There was no more wild country in Huron County then than there is now. Perhaps there was less. The farms had been cleared in the period between 1830 and 1860, when the Huron Tract was being opened up, and they were cleared thoroughly. Many creeks had been dredged-the progressive thing to do was to straighten them out and make them run like tame ca.n.a.ls between the fields. The early farmers hated the very sight of a tree and admired the look of open land. And the masculine approach to the land was managerial, dictatorial. Only women were allowed to care about landscape and not to think always of its subjugation and productivity. My grandmother, for example, was famous for having saved a line of silver maples along the lane. These trees grew beside a crop field and they were getting big and old-their roots interfered with the ploughing and they shaded too much of the crop. My grandfather and my father went out one morning and made ready to cut the first of them down. But my grandmother saw what they were doing from the kitchen window and she flew out in her ap.r.o.n and harangued and upbraided them so that they finally had to take up the axes and the crosscut saw and leave the scene. The trees stayed and spoiled the crop at the edge of the field until the terrible winter of 1935 finished them off.
But at the back of the farms the farmers were compelled by law to leave a woodlot. They could cut trees there both for their own use and to sell. Wood of course had been their first crop-rock elm went for ships" timbers and white pine for the ships" masts, until hardly any rock elm or white pine remained. Now there was protection decreed for the poplar and ash and maple and oak and beech, the cedar and hemlock that were left.
Through the woodlot-called the bush-at the back of my grandfather"s farm ran the Blyth Creek, dredged a long time ago when the farm was first cleared. The earth dredged out then made a high, hummocky bank on which thick clumps of cedars grew. This was where my father started trapping. He eased himself out of school and into the life of a fur-trapper. He could follow the Blyth Creek for many miles in either direction, to its rising in Grey Township or to the place where it flows into the Maitland River which flows into Lake Huron. In some places-most particularly in the village of Blyth-the creek became public for a while, but for much of its length it ran through the backs of farms, with the bush on either side, so that it was possible to follow it and be hardly aware of the farms, the cleared land, the straight-laid roads and fences-it was possible to imagine that you were out in the forest as it was a hundred years ago, and for hundreds of years before that.
My father had read a lot of books by this time, books he found at home and in the Blyth Library and in the Sunday School Library. He had read books by Fenimore Cooper and he had absorbed the myths or half-myths about wilderness that most of the country boys around him knew nothing about, since few of them were readers. Most boys whose imaginations were lit up by the same notions as his would live in cities. If they were rich enough they would travel north every summer with their families, they would go on canoe trips and later on fishing and hunting trips. If their families were truly rich they would navigate the rivers of the far north with Indian guides. People eager for this experience of the wilderness would drive right through our part of the country without noticing there was one bit of wilderness there.
But farm boys from Huron County, knowing hardly anything about this big deep north of the Precambrian Shield and the wild rivers, nevertheless were drawn-some of them were, for a time--drawn to the strips of bush along the creeks, where they fished and hunted and built rafts and set traps. Even if they hadn"t read a word about that sort of life they might make their forays into it. But they soon gave it up to enter upon the real, heavy work of their lives, as farmers.
And one of the differences between farmers then and now was that in those days n.o.body expected recreation to play any regular part in the farming life.
My father, being a farm boy with that extra, inspired or romantic perception (he would not have cared for those words), with a Fenimore Cooper-cultivated hunger, did not turn aside from these juvenile pursuits at the age of eighteen or nineteen or twenty. Instead of giving up the bush, he took to it more steadily and seriously. He began to be talked about and thought about more as a trapper than as a young farmer. And as a solitary and slightly odd young man, though not a person who was in any way feared or disliked. He was edging away from the life of a farmer, just as he had edged away earlier from the idea of getting an education and becoming a professional man. He was edging towards a life he probably could not clearly visualize, since he would know what he didn"t want so much better than what he wanted.
A life in the bush, away from the towns, on the edge of the farms-how could it be managed?
Even here, where men and women mostly took whatever was cut out for them, some men had managed it. Even in this tamed country there were a few hermits, a few men who had inherited farms and didn"t keep them up, or who were just squatters come from G.o.d knows where. They fished and hunted and travelled around, were gone and came back, were gone and never came back-not like the farmers who whenever they left their own localities went in buggies or sleighs or more often now by car, bound on definite errands to certain destinations.
He was making money from his trapline. Some skins could bring him as much as a fortnight"s work on a threshing gang. So at home they could not complain. He paid board, and he still helped his father when it was necessary. He and his father never talked. They could work all morning cutting wood in the bush, and never say a word, except when they had to speak about the work. His father was not interested in the bush except as a woodlot. It was to him just like a field of oats, with the difference that the crop was firewood.
His mother was more curious. She walked back to the bush on Sunday afternoons. She was a tall upright woman with a stately figure, but she still had a tomboy"s stride. She would bunch up her skirts and expertly swing her legs over a fence. She was knowledgeable about wildflowers and berries and she could tell you the name of any bird from its song.
He showed her the snares where he caught fish. That made her uneasy, because the fish could be caught in the snares on a Sunday, just as on any other day. She was very strict about all Presbyterian rules and observances, and this strictness had a peculiar history. She had not been brought up as a Presbyterian at all, but had led a carefree childhood and girlhood as a member of the Anglican Church, also known as the Church of England. There were not many Anglicans in that part of the country and they were sometimes thought of as next thing to Papists-but also as next door to freethinkers. Their religion often seemed to outsiders to be all a matter of bows and responses, with short sermons, easy interpretations, worldly ministers, much pomp and frivolity. A religion to the liking of her father, who had been a convivial Irishman, a storyteller, a drinker. But when my grandmother married she had wrapped herself up in her husband"s Presbyterianism, becoming fiercer than many who were brought up in it. She was a born Anglican who took on the Presbyterian righteousness-compet.i.tion just as she was a born tomboy who took on the farm-housewife compet.i.tion, with her whole heart. People might have wondered, did she do this for love?
My father and those who knew her well did not think so. She and my grandfather were mismatched, though they didn"t fight. He thoughtful, silent; she spirited, sociable. No, not for love but for pride"s sake she did what she did. Not to be outdone or criticized in any way. And not to have anybody say that she regretted a decision that she had made, or wanted anything that she couldn"t have.
She stayed friends with her son in spite of the Sunday fish, which she wouldn"t cook. She took an interest in the animal skins he showed her, and heard how much he got for them. She washed his smelly clothes, whose smell was as much from the fish bait he carried as from the pelts and guts. She could be exasperated but tolerant with him as if he was a much younger son. And perhaps he did seem younger to her, with his traps and treks along the creek, and his unsociability. He never went after girls, and gradually lost touch with his childhood friends who were doing so. She did not mind. His behavior might have helped her to bear a disappointment that he had not gone on in school, he was not going to become a doctor or a minister. Maybe she could pretend that he might still do that, the old plans-her plans for him-being not forgotten but just postponed. At least he was not just turning into a silent farmer, a copy of his father.
As for my grandfather, he pa.s.sed no opinion, did not say whether he approved or disapproved. He maintained his air of discipline and privacy. He was a man born in Morris, settled in to be a farmer, a Grit and a Presbyterian. Born to be against the English Church and the Family Compact and Bishop Strachan and saloons; to be for universal suffrage (but not for women), free schools, responsible government, the Lord"s Day Alliance. To live by hard routines, and refusals.
My grandfather diverged a little-he learned to play the fiddle, he married the tall temperamental Irish girl with eyes of two colors. That done, he withdrew, and for the rest of his life was diligent, orderly, and quiet. He too was a reader. In the winter he managed to get all his work done-and well done-and then he would read. He never talked about what he read, but the whole community knew about it. And respected him for it. That is an odd thing-there was a woman too who read, she got books from the library all the time, and n.o.body respected her in the least. The talk was always about how the dust grew under her beds and her husband ate a cold dinner. Perhaps it was because she read novels, stories, and the books my grandfather read were heavy. Heavy books, as everybody remembered, but their t.i.tles are not remembered. They came from the library, which at that time contained Blackstone, Macauley, Carlyle, Locke, Hume"s History of England. What about An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding} What about Voltaire? Karl Marx? It"s possible.
Now-if the woman with the dustb.a.l.l.s under the beds had read the heavy books, would she have been forgiven? I don"t believe so. It was women who judged her, and women judged women more harshly than they did men. Also, it must be remembered that my grandfather got his work done first-his woodpiles were orderly and his stable shipshape. In no point of behavior did his reading affect his life.
Another thing said of my grandfather was that he prospered. But prosperity was not pursued, or understood, in those days, quite in the way it is now. I remember my grandmother saying, "When we needed something done-when your father went into Blyth to school and needed books and new clothes and so on-I would say to your grandfather, well we better raise another calf or something to get a bit extra." So it would seem that if they knew what to do to get that bit extra, they could have had it all along.
That is, in their ordinary life they were not always making as much money as they could have made. They were not stretching themselves to the limit. They did not see life in those terms. Nor did they see it in terms of saving at least a part of their energies for good times, as some of their Irish neighbors did.
How, then? I believe they saw it mostly as ritual. Seasonal and inflexible, very much like housework. To try to make more money, for an increase in status or so that life could become easier, might have seemed unbecoming.
A change in outlook from that of the man who went to Illinois. Maybe a lingering influence from that setback, on his more timid or thoughtful descendants.
This must have been the life my father saw waiting for him-a life that my grandmother, in spite of her own submission to it, was not altogether sorry to see him avoid.
There is one contradiction here. When you write about real people you are always up against contradictions. My grandfather owned the first car on the Eighth Line of Morris. It was a Gray-Dorrit. And my father in his teens had a crystal set, something that all boys wanted. Of course, he may have paid for it himself.
He may have paid for it with his trapping money.
The animals my father trapped were muskrats, mink, marten, now and then a bobcat. Otter, weasels, foxes. Muskrats he trapped in the spring because their fur stays prime until about the end of April. All the others were at their best from the end of October on into winter. The white weasel does not attain its purity until around the tenth of December. He went out on snowshoes. He built up deadfalls, with a figure 4 trigger, set so the boards and branches fell onto the muskrat or mink. He nailed weasel traps to trees. He nailed boards together to make a square box trap working on the same principle as a deadfall-something less conspicuous to other trappers. The steel traps for muskrats were staked so the animal would drown, often at the end of a sloping cedar rail. Patience and foresight and guile were necessary. For the vegetarians he set out tasty bits of apple and parsnip; for the meat-eaters, such as mink, there was delectable fish bait mixed by himself and ripened in a jar in the ground. A similar meat mix for foxes was buried in June or July and dug up in the fall; they sought it out to roll upon, revelling in the pungency of decay.
Foxes interested him more and more. He followed them away from the creeks to the little rough sandy hills that are found sometimes between bush and pasture-they love the sandy hills at night. He learned to boil his traps in water and soft maple bark to kill the smell of metal. Such traps were set out in the open with a sifting of sand over them.
How do you kill a trapped fox? You don"t want to shoot him, because of the wound left in the pelt and the blood smell spoiling the trap.
You stun him with the blow of a long, strong stick, and then put your foot on his heart.
Foxes in the wild are usually red. But occasionally a black fox will occur among them as a spontaneous mutation. He had never caught one. But he knew that some of these had been caught elsewhere and bred selectively to increase the show of white hairs along the back and tail. Then they were called silver foxes. Silver-fox farming was just beginning in Canada.
In 1925 my father bought a pair, a male silver fox and a female, and built a pen for them beside the barn. At first they must have seemed just another kind of animal being raised on the farm, something more bizarre than the chickens or the pigs or even the banty rooster, something rare and showy as peac.o.c.ks, interesting for visitors. When my father bought them and built the pen for them it might even have been taken as a sign that he meant to stay, to be a slightly different farmer from most, but still a farmer.
The first litter was born, and he built more pens. He took a snapshot of his mother holding the three little pups. She looks apprehensive but sporting. Two of the pups were males and one female. He killed the males in the fall when their fur was prime and sold the pelts for an impressive price. The trapline began to seem less important than these animals raised in captivity.
A young woman came to visit. A cousin on the Irish side-a schoolteacher, lively and persistent and good-looking, a few years older than he. She was immediately interested in the foxes, and not, as his mother thought, pretending to be interested in order to entice him. (Between his mother and the visitor there was an almost instant antipathy, though they were cousins.) She came from a much poorer home, a poorer farm, than this one, and she had become a schoolteacher by her own desperate efforts. The only reason she had stopped there was that schoolteaching was the best thing for women that she had come across so far. She was a hardworking popular teacher, but some gifts that she knew she had were not being used. These gifts had something to do with taking chances, making money. They were gifts as out of place in my father"s house as they had been in her own, looked at askance in both places, although they were the very gifts (less often mentioned than the hard work, the perseverance) that had built the country. She looked at the foxes and she did not see any romantic connection to the wilderness; she saw a new industry, the possibility of riches. She had a little money saved to buy a place where all this could get started in earnest. She became my mother.
When I think of my parents in the time before they became my parents, after they had made their decision but before their marriage had made it-in those days-irrevocable, they seem not only touching and helpless, marvellously deceived, but more attractive than at any later time. It is as if nothing was thwarted then and life still bloomed with possibilities, as if they enjoyed all sorts of power before they bent themselves towards each other. That can"t be true, of course-they must have been anxious already-my mother must certainly have been anxious about being in her late twenties and unmarried. They must have known failure already, they may have turned to each other with reservations rather than the luxuriant optimism that I imagine. But I do imagine it, as we must all like to do, so we won"t think that we were born out of affection that was always stingy, or an undertaking that was always halfhearted. I think that when they came and picked out the place where they would live for the rest of their lives, on the Mait-land River just west of Wingham in Turnberry Township in the County of Huron, they were travelling in a car that ran well on dry roads on a bright spring day, and that they themselves were kind and handsome and healthy and trusting their luck.
Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the north and east of Huron County. We pa.s.sed a country store standing empty at a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren"t there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumacs jogged my memory and I looked back at the store. It seemed to me that I had been here once, and that the scene was connected with some disappointment or dismay. I knew that I had never driven this way before in my adult life and I did not think I could have come here as a child. It was too far from home. Most of our drives out of town were to my grandparents" house in Blyth-they had retired there after they sold the farm. And once a summer we drove to the lake at G.o.derich. But even as I was saying this to my husband I remembered the disappointment. Ice cream. Then I remembered everything-the trip my father and I had made to Muskoka in 1941, when my mother was already there, selling furs at the Pine Tree Hotel north of Gravenhurst.
My father had stopped for gas at a country store and he had bought me an ice-cream cone. It was an out-of-the-way place and the ice cream must have been sitting in its tub for a long time. It had probably been partly melted at one stage, then refrozen. It had splinters of ice in it, pure ice, and its flavor was dismally altered. Even the cone was soft and stale.
"But why would he go this way to Muskoka?" my husband said. "Wouldn"t he go along No. 9 and then go up on Highway 11?"
He was right. I wondered whether I could have been mistaken. It could have been another store at another crossroads where we bought the gas and the ice cream.
As we drove west, heading over the long hills for Bruce County and Highway 21, after sunset and before dark, I talked about what any long car trip-that is, any car trip over ten miles long-used to be like for our family, how arduous and uncertain. I described to my husband-whose family, more realistic than ours, considered themselves too poor to own a car-how the car"s noises and movements, the jolting and rattling, the straining of the engine and the groan of the gears, made the crowning of hills and the covering of miles an effort that everybody in the car seemed to share. Would a tire go flat, would the radiator boil over, would there be a breakdown? The use of that word-breakdown-made it sound as if the car was frail and skittish, with a mysterious, almost human vulnerability.
Of course it wouldn"t be like that if you had a newer car, or if you could afford to keep it in good repair, I said.
And it came to me why we would have been driving to Muskoka along back roads. I was not mistaken after all. My father must have been wary of taking the car through any sizable town or on a main highway. There were too many things wrong with it. It should not have been on the road at all. There were times when he could not afford to take it to the garage and this must have been one of them. He did what he could to fix it himself, to keep it running. Sometimes a neighbor helped him. I remember my father"s saying, "The man"s a mechanical genius," which makes me suspect that he was no mechanical genius himself.
Now I knew why such a feeling of risk and trepidation was mixed up with my memory of the unpaved, sometimes ungravelled roads-some were ridged in such a way that my father called them washboard roads-and the one-lane plank bridges. As things came back to me I could recall my father"s telling me that he had only enough money to get to the hotel where my mother was, and that if she didn"t have any money he didn"t know what he was going to do. He didn"t tell me this at the time, of course. He bought me the ice-cream cone, he told me to push on the dashboard when we were going up the hills, and I did so, though it was a ritual now, a joke, my faith having long ago evaporated. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
He told me about the circ.u.mstances of the trip years later, after my mother was dead, when he was remembering some times that they had gone through together.
The furs that my mother was selling to American tourists (we always spoke of American tourists, as if acknowledging that they were the only kind who could be of any use to us) were not raw furs, but tanned and dressed. Some skins were cut and sewn together in strips, to make capes; others were left whole and were made into what were called scarves. A fox scarf was one whole skin, a mink scarf was two or three skins. The head of the animal was left on and was given bright golden-brown gla.s.s eyes, also an artificial jaw. Fasteners were sewn on the paws. I believe that in the case of the mink the pelts were attached tail to mouth. The fox scarf was fastened paw to paw, and the fox cape sometimes had the fox"s head sewn on out of place entirely, in the middle of the back, as a decoration.
Thirty years later these furs would have found their way into second-hand clothing stores and might be bought and worn as a joke. Of all the moldering and grotesque fashions of the past, this wearing of animal skins that were undisguised animal skins would seem the most amazing and barbaric.
My mother sold the fox scarves for twenty-five, thirty-five, forty, fifty dollars, depending on the number of white hairs, the "silver," in the pelt. Capes cost fifty, seventy-five, maybe a hundred dollars. My father had started raising mink as well as foxes during the late nineteen-thirties, but she did not have many mink scarves for sale and I do not remember what she charged for them. Perhaps we had been able to dispose of them to the furriers in Montreal without taking a loss.
The colony of fox pens took up a good deal of the territory on our farm. It stretched from behind the barn to the high bank overlooking the river flats. The first pens my father had made had roofs and walls of fine wire on a framework of cedar poles. They had earth floors. The pens built later on had raised wire floors. All the pens were set side by side on intersecting "streets" so that they made a town, and around the town was a high guard fence. Inside each pen was a kennel-a large wooden box with ventilation holes and a sloping roof or lid that could be lifted up. And there was a wooden ramp along one side of the pen, for the foxes" exercise. Because the building had been done at different times and not all planned out in the beginning, there were all the differences there are in a real town-there were wide streets and narrow streets, some s.p.a.cious earth-floored old-fashioned pens and some smaller wire-floored modern pens that seemed less agreeably proportioned even if more sanitary. There were two long apartment buildings called the Sheds. The New Sheds had a covered walkway between two facing rows of pens with slanting wooden roofs and high wire floors. The Old Sheds was just a short row of attached pens rather primitively patched together. The New Sheds was a h.e.l.lishly noisy place full of adolescents due to be pelted-most of them-before they were a year old. The Old Sheds was a slum and contained disappointing breeders who would not be kept another year, and the occasional cripple, and even, for a time, a red female fox who was well-disposed to humans and by way of being a pet. Either because of that, or her color, all the other foxes shunned her, and her name-for they all had names-was Old Maid. How she came to be there I don"t know. A sport in a litter? A wild fox who tunnelled the wrong way under the guard fence?
When the hay was cut in our field some of it was spread on top of the pens to give the foxes shelter from the sun and keep their fur from turning brown. They looked very scruffy anyway, in the summertime-old fur falling out and new fur just coming in. By November they were resplendent, the tips of their tails snowy and their back fur deep and black, with its silver overlay. They were ready to be killed-unless they were to carry on as breeders. Their skins would be stretched, cleaned, sent off to be tanned, and then to the auctions.
Up to this time everything was in my father"s control, barring some disease, or the chanciness of breeding. Everything was of his making-the pens, the kennels where the foxes could hide and have their young, the water dishes-made from tins-that tipped from the outside and were filled twice a day with fresh water, the tank that was trundled down the streets, carrying water from the pump, the feed trough in the barn where meal and water and ground horse meat were mixed, the killing box where the animal"s trapped head met the blast of chloroform. Then, once the pelts were dried and cleaned and peeled off the stretch boards, nothing was within his control anymore. The pelts were laid flat in shipping boxes and sent off to Montreal and there was nothing to do but wait and see how they were graded and sold at the fur auctions. The whole year"s income, the money to pay the feed bill, the money to pay the bank, the money he had to pay on the loan he had from his mother after she was widowed, had to come out of that. In some years the price of the furs was fairly good, in some years not too bad, in other years terrible. Though n.o.body could have seen it at the time, the truth was that he had got into the business just a little too late, and without enough capital to get going in a big way during the first years when the profits were high. Before he was fairly started the Depression arrived. The effect on his business was erratic, not steadily bad, as you might think. In some years he was slightly better off than he might have been on the farm, but there were more bad years than good. Things did not pick up much with the beginning of the war-in fact, the prices in 1940 were among the worst ever. During the Depression bad prices were not so hard to take-he could look around and see that nearly everybody was in the same boat-but now, with the war jobs opening up and the country getting prosperous again, it was very hard to have worked as he had and come up with next to nothing.
He said to my mother that he was thinking of joining the Army. He was thinking of pelting and selling all his stock, and going into the Army as a tradesman. He was not too old for that, and he had skills which would make him useful. He could be a carpenter-think of all the building he had done around his place. Or he could be a butcher-think of all the old horses he had slaughtered and cut up for the foxes.
My mother had another idea. She suggested that they keep out all the best skins, not sending them to the auctions but having them tanned and dressed-that is, made into scarves and capes, provided with eyes and claws-and then take them out and sell them. People were getting some money now. There were women around who had the money and the inclination to get dressed up. And there were tourists. We were off the beaten track for tourists, but she had heard about them, how the hotel resorts of Muskoka were full of them. They came up from Detroit and Chicago with money to spend on bone china from England, Shetland sweaters, Hudson"s Bay blankets. So why not silver-fox furs?
When it comes to changes, to invasions and upheavals, there are two kinds of people. If a highway is built through their front yard, some people will be affronted, they will mourn the loss of privacy, of peony bushes and lilacs and a dimension of themselves. The other sort will see an opportunity-they will put up a hotdog stand, get a fast-food franchise, open a motel. My mother was the second sort of person. The very idea of the tourists with their American money flocking to the northern woods filled her with vitality.
In the summer, then, the summer of 1941, she went off to Muskoka with her trunkload of furs. My father"s mother arrived to take over our house. She was still an upright and handsome woman and she entered my mother"s domain magnificent with foreboding. She hated what my mother was doing. Peddling. She said that when she thought of American tourists all she hoped was that none of them ever came near her. For one day she and my mother were together in the house and during that time my grandmother withdrew into a harsh and unforthcoming version of herself. My mother was too steamed up to notice. But after my grandmother had been in charge on her own for a day she thawed out. She decided to forgive my father his marriage, for the time being, also his exotic enterprise and its failure, and my father decided to forgive her the humiliating fact that he owed her money. She baked bread and pies, and did well by the garden vegetables, the new-laid eggs and the rich milk and cream from the Jersey cow. (Though we had no money we were never badly fed.) She scoured the inside of the cupboards and sc.r.a.ped away the black on the bottom of the saucepans, which we had believed to be permanent. She ferreted out many items in need of mending. In the evenings she carried pails of water to the flower border and the tomato plants. Then my father came up from his work in the barn and the fox pens and we all sat out on yard chairs, under the heavy trees.
Our nine-acre farm-no farm at all as my grandmother saw things-had an unusual location. To the east was the town, the church towers and the tower of the Town Hall visible when the leaves were off the trees, and on the mile or so of road between us and the main street there was a gradual thickening of houses, a turning of dirt paths into sidewalks, an appearance of a lone streetlight, so that you might say we were at the town"s farthest edges, though beyond its legal munic.i.p.al boundaries. But to the west there was only one farmhouse to be seen, and that one far away, at the top of a hill almost at the midpoint in the western horizon. We always referred to this as Roly Grain"s house, but who Roly Grain might be, or what road led to his house, I had never asked or imagined. It was all too far away, across, first, a wide field planted in corn or oats, then the woods and the river flats sloping down to the great hidden curve of the river, and the pattern of overlapping bare or wooded hills beyond. It was very seldom that you could see a stretch of country so empty, so seductive to the imagination, in our thickly populated farmland.
When we sat looking out at this view my father rolled and smoked a cigarette, and he and my grandmother talked about the old days on the farm, their old neighbors, and funny things-that is, both strange and comical things-that had happened. My mother"s absence brought a sort of peace-not only between them, but for all of us. Some alert and striving note was removed. An edge of ambition, self-regard, perhaps discontent, was absent. At the time, I did not know exactly what it was that was missing. I did not know either what a deprivation, rather than a relief, it would be for me, if that was gone for good.
My younger brother and sister pestered my grandmother to let them look into her window. My grandmother"s eyes were a hazel color, but in one of them she had a large spot, taking up at least a third of the iris, and the color of this spot was blue. So people said that her eyes were of two different colors, though this was not quite the truth. We called the blue spot her window. She would pretend to be cross at being asked to show it, she would duck her head and beat off whoever was trying to look in, or she would screw her eyes shut, opening the plain hazel one a crack to see if she was still being watched. She was always caught out in the end and gave in to sitting still with eyes wide open, being looked into. The blue was clear, without a speck of any other color in it, a blue made brighter by the brownish-yellow at its edges, as the summer sky is by the puffs of clouds.
It was evening by the time my father turned into the hotel driveway. We drove between the stone gateposts and there it was ahead of us-a long stone building with gables and a white veranda. Hanging pots overflowing with flowers. We missed the turn into the parking lot and followed the semicircular drive, which brought us in front of the veranda, driving past the people who sat there on swings and rockers, with nothing to do but look at us, as my father said.
Nothing to do but gawk.
We spotted the inconspicuous sign and found our way to a gravel lot next to the tennis court. We got out of the car. It was covered with dust and looked like a raffish interloper amongst the other cars there.
We had travelled the whole way with the windows down and a hot wind blowing in on us, tangling and drying my hair. My father saw that there was something wrong with me and asked me if I had a comb. I got back into the car and looked for one, finding it at last wedged down against the back of the seat. It was dirty, and some teeth were missing. I tried, and he tried, and finally he said, "Maybe if you just shoved it back behind your ears." Then he combed his own hair, frowning as he bent to look in the car mirror. We walked across the lot, with my father wondering out loud whether we should try the front or the back door. He seemed to think I might have some useful opinion about this-something he had never thought in any circ.u.mstances before. I said that we should try the front, because I wanted to get another look at the lily pond in the semicircle of lawn bounded by the drive. There was a statue of a bare-shouldered girl in a tunic draped closely against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, with a jug on her shoulder-one of the most elegant things I had ever seen in my life.
"Run the gauntlet," my father said softly, and we went up the steps and crossed the veranda in front of people pretending not to look at us. We entered the lobby, where it was so dark that little lights were turned on, in frosted globes, high up on the dark shiny wood of the walls. To one side was the dining room, visible through gla.s.s doors. It was all cleaned up after supper, each table covered with a white cloth. On the other side, with the doors open, was a long rustic room with a huge stone fireplace at the end of it, and the skin of a bear stretched on the floor.
"Look at that," said my father. "She must be here somewhere."
What he had noticed in the corner of the lobby was a waist-high display case, and behind its gla.s.s was a silver-fox cape beautifully spread on what looked like a piece of white velvet. A sign set on top said, Silver Fox, the Canadian Luxury, in a flowing script done with white and silvery paint on a black board.
"Here somewhere," my father repeated. We peered into the room with the fireplace. A woman writing at a desk looked up and said, in an agreeable but somehow distant voice, "I think that if you ring the bell somebody will come."
It seemed strange to me to be addressed by a person you had never seen before.
We backed out and crossed to the doors of the dining room. Across the acre of white tables with their laid-out silverware and turned-down gla.s.ses and bunches of flowers and napkins peaked like wigwams, we saw two figures, ladies, seated at a table near the kitchen door, finishing a late supper or having evening tea. My father turned the doork.n.o.b and they looked up. One of them rose and came towards us, between the tables.
The moment in which I did not realize that this was my mother was not long, but there was a moment. I saw a woman in an unfamiliar dress, a cream-colored dress with a pattern of little red flowers. The skirt was pleated and swishing, the material crisp, glowing as the tablecloths did in the dark-panelled room. The woman wearing it looked brisk and elegant, her dark hair parted in the middle and pinned up in a neat coronet of braids. And even when I knew this was my mother, when she had put her arms around me and kissed me, spilling out an unaccustomed fragrance and showing none of her usual hurry and regrets, none of her usual dissatisfaction with my appearance, or my nature, I felt that she was somehow still a stranger. She had crossed effortlessly, it seemed, into the world of the hotel, where my father and I stood out like tramps or scarecrows-it was as if she had always been living there. I felt first amazed, then betrayed, then excited and hopeful, my thoughts running on to advantages to be gained for myself, in this new situation.
The woman my mother had been talking to turned out to be the dining-room hostess-a tanned, tired-looking woman with dark-red lipstick and nail polish, who was subsequently revealed to have many troubles which she had confided to my mother. She was immediately friendly. I broke into the adult conversation to tell about the ice splinters and the bad taste of the ice cream, and she went out to the kitchen and brought me a large helping of vanilla ice cream covered with chocolate sauce and bearing a cherry on top.
"Is that a sundae?" I said. It looked like the sundaes I had seen in advertis.e.m.e.nts, but since it would be the first I had ever tasted I wanted to be sure of its name.
"I believe it is," she said. "A sundae."
n.o.body reproved me, in fact my parents laughed, and then the woman brought fresh tea and some sort of sandwich for my father.
"Now I"ll leave you to your chat," she said, and went away and left us three alone in that hushed and splendid room. My parents talked, but I paid little attention to their conversation. I interrupted from time to time to tell my mother something about the trip or about what had been happening at home. I showed her where a bee had stung me, on my leg. Neither of them told me to be quiet-they answered me with cheerfulness and patience. My mother said that we would all sleep tonight in her cabin. She had one of the little cabins behind the hotel. She said we would eat breakfast here in the morning.
She said that when I had finished I should run out and look at the lily pond.
That must have been a happy conversation. Relieved, on my father"s side-triumphant, on my mother"s. She had done very well, she had sold almost everything she had brought with her, the venture was a success. Vindication for her, salvation for us all. My father must have been thinking of what had to be done first, whether to get the car fixed in a garage up here or chance it once more on the back roads and take it to the garage at home, where he knew the people. Which bills should be paid at once, and which should be paid in part. And my mother must have been looking further into the future, thinking of how she could expand, which other hotels she could try this in, how many more capes and scarves they should get made up next year, and whether this could develop into a year-round business.
She couldn"t have foreseen how soon the Americans were going to get into the war, and how that was going to keep them at home, how gas rationing was going to curtail the resort business. She couldn"t foresee the attack on her own body, the destruction gathering within.
She would talk for years afterwards about what she had achieved in that summer. How she had known the right way to go about it, never pushing too hard, showing the furs as if it was a great pleasure to her and not a matter of money. A sale would seem to be the last thing on her mind. It was necessary to show the people who ran the hotel that she would not cheapen the impression they wanted to make, that she was anything but a huckster. A lady, rather, whose offerings added a unique distinction. She had to become a friend of the management and the employees as well as the guests.
And that was no ch.o.r.e for her. She had the true instinct for mixing friendship and business considerations, the instinct that all good salespersons have. She never had to calculate her advantage and coldly act upon it. Everything she did she did naturally and felt a real warmth of heart where her interests lay. She who had always had difficulty with her mother-in-law and her husband"s family, who was thought stuck-up by our neighbors, and somewhat pushy by the town women at the church, had found a world of strangers in which she was at once at home.
For all this, as I grew older, I came to feel something like revulsion. I despised the whole idea of putting yourself to use in that way, making yourself dependent on the response of others, employing flattery so adroitly and naturally that you did not even recognize it as flattery. And all for money. I thought such behavior shameful, as of course my grandmother did. I took it for granted that my father felt the same way though he did not show it. I believed-or thought I believed-in working hard and being proud, not caring about being poor and indeed having a subtle contempt for those who led easeful lives.
I did, then, regret the loss of the foxes. Not of the business, but of the animals themselves, with their beautiful tails and angry golden eyes. As I grew older, and more and more aloof from country ways, country necessities, I began for the first time to question their captivity, to feel regret for their killing, their conversion into money. (I never got so far as feeling anything like this for the mink, who seemed to me mean and rat- like, deserving of their fate.) I knew this feeling to be a luxury, and when I mentioned it to my father, in later years, I spoke of it lightly. In the same spirit he said that he believed there was some religion in India that held with all animals getting into Heaven. Think, he said, if that were true-what a pack of snarling foxes he would meet there, not to mention all the other fur-bearers he had trapped, and the mink, and a herd of thundering horses he had butchered for their meat.
Then he said, not so lightly, "You get into things, you know. You sort of don"t realize what you"re getting into."
It was in those later years, after my mother was dead, that he spoke of my mother"s salesmanship and how she had saved the day. He spoke of how he didn"t know what he was going to do, at the end of that trip, if it turned out that she hadn"t made any money.
"But she had," he said. "She had it." And the tone in which he said this convinced me that he had never shared those reservations of my grandmother"s and mine. Or that he"d resolutely put away such shame, if he"d ever had it.
A shame that has come full circle, finally being shameful in itself to me.
On a spring evening in 1949-the last spring, in fact the last whole season, that I was to live at home-I was riding my bicycle to the Foundry, to deliver a message to my father. I seldom rode my bicycle anymore. For a while, maybe all through the fifties, it was considered eccentric for any girl to be riding a bicycle after she was old enough, say, to wear a bra.s.siere. But to get to the Foundry I could travel on back roads, I didn"t have to go through town.
My father had started working in the Foundry in 1947. It had become apparent the year before that not just our fox farm but the whole fur-farming industry was going downhill very fast. Perhaps the mink would have tided us over if we had gone more heavily into mink, or if we had not owed so much money still, to the feed company, to my grandmother, to the bank. As it was, mink could not save us. My father had made the mistake many fox farmers made just at that time. It was believed that a new paler kind of fox, called a platinum, was going to save the day, and with borrowed money my father had bought two male breeders, one an almost snowy-white Norwegian platinum and one called a pearl platinum, a lovely bluish-gray. People were sick of silver foxes, but surely with these beauties the market would revive.
Of course there is always the chance, with a new male, of how well he will perform, and how many of the offspring will have their father"s color. I think there was trouble on both fronts, though my mother would not allow questions or household talk about these matters. I think one of the males had a standoffish nature and another sired mostly dark litters. It did not matter much, because the fashion went against longhaired furs altogether.
When my father went looking for a job it was necessary to find a night job, because he had to spend all day going out of business. He had to pelt all the animals and sell the pelts for whatever he could get and he had to tear down the guard fence, the Old Sheds and the New Sheds, and all the pens. I suppose he did not have to do that immediately, but he must have wanted all traces of the enterprise destroyed.
He got a job as night watchman at the Foundry, covering the hours from five in the afternoon till ten o"clock in the evening. There was not so much money in being a night watchman, but the good fortune in it was that he was able to do another job at that time as well. This extra job was called shaking down floors. He was never finished with it when his watchman"s shift was over, and sometimes he got home after midnight.
The message I was taking to my father was not an important message, but it was important in our family life. It was simply a reminder that he must not forget to call in at my grandmother"s house on his way home from work, no matter how late he was. My grandmother had moved to our town, with her sister, so that she could be useful to us. She baked pies and m.u.f.fins and mended our clothes and darned my father"s and my brother"s socks. My father was supposed to go around by her house in town after work, to pick up these things, and have a cup of tea with her, but often he forgot. She would sit up knitting, dozing under the light, listening to the radio, until the Canadian radio stations went off at midnight and she would find herself picking up distant news reports, American jazz. She would wait and wait and my father wouldn"t come. This had happened last night, so tonight at suppertime she had phoned and asked with painful tact, "Was it tonight or last night your father was supposed to come?"
"I don"t know," I said.
I always felt that something had not been done right, or not done at all, when I heard my grandmother"s voice. I felt that our family had failed her. She was still energetic, she looked after her house and yard, she could still carry armchairs upstairs, and she had my great-aunt"s company, but she needed something more-more grat.i.tude, more compliance, than she ever got.
"Well, I sat up for him last night, but he didn"t come."
"He must be coming tonight then." I did not want to spend time talking to her because I was preparing for my Grade Thir- teen exams on which my whole future would depend. (Even now, on cool bright spring evenings, with the leaves just out on the trees, I can feel the stirring of expectation connected with this momentous old event, my ambition roused and quivering like a fresh blade to meet it.) I told my mother what the call was about and she said, "Oh, you"d better ride up and remind your father, or there"ll be trouble."
Whenever she had to deal with the problem of my grandmother"s touchiness my mother brightened up, as if she had got back some competence or importance in our family. She had Parkinson"s disease. It had been overtaking her for some time with erratic symptoms but had recently been diagnosed and p.r.o.nounced incurable. Its progress took up more and more of her attention. She could no longer walk or eat or talk normally-her body was stiffening out of her control. But she had a long time yet to live.
When she said something like this about the situation with my grandmother-when she said anything that showed an awareness of other people, or even of the work around the house, I felt my heart soften towards her. But when she finished up with a reference to herself, as she did this time (and that will upset me), I hardened again, angry at her for her abdication, sick of her self-absorption, which seemed so flagrant, so improper in a mother.
I had never been to the Foundry in the two years my father had worked there, and I did not know where to find him. Girls of my age did not hang around men"s workplaces. If they did that, if they went for long walks by themselves along the railway track or the river, or if they bicycled alone on the country roads (I did these last two things) they were sometimes said to be asking for it.
I did not have much interest in my father"s work at the Foundry, anyway. I had never expected the fox farm to make us rich, but at least it made us unique and independent. When I thought of my father working in the Foundry I felt that he had suffered a great defeat. My mother felt the same way. Your father is loo fine for that, she would say. But instead of agreeing with her I would argue, intimating that she did not like being an ordinary workingman"s wife and that she was a sn.o.b.
The thing that most upset my mother was receiving the Foundry"s Christmas basket of fruit, nuts, and candy. She could not bear to be on the receiving, not the distributing, end of that sort of thing, and the first time it happened we had to put the basket in the car and drive down the road to a family she had picked out as suitable recipients. By the next Christmas her authority had weakened and I broke into the basket, declaring that we needed treats as much as anybody. She wiped away tears at my hard tone, and I ate the chocolate, which was old and brittle and turning gray.
I could not see any light in the Foundry buildings. The windows were painted blue on the inside-perhaps a light would not get through. The office was an old brick house at the end of the long main building, and there I saw a light through the Venetian blinds, and I thought that the manager or one of the office staff must be working late. If I knocked they would tell me where my father was. But when I looked through the little window in the door I saw that it was my father in there. He was alone, and he was scrubbing the floor.
I had not known that scrubbing the office floor every night was one of the watchman"s duties. (This does not mean that my father had deliberately kept quiet about it-I might not have been listening.) I was surprised, because I had never seen him doing any work of this sort before. Housework. Now that my mother was sick, such work was my responsibility. He would never have had time. Besides that, there was men"s work and there was women"s work. I believed this, and so did everybody else I knew.
My father"s scrubbing apparatus was unlike anything anybody would have at home. He had two buckets on a stand, on rollers, with attachments on either side to hold various mops and brushes. His scrubbing was vigorous and efficient-it had no resigned and ritualistic, feminine sort of rhythm. He seemed to be in a good humor.