First Spring Grass Fire

by Rae Spoon

  Our grandfather started working on the railroad in Saskatchewan when he was sixteen. Our father grew up with his four brothers and sisters in an old railway station outside of Regina. He described the rumble of the trains as they passed right by his house. At night, he said, he would lay on the floor of his room and listen through the vents to the radio playing downstairs. He told us about the boredom and how he would put pieces of metal on the tracks so the trains would crush them. All of his siblings ran away as soon as they could to make lives elsewhere, but he was the youngest and ended up in Penticton after his parents retired there. Our father was obsessed with train sets and would show me tiny versions of pulley trains my grandfather had ridden, propelling them with his arms.

  Our grandmother had to be strong in order to live as long as she did with a cruel man like our grandfather. She used to work cleaning motel rooms, and our father told me she’d come home aching from twelve-hour shifts and then have to cook dinner. I remember her only when she was much older, a tiny woman with white hair and bright, playful blue eyes. I gravitated toward her because she paid attention to me, reading to me for hours, drawing pictures for me, and telling me stories about her father being late for the boat from England to Australia: “And that’s why we live in Canada. Because he missed the boat!” she’d say, laughing.

  When she was twelve, her parents sent her to live at her uncle’s farm. She spent her days in the fields picking weeds. “It was hard work and I was very young,” she told me once. “I never figured out why they sent me away.”

  I didn’t discover until I was a teenager that our grandmother met our grandfather because she was caring for his kids. His first wife had been institutionalized and my grandmother had been hired as a nanny. Within a year, she was pregnant. He sent the children from his first marriage away to their mother’s parents and married my grandmother.

  When I learned how to write, I sent letters to her, and she would write me back. I once sent her a letter in code and she took the time to decipher it and reply. She liked collecting pencils, spoons, and things with birds on them. She loved birds and had two of them; one of them was a canary named Mikey.

  After my grandfather died and she started to forget things like the stove being on, her children decided that it was time to sell the house. By then she’d become very anxious, probably because she could sense that control was slowly being taken away from her. They told her it was for the best, and when the house was sold they each took a portion of the proceeds from the sale. Then they took turns passing her around between them until one day she and her canary came to live at our house. A big moving van arrived from the Okanagan, and soon a quarter of our basement was filled with piles of her boxes and furniture. “She wanted to bring it all with her,” my uncle explained.

  “But she won’t need it here,” my father said.

  “I tried to tell her. You know how she’s getting … ” my uncle snorted.

  I was excited about my grandma moving in with us. My mother had recently given birth to my brother John and my father ignored me for the most part; he had insomnia so he slept a lot during the day, and the rest of the time he was at work. But my grandmother had changed. She couldn’t read well or draw anymore and she would often accuse us of stealing her watch or other things that she’d misplaced. She would sit for hours in the only chair that my father let her use from her belongings in the basement. I wanted to make her happy, but I didn’t know how.

  One Sunday night, my father was in a rare good mood and decided that we should all play hide and seek. As he started to count, we all ran to hide. One by one he found all of us except my grandmother. The whole family went through the house calling out to her. Soon we heard laughing coming from the family room, but when we got there we couldn’t see her. I crawled on my knees and looked under the coffee table and then in a space between her armchair and the wall. There I found her, crouched down with a huge smile on her face, her blue eyes shining brightly, her finger to her lips.

  Mikey the canary died a few weeks after that. I found him at the bottom of his cage. When I showed my grandmother, she didn’t seem upset. She just stared blankly at the bird and went back to her chair. Meanwhile, my father’s behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic, so my mother asked my aunt in Penticton to take my grandmother. After she moved, I wanted to write her letters, but I knew she couldn’t read anymore.

  By the time I saw her again she could barely put a sentence together. She kept trying to run away from my aunt’s house, but she couldn’t figure out how to open the inside lock on the doors. She would buzz around from room to room muttering to herself; other times she would refuse to get out of bed all day. They decided it was time to put her in a nursing home. The last time I saw her she was lying in a bed in a darkened room, and we got to eat ice cream with her. She pulled her head up to eat some off the spoon that the nurse offered her. All of us sat in chairs eating ours in silence, because she didn’t seem to understand us when we spoke. All of the things I had loved about her and all of her memories of me were gone.

  When she died, we didn’t go to the funeral, and I don’t remember crying. It had been such a long time coming. Much later, my cousin told me a story I hadn’t heard before: one afternoon, my grandmother managed to break out of the nursing home. To leave the yard, all you had to do was punch a password into a panel and the locked gates would open. My grandmother couldn’t do that, so she pushed a lawn chair up to the fence and climbed over. My cousin went to look for her and found her eating candy in a corner store. “I bought her the candy and drove her back to the home and they kept a closer eye on her there after that,” he said, shrugging. My heart jumped. So she had tried to break free. She knew what she was doing, at least until she got out. I could picture her smiling to herself on the other side of the fence, her blue eyes twinkling, just before she forgot where she was again.

  Healing Meeting

  THERE’S A SEA SNAKE that’s rumoured to live in the Okanagan Valley, where my father’s family lived. On the annual drive there from Calgary, the four of us kids would spread out in our two-tone brown Ford van, sweating on the vinyl bench seats as we crossed through the mountains. Our bare legs would get burnt on the hot seatbelt buckles. Pro-life signs dotted the sides of the picturesque mountains and lakes, punctuated by the odd fruit stand.

  The waters of Okanagan Lake, stretching from Penticton to Vernon, are the deepest blue. The sea snake purported to be living there is named Ogopogo, after a 1920s dancehall song, but it’s known in Salish as Naitaka (Lake Demon). My cousin Ben told me that scientists have never found the bottom of the lake because it’s on an angle that goes under one of the cities; I imagined that this was where the sea snake slept: under my uncle’s house, curled up at night, not too far below us. Whenever my cousins and I waded more than a hundred metres out into the water, the creature suddenly became a horror film monster. Someone would always yell “Ogopogo!” and all eight of us would rush clumsily through the deep water until we were back on shore, panting but safe. We would return to our beach towels, but when we got too hot, we would venture back into the water until someone called out “Ogopogo” again, sending us into another fit of panic.

  Some summers later, the signs of danger became more personal. By then my father had spent a few years in and out of the mental health institutions in Calgary. I was slowly figuring out that despite the fact that he was struggling with paranoia, he was also wholly abusive. He could see his control over me starting to slip, and that made him want to assert himself even more.

  One August I was sitting in my aunt’s living room in Penticton, wishing that we could go back to Calgary where I had left my roller blades, when she rushed into the kitchen. My parents were sitting at the table. I was laying low on the couch so they wouldn’t notice me through the gap between the living room and the kitchen.

  My aunt began to talk excitedly. “I just went to a tent meeting near the church. There was a pastor there from Texas. Remember how one of my legs
has always been shorter than the other?”

  When they were children, Aunty Cindy had fallen down the stairs while holding my father. The leg she broke in the fall ended up an inch shorter than the other. “Well, there was a prayer service after and I went up to the front. He was praying over me and asked if I wanted to be healed. I told him about my leg and he touched my head. I fell backwards and when I stood up, it was an inch longer!” I curled up on the couch, wondering snidely why she hadn’t chosen to heal her husband, whose legs had been partially amputated because of a logging truck accident. It seemed off to me, but my parents were hungry Pentecostals and always looking for some kind of spiritual revival. They decided that our whole family would go visit the pastor from Texas. The next morning we piled into our van, with my aunt and uncle behind us in theirs, and we all headed off for the tent on the side of the highway, which turned out to be a plain white vinyl dome filled with rows of folding chairs. We sat near the back with my uncle Andrew on the aisle as the tent began to fill up. A half hour later a man walked across the front to a tiny wooden pulpit. He was wearing a grey suit with brown cowboy boots and a white Stetson hat. He said to the congregation that he had come all the way to Canada because God had told him to come north to heal people. I saw that my aunt’s eyes were gleaming as he explained this.

  He then spoke for about an hour on the subject of being saved. When I was much younger I had made the choice about where I was going to spend eternal life, so I allowed my mind to wander. I pictured him taking off his hat and passing it around instead of an offering plate, and then putting it back onto his head full of money and walking out.

  He started singing as a sheet of paper was passed around for people to sign up who wanted to be healed. Out of boredom, I leaned over to my parents and said rebelliously, “I should get my eyes healed. I’m tired of wearing glasses.” When the sheet of paper got to us, I saw my father scribble something on it, but assumed he was just looking for another opportunity to speak in tongues in front of a crowd.

  Someone began reading the names out one by one, and those whose names were called would walk up to the front of the congregation. The pastor from Texas would then approach them and ask if they wanted to be healed. He would talk about faith and how Jesus wanted them to have it. I heard my name called, and then my father’s. Stunned, I stood up and walked to the front, my father right behind me. I knew if I bolted, I would be grounded for months. I decided that the best thing to do was to go along with it. The pastor from Texas asked me what I needed healed. “My eyes,” I mumbled into his dented microphone. And then he prayed for me, repeating that only those with faith would be healed. I rolled my eyes under their closed lids. It would be over soon. I wasn’t going to speak in gibberish or fall backwards. I wasn’t even sure there was a God.

  Next it was my father’s turn. He told the pastor from Texas that he wanted to be healed from his sleep apnea. My father put on a better show than me, getting worked up over his healing and even shedding a small tear or two. We then sat down and everyone put as much money in the offering plate as I had imagined being in his hat.

  Our vacation was over the next day. We made the eight-hour drive home without once mentioning what had happened. I took off my glasses and squinted at the mountains a bunch of times before putting them back on, wondering if I could be healed when I didn’t believe.

  Back in Calgary, the regular power struggles between my father and me resumed. There was an ongoing fight over whose version of reality was correct. He told us that we were making him sick, which I thought was unfair. He thought that I should believe him when he said that he had received an e-mail from God. One of the fights got so heated that I brought up his hospitalization as proof of my point. He said, “Yes. I was sick, but God healed me of everything at that tent meeting in Penticton.”

  I was fifteen. I lost my place in the argument. I could have thrown my glasses at him or brought up the fact that his snoring the night before had reminded me of an enraged bear, but I was trapped. My attacks had to be strategic. They had to be just enough to make me feel like I was surviving, but not push him to violence. I never measured my aunt’s leg or even looked at it to see if she was telling the truth. The truth doesn’t matter in survival situations. So I took the most alive parts of myself and hid them deep under our house, like a sea snake trying to stay out of view.

  Respect the Wheel

  WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, I moved to my maternal grandmother’s house in the northeast section of Calgary. My fights with my father had intensified to dangerous levels. He had decided that I had been doing drugs, so he invited a cop who was a family friend to come over and talk to me about it. I hadn’t done many drugs, at least no more than anyone else at school. I was angry after the family friend left. I trashed my entire room and threatened to jump off the overpass near our house if I had to stay there any longer. I wasn’t bluffing, and I think my mother could tell. I packed all of my belongings into the back of our car, and I didn’t use boxes. I just ran back and forth from my room to the car with my arms full of stuff. It was piled so high, you couldn’t see through the rear view mirror. My father was against the move, but my mother stood up to him on my behalf. Ironically, they drove me to my grandmother’s house together. When we arrived, I moved my things in by the same method, carrying them in my arms and piling them on the floor of the basement room with two-tone blue shag carpeting and wallpaper from the 1950s.

  My Uncle Jim lived with my grandmother for as long as I can remember. He left home when he was sixteen to go logging, but moved back in with her months later when a tree fell on him and broke his spinal cord. As kids we used to ride his wheelchair lift up and down on the porch for fun, and he let us do wheelies in his spare chair in the basement. Uncle Jim called me “Homer” because when he and my grandmother came to one of my softball games, I had hit my only two home runs, crying with joy the first time while I rounded the bases. My uncle snuck me a twenty-dollar bill after the game, which seemed like a small fortune at the time.

  On my first day at Grandma’s, Uncle Jim told me that there really was only one important rule in the house: “Respect the Wheel.” This meant that I had to be home for Wheel of Fortune, which was on every night at eight-thirty. There was an elaborate ritual. First, each of us had to pick one of the contestants to root for. There were always three of them and three of us, so it worked out perfectly. We selected them by calling numbers during the opening of the show before we got to see them. If our contestant won, then we won. We could also win by solving the puzzles. My grandmother was very good at it, but she would often lose because she would sound the puzzles out loud, which usually gave us a clue to the solution. That was only if we were watching it together, though; there was a television in every room of the house except the bathroom, and sometimes we would all watch in our separate rooms, screaming the answers to each other across the house. Uncle Jim was in love with Vanna White. We pretended she was his girlfriend. “All of these years and she looks so good,” he would say.

  One night my uncle decided to play a practical joke on us and watched an earlier broadcast of the show on a different channel at six. He started the game by modestly getting the answers right, but when he got the right answer before any letters were on the board, my grandmother and I started to wonder. We laughed until we were out of breath when he admitted his secret. We didn’t mind he’d broken the only rule.

  After a few weeks of the Wheel, I started to feel better about myself. My grandmother and I would wake up at five in the morning and she’d watch the Weather Channel with me before my hour-and-a-half commute to high school. She sent me to school with lunches of bologna sandwiches, chocolate bars, and apples. For dinner she would make all of my favourite foods, and I would try to eat everything she put on my plate. I started sleeping again, too. I got to take one sleeping pill a night, and I didn’t have to listen to my father’s nightly rants anymore. I also stopped going to church; my grandmother asked me once if I wanted to go and I said no
. She never asked again or bothered me about it. There was a feeling of togetherness in her house. My uncle and I would gang up on my grandmother and tease her, singing loud Christmas carols out of tune during the holidays. She said that she hated it, but I saw in her eyes that she didn’t really.

  At my grandmother’s house I learned that I was not a bad kid. I was actually really good at following the rules. I took the chores they assigned me seriously. I would shovel all the snow off the sidewalks around the house, chip the ice off with a pick, and then sweep away any remaining snow with a broom. I didn’t want my grandmother or my uncle to slip on the ice, which gave both of them so much trouble in the winter.

  My grandmother accepted me far more than my parents ever did. She’d never liked my father. We shared the same opinion: he was a tyrant. She spent her entire life taking care of her family, raising six children alone after my grandfather, who was the pastor of a church in small town, ran off with one of the elementary school teachers. My grandmother put a lien on his church and got the piano to make up for unpaid child support at a time when there was no protection for women whose husbands had left them. She always beats me in Scrabble and can play the piano, organ, and accordion by ear, and even made herself a steel guitar by playing a regular acoustic with a butter knife. Never critical of me for not being feminine enough when I was a child and loving sports, she watches every Toronto Blue Jays game she can on TV. But my grandmother is also a Baptist and holds a lot of conservative opinions. Even though my first kiss took place in my tiny room in her basement, I have never told her that I am queer or trans. She has said a lot of homophobic things and I know she would not appreciate the revelation or bend her rules to accept me. Jesus was the only thing that got her through all of those years. Without Him, she would have had no one on her side. So I respect the silence about certain things between us, and she never ventures to expose the truth.