The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  Nobody who ever watched him moving through a normal day would think: “Right there is one of the masters of the contemporary short story.” He rarely dedicated himself to a fixed writing schedule and if you want to know the truth, he did not get to his fiction as often as you might expect. People called him “the tortoise of the literary world,” as though his entire existence was focused only on his writing and he dedicated years and years of exclusive time to each and every story, but in actual fact, he wrote them fairly quickly, longhand in exam books, maybe one every six or eight weeks in the summer. My dad was a busy man and he had lots of different things on the go. He fit his fiction into our shared world as best he could. It was always important, but never the most important thing in our lives.

  Selfishly, I am glad that my father made the decisions he made and I’m happy that, very often but not always, he chose us over his other work. It’s important to emphasize, however, that he was not some dutiful martyr suffering through his days. I don’t think he felt like his family was keeping him from his desk. My father had things set up the way he liked them and none of this was accidental. Instead of a conflict, there was a link, I think a powerful one, between how he lived and how he wrote and these two parts of his experience nourished each other in productive ways.

  If you read his stories closely, you’ll see that they often turn on dramatic moments that are triggered when the independent desire of an individual character inevitably comes into contact with the collective responsibilities of the family, the community, or the home. He wrote about work all the time – it was probably his favourite subject – and nobody ever did it better. His stories always returned to the same basic negotiations, the fundamental compromises we all make to make our livings. He came back to it all the time: the ancient balancing act between the self and the other, autonomy and belonging.

  How do I know that these negotiations were important, essential, matters for my dad in both his life and his fiction? How can I be so sure about this? I’ll tell you. Because when he was still a young man, my father did do one thing that was completely out of the ordinary, wildly eccentric, and as artsy as you can imagine: he built himself the little house.

  Maybe you already know about Alistair MacLeod’s little house. Maybe you have seen it in photographs, or in the documentary Bill MacGillivary made, or maybe you have read about it on a book jacket flap or somewhere else. Maybe you have actually hiked past it during a visit to the Dunvegan campground that our relatives run. The little house seems to be growing more famous every year, more romantic, and I would not be surprised if one day this simple plywood box becomes a provincial heritage site or a park. Maybe, in the years to come, architectural consultants will be called in to restore it to a former glory that never existed. Maybe, like Maud Lewis’s tiny place, they will try to pack it up and move it to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax where it can be properly preserved and appreciated. Personally, I don’t think my family would ever let that happen. We are pretty sure that the little house belongs exactly where it is and how it is: a ten-by-ten square with one window and one door, anchored to an eroding cliff in Broad Cove, where it stares out over Margaree Island and into that part of the Atlantic Ocean where the Gulf of Saint Lawrence meets the Northumberland Strait.

  The little house is hard to get to now. You first have to walk about three-quarters of a mile down a very bad road that is criss-crossed every year with more and more fallen trees. Then you need to negotiate a route over about 150 yards of the large loose rocks that make our shoreline. There is no trail here and you have to watch your feet and step carefully, a different way every time, as you make your way across. If you are coming over the mountain, you descend on a path so steep it almost forces you to sit down and crab crawl your way on your bum with your hands and feet working on the sides. In the summer this route is almost completely overgrown with rose bushes and their thorns so you need to wear long pants. No normal car can make the journey anymore but in recent years it seems like ATVs have been able to get through.

  I think it’s appropriate that the little house is difficult to access. It was never meant to be a welcoming spot for the general public. Instead it is, by design, a private place, a house that was expressly created by one man’s need to be alone, at least for a little while. Please don’t think this description is an invitation to stop by for a visit.

  It’s not like you are missing much, though. There is nothing in the little house, not even a chair anymore. And, as is the case when people come to visit the Brontës’ home in Yorkshire or the dark rooms where Melville produced Moby Dick, there isn’t anything to look at, nothing to really contemplate, when you peer into the place where my dad did most of his most important writing. To the general observer, the little house probably doesn’t even qualify as a house at all. Maybe, they would see it as something more like a shack, not even a shed. It holds the expected amount of dead flies and a fair amount of broken glass that has been brought into our lives by an endless series of vandals who have spent decades smashing the panes in its single front window. Though we never lock the door, these people still love to tear it off the hinges and carve their names in the desk and put their boots through the walls. Over the years, we’ve found plenty of old booze bottles in the little house and lots of abandoned clothes and the occasional sleeping bag.

  Once when my father and I were opening up the little house for another season, he accidentally disturbed a wasps’ nest that had formed over the winter. A swarm of them attacked him repeatedly, stinging him all around his head, even in his ears. The pain was so extreme, he was crying as he pointed at the nest and then at the broken glass and the clothes that were not his. “This is not a good security system,” he said. In later years, when the walk down to the shore and across the rocks was getting to be too much for him, he said, “I do not know why I worry about this place so much if I can never get back to it.”

  The little house was my dad’s one truly crazy gesture. I can only imagine what my grandfather, my mom’s dad, a very skilled and very practical carpenter, must have thought when his newish son-in-law told him that he needed to construct a building like this and then somehow place it in exactly this one, hard-to-get-to spot. My dad had no skills with tools, but again, he knew what he wanted and what he needed. They had to prefabricate the walls and haul them over the hill one by one from the Broad Cove wharf. Then, because they knew the whole structure would be completely exposed to the elements, they had to anchor it in place with cables secured to old deadmen railway ties buried in the ground. I have slept in the little house many times and when the wind gets going, you can feel the whole thing preparing for liftoff. It shudders and it shakes and it strains against the lines that hold it in place, but it has not moved an inch.

  Even the trees that surround it are only alive on the side that faces away from the ocean. The same salt spray that halfway kills them washes up on the little house all the time, stripping its paint and weakening its walls. It is very difficult for us to keep the place in shape, structurally, and though we have worked on it almost continuously over the years, I can admit that we haven’t done a great job with it and mostly the little house just seems like a dump, an abandoned utility building in the middle of nowhere. It is the most inhospitable, hospitable place I know.

  But, man, do I love it. Everybody in our family is crazy about the little house and when I visit my adult brothers and my sister, I am not surprised to see that we all have photographs of the little house hanging in all our different homes spread out across the country. We bring it with us. We carry the little house around and it accompanies us on our various journeys because it reminds us of our dad and I think it matters to us for lots of different reasons.

  Clearly, the spot itself is almost sublimely beautiful, and it’s easy to understand why Dad needed to put it there. You can see it in any of our pictures, especially the ones taken in the fall when everything seems darker: the water and the sky, the island, the cliffs, the stones,
and the trees. The house is also part of our shared experience and it sits on land that has been in our family for seven, now eight, generations. I take my own kids down there for camping trips every year. Though it is rocky and useless for growing anything, our great-grandfather’s cows used to graze here and when Dad was a kid, he used to walk them home up the same road we now come down. Our family’s history and geography are mixed up in this place and all of that is almost as beautiful as the view, but I love the little house mostly for one big reason that runs almost directly opposite to these currents. I love it because in the end, Dad’s little house was his alone. It really did not belong to his family or to his history and what went on there could not be shared with anybody.

  I like to think of my father imagining the little house before it existed. I like to think of him making it up: a remote, but not too remote, place that might somehow be constructed somewhere outside, but still beside, his real regular life. Every person who has ever tried to produce something original understands what he was looking for – I see it in my own life almost every day – the same tricky balancing act he was trying to pull off. There is nothing new in this spot: still the self and the other, still the link between work and family, autonomy and connection. An individual’s responsibilities can take on an infinity of different forms, but in the end, we all have our skates to tie, our recitals to attend, our exams to mark, and bills that must be paid with money that must be made. In the midst of all the other things that demanded his time, all his other tasks, most of them taken on willingly and cheerfully, I love that my dad forcefully decided to create a little room so that he could have some room to create. We all know that Virginia Woolf had a lot say on this subject and though she came from a very different world, a universe that was so totally unlike my dad’s, I think they both understood these negotiations.

  My father visited the little house when he could. Not every day of the summer, but whenever he could. And when he got there, he did a special kind of work in that place that just couldn’t be pulled off at home. His trips down there – he often went in the morning carrying his brown leather briefcase or what now seems to me like an impossibly heavy manual typewriter – were not an escape from his regular life, but maybe something more like a necessary extension of it, a complement. We were not jealous or upset when he left and we did not ask him how things had gone when he came back. The work that happened in the little house, like all art, began as a deeply personal project before it ever gained any public notice. Whatever victories or losses he experienced there, he experienced them alone. I’m sure there were days when nothing came together right, when his lofty expectations went unfulfilled and nothing turned out the way he had hoped it would. But I know too, we all know, that there were days inside those thin walls when he was truly inspired and everything did come together, and it all worked out perfectly, maybe even better than he had originally imagined.

  I am confident that the stories written in the little house – pieces like the “The Closing Down of Summer,” or “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun,” or “Island” – will still be read a century from now and that they will continue to be translated into new languages and anthologized all around the world. Though my dad is no longer with us, the stories he started there – in an almost inaccessible, seemingly inhospitable room full of dead flies – keep on going. They live their separate existences and they continue to meet new people and make new connections every day.

  My dad shared his time with his family and his friends and he shared his stories with thousands and thousands of readers, yet somehow he managed to keep everybody happy. He struck a careful balance and worked hard to maintain it. When he was a younger man, he built himself a little house, a separate connected place, where he could practise his craft without ever really leaving his other home behind. I know this house is not mine – it can never belong to another person – but I will do what I can to maintain its plywood frame for as long as possible.

  Though the cliff keeps approaching and the land keeps falling away, I want (and maybe I need) the little house to endure. I need it to hold on against the big winds and the corrosive salt spray and the punks that smash its windows. Though it seems so flimsy – like language itself, or the imagination, or any of our first creative impulses – I know this fragile structure has sustained work of enormous strength and raw power. Even when I am far away and it is impossible for me, physically, to see it or to make my own journey back, I remember my dad, and I imagine him walking steadily and deliberately onwards, over the rocks and through the weather, toward his destination, his vision for the way things might work out.

  What Falls From The Tree

  Carol Bruneau

  AD-Day vet, my dad was one tough nut. He lived to be ninety, death something that came as a shock though he prepped for it – even wrote his own obit, to thwart my gussying it up. Just the facts, Car’l, what more do you need? He’d throttle me for writing this. But I’m doing it out of love, I would say, because not a day passes that I don’t miss him, at times acutely. If only I could tell him, here’s what he’d say: Adjust and adapt.

  An accountant, Dad detested sentimentality. He raised my sister and me on the maxim that life means putting up with stuff you’d rather not. A reticent Catholic with a Monty Python-esque sense of humour – a guy who kept climbing steep hills even after his cardiologist forbade it – my dad, I have no doubt, is up there shaking his head, but smiling. Even as his other maxim rears itself: Anything worth doing is worth doing well. How to strike fear into a writer’s heart! Not to mention a daughterly one. One whom he promised “never to forget” for doing things most would’ve, helping an aged parent get along independently – in his case in the modest home he and my mom built in 1953.

  The trim white Cape Cod belongs to my sister now. But it’s still fronted by the burgeoning oak he planted as a seedling – our dad a practical, private person who respected numbers and, well, let’s say mistrusted, poetry.

  Oh, he was tough all right. A trait he must’ve earned quickly, landing on Juno Beach, driving a tank, watching buddies fall and hauling bodies from wreckage – experiences kept to himself until he got old. Sleeping in slit trenches and under trucks, being bombed by friendly fire, and once, on leave in Paris, seeing sidewalks move – the effects of post-traumatic stress? He saw the aftermath of Arnhem, paratroopers by the hundreds dangling from trees, killed by snipers. He made friends with starving Dutch people and somehow made it to a place near Bremen, Germany, when and where the truce was signed ending the war.

  In his auto-obit he was insistent on details – was it his French heritage that made him an impeccable recordkeeper? Bequeathed a steel-trap memory for dates and spellings? Graye-sur-Mer, close to Normandy’s Courseulles-sur-Mer, was where he landed that day in June, 1944: Soldier B22706 attached to the 6th Canadian Armoured Regiment, First Hussars, 2nd Armoured Brigade.

  When I travelled to Normandy after he died, I was hard-pressed to find Graye-sur-Mer, but as I walked Juno’s sand – what can I say? – in the ripping wind Dad was somehow with me. From that walk, a smooth, heart-shaped stone with its centre hollowed out sits on my desk: a reminder.

  His French Canadian ancestry reaches back to Quebec’s founding. But, ever the contrarian, Dad was a dyed-in-the-wool Maritimer, falling in love after the war with tough little Halifax and my mom, and, after being raised in Ontario, firmly embracing Anglo-hood. His cultural exchange in the making since childhood, being told “Jean was a girl’s name,” he’d traded it for “John.”

  Adjust and adapt?

  It’s easy to canonize the tough, the good – and my father was nothing if not good, and devoted, and loving in his hard-nosed, reserved way. My dad was strict and determined, to a fault when I was a teenager and when in old age his body failed him. We all have our failings. Death has erased his – all but one, regrettable because it lingers. In soft-peddling his Frenchness, he failed to pass on his first language to us. How I wish he’d kept on being “Jean,” been a
tiny bit tougher, tough enough to withstand hegemony’s dull axe. Helped me own my ancestry, as only speaking a mother (father?) tongue fully allows.

  His reasons point to the WASPishness, once, of tiny, provincial Halifax. Beyond this, they’re a mystery as deep as my failing, my dumbness when it comes to remembering and uttering words of that other language locked inside me. Its roots as deep – though almost as mute – as Dad’s lofty oak’s.

  In France, Courseulles-sur-Mer is clearly marked, though Graye-sur-Mer – even if my life depended on it – eludes Google’s location. But, learning about Vichy-Nazi collusion, I’m struck by something even harder to pin down: how Dad must’ve felt. A twenty-something French Canadian laying his life on the line to free his forebears’ homeland from its government-supported enemy.

  Go figure.

  The world – life – abounds with such complicities and contradictions. If we hang in long enough, sometimes they add up and make a crazy kind of sense. A sense all their own.

  When I was old enough my dad taught me prayers, and the rituals if not the meaning of the faith he passed on to me. A faith that I fled, returned to, and now consider the gift behind Dad’s resilience – the gift of his example. But the last time we spoke – before death’s collapsed, collapsing conversations – we laughed about how he loved church as a kid, while I couldn’t stand it.

  One of my earliest memories is of Dad kneeling in the pew beside me, his black wooden rosary beads moving through his slender fingers – this practically before I could talk.

  As I grew, after weekly Mass we played Monopoly, and then he’d read to me, read and read. The unexpurgated, un-Disneyfied Pinocchio, and Grimm’s fairy tales, the grimmer the better. Dad taught me the thrill of seeing words create worlds on paper, the astonishing power of books. He loved history and current events; he trusted journalism. Ever unsentimental, he steered clear of fiction, harbouring no interest in what wasn’t “true.”