Beautiful Scars

by Tom Wilson

  “That’s too bad,” Janie tells me. “Bunny told me she had adopted you.”

  “And what about my name? Who named me Tommy?”

  “When you were born, I wanted to call you Thomas George, but Bunny thought it was too Native. I said that was important, but Bunny said no. So you were called Thomas Cunningham after George Wilson’s father. To tell you the truth, Bunny wanted to hide that you were an Indian. She wanted everyone to think she had you. She hid the truth from everyone, and anyone who suspected or knew any different was banished. Look at her best friend, Bea LaSalle from Sun Life. She used to come and visit all the time. She must have said something about you being adopted. Bunny cut her out and never saw her again.”

  On this one occasion I allow myself a bit of frustration, maybe even anger. “So George is gone, Bunny is gone, and here I am fifty-six years old. It’s all out in the open. It’s exhausting to think of all that effort for nothing. Isn’t the truth an easier route to take?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to be good to Bunny, and she was good to me. She adopted you but she didn’t want you to know. That was the deal. She would take you if I agreed to seal my lips. But I always suspected you knew. I said to her, I said Tom knows and I think he’s going to put two and two together.”

  WAKING UP—TWO

  My name is Thomas George Lazare.

  I come from a family of Mohawk chiefs. Peacemakers and peacekeepers, fighters and man-eaters. Lacrosse magicians, tobacco salesmen, gangsters, shamans, shit disturbers and survivors. But instead of growing up around these heroes and zeros, I grew up on the East Mountain in Hamilton, Ontario, the son of a blind war vet and a French-Canadian she-warrior.

  I am a living breathing lie. An embarrassment. A married man’s mistake and a young girl’s only chance to hop a fence out of town and escape to freedom. I was hidden from the world and from myself, my name was changed because it sounded too Indian and my clothes were fitted to look like the other kids’.

  I’ve been Thomas Cunningham Wilson ever since. An Irish-French kid. Not Indian—no way. No Indian blood in me. None. Zero.

  I knew the truth but I swallowed up the lies. I second-guessed myself. I felt guilty for doubting what I was told. I dreamed myself into fields where I thought I belonged. I got onboard space ships and woke up in cold sweats not knowing who I was or where I came from. I took many stabs at it as a kid, trying to figure it out, lying in bed thinking it over and feeling like I had fallen down a rabbit hole. I was a kid dressed like a prop, all short pants and bow ties. Dressed like I was going to a picnic with Winnie the Pooh, like a post-war upper-class twit.

  I think Bunny modelled me after Prince Charles. Hell, she didn’t know how to dress a kid. She had no feel for it. All she wanted to do was make me less Indian than I was. And some short pants with high socks and a white shirt with a blazer might draw attention away from my Mohawk features and the fact that I had a giant head that looked like it was carved from a spruce tree. And then as I got older, I was just bigger than Bunny and George. Like a giant compared to them. Like Will Ferrell to Bob Newhart in the movie Elf.

  I was sent out into the world as a kid who was from “over there” somewhere, a European kid when it was evident from looking at me that I was from here. I was from deep in the earth I stood upon. A Native North American among a people from another planet.

  SISTERS

  After Bunny and George became my parents, Janie got a job working for a periodontist downtown. She caught the Upper Sherman at the stop over on Brucedale Avenue. She ran into Mrs. Miller regularly but never spoke to her. She never raised her head when Mrs. Miller got on the bus. Just sat there silent, staring down at a gum wrapper or a cigarette butt on the bus floor.

  All day she thought about me. All day she thought of ways to distract Bunny so she could get her hands on me. Hold me. All day her arms ached for me. She thought she was going crazy. Her desire for her baby was consuming her. But every day she got home from work, she watched me from a safe distance. Watched Bunny feed me Gerber baby food from a jar and burp me while George sat at the kitchen table.

  One night George got really drunk. He grabbed his cane and swung it around the kitchen, knocking all of Bunny’s dishes off the shelves. He started yelling at Janie. He pushed her against the wall and told her to get the hell out. “You see the door? Take it—get out of here.”

  Janie didn’t understand. She was following the rules, minding her business, staying quiet, keeping away from the baby, but something went wrong. She kneeled down in a corner of the kitchen. She covered her ears with her hands and closed her eyes, cried and wished she could disappear from there. But instead she stood up to face George. She told him, “If that’s what you want, George, I understand. Don’t worry, I will be out of this house by the end of the week.”

  Bunny said nothing. Not a word.

  Janie marched out of the house the next morning and knocked on a door of a house advertising a room for rent, on James Street just a few blocks south from her work. She walked in and rented a bed and a sitting room with a shared kitchen and bathroom. She gave a deposit, and after work that day went back to Bunny and George’s and packed up her things. Still Bunny said nothing. Not a word.

  Janie stayed downtown, off the East Mountain and away from 162 East 36th Street altogether. She kept to herself, worked, read books, went to movies alone and every so often took the bus into Toronto. She studied and started training to be a nurse. When she graduated, she joined the army reserve. She stayed busy and never stopped trying to better herself. I imagine this was a lonely time for her. But she never turned her back on herself even though the world around her had done just that, time and time again. She just kept on trucking along.

  Sometime during this period she met a fella on the bus from Hamilton to Toronto and as she told me quite respectfully, “I was with him.” They had a short affair, a fling. Janie was taking contraception but she must have missed a date. She got pregnant…again.

  Life sped up for her. She isolated herself from the world except for work. Months passed. When she finally saw Bunny again her pregnancy was showing. Bunny knew right away. Bunny was hard as nails when she wanted to be. She saw a pregnant girl standing in front of her and she turned away. One mistake was enough. No compassion was to be shown for a young girl who obviously needed all the help she could get.

  Janie went home that night, packed her bags again and disappeared down the lakeshore on a Gray Coach bus to the Big Smoke. She was going to work as a nurse at the Hospital for Sick Children. It was obvious to everyone that she was pregnant. Everyone except the Sick Kids Hospital, that is. But when they figured it out they let Janie go. Fired. No unmarried pregnant nurses roaming their halls, no way.

  So there she was. Stuck in Toronto, pregnant and without a job, money, family or anyone to turn to. She got tossed out of her apartment on Huron Street because she couldn’t pay the rent and ended up in a home for lost girls.

  It was as if God was with her when she read the newspaper and saw an ad wanting a mother’s helper. A nanny position. She travelled up to the north end of the Yonge Street subway line. The Goldbergs let her in, saw the desperate state she was in and gave her the job of taking care of their little boy, Scott. That’s all Janie would have to do; for that she could live and eat for free with the Goldbergs, and she would be paid. Janie was saved by the kindness of strangers. She was taking care of a little boy the same age as me. There’s always a bit of hell built into the story. The knife was always getting twisted in Janie’s back.

  Janie delivered her second child at Branson Hospital, and a young Canadian couple adopted the baby girl. I don’t know where the couple were from, but they promised to keep the baby in the Toronto area so that Janie could visit her, or at least check in on her. It was a false promise. The couple picked up roots and moved to Trinidad soon after the baby left the hospital. They called the baby Frances. Janie was heartbroken and on her own again.

  When Janie told me all this I wonde
red at the people who had raised me, at the lack of compassion shown to Janie. For some reason it was this story, the story of my sister’s birth, that, more than any other, hit me in the chest.

  —

  It’s funny how the cosmos works. The questions and answers don’t always come when we expect them, but they often come at the right time. I had no way of knowing more about my father, but I was visiting my friend Jill Greenwood in San Francisco who told me about a website called 23andMe. She told me I needed to know more about the health of my birth family. Through a DNA swab the site could deliver information about family health history, inherited risk factors and ancestry going way back to Asia and Africa and South America. The cradles of civilization. It seemed like a good idea.

  I got home and ordered the DNA kit, and a week later it arrived in the mail. I hate rules and instructions, tax returns and filling out forms of any kind, so I asked Madeline to help. She came over, whipped out the swab, got me to run it around my mouth, filled out the paperwork, stuck the swab back in some plastic bag and mailed it off. An email came three weeks later. I entered a password, logged in to their site, and there waiting for me was my report.

  Among some of the less interesting facts about heart disease and prostate cancer, the report revealed that I may suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome and that my people probably walked out of East Asia many thousands of years ago. It also gave me a list of 644 DNA relatives that were out there—mostly fifth cousins, some seventh cousins—all Native Americans from all over the place, including a few fourth cousins from Kahnawake. Good to know but nothing earth shaking.

  Then, months later, out of nowhere I got a message from a woman on the site. Her name was Tracy Howard, which rang no bells, and she lived in Mount Royal.

  Her note was simple:

  Hello

  According to this DNA, Thomas Wilson, you are my grandfather.

  Please provide me with any facts that you can.

  How old are you? I am also a Mohawk from Kahnawake but I live in Montreal.

  Tracy

  It was a mistake of course. I knew I wasn’t her grandfather. I wrote back:

  Hey Tracy

  I am a grandfather myself but I may be a bit young to be yours. I was born in 1959.

  Hope this helps in some way and good luck with your search…

  tom

  I thought that was that, but then twenty-four hours later Tracy wrote back to me:

  Hi Tom,

  Yes, you are too young to be my Grandfather.

  But I’m still curious, we have over 22% DNA, that would make you a ½ sibling.

  Could you be my brother?

  I would like to exchange family info, what do you think?

  I will start by letting you know, the Mohawk side of me.

  My father is Louis Beauvais from Kahnawake, my mother is a beautiful northern European born in Canada.

  My father has many children, that is why, maybe you could be my brother.

  Hope to hear from you soon.

  Tracy

  I had been going over and over the revelation of Tracy’s note for months and months. I just couldn’t bring myself to ask the question I needed to ask. Then one morning I picked Janie up for groceries, and she asked me how my book was coming along. I could have answered with a simple “pretty good” or “not bad.” But instead I saw this as the opening I’d been waiting for. “Yeah, Janie. I’ve hit a wall. You see, your story, and of course I believe your story, is that a man named Rudy West is my father. But I looked up Rudy West online and he’s dead. I wouldn’t want to drag up any trouble or disturb his family by calling them up, so I only have your recollections to go on.

  “Your story is that my father is Rudy West, but my DNA—and DNA doesn’t lie—leads me to a family named Beauvais and a man named Louis Beauvais. I’ve been contacted by one of his daughters. She doesn’t know anything about me except that our DNA matched on a website I went on called 23andMe. I went on there to find out about health questions I had. And sure enough, this Beauvais connection was made.”

  She was quiet as I drove down Charlton Avenue, and I sat patiently as we whizzed past a couple of blocks. Then she repeated the name. “Louis Beauvais….Yes. I knew a Louis Beauvais….In fact, I dated Louis Beauvais a few weeks before I met your father.”

  I kept my hands on the wheel, but I started to shake, then began laughing out loud like an idiot. “You what?” I said. “You knew him around the same time you knew Rudy West? Janie—Louis Beauvais is my father.” I kept laughing.

  Then Janie started to laugh too. “Yes…I guess he is.”

  And that’s how simple the truth is for Janie and me.

  THOMPSON’S GIFT OF RAIN

  I told him to keep it steady down the middle of the lane—no foolin’ around, no sudden jerks or stops either—and I finished by looking him straight in the eye and delivering a direct, “You fuckin’ fucker.”

  This was serious business, after all.

  He laughed as I leaned forward on the passenger seat, shuffling my ass to the very edge of it, my chest now pressed against the dashboard, unzipping my jeans while taking my cock out and aiming it into the empty Tim Hortons coffee cup. Ahh…just in the goddamn nick of time. What a relief. What a luxury. My head cleared, my thoughts lightened, and the pain left my body.

  I’ve been pissing into Tim Hortons cups for forty-one years now. Forty-one years burnin’ up and down the road like a tool with my dick in my hand.

  Oh sure, I’ve had plenty of luxury Florida Coach tour buses and the odd private jet and lots of limos, but for the most part it’s been eight-cylinder sedans, trailer hitches and white sixteen-passenger extended cabs that make me look more like a guy from a correctional facility than a musician. Forty-one years of trying to get there before the sun goes down, just in time for load-in, sound check and maybe something to eat when we finally hit town.

  “Whatta we gonna eat?” The number one question for road survival.

  “Do you know a place?”

  “Eat yet?”

  “No, you?”

  The constant chatter that goes on all day. The same old jokes getting the same laughs. Accepting the moment and managing the circumstances, like a travelling Buddha in a twelve-step program. And all the second-hand smoke, coffee and sugar cookies you can handle, man.

  “Eat when you can, sleep when you can, and always take the cash.”

  The great lines that come with the trade.

  “Live by the song, die by the road.”

  Or my bass player Johnny Dymond’s timeless beauty, “Well we came a long way, but at least we didn’t get paid.”

  Or the one he uses when he calls his wife after being away for three weeks: “Hi, honey….Is anything okay?”

  So here I am in the same spot forty-one years down the road. Balancing myself in the front seat of a van, my face pushed into the windshield like a giant insect on the wrong side of the glass, looking out over Kansas and pissing into a coffee cup and watching the telephone poles flying by, totally satisfied and so uplifted by this moment that I start to sing…Jimmy Webb, of course. I mean who else? The song I’m humming, “Wichita Lineman,” comes outta these fields.

  The sun is going down on the fields. Kansas is exhaling all its October colours and stepping aside for the night to take over. Black-and-white Dorothys and Totos are running down country roads away from home again, and the ghosts of the Clutter family are getting into their pyjamas and kneeling beside their beds to say their prayers, soon to be murdered in cold blood and tossed onto the pile of human horrors inside the pages of Truman Capote’s greatest work. For us, the state of Kansas has been a long story that just went on and on like a drunk uncle at a family funeral.

  We left the city early enough, but the road beat us to the punchline today. The drive’s been torture and we want to keep moving until we reach Denver. We don’t want to stop for anything, no way no how. Side-of-the-road toilet breaks are out of the question and the piss cups have been
in play. Kansas City the eternal is about five hours behind us. It was hard to leave its candied barbecue and the ghost of Count Basie, his right hand plucking notes between shots of gin, lines of coke and draws of reefer. The city still holds down the rhythm that drags the faithful through the doors of the barrooms and the churches and strokes the heads of schoolchildren and blesses the masses. Saving Southern souls and getting them while they’re young.

  And on this, my spirit is finally free. After all these years I am feeling stronger than I ever have before.

  I never knew my biological father, Louis Beauvais, but by all accounts he was way more of a long-gone daddy than I ever was, and he sure left his own trail of black eyes, broken hearts and bullshit behind him. In the late 1990s, when my addictions were at their worst, when I drove my life into the ditch, I was following the same road my father took forty years before. A man whose ghost crashed through my walls and ruled my own wild spirit when all my soft spots were drowned in whisky and my flesh was weakened by golden-haired witches sitting at the edge of hotel-room beds and the back seats of cars. I never could explain what was happening to me, and I couldn’t imagine conjuring up a scapegoat or an excuse for how I was acting. I just didn’t know what was wrong with me. I didn’t know that I was him.

  Fuck the ghosts and fuck the loneliness. There’s no excuse for how it all went down.

  Now some of the roads I’m on, I’m going down for the first time in my life and I’m going down them with my son, Thompson. He’s behind the wheel sturdy as a trucker. He’s my soul bandmate, and in many ways the spirit and the guts of this tour. You gotta choose brave warriors to step on stage with every night, and I have the best of the best. He’s twenty-four years old and as genuine and soulful a singer as anyone I’ve ever heard. Every night I look at him on stage and I see the baby I pulled up out of the crib for midnight feedings. I see the open-faced little guy who, along with his sister, Madeline, shaped me into the proud man I have become. He’s got a quiet, peaceful strength that carries the load day in and day out as we cut through the middle of the land from sun-up to sundown. The guy is a pro. He figures he was just born in the breed. Together we travel out to the fringes, out to the unknown parts that our quest has created for us.