The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  Dad valued inviting other military personnel into our home and embraced the idea of a close military community caring for each other. Armed Forces duties often dictated soldiers being away from their own families, so as a military family my parents graciously welcomed guests into our home for all holidays. It was commonplace to hear, “Hey kids, another MP is having Easter dinner with us – his family live in British Columbia and he’s all alone otherwise.” Or “The Cassidy family are joining us for a BBQ on Labour Day weekend. They were just posted in from Ontario and have no family to celebrate with here. So they’re joining us.” Christmas Eve consisted of a large crowd of mismatched military members and families dropping by for potluck supper to celebrate together. I enjoyed meeting new people and trying out the different food dishes and customs they shared.

  In the spirit of honouring Dad’s values, I also invited other soldiers into my home for the holidays. One Christmas, while living in Petawawa, Ontario, I informed my husband, “Private Edwin lives on base and he can’t fly home to his family and has no friends around for Christmas. He’s spending Christmas Eve and Christmas Day dinner with us. It’s not right for any soldier to be alone on Christmas Day.” Most of the Forces were literally on standby for Y2K (Year 2000) on New Year’s Eve 1999. I ended up hosting a massive party as no soldier in my medical unit was permitted leave. It was quite the ring-in at midnight, with a crowd of military personnel, their spouses, and their children crammed into my home, all celebrating the New Year.

  There are certain mundane memories I have of Dad from my childhood. It’s strange the memories you hold over the years. Dad, ever so impatient and in a constant hurry, walked extremely fast. It didn’t matter that I was much shorter and had problems keeping his pace. I recall holding onto Dad’s finger and literally trotting beside him as he busily conducted his errands. He was totally oblivious that I was practically running to keep up. But it was more fun grocery shopping with Dad than Mom. Dad would let me get away with placing chips and Pop-Tarts in the grocery cart and real Raisin Bran cereal (not the no-name, cheaper stuff my mother picked out with less raisins that tasted like sawdust).

  I also recall a few benefits of Dad being a shift worker. If I wanted an extra allowance, I’d go into his room while he was sleeping and ask, “I’m taking twenty dollars extra from your wallet. Okay?” Dad, still sleeping, would mumble something completely unintelligible that I always took as, “Sure, go ahead and take out whatever money you want.” Mom also took advantage of Dad’s shift work by commanding us kids, “Keep the noise down! Your father is trying to sleep and he has to work night shift tonight.” But we were onto our mother – she was the one who wanted peace and quiet in the house. A bomb could have exploded beside Dad and it wouldn’t disturb his sleep.

  Military shift workers received boxed lunches packed with delicious sandwiches, treats, and fruit. Often Dad and his fellow MPs had no time to eat on busy police shifts. Bonus for me. Upon finishing his midnight shifts, Dad would arrive home and place the leftover boxes in our fridge. The smart child that I was, I would awake early, run downstairs, and immediately raid the good stuff out of them, especially the chocolate puddings and cookies. I recently reminded my older sister, Rhonda, of this and she only remembered the sandwiches and chocolate milk. No surprise she couldn’t recall the treats – I’d grab them before she realized there was any junk food. During my military career, I never complained about eating boxed lunches in the field and on the ranges as I felt connected to Dad every time I rooted through one.

  Having a father employed as a police officer was a deterrent to bad behaviour that would land us teenagers in trouble. But Dad wanted to ensure we remained law-abiding and he had a sense of humour in demonstrating this. My younger sister, Lesa, and her friend Shelley were dropping by the police hut to visit Dad. He kindly offered to take them on a tour and straightaway showed them to the cold, prison cell and invited, “Walk in the cell, take a look around.” Curiously, they walked in and suddenly they heard a distinct clink. Dad had shut and locked the cell with them inside. “Now sit there and think what it would be like to be in here for real!” And he walked away and left them contemplating prison confinement. We took Dad’s hint and avoided delinquent behaviour.

  My immediate family are extremely close-knit and as siblings we all get along and look out for each other. Years after Dad retired from the military, Lesa, who enjoyed teasing my father, jokingly asked him, “Which of us children is your favourite?” Dad looked her in the eyes and honestly replied, “Whichever one of you needs me the most.” The day Dad passed away on August 16, 2005, Rhonda, Lesa, Kevin, and I were all his favourite children.

  I’m grateful to my father for precious memories of being a navy man’s daughter and shaping my life to be a more respectful, open-minded, giving person.

  The Mushaboomer

  Daniel N. Paul

  My father, William Gabriel (Bill) Paul, was born August 4, 1896, at Mushaboom, Nova Scotia, a birth location that caused some of his more teasing and tormenting-inclined cousins, or aggravating, according to one’s point of view, to label him the Mushaboomer. He was the son of John (Jack) Paul and Rhoda Hubley, a mixed marriage that was not greeted with enthusiasm by the Hubley family, whose mindset was the norm for many Anglos of the day.

  He was a man of small stature, never weighing much more than a hundred pounds, and he never attended a school in his life, whether this was by choice or caused by the fact that he was Mi’kmaw, living in a rather racist society, I cannot say and he didn’t tell me. However, he was a very intelligent person who, in spite of this handicap, accomplished some amazing things during his lifetime.

  Dad grew up in a seaside area of Halifax County where the family resided in homes located at Mushaboom, Sheet Harbour, and Sober Island. The following are a couple of stories he told me about his childhood.

  One dark winter evening, when he was around eight, his mom and dad left him and his sister Susan Jane to babysit their two younger brothers Rube and John Jr., with the warning not to open the door to anyone. Coincidently, one of his father’s Mi’kmaw friends, an elderly gentleman who happened to be very hard of hearing, picked that night to come for a visit.

  Dad told me that soon after his parents left there came a knock on the door, which caused him and his sister to ask who was there, with no response. The knocks became pounding, which frightened them. When they didn’t get any response whatsoever to their queries about who was knocking, he, in desperation and fear, got his father’s shotgun, put a shell in it and fired it through the door, which action scared the shit out of the deaf man, who very quickly made his identity known. I’ll leave it with this: his parents were not pleased with the drastic action he had taken.

  He was very young when he saw his first motor vehicle, which caused him to run home and tell his mother, “I saw a horseless carriage coming down the road making a hell of noise!” He also told me that some stagecoaches were still on the go at the time.

  He was not a pretentious man and was quite adept at telling funny tales of his own unflattering experiences. He was also good at a put-down. One night a grandson, who was in the navy, came to visit with a navy buddy in tow. The buddy proceeded to tell my father, in a bragging manner, about what a wonderful seaman he was. Dad, growing weary of the bull, stopped him with this simple statement: “I was a fisherman in me youth and I wrung more saltwater out of me gloves than you’ll ever see!”

  From age twelve to sixteen, Bill deep-sea fished with his father and grandfather along the coast of North America, which caused him to decide to become a fisherman. He couldn’t swim a stroke and he had an explanation for it. In his early years, before changing his mind about the vocation, deep-sea fishing in the cold North Atlantic quite often brought tragedy to men manning fishing boats and their families. The cold waters would quickly bring on hypothermia. Therefore, many old-time fishermen thought it would be much better if they could not swim because to do so would only prolong the inevitable agony of dyi
ng. Better to get it over with quickly by drowning.

  After giving up fishing as a vocation, Dad became a factory worker, wood harvester, and lumber mill worker and much later a carpenter. He lost several fingers while working in sawmills. The following is a short story about him and a cousin getting lost in the woods while employed at a lumber mill. Keep in mind that in the early 1900s, there were still vast stretches of forests in Nova Scotia without roads.

  He and his cousin were working at a logging operation deep in the woods when the foreman elected them to travel to a store to bring in some supplies. They managed to get out in a day or so and acquired whatever they were sent for. Rather than returning the way they had come, they decided to take a shortcut through the forest.

  With Nova Scotia weather being what it is, a prolonged period of cloudy and foggy days and nights were passing at the time, so they had no stars, moon, or sun to guide them. Without such natural tools, they eventually got lost. As a backup my father had a compass, which he pulled out when they deduced they were lost and laid on a rock to get some guidance. His cousin Bill Marr, viewing the thing with its needle jumping all over the place, told my father, “That thing is no fucking good.” Then he gave it a good smash with his poleaxe, with the result being they were lost for about ten days.

  His father John died from the flu in 1914, and shortly thereafter the family moved to Halifax. Dad was working in a factory in the city when the 1917 Halifax Explosion occurred. He told me that the windows blew in and some co-workers were killed by flying glass and other flying objects. He left the area and ran for home in the west end to see if his mother and brothers were all right. They were. His sister Susan Jane, who was married and living on Water Street, was lying in bed breast-feeding her baby when the explosion occurred and found herself out on the street with her clothes mostly blown off. Neither she nor the baby was seriously hurt.

  The flu took the life of his mother in 1918. After her death the siblings scattered. Susan Jane and her husband moved to Boston and she changed her first name to Leta when she became an American citizen. She passed away from a heart attack at the age of ninety-seven while shovelling snow. Rube took up the life of a vagabond. He began a long romance with alcohol, contracted TB, and died in a sanatorium in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the mid-1950s. John Jr. moved to New Brunswick and married Bernice from Burnt Church Indian Reserve. He drowned on July 6, 1937, while attempting to save a young Acadien friend who was drowning in the Black River, Black River-Hardwicke District, Northumberland County, New Brunswick. John Jr. left behind a wife and seven children.

  After the death of his mother, Dad moved back to Sheet Harbour for a time. From there he began walking both ways to carry on a courtship with Susie, a young lady from Waycobah First Nation, who was living and working as a maid in the town of Truro. Susie’s best friend was Sarah Noel, whom he would marry and have fourteen children with.

  It was a romantic event. Dad met Mom through Susie and Susie was left behind. She was a good sport about it and was Matron of Honour at their June 7, 1923, wedding. The wedding reception was quite a party. As Status Indians were not allowed at the time to buy or have in their possession alcoholic beverages, my maternal grandmother made a big batch of homebrew to keep the party cheerful.

  In the 1970s, I told the story of the romance to the wife of one of Susie’s grandsons and she confirmed it with this from Susie: “Ah, Bill – he was the love of my life and my best friend Sarah stole him.”

  After their marriage, Bill and Sarah lived on Millbrook Indian Reserve for a time then moved, as did many other Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw families, to New Brunswick, where work opportunities were more plentiful. Many of their children were born in that province.

  Before finally winding up living in Saint John, they lived in many lumber camps throughout the province. The following happened at a lumber camp in the Red Bank area. One day my father was walking past my grandmother’s camp and he smelled her cooking what he thought was rabbit stew. He walked in and told her, “Jane, that stew smells so good.” She replied, “Want some?” He assented and she dished him out a tin plate full. He thought it was so good he asked for more. When he finished it, he told her, “Jane, that was the best rabbit stew I’ve ever tasted!” She responded, “It isn’t rabbit stew. It’s skunk.”

  By then I was laughing my guts out because I knew what was coming next. He ran outside and heaved it out. He had no answer when I said, “Why did you do that? It was very tasty, wasn’t it?” Although he and the rest of my family would not have much to do with eating many of the wild animals that my grandmother cooked and ate, I did, and enjoyed them, including muskrat.

  The place of my birth, Shubenacadie Indian Reserve, now Indian Brook, was preordained three years prior by a blatant act of racism committed against my family by white society. The gist of the story:

  Until the fall of 1935, Dad worked on the Saint John, New Brunswick, waterfront as a stevedore, and was therefore a taxpayer. That year, because of Depression-related work shortages, he and many others were laid off.

  Unemployed, with a growing family to support, he had to apply for city welfare to assure the family’s survival, which was granted. A white resident, viewing this as an affront to his warped sense of fairness, went posthaste to the city fathers and complained bitterly that they were feeding a bunch of Indians.

  The city fathers agreed with his complaint and reacted with the proper indignation of bigots. Thus, in late November of 1935, my parents and their five small children were rounded up and deported by the city council from Saint John to Indian Brook Reserve, Nova Scotia, a place they had never seen before.

  Upon their arrival at Indian Brook, with little assets other than the clothes on their backs, and cold weather setting in, the Indian Agent gave them a roll of tarpaper and told them to build a tarpaper shack. Which they did, spending more than two years living in it before moving to the tiny log cabin on Brown Hill where I was born in 1938.

  This was also the time when Dad took up a new vocation, carpentry. Living in the small log cabin with his wife and eight growing children was the turning point. He decided to build a permanent home for his family. To get it into the works he cut logs on the Reserve and traded his labour with a nearby sawmill to have it cut into lumber. The house was built on Brown Hill, but the property did not have a decent water supply, and we had to carry drinking water for over a mile.

  In 1942, he built a new, larger, fancy home in an area of the Reserve known as Brown Flats. The site had an excellent spring-fed water supply. There was no electricity on the Reserve at the time and heat was supplied by a kitchen stove and a tin pot-bellied stove. Water was carried into the house by the pail and an outhouse was where one went to contemplate life. Of course, in the wintertime, the contemplations were very brief!

  Even though our Reserve was mostly unsuitable for farming, the mid-1940s was when the bright lights of Indian Affairs decided that all Mi’kmaq had the potential to be successful farmers. The Department of Indian Affairs built a barn for Dad and the Department’s Indian Agent supplied a cow, a pig, and vegetable seeds. Not unexpected by the recipients of the illogical generosity, it was a bust.

  After building our new home, Dad got into building homes with gusto. Although he could not read a plan or write a note, all anyone had to do was read the plan to him once and he built it to specifications. Also, he used his imagination and designed homes in his head and built them. Some of his designs were so good that word spread far beyond the Reserve. He even got an offer from a Boston home construction company to move there and build for them. He declined all offers. In view of the deportation from Saint John, he did not want to be placed in a situation where he had to go through such a trauma again.

  Dad and Mom lived through many hard times. One of my brothers, Robert, was born in a poorhouse in New Brunswick. Many times during my childhood food was a scarce commodity. Hardship was the way of life for the Mi’kmaq and malnutrition was often an unwanted companion. However
, by the late 1940s, things began to change for the better and have improved gradually since. Disease took my three older siblings when they were ten and younger. Out of fourteen children five of us survive today.

  When my parents celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary on June 7, 1983, the community of Indian Brook put on a big party for them. During the party old friends and relatives gave many accolades, and Bill and Sarah received a congratulatory message from Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau. It was a big day for Mom, but she was diabetic, so I watched as she snuck about five or six goodies, then I told her to stop. She passed away on March 15, 1984.

  Dad loved hunting and fishing. He and some friends built a hunting camp at Otter Lake, Halifax County, and many good times were had there. He was a man who was always on the chilly side, so even in the summer he wore long johns and often had on layers of clothing. One evening at the camp, a new acquaintance watched him start stripping off to go to bed and exclaimed, “Will there be anything left when he finishes!”

  He won the Nova Scotia Guides Meet moose-calling contest a few times and had many stories of far-out hunting and fishing experiences. He told me of the day he was chased by a cranky bull moose during rutting season and had to climb a tree until the animal decided it had better things to do than wait for a scrawny human to come down so he could demolish him.

  He built his own rowboats and most would end up at Otter Lake. He displayed his lack of fear of water one day when his hunting and fishing buddy Ernie Ainslie and I helped him load a boat with supplies to renovate the camp, which filled the boat to capacity. Ernie and I were walking along the lake shore toward the camp when we looked out at the lake and saw Dad casually rowing the halfsubmerged boat toward shore. He actually looked as if he was enjoying it.