—
In 1962, Eileen and Stanley left town for a few days to search for an apartment in Dauphin, several hundred miles south. Another move was in the works. They took Roderick with them. Their nearly grown daughters stayed at home. The girls woke up one morning to the smell of bacon and eggs. Downstairs in the kitchen they found a boy they knew from school. Frightened and angry, they screamed at him to leave.
The intruder tried to talk his way into staying, complaining that the girls weren’t being very nice. He’d made them breakfast, after all. “We were able to get him out and lock the door,” said Marilyn. “There wasn’t a lot to do in The Pas.”
Looking back, Marilyn was even more relieved that she and her younger sister were able to chase the boy away. He would later be involved in the infamous 1971 murder of an area Cree woman, Helen Betty Osborne.
When the family left The Pas and its very real dangers they were intact but not unscathed.
—
The end of winter meant a chance for Stanley to spend some time with the family away from the pressures of work. Thanks to his job the whole family travelled by train for free. Trips “home” were common, back to Saskatoon, where Aunt Barb still lived. “We would go down there in the spring,” says Marilyn. “All in our mukluks and heavy coats to get off the train in Saskatoon and everybody’s in spring jackets and looked at us like, ‘Where are you from?’” It was on one such trip to Saskatoon that Roderick got such a bad stomach ache he had to be rushed off the train.
Roddy remembered crying and hugging himself in a dark room, being poked with needles by doctors and nurses unsure what was causing him so much pain. He woke up and looked around and couldn’t find his parents. Eventually the doctors realized it was appendicitis and he had an emergency appendectomy.
Perhaps the terror in his recollection was just a function of being a child at the time. But the memory that remained was of being abandoned while suffering—alone when his body turned on him.
—
Summer brought long train trips west to join the Anderson grandparents, uncles and aunts who lived near Prince George, in and around a little place called Burns Lake. The train crew brought Roddy to the locomotive. When they neared a turn, they said, “Lean,” to help get the train around the bend. He did and they laughed, but the boy had a job to do and took it seriously.
The Andersons were in the lumber business, and most of them possessed a down-to-earth good nature. Their pleasant company peeled the stress away from the policeman and his family—though the remote location was hardly carefree. Prince George is cradled by Rocky Mountain country, and the house sat on the edge of a deep, wooded valley that hid many wild things, beautiful and deadly.
A herd of wild horses lived in the valley. The river nearby was so pristine, people drank from it. Cougars roamed the woods, and Roderick left the outhouse one day only to walk right into the path of a bear. He ran one way and the bear ran the other. After that, Ernie Anderson built a screened-in walkway to the outhouse.
Evenings at the Anderson home were often given over to music. By the dim light of a Coleman lantern, Eileen played the harmonica, sometimes with one end in a drinking glass to give the instrument an extra, haunting quality. Aunt Doris played the accordion and Uncle Glen played the guitar. Somebody always picked up the spoons and everybody sang along. “It was like the Beverly Hillbillies,” Roddy remembered with a smile.
“Everybody was happy,” said Eileen.
At ninety-two, Eileen could still play the mouth organ with one end in a glass. Roddy tried and couldn’t quite get it. She showed him how. “That sound like a hillbilly?” she said.
Roderick’s penchant for mishaps caught up with him in the BC woods. “I remember Uncle Glen one time,” said Roddy, “he was my favourite uncle. And they were all lumberjacks. We got out in the bush. And of course I wanted to start the tractor.” The boy turned the key but let go when the noisy engine began to turn over. It clicked oddly and fell silent. Roderick’s heart sank, figuring he’d ruined the machine. “I thought we were going to be stuck there for months.” Glen began groaning that they were in trouble, and made a big show of how serious a problem this was. Roderick was mortified. “He took a wrench…and we’re off again.” There was nothing wrong with the tractor, of course. Glen was just teasing his mechanically disinclined nephew. Just how disinclined became evident when he was about ten.
Someone was taking a family photo outside the house at Burns Lake. Roderick wasn’t in the picture. He was in the background, tinkering in the cockpit of a large Caterpillar logging machine. He tinkered too much, and suddenly the Cat rolled into the shot.
“Everybody was screaming,” said Eileen. “He came so close to the house.”
“I wasn’t strong enough to pull the lever to turn the Cat.” Roddy smiled sheepishly. “I didn’t have that down yet.” He thought for a moment, trying to complete the image. “I don’t know who took the picture,” he said. “Do you remember?”
“No,” replied his mother. “I was too busy screaming!”
Not surprisingly, Roderick and his sisters were under strict orders to stay inside at night. Cheryl followed her grandfather outside anyway, curious what he could be up to in the dark and too young to imagine he might simply want a moment alone. She startled him and he wound up to hit her. Realizing who it was, he stormed back into the house and exclaimed to Eileen, “Your children have no fear! What’s wrong with them?!”
“There were no dull moments when he was young,” said Eileen. During their final visit, the number of times she shook her head with a laugh and called him “an active child” became a running joke between them. Roddy’s curiosity, imagination and stubbornness were well established in childhood—so was his suspicious nature.
Once, he was alone at the Anderson’s house. Word in the area was that a man had recently escaped from jail in Prince George. “I was on the couch, whittling with a knife. I went up the stairs and when I came down, I couldn’t find the knife, and I knew that escaped con had my knife. I got on my bike.” A dirt road connected the Anderson grandparents’ house to their daughter’s. “I started riding my bike and in the middle of it were all these cows. So I went around the trees and the cows started chasing me. I got around them and I got to Aunt Doris’s. Cause they needed to go get that man I was positive had my knife.”
Eileen picked up the story. “My sister-in-law lived about half a mile from my mother’s place. Rod would go over there to play with the kids in the daytime. I looked and he come running as fast as he could, ‘Mommy, Mommy, would you come and get that she cow that won’t leave me alone!’ Any cow in our household was a she cow.”
It’s a cute story, like many about Roddy’s childhood—when others tell them. Eileen remembered the she cows. Roddy remembered the knife.
—
Summers never last, and fall 1962 landed the family in the small apartment they’d found in Dauphin. Five hundred kilometres east of Saskatoon, Dauphin was mercifully well south of The Pas. A sleepy little town, it did come with some consolations.
The apartment they moved into was right behind an A&W. Roderick often asked his mother to take him for a hamburger. She rarely said no.
“You’d sit there and eat it and you would relish it,” Eileen remembered. “And I used to look at you and, ‘You think I could have another one?’ I couldn’t help, if I had money enough, to get you another one to watch you eat it.”
Roderick was struggling in school. In some parts of the country, math and spelling were taught during those years by a form of memorization—visual learning—that would be abandoned shortly after he passed through the affected grades. Further, education standards and methods weren’t consistent from province to province. These were reason enough to find school difficult. But added to this, Roddy often described himself as suffering from what we would now call ADD—attention deficit disorder—and struggled to focus on things that didn’t greatly interest him. Education was bound to prove more than a ch
ore. Although as an adult he loved history and could recite passages from Shakespeare, he claimed to have never read a book in its entirety.
In Dauphin Roderick’s parents enrolled him in bagpipe lessons. He was taught the eight holes on the chanter, practicing the simple scales of the military instrument. His teacher struck him on the knuckles when he made a mistake. The elimination of Scots Gaelic culture from the family was about to receive a hard correction, borne on the still-slight shoulders of its youngest son.
—
After several months in the apartment, Eileen found the family a three-storey Victorian house with a wraparound porch and a weeping willow in the yard. It was the perfect family home, and they soon moved in. She and the kids wanted to stay in it permanently. Dauphin was small and quiet, an ideal place for the kids to grow up. But after close to two years, the CN Rail Police had other ideas.
Cheryl came home from school to find her mother pulling clothes out of the drawers. “What are you doing?” Cheryl asked. “Packing,” Eileen replied.
“What else is new,” Cheryl groaned
Roderick was on the move again.
—
On the northwest shore of Lake Superior, a very long way from anywhere—except Duluth, Minnesota, which most Americans would consider a very long way from anywhere—sat the twin towns of Port Arthur, where the family moved to next, and Fort William. Today, they are a single city known as Thunder Bay, and it’s still about as isolated a city as any near the Canada–US border.
Being the new kids in the neighbourhood, Roderick and his sister were once again tested, beat up, or somehow made to prove themselves. Marilyn had moved on to nursing school in Fort William, so she was out of the mix, and Cheryl was in high school—more likely now to be teased than outright beat up. Roderick, however, was only ten, and still a target.
Marilyn remembered: “I think he was only in grade four at that time. This guy was always after him, but Rod was quick, even at that age. The kid kept saying, ‘I’m going to get you after school. I’m going to beat you up again,’ and Rod said to him, ‘Oh, hey man, you must be talking about my twin brother, that’s the guy you’re after!’ It worked once and then he was back in the doghouse.”
One particular bully on Roderick’s case was nicknamed Jinx. Both boys had a paper route and they’d collect their papers at the same place every day. Jinx would go after Roderick every chance he got. The tables turned only briefly. Jinx was a catcher and during one baseball game Rod took him out hard when running in to home plate. The insult would be avenged, however, and Jinx spent recess chasing him all over the school, kicking him in the behind every time he got close.
Cheryl got a job as an usherette in the local movie theatre. She could get her brother in to see movies for free, spoiling him with gratis popcorn and candy. He took full advantage. When The Sound of Music was held over, he watched it five Saturday afternoons in a row. The wartime musical—a staple on any list of wholesome entertainment—mesmerized him.
Even the movie theatre wasn’t safe harbour, though. Unattended boys in dark rooms presented easy targets for sexual predators. One approached him and he fled the theatre. Bullies of every sort found Roderick. It’s no wonder he learned to move so fast.
—
At home, the doghouse was soon Rod’s exclusive space. He was getting older, and his mishaps more serious—and there were no other kids left to occupy it. After high school Cheryl left for Toronto. Being much closer to home, Marilyn still visited every other weekend. One Friday, she saw how her brother’s behaviour was outgrowing their parents’ ability to contain it.
Eileen picked up Marilyn in Fort William for the weekend. When they pulled into the driveway, Eileen thought something was wrong. The other family car—a dilapidated Oldsmobile that betrayed just how frugal Stanley really was—seemed to be not exactly as she’d left it. She couldn’t put her finger on what was bothering her, though, and they went inside.
When Marilyn and Eileen entered the house, the phone rang. It was a friend of the family. “Eileen, were you out with the Oldsmobile today?” asked the friend.
“No.”
“Well, I thought I saw it driving and I couldn’t see anybody driving it.”
Eileen was certain now that something was wrong. She went outside again and this time noticed a little chip out of the cement front-door step.
She went back inside, found her son, and asked, “Rod, did you move the car today?”
“Uh…I just backed it out and put it back in the right place for you, ‘cause you said the snow drifts were too deep.”
Marilyn laughed to remember the episode. “The little beggar had taken the car, had driven down onto one of the busiest streets of Port Arthur and got it all the way back, up a huge hill and into the driveway, and quietly put the keys away,” she said. He’d bumped the step when he pulled up to the house, but figured no one would notice. “Nothin’ to it!”
Roderick continued his bagpipe lessons. “Every Friday I had to go to band practice,” he said. “So all the other guys are playing baseball. Who would ever figure it would be my career? Make a living playing the bagpipes…” The baseball diamond nearby taunted him. Normal kids started their weekends there. He didn’t. Though he did sleep in the dugout a few times, when his father scared him too much to stay at home.
Roddy never told his mother or his sister that he drove that old car to the ballpark and spun it in circles with the gas pedal floored—“doing doughnuts,” as Canadians like to call the stunt—around and around the ball diamond.
When in 2015 he confessed to Cheryl about that day, he wondered aloud, “Why’d I steal that car?” as if through the fog of his accumulated years he couldn’t put together the building anger in his juvenile heart and the absence of any way to vent those feelings. It was hard to make friends when you moved every two years, and now there was no one left at home he could share his anxieties with. He was a sensitive kid raised to be tough, and the opposing natures were souring in one another’s company.
“You were too bright, too curious, needed an outlet. The car was just another way to find out how something worked,” Cheryl answered him. The memory is another case of our father’s life looking cute from the outside while feeling like something entirely different to him. “I don’t think you were bad. It was a rigid home. You had no room to explore your intelligence.”
Roddy looked at his sister. He looked away. He seemed unconvinced.
—
Young Roderick did find a friend in Port Arthur, and he never forgot his name: Bobby Hansen. Rod fell through the ice again, and this time in considerably deeper water. Lake Superior rarely freezes over. As the name suggests, it’s a massive body of fresh water, so broad that the sun sets half an hour earlier on its eastern shore than its west. The shoreline waters do freeze, however, and Roderick and Bobby found themselves on the ice one day. Roddy shrugged off what should have worried him: the ice was too thin. If Bobby hadn’t been there to grab his hand and pull him out, you wouldn’t be reading this story.
The pattern had been set with the move from Saskatoon—uproot, relocate, get beat up, get in trouble, make a friend, move on. It intensified in Port Arthur. Eileen was working as a buyer for the Zellers chain of department stores. Stanley was as elusive as ever, either working or distant from his son when around. Roderick came home from school every day to an empty house.
When anxious, he developed a habit of sitting on the edge of his bed or a chair and rocking back and forth. He rocked on one couch so much he broke it. With his sisters gone, the house was silent, overpoweringly empty. He sat at the foot of their beds and rocked the hours away. Wishing more than anything that he could have gone with them, he wondered what joy life could hold in their absence.
Hiding at the baseball diamond at night, driving the old car: these were small misdemeanors next to what was to come. It was time to move again.
—
At age twelve, Rod found himself living in the newly developed
suburb of Don Mills, on the edge of English-speaking Canada’s largest city. Toronto in 1967 was only hinting at the multicultural place it has since become. Its killjoy focus on work echoed every quality that Stanley Toombs felt made a man worthy of the title Head of the Household. No place could have made him more aware of the growing distance between himself and his boy. Roddy’s enchantment with mischief continued, and so did the bagpiping. “I was a good bagpiper,” remembered Roddy. He recalled a Highland Games in Toronto where he played for an audience. “I was so young. At the end of the games we had a ceilidh. The guys’d be in there drinking. There was no place for me, but I loved meat pies. So, I’m lurking and I can’t go in the [beer] tent and I see this box of meat pies. There must have been twelve of them. It was like a bonanza. I stowed the meat pies. I went to run, but I didn’t see the rope holding up the tent. I tripped and those meat pies—all over the dance floor. Well, the punishment was for the rest of that season. When the dancers are competing, the drummers they all need a piper. I had to play all damn day for them. Can’t help getting better at it.”
Caber Feidh was the name of one pipe band Rod joined in Toronto. He was just turning thirteen, but many of the band were grown men. Stanley left him in their hands during long rehearsals and trips to competitions out of town. “Lotta pipe bands,” Roddy said, voice trailing off. Talking about them seemed to draw him away to unhappy memories.
He and his parents had settled in an apartment. The unit was in one of several close buildings, each about twenty storeys tall. “It was so many fuckin’ people.” Just talking about those years made Roddy edgy. “It got ugly in Toronto, because I would leave,” he said. Some nights he took off and didn’t come home for days on end.
The meat-pie story might be funny fifty years later, but it was another embarrassing episode for Stanley. Discipline wasn’t working, but that didn’t stop him from trying, the only way he knew how.
Rowdy Page 4