Читать книгу When Fenelon Falls - Dorothy Ellen Palmer - Страница 15

So there was a lost world down there, way down below the duckweed, but unlike the Donovan song, I doubt it was anywhere you’d want to be. I often wondered what the snapping turtles thought of their not so brave new world, if they rolled their eyes at the random crap we so indiscriminately chucked into their habitat, if they had the good sense to take their shells elsewhere while the swimming was good. Probably not. Like most of earth’s creatures, turtles are both stubborn and shortsighted. I bet death surprised them.

The frogs were a little smarter. They moved out ahead of the overcrowding, creating their own housing crisis deeper in the swamp: too many frogs, not enough pads. Jordan loved it. You see, once she got her feet in place and gained her balance, she was March’s undisputed Frogging Queen, particularly good at hanging on to bait frogs, those tiny baby leopards that squeezed out of larger hands. Must have been the manual dexterity of all that writing and knitting. She would have won every Frogathon had Dexter and Alexander not cheated. Seventeen that summer, and so inseparable that Uncle H did their already similar nicknames of Dex and Der one better by calling them Ching and Ching, the boys simply combined their catch. They resented the fact that when Uncle H wanted bait he went to Jordan first, that when it should have been a nephew, a niece went fishing with him in his boat, Excalibur.

Should we have been in the swamp at all? Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies. All I’ll say is that any future archeologist would have a field day, X-raying our ex-swamp. It held a career-making Ph.D dissertation: The Cultural Anthropology of Illicit Mid-twentieth-century Refuse. Pun intended. I’m sure my father’s exuberant landfill practices violated every known dumping code, even back then. Was any of it toxic? Let’s hope the oil drums were empty. Let’s hope they were oil drums.

Whenever a patch of swamp solidified into chunky duckweed stew, Dad would whistle for Balsam. He’d say the same thing every time: ‘Gotta see a man about a rock.’ A few days later there’d be a familiar threatening sound, a mechanical growl that by the time it reached us sounded like some fool firing a machine gun at a tank, a din that only got worse until Mr. Eustache Hezekiah Gale cut Bessie’s engine and she dropped her load.

Jordan dropped whatever she was doing and ran. She loved Hezzy. The rest of us kept double distance. It’s not kind but it’s true: he looked like both of them, Popeye and Olive Oyl. Short and muscular, he had the longest arms I’ve ever seen; brown and bandy, he carried them curved like a ready gunslinger, hanging to his knees. But he also had slicked-back black hair and tiny black eyes set much too close together. He had a chipped right front tooth that had turned equally black. He shaved on Sundays and on the other six days had a face full of Brillo pad. Jordan would launch into his arms and he’d say, ‘Here’s a girlie wants to be tickled pink!’ He’d swoop her up and give her a whisker rub that could’ve scraped paint. She’d sit in his lap and ask yet again how he got his name: ‘Well, girlie, it seems I got me one grandaddy from Kee-bec an’ another from In-ver-ness. My mama, she called me after the Frenchie one, but I stuck with the one that wouldn’t get me beat up after school.’

Hezzy knew where to dump without having to ask. He’d cut the ignition of his rust-green 1930s pickup, get out and lean on the door. He’d slip his key, that’s key singular, not keys, into his overalls chest pocket, trading it for his Buckinghams and a book of matches from the Pattie House, his watering hall in Coboconk. Then he’d pat his best girlie’s ass and say, ‘Good one, Bessie B.’ Twice the size of the putt-putts we call trucks today, Bessie Behemoth would call a Hummer ‘junior’; she hauled rocks enough for a personal mountain. And Hezzy had one. Thanks to a glacier that paused and took a dump between Cobie and Rosedale some uncountable number of years ago, creating a rock face that still stares at you as you’re driving up Highway 35, local farmers had more rocks than they could ever use. The first settlers, many of them rock-savvy Highlanders, tried. Better bend than break. You can still see stone houses, stone fences and old stone roads. But there are only so many ways to bend a rock, and a century has dated their usefulness. Hezzy saw them as vermin, as big obstinate bugs. He was as happy to be rid of them as Dad was to get them, but they both stayed framed in the same scripted dance of distance. A good-old-boys flick, two aging cowpokes who’d known each other forever, but, beyond hat tipping, don’t know each other at all:

Dad: So, buddy boy, what do I owe you?

Hezzy: Tommy, it’s rocks. Himself owns ’em. Hain’t a selling what I don’t own. It’s illegal, see? I tol’ja finishin’ school wouldn’t make you smarter ’n me.

Dad: That you did, pal. So can I pay for your gas then, and your time?

Hezzy: Nope. I’m gettin’ a field ’n’ all you’re gettin’ is a buncha disappearin’ rocks.

I like to imagine Hezzy’s response to the fact that forty years later people part with big bucks for big rocks, that they’re a hot commodity in newfangled stores called garden centres. I can just hear him, ‘Garden what? City pissers are dim, I’ll gran’cha that, but y’gotta be a special kinda stupid t’pay for rocks.’ He’d be slapping his knees and coughing. He’d suck on his Buckingham and try again, ‘Whatcha going to sell ’em next? Water?’

His kind has all but passed from the planet, but his settler common sense plays a central role in these pages. Hezzy didn’t call a spade anything; he was too busy digging. He figured folks had more use for lawn than swamp and he was quite prepared to look the other way to help us get it. Hard to ignore the stove top jutting through the duckweed? Not to mention the helter-skelter Rosedale Roxy? Not for him. ‘Don’t go a-huntin’ guilty,’ he’d say. ‘It’ll find you just fine.’ Or, ‘When a ewe’s drowned, she’s dead. And folks? Same difference. We’re all just walkin’ fertilizer.’

To solidify the rocky patch, Dad drove into the Canadian Tire in Fenelon and ordered a load of gravel to be followed by a load of soil, both of which – insert sigh here – you have to pay good money for. He skimped, surprise, surprise, because after a heavy rain we’d get up in the morning and discover that the swamp had belched up a tire, a distasteful lawn chair or an indigestible chunk of couch. Jordan and I would run on deck shouting, ‘All Hail the Swamp Vomit!’ We’d lean over the rail chanting our version of Donovan’s song, also from Centennial Year: ‘First there is a bedspring, then there is no bedspring, then there is.’ Or ‘First there is a toilet, then there is no toilet, then there is.’ We sang in an unstoppable loop, the way a bus of kids will shout themselves hoarse at ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the wall.’ And then we had to end it properly.

‘SNAFU,’ she’d pronounce seriously. ‘FUBAR,’ I’d respond with equal gravity. We’d pause, nod and shout together, ‘Sayonara, SNAFUBARRR!’

Dad couldn’t criticize. He’d been the one to tell us, privately of course, what SNAFU and FUBAR meant. Seems in the days of wartime rationing, you could even economize swearing. It had, of course, been Jordan’s creative economy to combine them. Dad had grinned, until he heard high heels, at which point he shook his finger in Jordan’s direction, gripped his shovel and force-fed the unpalatable back down the swamp’s gullet. As I guess you’ve figured out by now, Dad was too busy feeding the swamp to raise us and too busy filming the script of our lives to help us write it, so MC pretty much directed the show. She plotted as she wished, but the universe was listening, so she also got its opposite.

A case in point: take the review of the Summer Protocol that MC launched into once we came in from the bonfire. Accentuating her points with the hairbrush as she made Jordan’s night braid, she ran through her expectations and came to Kronk. ‘What cannot be cured must be endured. Boozers are bums. Avoid him.’ Well, that would have been pretty hard to do because Jordan was, in fact, his business partner, the main supplier of the baby brown leopard frogs he sold for bait. When he’d been mean to Yogi, we’d repay him in his own coin. We’d sell him a dozen little baiters one day, swipe them out of his Coke cooler at night, and sell them right back to him the next: two dimes a dozen. For Jordan’s collection. Other denominations went straight down our gullets via Mrs. Miller’s General Store. MC should’ve listened to herself, to what she said often enough about her daughter: forbid a fool a thing and that he will do. Us fools figured what she don’t know couldn’t hurt us. So assuming one of the things MC might have wished for was obedient children – ones who didn’t consort behind her back with the local drunk to make under-the-table cash for better treats that she was willing to provide – she didn’t get it.

Did she deserve our deception? Good question. One, I never asked. When you’re a hungry kid, any notion of just desserts for adults flies out the screen door. MC fed us the way she fed the swamp, with reluctance and resentment, and wouldn’t let us be fed any other way. Enough is not as good as a feast. There was no long table sit-down, no Who Pudding and no Rare Who Roast Beast. We ate alone. And that pushed us another fork length away from March, busily potlucking each other’s cottages. In Almost, the purchasing, preparing, consumption and clean-up of food was pure Protocol, never pleasure. Monday: bangers and mash. Tuesday: Salisbury steak. Wednesday: chicken potpie. Thursday: Spam or Spork. Friday: fish and chips. Saturday: bubble and squeak. Sunday: roast beef and Yorkshire pudding if you’d been good. If not, Spam tastes just as good reheated. What we ken first we know best.

For years, I honestly believed every family ate like mine, believed that all mothers buttered their kids one slice of day-old white bread each and plated portions in untouching triangles: potatoes mashed or boiled on the right, canned vegetable on the left and meat below. Food got served on Melmac green or brown, and you ate it. All of it. No questions asked. No Biafran children necessary. No Oliver Twist audacity. The very concept of asking for more, of more existing to be asked for, never occurred to us. Mom’s special spatula had already scraped every morsel, drop and crumb. It rendered the question of sharing moot. Those who never learn generosity at the family table are unlikely to offer it to others. They never extend it to themselves. Here’s what they ken first and best: they don’t deserve it.

More turtle stubborn than I ever was, BS kept trying to do so. She began that summer by attempting to rewrite the menu of the Summer Protocol. Probably not good timing, given MC’s singeing at the bonfire. Not wise to pick the moment when your mother is raking your head with a metal hairbrush. They sounded like this:

‘Can I sleep out in one of the cousins’ big tents this summer? Ouch!’

‘No dear, that’d be a waste of good sheets.’ Good twenty-year- old sheets.

‘Could cousin Marianne have dinner, owww? Or maybe cousin Dale sleepover?’

‘We’ll see, dear. It depends on how good you are. Only time will tell on that score.’ Jordan’s version two imitated that line later, adding its translation: ‘No, you selfish little brat, because we’d be obliged to return the favour. If you sleep there, then said cousin will want to sleep here. We’d have to feed them breakfast which isn’t possible because a box of eight Muffets and one box of Alpha-Bits in pre-measured one-cup servings lasts this family exactly five breakfasts. You only get bacon and eggs on the weekend if you follow the rules.’

In real time, Jordan sighed. ‘Time, tide and turnips. I’m never good enough for you.’

Mom snapped a hair elastic and played dirty. ‘Fine. You win.’ When maybe gleamed in her daughter’s eyes, MC shrugged. ‘I don’t care if all of March learns you wet the bed. But you might.’ When Jordan’s retort included the word ‘damnation,’ she got to burn the midnight oil writing this poisonous little reproof a hundred times: ‘The intelligent have vocabularies sufficient to any task. Only the vulgar and unintelligent resort to profanity. Which are you?’

Now don’t misunderstand. British vernacular and war lingo – those were encouraged. We could say ‘bloody well’ all we bloody well wanted. Given Grandma’s working-class roots, she often uttered words learned well before she married a minister. If the occasional imitative ‘bollocks’ and ‘shite’ left our mouths, she’d say, ‘Well, I’ll be buggered, that’s Lizzie the Q’s second language!’ March found it charming. But we never swore. We were never profane. Not even Derwood. The words I hurled at Yogi’s stoning were every swear word I’d ever uttered. You’ll find that hard to believe, I’m sure, but it just wasn’t done. Even when I swore in my head, it was laughable by today’s standards. ‘Tough titties,’ now that was bad-ass. Alone, BS and I would try, ‘What the cluck!’ and ‘Kiss my asp!’ and ‘Chuck you, Farley!’ We’d even risk ‘Puck off!’ ‘Piss off’ was rude; we said ‘P.O.’ We’d call Derwood an asswipe and feel like James Dean. But that was as foul as we got. And had we been in ear’s reach of a familial adult, they’d have replaced our Dubble Bubble with a bar of Sunlight. And scrubbed.

So that first Saturday night, MC got her way and BS got hand cramps. But win by emotional blackmail and no one wants to give you anything else. MC should have listened to herself: he’s the slave of all slaves who serves none but himself. When you cannot give, you’ll little get. Penny wise and pound foolish. Deny your child and she ceases to be your child. So Queen MC got her pink-trimmed castle, her royal purple petunias, a gangplank dock, a chuck-you-Farley-March deck and got left royally alone. She presided over mosquitoes, snappers, skunks and an inquisitive gaze of raccoons. Yes, that’s exactly what you call a bunch of OB’s little caged friends.

But MC did give us something else, a gift she never intended. As the minister-grandpa I never met might have put it: ‘The last shall be first.’ Unlike Marches One to Six, veiled by sacred cedars and rose hedges no one but a sky pilot would call a bush, we had eyes. We could gaze out. If you stared past the garbage and breathed past the smell, Almost had the very best of sunsets. Bannocks are better than no bread. Our little finger of a dock got washed at each day’s end by the rosiest light of all. When Jordan sat there – well, you remember.