Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  When sparring with Roderick, Stanley would hit his son quite soundly, then insist that he not tell Eileen. But if Roddy learned anything in his life, it was that you don’t let a solid punch come between people. “That wasn’t the source of pain,” Roddy said, looking back. “It was the cold absence when he was present.”

  —

  The CN Rail job was a tough one. Stanley Toombs was valued for many reasons, including his capacity for violence—dealing with it and dealing it out. He rarely discussed work at home, and the tough exterior he cultivated to survive became harder to shed at the end of each day. Visits with his wife’s family provided some relief. His brothers-in-law brought out the joker in him, and he’d crack up the kids at the table until they couldn’t eat. But such visits were far between. Mostly he sealed himself off from his family and hoped he could keep the turmoil inside.

  Then Stanley was offered a promotion. He needed the pay raise. Both he and his wife were working side jobs. Now in her teens, Marilyn watched Roderick and Cheryl after school. Eileen worked as a department store buyer and took hours at a drive-in movie theatre concessions stand. Stanley worked at a gas station every other weekend. They grew and then canned most of their own vegetables in a garden plot. Roddy was assigned a row to weed every day after school. When the offer of more money came, Stanley had little choice but to accept, even though the promotion meant moving to northern Manitoba. And his family had no choice but to follow. “Women and children were still property,” said Cheryl, with a sharp mix of irony, resentment and pragmatism. “Dad really did provide. Climbing the ladder was what he was supposed to do.” She captures domestic life in the culture that sired Rowdy Roddy Piper with a few quick words: “The psychological well-being of a family meant mom and dad were together and you weren’t being beaten; you went to church and you didn’t divorce.”

  Cold comfort in a life that was about to become a lot colder.

  —

  No town on the prairies made as deep an impression on Roddy’s family as their two years in The Pas. The small Manitoba town sits at the meeting point of two large rivers and the Opaskwayak Cree reserve. In 1960, The Pas had found itself suddenly unpoliced. Stanley hadn’t exactly volunteered for the move north to an essentially lawless frontier town—the last place a man could collect unemployment benefits before he disappeared into the nearly ungoverned North. The job required a certain sort of officer, one not worried about being comfortable, and who wouldn’t be easily intimidated. The family arrived to a scene out of the Wild West, with trappers drinking on the street and sled dogs staked outside the shops and bars on the main street. “When we arrived the town police could no longer handle the rabble-rousing and they were waiting for the RCMP to come and take over,” explained Marilyn. “So there was no other police force there when we arrived. It was quite frightening.”

  Many kids travelled to school on dogsleds. Stanley would need sled dogs when calls took him away from the only road in and out of town. Native kids from Opaskwayak came to school the same way. They staked their dogs outside and brought the lead dogs to class, where they would sleep beneath their desks. The lead dogs had too much pride to sit outside like pets, and the other dogs wouldn’t go far without them.

  As cold as Saskatoon could be, The Pas was much colder. “Your tears froze on your face,” said Cheryl. “And you didn’t worry about a runny nose, it froze on your face, too.”

  With their mother working, both sisters were taking care of their little brother now, and they sent Roderick to school in mukluks with sanitary napkins in them to keep his feet warm.

  In deepest winter The Pas was dark when the kids woke up and nearly dark again when they walked home from school. The snow could be as deep as six-year-old Roderick was tall. He was a cute little kid, but something about him got under people’s skin. To keep from being picked on, he stayed away from the roads and well-travelled paths. He didn’t much care for the sled dogs either. They were large, brawling animals that could badly hurt a child who didn’t know how to handle them.

  To keep out of people’s way, Roderick walked to and from school along the edge of the forest, a forest that went on and on beyond any distance a boy could imagine—so he imagined the worst.

  He’d been warned about what lived in the woods, and that these beasts sometimes roamed its edges, hunting domestic animals and other small creatures. So his mother and sisters taught Roderick to sing aloud as he went.

  John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt…

  Every year or two, a child would stumble upon a timber wolf, or a whole pack, before either knew the other was there. Surprising them could be a fatal mistake. If the wolves heard you coming, however, they scuttled back into the trees. And so he sang.

  His name is my name, too…

  —

  Roderick was bullied in The Pas as in every other town in which the family lived from then on. But it was here, in this former trading post, that some of the Toombs kids started learning how to fight back. “They’re not that big,” Stanley told his kids about the bullies. “Go get them.” And, he added, if any were in fact as large as they seemed to his children, “Point them out to me.” Surprisingly, the first time a bully was pointed out at the Toombs’ home, Stanley was doing the pointing.

  One day after school a boy and his father appeared at the door. The boy was nursing a sore nose and a bruised ego. His father had insisted on seeing the Toombs boy who’d beaten up his son, who had, of course, been picking on Roderick.

  Stanley promptly presented the aggrieved father with the real culprit: twelve-year-old Cheryl. The father slapped his son out of shame that he’d been bested by a girl. “We were a civilized family,” says Cheryl. “We were taught to talk things out. But in that place, fists solved problems.”

  —

  Cheryl did more for her little brother than punch out neighbourhood bullies. She might have used her hands to nurture his most memorable quality as a wrestler.

  A teacher in The Pas who thought Roderick had a nice voice entered him in a singing contest. The song chosen for him was a hymn called “They Didn’t Think.” He was going to be competing against kids and adults, and the idea of getting up on stage made him nervous. To help, Cheryl held one hand in front of him as he practiced, making movements to go with the song, both to remind him of the words and to give him something to focus on beyond his anxiety.

  Once a trap was baited with a dainty piece of cheese;

  It tickled so a little mouse it almost made him sneeze.

  An old mouse said, “There’s danger; be careful where you go.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” said the mousey, “I don’t think you know.”

  When the day of the competition came, Roderick, all of six or seven years old, took to the stage, knees knocking, and opened his mouth to sing. A few rows back in the audience, his sister sat with her hand in the air, guiding him with the mouse movements just like she had in practice.

  So he walked in boldly—nobody was in sight;

  First he took a nibble, then he took a bite;

  Close the trap together snapped as quick as you could wink,

  Catching mousey fast there “because he didn’t think.”

  He finished in second place.

  Roddy loved telling this story about Cheryl. “A lot of guys in my business, they say the hardest thing to do is cutting promos, getting in front of that camera. I’ve always been good at it,” he said. “I think all these years, I’ve just been singing into my sister’s hand.”

  —

  Life in The Pas was hard for the kids to get their heads around. When he wasn’t getting picked on at school Roderick took his lumps elsewhere.

  The family lived on a small highway. One day Marilyn and Cheryl were leaving the house and crossed the road. Roderick got it in his head that he should run across, too, and kiss them goodbye. He didn’t look, he just ran. A passing truck hit him and sent him tumbling across the gravel. The driver stopped and got out of the truck, trembling with fea
r that he’d killed the boy. Establishing another pattern he’d follow throughout his life, Roderick received severe bruising from the collision but otherwise was remarkably uninjured.

  —

  As staunch Presbyterians of Scottish extraction, the family had an obvious choice of denomination, the United Church of Canada (the uniquely Canadian church takes its name from bringing together several different protestant streams, in particular Presbyterians). The local congregation got to know Roderick well.

  Eileen and Stanley were friendly with a family named Brown. Roderick played with their daughter. “She’s always telling him about the ghosts,” said Eileen. “Rod come to me, ‘Mommy, Mommy, is there ghosts?’ I said, ‘There’s no such thing.’”

  His fascination with ghosts made an issue of itself one Sunday morning as the minister was closing his sermon. “He says, of course, ‘In the name of the father, the son and the holy ghost.’ Rod jumped up on the pew and he said, ‘See, Mom! I told you there was a ghost!’”

  The church was large, and its pews were long enough that anyone in the middle who tried to get up during the service would bother quite a few neighbours. The family always sat in the middle. On another Sunday, Roderick turned to his mother.

  “I have to go to the bathroom, Mom.”

  “You’ll have to wait, Rod. The minister’s in the middle of his sermon.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom, Mom, I have to go now.”

  Fearing the worst, Eileen led her son down the length of the pew, disturbing everyone along the way, and took him to the washroom. A few minutes later, they returned, disturbing the row again. Her son wasn’t finished. “I need a drink of water.” “Rod, we were just to the bathroom, you’ll have to wait.” “Mom, I need a drink of water right now.” “Rod, we are not leaving again.” “Well, if you don’t give me a drink of water, Mom, I’m going to ask God.”

  His mother turned to him, surprised. “Well, where is He?” she challenged him.

  He stood up in the pew and pointed to the minister. “Right there!”

  Roderick’s misunderstanding concerned the minister enough that he held a special sermon the following week. He brought all the children to the front, so he could explain to the kids that the minister of a church isn’t God, and he put Roderick Toombs front and centre.

  —

  Stanley was finding The Pas a rough go, but the CN Rail officer was no shrinking violet. If a quarrelsome prisoner was acting up while being marched back to the station, Stanley wouldn’t hesitate to handcuff him to a fence post in the cold to settle him down while he took his time and peed behind a tree.

  When winter storms blocked the roads, days could pass before they were plowed. The rail line was more likely to be clear and was the easiest way through town. Once Stanley was walking the line with his youngest children when they approached a parked train. He noticed one of the boxcar doors was slightly open. “Take Roderick home, now,” he said firmly. Cheryl and Roderick stopped, alarmed at their father’s sudden change in demeanour. “Now!” he growled. They turned and ran.

  “I’m trying,” Rod said as his sister urged him forward. His short legs made it hard to keep pace in the deep snow.

  Behind them, Stanley yanked open the door and a man with a knife jumped out. Before the man could strike, Stanley stopped him with a hard punch, cried “home, now!” one more time to his kids, then knocked the man out with a second blow.

  When the kids arrived at the house, breathless and scared, their mother asked them what happened. When they told her, she just said, “Oh, Dad was having trouble with a baddie.” If Eileen couldn’t hide the brutality of her husband’s job from her children, she’d at least try to sugarcoat it.

  Life’s lessons found her young son, regardless, and they hit as hard as his father could.

  Roderick got his first dog while living along that highway in The Pas, a small golden Lab puppy he named Tammy. Eileen and Stanley told him repeatedly to keep the front gate shut. Realizing the welfare of his new dog depended on him, Roderick routinely locked the gate behind him on the way to school.

  But one day, just a minute after he’d passed through the gate, locking it as usual, he heard a screech behind him as a car braked on the highway. It didn’t stop, though, and passed him where he stood on the shoulder of the road. He ran back and found Tammy lying in the dirt.

  A neighbour had gone to the house and opened the gate. The dog got out.

  From inside the house, Marilyn heard her brother crying at the back door. She found him standing there with the puppy in his arms, bleeding all down him. “It had died,” said Marilyn. “My brother was devastated. The smell, the metallic smell of the blood, never, ever left him.”

  Roderick was confused enough by what had happened that he wanted his father to give the little dog mouth-to-mouth. Stanley buried the animal.

  —

  For all the bullying, Roderick made a few friends in The Pas. One was a girl his age who lived with her family across the highway. The two played together often and, given how far north they lived, often meant they usually played in ice and snow. One day the girl went through some thin ice in a bog and they both got soaked. The kids trudged back to her home and stripped down in her garage, placing their winter clothes in front of a blazing wood stove. The girl’s mother found them undressed and cried “Rape!” She then called the police.

  It’s hard to imagine anyone accusing a boy of rape when he is barely old enough to spell his name. Imagine how that boy felt when the police arrived, and the officer was his father. Whatever wrath Stanley brought down on his son, half a century later Roddy could only shake his head and shudder when asked about it. He would tell many friends about many beatings he endured for misbehaviours, some as minor as this. One friend we spoke with said he’d told her he was beaten so badly once he’d had to stay home from school for a week. As a little boy, he’d been puzzled by the uproar and trouble. But he recalled clearly the whole town calling him a “pervert.”

  Before Roderick was old enough to understand love, he felt shame. Like the smell of his dog’s blood, it never left him—the shame of the accusation and his terror of his father. By the age of seven, he’d learned the value of silence in the face of suffering. Best keep it to himself.

  The town left a painful impression on him, and so did his father’s strict adherence to Victorian propriety. He wasn’t the only one in the family who suffered its narrow confines.

  —

  Marilyn won a local beauty contest—Miss Field Day Princess—and was asked to try her charisma and good looks at the provincial level. She went home excited by the prospect. Stanley’s response was devastating, if no surprise.

  “Absolutely not. No daughter of mine will be entering that type of contest.”

  As the oldest child in the family, Marilyn was the sharp end of the spear in the children’s effort to penetrate their father’s tough exterior. She didn’t get very deep. Marilyn was voted prom queen but Stanley wouldn’t allow any drinking, and the after-party was to take place at a bar. The prom queen herself was forbidden to attend. “It was just a little strict,” she said.

  In territory like northern Manitoba in the 1960s, a police officer had his reasons for keeping his kids on a short leash. One of Marilyn’s classmates died in a car crash that night. The roads in the area shifted wildly with the freeze and thaw of the seasons. Hard to navigate and pitch black at night, the roads in winter and spring could also be sheer ice. Typical of life in the North, even the most celebratory of nights is tempered by awareness of human fragility. You either learned to deal with the possibility that the next moment could kill you, or you struggled miserably.

  A young woman from England joined the staff at the local grade school. She was one who struggled. The teacher insisted the Cree kids leave their sled dogs outside. Unable to sit still and ever thinking beyond the boundaries meant to contain a boy his age, Roderick wasn’t going to have an easy time with a disciplinarian like that. She sent him
repeatedly to the office for the strap. There were calls to his parents. “She thought she was running a military academy,” Cheryl said. “Dad had a word with her.” When Stanley found a teacher too strict, it became less of a mystery how a prim young Englishwoman had ended up in a place as rough and remote as The Pas.

  But the town remained a puzzle, one the family never really solved. “We were outsiders,” said Cheryl, “we didn’t know the rules.” One of those rules—the unwritten ones—had to do with the Cree kids from Opaskwayak across the river: stick to your own kind. In the stratified world of teenage social life, the rule was taken seriously. The Toombs kids didn’t understand that. Marilyn, Cheryl and Roderick talked to the Native kids, hung out with them, and sat in the wrong part of the movie theatre. The beatings and bullying they endured came mostly from white kids who didn’t like seeing those lines crossed.

  —

  Stanley and Eileen’s tireless son tested his parents’ patience. Neither the strap at school nor the back of his father’s hand at home slowed Roderick down. “There was a surprise every day with you, Rod,” his mother teased him during their last visit, early in his last summer. “I love you to death, but…”

  He smiled at her playful chiding, but lowered his head. The sting of all those childhood reprimands lingered.

  Eileen recalled a story that made it clear how her son’s tendency to tinker with things frustrated his parents.

  Roderick discovered his mother’s new electric floor polisher, and whenever she ran it around the house, he sat on it for the ride. One day she found him sitting on the kitchen floor leaning intently over the polisher. The casing around its motor was open. Roderick held a screwdriver in one hand. “He had it in the insides and he was breaking all the—”

  “I was fixing it!” Roddy interjected, his head snapping up in protest.

  “I said, ‘Why on earth would you do something like that?’ I don’t know. There was never a dull moment, dear.”