“Sometimes spirit whispers, ruffling our hair, rustling our papers, and the fragile pages of our ancient manuscripts.”
The Window Maker
We had to do something with Dad’s ashes. They’d sat up on the top shelf of his closet for over a year in a carton that reminded me of Chinese takeout, and although Mum had never said anything about it, I’m sure she wanted us kids to help make arrangements. But all we could do, it seemed, was dither, argue, and forget. I suppose none of us wanted to be reminded of what that strangely heavy package represented—not so much because of the facts of who Dad was, but because our recollections diverged, each of us transfixed by a different aspect of the remains inside his plastic urn. We were unable to reconcile our truths and didn’t know how to honour Dad and be faithful to his memory at the same time.
His room became a sort of mausoleum, its door closed, window shut, curtains drawn. I found it hard to breathe in there. The stagnant air seemed dead—incapable of transmitting sound or sustaining life.
On visits, I’d sometimes sneak over its threshold, closing the door behind me with a barely audible click so Mum wouldn’t hear. I didn’t want to look in the closet, where all Dad’s suits and slacks and ties and shoes were hung and stacked and lined up in perfect order. Didn’t want to examine the contents of his dresser drawers: the T-shirts, underpants, scarves, sweaters, and socks that really should have been thrown out or carted off to the thrift. I just wanted to be there, breathing that strangely still and silent air which had long since lost the scent of him—transubstantiated air, thick and heavy as water.
I guess I was hoping to sense evidence of his existence still lingering in the spaces between molecules, the places where the light lives. Was there something left of him more substantial than memories and photographs—a consciousness I could actually commune with and ask my unanswered questions?
My thoughts during those unsettling visits would inevitably coalesce at the very beginning—in my father’s arms. I’m not clear on all the details, but think we were at Kennington Cove. A buffeting wind blew in off the Atlantic. I can hear the waves crashing onto the beach, smell the salt air, and feel the tingle of its molecules on my skin and in my hair. I can’t say why I was in his arms that day. Dad wasn’t so much a touchy-feely type, his philosophy on child rearing running along the lines of let ‘em stumble and they’ll learn. So I can’t escape the inherent contradiction of that tender encounter. I think I might have been haunted even then by the awareness that I would never experience that intensity of his love again.
It’s what you’d call a seminal moment. My hand is on his cheek. I see it there, the tiny, splayed fingers of a three-year-old. His bristles tickle my palm, so I guess he hadn’t shaved that morning. I laughed, so we must have been having fun.
He’s striding from our blanket, spread out on the sand, down toward the surf. The thunder of collapsing waves gets louder and louder as we approach. I’m not afraid, though. I’m in my father’s arms, and—no matter what—in Dad we trust. But something like fear pulses in the places where our skins make contact, and I can’t be sure if it emanates from him—like the heat from a sun-baked stone—or if it’s just me, or if maybe it’s a sort of psychic current, electrifying the atmosphere. It doesn’t matter; we were happy. Not happy enough to dance or laugh, but enough to know that it might be possible to dance and laugh in our nearly-naked state if only we could let go completely.
We both knew a rite was being enacted that afternoon, but neither of us could say what was sacred about it. The day after, we would be immersed once more in the tense admixture of fear and trust that binds families together—a feeling that we must all be saved but never quite know from what. It was as pervasive as the aroma of pot roasts, pancakes, and maple syrup in our household. But who thinks such things as a three-year-old in his father’s arms, and by the time we’re old enough to carry our own kids down the beach, who wants to confuse childhood memories with the truth?
At some point in our transit from sun-warmed sand toward crashing waves, I turn from my father, wrenching round in his arms to see where we are going. The waves roll in, mountains of water that shudder and buck as they head up the beach, falter, then fall again and again. I squeal. It’s not often I get to use that word in reference to myself, but that day I squealed. I don’t want him to stop, but do want him to know how excited I am to be on the brink of the ocean—with him. He laughs. And, oh, when he laughs, all his Cape Breton upbringing echoes through the universe, tickling anyone in his presence. Dad had a wonderful laugh, a magical laugh. Problem was, he laughed even when he was angry.
For that mythical moment—and I knew it had the aura of legend about it even then, in my childishness—for that mythical moment we are one.
This is not gushy sentimentalism, I have to say, for any of you cynical bastards out there who’ve become too hard-baked to let any new emotion in or old emotion out. It’s a fact. Dad and I bonded the instant his bare feet splashed into those thrashing waves. I felt the cold swirl of the ocean telegraphed up the neural network, shooting through axons, leaping synaptic gaps, arcing the seam between body and soul—bodies and souls—with a substance infinitely extensible and strong, a substance scientists have been looking for ever since they postulated the Big Bang. Me and my dad found it that day at Kennington Cove—what has been referred to in recent headlines as the God Particle, whatever that’s supposed to mean to an inveterate atheist like me.
Did he know what he was doing, as Mother watched from our blanket on the sand, and my grandparents too? Did he suddenly decide, This is the moment when my son and I shall bond? And if that was the case, what concatenation of elements urged him on? Perhaps it had something to do with the position of the sun in the sky. Maybe it was angled just right, penetrating the slates and blinds of his physical being—that lean, muscular body of his—the rays piercing right through to his heart, triggering an ancient code. Or maybe the wind off his ancestral ocean made him shiver, reminding him that something ceremonious needed doing. Whatever trip wired that impromptu baptism, there would be no turning back, no effacing its indelible effect.
We both knew it.
My sister and oldest brother were out there in the waves, body-surfing. They’d thrash and paddle out as far as they could, bobbing on their tiptoes, then when the right wave came—one bigger than all the rest and curled just so—launch, flailing desperately to stay ahead of the tilting surge, which would catch them, send them shooting like seals toward the shore. I envied their size and strength. When would my turn come to do something they couldn’t? I wished they would look our way for just a moment and envy me. But they didn’t. Dripping, laughing, they would right themselves and stumble back down the beach and into the waves to catch their next ride.
Dad took me out farther and farther until the water swirled round me. At first, I tried to avoid the dunking, climbing higher up into his arms. But he held me firm, clamping me to his chest. He stopped at the exact point where the waves broke, seeming to lunge at us with palpable fury. But Father stood, firm as a breakwater or bridge piling, long enough for me to understand that he was an immovable object…
And there he was in a carton in his bedroom closet—along with his draped and drooping garments—the source of family dispute still, almost a year after he’d been rendered to ashes and chips of bone.
On the road to Pentiction
Karl and Noreen didn’t really want to go to Dad’s memorial, but out of respect they didn’t complain. I was grateful for their dignified stoicism. As for me, I wanted to be there in spirit as well as mind, to celebrate and mourn the passing of my father and dampen the interminable, nagging psychoanalysis of an amateur son.
The three of us spent the five-hour trip up to Penticton staring at the scenery, making perfunctory comments, and putting in requests about the basic calls of human nature. There are some things you only get to do once in your lifetime; attending your sort-of patriarch’s memorial among them. At least we weren’t arguing.
Noreen did sigh occasionally, her way of reminding me it was hot in the car. Opening the windows simply added bellows to the heat, like being breathed on by the devil himself. There were antecedents to those accusing sighs. When we bought the Matrix, I was the one to nix the ‘extravagance’ of air conditioning and electric windows. Noreen disputed the point, but I prevailed. “We live on the West Coast, for god’s sake,” I argued. “In a temperate climate. There’s only three months out of the year when we actually have to worry about possible heat waves, and the climactic dial is only set at broil for perhaps eight hours out of twenty-four. Why would we spend hundreds of dollars for an environmentally unfriendly feature we might need less than ten percent of the time we’re actually in the car?”
This is the reason, Noreen was reminding me.
For his part, Karl slouched in the back seat, disconsolate as a hermit crab without its shell. Being plucked from ‘the bunker’ and carted off to my parents’ bungalow on Nicolson Street in the suburbs of Penticton was not his idea of quality time. I suppose it wouldn’t have been mine either as a surly 18-year-old. To make matters worse, his cell phone was out of range for most of the drive—Noreen would have torn a strip off him anyway if he’d logged into any of his gaming apps via the family data plan. Like one of Plato’s cave dwellers hauled up out of the nether gloom, he squinted uncomfortably at the blistering light.
By some unfathomable process of elimination, they both blamed me for all that had gone wrong, was going wrong, or ever would go wrong in our family relationships. Honestly, I think they secretly accuse me of making the weather, I thought. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Karl and Noreen hated me; ‘intensely disliked’ would be a less inflammatory descriptor.
Somewhere past Hope
Every phase of life begins as a sort of adventure. But by our senior years, after we’ve been through the spin cycle more times than grandpa’s underwear, we come to the conclusion that even the fresh starts are false—or perhaps they’ve been rendered false by the ad agencies that colour our dreams pastel pink with a flash of perfectly white, aligned teeth. And if we’re religious and honest at the same time, we have to suspect that the really big liar is god himself—that he’s above the clouds thinking up ways to fool us.
I’m not religious or particularly honest, so god hasn’t been a disappointment to me. More recently, I’ve recognized him as a man in an Armani suit, carrying an impossibly slender briefcase, his stylish leather shoes echoing through marble foyers, legions of hirelings—accountants, marketers, designers, consultants of every stripe hot on his heels, gabbling formulae intended to pervert the course of innocence and make slick and smooth the ways of nature.
Noreen strode into my life one hot September afternoon when I was sitting in the Quad at Simon Fraser University, wondering what the hell I was doing there. “Hi,” she said. One minute I’d been alone, happily contemplating my angst; the next, a tall, denim-clad young woman with her dark hair pulled back into a long ponytail was sitting beside me, asking who I was with those piercing blue eyes of hers, taking my breath away. “Mind if I join you?” She plopped her knapsack down on the bench between us, ripped open its zipper, and pulled out a brown-bag lunch. “I’m Noreen.”
“Kyle,” I said. “Kyle Welland.”
“I’m not usually so pushy, but I’ve seen you around, and, well, I just wanted to get to know you. Weird, huh?”
“Maybe not,” I joked. “I mean, there is such a thing as personal gravitas, don’t you think? A force that pulls people into orbit like the earth around the sun, the moon around the earth, the lunar module around the moon.”
Noreen laughed, almost choking on her avocado and cream cheese cracker. I breathed a sigh of relief. She got it.
God, she was beautiful! That’s all I could think. That and why the hell was she sitting next to me? Her long alabaster fingers worked themselves around the rims of her whole-wheat wafers nimbly, and she stared at them with devotion before crunching down with her perfectly imperfect teeth. Then she chewed, her eyes closed briefly, her thin lips pursed, jaw muscles working. I could have composed a sonnet right then and there if I’d been alone with just the memory of her. But Noreen never lets you think of her that way. She’s always making herself real, even when she’s not in the room.
“What are you taking?” she asked.
“For my hemorrhoids, you mean?”
The one flaw to Noreen’s perfection—if you wish to consider it a flaw—is her laugh. When it’s unrestrained, it emanates from her chest, not her belly, so it gets squeezed out too fast. You could easily mistake it for nervous laughter if you didn’t know her very well; almost a bray if yours is a malicious frame of mind.
My father’s laughter emanated from deep, deep down inside his belly, so it had time to form as it worked its way up through his innards and over his vocal cords, emerging as a rich, round sound that made you want to laugh with him. He was a maestro of laughter, my dad.
“No, Goofy! What courses are you studying?” she persisted.
She’d called me goofy! From the doldrums of self-doubt, I had been elevated into the Nirvana of a possibly romantic Seventh Heaven. Goofy! Instinctively, I knew it was time to tack—steer a course into the wind, trim sails, and so on. “Political science,” I said. “I want to get into journalism eventually.”
“Wow!”
“You?”
“Student records.”
“Huh?”
“I’m a clerk in the admin office. That’s where I’ve seen you before. You’re an adult student, right?”
“I’m old enough to be an adult, that’s true.”
You have to understand, Noreen appreciates humour, but generally in a serious vein. So when I laughed and she did too, we weren’t necessarily laughing at the same thing in the same way. Not at all. What she loved most about me from the start was my goofy streak, the same way someone with a vitamin deficiency takes a pill. I loved her directness and sincerity. Some days we remember that; usually we argue because of it.
That’s archetypal, isn’t it? Lovers getting annoyed and frustrated over time by the things they loved best about each other when they first met.
Halfway between Vancouver and Penticton is Manning Park Resort. As usual, we pulled in for a pit stop. Noreen and Karl headed for the restaurant. I plunked myself down at a concrete picnic table out on the grounds, watching the tourists feed the ground squirrels and the whisky jacks, amazed that nature would come so close to anything as dangerous as a human being with a peanut or a bread crust in its hand.
The wave broke at that precise moment, and I wept silently for my father—for all he had been and all that he hadn’t. I didn’t make a scene. Nobody knew. They went about their business: entertaining nature’s menagerie; keeping tabs on their riotous kids; holding hands and walking meditatively. I knew I was weeping and broken, and that was enough. I sure as hell didn’t want Noreen and Karl to have to commiserate with me.
When we left the resort, ramping up speed to merge back onto the Crow’s Nest Highway, I reached across and placed my hand over Noreen’s. She glanced at me, and for a second, her chronic ennui evaporated. She knows, I thought.
We still do love each other. Even after all that’s happened we can imagine our ways back to that bench up at SFU.
Downhill from here
From Marron Valley, just past the Twin Lakes Golf and RV Resort, it’s all downhill into Penticton. In our final approaches, we lurch through the switchbacks until we hit the junction of Highway 97; then turn left, skirting the western shore of Skaha Lake; finally we coast onto Skaha Lake Road, turning left again at the Channel Causeway, a route that leads to Mum and Dad’s.
Gravity takes hold on that last summit. In fact, I sometimes think that once we have crossed that divide, a force stronger than gravity latches on and pulls us down, down into the epicentre of our nomadic family’s story. The restraining force that—for the most part—keeps me on the coast has become too weak to exert any influence past the hamlet of Kaleden.
Penticton isn’t such a bad place… No, let me not damn with faint praise. I’m sure it’s a great place to call home for the 33,000 or so souls who live there. It’s got everything a retired prairie farmer, or tourist, or orchardist, or resort operator could ever need or want: great weather, swimmable lakes at both ends of town, fresh fruit right off the vine, and so on.
But for me, there’s something strange about its gravitational field—the way it sucks you in with its exponential yearning. I always feel short and squat when I’m there, the way you’d feel being watched from a great height. I’ve never mentioned this to my brother, Robert. He and his wife, Cathy, were the first Wellands to establish roots in Penticton, and he’s somewhat protective of his new homeland. So I avoid mention of its strange gravity, which I believe actually densifies the atmosphere in the vicinity of the town. I complain about my asthma instead when asked why I don’t visit more often. As often as not, an excuse is as good as a reason. Even so, Robert scoffs at the notion, as if nothing resembling a disease like asthma could possibly exist in his version of paradise.
He had been living in Penticton a quarter century or more before my parents decided to join him. They migrated from Toronto. My sister Beth and her husband John were drawn in somewhere along the way too, so that the whole family excepting me was living in Penticton by the time Dad died—or passed, if you prefer that less definitive idiom. As usual, I was reviewing this schema of family history as we rolled down the hill from Kaleden, buffeted by the hot air blasting in through the Matrix’s open windows.
“You could long-board all the way into town from here, Karl,” I shouted over my shoulder, hoping to cheer up the gloomy man-child in the back seat as we neared our destination.
“How would you know?” he griped.
“Don’t be so rude,” Noreen chided.
My parents actually made the front page of the Penticton Herald with their entrance into town. They had carried a folder full of bonds taken from their safe deposit box in Toronto all the way across the country to Penticton and were anxious to get them securely locked away in the land of ripening fruit and heat-lamp sunshine. So, their first stop was the Royal Bank branch at the corner of Main and Nanaimo. But they didn’t have an appointment and were asked to come back later that afternoon. Dad put the folder on top of the car, got in, reached across to open the door for Mum, then closed his door and drove off.
The next day’s Herald featured him and Mum holding up one of their bonds, which was rumpled and stamped with tire tracks. I could tell Dad had been laughing just before the photo was taken; Mum was smiling stiffly, in that reserved way she sometimes adopts after she’s been involved in what she considers a ‘stupid’ mistake. The newspaper account noted that almost all the paper had been turned in to the police by the honest citizens of Penticton, adding that the outstanding balance couldn’t be cashed anyways, seeing as they were in Mum and Dad’s name.
Like I said, Penticton is truly a great place, if you aren’t adversely affected by its gravity.
The chosen one
If Dad had things his way, everyone at his memorial would have got drunk. His real memorial wouldn’t have been a starched, dignified affair, convened at a funeral chapel downtown—the one with an austere black sign out front reminding people that the business had been established in 1908, which, according to the digital stopwatch right under the sign, would have amounted to about 51 million minutes of interring corpses before Dr. Henry Hansen signed off on Dad’s death certificate at the Penticton Regional Hospital.
The thought of a church ceremony was gruffly nixed by Robert. “He’d be squirming in his urn,” he grumbled out of Mum’s earshot. As usual, when it comes to the practicalities of family politics, he was right. None of us were churchgoers, and at least one of us was a practicing atheist. Our apostasy, from even the attenuated sermonizing of the United Church of Canada, couldn’t be pinned to a specific date with any more accuracy than a dart thrown at a calendar. As kids, we all liked Reverend Kennedy, up to a point. And I, as the last Welland to attend Norwood United, was willing to sit through his sermons, scourged by the itchy wool suit that had been purchased by my parents as a Sunday school grad gift, because I was infatuated in a very serious way by the reverend’s stunningly beautiful daughter Peggy. She sat in the front pew but would occasionally bestow radiant glances upon her father’s flock. I prayed her fervent blue eyes would alight upon me, sang hymns with gusto, hoping mine would be the voice that reached the conch-like perfection of her right inner ear. But when no sign of benediction was bestowed, my faith petered out.
I had hoped to slip away from the congregation like a carelessly docked rowboat, drifting off onto a perfectly still lake, its untethered rope slipping into the water with a barely audible plop—the type of sound a fleeing rat might make. But my sin became known when Reverend Kennedy phoned my parents to ask why I had not been seen in church for some weeks. I had been dreading the damning summons. A couple of days before, an hour or so after the flock would have been loosed from Sunday service, Peggy’s eyes finally did fasten upon me. She was still in her Sunday dress and patent leather shoes when I emerged from the Deep Pockets Pool Hall, my itchy jacket slung over my shoulder and my tightly knotted tie loosed, looking as cool as I could alongside my good friend and pool hall nemesis Doug McCallum. There could be no doubting that, at last, I had been noticed by Peggy Kennedy. In that instant, she divined the ungodly truth. I had been spending the money my parents gave me for Norwood United’s collection plate in what could only be judged as the basement portico of hell. I waved sheepishly, painfully aware I was in the kind of trouble that started with a capital ‘T’, that rhymes with ‘P’, and that stands for Pool.
Dad laughed when he heard the story; Mum made sure I paid back ‘every last penny’ of the filched collection plate money; I never darkened Norwood United’s door again.
My father’s real memorial would have been held in the officer’s mess of some air force base if he’d died before he hit forty-five. That’s when he decided to quit rather than be reassigned to ‘flying a desk’. His second career—as a high school teacher of industrial arts, math, and science to hordes of bored suburban Toronto-area students—was rewarding but didn’t inspire the same sense of camaraderie and bravado as his first. His actual memorial, in the fruit-growing Eden of Penticton, came after creeping dementia made him give up carpentry and square dancing, both of which he hated anyway. It was the celebration of a long-since-past tense.
“You never want to wind up in heaven before you’re dead,” he warned me once from that lucid dream state when dementia had reduced his inhibitions but hadn’t yet destroyed his mind. By then, everyone had forgotten, or obscured, or forgiven, or denigrated the real Bryce Edwin Welland.
We pulled into Penticton at about three o’clock. Robert’s truck was parked out on the street at my parents place, Beth’s car in the drive. Noreen sighed. Karl shouldered open the rear door and clambered out the passenger side onto my parents’ lawn, theirs being one of those subdivisions with no sidewalks, just manicured lawns edged with a quarter-round of concrete at the road. He seemed to get along better with Robert than with me, a pattern I’ve seen in other people’s kids. Noreen thinks that’s because Uncle Rob is direct and blunt to the point of gruffness in his jocular commentary about Karl’s appearance and behaviours. “You’re too wimpy,” is the way she puts it. “You worry too much about his sensitive feelings.”
This from a mother who insisted on home birth because she didn’t want the hospital mood or the smell of antiseptics permeating our son’s skin.
“Hey!” I shouted after him as he schlepped across the lawn to my parents’ front door. “Don’t go empty-handed, help unload here!”
“I’ve got to take a crap.”
“Well, clench it.”
“Jesus!” Noreen hissed. “Let it go. We can get the stuff later.”
She was right, of course. First things first. What was I thinking? I cranked up the driver’s side window; slammed the door with just enough force to say I was determined, not angry; then followed my wife and son to my parents’ front door, which Karl had left ajar. “Hey, Bud,” I heard Robert’s booming voice as I made my way up the steps. “How you doing?”
“I’m okay,” Karl said.
By the time I entered, Rob had my son clenched in a bear hug and was slapping him on the back with enough force to knock the wind out of him. Then he saw me. “Bro!” he bellowed, letting go of Robert and clinging onto me like I was the last life preserver on his thrashing ocean. He’d been drinking. Not enough to slur words or muddle thoughts, but his expressions of joy came across as overly sentimental. Slushy. I slapped his back and hung onto him, too. Noreen watched our manly effusions dutifully, then accepted a hug from Rob on her way in.
Mum sat in her favourite rocking chair by the living room window. Had I glanced up from her front yard, I would have seen her there, looking out into the blaring light. She usually greets us in the foyer, but even as I crossed the living room, she did not move to get up. This surprised me. If I’d imagined our first meeting as widow and bereft son, I would have cast her as the more consoling of the two, but she lacked the energy needed to set the contraption in motion and propel her body forward. It’s not one of those simple rocking chairs you would expect to see on a porch in the Adirondack’s; rather, hers is a complicated affair of rods, joints and levers intended to keep the occupant level with the ground at all times as they swing back and forth. She seemed shrunken and shrivelled in this contraption, like a plant dying for lack of water.
“Mum?”
Only then did she raise her red-rimmed eyes to me and her gnarled, arthritic arms. I leaned over and hugged her awkwardly, her body feeling brittle and insubstantial in my embrace—a parchment that might disintegrate at any moment. We held onto each other, and then I felt the tremors of her sorrow, and the horrible truth dawned on me that she had been waiting all those hours as we drove to Penticton so she could cry. I was the son chosen to receive her grief.
May we rest in peace
Memorials are such awkward affairs. Nobody really knows what to do, what to say to make the deceased’s life meaningful. You can’t really utter the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, can you? Can’t point out that the medals arrayed on the table were earned dropping bombs on civilian populations or that your old man never once set foot in a legion hall or talked about the war after it was over. Or that the picture of your Mum and Dad in an oh-so-British back yard, up against a brick wall, him with his air force cap askew, her laughing, was probably taken before my sister was conceived and the honourable thing had to be done. Or that the reason there’s no picture of me as a babe in swaddling clothes is because none was ever taken—that somehow, even the act of procreation had become something of a duty by then, and the resulting child an obligation, born into the throes of marriage.
Dad’s was an open casket affair, his body laid out in a black curtained chamber for viewing before the memorial actually began. It was positioned in the far corner of the large empty room, entailing a ritual walk, almost as if you were intended to be fully aware that the decision to view the corpse was being taken against your will by prolonging the ghoulish rite. I had no choice. The duty to view my father’s corpse was inbred—predictable as iron filings drawn to a powerful magnet.
Because it’s not good enough for someone to tell you your father is dead, is it? You have to go see for yourself and ask: Where did he go? You can’t really begin to think that question until you’ve viewed the corpse. It’s in that precise moment that you realize someone you love—no matter how flawed and fractured that love may be—has actually ‘departed’, their spirit evaporated like spilled naphtha.
They couldn’t get the hands right. The way they were arranged on his chest, against the blue serge of his blazer, under the Royal Canadian Air Force crest, was… and there’s no other language for it… grotesque. I imagined my father’s hands confidently nudging the throttles of a Lancaster bomber forward, the engines gulping down the added fuel in a rage, roaring for more. Once, just before he resigned from the force, Dad took me up for a flight in a clattering, rattling Expeditor. We crawled through the sky above a miniaturized landscape in that alloy contraption, godlike in our ability to look down on the crows and gulls flitting about far below. Long after he had grounded himself, I asked him if he’d go with me to the Canadian Heritage Warplane Museum in Hamilton to look at the planes he’d flown. Maybe get him to tell me some of the stories he’d never told. He laughed, waffled, hesitated, and finally refused, his liver-spotted, palsied hands lying on the dining room table, appendages that seemed to surprise him in his old age with their involuntary movements and weaknesses, fingers “as useless as fists-full of sausages,” he’d once complained. Mum told me later, in a hushed voice, that Dad was afraid to go because “he’s forgotten more than he remembers, dear.”
Rigor mortis sets in about 12 hours after death. The muscles tighten around the bone, jerking the limbs into a sort of fist, which can’t unclench because the enzymes that normally complete the cycle of clutching and releasing are no longer being produced by the body. It remains in that state about 48 hours, then, as decomposition sets in, the body relaxes, accepting that it has well and truly died. Dad’s hands never did relax, so the mortician arranged them as best he could, the fingers meshed like cogs in a jammed gear train.
His face looked almost normal. You could tell there was something unnatural about it, like it might have belonged in a wax museum, but at least you could imagine it once having been alive. The hands are what I remember, though—the messages they conveyed in their post-mortem sign language.
In the closet
Mum stowed Dad’s cremated remains on the shelf in his bedroom closet, where they sat for a year, forgotten for the most part, dithered and argued over whenever they were brought to mind. I was content to leave them undisturbed for an indeterminate time being, a box full of inert ashes mixed with shards of bone, hidden in a dark, unfrequented place along with all the other evidence of Dad’s earthly existence. That’s how I loved him and how he would have appreciated being loved. But my siblings insisted annoyingly that I, being the writer in the family, pen a eulogy to be delivered as Dad was tipped out of his temporary urn into his forever-after. And, while I was at it, I might as well determine where his scattered ashes would finally settle. Should they be sprinkled from the open cabin of a whump-whump-whumping helicopter into the wild blue; or into the swells of the Atlantic, off the coast of his beloved Cape Breton—a place he hadn’t visited in more than three decades; or perhaps interred in an outrageously expensive plot neither Mum, nor any of the rest of us would ever visit?
What would Dad have wanted? Asking almost always made me smile, because I knew he’d got exactly what he did want—a plastic cannister and no fuss beyond what was necessary to satisfy the requirements of the law and the lowest expectations of decency and pretence in a civilized society. Dad would have laughed at our dilemma, as he’d laughed at everything he didn’t want to contemplate or comprehend, at everything he considered superfluous to the basics of getting up in the morning, showering, shaving, eating, dozing, shuffling from one location to another, and going to bed. “If you just let things be,” he once said, “if you don’t try to figure them out, you don’t end up telling yourself a bunch of lies.” There was more to his laughter than that, of course, but whatever the motive, his guffaws achieved their purpose; they kept people at bay as effectively as the snorting of a sleeping pit bull. In the end, that laugh of his emanated from the void of his dementia—the resonances of a habit he had acquired early in life. Robert and Beth no longer heard Dad’s laughter after he was dead; Mother couldn’t stop hearing it, which led to the unsettling realization that it was the only part of him that survived—his eternal mocking, self-deprecating laugh, which effectively put off her dreams of something better, something more meaningful in their lives.
En Route
Something had to be done. The inert strata of ashes in their box, reminiscent of Chinese takeout, had to be dispersed—with some semblance of ceremony. Somebody had to make a decision, and by a process of exhaustion, that somebody ended up being me. Out waited and manoeuvred, I phoned my siblings and told them I was coming up to ‘put Dad’s ashes to rest.’
“Where?” Beth wanted to know. She favoured the blue sky.
“Skaha Lake,” Robert, the practical cheapskate, countered.
I flipped a loony; heads it was; Robert won.
Neither of us quite knew how to end the ensuing pregnant pause when I delivered the verdict to my sister. I swear, the telephone lines between us sagged under the weight of her disappointment; the communications satellite almost spiralled out of orbit and burned up in the atmosphere. My only hope was to wait her out, to utter an atheist’s prayer that the black hole of her outrage would become so big it would consume its own words, its own fury, and eventually collapse in on itself, reduced to an infinitesimal point of resentment in the hazardous constellations of our private affairs.
“Skaha Lake?” she said, before realizing she had surrendered.
“Ten o’clock, Saturday,” I affirmed. “Then I think we should go for brunch at his favourite White Spot.”
“Not Tim Horton’s?” she quipped.
Truth be told, ‘Timmies’ was Dad’s preferred dining-out experience. Staff in uniforms, which assured him of their roles and his. Predominantly high school students and seniors, so as not to confuse the issue. No tip required, or accepted. Decore perfectly bland and predictable—what you’d come to expect from their TV commercials: a standard, safe environment. Mum and Dad would go there once a week or so and sit quietly sipping their coffees and nibbling their ‘Timbits’ while the world happened around them.
During those outings, Dad sometimes waxed philosophical about the meaning of life, as defined metaphorically in the compass of a sugar-coated Timbit. He would hold the donut hole up for observation between his thumb and index finger, posed as if he were a god studying an inhabited planet, and philosophize extemporaneously. “Oh shut-up!” Mum would chide. But you could tell they were both enjoying their comedic roles. And that’s how they loved each other.
“This is a formal occasion, Beth,” I said. “I think we’ll have to spring for breakfast at the Spot.”
For the final, final ceremony I went up on my own. After lashing our scraped, battered Frontiersman canoe to the roof rack, I reversed the Matrix out onto our Kitsilano street, pointed it in the general direction of the Trans-Canada Highway, and pulled away. I’d already packed and said goodbye to Noreen and Karl, but it still felt like slinking off. This, despite the fact that neither of them wanted to go. Noreen had clients to attend to and houses to show, weekends being the busiest days for realtors, and she simply couldn’t find the time for ‘a second funeral.’ Karl needed no excuse and didn’t bother making one up. He simply refused, and I didn’t insist. I needed time to myself anyway, and the rote drive up to Penticton would allow me to think things through—to rewind and review the past, then fast forward into some kind of future.
The canoe’s bow thrust into my view of the sky, narrowing my focus to the road ahead. On happier occasions, we used to laugh at this perspective, comparing the inverted Frontiersman’s prow to the inside of an eagle’s beak, which made us morsels of that predatory bird’s gobbled-down lunch. More recently, though, the canoe had been stored upside-down behind the garage, its hull faded by the merciless sun, moss spreading from incubation spaces under the plastic trim along its gunnels.
The last time I’d had it out on the water, Dad and I had gone for a paddle on Vaseaux Lake, launching from a little pull-off just before you get to the provincial park, heading south down the Okanagan Highway from Penticton. Dad sat in the bow. He dipped his blade into the water but didn’t put much into his strokes, drawing the paddle back at almost exactly the same speed as we were moving forward, content to pretend. I thought the outing might remind him of his younger days, when he’d take a week or so each summer to go off fly-fishing on his own. But he didn’t talk about it, if the experience did stir up any memories. And coming back, he didn’t even make a show of paddling, huddled and shivering, even though it seemed too hot for me, out on the glittering surface of the ruffled lake.
What happens to the space once filled by the presence of a loved-one, even an imperfect loved one? That was my intended topic for the drive up to Penticton, and until I reached the Broadway Trans Canada on-ramp, I thought it was Dad I missed—that my memories were not enough to hold onto him, and he would become merely symbolic or a fading cartoon. But as I accelerated into the east, it struck me suddenly—like a bird or rock hitting the windscreen—that it wasn’t only Dad I missed. Sure, his ashes were in the crude urn I intended to empty into Skaha Lake, but I missed Noreen, too, and Karl, and Robert, and Beth. In fact, my universe was a tattered garment, sutured together where had-beens no longer existed. It wasn’t just that the people closest to me had changed; they had vanished utterly, replaced by strands of memory, through a slow process of accretion, calcification, and distortion that resulted in a patchwork of mutually acceptable lies. Death, I finally realized, is definitive; life a matter of eternal compromise.
Past Hope, the Trans Canada narrows into a winding band of pavement, following the contours of the land. You find yourself actually driving, looking for a smooth line through the s-curves and hairpins of the Cascade Mountains. Had Noreen been in the car, she would have been scolding at every turn, telling me to slow down and ‘watch out!’ Had it been a younger version of me in the driver’s seat beside her, she might have reacted differently; she might have shrieked, and laughed, and called me stupid in the non-pejorative. Transitions! They force you to think. I punched the accelerator a little harder, coming out of every turn a little faster until I could hear the tires squealing and feel the car slewing, me counter-steering to stay on that line. It felt good to actually be driving, to be making decisions that invoked risk as well as competence—to be out of the methodical grind of the Lower Mainland and mindless scroll of the Fraser Valley. For a stretch, I revelled in the mystique of the race car driver—looking out from under the beak of the red Frontiersman lashed to the roof of our Matrix. I laughed, then slowed down, easing back into the groove of casual driving, satisfied I could still do it… could still be stupid, like a young lunatic on a motorcycle.
Then it hit me!
“Fucking idiot!” I growled, the scene flooding back into me from that eternal reservoir where such incidents slosh around forevermore, unremembered until the precise moment when they descend like the waters of a burst dam. “Fuck!” I pounded the steering wheel but couldn’t void the futile rage or its residue of despair.
Dad came home late that night. Drunk. He and Mum argued, yowling and screeching like cats. She fled into the kitchen, yanked open the cutlery drawer, grabbed a knife, and he was still coming at her, framed in the kitchen door. Pressing. Then Robert was there, between them, a lanky teen in his gaunch, hair still mussed from his pillow, refusing to let this happen. “No!” he yelled. And Dad stood there, swaying, a predator suddenly confronted with something fiercer than himself. And he couldn’t move, couldn’t figure a way, because that was his son, blocking him, and he had to back down, because that was his son standing there in front of him, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone.
One lie ends, another begins. I gripped the wheel and drove on toward Princeton, where I always stop for coffee en route to Penticton… If I’m alone.
Total Immersion
I dug into the water, pulling, then inflecting a ‘J’ into the tail end of each stroke, aiming for a miniature lighthouse at the tip of the marina breakwater. I kept to a ley line between that and a bench in Skaha Lake Park where Mum sat, flanked by Robert and Beth. I’d put Dad’s remains in the bottom of the canoe, off to the side a little, so the box wouldn’t tip when I heeled the canoe over to paddle. No hurry, I told myself. Stroke and glide. Stroke and glide. At a point about halfway between the bench and the light, I kicked out the stern, then back-paddled hard, spinning the canoe round to face my family. They could have been strangers, huddled there on the park bench, watching someone they didn’t know engage in a ceremony they couldn’t comprehend. The sentiment seemed churlish until I realized they might be thinking the same, that Robert and Beth might be looking out at me, wondering: What does he know, the bossy little shit? Nobody ever likes the guy who makes the decision nobody wants to make, and I could feel the dying embers of their resentment radiating out over the still waters.
Dad’s remains were surprisingly heavy—the dust of an average male weighing in at almost three kilos. And dust is a misnomer. According to Wikipedia: A cremator is an industrial furnace that is able to generate temperatures of 870–980 °C (1,600–1,800 °F) to ensure disintegration of the corpse. Hellish as that passage through the crematorium’s ‘retort’ may seem, it doesn’t ensure total incineration, so what’s left gets swept out of the retort and pulverized by a machine called a cremulator—essentially a high-capacity, high-speed blender—to process them into ‘ashes’ or ‘cremated remains.’ I held Dad up for Mum, Robert, and Beth to see, as if I was a Mayan priest displaying a human sacrifice, then tipped the box of fragments and ash into Skaha Lake.
It was early and quiet, so Mother’s voice trembled over the water like the cry of an exotic bird. Her keening still resonates somewhere in the universe, mingled with the primordial wail of all mothering humanity. But the surface of Skaha Lake was not perturbed, and I could see all the way down to its bottom. Father’s ashes formed an inverted plume—a mushroom cloud roiling toward the centre of the earth, driven by a force stronger than gravity. I wept, too. He had seen things I would never have to forget; couldn’t escape— even in the dissolve of his smiling dementia—the cataclysms he’d helped precipitate. He had been at the controls, manoeuvring his lumbering bird of prey over Dresden to drop bombs out of its belly, incendiaries that cremated the living—thousands upon thousands of writhing souls. He had done his duty, earned his medals… and paid his price for the rest of our lives.
Would I have done the same?
Probably. But don’t bring God into it. And don’t accompany necessary sin with the beating of drums and the blare of bugles. Don’t overwhelm disgust with bellowed anthems and drunken celebrations of victory, as if war is a kind of football game. We men sometimes do disgusting things because other men have forced us to it with barbarities that are even more disgusting. But ‘duty’ doesn’t absolve us or give us the right to sneer at anyone who says, “No! I shall not kill!”.
The technology for reducing bodies into disposable ash was perfected by the Nazis, the masters of so many things requisite to monumental cruelty and madness. At death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chełmno, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka, those murdered by gassing were disposed of using incineration.
Wikipedia goes on to say: The efficiency of industrialized killing at Operation Reinhard during the most deadly phase of the Holocaust produced too many corpses, therefore the crematoria manufactured to SS specifications were put into use in all of the camps to handle disposals around the clock, day and night.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, for example, there were four crematoria in operation: two large ones, I and II, and two smaller ones, III and IV. Those of type I and II consisted of three parts: the furnace room; the large halls; and the gas chamber. A huge chimney rose from the furnace room around which were grouped nine furnaces, each having four openings. Each opening could take three normal corpses at once and after an hour and a half the bodies were completely burned. This corresponds to a daily capacity of about 2,000 bodies… Crematoria III and IV worked on nearly the same principle, but their capacity was only half as large. Thus the total capacity of the four cremating and gassing plants at Birkenau amounted to about 6,000 daily.
Dad knew what he was fighting against, but he came to hate the bastards he was fighting for with almost equal vehemence.
Plug Cut
By the time I got to White Spot Mum, Beth and Robert were settled into a booth at the back, looking fidgety and impatient. It had taken a while for me to portage the Frontiersman across the beach and get it lashed onto the roof of the Matrix; they’d been waiting twenty minutes or so, and were obviously disgruntled.
“You should have let me help, bro,” Robert said.
“Some things you’re better off not getting help with Robbie, we wouldn’t have got here any faster with you getting in my way.”
He let out one of those loud, booming laughs of his…
“Stop it, you two,” Beth hissed.
In a penitent mood we studied our menus, smirking, and placed our orders. Then Robert announced he would be paying for lunch. “It’ll give me some air miles,” he quipped grandly. Beth rolled her eyes; “Thank you dear,” Mother said.
It was then I noticed the canvas bag beside her on the bench. She caught my glance and before I could ask announced, “I’ve brought a few of your father’s things with me, which I wanted to pass on to each of you.” She peered into the bag, holding it open by the handles. The first thing she pulled out was a long, black jewellery box. Dad’s medals.
“Robert,” she said solemnly. “These are for you.”
He glanced at me almost as if asking permission. I smiled. The last time we’d seen them was at Dad’s memorial, on a table with all his other effects—mementoes of the man, the significant clutter left behind for each of us to make sense of in our own way. “Thank you Mum,” Rob said, choking up a little as he opened the case, scanning the row of ribboned medallions on their plump, velvet cushion. They reminded me of coins, minted in some strange currency. While he was distracted, Mum rummaged about and produced another, smaller black case. Dad’s Distinguished Service Cross. This she put on the table and slid across to him. Rob is not given to reverence, but he stared long and hard before picking up the box and opening its lid. “Thanks Mum,” he whispered.
“Beth,” Mum said. “This is for you.” She slipped a framed portrait of Dad out of her bag. He was a young man in the photograph, smiling proudly, his air force cap poised on the verge of jaunty. It had also been on display at Dad’s memorial. “The original will be yours, too, when the time comes,” Mum said, referring to the life-size version hanging in the foyer of her house. Beth placed the photo on the table, facing toward her, then hugged Mum, crushing the canvas bag between them. It was an awkward embrace, but they held each other for a long time. Then Beth thanked Mum, the inflection in her voice suggesting she was already wondering where to hang Dad’s official portrait in her own house, and where to place the end table version in the meantime. “We’ll have copies made for the boys,” Mum confided.
She paused a moment before reaching into the bag for my inheritance gift, fixing me with a tremulous glance. What she extracted didn’t resolve into anything I recognized. It was a turquoise and yellow tin with “Dixie Queen Plug Cut” printed in bold red letters on its lid. From its side, encircled by a red medallion backdrop, a Victorian woman with an unlikely turquoise hat as big as a pillow balanced on her head, regarded the world disdainfully—as if she couldn’t believe how things had turned out almost 150 years after her times. “Smoking Tobacco” was printed along the bottom edge of the tin. “Dixie queen plug cut smoking tobacco?” I asked, as Mum slid the antique container across the table.
“Open it,” she coaxed.
I fiddled loose the latch and popped the lid.
“What is it, Mum?” Beth asked.
“Shhh, dear. Let’s let Kyle sort it out.”
Inside, two old photos in a matte frame lay on top of what appeared to be a stack of letters. A scent reminiscent of lavender wafted up from the tin. I imagined perfume, sprinkled from the fingertips of the austere, beautiful woman regarding me from the right-hand photo.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“That is your great-great-grandmother, Anna Armstrong,” Mother said.
“I’ve never seen this,” Robert complained.
Opening a note placed on top of the papers, Mum said, “There were very specific instructions came with the tin.” She read, “Not until the fourth generation shall the contents of this funerary box be released, and who is to receive the box shall be decided by the custodian of each generation. The fourth inheritor shall have sole discretion as to what shall be done with these letters, but shall not make up his or her mind until the contents have been thoroughly examined…”
“So what’s all that mean?” Robert demanded.
“It means, Bro, that I have just been handed the responsibility of resurrecting the memory of our great-great-grandmother and grandfather. Is that right, Mum?”
Mother nodded.
“And who’s the gentleman?”
“That’s your great-great-grandfather, Christopher Newman.”
He didn’t look at you so much as beyond from his sepia-tinted frame. I judged him instantly as a man who had watched many sunrises…
“He was an Anglican priest,” Mother said. “He came to British Columbia as a missionary during the Gold Rush. It was most probably him who set the terms of passing along the tobacco tin.” She paused; we waited. “I did cheat, just a little,” she confessed at last, with a quick smile that would have been coquettish if she’d been 50 years younger. “There’s a note that explains everything under the photos.”
Carefully, I lifted the matte frame out of the box and set it up on the table. Underneath was a card in an envelope. I slipped it out and opened it, scanning what I took to be Christopher Newman’s tight, precise script. His missive was dated Friday, September 5, 1902, from Victoria. I read it out loud:
To whom it may concern,
If my and my wife Anna’s wishes have been adhered to, you will be reading this note more than a hundred years after it was penned, and will have been handed the task of reviewing the contents of this rather crude vessel, then making your own decision as to what should be done with them.
Neither Anna nor I have any expectations. What you choose to do is at your sole discretion. You may wish to destroy the contents, or perhaps share them with an antiquarian society of some sort or other, or simply close up the box and pass it along to someone else. Our only reason for including this note is to give you that latitude and offer a brief explanation as to how the papers you will find here came to be.
Anna and I met and fell in love in Barkerville, British Columbia in the summer of 1871. I arrived there as a missionary priest and émigré hailing from Manchester, England; Anna had been at Barkerville for two years prior, and I will let her describe herself how she came to be in that rough-and-tumble town. The point is, we got to know each other suddenly, and for reasons you shall perhaps understand, had neither of us been completely forthcoming about our personal histories up to the time of our meeting and falling in love. Then, just as suddenly, we were separated by events.
It was Anna who insisted—upon my proposal of marriage—that we each write an honest accounting of our lives up to the point of our meeting and falling in love. She made that a condition of our engagement, and I agreed whole-heartedly.
So, what you see in this tobacco tin, which I found in a cabin I took over when I arrived in the Cariboo, are two journals that converge at the point Anna and I met and fell in love—a love reawakened every time I see my magnificent bride.
No more need be said by way of introduction. The stories are yours now, and we trust you will know what is appropriate to do with them in your own place and time.
Yours in Departed Friendship,
Christopher and Anna Newman
Victoria, Friday, September, 1902
Episodes: Chapter Header | On the road to Pentiction | Somewhere past Hope | Downhill from here | The chosen one | May we rest in peace | In the closet | En Route | Total Immersion | Plug Cut