Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia

  One morning, crossing from church to Sunday school, we turned down the street instead and used our dimes for the offering to buy Cokes at the drugstore. Since our father usually didn’t get up on Sunday morning and our mother was busy with cooking, we decided it was a safe as well as pleasant solution to Sunday school. After it had become a habit, we sat in unguarded debate with the man behind the counter about whether there was more Coke in a bottle than in a glass, when Colonel Packer came in to buy a Sunday paper. Ushered into his Buick, we were delivered home for appropriate discipline.

  “You don’t go to church,” I said to our only recently awake young father.

  “I do sometimes. You don’t have to go to church to be religious.”

  “Then why do we go?” Arthur asked.

  Our father turned a matchbook on the arm of his low-slung chair, in the cracks of which we could usually retrieve enough change for a movie if our allowances had run out.

  “Convince me,” he said.

  We did not go to church after that unless it was a family undertaking, Christmas and Easter Christians until years later, after Arthur and I had both left home, when our parents took up with the church again for some years, in a mood of community spirit, grateful to be together again after the long war, or as a new conservatism that age and some kinds of disappointments can bring.

  Free of Sunday duty, I expected other kinds of adventures with my brother, but he was increasingly restless. Boys didn’t play with girls, particularly kindergarteners. Only boys were supposed to play war and soccer. Why did he have to walk to school with me? Why did he have to take me to the movies? Kids did jeer at us. Arthur, the pacifist, walked more quickly, longing to run away, to escape the humiliation I was to him. I, the pugilist, jeered back, called our tormentor “a nigger, black trash,” using the weapons Josephine had given me. One boy retaliated by tying Arthur up. Only when I bribed his sister with money to get her jump rope back did he let Arthur go. He didn’t speak to me for a week.

  I always had more money than Arthur did. He was both generous and careless. I hoarded. So, when he otherwise would have refused my company, I could sometimes buy my way in. I even bought my way into one of his clubs, its meeting place in the bar room in his friend’s house. They needed light in there and first cut a small hole in the roof, good enough for a lookout but not for reading or playing cards. I bought candles to be allowed to join. One day I came home from school to find the whole store of candles laid out on my bed. Both Arthur and I were forbidden to play at the house again, pyromaniacs and carvers up of property that we were. Arthur, of course, blamed me. Secretly, I was relieved to be banned from that house where the brother’s brutality to his sister made Arthur look a paragon of gentleness and forbearance.

  When even being a patron of his projects didn’t work, I spied on him and told on him, knowing I only confirmed his desire to be rid of my company.

  The first Christmas at 727 Cowper, we were given a set of phones to be set up between our two rooms, mine next to my parents’, his at the back of the house behind the kitchen. The instructions for setting them up were burned with the wrappings, and the phones were never connected. Mine stayed on my bedside table and for some time received the secrets and questions Arthur no longer wanted to hear.

  The first-grade reader was as personally insulting. I would not read “Dick and Jane.” I said “Arthur.” Corrected again and again, I finally wouldn’t read at all, for the story not only confirmed my separation from my brother, but revealed the source of his growing prejudice against girls, who only watched boys play or helped Mother. As for Spot, we didn’t have a dog, and Arthur had taken to tormenting the cat even more cruelly than Josephine had done, dropping it from the garage roof, kicking it. When it died, Mother said she didn’t really like pets. We could bring home any strays we wanted, as long as they were human.

  I did begin to make some friends of my own. Wally, Chinese, and Chiaki, Japanese, were the two brightest boys in my class and they weren’t as averse to playing with girls as the other boys were. They were even willing to captain opposing mixed teams at recess, called the Japs and the Chinks. We knew that, in the grown-up world, the Japs were bad and the Chinks were good, but those two boys, best friends, were equally liked. I sometimes invited them home after school. Mother Packer thought them odd companions, “like little rats,” she said, silently scurrying by her when she was there one afternoon to take care of us. She didn’t have much use for Eddie, the Jewish boy down the block, either, but there we sadly agreed with her. Eddie hung around me as dismally as I tried to hang around Arthur, and I was no kinder. Eddie was a mama’s boy, fat, easily given to tears, the neighbourhood butt of most jokes. I was learning right along with my brother what a boy should be, and, though I sometimes detested the cruelty—I can still see a cat hanging from the top of the school flagpole—I detested a sissy with the rest.

  Arthur was increasingly in trouble at school. Often when we changed classes, there he would be, sitting on the principal’s detention bench, and everyone in the class would hiss, “There’s your brother.” If I tried to speak to him, he ignored me. He often had to stay after school. When he arrived home, famished, Mother said, “Gee, if your teacher is going to keep you this late, you ought at least to ask her to serve tea.” The next day, even later, he said, “She didn’t think it was funny.”

  Given tests, Arthur was labelled unusually gifted, one of the children to be studied by a Stanford research team. He was in trouble so often at school, our parents were told, because he was bored. The label didn’t help. His teachers bullied him with it and he withdrew further. I think now he was probably as frightened as I often was, first by the newness and strangeness of the place, then by the often-bewildering requirements of the school. Told he was bright enough for the work to be easy made him more self-protective. He avoided. He lied. At least I was spared the brutality of being a boy. I, meanwhile, fell in love with my second-grade teacher. For her, I would even try sometimes to read aloud and, since she had no misgivings about my left-handedness, my printing improved.

  Arthur never did his chores at home unless he was reminded, but then he usually did them cheerfully enough. If he was punished, he took that cheerfully, too. I didn’t have to be reminded often, but, when I was, I sulked. Punishment of any sort sent me into a silent, revenge-vowing rage. I would stay in my room for hours, planning hunger strikes, go days refusing to speak. Only my father could break my will. He always did it with kindness, sitting down next to me on my bed, putting an arm around me and asking, “So what is the problem, Cookie?” All my resolve failed into furious tears, after which I had to agree to forgive and be forgiven. I adored my father, but even then his power offended my sense of myself. He would often say, “You know, if we could just shuffle the two of you together, we’d come up with a pretty fine person.” Since I already felt the bereaved half of a strong identity, his view seemed to confirm that loss. I didn’t know how to replace or find for myself all that had gone from me in the broken bond with my brother, who felt required to root out of himself the gentleness that had linked us.

  Arthur Rule Jr. (Jane Rule’s brother)

  Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia

  I have little recollection at all of the indignities I suffered at my mother’s hand. I suspect, therefore, most of them were invented, ways of taking out on her the bewildered sense of hurt and fear I felt. I grew increasingly frightened of the dark. Listening to the radio broadcasts of some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories made me sweat in such fear that my mother thought I had wet the bed. Those black gloves coming out of a secret panel in the wall over the bed in the film The Cat and the Canary gave me nightmares of Josephine come back from the dead to get me. The evening news Dad read in the paper while I sat on his lap made me dream of Japanese soldiers, the size of our lead soldiers, marching across my bedstead. I was as huge as Gulli
ver, waiting to be bound up. When I asked my father how big Japanese soldiers were, he answered absent-mindedly, “Small, very small.” I didn’t ever say I was frightened, but I called out every few minutes, sometimes for several hours, after I was in bed, listening to hear the weight of Mother’s footsteps to see if her anger had become more frightening than the dark. To comfort myself, I got a fingernail file out of my bedside-table drawer and gradually filed off all the finish of the leg nearest me. If Mother noticed it, she never mentioned it.

  Once we were taken to San Francisco to spend the night with my father’s aunt while he and Mother went to a party. Auntie Sue went out after we were in bed, I out on an enclosed back porch, Arthur in a bed in the next room. Thinking we were all alone, which was terrifying enough, I suddenly saw the kitchen light go on. I rushed in to Arthur who decided to explore to find out who was there. We had not been told or hadn’t taken in that Auntie Sue ran a boarding house. We crept along the dimly lit corridor upstairs, peeking through cracks and keyholes, finding several of the tenants in. Since they seemed comfortably at home, we decided the person in the kitchen meant us no harm, but I begged Arthur to let me get into bed with him. Grumpily he agreed, if I would sleep next to the wall. I lay awake and tense, listening to strangers move about the house, and then I began to peel paper off the wall, a task as comforting as the filing of my table leg. I was still awake when my parents came home and carried me into my own bed again. The next morning, up early to get back to Palo Alto in time for school, I walked into the bedroom door and fainted. Though I’m sure Mother and Dad heard about that wallpaper, they didn’t discuss it with me, and we never stayed with Auntie Sue again.

  SUMMERS, IN CONTRAST, WERE LIGHT-STRUCK months for me, perhaps for my brother, too. Each year around the first of July, we went to South Fork, 240 acres of redwood trees in Humboldt County, California, ten miles north of Garberville. It was officially Paradise Ranch, named by a fruit rancher who owned it until he was killed by Indians and my Great-Grandfather Vance bought it from his bank cheaply. Our only acknowledgment of that name was to call two dead redwood trees at the south end of our valley “God and the Missus.” The Vances called it South Fork because it bordered on the south fork of Eel River and was their farthest summer outpost from Eureka, California, the town in which my great-grandfather was president of a bank, a railroad and owner of extensive property, a result of his rectitude rather than acumen. He’d inherited money from an uncle who had disowned all his children. The family’s regular summer home was at Carlotta, a widening in the road with stone and a lumber mill named for my grandfather, which could be reached easily from Eureka by carriage or train in my mother’s childhood. South Fork was an overnight journey from Carlotta by buckboard, past Indian encampments. The stay there never lasted longer than two weeks for trout fishing, berry and fruit picking. Mother Packer had inherited it, and she and the Colonel spent at least two months there every summer, where we joined them, Mother, Arthur and I for the summer, Dad for occasional weekends and his two-week vacation. In those days, before the Golden Gate Bridge was built, we had to cross from San Francisco to Marin County by ferry and drive nine hours to get there.

  It was not a happy choice for my mother, who became resident cook and housekeeper. She and her mother never got along easily, Mother Packer sarcastically critical of Mother and us. Mother Packer and the Colonel didn’t get along well either. He was the sort of alcoholic who stays nervously sober for months and then goes on a suicidal binge, locked up in a hotel room with gallons of high-proof alcohol. Mother Packer would have divorced him, but she had divorced her first husband when Mother was four. To divorce again would have sealed the world’s judgment against her. The Colonel might have left her had he not enjoyed the comfort of her money. So they bickered and flared. One night, separated from them by the thin redwood walls of the summer cabin, Mother was sure the Colonel was trying to kill Mother Packer. Twice there was a heavy thud and then a scream, before Mother banged on their door and called in to them.

  “Gov is trying to kill a bat right over my head,” Mother Packer explained in exasperated fear while I lay in bed and giggled nervously.

  I was never afraid of the Colonel. While adults tiptoed around his tense silences, I was as apt to seek the shelter of his quiet lap. I did not know then he was not my real grandfather, and, though he had a temper, it was more often pathetic or funny than frightening. Once making ice cream out under the relative cool of the great fig trees, he cranked and cranked without results until finally, in a filthy mood, he opened up the freezer to find that the women had forgotten to put in the dasher. His parade ground vocabulary was wondrous to hear. Our laughter excited the Colonel’s German shepherd to barking and the Colonel stamped off into the cabin, leaving us to get on with the job. He was a kind man, in his shy way. He did not lay claim to us as he might have had we been his, but he made a personal effort, always choosing Christmas and birthday presents for us himself, separate from those Mother Packer gave us. They were often books carefully selected for our interests. Once he gave me a real army canteen, something I had no idea I wanted until I had it. Though he often protested my father’s willingness to take me along for a day’s fishing trip, that canteen was his way of giving in. We had rituals with him, raising the flag each morning, saying the salute, lowering it each evening, folding it properly, never letting it touch the ground. The flag served a practical as well as patriotic purpose, for it could be seen from the highway across the river and signalled to friends and relatives that we were in residence.

  We hadn’t many visitors except on weekends when Mother Packer’s sister Etta might come down from Carlotta, driven by Charlie Weedman, once blacksmith at Carlotta and suitor to Etta. He was sent away, but when my great-grandmother died, he returned to the blacksmith’s cottage and did general chores around the place, companion to Etta until she died, living on there, tending her magnificent acre of garden for the rest of his life. Though they seemed to us far too old for such nonsense, we were encouraged to tease them, to call out on our way to bed, “Good night, Aunt Etta. Good night, Uncle Charlie.” I suspect he was as much a natural solitary as Etta and that they had arrived at exactly the right proximity for their temperaments, Etta at the top of the hill in the family’s large summer house, Charlie at the bottom in his two-room cabin, filled with neat stacks of old magazines and newspapers.

  Arthur and I loved Charlie. It was he who taught us to fish and to hunt. Because my Great-Grandmother Vance had been a famous fisherwoman, wrapping her own rods, tying her own flies, women in the family were expected to fish. There is a picture of Mother Packer as a girl standing over a dead bear with a rifle in her hands, but generally the women didn’t hunt. I recall landing numbers of small trout, but at dusk by the vegetable garden, when Charlie pointed out the ears of a jackrabbit, the rifle was always in Arthur’s hands. He turned away from cleaning the kill, which I enjoyed, Charlie pointing out heart, liver, lungs, kidneys. I once counted twenty-six cherry pits in one pigeon.

  Mother Packer’s other sister, Ida, had died in childbirth years before. Because there had been a squabble over her estate, the family feared her widower would try to kidnap Mother and hold her for ransom, a romantic terror I almost envied her.

  The only brother, Harry, lived in Eureka, blind from diabetes, rich from having inherited least of the real estate which had increased in value much more than the stocks and bonds held in conservative trusts for Aunt Etta and Mother Packer. Once a week, he lined up his family—wife, son and daughter, numerous grandchildren—and handed out their allowances. A mean man, fond of practical jokes, shrewd, his sisters would hear no word against him, not even that he was blind, a lesson I learned when I was about six. Etta and Mother Packer were quarrelling over choosing a silver pattern for a place setting for him, lighter and easier to manage than the family pattern. “What difference does it make if he’s blind?” I asked and was sent to my room for twenty-four hours. “He was the only man I ever trusted,” Mother
Packer said when he died. My father, having looked into some of Harry’s financial dealings with his sisters, shook his head and held his tongue.

  Harry’s family rarely came to South Fork, but once or twice a summer, a meeting place between South Fork and Eureka would be chosen, and all the family, as well as close family friends, would bring a picnic. I don’t think I ever saw a sandwich at one of those picnics. There were fried chicken, ham, roast beef, meat loaf, quantities and varieties of potato salad, aspic salad, tossed salad, homemade bread and rolls, cakes, pies, cookies and whatever fruit and berries were in season. Though it got very hot, up to 110 degrees, the redwood groves we chose for picnics were always cool. And always a river ran nearby for keeping watermelon cool, for fishing, for swimming.

  Our ordinary lives at South Fork were solitary. In the morning, before the day got too hot, I often set out with a coffee can strung round my neck to the wild meadow to pick blackberries or the more difficult, tiny huckleberries. It took me a couple of hours to get enough of these for pie. I loved that chore. Berries grew particularly thickly around the burned-out foundation of the house the original owner had built for the squaw he took to live with him. She had died in that fire, and some said there was buried treasure somewhere near that house. At least once in a summer, Arthur and I worked up enough enthusiasm to go digging for it. I loved the meadow full of sunny mysteries, but I had to be careful of poison oak because a bad case of that could keep me bandaged and house ridden for several weeks, not allowed to feel sorry for myself unless I was alone. Then I’d crank up the old Victrola (which still sits in my study today) and put on “Red River Valley” over and over again, weeping through my swollen eyes onto my blisters. Dad was best at doing bandages, his hands deft and gentle, his patience absolute.