And Clifford’s response:
“See, if you’d been in there, you could have steered. All it needed was a pilot.”
Motorcycle
The sun has warmth to it when I step out of the shadows of the pines, out into the centre of what was once the yard, the place where I used to play, where so much happened. This is where I came into being, came into the world, came into a life, my origination.
I toss the hoop into the air, watch it spin, see the sky and the pines behind it and through it, see it reach its zenith and start to come back down. I catch it and carry it with me as I look around.
Mom’s old gas-powered washing machine should still be around here somewhere — a white enamel tub with four metal legs and a place for a gas engine underneath. The wringer head, if I remember correctly, would have been stainless steel. It shouldn’t be hard to spot.
She’d used it only out here, in the front yard, the metal flex exhaust pipe lying across the ground, puffing noisily. I don’t think she liked it. She didn’t like any technology, especially anything that used gasoline. We used kerosene lamps instead of the hand-pumped gas lamps that other families had. She liked it that way.
Probably why she didn’t seem to mind that Clifford took the engine out.
Five horsepower Briggs and Stratton.
Now why would I remember that, precisely?
He probably drilled it into me.
And it had a kick-start. That was easy to remember. A gas engine under a washing machine, and you started it by stomping down on the pedal.
That’s where he got the idea from, from that kick-start.
“I can make a motorcycle.”
And he did.
It took a lot longer to make than the aeroplane.
His garage was a large white canvas tent at the back of the house, a shady place to work. I came to check on his progress occasionally, stood around and watched him put things together.
A bicycle, and this time it had tires with air in them and everything.
And a kickstand, so that the back tire was up in the air a few inches.
“That’s so I can start the engine. It’s going to be direct drive.”
He didn’t have to invite me to be a witness.
I wanted to be there. This was something I couldn’t miss.
It was done. It had taken him days and days, but it was finally ready. The motor was mounted, chain drive to the back tire. The kickstand worked.
“Now you watch. Stand off to the side, though, don’t get in the way.”
He sat on it. Stomped down on the pedal and the engine came alive and the rear wheel was spinning. When he knocked the kickstand out of place, that back tire hit the dirt and Clifford and his motorcycle took off.
No brakes. Well, he had to take the pedals off the bicycle to fit the engine.
No throttle. The engine had one speed. Wide open.
He must have been doing thirty, maybe thirty-five miles an hour when he hit the back of the house.
Philosophy and Shoelaces
I have a memory of riding a bicycle, fast down the gravel highway, and I know a truth, an absolute truth. Clifford told it to me. But it isn’t until I am alone — my legs pumping, my heart pounding, wind and sun and sky — that it hits me and I know it: “You are the only one who is real, there is only you and God. Everyone else on the planet is a robot put here by God to keep you company.”
It’s my moment of awakening. I am seven years old and I am alone on a planet. I experience the birth of consciousness.
If I was seven, he was thirteen. What kind of thirteen-year-old comes up with something like that and tells it to his little brother? Did he have any idea what that was going to do to me?
Maybe he did. Maybe it wasn’t just a malicious trick. Maybe he saw Dad sitting in a wooden chair, holding on, and he wanted to shield me from it. Maybe if I thought of Dad as just another robot, I wouldn’t hurt so much.
No, that’s too simple. I hold the hoop out in front of me and examine it closely. Anyone who could imagine something like this spaceship wouldn’t make up a single-use philosophy.
That idea, that I am the only real person, infects my seven-year-old self. I have a sense of self, an absolute sense of being. I am awake, on a planet. I belong here. I have more respect for the people around me. Maybe because I see none of them as my masters, I can be benevolent toward them, treat these robots, who don’t even know they are robots, with kindness, because I know the secret of our relationship and they do not.
Maybe Clifford was right. Maybe that is what he wanted me to experience: that I had no master on this planet, that I was an independent, sentient being. Maybe he planted that seed in my forming mind to help me as I became aware.
Or he was a thirteen-year-old mischief maker having fun with his gullible little brother. Tell me anything and I’d believe it. But somehow I don’t think so. Whatever he did to me was intentional. It was more than that he was six years older than me. I came into this world and he was here waiting for me, waiting to teach me, to guide me.
“Roar like a lion.”
And I would make the sound the best that I could.
“Hiss like a snake.”
And I would put my teeth together the way he told me to and make snake sounds.
In the early 1960s in northern Saskatchewan, there were no speech therapists. There still aren’t. A child with a speech impediment has to travel south to a city to learn how to speak. I had Clifford. I made lion noises to learn how to make the r sound, snake talk to pronounce s. Otherwise, I told of seeing “a cow on du wode” instead of “a car on the road.” Or excitedly report that “I teen du puppied” instead of “I seen the puppies.”
There’s an earlier memory. A high chair, Mom, Clarence, the stove, a pot of porridge, and I know something. I know that you have to put salt in porridge when you cook it. I might be two years old and I am trying to tell these adults that someone forgot to put in the salt. No one can understand the garble of my words. I am just a little person trying to show off that I know something, and they keep putting more sugar in my breakfast.
Clifford gave me my voice, my words.
I don’t remember his teaching me how to tie my shoelaces, but he must have. The memory is of his teaching a cousin a year older than me to tie his laces. The cousin couldn’t, kept getting it wrong. Finally, Clifford says, “Ray, you show him how.” And I untie and retie my canvas running shoe. I do it quickly, show-off style. “See.” Clifford’s voice is gentle. “He can do it and he’s younger than you. Try it again. You can do it.”
There on the north side of the house, where the grass is tall, that is where we had been sitting. I can almost see him there, the teacher, patient with his two young charges.
This house and this yard, these trees, the old garden, even the sand out front stirs memories, some of them sharp; but others, like tying shoelaces, are soothing. These are the memories that I’ve come back to find, to bathe myself in, or maybe to feed upon, to fill myself, to restore my soul.
Memories of Dad and memories of Clifford combine and become a memory of Clifford and Dad, the pair of them: Dad working in his garden, bent over at the waist with a hoe in his hand; Clifford with a watering can still dripping its last drops. Clifford was saying something, something long-winded, as I came up to them. Dad straightens up as I approach and says, “That’s a very interesting idea you have. But have you thought about how you’re going to use that idea to make things better?”
Chair
I don’t have to go into the house and look at the chair again. The memory catches up to me and I allow myself to follow it. It’s not as harsh as I expected. There’s a gentleness to it. The memory is not even of him. I have no memory of putting on my coat and going outside; all I have is Mom’s telling of it.
“He used to make me put the kids outside when he
was having a heart attack. Didn’t want them to see him like that. He’d sit in a wooden chair and hold on. At the end there he was having a heart attack every day.”
My memory, when I force it, when I put all the pieces together, isn’t much: adults talking in hushed, serious voices, going quiet when I approach, telling me to go outside and play; trips to La Ronge; then Dad is in the hospital in Prince Albert. In 1965 there were no transplants, no bypass surgeries, no stints. All they had to give him were Aspirins.
Mom goes to visit him. When she comes back, she says, “He wants to see Clifford.”
That’s a blow.
Why Clifford?
What about me?
I’m the one who loves him.
Why did I love him so much? Was it just because I lost him? Is this just the way my underdeveloped brain analyzed irrational guilt and grief? Or was there something more? There was, wasn’t there?
Then, December 15, 1965, at ten o’clock in the morning, the only person in the world who loved me…
I came home from school at lunchtime, and Mom and Grandma were packing up his clothes, cleaning him out of the house.
I was only eight years old and I was not supposed to understand.
I had to go back to school in the afternoon.
I stood at the back of the one-room schoolhouse, three shelves of books that we called the library, I held onto the bookshelf because I didn’t have the strength to stand. I stood there and cried. I couldn’t go to my desk.
And Miss Sanderson taught the class, let me stand there, or left me there to sob with my head in the corner between the shelves and the wall…
* * *
I don’t want to relive that.
Don’t want to go through it again.
There have to be good memories here too.
Down there, down the little slope that used to seem so high, that’s where Mom worked on her moosehides. Mom and Aunt Maggie laughing, and kids running all over, and cousin Virginia and I sat on the top of the rack that held the moosehide and played a game with pine needles.
But the memory of my father’s funeral returns.
My oldest brother, Jimmy, went to Prince Albert with his black Chev truck and brought Dad home in the back. We had to go to the wake at the church, all of us crammed into the cab of the truck, and Jimmy got stuck in the deep snow and rocked it back and forth until he got it out again.
Then we were in the church.
Dad was in a coffin at the front.
It was nighttime and there were people there, sitting in the pews, visiting, hushed voices.
Mom lined us up: me, Sherry-Ann, Stanley, Garry; she carried Donny. We had to say goodbye to our dad. We had to kiss him. We were too short and she picked us up one at a time.
He looked like Dad, sort of, not quite; there was something missing.
His cheek was cold where I kissed him; cold and it wasn’t soft anymore, like kissing a candle.
Then we got back in the truck and went home.
The funeral was the next day.
I stopped crying. I couldn’t cry anymore. All the tears were gone. I was empty. I didn’t sit with my family. They were all up at the front of the church. I sat with Miss Sanderson’s little brother.
I can see myself there, I am above and behind the little boy in the pew next to the older boy. The older boy is about sixteen, a little older than Clifford. It’s as though I am above and behind, at the back of the church, watching it all unfold. Was it the shock of it that drove my spirit out of my body?
Hey, hold on a minute —
Where was Clifford?
I search through my memories and can’t find him.
Not at home; Mom and Grandma packing.
Not at the wake.
Not at the funeral. Not in the church.
They carried the coffin out of the church and the people walked behind it to the graveyard. He wasn’t in that line. I was the last one out of the church. I stood on the steps and saw the people, saw my sisters walk together, saw all the people going, walking behind the pallbearers carrying —
He wasn’t at the gravesite. Yellow sand against the fresh white snow, and people stomping to keep warm. More words from the preacher, then “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and the people picked up a handful of sand and tossed it on the coffin. I did too. Thought it was my duty.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Then the men shovelled, quickly, efficiently, changing off. A man shovelled for a while, then another man tapped him on the shoulder, and the first man passed the shovel over and went and stood with the people. There were a half-dozen shovelling, trading shovels, trading places. Clarence and Jimmy shovelled. I saw them. Then the hole in the ground became a mound of dirt. Someone planted a cross, and the women came up and started putting the flowers on the mound. And Clifford wasn’t there.
Where the hell was he?
I notice that I’m tapping the hoop against my leg. I stop.
Where was Clifford?
Did he take off?
He’d done that before. There was the time he stole Uncle ’Dolphus’s canoe. He was supposed to be in school. The memory is blotchy; overheard conversations. The canoe was missing; it had been pulled up on the shore down by the river, then it was gone and Clifford…
And Uncle ’Dolphus was upset…
Clifford came home three days later.
The clearest part of the memory is “I didn’t have a paddle. I just gave that canoe a good push as I started out and I went all the way up the river by inertia.”
I don’t remember if I asked him or if he just told me.
There were other times.
Hitchhiked to Prince Albert. Came back. A new shirt.
“Where’d you get the money?”
“None of your business.”
I’ve relived the memory of that funeral a thousand times in my life until now, and this is the first time I’ve noticed that Clifford wasn’t there.
I’ve analyzed it.
It was such a powerful catalyst. Everything changed. One world came crashing down and a new one emerged. I became a different person.
If it had that much effect on me, what did it do to him?
How many times have I told myself that I lost the only person who loved me when I was eight years old? The man who gave me pencils, the man who hugged me and took me to his garden when I was feeling rejected because a new baby came home. The man who helped me learn to read and write and count. The only person who understood what I was saying.
What about Clifford?
What did he lose?
How alone in the world did he feel?
He would have been fourteen. He’d have spent that much more time with Dad, become that much closer.
And then…
When Dad was in the hospital and Mom went to visit him and came home again, she said that Dad told her he wanted to see Clifford. But we didn’t have the money to put Clifford on the bus and he couldn’t go.
Out of his nine children, Dad wanted to see Clifford…
If I felt I had a powerful connection to Dad…
I’m tapping the hoop against my leg again.
So that’s why the experiments with space travel stopped.
What happened to his mind?
Did he become as angry as I did?
* * *
There’s a bit of wind in the tops of the pines, a whispering, then silence.
What am I doing here?
Why’d I come back?
Is it because my life crashed, spun out of control, and came tumbling down? Did I come here to try to find some piece that I could attach myself to and maybe rebuild it? Or am I trying to find healing, fix the wounds, the grief of yesterday still fresh in my flesh, in my bones? I ache with sad
ness. Maybe I’ve forgotten who I am and I’m searching for an identity.
Who the hell am I?
I have no answer, only vague notions, something about being the son of a Swedish/Sami immigrant, a forest dweller, an Indian, and something else, something I can’t name, but it’s real.
II
Buckshot
There’s a hood off a car, half-hidden in the tall grass. That’s where we tied up the dogs. Sabre, Sporty, Queenie…the remnants of Dad’s dog team, the ones he kept after he caught his feet between the sleigh runners and broke both his ankles. Not long after that he bought a snow machine.
There was one dog. A special dog.
At first, we called him only Puppy. He’d earn his famous name later.
Dogs weren’t pets. They were workers. Dogs lived outside, tied up.
It was because of the sadness in the house, a sadness so deep you could almost see it, it pulled us all down, that Mom let us have a pet, a puppy, just one.
We could bring it in the house and play with it.
I doubt there was ever a puppy in the world that grew up with as much love and affection. Five grieving children poured their hearts out into it. He was played with constantly, and a lot of the games were rough. I remember putting him in a cardboard box and playing catch with the box.
Talk to any of my younger siblings today and undoubtedly they will remember Buckshot, the big yellow dog with the really long hair.
Mom was pretty smart. A puppy can cure grief.
But I don’t remember Clifford playing with it. He wasn’t part of that. Maybe he was too old for puppies. Maybe there were too many already playing with it.
But it was Clifford who named him. I remember that.
He’d grown into a young dog and had gone missing for a couple of days. There were rumours and stories. The men who worked down at the fish plant shot a dog they caught stealing meat from their cache, a yellow dog. It got away.
Then he came limping home.
Clifford picked the shotgun pellets out of his flank with needle-nosed pliers, held up a tiny handful of little lead balls, and said, “I think we should call him Buckshot.”
Clifford Page 3