by Kyp Harness
WIGFORD REMEMBERIES
Copyright © Kyp Harness, 2016
all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, .
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cover design & typography: Carleton Wilson
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ISBN 13: 978-0-88971-319-2
ISBN 10: 0-88971-319-7
Gentle Mighty Hands
And no I never will forget—no no—howling winds, flurries of snow through the grey sky down the gravel sideroad down the hill over the creek up the hill to the little farmhouse with the linoleum floors and an old white stove burning a constant fire over which there was a black iron lid over a hole through which he spat his tobacco and a door opening at the top of the stairs. Well! Come in, come in! and You’ll be staying for supper won’t you? with the thermometer and the barometer and the ticking clock and back a while to the house down the old sideroad with the weeds and the ditch and the verdant green forest alongside a creek brown and flowing by the wire fences, oh yes, and foxes and rabbits in the thickets, all very strange.
She went to give me a lickin’ but I ran—I was trying to draw musical notes on staff paper, five years old, I was sitting on the floor using a footstool as a table. In a characteristic fit of rage I kicked the stool, maddened by the failure of my efforts. She chased me to give me a lickin’, she turned me over a chair in the living room in the bright white morning, she had me down but my one hand over my bum trying to protect it held a pen.
The pen went clean through her hand with the force of the blow—memory of her standing screaming with stunned disbelief, shock, looking at her palm just starting to bleed, pen protruding from both sides of the hand like a fake protruding arrow through someone’s head—the blood then starting to flow thick and ketchup-like down her wrist.
She swore cusswords with the pain, called Aunt Maxine and Uncle Elmer to take her to the hospital—in the waiting room the utter, dour, sour silence of adults, me knowing the first stabs of guilt, blame, shame, self-reproach. What words are there to say to the child who would do such a thing to his own mother? Especially by the normal day-in-day-out dreary blind-to-time humble workers in the mine?
The mark of Cain indelibly branded on me that moment—all pretense of innocence stolen away very early by this grim circumstance of chance. Afterwards her bandaged hand an accusative reminder: What happened to your hand, Mona?
“Ask HIM what happened!”
All eyes turning and waiting as I stumbled trying to explain. Of course there was no explaining—we’re human beings, we hurt each other, it’s a bad show… But still in this my fifth year, in the house by the gravel road, by the creek and the dark greenery of the mysterious woods, I sought in my way an explanation as to how and why this should be.
Was it because of the garter snakes I saw sliding through the grass, whose dry smooth flow disturbed me so (especially after sighting a rain-drenched, cardboard wrapping paper spool lying in the forest which I also took to be a huge monster snake), that I determinedly placed thorny branches in the ditch I thought they emerged from in order to kill them?
Was it because of the raccoon I saw rotting by the side of a corn field, half its body brilliantly alive with an infinitude of glistening maggots?
Was it because of the harsh words and the harsh silences of the exhausted bodies at the end of a long day of work, the fierce pain and fury of the parts of them still unresigned and unreconciled to the shapes life was forcing them into—their tongues and hands blindly flailing out as the waves of anger and boredom and wounded pride pulled them back, back from their visions of glory and swept them into the hungry oblivion of old age and death?
Was it because of the bitter and inconsolable misery I sensed, passionately cursing existence behind the masks of goodwill and earnest well-wishing everywhere—the worm of discontent that wriggles behind each amiable smile, the misery that gives the lie to all decency?
But as the seasons turned, the yellow school buses crackled down the leaf-littered gravel roads, and the snow later swamping the roads in a grandstanding display of prodigiousity (closing schools and businesses for miles around), and on the blackest freezing night of Christmas, when in the streaking blear and blur of impossibly colourful lights, so many expectations are raised and so many are mercilessly disappointed, in the thawing muck of springtime when butterflies land on milkweed stalks and the creeks rise turgid, swelling, musty, embarrassing the shores, when the tractors like armadillos nose the awakening earth and the sun rises high to its vantage point, raining its fire upon the land and the lake all through the hallucinogenic empires of summer—as all the fine and brazen youth, who scorn and ridicule the customs and advice and infirmities of their elders, and who then become the elders themselves, their customs and advice and infirmities being scorned and ridiculed by yet another generation of strong and brazen youth—until all ages become consigned to the graveyard, under whose blanket of earth and grass and moss and stone they lie being gradually forgotten, expunged from the minds of all living as the leaves gather on the ground above them, then the ice and the snow, then the rain and the butterflies, then the hot sun heating their gravestones, then the leaves rushing enthusiastically back to provide their yearly throw blanket, as the bodies melt into dust.
Above and beyond the parade of sufferers marching to their graves and the sour drunkenness vandalizing the sacred miracle of consciousness, still in my mind’s eye I see a farmhouse on a hill, the silence in the air all around it like the soundless infinities of the universe itself, the earth sprawling from all its corners, and up the back steps coming into the kitchen, with the thermometers and the barometers and the clock ticking on its shelf, is an old portly man who through the eyes of a child might be as old as the earth itself, or God, or Santa Claus who says, Come in! Come in! and Won’t you stay for supper?
His working days through—yet it was he and these gentle, mighty hands that had pulled a living from the earth, pulled a life from the soil, drawn out of it this very house and all of its scattered inhabitants and descendants. And of course to the earth he did return, it outlived him, and far after others will pry life from stone, and far before, of course, the Native trod the soil, before the English and Scots and Irish came to steal and squat, and before that massive glaciers one time sailed these fields majestic as any cruise ship.
But for a while there was simply an old man who sat at the kitchen table reading a newspaper through a magnifying glass, who got up periodically to spit his tobacco into the fire of his old stove, who looked out the window and made note of the very occasional cars that slowly passed by, knowing each one and whom they belonged to, who got up and pulled his chair up to the telephone in the next room to make a call, who was lonely and old, who looked
expectantly down the road for company, who had thrown a lifetime of work and sweat into the land, who had known hardship and tragedy and sickness, who had found comfort in tissue paper hymnals and sunlight through painted glass and a fifty-year favoured pew, and who still lay in a darkened bedroom and feared death.
For a while there was just an old farmer the world was passing by at the speed of light, and he rose in his plaid shirt, put down his magnifying glass, opened the door and called out, Well! Come in, come in! and You’ll be staying for supper, won’t you?
The Hole
On a bright Sunday summer morning a young boy plays in a hole at the end of the laneway by a gravel road: the purpose of the hole being to serve as a receptacle for an intended fence post—he can crouch in the hole and hide himself entirely from view, looking at the side of the hole, the brown-grey earth freshly dug, cold, damp, with the severed gnarly roots of weeds and assorted stones embedded in it.
From the house (his home) a distance behind him, he hears the voice of his mother shouting angrily, in slashing-white flashes like the edges of breaking glass. The boy stands up and turns to see his father come trudging silently from the house with stoic determination, his pace as matter-of-fact and blank as the expression on his face, a bag of golf clubs slung over his shoulder.
The boy ducks down in the hole as his father comes walking to him, then slowly raises his head to take a quick peek, noting how his father has magically appeared closer in the interim, grown larger. He ducks back down and counts to three, then looks up from the dank clay and cold, quiet smell of the earth to see his father now looming above him against the sky, squinting down the road.
The boy allows his gaze to travel down his father’s pants and focuses on his shoes now so close beside him he can see the texture of their canvas, the metal around the eyelets where the laces come through. He hurriedly ducks down again, making enough movement so that his dad will take note of his presence.
“Hey, partner,” comes the deep, quiet voice with a chuckle. “Playin’ out here in this hole again, eh?” He takes the golf clubs from his shoulder and sets them down on the gravel. The boy looks up at him, his eyes level with the ground, seeing his father’s face and shoulders floating high above the blades of wild grass.
“Be sure you don’t get those pants too dirty,” his father says, pulling a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his shirt.
The boy pulls at a root sticking from the wall of the hole, looking over and up at his dad from the corner of his eye. “Why’s Mom yellin’?” he asks.
“Oh, she’s mad,” his father begins, pausing to light his cigarette and replacing his lighter in his pants, exhaling a swift stream of smoke. He squints off down the road and resumes. “Oh, she’s mad, I suppose, ’cause I’m goin’ out golfin’ and, you know, she don’t like that.” He stands with one hand in his pocket, smoking his cigarette, gazing down the road.
“How come?” his son asks, now staring at an ant crawling on a leaf at eye level, hearing the constant hum he always hears on bright summer mornings and smelling the different smell cigarette smoke always has outside.
“Oh well, your mother doesn’t understand, or…” He pauses, revising his thought before delivering it emphatically to the end of the road, “…doesn’t want to understand, I guess, that a man has got to be able to go out and relax himself every so often after he’s been workin’ like the devil all week long to keep the bills paid.” He frowns and shrugs, offering the proposition: “I mean, it’s only reasonable, eh? I mean, what the hell, ol’ Dad’s gotta be able to go out and play sometimes, too, eh?” he asks, looking down at his son in the hole.
“I guess so,” says the boy, watching the tiny legs of the ant.
“Sure,” says his father, tilting his head. “Go out, see his buddies, have a good time. I mean, what the hell, eh pal?”
The boy looks up at him, smiling, and nods, to not have him ask the question again, as far in the distance a swelling cloud of dust announces a car coming along the road…
“Maybe,” the boy says quietly, “if she gets too mad you can come out here and stay in the hole with me, and we can live out here.”
His father turns to the car coming up the road, his arm outstretched and waving at it, then he reaches down for his clubs, swinging them over his shoulder as the car comes up, crackling on the gravel. He looks back at his son for a moment, blankly, as if he’s forgotten something. “What?” he says, then smiles with a short, surprised laugh. “Thanks, little buddy, but I don’t think there’d be enough room for the both of us in there, do you?”
“Hey, Buzz! Let’s go!” the men are calling from the windows of the car. There are two in the front seat and two in the back, all smiling and chuckling.
“Right-o!” he replies, jogging over to throw his clubs in the trunk.
“Get out okay this mornin’, Buzz?” a grinning red-faced man asks from the front seat as the boy’s father reaches for the handle of the door.
He shares a quick teeth-flashing smile with the man then turns to his son as he climbs into the car, pointing at him. “You be good now,” he says sternly with a sudden frown, then bows and shoves himself into the back beside the other men. The car door slams and they drive off, the gravel crackling and the dust billowing behind them as they roar down the road.
The boy stands in the hole, crouching low and counting to three, then popping up again, noting how the car grows smaller, suddenly leaps up the road farther. He ducks down again then slowly eases his head up to peer solemnly over the edge of the hole, noting now how the car has suddenly and magically become no more than a distant billow of dust, now shrinking, now dissipating into the still morning air.
A Man Who Really Could See
In the years in the country on the days when our parents were working, my brother and I were left in the care of Daddy Jack and Momma Simpson and their family at their pig farm on the highway.
Daddy Jack sits at the kitchen table in the early predawn hours—the sky through the window purple, almost green. He sits there beneath the yellow light bulb, a butt between his fingers, the ashtray before him overflowing with the broken brown tobacco crumbling from the half a pack he smoked before we rose—his face pulpy and clustered, a reddish brown, his large, hawk, Native nose (he’s part Chippewa) and his tiny black eyes rimmed with weary satchel bags bespeaking a tiredness and a sadness beyond his years. A FARMER’S CO-OP calendar is on the wall behind him—the month is April.
Fat Momma Simpson serves oatmeal from off the stove. Daddy Jack don’t want any—Daddy Jack don’t eat much, mostly just drinks beer. Sometimes when he gets hungry, say three in the morning, he hauls a big steak out from the freezer in the basement, fries it rare and eats it out of the pan, the blood sloshing ’round in the bottom of it.
Now from his bed comes Daddy Jack’s son Jack Junior whom they call Bud—his long black hair ruffled up and sticking out all over, tall and thin, his ribs like ladders. He sits down at the table and lights up a smoke. Momma Simpson is talking about the retarded kids again—she does volunteer work with the retarded kids—wants to bring them around to the farm for a day.
“We don’t want no fuckin’ retards around here!” scoffs Bud, and goes into a spastic impersonation of their motions that makes me laugh.
“You shut UP!” booms Momma Simpson. “Those kids got just as much right to be here as you do!”
Bud scowls and shakes his head, looking down at the end of his cigarette as he taps it out at the ashtray. Daddy Jack chuckles briefly. One time a local retarded boy came over and sat at the table, smiling and nodding all through dinner—after he left Daddy Jack said, “Well I’ll be goddamned if that boy ain’t the biggest halfwit I ever saw in my life!” And Momma Simpson had yelled, “For Christ’s sake Jack, the boy’s RETARDED!”
Now Daddy Jack is talking to Bud about farm matters and such, his low, deep voice remonstrating about t
he feeding of hogs. The combined smoke of their cigarettes chokes me as I eat the porridge. The floor is covered with newspapers stained with mud and pigshit.
Momma Simpson is sucking porridge from her spoon, her lips pursed with a pained expression. She has dreamed of better things, to be sure, a life of ease and decorum, but feared she was incapable of attaining them. Thus she married Daddy Jack, banishing both doubt and dream.
Now Bud and Jack are heatedly discussing the mending of an axle on the grain wagon. “Now goddamnit Bud I tol’ you to take that into town yesserday!”
“Ah, I’ll take the fuckin’ thing in tomorrow,” scoffs Bud, his eyes squinting and his lips curling into a sneer.
“Now where’s that lazy sonofabitch Harley?” Daddy Jack inquires, looking about. When he gets angry his eyes narrow into tiny slits and the corners of his mouth turn down, looking like he’s about to cry.
“Now Jack you leave that boy ALONE!” says Momma Simpson. “Stop givin’ him a hard time!”—Harley being Daddy Jack’s younger son, Momma Simpson’s darling.
“I’m not givin him a hard time…”
“You ride that boy’s ass every day of the week,” insists Momma Simpson, her voice muffled low and droning, coming from deep in her throat, all coated round and blanketed with fat like a bell ringing in a sock.
“Shit,” Daddy Jack says. “HARLEY!”
Out comes Harley, dreary and bleary, his hair sticking up like dry straw, his mouth agape, his fat bare belly sticking out. Saliva drips from his lower lip. “Goddamn…” he mumbles, all weary
“I was gonna throw a glass a water on ya!” Daddy Jack says.
Harley shakes his head like a horse. “Piss,” he murmurs.
Momma Simpson looks at Harley with loving eyes. “You gonna have some porridge?” she asks.
“I was gonna grab ya by the toe an’ pull ya flat on your ass outta that bed,” Daddy Jack says, chuckling.