He holds me to him with one arm and picks up his suitcase. We head for the house. I try to put my arms around his neck but the layers of clothing inside my snowsuit are snug around my limbs and I don’t bend much at the joints. My suit is of slippery stuff but he holds tight and I know I won’t fall.
Four years later, when I am six, the centre of Black Diamond will burn down completely, a conflagration razing four city blocks of buildings, all the local businesses. I imagine my father hosing our little house down all night long to keep the embers at bay, as I sleep the sleep of the just inside, only two streets from the blaze. I don’t stir as the flames light up the Southern Alberta sky just as the oilfield flares used to, burning off gas from the top of the rigs outside of town, when the wells first came roaring in during the boom.
They will not rebuild the centre of Black Diamond after the fire. Instead, they relocate disused buildings from nearby ghost towns – Naphtha, Commonwealth – towns that died when the petroleum industry moved to the new oilfields in the north of the province, at Leduc.
Waste not, want not. The abandoned ghost town barber shops and hardware stores, banks and appliance repair shops will be trundled cautiously along the foothills roads to serve again in Black Diamond, this flourishing little place, which remains today as hell-bent as ever on preserving anything of value that can be saved from the past.
Chapter 15
Sometimes I am wrong. It happens to everyone. I’m not infallible.
I am wrong at the end of this lightning visit I pay my parents a year before my mother breaks her hip, a year before my sister and I fly to my father’s rescue.
As I sit waiting for my flight to Vancouver in the Calgary airport where my uncle and aunt have brought me, I am pale with grief over a future that holds for me the certainty that my father will die at my mother’s hand. This future I am imagining will not come to pass at all, and there are any number of verifiable facts I could be crying over instead.
But I am convinced that my parents are headed for doom.
I see this in terms of weeks, not months. My mother’s rage will cause my father’s death, or perhaps whatever is eating away at their formerly healthy and well-upholstered Canadian frames, rendering them as thin and brittle as winter branches, will carry them off.
But I am wrong, and they survive the coming year, doing what they do. My father will turn off his hearing aid for good and get thinner. I don’t know at this point that he is getting thinner and thinner because he is being starved.
My mother has always wanted to be thin, and during this year before she breaks her hip, she maintains her emaciated look with the aid of double doses, or perhaps triple, of the thyroid medication she takes for her self-diagnosed hypoactive condition, but I don’t know this either yet. I know only that she says she has cancer in so many places that she can’t even begin to list them, and this on top of something she calls terminal osteoporosis. I believe the osteoporosis.
During this year before she breaks her hip, she will continue to obsess over my father’s sleep apnoea, and to oscillate wildly between trying to starve him when he is conscious and waking him every half hour when he is asleep to keep him alive.
One winter’s night, she drags him off in the wee hours to the emergency room of a hospital miles away, where they do not know her. The doctors find nothing untoward except her mental state, as she suddenly takes to beating my father up with her large handbag as he lies on a stretcher. She receives a letter some days later from the Head of the ER explaining that she is not welcome in the hospital if she acts like this, because it is not their policy to allow a patient supposedly in some strife to be clobbered senseless by the person who brought him in.
My parents go on for a little over a year like this. My mother obsesses not only about my father’s breathing, but about winning what she refers to as ‘her own money’, by means of the mail scams she spends her time sending cheques to. Everyone should have a hobby. She wants to spend all of her husband’s money. That’ll show him, she says. She also wants to win her own. She is having a red-hot go at it.
This takes some organisation, as I will later learn.
She lost her right to drive during the routine road tests that over-80s take to renew their licence, the reasons being speeding in a school zone and avoiding side-swiping a truck only because the examiner grabbed the wheel. Since then she corrals neighbours and acquaintances from Okotoks to drive her in to Calgary to pick up new chequebooks and buy envelopes and stamps, or to mail the dozens of cheques she posts every day at a post office she trusts in the city.
On one occasion, she commandeers the Okotoks librarian to drive her to the South Calgary mall so she can go to the bank for more cheques. When they get there, this lady makes the mistake of suggesting that my mother might like to ride in the mall courtesy vehicle, since the bank is way off yonder down the marble concourse and she is worried about my mother slipping. Incensed at the implication of infirmity and age and decrepitude, my mother clubs the unsuspecting woman over the head several times with her walking stick. Before the shock and awe wear off her victim, allowing her to back away, she storms off.
The librarian follows at a distance, holding her head and sliding behind mannequins and floral displays every time my mother turns around to see if she is being tailed. She certainly does not intend to drive my mother home and has a fleeting and, for her, uncharitable thought about how you put your cats and dogs in carry-cases to drive them somewhere and that there should be a model available for my mother. She has qualms, however, and can’t bring herself to just leave her there.
When she sees my mother go into her bank and emerge a few minutes later with an employee who takes her arm and heads for the parking lot, the librarian decides she’s done enough and walks off to do a little window-shopping, all the while wishing that her husband did not have a little deal with my father, getting the hay from the property for free in exchange for cutting it because, really, she could do without the aggravation.
Late in the summer of this year, my parents’ banker from that branch in the South Calgary mall, a conscientious woman who is alarmed at the gobsmacking magnitude of the money bleeding out of their accounts, and at the sheer insanity of the number of cheques clearing, phones the property and makes an appointment to come and speak to them. She has done this in the past when there were investment decisions to be made or papers to sign, so my mother is not on her guard and does not prevent this visit.
When she realises what the banker has actually driven out to speak to them about, and in spite of her rage at the impudence of this woman questioning her actions, my mother immediately adopts a defensive position of teary and hand-wringing contrition. She says she doesn’t understand what she could have been thinking with all this gambling, and promises to stop forthwith. She protests that she hasn’t been well; that she is old now and the grief of losing her one and only child, her little girl, so many years ago just gets worse with time, not better, an everlasting and deepening wound in her heart.
My father, I imagine, has the general demeanour of an old stag caught in the headlights on a country road. He apparently does not pick up on the issue of dead or living offspring, there being more serious matters to hand. When he worked, he had a finance department and accountants to calculate sums, to pay in and pay out, to keep things on an even keel. Since he retired, my mother has taken over this function for their personal assets. She has always been clever with money, and he has trusted her.
What shocks him now, as he stares at the embarrassed banker reading amounts from a printout, is not the number of zeros involved. His wife has always been an extravagant spender, and he has never begrudged her a penny of what she paid for the fur coats, the oil-paintings by artists of the Group of Seven, the huge chandelier he abhors which hangs over the great room. There were things to show for these outlays, and a kind of grudging pride in him at the sight of his wife spending big, just because she could.
Now she is throwing money aw
ay, squandering it, a work in progress a bit like quilting, every day amounts big and small winging their way via airmail to post boxes in Malaysia, Queensland, Hong Kong and Florida, where the scam-providers fish for marlin or play mahjong and laugh all the way to the bank. My father imagines the hard-earned assets he has nurtured and loves being eaten away, dissolving in an acid bath, and is appalled. Rancour blossoms in his heart.
Who knows what the banker is mulling over in her mind as she drives away, but I think we can safely believe that she is mulling. One thing above others sits badly with her in the days that follow and that is the dead child, gone for so long but still causing unfathomable pain, the blank emptiness where the offspring should be. The banker for some reason doesn’t believe this for a minute, any more than she believes that my mother will stop writing cheques. What is the internet for anyhow, she reasons as she steps sideways out of her strictly banking roll, finds my sister on the web and contacts her.
My sister tells the banker that yes, she is the daughter of these people, and not only that – there is a bonus daughter, a second little girl, an older model but still in good running order, who has chosen as a life plan to live on continents other than America. My sister tells this nice, concerned banker lady that she must not mistake us for people who have any influence on what my mother may do, that we are disowned and disinherited, and have no legal right to do anything.
My mother intensifies her mail campaign rather than putting an end to it. My father works himself into a wraith-like lather because he knows this and cannot stop it. The one who doesn’t care has all the power. Summer glides into fall. The leaves turn and the asters bloom. The Canada geese fly south over the foothills in impeccable V-formation, high, high up in the perfect dome of blue, safe until they land. Along the Sheep River, the walking paths are paved with the gold of the aspen leaves, floating down on the warmth of the Indian-summer sun.
That will be the year that was, following my departure from this airport where I sit looking out the huge windows, drinking in the panorama of the Rockies to the west, trying to imprint on my retinas the line of the peaks against the sky.
I remember that every day at dawn when I was a teenager (except Sunday of course – this is Alberta and nothing happened on Sunday in Alberta), the Calgary paper was delivered with a thump to the front step of the house where we lived in the city by a paper boy flying by on his bike. He never missed. I tried to get to the paper before my mother, who was always eager to compile her gallery of horrors for our breakfast edification: seals blown out of the water off Alaska by American weapons testing; unbelievable and tragic car accident stories (‘Paramedic called to fatal accident on Banff Highway recognises both children in the crumpled wreck’); cats up trees and babies with their heads stuck in railings. Four dead, my sister would mutter to warn me as we passed in the hall of a morning, one dog, one horse, two humans.
I wanted to get to the paper first to look at the editorial cartoon, but not for its content, about which I was totally unconcerned. I just wanted to start my day, before anything else happened to me, by seeing where in the drawing the cartoonist had hidden the little person looking toward the sketched-in backdrop of the Rockies, ignoring whatever else was going on in the cartoon, and saying quietly, like a mantra, every day, Aren’t the mountains beautiful today.
Chapter 16
Sam Livingston had the right idea. He came. He stayed. The nine-foot-high bronze statue of his head, shining like a gold nugget in the prospector’s sieve that is the Calgary airport arrivals hall, is telling you this. The plaque informs you that this is ‘Calgary’s First Citizen’.
He is wearing a battered broad-brimmed hat and his hair is long and wild, his beard tangled. Everything about him is scary and unkempt and dangerous except for the eyes, which give you access to a sane and civilised soul.
The sculptor who created this head obviously had something in mind. He hopes you will stand in front of it, that the face will fill your view and become a landscape. Those are his words. You look into these surprising eyes and you begin to wander around the landscape, feeling all the tensions of this place in precarious balance: wildness and decency; gritty determination and the whiplash humour that saw Sam delegated to represent Fort Calgary at agricultural fairs and expositions in Toronto, where his arrival in fringed buckskins, maybe smelling a bit gamey, would have scared the silk socks off the snug-suited financiers of the East.
Welcome to Calgary.
Except of course that I’m not arriving. I’m leaving after my three-day fiasco visit to my parents. I won’t see Sam in the arrivals hall until next year, after my mother falls in the kitchen, her hip-joint in powder.
Although I don’t see Sam from the departure lounge, I picture him. I think about him staying here, calming down and doing something good after all his years of panning for gold and trading in buffalo hides with the Plains Indians. He settled. He married a girl and fathered fourteen children. He founded a school, maybe so that all those children could get an education, and set his mind to cultivating the rich prairie soil, bringing the first mechanised farm equipment to Calgary, the first threshers and binders that did not rely solely on the strength and sweat of humans and horses. He showed the Marquess of Lorne, who was Canada’s Governor-General, and his wife, who was Queen Victoria’s daughter, around Southern Alberta’s innovative agricultural landscape when they visited.
The people around the place didn’t forget what he had done for them. His funeral procession in 1897 counted forty carriages. They misspelled his name on the tombstone in Union Cemetery though. The headstone has broken in two, vandalised, but when they repair it, I think they’ll get his name right.
He stayed put, but I don’t. My plane takes off and we aim straight at the Rockies, the morning sun at our backs. Some minutes later, we lift just enough to clear them. I look down and feel the familiar jolt of surprise at how close the underside of the aircraft is to the jagged blades of rock that thrust upwards toward us, too steep for snow to cling to, slate-grey, angled and dark. The Rockies are less endearing seen from above, and you can’t help but feel the full force of the unlikeliness of life. You know that all it takes is one capricious little updraft followed by a small but disobedient air-pocket, which is nowhere near where it is supposed to be, to disembowel this airborne sardine tin and scatter us all, still strapped in our seats, along with the contacts on our cell phones, our suitcases and the photos of our children and the jars of preserves we are carrying as gifts, into the chasms below.
There would be no trace of us, no record of our individual travails or the titles of the books we were reading, the pages of which flutter a moment above the emptiness in a tiny tribute to us, as we disappear into this gigantic mineral presence and are no more.
Kind of like my memory.
Large periods of my early life are like that, like the blank bit that airplanes routinely plummet through and recover from. It’s not that I have misplaced my recollections, and if I taste whatever Canada’s equivalent of Proust’s madeleine tea-cake is, maybe a chocolate-chip cookie or a Nanaimo bar, it will all flood back, all the bright, clear sights and sounds, colours and voices, and faces I loved.
It’s not like that. My past is not merely faded, or camouflaged under the dust of years. It’s not there, and I know a blessing in disguise when I see one.
I have managed to shake free and flee to far-flung places where I feel reasonably safe because I do not carry a lot of my past. My sister carries it for me, her foot in the bear-trap of our childhood, unable to extricate herself no matter how hard she pulls.
I blanked it out and she didn’t. Thanks to that blankness, I got the hell out of Dodge, while she feels the blows of the past continuously in her present. Let me give you an example.
Hair.
In all the photos of me as a child, I have long hair. I remember the painful dragging of combs through my curls, the yanking and tugging to get the plaits even, the tight feeling at the temples like I’d been sc
alped.
I remember the scrape of the fine-tooth comb that came out once a year, to be used by my mother to comb kerosene through our hair after our outing to the Calgary Stampede and Rodeo.
There’s no escaping family rituals. As a child all you know is that they are fuelled by something dreadful and strong. You will try to come to terms with whatever this is later. In adulthood, my sister will attempt this coming to terms by adopting two Cree children. As for me, I will become a hyper-vigilant adult, forever on the lookout for the early warning signs of the ferocity that is in all of us.
We went to the Stampede dressed as cowgirls, with my father in cowboy gear. We weren’t nuts. Everybody did this. The entire business community went to work in chaps and Stetsons for the ten days of the Stampede, and probably still does. We went to the evening show and watched chuck-wagon races and bull-riding and calf-roping and ate fairy floss. I don’t think we were ever allowed to visit what was then called the Indian Village to see the teepees, or to go anywhere near any member of the First Nations. Nonetheless, when we got home, the comb came out and we were de-loused, just in case.
Hair.
As I approach my teens, I no longer have braids down my back. I would have been a hit as a Pre-Raphaelite or in the sixties with flowers threaded through my clouds of hair, but we aren’t there. I have a ponytail I work hard at keeping smooth and shiny, and as I look at photos in Seventeen magazine, I imagine the freedom of less hair. I would like Audrey Hepburn hair, or even Lauren Bacall hair if I absolutely have to keep some length. Musing and speaking more to myself than to anyone else, I say that I am thinking about short hair.
I don’t even see my mother coming; this was her strong suit – you never saw her coming. She has her sewing shears in her hand and as she grabs my ponytail, she hisses at me between clenched teeth, no one needing to hear the words but me. You want short hair, do you? Well then, let’s give you what you want. Let’s give you short hair.
The Erratics Page 8
