by Carla Funk
For days, I lay on the chesterfield in an undershirt and pajama bottoms, humiliated by the neighbourhood moms and kids who showed up with gifts and get-well-soon cards. Uncles and aunts and cousins stopped by, too, to hear my dad recount the story. He never tired of telling how he had warned me not to climb the ladder, and then he dragged a vertical drop in the air with his finger—fffsh—down the chimney I went. Someone always cracked a Christmas joke—“You trying to play Santa Claus?” Someone always said, “Good thing the fire wasn’t burning.”
“Show them,” my dad said, pulling back the blanket. He pointed out my stitches, cuts, and scrapes as if to testify to how hard and far I’d fallen. I turned away and sulked into the cushions until my mother said, “Okay, enough.”
My bruises morphed from black to lilac to green to sallow gold. The wounds on my cheeks scabbed over and began to fade. The doctor drew the halter tighter, but still, the broken collarbone felt wrong. For weeks, I lay around the house trying not to move. The pain in my shoulder throbbed when I breathed too deeply. When I moved in my sleep, I woke crying. My mother pressed her cheek to my forehead to check for fever, held a straw to my lips so I could drink my apple juice.
“Take her to Mrs. Giesbrecht,” my dad said. “She’ll fix her up.”
IN THE MENNONITE community, Mrs. Giesbrecht was the one to see when your body wasn’t working, especially if the doctors couldn’t help. With her man-sized hands, she knew how to turn a breech baby, set a bone, align a spine, and unsnarl a knotted muscle—a gnerpl. Everything she knew she had learned by practice, like the old midwives who apprenticed at the bedside instead of in the classroom. Everyone called her a “care-o-practor,” and no one cared that she had no medical certificate or diploma hanging on her wall.
She met us at the front door, quiet-voiced and smiling. She was a sturdy woman with large, thick glasses, who wore her brown-grey hair in a tight bun at the top of her head, slicked and piled up and held together with a nest of bobby pins. Most middle-aged Mennonite women wore simple dresses and head coverings, but Mrs. Giesbrecht wore dark slacks and a flowered blouse. After a few words with my mother, she led us through the living room, where the curtains were drawn and her husband sat in front of the TV, staring at the screen. The whole house was dim, small, closed in, and the narrow hallway down which we followed her seemed to grow darker as we walked.
On a table covered with a quilt and a bedsheet, I lay on my back while Mrs. Giesbrecht rubbed liniment oil on her hands, the smell like hospital and sickness. She started on my shoulder, feeling along my arm, my ribs, then my neck. My mother sat on the edge of a bed tucked against the wall, holding on to her purse, telling Mrs. Giesbrecht about the fall. Mrs. Giesbrecht nodded, said, Yo, she understood. Though her hands pressed my shoulder, pulled my arm across my chest, nothing hurt. She spoke in Low German while she worked, in the kind of voice the grey-haired women used at prayer meetings. My mother sat quiet in the background, as if in a dream, there and not there, and I floated in that threshold space between waking and sleep, my limbs heavy and yet hollow, Mrs. Giesbrecht’s voice murmuring familiar sounds but no words I understood.
Then yes, oh but yo, that is it, Mrs. Giesbrecht said, and her hands tightened on my shoulder, stretching and turning, a pain now, but different than the stab and ache—this time like orange easing into yellow into white, and then as if fitting together a notch into a groove, she shifted my collarbone with one clean, quick maneuver. What the fall had broken in me, she fixed, setting right the off-kilter part that wouldn’t heal inside, my body malleable as mud in her hands. When I sat up and drew in a breath, my rib cage didn’t burn, my shoulder didn’t throb. Mrs. Giesbrecht pulled my sleeve back over my shoulder, and my mother stood up, fished in her purse, and handed her a twenty-dollar bill, payment for my back-room healing, however small the miracle.
AS SPRING SHIFTED into summer, we moved into the new house. Because the main floor wasn’t yet finished with carpets and flooring and paint, we lived in the basement through the first winter. Where months earlier I’d stumbled over crushed rock and staggered through the lumber framework, we now ate our meals, watched TV, practiced piano, bathed, slept. In the living room, every time I watched my mother kneel at the fireplace with kindling and crumpled newspaper, strike a wooden match, and send smoke rolling up that chimney, I saw myself falling all over again. Falling through darkness, falling into flames. Climbing charred from the hearth like some girl out of myth. “It could have been worse,” my mother always said. “It could have been so much worse.”
When I climbed that silver ladder to the sky, I knew that what I was doing was wrong, and because it was wrong, I wanted to do it. The old story’s forbidden thrill that lay coiled up inside me asked to be fed, wanted to be tasted. My father’s voice saying no, saying don’t, made me crave the yes and why not. The voice that urged me rung by rung toward the roof was deep down in me, I knew it, a little hiss that tendrilled from the heart of me, the same whisper that slipped me hints and missives. Sneak another lemon drop, when my mother turned her back. It wasn’t really you who ripped the page. You don’t know how it happened, how the teacup cracked, why the clock fell off the wall. The climb and fall cut in me a promise of more to come. More stitches, more scars. More of the laying on of hands in future rooms, in darkness. More of me rising from the bed, from the dirt. And more of me waiting to be set right, made new.
Sunday Dad
GONE WERE THE cigarette smoke, burnt coffee, and my dad’s grease-stained work clothes. Gone the week day incense that hung its cloud throughout the house. Instead of him sitting at the dining room table working through a stack of pink load slips, punching the buttons on his adding machine to tally the logs hauled and money owing, and puffing a smoke haze toward the light fixture, he sat with us, fully awake, fully present. He wore polyester slacks with a sharp crease ironed down the front of each leg and a crisp dress shirt with its top two buttons undone, the collar spread open to reveal the clean white T-shirt beneath.
At the table on Sunday mornings, we sat together, passing platters of pancakes and bacon and hash browns like a family on holiday and feasting. Even the radio’s gospel hour harmonized with us. Though in the hour before church my dad might yet change his mind about coming with us, I watched with hope for signs of life. If in his left chest pocket he carried dinner mints instead of a pack of Export A’s, if he splashed on extra aftershave, if he ran his comb through his slicked-back hair one more time, chances were high we’d be on our way, all four of us together in the shiny green Chrysler, revving down the hill and into the valley.
In the driver’s seat with the window cocked, my dad drove with one hand on the steering wheel, and with the other, tapped the dashboard in time to the beat of the music on his favourite 8-track tape. When Ferlin Husky sang “On the Wings of a Dove,” and the rising melody flew us across the wooden bridge that spanned the river, if my dad hummed along with the chorus, I knew that day he’d join us in our wooden pew at the back of the sanctuary.
When we walked through the double doors of the church, the deacons who stood inside the foyer to welcome congregants acted as if my dad were a special celebrity guest. Even the pastor beelined toward him and shook his hand for what seemed like a long time, clasping his shoulder as he pumped that handshake, asking how the logging was going, how bush camp was treating him, how’s the family, good to see you, so very good to have you here. My mother whisked off to hang up our coats, leaving my dad to stand with his brothers and talk truck, all of them in a row with their arms folded across their chests, looking straight ahead, all of them sucking on mints until the church buzzer buzzed to signal the start of service, and my mother led us to our pew.
Mr. Rempel, the tall, bald man with glasses as thick as my dad’s, took the pulpit and welcomed us again to the house of the Lord. “Turn for our opening hymn,” he said, “to number 248, ‘When the Roll is Called Up Yonder.’” As the piano and vibraphone played the opening chords, my dad flipped the pages
of the hymnal, licking his thumb to get a grip on the paper, searching as if lost. When finally he found the right song, the congregation was halfway through the first verse. He held the book low so my brother and I could see the notes and words, and together, we launched into the chorus. My mother, holding her own hymnal, carried the soprano melody. My dad’s voice was strained, an almost-tenor holding its pitch, singing about that bright and cloudless morning when the dead in Christ shall rise. As he sang, the Scotch mint clacked against his molars. Every few minutes, he reached into his shirt pocket and plucked out another, popped it into his mouth. When we swung back again into the chorus, repeating the words when the roll is called up yonder, I pictured the hill beside Grandma Funk’s house and one of her giant homemade buns inflated to the size of a car rolling up that gravelled slope that led to the auto junkyard—the roll, being called up yonder to the open field of scrap metal and rusted-out wrecks. When the roll is called up yonder I’ll be there, the congregation sang in four-part harmony, my dad’s foot tapping to the marching cut-time rhythm.
To be this close to him, the sleeve of my dress touching the sleeve of his shirt, made church feel like a special occasion, like Baptism Sunday with its row of congregants kneeling at the front, waiting for the silver pitcher to pour a stream of water on their bowed heads, or Easter Sunday with its potted lilies lining the edge of the stage, and the call and response of the congregation standing to echo the preacher’s proclamation of He is risen! After worship, when we sat down, my dad handed us each a mint and then offered his hands, one for my brother to hold and one for me. With his palm up on my lap, I picked away his calluses, tugging the edges of the hardened yellow skin until a thread came loose. While the preacher read aloud another parable of the Kingdom—the rocky ground, the scattered sheep, the prodigal son chewing on a corncob in a pigpen instead of feasting with his father, we worked our dad’s hands, peeling away their leathery toughness. By the time we stood for “Blest Be the Tie That Binds,” the final benediction, the rough and sallow calluses had given way to soft pink flesh, and on the carpet at our feet, the bits of old skin lay.
Where his mind drifted while we sat together in that pew and what he heard inside the sermons, I never considered. When the preacher told the story of the rich young ruler who knelt at Jesus’s feet and said, What must I do to follow you? I pictured my dad in the middle of the driveway with the rolled-up bay doors of his shop behind him, his new Kenworth gleaming and ready for another load, and Jesus standing in front of him, saying, Forsake it all. The truck, the shop, the fridge full of whisky, and the Kal Tire calendar’s summer beach bikini girls—he could never give them up.
WHETHER IT WAS the preacher’s message on tithing—about how God commanded people to give money no matter how rich or poor—or his stern words about the perils and pitfalls of alcohol, fornication, and gambling, I still don’t know, but by the time I was five, my dad had quit church.
“Monkey-wrenching to do,” he’d say, or, “Someone’s gotta split the firewood if you yahoos aren’t here.”
Not much was said about it out in the open, but I had the sense that the muffled conversations happening behind the locked bedroom door every Sunday morning had something to do with his refusal to attend. At family gatherings, Grandma Funk would look with her kind, watery eyes across the table at my dad, her firstborn child, and say things like, “Oh, bah, it would be good for you to come again.” Grandpa Funk said nothing. My dad looked away, crossed his arms, and leaned back in his chair, his jaw clenching and unclenching.
Some of the Sunday ritual held on to my dad, though, even after he stopped coming to services. He still sat down with us for a proper after-church lunch and took his nap like he always did, sleeping off Saturday’s late night and the morning’s work on the chesterfield. In the late afternoon, my mother clicked on the TV for Hymn Sing, the half-hour show in which a small choir of men and women in matching robes sang the old hymns in four-part harmony. My dad yawned, let his false teeth slide loose from his mouth and perch half-in, half-out. His hair, no longer slicked back into a ducktail, fluffed up in flyaway strands. Without his glasses, he saw only blurred shapes and shadows.
“Mom,” he called to me, mistaking my identity. “What time is it?” My dad fumbled on the end table for his glasses, fitted them back to the miracle of sight, and sat on the edge of the couch cushion until he got his bearings.
“Almost Tommy Hunter time,” I said.
The Tommy Hunter Show was my dad’s all-time favourite, better even than Wild Kingdom or Fandango, the country-music quiz show he watched on weekend afternoons when he wasn’t hauling logs. As the theme music and opening credits ran, the regular cast—Leroy and Donna, the house band, and Tommy—flashed on the screen with white-toothed smiles and glinting eyes, and after that day’s special guests were announced, Tommy himself jogged out in a leather vest and bolo tie, carrying his guitar. He welcomed his studio audience, saluted the viewers in TV land, then took his place centre stage behind the microphone and broke into the first rousing song.
Tommy knew how to keep it light and jokey with his fellow stars for the first half of the show, but after the second commercial break, he shifted into a mellow, tenderhearted mood. The penultimate number always featured Tommy half-standing, half-sitting on a stool, bathed in soft light with a stained-glass window behind him. This was the point where my dad leaned toward the screen with the same attention he gave the Wednesday-night Lotto 6/49 draw. When Tommy recited a poem or told a story, my father looked as though he were the only one being spoken to. His gaze stayed locked on Tommy, and the rest of us in the room faded to background noise. Tommy’s voice dropped low when the old horse’s swayback gave way beneath the cowboy, surged when the flames of a barn fire blazed out of control, and gentled to an amen and God bless y’all at the end. If Tommy had been our church’s preacher, my dad surely would have listened to every verse and sermon, would maybe even have heeded the final altar call, rising from his pew to make his way down to the front of the sanctuary while the organ played “Just As I Am,” the classic hymn of repentance and surrender.
“That Tommy’s a good guy,” my dad said, as if he knew him. “Canada’s country gentleman.”
Sometimes, Tommy’s closing number was a familiar hymn, his country take on “I Come to the Garden Alone” or “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” songs my dad knew well, songs with enough ache and longing to send him rummaging in the dining room junk drawer. “Where’s the mouth organ?” he wanted to know, and when he found the hinged cardboard box, he sat back down in front of the TV, pulled out the harmonica he had bought as a young man, and ran his mouth back and forth over the holes in a sliding scale. While the closing credits rolled, he found his starting note and breathed out the only songs he knew—the chorus of “Jingle Bells,” no matter the season, and “Jesus Loves Me.”
He cupped the harmonica, humming through his hands, his fingers yellowed and creased with the work and dirt of the week behind him. I sat beside him on the edge of the couch, listening to him feel his way through a refrain I sang every Sunday with the children’s choir in the basement of the church, his song wordless, but carrying pieces of a tune we both knew by heart.
The Pledge
I PLEDGE
My HEAD to clearer thinking,
My HEART to greater loyalty,
My HANDS to larger service,
My HEALTH to better living,
For my club, my community, and my country.
—THE 4-H PLEDGE
“THE WHOLE THING reminds me of the Moonies,” said my mother on the drive home from my first 4-H Club meeting.
She still shook her head over that day a young, long-haired woman had wormed her way into our house and sold us a huge decorative candle. “I’m raising funds that will build our church,” she told my mother, who eyed her warily from across the living room. The candle woman talked softly about the Unification Church and the Reverend Moon, the man she called True Father, the one who who’d
lead them into abundant love and life after death. The experience of the Moonie woman sitting in our house for two hours talking about unity and the Four Position Foundation and humanity’s liberation from sin, together with the monstrous ten-dollar candle she’d been coerced into buying, had left my mother suspicious that cult activity was going on all around us and in unsuspected places. The candle, whorled and swirled in shades of brown with ornamental cut-outs in the wax, was still displayed atop a doily on one of our living room end tables, and every Friday afternoon, when my mother ran her dusting cloth over the furniture, she picked up the candle and wondered aloud why she hadn’t thrown it away. Pffft, those Moonies, she’d say, then set the candle back down and move along to the coffee table.
“I don’t like the way you have to put your hand on your heart when you pledge,” my mother said, gripping the steering wheel, shaking her head. “That’s weird.”
We bumped along the rutted gravel roads of the rural farming district way beyond the town limits, heading home. In the cold and drafty community hall where the meeting was held, I’d sat for an hour on a wooden chair, one in a row of kids who all wanted to raise livestock. We listened to a man in denim overalls talk about the importance of good citizenship, what it meant to be a young leader in today’s world, and how, like the Club motto preached, “to make the better best.” In 4-H, said the man, you’ll learn to do by doing. You’ll raise an animal. You’ll groom it. You’ll practice good stewardship. And if you work hard, you’ll even make some money.