by Brad Fraser
I read everything I could get my hands on. Wes was never shy about leaving Playboy and other men’s magazines around the house, along with the gorier twenty-five-cent, black-and-white magazine-size horror comics that were sold alongside them. I devoured every word. No concerted effort was ever made to keep such material away from the children. No one ever explained that some things could be less constructive to read than other things, so I had no parameters and mentally hoovered up the shit with the gold. I was genuinely shocked when I was at the homes of other kids and realized their parents controlled what they read.
My parents never talked to me about sex, but you don’t live in circumstances such as ours without being aware of every moment of your parents’ sex lives or domestic conflict, and besides, almost everything they read seemed to be about sex.
Just before I started the third grade we rented a farm about half an hour outside of Smithers, B.C., a small alpine town. It was a working farm, huge and sprawling, with a well-built two-storey Dutch farmhouse and loads of outbuildings, meadows and forested areas. There was even a stream that ran beside the barnyard and down a hill to disappear into a culvert that ran under the road. It was a paradise for four wild kids and the two family chihuahuas, Lady and Chico—my dad bred them to sell the puppies and was more demonstrably loving with them than with any of his family—but not so much for my mother, who was once again isolated and required to feed various livestock.
I often felt guilty because I preferred the time Wes was away from home to when he was with us. By this time he’d intimidated me into submission. He was always unhappy with me because I wasn’t masculine enough. I wasn’t particularly effeminate, but I was sensitive and creative as well as slight of build. I was sad when animals were hurt or I heard about bad things happening to other people and I cried when my favourite cousins and aunts left after a visit. I was forever getting in trouble for playing with dolls. Things did not improve when I explained to Wes that I wasn’t playing with them but making them better clothes. I loved to sew and was quite good at it. I was always making my sisters new outfits for Barbie, as well as detailed houses I crafted from shoeboxes and smart furniture I’d cut out of cardboard and carefully glue together.
Doing this sort of thing was what made me happiest. What I experienced when I was drawing, painting or crafting was similar to what happened when I was reading comic books or novels. I lost any awareness of where I was or how time worked and existed in a blissful, suspended state where I wasn’t negotiating the dangerous world of adults and the ruthless world of children. I could be made happy by so many simple things: a paint-by-numbers set, an Aurora monster model kit, half a dozen comic books, a packet of Plasticine, two Faber-Castells and a couple sheets of paper. Yet my parents would continually give me baseball mitts, plastic weapons of war, cars and the like in an attempt to change, and control, my troublesome true nature.
Even at school I was shamed for my interest in the arts rather than the rough-and-tumble world of developing physical violence and intimidation boys of my generation were expected to indulge in. My lack of ability in gym class often got me called a sissy and a fruit. In grade three, when my order from the Scholastic Book Club, Little Women, was called out for pick up the class laughed at me. I wasn’t picked on as much as the other gender-ambiguous kids were but, by the time I was in high school, when someone wanted to attack me they did it by calling me a fag. I was also insulted for my appearance, mostly my mouth. Liver-lips was number one, with Bucky, for my spaced, bucked teeth, number two. From the beginning of school I’d been made aware of my dental deficits and problems with my teeth have been consistent throughout my life. Good-looking kids are always told they are good-looking, kids who are not good-looking are always told they are not.
We were eventually evicted from the idyllic farm when our hard-core Christian landlords discovered my father had been slinging beer in the bar of the Bulkley Hotel on weekends during the previous winter, when he was traditionally laid off and we lived on his unemployment. We kids were shipped to our Grandparents Fraser for a few weeks that summer. When we returned we now lived in town, in the Smithers version of the other side of the tracks, which was right next to the train tracks because the only thing on the other side was wilderness.
My first year in Smithers had seen less bullying than the previous two years, when I’d been the new kid every few months, which guaranteed being bullied on its own, and by the time we moved into town I had a couple of friends from class to hang with. For the first time I had sleepovers and spent time with other families, and I became even more aware of how odd my family was.
When I got home my mother would never ask how it’d been but I’d tell her anyway, extolling the beauty of the other home, the deliciousness of the food, the friendliness of the parents. Sharon would shoot me an irked look and say, “You don’t have it so bad here.”
This was a favourite line of reasoning for my parents. As long as there were people who were worse off than us, we were okay. We weren’t starved, beaten or violently raped like the children of some of our parents’ friends and acquaintances. We might exist on processed food and bad cooking but at least there was usually some kind of food in the fridge. We might have only gotten a couple of outfits of clothes a couple of times a year but we were appropriately if cheaply dressed for the seasons and usually had someplace to live.
One day my mother was kneading dough for bread. Baking was the one culinary category she had some skill in. I looked up from the paper bag I was drawing on with a pencil that I’d sharpened with a knife because we were the kind of household where something as practical as a pencil sharpener was considered exotic and asked, “Why can’t we ever live in nice houses?”
Without looking up she said, “There’s nothing wrong with this house.”
I put the pencil down. “I mean a house with a nice yard and garage and a lawn and that.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“How come the men Daddy works with all have trailers of their own and we don’t?” Most of Wes’s peers owned trailers that they moved from town to town so they had consistent homes for their families in various trailer courts.
Sharon gave me a hard look and said, “Because they can afford it.” And the conversation was over.
The truth was my parents’ entertainment budget—their love of partying—kept us poor. Given a choice between paying bills or going out three nights a week, there was no choice.
* * *
—
I came home from school one day and could tell from the way Sharon was sitting at the kitchen table intensely smoking that something was wrong. When I asked she said, “Aunt Janet is gone.”
I had no idea what she meant. “Gone where?”
“She took the kids and left. No one knows where they are.”
Something atom-bomby went off in my ten-year-old head. This made no sense. Why would members of our family suddenly disappear without telling us? Especially Aunt Janet and her kids. “Why?”
“She got tired of Don beating her.”
“Will we ever see them again?”
She stubbed her cigarette out with extra vigour. “Nope.”
This moment was also the start of my mother treating me as if I was her friend because she had no idea how to make appropriate friends. Eventually she would tell me things about my father and her marriage that she had no business telling me, and which I didn’t want to know. But I knew she needed me so I never complained.
That next summer, when we returned to the house by the tracks after another extended summer holiday in Alberta, the doors were padlocked and there was a large poster telling everyone we’d been evicted for non-payment of rent.
Wes immediately found another dump behind a gas station right where the highway and Main Street intersected. It was slowly sinking into the swamp that Smithers was built on. My siblings and I immediately dubbed this “the flooded
house.” I was more embarrassed by this house than any place we’d lived in and I never had friends over. Not that many of my friends ever wanted to come to my house anyway. They were all terrified by Wes’s loud, mean-spirited “joking” and weirded out by Sharon’s concentrated indifference.
One day Sharon was washing the dishes and I was drying them when she said, “Your father and I are thinking about splitting up. He’s going to live at the Bulkley Hotel and I’m going to live here. We’ll try that.”
I began to cry. This was my worst nightmare. I was convinced we would disappear from the larger family just like Aunt Janet and her kids. Sharon said, “Quit crying. It might not happen.” Then she gave me a hard, warning look and said, “Don’t say a thing to the other kids.”
They didn’t split up and she never mentioned this again but I lived in fear of a divorce announcement at any minute for months.
As summer arrived and Wes continued to come home, my terror of the potential separation decreased and my stress-induced psoriasis cleared up. After some bumpy spots, finishing the school year was a lot of fun. I had a close group of four male friends and we spent hours having adventures around town on our bikes. (I’d shamed my parents into buying me a cheap discarded bike from a richer friend as an early birthday gift.) I was riding home after one of these adventures when I saw a truck outside the house loaded with our belongings. I threw my bike down in the gravel parking pad, leaped over the eternal puddle in front of the bottom stair and raced into the kitchen, where my mother was seated on a wooden crate, smoking and drinking Coke from the bottle.
“We’re moving?”
She nodded casually, licked a piece of tobacco off her bottom lip, caught it on a fingertip and flicked it away. I threw my head into her lap and cried. After a moment she pulled me away by my arm and said, “Your dad took the kids for ice cream. Go wash your face so he won’t see you like this.”
“I don’t want to move,” I protested. “I have friends here!”
“You’ll make friends in Merritt.”
“Where’s Merritt?”
“The Okanagan.”
I said, “I don’t want to go to the Okanagan.”
“No one gives a shit what you want,” said my father as he walked through the door with the other kids in tow, their faces shiny with smears of dried ice cream. “Now get in the truck.” And then, like he could read my mind: “I threw the comics away.”
In Merritt we moved into a one-bedroom motel suite, but at least this one was downtown, not on the highway, so we could explore the dusty town. Just before school started, the two-bedroom suite next to the motel owner’s apartment came open and we moved out of the cramped one-bedroom. Instead of sharing a single bed, head to toe, as my sisters did across from us, my brother and I went to sleep in our parents’ bed until they were ready to retire, when we were moved to the hide-a-bed in the living room. Not the best living conditions, but I have rarely been happier than I was sitting in the living room on a Saturday morning, eating Honeycomb and watching hours of cartoons through the miracle called Cablevision which expanded our TV viewing from the single-channel world we’d known in the north.
My parents decided I was now old enough, at twelve, to babysit my siblings. They’d always held me responsible for anything negative or stupid my siblings did, and this just continued that process. Now I was my mother’s best friend and surrogate as well. Wes resented our closeness and would make fun of it from time to time.
Mom enrolled us in a free town-sponsored summer day camp, where I met the first people from India I’d ever seen. I’d met other people of colour because my mother’s brother had married a Black woman in the early sixties, which created a great deal of friction in both the Briscoe and Fraser families, each of which had their own racist/anti-racist contingents. Despite my father’s Metis heritage, he wasn’t at all above using the crudest epithets for any other race. Sharon was the voice of reason here, proclaiming endlessly that “all people are equal” even as she gave me the stink-eye for bringing a Chinese boy home after school. This split in attitudes would be reflected in their children.
One weekend Wes didn’t come home. This was a rare experience but not entirely unknown, as the company sometimes demanded overtime.
The next Friday when I got home from school, Sharon was scrubbing the floor in the entranceway and crying. I asked her what was wrong. She shook her head.
“Where’s Dad?”
She dropped her rag in the bucket and put her head in her hands, sobbing without reservation now. A chill ran through me. “Did he leave us?”
She nodded, her chin trembling.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She stood, pulling down the legs of the jean cut-offs she always wore around the house, grabbed the bucket and went into the tiny kitchen. Tears were leaking out of my eyes. I was shaking.
“Mom—”
“Go out and play with the other kids.” She threw the bucket into the sink and disappeared into the bedroom, slamming the door.
I realized we were living Aunt Janet and Uncle Don’s story in reverse. My father had left us.
* * *
—
At first Sharon was too stubborn and embarrassed to admit to the few friends she had that anything was wrong. We ate through everything in the house. She borrowed money from a few friends, but we didn’t associate with the kind of people who ever had extra money, so that was short-lived. I began to have uncontrollable crying jags in class and to lash out at the resulting jibes in a way that lost me the few friends I had. At night I’d lie in bed and listen to Sharon talk to her girlfriends on the phone and quickly pieced together that Wes had abandoned his family for a woman in Williams Lake they called the Amazon, and he had no intention of returning. My siblings were no longer buying Mom’s explanation of continuing overtime and everyone was getting scared.
The local grocer, who we’d run credit with each week until Dad showed up on the weekend and paid the bill, refused an extension after three weeks. When we’d been two days without food mother finally threw herself at the mercy of a couple she knew and admitted we’d been abandoned. They took her to the appropriate office for emergency welfare. Eating again, Sharon got a job at the big supermarket and paid off the grocer’s bill. I did everything I could to distract my brother and sisters from our father’s absence while escaping into comic books, cartoons and bike rides whenever possible.
And then everything changed again with a late-night ringing of the telephone.
I heard my mother answer the call. She listened for a long time, asked a few hurried questions and hung up. She opened the bedroom door. “Bradley, come out here.” I pulled my pants on and went into the living room.
“Grandpa Fraser died tonight.”
I began to cry.
My father’s father had loved me in a way his son couldn’t. I’d always felt valued and protected with him. We’d last seen him only a few months earlier when my father had decided at the last minute that we were going home for Christmas.
Everyone was there except Aunt Janet and her kids. On Christmas Eve we all sat around the pot-bellied stove in the living room of the old farmhouse singing Christmas carols, my pedophile cousin playing a sweet guitar, while outside bloated snowflakes sifted down from a brittle Alberta night sky.
The day we were leaving, Grandpa’d pulled me aside, given me a whisker rub on my smooth cheek, pointed at the eyeglasses I’d started wearing the year before and said, “Don’t read so much. It’ll ruin your eyes,” before hugging me for the final time.
The day after the phone call, Wes returned without explanation and took us on a dangerous drunken drive back to Gainford for his father’s funeral. When we got home he and my mother had many intense, hushed arguments in their bedroom at night. I could hear the murmured accusations and counter-accusations. Wes was particularly incensed when he learned Sharon had go
ne out with another man while he was shacked up with another woman in Williams Lake. We still had two and a half months of school but as soon as it was done he moved us back to Gainford and the farm.
The house was in terrible shape. Mice and spiders came out of the floors and walls. A huge colony of bats had taken up residence in the attic. Initially we were terrified whenever a bat flew out and we’d scream for our parents to save us. After a couple of months we’d just grab a plastic tennis racquet, kill the thing and take it outside to the garbage. This was not the idyllic retreat I recalled so fondly from my childhood. It was a badly built, ugly old house with ratty furnishings, even by the low standards of the community, and I hated living there.
My parents never explained why we’d moved to Alberta, but I suspect Wes was trying to get us as far away from his girlfriend as he could. It seemed to make him more miserable when he was with us. He became even more authoritarian than before. I’d be lying on my bed reading when I’d hear him yell my name. I’d have to hike downstairs to see what he wanted, which was usually for me to change the TV channel for him or to get him another beer. We’d all been taught our place. His comfort was everything. Ours meant nothing. My resentment shimmered and began to take form. I was growing tired of being afraid.
The most positive experience of this period was Dave Haugen, my seventh-grade teacher, fresh out of university and hungry to make his mark as a teacher. For one English class he assigned us to write the most descriptive paragraph we could. I was reading Dracula at the time and let my obsession with horror movies take over. I wrote a paragraph that started “There on the bed lay Jude, her throat torn open as if by some savage animal, her breasts splattered with blood” and went on in the purplest Victorian-flavoured prose to depict the murder scene in a manner that was part Bram Stoker and part Harold Robbins. Mr. Haugen was so impressed he read the entire paragraph to the class, who were equal parts disgusted and intrigued. When he was done he set the page on my desk, looked me in the eye and said, “You should think about being a writer.”