by Miriam Toews
Elvira and I and the girls moved to a new white brick bungalow with a double garage, wall-to-wall carpeting, a finished basement, two fireplaces, three bathrooms, a sauna, and a large yard. A nice home, a lovely home in fact, quite luxurious from all appearances. Our new address was 58 Brandt Road, and it was only two or three hundred yards, across a field and past a few houses, from our old house. Often I would sit in my new fancy living room and stare out the picture window at the pink house at 229 First Street, wondering what had happened, wondering why I had let it happen. Occasionally I would walk past it, when I was feeling brave, and chart its progress of decline. Albert had rented it out to a young family for the length of time it would take him to develop the land around it. The screen on the front door became torn, the paving stone on the little walk leading up to the house was chipped off, and the flowers hadn’t been replanted or the windows washed or the eaves cleaned or the lawn mowed regularly or the driveway properly shovelled.
Years later, after the house had been removed, Albert Enns met me on the street. That’s business, he said with a good-natured shrug, as if to indicate his helplessness in the matter. Don’t worry about it, Albert, I said cheerfully, what’s done is done. Three weeks later, in a complete and regrettable act of madness, I bought a car from him, in an attempt to remove any trace of hard feelings he might think I had for him. Elvira had, long ago and for her own self-preservation, learned to laugh at my foibles, rather than become exasperated, and I was grateful for it. We had, it seemed, a tacit agreement not to call each other on points of “strange behaviour” and simply to move ahead, hoping, hoping for normalcy.
This move marked the very beginning of the end of my world as I knew it. There were other factors as well. It was the mid-seventies and even Steinbach was changing, albeit slowly, with the times. Which reminds me of a joke: How many Mennonites does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: Change?
Elvira by this time was attending the School of Social Work at the University of Manitoba, commuting in car pools made up of women Marj’s age. Forty-year-old Mennonite housewives from Steinbach did not, as a rule, attend university, and Elvira naturally enjoyed being one of the first to do so. Marj was studying history at the university, living in the city in an apartment she shared with friends, and coming home on the weekends. Miriam had begun grade seven at the Steinbach Junior High School. (And had, thus far, avoided suspension.)
My family had changed, but I remained the same. The only thing that was different was that now, rather than going down First, up William, across Main, I was going down Brandt, up William, and across Main. And back. And forth. And back and forth, becoming more bewildered with every heavy step, and more determined than ever to hide it from everyone.
Just ran into a former student visiting her grandmother. She called to me from down the hall. I recognized your walk, she said, laughing. It’s very distinctive. I remembered that I had, in fact, fashioned my style of walk to conceal my depression. I would not, I reasoned at the time, be accused of dragging my heels, or of shuffling along the streets of Steinbach in some kind of despondent funk.
Are you visiting somebody here, Mr. Toews? asked my former student when we had finished chuckling about the past. Yes, I said, still smiling, that’s right, that’s right. I’m just out for a walk and I thought I’d pop in and visit a friend. My student said, So you’re keeping busy, then, are you? Absolutely, I said in my booming classroom voice, and enjoying it.
I hoped the nurse on duty wouldn’t come and ask me to return to my room.
You were my favourite teacher, you know that? stated the woman. And you were my favourite student, I quipped. I remember the day you ran into the teeter-totter and chipped a tooth. You were very brave about it. I recall there being quite a lot of blood.
Was I? she asked. That’s funny, I still have it. And she smiled, with exaggeration, so that I could see the chipped tooth. I better be going, she said. Take care of yourself, Mr. Toews. I will, I said, and you too. And give my regards to your husband, I added. He had also been my student. Is he still interested in becoming the prime minister?
She laughed and shook her head. No, no, she said, he’s working for his dad in the shop, welding. Well good for him, I said, if I need any welding done in the future I’ll know where to go …
You bet, said my student, and we smiled yet again and waved and waved, and then she was gone.
Spent several moments staring at “Summer Memories,” reflecting, and flipping through book of poems. References to trains: many. Interesting for a boy who grew up in a town without a station. Reason: elders afraid of outside world influences shipped in by train. Nearest depot: Giroux, Manitoba.
The move to a new house, my girls growing up, my wife broadening her horizons: shortly after moving to Brandt Road, Elvira began planning our trip to South and Central America. In a year’s time, we would be visiting our friends Stan and Marion Houghton in Pifo, Ecuador, near Quito, where Stan worked as a radio technician, and also, briefly, my sister and her family in Panama City. When I voiced some concern over the cost of this trip, Elvira told me that she had, that day, taken a job as a receptionist at the chiropractor’s office (in addition to more social work classes at the university) and that every paycheque she received would go into our South American fund. Try not to worry, Mel, she said excitedly, it’ll be great! You’ll have lots to write about!
I looked forward to our adventure with a combination of intense, palpable dread that affected my bowels and minimal, fearful curiosity. Didn’t they shrink heads in Ecuador? I may have been weary of living in my own turbulent head but I didn’t relish the thought of having it shrunk to the size of a grapefruit and hung from the waist of a naked Ecuadorian Indian man. I knew Elvira would take care of all of the details, the tickets, the immunizations, the malaria pills, my medication, the passports, the traveller’s cheques, the packing, the travel insurance, the securing of the house while we were gone, and everything else a person has to do in order to ship her family to another continent for six weeks. All I would have to do, on our scheduled day of departure, was get out of bed, get dressed, and get into Elvira’s brother’s car. He had agreed to drive us to the airport in Winnipeg. Rather a nice and surreal way to leave the country for the summer: just wake up and go. On the way to the airport I managed to voice my concerns to Elvira: We’re not scheduled to visit any headshrinking territory, are we?
She laughed, grabbed my wrists, and said, Of course not!
Marj, her university courses having ended in April, had already left for Stan and Marion’s. When the rest of us arrived, after a brief stopover in Bogota, where we were held up by bandits and rescued by the police all in the course of approximately forty heart-stopping seconds, the Houghtons welcomed us graciously into their home, located on a small compound of houses rented out to the radio staff and other assorted missionary types. It was on this beautiful, windswept compound high up in the Andes that Elvira met an Irish woman who taught her how to make French silk pie, a delicious rich dessert that both she and I instantly loved. Frankly I would have been quite content to remain on the compound, staring at the mountains and exchanging recipes with the neighbours. But it was not to be. Elvira had not saved every penny from her receptionist job to come all the way to South America in order to sit around in lawn chairs engaging in idle chitchat with people who weren’t even Ecuadorian.
Stan and Marion and their daughter, Becky, who was close in age to Marj, had planned to take us on a meandering road trip in their Land Rover, with overnight stops along the way at various friends’ homes in places like Quito, Guayaquil, Rio Bamba, Cuenco, and Banos. Very good! I exclaimed, attempting to sound enthusiastic. Sounds wonderful! Where else are we going? And when do we leave?
Right now, answered Stan, a gentle, affable man who never seemed to lose his cool. And so we piled into the Land Rover and hit the narrow, rutted, treacherous mountain roads on what was to become a memorable odyssey for all of us. And guess what, Mel? said Elvira, who
was beaming in the front seat, elbow out the window, hand tapping the roof of the Land Rover, happy as a clam and drinking in the scenery and the sights like a woman who’s spent the last thirty years in a windowless cell. What! I yelled from the back seat, where Miriam and I had stationed ourselves. We are going to headshrinking territory after all!
Of course we were. Fabulous! I answered. Can’t wait!
Actually, interjected Stan, the voice of reason, there hasn’t been a documented headshrinking in at least four years.
Ah, I said, not documented … are they usually?
But of course Stan and Marion and Elvira and Marj and Becky were laughing by this point, and I had come to believe that I wasn’t going to survive the trip anyway and that brings a certain sense of calm to a man, in a strange way. I took Miriam’s hand and squeezed it and she gave me a reassuring look, a Hang-in-there-baby kind of look, and I smiled back. It hadn’t occurred to me that we would all lose our lives on this crazy expedition, only, for obvious reasons, that I would and that the others would return home unscathed.
But of course I kept notes. If my head were to be shrunk, it would be documented, I would see to that, at least.
In my journal I recorded the first verse of the poem by Emily Brontë entitled “Last Lines”:
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
twenty-four
Our road trip proved to be a success filled with laughter, adventure, romance, danger, and excitement, and I meticulously filled several ringed notebooks with the details of the journey. We attended an all-day wedding in a village called Pulucate, high up in the Andes, watching respectfully from our seats on a log in the back of the grassy plateau as the minister, at one point in the proceedings, turned his back to the couple and the audience and urinated off the side of the cliff. After the ceremony, we were ushered into several grass huts where we were served, by the fifteen-year-old bride herself, buns, oranges, salad, and guinea pig. (Elvira tricked me into eating it by telling me it was chicken.) After the wedding we walked for several miles back down the mountain path to the road where the Land Rover was parked, and Elvira picked wildflowers from the side of the road and gave them to me as a present. Marj wound them into a type of headband for me and made me pose for several photographs. Wonderful day in the Andes Mountains, I recorded later that evening in Notebook Number 3.
Many times, as I have noted, I was afraid the Land Rover would go over a cliff. Around curves, as is the mountain custom, Stan would honk his horn. If there was oncoming traffic, the car on the side nearest the mountain wall had the right of way. The road was wide enough for one vehicle only and the driver on the outside, nearest the sharp drop, would have to back his or her car, sometimes for a mile or two, to a spot in the road that had been widened slightly for the purpose of passing. Why this was the case, that the inside vehicle had the right of way, I do not know, and I wonder how many heart attacks have occurred as a result. Stan was used to driving in the mountains, and if backing up for a mile along curved, narrow dirt roads and risking plunging off thousands of feet into rocky ravines made him nervous, he didn’t show it. Many times during these reversing sessions I would glance out the window and see no road beneath me, only the turbulent water far below. One time, during a particularly terrifying reverse, I told Stan I would get out and walk, and he said, Mel, there’s no room on the road to walk. Miriam and I, in our usual positions in the back seat, patted one another’s hands, exchanged fatalistic grimaces, and waited to die.
Then there was the headshrinking leg of our journey. Somehow we had made it to Shell, a small military base on the edge of the jungle, and, as the name so arrogantly suggests, a town taken over by the large American oil and gas company. From Shell we were to fly to Macuma, a tiny jungle village smack in the very heart of headshrinking territory. Stan and Marion knew of a missionary couple who lived in that village and who would be more than happy to show us around. Excellent, I murmured, have them put the water on to boil.
And so, after a sleepless night of taking cover from the bats that lived in the military barracks in which we stayed and a breakfast of fried plantains, seven of us, including the pilot, piled into a six-seater Cessna and prepared for takeoff. Stan had opted to stay behind in Shell because there wasn’t room for all of us, and because they had been to the jungle before. (I too had offered to stay behind, but Elvira told me this would probably be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I couldn’t think of a counter-argument at the time.) The seventh person travelling with us did not take up a seat of his own. He was a baby, the son of one of the Indian jungle-dwellers, and he had been airlifted into Shell for medical treatment. His mother had walked for four days through the jungle to bring him to Macuma, knowing that he was very sick and close to death. The Indians living in the jungle were, probably wisely and very likely with good cause, suspicious of the white missionaries, the doctors, the pilots, and the American oilmen, but this mother had no options at the time other than to watch her son, if not treated, die.
The nurses at the small clinic in Shell had made arrangements with Marion to have this baby travel with us back to Macuma, where his mother would be waiting for him. During the flight Elvira held the sleeping baby, wrapped in a soft yellow blanket, on her lap, and the girls crowded around him, oohing and aahing over his inch-long eyelashes and dark head of hair. When we landed, the baby’s barefoot mother was at the door of the airplane within seconds. Elvira handed the woman her son, and she, without a word or any expression whatsoever, tied him to her back and disappeared into the jungle, presumably to begin her four-day journey back to her home. What an act of faith, what an act of love, I thought of her decision to give her son over to foreigners in the hopes that he’d be healed. I wondered what type of resistance to the idea she might have met from other people in her village. I duly noted this experience in my notebook.
Later that day, after a refreshing glass of lemonade at the home of Marion’s missionary friends, we went on a guided walk around the village, which consisted only of a few residential huts, a few more modern homes, such as the one in which the missionaries lived, a tiny landing strip for planes to land with supplies for the villagers, a school hut, and a church hut. The children we encountered were friendly but said nothing, the adults were wary, and I felt profoundly ridiculous for being there. Nevertheless, Mrs. Moroz paraded us around the place and then suggested we go for a hike in the jungle. Of course, I said, and afterwards let’s go for a refreshing dip in the piranha-infested headwaters of the Amazon. What are we waiting for?
We weren’t as far as a hundred yards into the dense, dark jungle when Miriam got her boot stuck in the muck along the narrow path. Really stuck. Cautiously I crept over a rotten log that spanned a type of greenish, mossy bog to where she stood rooted to the ground and laughing at her predicament. I suggested she take her foot out of the mired boot and balance herself by holding on to my back. Then I leaned over and attempted to tug the boot out of the muck, nearly falling over repeatedly as Marj took photographs and yelled encouraging words to me over the muffled roar of Elvira, Marion, and Mrs. Moroz laughing.
It took ages to remove the boot and in the course of the procedure both Miriam and I became covered in jungle slime, dirt, and offal. Eventually we got the blasted boot out, and Mrs. Moroz, whose white dress had remained spotless throughout, washed our clothes in her primitive ringer washer and hung them up to dry. In the meantime Miriam wore a hilariously uncharacteristic outfit, which she, so hypocritically, refused to be photographed in: a conservative high-necked dress with a small floral print, belonging to Mrs. Moroz, and I wore her husband’s housecoat. If the villagers had needed something to laugh at, something to mock, we would have fit the bill nicely. In any case, I believed, our clown status in the village would prevent our heads from being shrunk. What prestige is there in shrinking th
e head of an imbecile, after all? A court jester’s life is saved by the mere fact that he’s perceived as a moron, and so I thought would be mine.
We left Macuma and met up with Stan and Becky in the bat-infested barracks of Shell and drove back towards the teeming, torrid coastal city of Guayaquil. Along the way we had many adventures, though none quite as nerve-racking as the jungle tour, not counting the shopkeeper from Cuenco who threatened Elvira with a machete for not buying a piece of fabric she had made the mistake of admiring. Marion sorted him out, surprising him into stunned submission by speaking sharply to him in his own language. Elvira loved the fact that she had been threatened by a machete-wielding Ecuadorian.
After spending two weeks in Panama City, with its intriguing canal, and in La Chorerra, where my sister lived, I was ready to leave.
One thing I do remember when I think of Panama: the death of Elvis Presley, on August 16, 1977. I was not a fan of his music but I had been tracking his career haphazardly over the years. Well, not his career, really, but his personal travails. Many newspaper articles mentioned his mood swings, his dependency on pills, and his inability to find himself in all the hype surrounding his image. They said he spent a lot of time alone in his bedroom, depressed.
I suppose that during this time I, a conservative, well-dressed, mild-mannered small-town elementary school teacher, related more closely to Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll, than I did to my missionary family members. My daughters would have been beside themselves if they’d heard me say it, and I should have mentioned my affinity for Elvis if for that reason alone, just to hear them laugh.
From Panama we flew to Miami for a few luxurious days in a beach hotel before going home. While we were in Miami, Miriam picked up a brochure on Walt Disney World, located just a few hours away in Orlando, and decided she must go. Elvira and Marj wanted to stay at the hotel and sip non-alcoholic Margaritas by the pool, and so I offered to accompany Miriam. The next morning she and I woke up at five to catch a bus headed for Orlando, for a day of “thrilling adventure we would never, ever forget,” according to the pamphlet, which I added to the stack of travel brochures I had collected throughout the course of our journey, for research purposes.