The first night we stop at a motel in Sicamous, Houseboat Capital of Canada. The mosquitos are ferocious as it has been uncharacteristically hot and dry this year. The shores of Shuswap Lake have become a marshy paradise for mosquito breeding as the lake shrinks and the water recedes. My sister and I swim in the tiny motel pool and sit a moment in the tiny motel spa, not accompanied by her partner who is from Saskatchewan and does not do water.
Sicamous is a small place, a summer place where the fun is in renting a houseboat and sleeping out on the water. The Trans-Canada Highway bisects it. The lake is on one side and houses and businesses on the other – bait shops, motels, restaurants: Moose Mulligan’s, Joe Schmuck’s Roadhouse, Bahama John’s. At Moose’s, I order a lemon, lime and bitters, and after they question me carefully about what that might be, they do their best and I try to drink some of the result from the milkshake container it comes in, because they tried, that good old Canadian spirit. Over the border in the US, they would have just brought me a Sprite.
As we walk in the dark along the highway back to our motel, intermittently deafened by the roar of semis on a tight schedule, I remark to my sister that we are not very visible here on the verge in our dark clothing, that we could be in some danger of being mowed down. I’ll fix that, she says, and when the next truck looms ahead of us, she lifts her jumper up to her neck and her white bra shines in the headlights. I don’t know if she should be gratified by the long blast of the bullhorn the driver responds with. What if he turns around, I say. Where, she asks. He can’t. Has to keep going. She flashes drivers all the way to the motel.
You can drive from Vancouver to Calgary in sixteen hours if you don’t stop, but we are taking our time. This is, after all, my holiday for the year, so we think of stopping a second night in a pretentious hotel in a hamlet called Harvie Heights on the eastern slope of the mountains, only because this tiny place is named for our grandfather. He was known as Honest John and I don’t think that was ironic. A dour Glaswegian immigrant, he rose through the ranks of the civil service to be Deputy-Minister of Lands and Mines.
The receptionist in the up-market mountain-experience lodge announces that she must have two credit card imprints before she will even show us the rooms so we can decide if we really want to spend this much money. As we stare at her, an irate guest interrupts, demanding to know why his room has a fire-pit on the patio, and instructions for making a fire, but no wood anywhere. She suggests he should climb up the slope behind the hotel and gather some. Bears shouldn’t be a problem until dusk. He suggests he will just break up one of the chairs in his room and burn that.
My sister and I exchange a glance and, as we walk away from Ms Snarky, we take notebooks and cameras from our bags. We photograph Ms Snarky from a distance, talking among ourselves about an article and the Canadian Automobile Association. We go outside and stand in a flowerbed to photograph her again through the window, then drive away to find somewhere else to stay.
The next day we spend hours waiting on the highway behind machines doing roadwork, and we arrive at Dad’s several hours later than we expected. My mobile doesn’t work and my sister doesn’t have hers, so there is no way to let him know we’ll be late. He is agitated when we arrive, having worked himself into a lather of worry and annoyance. It’s his dementia, the helper whispers to me as we stand in the entrance.
Who said he had dementia? I snap at her.
I don’t think he has dementia. Nobody has diagnosed him with dementia. As far as I am concerned, his brain has been working fine since he got off the starvation diet my mother had him on. I think saying he is upset because of his dementia is a convenient way of saying you haven’t been bothered to comfort your old charge when he has been worrying himself needlessly into knots.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I should see he’s a bit frayed around the edges, especially a week before the end of our stay when he begins fretting at night, wandering the house and counting the money in his wallet, and marking a day off the calendar every morning at breakfast, calculating how many more days we will be there with him. Maybe I should see how disruptive it is for him, how we perturb the rhythm of his days with his carers, the routine he has adapted to since Mum left the house eighteen months ago. He loves that we are there, and when we leave he hates it.
And I don’t see the signs with my sister either, even though her feathers are beginning to fall off too. She has been flying here to see Dad every couple of months, sometimes alone and sometimes with her partner, trying to solve all possible problems, trying, I suspect, to predict the unpredictable and control the uncontrollable. After her last visit, when her flight home landed in Vancouver, she stood up to be first off the plane and fainted in the aisle, ensuring that no one could deplane and that her partner had to climb over seats to get to her and the ambos, who got on board and blocked the aisle with their gear.
I miss the signs and watch Dad wave goodbye sadly as we leave, thinking we’ll come again, having promised him we will.
Life unravels differently. It always does.
Some months later my sister receives a phone call from the agency that has found the helpers for Dad. It is a grim winter’s dusk on the coast in Vancouver where she lives, and an evening of robust snowfall and blizzard gales over the Rockies near Okotoks, where Dad is.
The caller informs my sister that the helper on duty today, the big girl we like, the only one we have ever trusted, has just phoned in her resignation and informed them that she is the only person who has my father’s best interests at heart, that his wife is evil and his daughters do not care, that she is with him now and not leaving, and that she will look after him from now on.
He tells my sister he is unsure how to proceed. Never tell my sister you are unsure how to proceed.
She high-tails it to the airport and catches the last flight, jouncing around in the snow-clogged air just above the jagged, rocky peaks on blasts of murderous wind. The person who phoned meets her at Calgary airport and they drive through eddying snow, peering through the windscreen as they navigate, very slowly, the blurry, whited-out roads where the question is not Are we there yet, but Are we still on the road, all the way out to my father’s place to stage an intervention.
They arrive well after midnight. My sister has keys. The helper is asleep and once roused, expresses surprise at their presence, so strongly does she believe in her mission, the defence of this darling old gentleman, so ill-served by the harpies in his life.
I do not know how they arrive at a result, but in the end she packs her things and leaves. She pulls over and waits on the road near the house for some time, but she doesn’t come back. My father sleeps through it all.
The next morning, my father asks my sister what she is doing there. He wasn’t expecting her. She explains the situation: that she can find new helpers, but that the delusional, kleptomaniac, serial killer, drug-addled, gold-digging bunch we’ve had are the cream of the crop. It can only get worse on that front. The only other solution is that he move to the coast, with her and her partner at first, then somewhere near them in the longer term. She sighs. She hasn’t slept and she can’t see her way through this. They’ve spoken of this before. He hasn’t wanted to consider it.
He stands up from the breakfast table. Let’s go then, he says. But I’ll need to bring the cat.
They pack him a bag, turn the water off so the pipes won’t freeze, and ask the security company that patrols to double the number of perimeter checks. They put the cat in a blanket in her carry-case. As they close the front door, Dad looks back into the great room and says, At least I won’t have to look at that damn chandelier any more.
Chapter 23
Here’s the problem. You can’t leave a big house in the country empty, especially if it has wide windows and is full of things easily sold on to finance an enterprising burglar’s needs: the next fix, a payment on a gambling debt.
Word spreads. At best, squatters move in. At worst, pot producers get wind of the opportunity
and break in to set up a grow-house. Before you know it, and by the time the water and electricity providers flag a huge increase in demand to the house, your abode is a humid ruin and the police are looking at you for production of an illicit substance and maybe trafficking. It is your house, your responsibility.
My sister sets about finding a solution. She learns that our parents’ wills are worded so trickily, and have been tied in such inextricable knots around the eventual disposal of the property that it is impossible for my father to sell it on his own. My mother has stipulated that the property must go to a land trust, to be protected and maintained the way it is forever, that no money must change hands during this exchange. Even though none of her wishes would hold up under legal scrutiny, we would still need to go to court to challenge them.
Next best solution: we find a renter who is not a drug producer. For this to work, we need to empty the house. My sister calls to see if I will come to Canada. With a team of her friends and her partner, we will live in my father’s house for however many weeks it takes to prepare and hold an estate sale, and we will rent the house empty.
I say no. I am still working, but I think I would say no even if I weren’t. I see things differently from my sister. She sees a challenge, a showcase for her formidable organising abilities and perhaps, who knows, a way of dismantling and negating a past that haunts her. I just don’t think I owe my parents weeks of back-breaking work and eventual danger – I have only ventured a few feet into the bomb shelter but what I have seen has discouraged me from ever going further in. I would not send anyone in there without a Hazmat suit. I tell her that I will cheer them on from a very great distance.
My sister rises to the logistical occasion. With her partner and six friends, she will travel to Okotoks to sort and clean and donate what is not estate sale material, and organise what is. In the meantime, her partner’s brother will drive up from Medicine Hat and live in the house.
It becomes obvious that for the estate sale to be a success we need to get the word out, and for that we need the help of some estate sale pros. My sister settles on a company called Estate Sale Pros. They charge a fee for online marketing, and printing a glossy catalogue, and signs and brochures, and for providing a presence on the ground on the day. For a much larger fee, they will take charge of the whole kit and caboodle, the sorting, the cleaning, the discarding, the buffing and polishing and staging. I would have gone that way myself, but my sister moves in with her team to do the prep.
I call them often in the evening, prairie time, when they are exhausted and giddy from whatever they drank at dinner. These are almost all her lifelong friends and I know all but two of them. They take turns telling me funny stories they wish I were there to share. The stories usually end with the idea that maybe you had to be there.
My sister mentions that she seems to be having allergic reactions to something, her tongue tingling, her lips swelling a little, and I reiterate my warnings to stay clear of the bomb shelter and especially the barn. As it turns out, she is not suffering allergies but the first signs of angiodema, an autoimmune condition that will almost kill her some months later, possibly precipitated by fatigue and stress, but we don’t know that. I will hear later that she hardly slept for all the weeks the team worked on the house, busy all day and spending part of the night writing up lists of chores for all eight of them for the coming day.
They work every day, no time off, double shifts. They sort, they toss, they cart to the tip, they make lists and separate piles of all manner of things. Two of the team, the ones I do not know, will not go the distance. They complain about the living arrangements, the food, and the chores they are assigned. They don’t ferry bottles and cans to the tip, but take them to another town altogether to cash them in, and keep the proceeds. When they are evicted, they pay themselves for their trouble by secreting a number of objects in their bags, as a salve to the battler’s resentment they feel toward the well-to-do.
The magnificent six push bravely forward each day after this setback. My sister’s brother-in-law takes on the barn. He removes toxic chemicals dating back to before the concept of toxic chemicals. He repairs mowers and refurbishes a cutter sleigh nobody knew was there, and a cast-iron horse-head hitching post.
Even though it is late in the spring and the crab-apple trees have bloomed, they are snowed in twice. The second blizzard is a momentous storm. If my father had still lived there when it hit, he would have died. The electricity is cut off, so there is no heat as the furnaces won’t light. The team sleeps in their outdoor gear and boots.
There is no water, as the pumps for the well run on electricity. They can’t flush the toilets. They cook under a tarp on a barbecue in a sheltered corner of a patio and melt snow for water to drink. They all want a shower. They can’t get out. The roads are blocked for miles around.
After a couple of days, when the snow melts, you can see the tiny green shoots of crocuses piercing up through the ground, looking for light, having another go at announcing spring. The roads open. The Estate Sale Pros arrive in their SUVs to make lists for the catalogue and to take pictures. It will be 17 pages long, photos and text, inviting prospective buyers to ‘see this home and homestead, full of the most amazing antiques ever offered for sale in one estate’.
The text is breathless and features a number of crimes against inverted commas (‘very desirable grandfather clock’), and some juxtapositions I would find funny if the whole business weren’t breaking my heart. One reads on the first page that ‘this is a 4800 sq ft home packed full of antique treasures and modern small appliances’, and under the photo of my mother’s antique dining room buffet, (‘amazing’), the caption spells it out: ‘attached scroll-work mirror supports, cutlery drawer, four cathedral-topped cupboard doors with matched panels of glorious burl veneer. Dating to the late 1800s, this is definately [sic] a showpiece in any home.’
So far so good. But since this is the Wild West, the author can’t help but conclude, ‘Try to imagine it as a bar in a party room’.
My sister and the team hold a pre-sale event for family and neighbours. My parents’ entire life is laid out on trestle tables by category, with a price on every object. My cousin David buys several dozen bottles of good Bordeaux from my father’s cellar, Ducru Beaucaillou 1972. My former husband took my father to visit that chateau which belonged to family friends, and I can see him in my mind’s eye, loving every minute in the cellars, talking to the owners. I wish he had drunk his wine, but since he didn’t, I’m glad my cousin will.
The day after the pre-sale event, one of my sister’s team, a big jovial man with white hair and a beard, drives into Okotoks and, looking like a Santa Claus recruited into the Hell’s Angels, deposits the proceeds of the evening into my father’s account, under the worried and suspicious stare of the locals.
The main event takes place over the following weekend, May 13th to 15th. What should be ample parking festooned in a field soon overflows as hundreds of people come to troll through the house, to snoop and haggle and to buy, following the directions in the brochure for getting to the property: ‘Leave Calgary going south on the Deerfoot Trail towards Fort MacLeod. Take the 2A turnoff to the right, towards Okotoks. At the top of the first hill, there is a radio tower on the right and a horse arena on the left. You will be turning right here, past a house with corrals and a large red barn, and continuing to a T-junction.’ I can see it all in my mind as I read.
At this point, what the prospective buyers see is what I saw every time I came here. They see a parkland of clipped lawns, weeping willows with pale tendrils stirring in the breeze, and stands of conifers. What they also see, however, and what I have been lucky not to see, is a house with doors wide open, people with clip-boards in matching vests inviting them in to pick through the remains of what can only be known and understood in context; to contribute, as vultures do in the desert, to the dispersal of the vestiges of life.
Chapter 24
Dad settles in to a new ro
utine on the coast at my sister’s. The house is large and square, on a big flat block of land. It is a functioning bed and breakfast, and was the first brick in the now impressive wall of properties owned and managed by my sister and her partner. Having my father there presents no physical problem. A couple of new handrails do the trick, and he is at home in the Rose Room: a comfortable double bed, an ensuite of hospital-grade cleanliness and, through the weeping willow branches that sweep gently across the wide window, a view to a quiet suburban street, no footpaths, clipped lawns, people walking and cycling and exercising their dogs in the early morning mist on the shiny surface of the road, sparkling like wet coal after the most recent shower.
My sister says her suburb is working class; she also tells me that she considers herself working class. When I stop laughing and ask for her definition of this, she says, Working class – working, having a job. Dictionary in hand, I endeavour to explain that while that may be definition number three or four, the usual meaning has to do with other concepts: white collar or blue collar; propertied or landless; education or lack thereof; dependence on the sweat of your brow to put food on the table for the kids, or having a savings account, a trust fund, a safety net. I mention Dickens and Austen. I complicate things by bringing in the rural poor.
She won’t budge. I explain that by her definition Gina Rinehart is working class. She doesn’t know who that is and I don’t know who the Canadian equivalent would be. I say that if her neighbours were a working-class family of four, they wouldn’t have two cars and an RV parked in the drive. I try to make her see that we have sprung desperately from a violently aspirational upper-middle-class background, and that I see that as part of the greater malaise we live with. She just shakes her head and repeats, Working class.
The Erratics Page 12
