by Mark Critch
I started following Nanny on her trips downtown. This involved a lot of travel. There would be a cab ride to the mall, followed by a bus, then a transfer to another bus and a trip to Woolco’s, where we’d get a piece of strawberry shortcake, eaten silently as she recharged her octogenarian batteries and tried not to die, and then the same trip in reverse.
She had big, soft, wrinkly arms that were always cold. In hindsight, that may have been her capillaries shutting down. I loved to sit on the couch and stroke her elephant trunk of an arm and chat about the things kids talked about with their best pal—like Who was a superior singer? Eddie Cantor or Jolson? And Just who the hell does that new young priest think he is, quoting Beatles lyrics in his sermon? And Is it pension cheque day? Check the mailbox.
She wore a uniform that said “Nan” the same way a firefighter’s red helmet denotes authority or Donald Trump’s blue suit–white shirt–red tie combo makes you wonder how someone can be that rich and own only one suit.
Nanny always wore a floral-pattern dress, blue apron, and an old-lady kerchief on her head. She looked like a Russian doll that you could open to find several smaller Nans inside.
I remember her sitting in her looted Colonial Building chair, reading the obituaries aloud. We always checked the obituaries. It was important to see whom you had outlasted and always a good idea to make sure that you weren’t in there yourself. It was a beautiful, sunny day and she’d looked up from her paper to remark, “It’s a lovely day for a funeral.”
I agreed and turned my attention back to the TV set. Nan had her interests and I had mine. I was watching The Quick Draw McGraw Show, a cartoon about a cowboy horse. In a brilliant twist on the genre, in this cartoon the horse was the sheriff and used the gun! It might have been a lovely day for a funeral, but it was a perfect day to stay inside and watch cartoons.
I was in a bit of a funk, to be honest. It was payday and Mom and Dad were headed down to the mall to do their banking and get groceries. I was being left behind with my grandmother. This was an outrage. At that time in my life, my whole world was a triumvirate of places. If I were to draw a map of the world it would be a triangle: home–church–mall. My parents were waiting on a taxi and I had exhausted my arguments for going. I was lost in the world of Quick Draw McGraw.
After a particularly good shootout (especially for a horse—I mean, the Lone Ranger had opposable thumbs, but Quick Draw was aiming with hooves!), I turned back to Nanny to see if she was catching this.
Her face was still buried in the newspaper. “To each their own,” I thought. Then something happened that required adult consultation. All of a sudden, Quick Draw was chasing after some cowpokes on a stagecoach pulled by horses. This horse was riding another horse. Okay, I bought into the whole anthropomorphic horse thing, but what was wrong with the horse he was riding? Had some of the horses enslaved their equine brethren? And if he let the horses go, wouldn’t he be able to travel as fast as the other horses? After all, he was a horse himself so he wasn’t really saving himself any time.
I looked back at Nanny to ask her if she also found this cartoon a bit far-fetched, but she wasn’t in her chair. She was lying on the floor, her paper still in one hand. “That’s odd,” I thought. I never for a moment thought anything was wrong. Nothing had ever really been wrong until that moment. I wandered over to her and called her name.
Nanny?
Nanny? Are you awake?
I shook her shoulder. Nothing. I grabbed her wrinkly arm. No response. I felt the panic move up my body from my stomach to my chest to my arms as I tugged vigorously at her passive hand. I knew she was dead. Something inside me could tell, but I had no idea what all this really meant. I didn’t know that people could just die. I thought people had to be killed to die. I thought they had to be shot like the bad guys in my Quick Draw McGraw cartoon. I knelt at Nanny’s side and gently rubbed her cool, wrinkly arm one last time for comfort. Someone had shot Nanny and I was going to avenge her the only way my three-year-old self knew how—I was gonna tell.
My parents hadn’t left the house yet. Dad was smoking a Rothman’s and listening to his own voice on the radio. Mom was in the bathroom putting the finishing touches on her makeup. I had to tell them, warn them of the danger lurking somewhere in the house. But to get to them I had to cross the no-man’s-land of the living room and risk the cavern of the front hallway without getting shot myself. I jumped from Nan to the cover of Dad’s TV chair. I could see Mom studying herself in the mirror from this vantage point. Sure, I was still mad at her for abandoning me for the excitement of the mall, but I couldn’t just let her get shot, too. I barrel-rolled into the hallway, Captain Kirk style. Clear! I made a mad dash for the bathroom, landing at my mother’s feet.
ME: Mom! Mom! Get down. Nanny’s dead! Nanny is DEAD!
MOM: ForTheLoveOfGod,Mark,GetOutOfTheBathroomI’mTryingToPutMeFaceOn! Don’tSayNanny’sDead! BeQuietShe’llHearYou!
“No, Mom,” I thought, “she won’t hear me. She won’t hear anything ever again. She’s dead!”
ME: Nanny is dead! Listen to me! There’s a bad guy in the house and he’s got a gun and we have to get out of here! Dad can take care of himself!
MOM: Mark,You’reNotComingToTheMall. That’sIt! NowGoWatchTheLoneRanger.
She pushed me out of the bathroom and closed the door, locking it. The metallic click of the lock sounded like a gun being cocked and for a moment I tensed, expecting the worst. There was so much wrong here. First, Mom had locked me out, taking cover in the bathroom, which frankly, I wished I’d thought of. Second, I was not watching the Lone Ranger. He was a man who rode horses. I was watching a show about a horse that…rode a horse. Was that horse just very stupid? Or had he fallen down on his luck and this was the only way for him to find work and rebuild his life? And while we’re thinking about it, why can Goofy talk and drive a car but Pluto is clearly Mickey’s pet? Is slavery legal in the cartoon universe or is this some weird sexual S&M situation? “Don’t think about that now,” I said to myself. This was no time to debate the finer points of historical accuracy of Wild West animation.
I needed to get to my father in the kitchen. He was a newsman. He dealt in facts. He could be reasoned with. To reach the kitchen I had to enter the hallway that ran between the front and back doors. The only cover there was the telephone table. Luckily, this was a rare time when there were no cats to be shampooed or calls to the deaf to be made.
Now I hid under this same telephone table, expecting to be shot at any moment. From my hiding spot I could smell the smoke billowing from my father’s nostrils. Dad smoked three packs of Rothman’s a day. Between the burnt meals that Mom prepared and the steady cloud of blue smoke from my father, the house always had the atmosphere of a Civil War battle.
I’d seen on TV that smoking was bad for you, so I once stole a full carton of Dad’s smokes. A carton of smokes was the Dad gift for every occasion.
ME: What do you want for Christmas, Dad?
DAD: A carton of smokes.
ME: Father’s Day is coming up. Anything special you’d like to do?
DAD: A carton of smokes.
DOCTOR: I’m sorry to inform you, Mister Critch, but I think the tumour is inoperable. Is there anything we can do to make you feel more comfortable?
DAD: A carton of smokes.
I’d taken his prized carton and hid in Dad’s closet. I opened each pack and snapped every cigarette in two. I left a mountain of tobacco covering Dad’s shoes and headed for the blue fog of the kitchen.
“Mom, Dad. I have an announcement to make.”
They followed me to the closet and I opened the door. “The surgeon general says smoking is bad for you.”
“My carton!” the old man screamed.
“No need to thank me. I’m sure you would have quit on your own,” I proudly replied.
“That was my birthday present!”
I soon found out that ruining smokes makes your arse red.
But now, with Nanny lying dead in the next room, Dad’s constant stream of smoke would be the perfect cover for my last chance at survival. The air was thick with the fog of war.
I crawled out from under the phone table and made a mad dash for the kitchen. Dad was staring intently at the radio as if he’d miss something if he looked away for even a moment.
“Dad! Dad! Get down. Nanny’s dead! Nanny is DEAD!”
My father inhaled deeply and replied without even looking at me.
“Don’t say Nanny’s dead. She’ll hear you.”
Same as Mom! Had they colluded? Maybe they were working with the killer. Maybe they were the killer. The voice on the radio reported on a fire that had cost a family their home the night before. If only the reporter knew of the life-and-death situation that went unreported mere metres away!
BEEP! BEEP! “Mary! The cab is here!” Dad put out his cigarette. There was no more definite sign that my father was about to leave the house than the butting of his indoor cigarette followed by the lighting of his outdoor cigarette. We didn’t have a car then because my parents never went anywhere except for the mall and church, and both only once a week.
The cab driver’s name was also Mike. He was known as Mike the Taxi Driver. The old man was always great with nicknames. As it was payday, the Critches’ riches were currently depleted so there was no cash in the house to pay for a taxi. However, Dad knew that Mike the Taxi Driver would take a cheque, and he always called Mike on payday. It could not have been profitable at all for poor Mike the Taxi Driver. He drove for OK Taxi, and their stand was all the way down on Water Street. Mike had to drive twelve kilometres both ways to make a two-kilometre run.
BEEP! BEEP! Mike angrily leaned on his horn again. He had money to lose. There was no time for waiting. I was about to be left home alone with a dead babysitter and an imagined murderer on the loose. I reached for my father’s teacup, knowing it was full of piping hot tea. Teacups were always replenished at my house. The only time I’d seen an empty teacup was when a DJ friend of Dad’s named Duke visited. He would pour his tea from the cup into the saucer and slurp it from there. It was an ungodly way to take your tea, and I was happy when I heard Duke had been fired for talking dirty to callers when they phoned in to request songs. The man was clearly an animal.
I took Dad’s teacup and emptied the steaming hot contents onto his lap. He stood up and screamed what he always did when he couldn’t believe what I had done.
“MAAAARRRRRRRYYYYYYYYY!”
Mom, thinking he didn’t want to keep the taxi waiting, finished her face and rushed to the kitchen. She looked at my father’s soaked crotch with an expression of pity.
“OhMyGodMike. WhyDidn’tYouTellMeYouHadToUseTheBathroom? SureICouldHaveLetYouIn. YouCan’tGoToTheMallWithPissyPantsOn.”
The old man turned to look at me with the kind of rage that would make you forget the corpse in the next room. He looked like the bull in the bullfighter print that was the sole piece of art in the house. I needed the bull before me to charge. It was the only way I could force him to follow me into the next room to see his poor mother. I had to make him see for himself.
I ran past him, through the dining room and to the corner of the big brown faux-leather chair—the nicest piece of furniture we had, reserved only for the man himself.
I remember running. I remember the long blast of the horn that signalled Mike the Taxi Driver might just pull away empty. I remember hearing my mother asking what was going on. I remember the phantom touch of my father’s hands as they came within a hair of grabbing my back. I can remember a thousand tiny details of that day. But I can’t remember anything past the corner of that chair. I can only imagine the terrible grief as Dad saw his mother lying dead on the floor. I can only imagine that there were tears. I think my young mind erased the memory of seeing my father cry for the first and only time of my entire life.
The next thing I remember was hiding under a neighbour’s dining room table as she tried to coax me out with an ice cream. “Not on your life,” I told her. “You’d be under here too if you’d seen what I’d seen. A guy could get shot out there.” I felt like the cat knowing that venturing out into the open could get you shampooed. Or worse.
Years later, my father told me more about that day. With his mother dead, he had to contact his brother. He hadn’t spoken to Leo in years. He knew he was living in Toronto, but that was about it. Using his media and police contacts, he finally got a number and called from the solemn grandeur of the telephone table. A woman answered the phone.
WOMAN: Hello?
DAD: Is Leo there?
WOMAN: Leo? Who is this?
DAD: It’s Mike. His brother. My God. What a clear line. I’m calling from Newfoundland. Long distance, so make it snappy, hey?
WOMAN: Mr. Critch. When was the last time you spoke with Leo?
DAD: I don’t think you understand. This is long distance. I’m calling to tell him that his mother died. Could you give him the message?
WOMAN: I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Leo is dead. He died two days ago.
DAD: May I ask who this is?
WOMAN: I’m Leo’s wife. He didn’t tell you he was married?
Dad told me that Leo had married an “Indian” woman and didn’t want to tell his mother because she wouldn’t approve. I asked him what kind of Indian. He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “You know. Curry or teepee?”
“You know,” he said wistfully, “I never thought to ask.” And that was that. No follow-up calls. No letters. No curiosity. With that call, my father lost his mother and his brother. Their obituaries ran side by side in the same newspaper. So if you’re a half-Indigenous or half-Indian Critch in Ontario, we may be related.
Nanny wanted to be buried alongside her long-deceased brother and parents in Belvedere Cemetery in St. John’s. The caretaker told Dad that the grave was pretty full and the burial wouldn’t be pretty. He said he might have to put her coffin in on its side, and suggested no mourners at the grave. But Dad had been the dutiful son all his life, and he wasn’t about to stop now.
At the graveside, curiosity got the better of him. He looked down and for the first time in forty-five years he saw the corner of his father’s coffin. He fainted.
In January of 2015, I was there to lower an urn containing the earthly remains of my father, Michael Edward Critch, into that same grave. The gravedigger was wrong. There was room for one more after all. Newfoundlanders will always shove over to make space for family. They were all together again now. Patrick was as far as you could get from the heights he once climbed in New York. Catherine Tobin Critch was back with her husband after forty-five years apart. And Dad, at the age of ninety-three, was staying with his parents again while his brother, Leo, was God knows where, off on an adventure on the mainland. Nothing much had really changed over the past hundred years. In their lifetimes they had seen world wars and a depression. They’d had their nationality changed without ever having to cross a border. They were very well knit.
3
THE WHEELS ON THE BUS
THE WORLD AS I KNEW IT changed forever in September 1979. My sheltered existence had been like living inside a snow globe and someone was about to throw it against a wall, shattering it into a million pieces. The goopy liquid would pour into a newly revealed reality while the little boy inside realized that not only was there a world outside of the one he knew, but it wasn’t even snowing.
I followed my mother into the temple of my childhood—Woolco. Over the years to come I’d see the hallowed halls of this department store become a Woolworth’s, a Walmart, and a Sears, but to me it would al
ways be Woolco. For my mother, it would always be “Wilco.” For some unknown reason, Mom mispronounced certain words that only she had trouble with. Woolco was “Wilco” and an iron was an “orn.” Whereas someone else would iron a shirt they bought at Woolco, my mother was going to “orn a shirt she bought at Wilco.” This was the land of “Dollar Forty-Four Day,” when random items would be marked down to just $1.44, creating near-riots among the see-through plastic hair-hat crowd over the last apple pie.
For me, Wilco was heaven on earth. It was more exotic than any Moroccan trading post, and housed the only toy department worth talking about in St. John’s. Rows of Star Wars action figures and Dinky cars, the Six Million Dollar Man doll that had a telescopic eye you could look through, the big Mego Batman and Superman dolls, a bag of little green army men with far too many minesweepers and guys with binoculars and never enough infantry men with guns—all this bounty and more could be gained with big sad eyes or a properly timed meltdown.
But now my mother turned away from the Micronaut mecca of the toy aisle and into a section of the store where even I hadn’t yet ventured. The smell was overpowering and intoxicating all at once. It was the smell of fresh plastic and vinyl. Shiny new pencil cases and book bags lined up as far as the eye could see: Spider-Man, Star Wars, Sesame Street, and more in all their highly flammable glory. There were so many options that I almost envied my brother; surely we were stopping to get him some school supplies. To be honest, he was a bit old for a Batman book bag and I felt slightly embarrassed for him.
“PickYouselfOutABookBagNowYouGotSchoolMonday.”
“I beg your pardon,” I thought to myself. “I most certainly do not.” I’d seen my brother trudge off down to the end of our driveway in the morning to catch the school bus. The door would open and the bus would swallow him up. I thought the bus must eat a part of his soul, because each day at three-thirty when it spat him out again he looked world-worn and weary, like a miner climbing out of the shaft. My father looked the same way when he came into the house after work at five-fifteen asking, “What’s for supper?” He knew damn well what was for supper. He could see the steam on the windows. He could see the damp wallpaper beginning to peel off the walls. He could feel the air so wet it could cure asthma. But still he asked, and in that brief moment there was hope of something new, an escape. A whole day working led to this question—the best part of his day—and even that would perpetually disappoint. So I’d seen how leaving the house in the morning and coming back in the afternoon broke good men, and I had no intention of ever letting it happen to me. No, it was a housewife’s life for me. Morning chat shows and afternoon soaps. My mother was mistaken. I didn’t go to school. I didn’t “go” anywhere. I went to home.