The most major thing in my family’s life was Vatican II. The most important human person was the Bishop of Victoria, Remi Joseph De Roo. That was a famous if silly-sounding name. He was a Vatican II liberal. A great one for the folksingers, Bishop De Roo, and completely at odds with Vancouver and the rest of the Lower Mainland, where they kept to very conservative liturgical traditions and preaching and were very indulgent to traditional sacramental, devotional aspects of the faith. Over there in sin-ridden Vancouver, people didn’t jump on the idea that Catholicism was the living synthesis of straight Middle Eastern monotheism and the easy-going Greco-Roman polytheism, which made it simple to gobble up new worship and observances that came along. So in popular terms the Church in conservative Victoria was liberal. It was as though the two groups were twins confused at birth. Logically my parents were better suited to Vancouver but they immigrated to the wrong place. Typical. How they suffered (and made us suffer), how they loved suffering—so was suffering really such a sacrifice? Anyway, they became the outcasts again.
I never bought into the whole anger/forgiveness duality, not in the Church or in my parents’ marriage or in the family. Confusion was all I saw when I looked around myself. The church I was brought up in had no Latin Mass, no altar rail, no raised pulpit. The nuns in the schools had modified habits or else were working undercover in plain clothes. All of this seemed normal to me but was very upsetting to all the other Kuipers. By this time two old-growing grandparents had joined in along with my crazy Aunt Yo—it’s spelled Jo—and of course my brother. We lived in a decrepit-seeming old house with a wide porch, one bathroom and green shingles that hid the ever-upcreeping moss. The house wasn’t getting any bigger, so the bedrooms kept getting smaller and smaller.
My brother, the altar boy, was privileged and righted to live by himself in total privacy year-around on the glassed-in summer porch, which let him put on exhibitions of himself for the Protestant girls in the houses on either side. I hated and envied him. In the early 1970s, he went down to Seattle and tried to enlist in the Vietnam War but chickened out when he figured they’d make him eat meat on Fridays. He was my parents’ favourite. Would have been even without being the first-born of us two (an extremely small family as Catholic families were supposedly measured).
If we ever get out back home from wherever we are, I’ll show you the little plastic statue Aunt Jo gave me on my first communion. It shows a little girl in white kneeling at an altar rail as Jesus Himself gives her communion. I keep it on the shelf in my bathroom with other childhood religious kitsch, including a headless statue of Sainte Thérèse, the Little Flower, that Grandmother left me in her will. Authority-exertion from beyond the grave. I find this a big conversation starter and also sometimes a conversation stopper. Jewish friends find it especially interesting. There’s also a wooden statue of the Virgin that someone, I don’t know who, bought for ninety-nine cents in a strange little shop in the area behind the one-time Spencer’s Department Store. On my wall there’s a hand-stitched sampler of sisters in habits ringing a bell. It’s supposed to be from the Sidney Poitier movie Lilies of the Field. Mother says Aunt Jo started to stitch it while watching the movie on television because the movie was black-and-white and she happened to have black thread and white thread in her sewing basket. A miracle! Jo was deeply committed to old-time Catholic voodoo.
I’m not saying that I was not myself a believer when I was too young to know not to be. A lot of adolescent Catholic girls disengage from their early school experience in high school, but I was already lost by then, a refugee from the world of the outcasts. To the extent I understood about what was going on in the outside world I saw this whole Vatican II proposition as having been just another cause for tension in that big old house being eaten by moss. If I thought about it I guess I felt it was fun to see the Church contradict itself on issues like Marian devotion or using Latin, but I was more swept up in the countervailing force of rejecting my parents: their attitude about prayer, for example. But I couldn’t reject them and be seen as a rebel, because everybody seemed to be already rejecting my parents and what they believed. Or were my parents rejecting everybody else and getting rejected as a result?
Whatever else growing up did to me in terms of damage and hurt-infliction, it gave me my love of science and ideas instead of some sick need to fetishize experience, and these issues I’m telling you about were probably the first set of presumptions I learned to destroy by thought. The permissibleness of saying the rosary was a big one, let me tell you. So was the heresy (that’s what Father said it was) of having the priest facing you, not with his back turned. These were changes that the folksingers who frightened my parents were designing to get people to participate more directly in the prayers of the service, not to set up alternative prayers of their own, you see. And to make the priests feel close to the people as well as vice versa. Another big one had to do with prayers to the saints in general. First, the old men put a new and ever longer emphasis on Christ and on meeting Christ in the Mass. Then, in the same way, saints were downgraded because prayer to the saints might distract people from Christ and the Mass. The whole calendar of saints was edited as they tried to cut down on the number of ones who never really existed. People like my family thought this saint hunt was a witch hunt. I actually heard my father compare it to McCarthyism in the States. It was also the only time I heard him elocute what you would call an abstract thought.
Weeding out some of the saints was especially hard on Aunt Jo. She had an obsessionistic collection of saints in plaster, terra cotta, porcelain, wood and especially plastic, and not just the biggies like Joseph either. Her friends would come to her when they were experiencing a difficulty and she would pick the right saint and put the statuette down on the sofa cushions and mumble a prayer. She was like a Catholic witch. Or at least a kind of religious herbalist. If your husband was dying of cancer or you lost your car keys, Jo would select a saint and get to work. Sometimes the people found their keys. More seldom the hubby went into remission. People would try to give Jo money to thank her but she’d refuse, saying that if they wanted to thank Heaven for giving her the gift then they should just make to her a donation of saints she didn’t already possess. She was a railway engineer and Vatican II was like the airline industry. She had to watch her business dying a mile at a time, one passenger after another, as she looked out the window, projecting herself into the past.
I disliked Jo a lot less than I did other relatives. Living in the house with her is maybe what led me to fulfill myself in social work. (A vocation! She would have liked that.) The rest of them were pretty useless. When I was an old teenager getting ready to leave home I tried talking to the priest about my sexuality. A stupid thing to do, but I thought he might listen with an open ear because everybody knew that he’d been having an affair with a Protestant woman for the last twenty years. He just barely managed to contain his horror and recommended remedial counselling at once. There were no intelligent people to talk to about something like that, so I tried talking to my brother. He was so disgusted he told our mother, who told Father (I sometimes wonder how she phrased it). He responded by taking me shopping at Canadian Tire, using up his precious store of Canadian Tire Money that he had been hoarding for years and years—a wartime-memory deprivation thing maybe. He had to drag me in almost screaming. We went to where everyday tools were displayed. He slowly, so slowly, picked out a “good” hammer and a “good” little saw and showed me all the different types of screwdrivers, the way they were sized and how the colour of the handle meant something.
“You’ll be needing all this before too long when you’re living on your own and won’t have me or your brother around,” he said. To him, this is what the issue meant. I guess he thought being a lesbian was a bit like being a cloistered nun. Who knows how his mind worked? I ended up getting married as a way of shutting myself off from all the idiotic family stuff. You can imagine what a success the marriage was. But ever since then I haven’t mad
e any big mistakes. Well, not until now maybe.
Theresa was a very tense sleeper. Whenever I looked over she had her knees drawn up to her breasts and was clenching her tiny fists. In the morning, she complained of TMJ and kept rotating her jaw in some exercise that was supposed to reduce stress.
I thought I was the first one awake, but Bishop had beaten me to it. Despite what I’d shown him, he was still having trouble making a fire, even though everything except the actual road seemed at least a bit drier than it had the day before. He had lugged some water for boiling and I saw he had the plastic bottle of bleach ready. (I wondered if he remembered that you only needed a drop per litre. We’d soon find out, I guess.) Instead of getting ground coffee he’d picked up a small bag of the beans (odd thing to find in a country store) and was trying to flatten them with blows from his shovel. When that didn’t work he switched to a big flat rock. When they were hit, they’d shoot off the other rock he was using as a table and fly up in the air. He’d go searching for them and, when he found one, wipe off the dirt. Then he’d polish the little brown bean on his shirt-tail, like someone cleaning eyeglasses with a soft cloth. I went over and started talking with him about what a beautiful morning it was and gently took over the job, using a smaller, flatter rock to grind the beans a few at a time with a circular motion instead of trying to bash them from above. It wasn’t the most efficient way but eventually I was able to make some cowboy coffee by carefully scooping up the coffee dust and throwing it in the boiling water. The secret to cowboy coffee is to bring it to a boil twice. The beauty of it is that anything tastes better cooked outdoors. That’s all that makes it drinkable.
Theresa was up by this time, carrying a bar of soap and a tee to use as a washcloth, trudging off through the low brush back towards a tiny stream we had passed a little ways back. Bishop looked like he was surveying his domain, though I sensed his domain (or should I say hideout?) was still very far away, I didn’t know where exactly. He opened a can of salmon with his knife, bent back the ragged lid and ate with his fingers right out of the can. When he finished gobbling it down, he emptied the liquid and little leftover bits on the ground behind the truck and threw the can up into the woods. This time I had to say something.
“That’s really not a good idea,” I said.
He looked a little blank.
“This is the time of year the bears are out looking for berries and stuff. If a bear got a whiff of that can or this patch of ground, it’d be down here in a second. I think you should go up there and bury the can where you find it.” I tried to say this in a way that wouldn’t hurt his feelings. “Bury it deep. After you fill in the hole, you should probably take dirt from another spot and make a sort of mound over it, about this high.” I put my hands about ten centimetres apart. “Tamp it down real well with your feet. Then it should smell like a human, not like fish. That ought to keep them away.”
I was amazed he didn’t know this stuff. Okay, he’s a city kid, but hadn’t he ever seen a picture of a bear fishing for salmon in a stream?
“The juice from the can’s already soaked in. I don’t know what to do about that.”
“I do,” he said. He went over to the exact spot, opened his fly and peed on it for what seemed like five minutes. Fortunately he kept his back to me.
“That should turn em off,” he said.
It worked for me.
When Theresa came back and she and I had got some nourishment in us, Bishop called a kind of meeting.
“We can’t go on driving a Canada Post truck. It’s a miracle they haven’t caught”—he changed what he was going to say—“up with us yet.” I had to agree. “Our choice”—I loved the way he said our—“is either to stay on the big highway, get another vehicle and ditch this one, or else stick to roads like this and disguise what we’ve got.” He seemed to wait for us to respond, but we didn’t. “I’ve decided that camouflage is the way to go.” At his feet were two of the big bags from the store and he dumped out cans of paint, rolls of masking tape and brushes of various sizes.
“You want us to paint the truck with these?” I couldn’t believe it, but I tried not to let my voice sound surprised. He nodded.
Theresa and I asked why on earth he chose that colour: a sickly awful green. He said it was the only paint that the store had enough of that wasn’t white. “It’s not great but it’s better than white. We won’t need as many coats.”
The day was warmer than the day before. There was no breeze to speak of and it was too early for bugs. So I said to myself why not. We didn’t have any newspapers and we’d need quite a few, but Bishop didn’t want us to go back to the store and buy some. He said that as things stood the people there probably couldn’t give an accurate description of us, but if they saw us a second time they could.
“Send Theresa. They haven’t seen her yet.” He didn’t think that was a good idea either.
We cut up a couple of mailbags along the seams to see if we could use them to mask the door handles etc. But of course the tape wasn’t strong enough to hold up anything thicker than newspaper and we had nothing else that would do. We did find, though, that the canvas was so thick and the windshield, though it seemed straight up and down, was on just enough of a slant that we could lay pieces over the glass and hold them in place, sort of, with the wipers. Around the headlights and stuff we’d just have to be careful. It was going to be a messy job. Bishop and I took off most of our clothes to keep them from getting splattered but T was too shy or something.
Bishop pried off the lid of the first can and used a rusty nail and a rock for a hammer to punch holes in the lip where the top rests, so that any paint spilled in the track would drip back into the can. “This not only saves paint, it keeps the lid from not fitting tight because of dried paint inside here, see?” He said it was only one of the many little tricks he had learned from his grandfather who was some sort of house builder or architect back east.
Anybody who stumbled on it (no one did) would have found a weird-looking scene: a woman and a man in just their underwear and another woman buttoned up to her throat, covering the cab and steel box of a truck with oil paint the colour of mushed-up green peas. It was a nauseating colour, though it sort of blended in a bit with some of the early spring vegetation—better than blue would have done, that’s for sure, or red. A good thing the store didn’t have a lot of red. Still, I could see why they were stuck with all this baby-food green. Who’d want that in her house?
The job took the three of us the entire day, using a little sash brush a few centimetres wide to go round the trim and ones about four times as big to do the rest. They weren’t high-quality brushes and a lot of brush hairs got left behind. At first, I kept trying to pick them out of the wet paint, using my fingernails like tweezers. (Theresa wasn’t as good at this, as she kept her nails so short. Maybe she chewed them that way.) Bishop told me not to worry about the bristles. “Every time you pick up one you leave a fingerprint. You don’t want your prints all over this thing.” I hadn’t thought of that and it frightened me a little bit the way he said it.
Then he said: “Don’t worry about the roof of the cube. We’ll leave it till last and see how much paint we have left. What’s important is what they can see from the road.” This made sense but it sent another shiver down my body because I knew what he was getting at. I hadn’t quite pictured that we were being followed by a posse or whatever they’re called.
Theresa was territorial, the way she guarded her side of the truck. Once she staked out an area, she kept Bishop and me away and worked with a lot of concentration, keeping two brushes going, doing the big open patches with the large one and the smaller spots and touch-ups with the baby one. She didn’t sing to make the time go by, didn’t even talk. Bishop and I worked as a team, me with a big brush and him a little one at the same time. We’d switch when we got tired. I was surprised how well we worked together. I was also surprised that Bishop wasn’t a better painter, what with all the trades he kept telling
us he’s learned at the knee of that grandfather in some place whose name I kept trying to remember. Rattlesnake. No, that wasn’t it. Watersnake. Gartersnakeville?
By the end of the day we’d covered everything but the roof and still had nearly one full can of paint left. I thought we should go back and do major touch-ups. We’d been putting it on pretty thick but the original paint still showed through most places, especially when the clouds would break and we’d get a glimpse of what the job looked like in direct sunlight. It wasn’t a pretty sight. But Bishop said we had enough paint left to do at least part of the roof, for when they sent the helicopters to hunt us down. By now his paranoid remarks didn’t bother me so much; I realized this was just his way of speaking. It was creepy but that was how he talked.
He hadn’t considered how to get up on top of the box without ruining the wet paint on the sides. He sat down on his haunches to puzzle out the answer while Theresa gave him poisonous looks. Eventually he dragged up a deadfall spruce about three metres long and, pointing it straight up with his two hands, lowered it some and finally let it go. He’d figured the distance pretty well, actually. The top end only messed up a small patch on Theresa’s side, easily fixed with paint still on the other brushes. I was surprised how quickly he scampered up this log ladder, like a South Pacific boy scurrying up a palm tree for coconuts. He got about half of the square surface covered—the front half, closest to the driver. The rest stayed government blue-and-red.
The three of us were a mess. Bishop put some gas from one of the jerry cans on the T-shirt Theresa had used that morning for washing and started to rub off all the blotches of vomity green on various parts of his body. We pointed out ones in places he couldn’t see. Then he and I did the same for Theresa, who had a big drop the size of a quarter in her hair, right above one ear, and a smaller one on her chin. Then came my turn to get the once-over from them.In the end, we all marched down to the little stream to wash off the gas and dirt. Strange considering the season, but the water wasn’t deeper than a half-empty bathtub at most. With Bishop and me still in our underwear, the three of us got in at the same time and managed to mostly submerge ourselves by holding our arms over our heads and keeping our legs out straight. Some of us might have wanted it to be otherwise, but it was a very unsexy experience. The water was freezing cold.
Jericho Page 13
