Both my mother and her brother were frightened of their own taciturn father, though they always tried to please him because they loved him and courted his good opinion. There were various chores, for example, that Stanley in particular would be required to perform, and my mother said that he would throw himself into any task with enthusiasm, only to be told by his father that there were worms in the bushel of apples he had picked or that the wood he had stacked made an uneven and therefore dangerous pile. With the exception of reading and composition, he did not excel in school (though my mother did) and this, too, rankled. At harvest time, he tired quickly and often froze on the upper rungs of a ladder. My mother remembered him clutching a branch and weeping while their father baited him, in full earshot of the workers, from his own safe position on the ground. “You’re twelve years old,” he would shout, “and you’re behaving like a six-year-old girl.” My grandfather would turn away then, in feigned disgust, leaving Stanley with apples and leaves and in full terror of what my mother claimed was hardly a life-threatening distance between him and the earth. It was she who crept out to the orchard at dusk after the other pickers had left in order to coax him down, rung by rung. There was always something in her that made her want to protect her brother, to actively defend him if necessary. She would continue to coax him down from dangerous heights many years later when he had begun to embrace, rather than avoid the fear, the vertigo.
My mother recalled her brother’s quietness on the journey back to Canada, how he turned his face toward the car window and the passing farms beyond it or the way he stood at the rail on the ferry and looked down at the frothing water. She remembered his expression as being almost adult in its preoccupation, a look she had seen on their father’s face when he had been worried about weather or the price of a bushel of apples, or even (because he was essentially a kind man) when he had been concerned about a neighbour who was sick or who had a problem that needed solving. Now this absorption was visible on her brother’s face and in his posture, and she was puzzled by this.
Two nights later, back on the north side of the lake and sleeping in her own familiar bed, she said she was awakened by the sound of men shouting. On her ceiling, a wash of orange and yellow was shifting and intensifying, draining down the wall. When she ran to kneel in front of the low window of her room, she could see cars and trucks, lit by an amber glow, already parked in the yard or coming up the lane, and although the barn was not visible from her room, she knew what had happened and who had made it happen. “And I also knew,” she told me, “why he had made it happen.”
The following morning, after the barn was gone and the fire was no longer dangerous enough to need constant attention, my grandfather took off his belt and whipped poor Stanley, who had been hoping, my mother knew, for the balm of consolation. The boy had gone silently, without tears, to his room, had stayed there all day and night. The next morning, he had departed silently for school. She followed him, giving him the distance she sensed his pride might need, and wincing when he stiffened with pain. Neither the boy nor his father ever spoke about the incident, even when the burnt rubble that had once been the barn was being dragged away, but something had altered forever in their relationship. As if the punishment had distanced him enough to provide a clear view of the older man’s character, Stanley was able to see a flaw in his father – “A crack in the cup,” my mother said – and that flaw made his parent more human and, strangely, easier to love. Stanley’s grades improved after that and he lost his fear of his father. “It vanished completely,” my mother said. “Gone, as if it had never been there. And he could do anything he wanted after that, just stared my father down in the face of objections. There was this purposefulness about him, and I could see he was changing, becoming someone else.”
Years later, my mother’s American cousin, Sadie, now married to my Uncle Stan, would create a flourishing rose garden inside the remaining walls of the burned barn’s fieldstone foundations. Eventually, because it would not be needed for either storage or workhorses and was deemed to be unsuitable for conversion into housing for the labourers, the new barn, which had been built in the wake of the fire, was pulled down. Aunt Sadie announced that she was pleased because to her mind the proportions of that building were all wrong and did nothing for the property. But what my mother remembered was how confident her brother had been on the ladder in the weeks following the fire when he and his father were working on the construction of that barn, without, as she said, a hint of tension between them.
Was this the moment then when my uncle’s charisma was born and began to grow? A quiet child, inclined to be plump, he became, as my mother described him, a handsome charmer in young adulthood. Every woman from five to fifty was drawn to him, and there were moments when he was seeing half a dozen girls at one time. Teachers sometimes boarded at the farm, and there was one, I believe, with whom he became physically involved, though the exact details of all that were never clear to my mother, who was most of the time a bit put off by the females who mooned around her favourite brother. Then came the summer when the beautiful and distant Sadie was sent from the other side of the lake in order to remove her from the influence of some undesirable whom she had taken a fancy to.
At first she was sulky and withdrawn, my mother recalled, barely leaving the room that Mandy and I would sleep in during our summers and that she, Sadie, shared with the girl who would later become my mother. If she noticed Stanley or his brother, Harold, or any of their friends, she showed no signs of this. And perhaps it was this very indifference that caused my uncle to react to her so powerfully. When she had been at the farm barely a week, he stopped going to the dance pavilion on the weekends, and by the time two weeks had passed, it was difficult to persuade him to leave the farm for any reason, even if he was offered unlimited use of the car. As if Sadie’s presence in the house had brought back to him everything that had made him so uncertain and timid in his childhood, his former silence returned. Occasionally, however, he would break out of this into what my mother called “downright silliness,” joking and throwing his weight around until one parent or the other would tell him to stop. At mealtimes he either stared at Sadie or looked resolutely at his plate, his expression pained, angry.
My mother admitted that she had been jealous of Sadie at the time. Her American store-bought clothes, her perfect skin and hair, the movie magazines that were hers and that anyone had to ask permission to look at. She was envious as well of the effect she had on both of the brothers because Harold, too, was not immune to Sadie’s charms, though not as disturbed by them as Stanley. It would be Harold who would successfully tease their American cousin out of her sullenness, cause her to participate, usually by baiting her in a cheerful sort of way. “‘Went out last night to take a little round,’” he would sing. “‘I met my little Sadie and I blowed her down.’” Or he would call her Sadie Hawkins in reference to the spinster who chased bachelors in the L’il Abner comic strip. “Well, Sadie Hawkins,” he would say at breakfast, “I can tell by the look of you that you’re after chasing me today. I’d better start running.”
This had a certain effect on my mother’s cousin, at least caused her to make eye contact, though in a truculent sort of way. It wasn’t until Harold threw a pailful of cold water through an open window while she was quietly doing the dinner dishes – “my parents expected her to help with various household chores,” said my mother – a splash of water meant to wake her up – that she fully responded, flinging the damp cloth against the screen and racketing out the door to chase him as he had predicted she would. Stan, who was coming out of the field with the family’s few remaining cows, witnessed the end of the chase, his brother and Sadie rolling together on the lawn. Her tanned legs kicking, her blonde hair tangled, his brother laughing as she beat her small wet fists against his chest.
Two days later Stanley enlisted, walking the thirty miles to the Canadian Forces Base at Windsor. He spoke to no one, told no one where he was going. “Ju
st disappeared in the night,” was the way my mother put it. It was the early 1960s, there was no war, at least not one that involved our country, so there was nothing romantic or heroic about this gesture and, when they were finally informed, his parents saw his sudden departure as a practical employment decision rather than an act of desperation. Sadie, on the other hand, having paid next to no attention to Stanley when he was present, became almost immediately obsessed by his absence. This, after all, took place at a time when young men in her own country were departing in significant numbers for the war in Vietnam. He was subsequently posted to Maritime Command in Halifax on Canada’s East Coast, training, he suggested, as some kind of engineer. He would be there for four years.
As soon as she had an address Sadie began to write letters to him, an activity she continued until the end of his service. These letters remain in the house, and I confess that I have read some of them. Being a chronicle of how her high schooling was unfolding and later of the design courses she was taking at the college of interior decoration, there was nothing in them that could be confused with romance. But it would have been the fact of those letters, arriving punctually, first at Windsor Army Base in Ontario, and then later at cfb Halifax, Nova Scotia, that would have made a man with Stanley’s imagination invent the affection that, as far as I could tell, was not really in them. Later he would inform my mother that he had slept with those letters under his pillow and had kept one or two close to his heart when he worked on the ships that I was later to learn he never sailed on. Those letters signed Love, your cousin Sadie. Those prosaic letters, and a glimpse of her rolling on the lawn with his prosaic brother, her connection to the ordinary, reinstated his confidence. When he strutted home again, miraculously mature and ready to take over the farm, it was her to whom he was returning, and he began, almost immediately, to make frequent trips to the other side of the lake. They were married three months later.
“He still in uniform, she in a perfectly designed white satin dress,” my mother told me as she fumbled in a drawer searching for the wedding photo. “I know it is here somewhere,” she said, moving her hand through letters and cards and some old snapshots of me as a child. I allowed her to do this even though I knew the picture was still in this house and not in her room at The Golden Field. My uncle’s marriage had collapsed. No use looking for it anywhere.
When I tell you this story now, it does nothing but confirm my belief in the arbitrariness and frailty of the way human families are engendered; how pivotal, for example, the forgotten “undesirable” young American boy or a pailful of water thrown through the window are to the establishment of the seemingly stable world that I myself walked into each summer as a child. What, I often wonder, would have taken place if my uncle had not decided to join the Armed Forces? Even though his enlistment, looked at in the cold light of day, was mundane, and the activities attached to it – he was, it turns out, a riveter – boring and endlessly repetitive, it determined almost everything that would later happen in the family. It was just a simple departure: there was no glorious cause to espouse, no sacrifice to make. But perhaps you feel differently than I do about causes and sacrifice, being so fully involved at this time in a cause more mysterious and deadly than anything I have ever encountered.
Mandy, to my knowledge, never thought much about her father’s stint in the peacetime military, though of course she knew it had taken place. There was that wedding photo, after all: a man in uniform marrying a woman who could not pay any attention to him until he disappeared.
What we are drawn to and what we turn away from are equal, I think, in their power over our bodies and our minds and seem, to me at least, to be equally determining of what becomes of us. A farm boy evolving into a soldier causes a girl to turn the light of her attention from one brother to another. He moves away from her, then she moves toward him, and the whole summer world as I would come to know it is seeded in those shifts of mood and location. A young Mexican in a foreign country panics in the face of violence butting up against adult fear, and he and passion are removed forever from my life. Thrown off course by a sudden shift of the wind, a butterfly will never reach its intended destination. It will die in flight, without mating, and the exquisite possibilities it carries in its cells and in the thrall of its migration will simply never come to pass.
A few nights ago the Coast Guard’s airborne search-and-rescue team was conducting training exercises about a mile offshore. Large, cadmium-orange discs, designed to illuminate a sizable expanse of open water, floated slowly down toward the lake, causing parallel gold paths to appear on the lake’s skin as if there were a series of autumn moons reflecting there. Were it not for the slowness of their descent, these ovals would seem almost celebratory: a variant of fireworks. Feu d’artifice, as the French would say. Artificial fire.
Fire has always been a part of our family’s story – there was that barn my uncle burned, of course – but it was a significant factor in the settlement of this flat, prairie-like landscape, here in the southern part of the province as well. My uncle said that the earliest settlers, our own great-greats among them, were so overwhelmed by the sheer number of hardwood trees, and the tremendous size of those trees, that rather than continue to cut them down themselves, or hire choppers, they set acres of forest on fire. As far away as the then small settlement of Chicago across the lake, people apparently saw the glow in the northern sky and knew it was the burning of Essex County. My mother often talks about seeing an orange stain in the night sky in the 1960s and being told that Detroit had been set on fire in the midst of civil unrest. And Mandy, poor Mandy, would never fully recover from the “friendly fire” that had dropped from an American war plane on a platoon of recently arrived Canadian troops in Afghanistan, killing six of her colleagues.
Certainly, the nighttime exercises I witnessed the other evening were not as charged with meaning as those I have just mentioned, and yet how sad and stately the orbs of light seemed. Their appearance was like a rehearsal of tragedy with just a hint of possible redemption trembling at the edge. They have nothing to do with migration, of course, but I couldn’t help but think of the weaker monarchs that, exhausted by the effort of crossing the lake, are drawn down from the sky and into the waves. And I couldn’t help but think of Mandy either, Mandy and her father.
Not long after things fell apart, Mandy decided she wanted to become a search-and-rescue specialist and enrolled in night classes at a nearby college while she was still in high school. The courses she took had names like Managing the Lost Person or Lost Person Behaviour, and young though I was, I was not unaware, all things considered, of the significance of this. I was fighting with my own loss at the time and had turned inward, having neither the maturity nor the confidence to do anything else with my grief. Back in the city, my mother and I carried on with the routine of our lives, and now and then Mandy and her mother and brothers visited. Most of the time the boys slouched morosely near a television set with some kind of game scrabbling across its screen until it was time for bed, while Mandy and I withdrew to the room, my city bedroom, which we were to share for the night.
It was during one of those visits that Mandy told me what she intended to do in the future. “A peacekeeper,” she said, adding that it was difficult to get into military college, though more possible now for girls because of affirmative action. She looked downwards as she spoke, thinking aloud, only now and then glancing in my direction, as if she had just remembered I was there. This sort of introspection, even when she spoke, had been a part of her ever since that summer night. Mandy, the girl who in the past was so certain in her gestures, her stance, now talked quietly – if at all – and rarely made eye contact. Her posture had changed as well: she kept her head down, almost slunk through a room, and she had begun to wear large, ungainly garments that hid her hips and breasts without extinguishing either the extraordinary beauty that was her birthright or the physical strength she had acquired by swimming all summer in the lake and all winter in
her high-school pool. It seems to me now that she was in the chrysalis phase, hiding behind the subtle anger that was evident in her attitude and posture and wrapped up in those clothes.
I asked about this “affirmative action” I had never heard of, and she said it had something to do with enabling girls and women to do the things they had never been encouraged to do before. The search-and-rescue courses were just the beginning, she told me. They would look good on her application, though her academic marks would have to be very high as well. Her mother was in favour of this notion probably, Mandy conjectured, because entrance to the officer training program would place her in the midst of the well-bred, good-looking, and intelligent young men who had always filled the halls of that historic institution. But Mandy was having none of that. According to her, she intended to outrun, outmarch, and outmanoeuvre these boys at every pass. She would study harder and train longer. She reminded me that she had read more books than they could even imagine and then rolled up her sleeve to show me the small, tight muscle on her upper arm. She was surprised, she said, that I had not started to think about my own future and a bit shocked that I wasn’t familiar with the term affirmative action. You’re the city girl, she said, looking fully into my face for the first time. I thought, I still think, she was suggesting that that fact alone should give me some connection to a more vital and therefore more comforting life. I looked around my room. It was the place where I spent most of my time now. The city had become a distant hum, the soft noise of the world going on without me.
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