep! It has been likened to a capsule of Eternity, but I prefer to think of it as the time when the soul, liberated from the body for the space of a few hours, goes forth seeking adventure.
Were it not for these adventures, from what source would come the substance from which our dreams are fashioned, that part of our life that belongs to the Nocturnal, in the duration of which we attain the perfections, never neared in our conscious hours.
“Grandfather had a Vanguard once, didn’t he?” said Shawn. “I remember we used to drive around the island in it.” Grandmother said, “This was a different kind of vanguard; not an Austin car.” She continued.
‘Through the misty dampness, roosting on the broken bough of an aged pine, can be seen several crows. In their severe black frock coats, they are not unlike ancient schoolmasters, creaking disconsolately of their lot. Even Mr. Wimpy, our pet white rabbit, is in that indeterminate need of “to be or not to be” he cannot decide if he should eat the choice morsels offered him by the children, (who, by the way, enjoy to the utmost the wet day) or to retire to his nest to dream of other days and another life.’
“Why don’t we have any rabbits now, Grandmother?” Shawn asked. “We have to wait until Easter before there are more rabbits when they come with eggs, OK?” and grandmother went on. ‘Now the sky clears slightly, the sun bursts forth on a wet world. The outdoors beckons. As I leave the sanctuary of my study, I see through the grape-clustered window, on the gravel driveway, a swarm of wasps busily engaged in dissecting an over-ripe blue plum. The children shriek with delight. They know my appearance means a jaunt across the rocky beach to gather driftwood. It will be added to our already ample store, stacked against the time when the winter winds ride high and we are smug by our cheery fire engrossed with whatever pastime or hobby claiming our interest at the moment. Hark! In the distance can be heard the sound of the mailman’s car. The Rural Mail is the medium through which we contact news, styles, sports, and other items of interest. Hurriedly we trip to the gate just as the mail car chugs up. The bundle is quickly scanned for treasured letters from absent friends and loved ones. All this new reading material promises an evening to be looked forward to after the children are tucked in their beds.
“It isn’t time for bed yet is it, Grandmother?” asked Shawn with a shade of dismay in his voice. “Not yet, my boy, that’s just part of the story,” and Grandmother pressed on. ‘For this is Pender – one of the many isolated, half-forgotten lonely Gulf Islands. Pender, beautiful with a beauty that almost hurts, admired by tourists, beloved by its inhabitants. Pender, for where one can leave Vancouver, that epitome of civilization, and in a few hours by boat, or minutes by air revert to the primitiveness of the old-fashioned wood burning cook stove, and the coal oil lamp.
Dusk creeps in and the family gathers around the lamp-lighted supper table. Heads are bowed and the blessing is asked. The meal is simple, consisting of the offerings of a well-tended garden, and wild fruits nature so plentifully provides. With appetites sharpened by the aroma of freshly baked bread, silence reigns supreme as the food is enjoyed. The repast ends, the dishes are cleared away. Little heads begin to nod. Wee ones are gently tucked in, while the bedtime story is drowsily heard.
Darkness falls like a giant blue canopy caught on the mountain peaks. Peering through the clouds that drift by like masted vessels, the rising moon rolls out a bright path, like a ceremonial carpet, across the placid surface of the now placid channel. Somewhere in the woods a night bird calls querulously. Peace, harmony and tranquility settle over all. These three, together with happiness, which is the elemental right of every human being, may be found in heartfelt measure on Pender that lovely island nestled on the bosom of the Pacific. This is one of the varietal days of life on Pender Island.”
Grandmother replaced her papers in the knitting basket and looked at her grandson. “Well, what do you think of that story?” she asked hopefully. She could feel the small body heave a sigh beside her.
“Do you have any other stories about that time?” Shawn wanted to know and grandmother, feeling a restless squirm said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, just recalling the mail delivery and the ever present ocean, I have two stories, maybe three and I see the first one right behind your left ear.” So saying she darted her hand up to his ear and retrieved a sheaf of seemingly invisible papers, shuffled them in both hands and peered into their contents. “Ah, yes, I remember this one. This one happened soon after we landed on the farm. The farm wasn’t like it is today; there was no electricity and no telephone and for most of the year we had to use an outhouse to conserve water from the well. That was before we got a cistern for storing water and the island had electric power set up. We did have the farm, cows, chickens and the like and lots of garden produce and plenty of canning to do for survival in the winter. Your grandfather tried lots of different things to bring in extra money and so did I. Mostly I was able to give room and board to work crews who were putting in the hydro electric service and after that to several individuals who came to stay for months and years at a time.”
“What kinds of things did grandfather do?” asked Shawn. “Well, your grandfather tried running a small store where he sold milk, eggs and ice cream and vegetables but there were only about two hundred people on the island and far fewer cars so most couldn’t get to the store. Then he tried selling kitchen appliances door-to-door but no one could afford the cost. He tried selling Watkins products but there weren’t enough customers. So he settled on running the dairy and eggs and took over the mail delivery route. The first vehicle we had was an old ’48 Dodge Fargo truck.” Grandmother closed her eyes and rested her head on the back of the armchair. “That was a great truck,” she said finally, “it was bright yellow, my favorite color; bright yellow like daffodils on a hillside in springtime or lemons in the middle of winter; bright yellow like the sun in a dark blue sky without any clouds. It had bulging fenders and a bulging bonnet for a hood over the engine and on the side of that cover, the word ‘Fargo’ was written in chrome with the ‘O’ looking like a map of the world. It had truck tires but each of them had a wide halo of thick white rubber.
They were called white walled tires and they looked pretty snazzy. It was a big old pickup with an open box and your grandfather build some racks into the back for carrying goods. He could deliver cream, milk, eggs and the mail around the island that way. The mail would come from the mainland and from around the other islands on the ferry and grandfather would pick it up most evenings. One evening he met the ferry and someone, a neighbor from another island, had sent a nanny goat and two kids as ‘mail’ to someone else on the island. There was already hay and straw in the back of the truck so the goats were loaded in where they were tethered to the wooden racks and were quite comfortable. The mail was collected as usual in a big canvas rucksack your grandfather used for carrying all sorts of things and that was hung in the rack behind the cab of the truck.” Grandmother smiled and giggled a bit at this point. “The next morning grandfather was up early as usual, milking the cows in the barn and separating the milk into cream and milk, bottling and loading it into the truck for delivery, all in the dark, of course.”
“Now it should be understood that he couldn’t really blame the goats for what happened next. After all he had used that canvas sack to carry everything in including oats and grains for the chickens and cows. Well, when daylight dawned halfway through his deliveries, he realized the goats had made it their business during the night to chew through the temptingly placed canvas bag as well as chewing through several letters and carefully wrapped packages. There was little left but for goat droppings and bits of stamps, parchment paper and colorful, frayed ribbon. Grandfather told me what happened when he returned from deliveries and how he had to tell everyone there was no mail that day. He said it took every ounce of his restraint to refrain from announcing to anyone, ‘You’ve ‘goat’ mail’ as he hurriedly kicked straw over the evidence.”
“We don’t have any goats either; why not?” asked Shawn, “Do we have to wait for the mailman to bring them?”
“No, my dear, the mailman doesn’t bring goats anymore,” and Grandmother saw that she would have to pick up the pace to counteract Shawn’s disappointment.
“Are you able to lift your arm, Shawn?” asked grandmother quickly. “Sorry,” said Shawn, raising his arm, “was I hurting you?”
“Oh, no,” said grandmother, “I just had to grab that second story. This one has to do with the fact that we had water all around us. Well, we had boats and it was the ocean. No one thought of swimming in it, especially grownups that found it too cold all the time. Grandfather and I used to take your father and his friends down to Hamilton Beach where they would play at trying to make rafts. You see there was a new teacher at the school, a Mr. Robinson, a younger man in his later twenties with a wife and two small preschool daughters of his own. Well, your father and his friends were between ten and twelve years old and they found Mr. Robinson great fun to be with and learn from. And he was certainly energetic and innovative and all in all a natural born teacher. He enjoyed telling them stories and reading to them. He read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn adventures and the boys got the idea to build a raft.
But whatever they managed to build wouldn’t stay together or hold their weight if more than one got on it. They even talked about what Thor Heyerdahl would do – more of Mr. Robinson’s input, no doubt. It all seemed pretty harmless until we realized he had also taught them to use a lever and a fulcrum in a science experiment and that’s when you pry something like using a teeter-totter. To our shock and dismay, here were ten and twelve year olds moving and rolling logs much larger than them selves down into the surf of Hamilton Beach. Then losing no time at all, they were grabbing poles and these little log-jockeys who had no idea about swimming were out in water three times their heights. Well, all of them were very quickly corralled and hauled out of the surf. The very next day and through the summer a certain Mr. Robinson was commissioned by the PTA to teach every child to swim in the ocean at Hamilton Beach. Even to this day you will find grownup children praising the wisdom and foresight of their hero, Mr. Robinson, who taught them all to swim.”
Grandmother was about to ask Shawn what he thought of that story but when she nudged him, she realized he had fallen asleep. He roused only long enough to say, “Grandmother, I’m going to go back to sleep to dream and finish teaching my rabbit and goat to swim in the ocean.”
Becoming William
December 22, 1962
Away from the wharf it wasn't William or Bill but Billy who slogged his way through rain filled puddles on the narrow graveled road. Christmas was only a few days away. A wet snow fell and tumbled into the puddles like brown sugar melting down into milk-soaked oatmeal. A typical coastal December of fog and mist-bound days filled with unending rain and the occasional freak attempt at snow. His rubber boots plowed through tire trenches on his way home and then, all at once, he felt the live warm tingle of water oozing in at a crack. The thought of wet wool socks gathering in a wad of sweat and mud in the toe of an unbreathing rubber boot smothered him. That was the trouble with those darn rubber boots he thought. Socks always slipped off and wadded up. Boots were clumsy and ugly and they made him feel clumsy and ugly. If he tried to wear the pant leg outside to hide them, they smacked against his calves and stung.
But now, here was this hole in brand-new rubber boots that had to last ‘at least three more months’. His mother’s admonition pounded in his head. At home upstairs in his bedroom he found the leak and with a wooden stove match tried to melt and seal the rubber around it. This only served to raise a charred blister, burn a hole in the boot and make the leak larger. Now he would be accused of trying to destroy the very boots his parents knew he hated so much to wear. This was real trouble and he was already distressed over the care and feeding of a neighbor’s Bantam rooster. “A thirteen year old boy should be able to take the blame for a job poorly done”, his father had said, half in derision and half in challenge. “It’s time his dreaming and foolishness were stopped and he started taking some responsibility for his actions”.