One in Every Crowd (7 page)

I PUT THIS STORY TOGETHER OVER THE last ten or twelve years, and it is still full of holes. It is a true story in the same way that an old vase that is broken into pieces in the sink and glued back together holds water. Maybe, maybe not. But it is no less beautiful to look at. This is what I think I know.

On October 31, 1997, my father turned fifty years old. He and my mother had split up about two years earlier, and as far as any of us could tell, he was attempting to drink himself into an early grave.

As always, he never let all that booze get in the way of a solid day’s work, so he was half in the bag and all the way inside a tanker he was welding on when the phone rang in the little office at the back of his shop. He hung his torch up on the ladder and climbed out to get the phone. It had been ringing all day. Big family and a big birthday. Big pain in the ass.

“Happy Birthday, Don.” The woman’s voice was husky, with a bit of a smoker’s rattle.

“Um, thanks.” He didn’t know who she was, but he felt as though he should. Something in her voice told him he should recognize her. Not the sound of her voice, more like the way she weighted down her words, like they meant something.

They chatted a short while; how was he doing, did he feel old, that kind of thing. She cleared her throat, paused for a second.

“You don’t even know who this is, do you?”

“Keep talking,” he insisted, sitting up a little in his greasy rolling chair. “I’ll figure it out any minute.”

“I should hang up on you right now.”

“No no no, don’t. Don’t hang up. I will never sleep again from wondering. Just give me a hint.”

“You forgot our promise.”

My father took a sharp breath, dropped the pencil he had been fiddling with onto his desk.

“Patsy?”

She didn’t speak, but wasn’t silent on the other end of the phone line; a small, animal-like noise escaped her throat by accident, and thirty years hung in the space between them for a long second.

He repeated her name, more sure this time. “Patsy Joseph?”

She nodded, but he couldn’t hear her nod, so she swallowed and spoke. “Uh-huh. It’s me. And you forgot our promise.”

My dad tells me this story in his boat, in 2003. It is August. We are in the middle of Marsh Lake, trolling one of his sweet spots for lake trout.

Patsy Joseph was his very first real girlfriend, he tells me, and she was two years older than him. They had promised each other when she was seventeen and he was fifteen that they would call each other on their fiftieth birthdays, no matter where they were. He had forgotten hers, almost two years earlier. She hadn’t. Hadn’t forgotten him at all.

They started talking on the phone quite a bit, and soon it was every day. She had left Whitehorse when her father moved to Hope, outside of Vancouver. The two childhood sweethearts never wrote or talked on the phone, he was mostly working in the bush back then, and they lost track of each other. When Patsy came back in the summer of 1969 to look for him, she heard from one of her girlfriends that he had gotten one of the Daws girls pregnant, and that he was married, was building a house up in Porter Creek somewhere. Catholic girl, what else could he do but the right thing?

Patsy was devastated, and left town with a truck driver who told her she had pretty eyes. Ended up in Dawson Creek. Good a place as any. Got a job in an auto parts place, on account of how my dad always made her help him fix up his ’53 Mercury Comet convertible and so she knew a little about cars. More than most women did back then anyway. So, she still worked at the auto parts place, yeah, thirty years later, and she still lived with the truck driver, only he didn’t drive truck anymore, he was on disability because of his back and maybe he couldn’t drive the long hauls like he used to, but he could still beat on her so they weren’t really together, these last few years, she lived in the upstairs suite of their house and he lived on the ground floor, and she wanted to sell that house and be rid of him for good, but they couldn’t, not with this market, and so there she was. She told my dad she still loved him, always had, that she still had his old letters and birthday cards and some photographs. Kept them hidden from the truck driver all these years. Jealous and mean, you know the type.

My dad and I share a weakness for a lady who needs help. It feeds something big and empty in us to arrive on the scene with a truck or jumper cables or a generator or wide open kind of dumb heart; we like to think it sort of makes up for always saying the wrong thing just when the song ends and the room goes quiet. My dad told his childhood sweetheart that he had not seen in over thirty years not to say a word to her ex-trucker, just to pack up her car when the guy was asleep, take only the stuff she really needed, and drive to work like it was any other day, and he would meet her there. He would take care of the rest. He would take care of everything. He would take care of her. And did she have snow tires?

The next bit of this story I heard much later, not in my dad’s boat, but in his 1981 Ford F-150 pickup truck, driving in a full-on blizzard on our way back from spending the night in the little house in Atlin that he was building for when he and Pat finally retired. They had been married for about ten years. The windshield wipers thump-thumped in the quiet but merciless storm; snow devils swirled on the black ice in front of the two stab marks our headlights made into all that oblivion. Nobody but us crazy enough to be out on that road in this weather. Used to be when I was a kid I was never scared when my dad was driving, no matter how big the waves or black the ice. Now I am older. I light his smokes for him so he doesn’t have to take his hands off the wheel for long. No streetlights here, just dark and snow and cold all around us, not even a light on in a cabin, not out here, not until we hit the main highway. His face is lit up only a little from the dashboard lights, and the cherry on his cigarette dangles in the dark when he talks.

He tells me how he drove almost all the way through the night, when he went south to go get her, and walked into the auto parts place in Dawson Creek in the early afternoon. She was behind the counter wearing an angora sweater, kind of light blue he thinks it was, and he tried not to let his face show it, but he couldn’t believe how old she looked. She said it was time for her coffee break; did he want to come up to the lunchroom with her then? She wouldn’t meet his eyes with hers, wouldn’t look at him right on at all, kept hiding her face behind her bangs, which were still blonde, but shot all through with silver now. She told him much later she couldn’t rest her eyes right on his face at all that day, not even for a second, because she couldn’t believe how old he looked. Couldn’t look right at the years in his eyes and stamped all over his face. So she stared out the window into the parking lot of the auto parts place even though there was nothing much to look at out there and she had seen it all a million times anyways, but it was better than turning around and seeing your beautiful memory grown old and wrinkled and grey and with a bit of a gut now. And my dad, he has never been any good at knowing the right thing to say, so he tells a joke. And she smiles at the joke, because he’s funny, he really is, the old man is, and she turns to look at him just a little and then she laughs.

Light me another smoke, he tells me, and so I do, trying not to get any smoke in me at all because I quit for over a year now, which makes him not trust me in a way that neither of us can put our finger on.

“Anyway,” he says, “that’s when I saw her. The girl I fell in love with when I was a kid. She laughed, and all those years just fell away somehow, and suddenly it was just her and I standing there, together. So she quit her job and followed me home back to Whitehorse in her Lincoln Continental and I married her up at Nolan’s reindeer farm with only an eight-fingered farm hand as a witness. Filthy old Danny Nolan is a justice of the peace, can you believe that? Didn’t invite any of the family. Not even my brothers. John still hasn’t forgiven me.”

My father’s eyes are shining with tears he will not allow to slip out and down his cheeks. He opens his window a crack and the wind sucks his cigarette butt out of his square-nailed fingertips and disappears with it. It was true. I had seen it for myself, the previous summer. I had seen Pat’s face crack when she laughed and reassemble for a split second into a much younger memory of itself. Almost pretty. I can’t even remember what the joke was, but I remember that face, remember wondering where it had come from, and where she hid it the rest of the time.

We finally make it to Whitehorse; the last fifty clicks into town we just trailed behind the snowplow, the storm swirling behind us and filling in our tracks as soon as we were gone. Pat has the coffee on, and all six of their dogs explode in a fit of barking when we stomp through the front door and strip off our wet parkas and heavy boots. Pat is pissed off, she is not saying anything but you can see it in her face. We shouldn’t have been driving in that weather, and we both know it, so we say nothing.

I sit down at the little kitchen table and pour a dollop of evaporated milk into my coffee, add a sugar cube from the Roger’s box on the counter. My dad is stoking the fire. The television is on but turned down so you almost can’t hear it. She won’t let him smoke in the house anymore, and it smells like the cinnamon-scented candle burning on the coffee table. There are several pictures that hang on the wall next to the bathroom, above the washer and dryer, right next to her Elvis clock. Pictures of the dogs when they were puppies, stuff like that. There is one of her and my dad, one she kept secret from her ex-trucker somehow, all of those awful years. She has had it blown up and framed. Black and white, my dad and her, back in the mid-sixties, he with his hair slicked back and his smoke pack tucked into the rolled up sleeve of his white crew neck T-shirt, his jeans with wide cuffs and his lips curled in a smile around his cigarette. She has a kind of beehive hairdo, and his arm is around her waist. They are standing in front of an old wall tent, and the chrome on the grill of the Mercury Comet winks in the sunlight beside them, and the soft shape of the mountain next to the Fox Lake campground rolls in the far background. The photo looks like something out of an old ad from
Life
magazine or something. This photo hangs right next to another one, this one in colour, a shot of the two of them again, her with her new perm and him with his silver shock of hair sticking up all over. He is wearing sandals and a clean work shirt with the sleeves pulled up over the welding scars on his forearms, and they are standing next to the Lincoln Continental, which is parked beside the motor home he traded a guy for some welding a couple of summers ago. In the background is the same mountain; they have returned to the very same campground site, it looks like, right there on the gravel beach of Fox Lake. But there was a forest fire there a couple of years ago, and so the trees left standing on the familiar shape of the mountain are crooked little blackened matchsticks, the fireweed curling up between them and taking over. My dad has a gut and his wife is squinting into the sunlight, her glasses catching a glint so you can’t really see her eyes behind them. But none of this matters, really, because it is forty years later, and they are both smiling.

MY GRANDMOTHER HAS KEPT A JOURNAL FOR MOST OF HER LIFE. All ninety years of it. She loves to write, she tells me on the phone from the Yukon. I can picture her, all the way from Vancouver, it is January, so she has the propane fireplace on in the living room and she is sitting with her legs tucked up beside her on the couch like she does. She is wearing a dress with a floral pattern and the rug needs a good vacuum, which she would do if she could still see the dirt, but she can’t. There is the smell of drip coffee and bread dough set aside under a clean tea towel to rise. Newspapers and magazines cover the coffee table, and she has a fresh cup of black tea with cream and sugar in it on the side table, next to a plate empty save for a scattering of toast crumbs. She has lived in this little house on Elm Street in Whitehorse since 1967. It is the only house belonging to anyone in my giant family that has been there all of my life. Everyone else has sold and moved up, to make room for more kids, and later, less room for fewer kids. Only this house remains, as unchanged as playground concrete in all of our memories. I can’t imagine my grandmother anywhere else but in this house, and I refuse to think about anyone else ever living here when she is gone.

“Did you get my envelope?” she asks me, as always speaking far too loud into the receiver, as though she doesn’t quite trust in the technology. “I sent you a copy of all of my latest scribblings.”

She has been going back through her old journals, editing them and typing them up. Her vignettes, as she calls them. She has been sending me envelopes, sometimes containing carefully folded, ten-page-long stories handwritten in her sloping but still solid script, sometimes typewritten in all capital letters, with capital Xs crossing out mistakes, and corrections made in blue pen in the margins. Most are untitled, with just that day’s date in the upper right hand corner. I read and re-read them; they are full of old stories, confessions, and advice. Lately her musings have grown somehow more poignant, more emotional, full of regrets.

“What I bitterly regret are the things I didn’t say, and the questions I didn’t ask,” she writes. “I have dreams now, and I dream of the past. I am not old. I’m not an old lady. I am young, vibrant, full of life. I’m like that in all my dreams. So I enjoy my dreams.”

Her last letter was four pages long, typewritten. She has titled this one, called it “All about Herman.” I don’t remember Herman, as a child I knew of him only through escaped bits of stories whispered here and there, nobody talked about Herman much. He died Christmas Day in 1970; I never knew why. I knew next to nothing of the story of Herman until just last year, when my grandmother writes:

“It all started with the morning of March the 9th, 2008. It was his birthday on March the 9th, 1930. He has been dead now for thirty-eight years, and on this morning, I am thinking about him. I remember him, and a week or so later, I can’t get him out of my mind.”

Herman had been an engineer for the Department of Public Works, and my grandmother was a secretary. She was married; her husband and three of my uncles had recently left the Yukon and travelled ahead of her to New Zealand, where she was to join them in a year, when they had found work and set up a place for them all to live. My dad didn’t want to leave the Yukon; he was already working, driving a caterpillar in the bush on a road building crew. My grandmother was to stay behind and save all the money from her government job. At least that was the plan. But that is only sort of what happened.

It turned out Patricia liked being alone. This was unforeseen.

And then the big, rugged engineer began to court her. At first she turned him down. Finally, she agreed to go for a drink with him one night. They began an illicit affair. He took her on trips. He liked classical music. He was well-read. He was in love. And she was in trouble.

Time did what it does, and the day came for her to travel to New Zealand and be reunited with her husband and sons. Herman travelled with her to Vancouver, and put her on a steamship. When she arrived at the little cabin she was to share with two other women for the journey, it was full of flowers Herman had sent her. Her cabin mates thought she was crazy to leave a man like that behind.

“I haven’t any words to describe my disappointment when I arrived in Auckland. The boat docked, and there he was. This husband of twenty-odd years that I was committed to spend the rest of my life with. He was there. He takes me home to a rented house, full of furniture bought on the hire-purchase, which I am supposed to get a job right away and pay off. He doesn’t say I’m so glad you’re here, welcome, I hope I can make you happy. He doesn’t say any of those things. He just spreads the newspaper out on the table to look for jobs. For me. I do get a job. I am hired as office manager, switchboard operator, and tea lady. One of the mistakes I made was I used day-old milk; I also bought lemons when there was a lemon tree out in the yard, where I could have picked a lemon. Well, I had picked a lemon, twenty years ago.

“This was not a new life—just more of the same dismal, unhappy existence. Don, the man I had married, was not my friend. I began to dislike him, and that dislike eventually turned into hate. I had brought all of this onto myself. All right, I had allowed myself to have feelings for another man. How was I going to deal with that? Well, he dealt with it.”

She eventually left Don and New Zealand, and returned to the Yukon alone. Her youngest son, John, would follow her in a year.

She tells me this part of the story forty years later, at her kitchen table, the part about how she pulled her car over to the side of the road in Cache Creek, at the crossroads, and pondered all those road signs for a long minute. Should she go back to the prairies, and her mother, or was it north she wanted? She claims she wasn’t thinking of Herman so much in that moment. She tells me she thought it was over, that they had ended it. But she continued north, so I don’t know if I believe her. I don’t think it was me she was lying to. I’m no shrink, but I know enough to know when a woman most needs to believe her own lies first.

I get the story from her in snapshots, short bursts, late-night kitchen table talk when the lips are loose with the whiskey. I knew she returned to the north, it was why we were all still here. She tells me part of the story in 2004: she breathes out in one long sentence that my grandfather broke her nose in New Zealand. Just a detail, an aside in another story about something else. She doesn’t rest on the memory, and I will myself not to react, so she won’t lose her train of thought. She does that now, more and more. Yesterday on the phone she confesses that she never wrote to me much about what happened to her in New Zealand because she hates to remember it, wants her sons to hold a different past in their heads. A different father. My grandfather, and what he did.

“In a fit of pent-up bottled rage, he attacked me. I can’t imagine his hatred, and anger that he would smash me in the face over and over again with his fist. The blood was spattered all over the wallpaper. He wanted to mess up my face, so that I wouldn’t be attractive to another man. The kids were there, they knew what was going on. They saw it. They had to clean up the mess. Years later I asked Rob, I said what did you do about all that blood on the wall? He said, we cleaned it up.”

Pat returned to Whitehorse, alone, and got herself a job. She stayed with friends of the family and made no attempt to contact Herman. But they ran into each other on Main Street.

“He must have thought he’d seen a ghost,” she writes. “We didn’t speak very much, but he didn’t go away. He came back. He came to see me. This time this was serious. We resumed what we had started. I thought our relationship was private. I thought nobody knew. I thought it was a secret. I thought we were kinda sneaking. It was not private. Everybody knew. The whole town knew. I didn’t have to make a secret of it anymore. I was acknowledged as his partner, and I started divorce proceedings.

“I realize now the seriousness of his drinking problem. Like he was two people. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The Dr Jekyll was a good natured, amiable, agreeable, softhearted, generous, loving … what else can I say? But the Mr Hyde could be terrifying. He could charge at me like an enraged bull, and he was bigger, he was twice the size of me. He wasn’t fat, he was just meaty. I probably should have been afraid of him, but I wasn’t. Because I knew he wouldn’t hurt me. The last thing in the world he would do would be to hurt me.

“He built that house, and I know he built it for me, I know he did. We tried to live in it, but it just didn’t work. There was just too much. It was battle stations all the time. I know it was the drinking. He spent a lot of time in bars. The Capital Hotel. I was not allowed to go there, and I never went there with him.

“He talked of getting married, but this bothered me. I couldn’t see that. But he told me that if I married him, he would give me a sapphire ring that would flash blue like my eyes did when I was mad at him. If that’s a proposal, then I guess that’s what it was.

“But it ended on Christmas Day, 1970. He collapsed in my house. Right there. Right there on the floor. A big, vital, alive man came crashing to the floor. I called the ambulance. In those days you didn’t go with the ambulance, that wasn’t done, you were in the way if you did. So I just hid in my second bedroom, I couldn’t bear even seeing them taking him away. I didn’t visit him until the next day. I went in there and I discovered that he had tried to walk out of the hospital. He had torn out his tubes and whatever they attach to you and tried to walk out. I thought this was probably a good sign that maybe he was going to be all right. Even when somebody said to me how’s Herman doing? I said I think he’s out of the woods. I said that. He was anything but out of the woods.

“That night I got the call about three o’clock in the morning that he had died. He was forty. Forty years old. The same age as you?

“But had he lived, he would be eighty-one today. He’d probably be as mean as sin. In a way, I am glad he never lived to see me grow old. I’m glad in a way. Because he wouldn’t have been very nice about it. He would have been cruel. All in all, we were together about five years. I was as happy as I’ve ever been in my life.

“Which brings me back to March, 2008. I feel his ­presence. I don’t believe in spirits. I can’t imagine him going to heaven. He just wouldn’t fit in. And the thought of me having to spend eternity with him in heaven? I’d rather not. We would just fight.

“You should only marry for two reasons. Only two reasons. Love or money. I know what real love is now. And what I had for Herman, there was nothing like it before him, nor has there been since. Passion helps. I mean it helps. It’s the glue that holds the love together. Well, all right, sex. Let’s face it. My love affair with Herman was passionate. Even when we fought, it was passionate. I think it can actually outlive death, and even time. In retrospect, I believe this. Now, I am ninety. Like sweet ninety and never been kissed? I still feel the same way about him that I did forty years ago. Believe it or not, that is the truth. He told me he liked to hold my little hand. Somehow, I’d like to think he still does.”