The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  Right. Along with Monty Python, he adored The Avengers and Hitchcock. Bookending our orange-flowered couch, the two of us sat glued to these shows. As a kid, Psycho barely made me flinch – as long as Dad was there.

  In Normandy, high above the beachhead west of Juno, from the bus I glimpsed a huge white statue of Notre Dame, not far from wherever it was he and his company landed. Bits and pieces came together: those beads, his perseverance – the random marvels that he’d lived through the war, become a dad. This reserved, funny yet stern, slight-of-stature and unassuming man who enjoyed nothing more than a good long walk and a bracing saltwater swim – things quietly Maritime – and believed, honestly, there was no finer place than Halifax.

  After he died I kept digging, digging to get to the bottom of what I still consider to be Dad’s mystique. That part of him … the part of anyone you can’t fully know, whether the person is blood or not: the mystery of what makes someone tick. Accepting the unknowable is part of letting go. But blood remains: a tree’s roots and branches, and the fact that acorns fall and hatch seedlings that grow near and far from the parent.

  My digging has brought me close to my Québécois cousins, in whose looks – and in mine – my father’s are uncannily alive. And my digging has taken me back to France, most recently to the old walled city of Poitiers, which one side of Dad’s forefathers left to pursue the fur trade in New France. It’s not far from La Rochelle, the port from which the other side, his mother’s ancestors, sailed in 1649. A place, God willing, maybe I’ll visit someday.

  But in Poitiers’ eleventh-century church I lit a candle for Dad and for all of “our own” who’d married, buried, and baptized loved ones there. “Loved ones” a term that Dad found cringe-worthy, the way it gets thrown around – too marshmallowy-glib to convey the forbearance and forgiveness behind it: the endurance love requires.

  A toughness of fibre, character – whatever you call what threads through bloodlines, whether real or imagined – is memory’s sinewy part. A family tree jotted in my great-aunt’s hand – Dad’s mother’s sister’s – testifies to an airy link with Charlemagne (oh, the mists of time, the vagaries of history) dragging us back through the Wars of Religion to the Crusades. The attackers and the attacked. Mountains of dust: the once-loved, long-buried dead.

  What “stands,” as fact fades into the gauziest fictions, is the present, its kernels of evidence that something lasts. A name, a token of something carved out? On his mother’s side, Dad’s roots reach back to a cabinetmaker, under Cardinal Richelieu a defender of the faith who, after settling across the river from Quebec City, acquired the name Deschênes. It honours the oaks that abounded on his land.

  Dad never mentioned this. Maybe he didn’t know. But I think he did.

  Why else would he have planted his tree?

  An Excerpt From Lost River, A Memoir

  Harry Thurston

  In those days, a half-century ago, tradesmen worked six days a week. On Saturdays, however, my father only worked until noon, and there were no baseball practices or Little League games on the weekends. I waited anxiously for noon hour and the sound of my father’s pickup truck pulling into the backyard. There is another lasting image, a memory-movie of him coming around the corner from Brunswick Street on foot, in his faded dungaree jacket with its sturdy metal buttons and large hip pockets – a workman’s jacket, well faded and worn, which I would later borrow as a statement of my counterculture ideals.

  I can see him now.

  He was wearing his black-striped train conductor’s cap; I’m not sure why he preferred it to a standard ball cap, perhaps because it was looser fitting and therefore more comfortable. It became a signature of his working garb as well as of his personal style, and it always carried on the bill a patina of sawdust, evidence of his craft.

  I awaited his arrival impatiently, knowing that we were going fishing. We ate our main meal at noon to fuel my father’s workday and my mother would have dinner already prepared. She would also have made sandwiches and large molasses cookies and prepared a thermos of coffee and milk to take with us. My father changed out of his work clothes while I packed our fishing gear and lunch into the truck – and we were gone for the rest of the day. My mother would not expect to see us until after dark.

  * * *

  Where we were to go was usually arrived at by consensus. My father listed place names rather than river names – “Deerfield, Pleasant Valley … Forest Glen?” – from which I would choose, usually opting for Pleasant Valley, our favourite fishing spot.

  There was indeed a valley, albeit a modest one in a gently rolling landscape of whaleback drumlins, which had been dumped there during the glacier’s grudging retreat. We caught flashing glimpses of the river as it meandered among the low hills. Then, at a white country church, we turned right and descended a steep hill, crossed a wooden bridge, and we were there. Dad pulled the truck into a layby and we gathered our gear. Again, with a frugal exchange of words, we decided where we were to fish. I usually went upriver from the bridge, and Dad, downriver. It seems odd to me now, though it did not then, that we rarely fished together. There was something in our mutually reticent natures that preferred solitary outings. What we shared was the same desire for, and pleasure from, being alone on the river – any river – and this was an unspoken bond between us.

  We went our separate ways, knowing that we would meet later to share our successes or disappointment. I walked upriver though a meadow to find the few small, swift runs that offered a chance at a fish, while Dad worked his way downriver. I often returned to the bridge to find Dad nowhere in sight. I then covered the same water, letting my line drift close to the bank or swing out under the shade of the trees that leaned so far over the water as to almost form a bridge. Eventually I would meet Dad returning. I watched him closely, trying to read his body language.

  I can see him now, his rolling walk and self-conscious smile telegraphing his good luck – a catch of trout strung on a forked alder cut for the purpose.

  If there was still daylight left to explore other waters, he would ask, “Where to next?”, for it went without saying that we intended to stretch out the day until darkness drove us home. It was during one of these times that I asked about a river I remembered visiting when very young, a beautiful river with waters blue-black as anthracite and trout dark as the star-flecked night sky – the Lost River.

  I described it as best I could, remembering that there had been a dam and that the trees leaned out over the water, but beyond this I could offer few details, too few for Dad to compass where I was talking about. He would shake his head and then we would drive away through the back roads of the county, stopping to fish along the way, in a quixotic search for this elusive water.

  It was during these off-highway excursions that Dad told the stories that became set pieces in any fishing trip. If we continued in a southeasterly direction, toward the Tusket River system, he told the story of Uncle Percy, who had once lived on the Tusket’s headwaters.

  “He was a cooper. Do you know what that is?”

  “No.”

  “He made barrels.”

  I only knew Uncle Percy as a stout kindly man in a baggy suit, who had a big pockmarked nose like the famed singer-comedian Jimmy Durante, an easy sense of humour, and a generous nature. He and his wife Sadie came once a year from Boston to visit with my father’s mother, Sadie’s sister. Like many Nova Scotians, they had gone to the “Boston States” and made a success of themselves, and now had enough money to make the mandatory trip home in the summers.

  Sadie, too, had a remarkable nose that took a dangerous detour halfway down its bridge. This unfortunate turn gave the impression that she was of a suspicious nature, always sniffing out trouble, which was true when it came to Percy’s habits. Percy smelled strongly of aftershave, which Sadie knew served as his cover for the drinks that he surreptitiously consumed in the tiny workshed in my grandparents’ backyard. At breakfast, he always ate pickles, crunching t
hem with the unrestrained zeal of a horse chomping carrots.

  “Percy was a hard worker,” said my father, who was obviously fond of the old man, as was I.

  When he had finished making a supply of barrels, he would load them into his Model T truck and make the trip to Yarmouth, where he sold them to various dry goods and fish merchants. Dad always chuckled to himself at this point in the story.

  “Then he would go on a toot. It might have taken him a month to make all of those barrels. After a few days, when most of the money was gone, he’d come home and sleep it off.”

  But here was the point in the story that made it worth telling and hearing again and again. When Percy next went to the barn to fire up the Model T truck, it wouldn’t start. Contrite and bewildered, he looked under the hood only to find that there was no engine.

  “Each time he came home from one of these benders, he would take the engine out. There were only four bolts holding the engine in, you know, in one of those old Model Ts.”

  It seems that Percy was paranoid about somebody stealing his truck. He would block-and-tackle the engine and hang it from the barn rafters. When he looked up, it swung vertiginously, like a mechanical side of beef.

  “He did this dead drunk.”

  My father’s chuckle punctuated the punchline of this man’s story and frequently brought on a fit of coughing from his TB-weakened, smoke-filled lungs. Then a silence followed, broken by the rumble of the truck tires over the pot-holed dirt roads that we travelled in search of Lost River.

  If from Pleasant Valley we proceeded in a northwesterly direction, toward the Carleton River system, the second largest waterway in the county (which, like the Tusket, feeds and drains hundreds of lakes), it would occasion two other stock stories. Each seemed intended to impart a moral about life and fishing, which, to fishers, are one and the same.

  The Carleton River passed from one lake to another, at once filling and emptying them. One of these river runs was at a place called Hick’s Dam, though, mysteriously, there was no longer any sign of a dam at the site – perhaps, I thought, there had been a sawmill there at one time. We rarely stopped to fish, but we hardly ever passed by without Dad recalling an encounter there as a young man. He had hooked and lost several trout when an older man, having seen enough, decided that it was time to intervene.

  “‘You have to be patient, young man, let the fish swallow the hook,’ he said.”

  Patience and humility seemed to be the lessons imparted by this pithy parable. What was poignant for me was that in the story my father, then in his fifties and already old in my mind, was transformed into a young man, one in need of and open to life’s lessons – as I should be. It was also clear that my father was telling a story on himself, that there was a time when he had yet to acquire the qualities that would make him a better fisherman, and a better man – as I hoped to become.

  We often drove to the far eastern end of the county, fishing as we went until it was time to turn toward home. Late in the day, the westering sun streamed in through the truck windshield, making me drowsy, a feeling abetted by the strong smell of tobacco and wisps of smoke from my father’s ever-lit cigarettes.

  Always when we passed a small house on a hill, deep in the county, my father would say, “That’s where your great-grandmother Lahliah Corning lived.”

  She worked in town as a domestic and every Saturday, after serving lunch, she would walk the twenty miles home, arriving at dark only to turn again, after Sunday dinner, and walk back to town.

  “She was just a small woman, no bigger than your mother.” The lesson seemed to be, do not forget where you came from.

  If my father’s oft-repeated stories seemed intended to remind me of my origins, they did not jog my memory of the source of that perfect river despite our determined rambles around the countryside.

  I can see him now, one hand on the wheel of the pickup, a cigarette ever-smoking at his lips, which are curved into a slight smile.

  From Lahliah’s place, it would take a half-hour to drive home, during which I would often doze off from the day’s surfeit of sun, fresh air, and smoke.

  * * *

  This was the pattern of our Saturdays throughout my early teens, beginning in mid-April, when fishing season opened, and continuing until early June when the river levels dropped and the water warmed and trout sought deeper, cooler water in the lakes where we did not fish. But in midsummer, if it rained and rising waters promised to stir the trout from their torpor, my father and I would pack up and go.

  And during those years, spring and summer, we continued our hapless search for the Lost River. My father wracked his brain trying to remember where such a river might be and we began to cover all of the old haunts where he had once fished and where he might have taken the family on a Sunday long ago. We fished at Deerfield, where the water dumped out of a lake into a fast run under a wooden bridge, then slowed into a deep dark pool at a corner where twisted old hardwood trees shaded it. In the fast water where Dad fished, there might be trout and, memorably, he once caught two large browns in the same day, while below, in the slow waters where I fished, there only seemed to be horn pout, black, square-headed fish which sported two sharp spines behind the eyes and a wide, downturned mouth – a prehistoric, stubborn-looking creature. They fought furiously and often swallowed the hook deeply, so that I had to be very careful not to stab myself when trying to free them.

  If we fished in waters that had no name, we felt obliged to give them one of our own. We were like Emerson’s poet: “the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes for their appearance, sometimes after their essence …”

  One such place we dubbed Mosquito Brook, for its plague of biting insects. The water was not visible from the road and I am not certain how my father first discovered the faint path that led through the woods to this meadow of sedges, divided by a tea-coloured, tannin-rich stream. (Perhaps he had made the path himself, for we never met anyone else at that place.) Mosquito Brook was bordered by dead tree trunks, which, looking back, makes me think it had been dammed, either by humans or beavers. Often we fished there late in the day, when we had exhausted the more traditional and welcoming fishing spots, and Dad would ask, “Where to, home or Mosquito Brook?” and I would say, “Mosquito Brook,” even though I knew the mosquitoes would be at their fiercest at dusk. But it was better than giving in before the day was done, and usually there were active trout dimpling the still waters as the evening hatch came off.

  Late in the season, we might return to the Annis River where we had not been since the ki’ak were running. The fishing stand was deserted now, though still flecked with the scales of these river herring whose funky smell lingered faintly in the air. The waters below the stand were now low enough to wade and we might catch a few trout in the swift waters created by the stone weirs the ki’ak fishers had built to steer the fish into their nets. Or occasionally, where the waters slowed, a large eel, which invariably incited a string of curses from my father, who harboured a primal fear of snakes. But when he had cut off the head of the eel to more easily extract the hook from its writhing, snake-like body, we would pack this strange fish home, chop it into bite-size, vertebral segments and fry it – the pieces, even in the pan, seeming to retain the nervous impulses of the living animal. They tasted like scallops, rich, though earthier.

  We stopped at other less frequented places along the Tusket and Carleton river systems, which had their own rewards of an occasional trout or fishless hours well spent and of fond stories repeated in-between, but none conformed to my innocent image of Lost River, much to my father’s growing frustration.

  * * *

  Most often, we began our day at Pleasant Valley. It was on one of these Saturdays, when I was twelve or thirteen or fourteen – I cannot remember which, it was so long ago – that I had a revelation.

  I took my usual route, going upriver. To do so I had to skirt an obstruction. In my haste to get fishing I had always ignored this structure, but
on this day I stopped to examine it. Overgrown with rank weeds, small trees were also rooted in what I now saw was crumbling concrete. Water spilled through a breach in its centre and pooled below. I realized for the first time, or at least I articulated it to myself for the first time, what this structure actually was – it was a derelict dam. This explained why the area above it was a wide meadow, where rivulets of water – streamlets – meandered and then coalesced, seemingly haphazardly. This open ground had once been a headpond and the river, like a lost child, was now in search of its old home.

  I climbed on to the top of the old dam, balancing carefully as I stepped over the vegetation, making my way to the opening where the water sluiced through. I looked downriver. May trees with their unblemished greenery leaned out over the black-as-coal water.

  I had found Lost River.

  * * *

  I never told my father, a regret I carry to this day. Still a boy at the time, I was embarrassed by my naïvité and perhaps a little afraid of his reaction after leading him on a wild goose chase, summer after summer. I realize now that he likely would have said, “Well, I’ll be damned,” and laughed off the whole affair. It would have become another story from our fishing days about the folly of forgetfulness, like Uncle Percy and the Model T, that as men we might have shared and laughed about, had he lived.

  I never mentioned Lost River again, hoping, I suppose, the quixotic quest would be forgotten, and it wasn’t long after, as I entered my mid-teens, that we abandoned our Saturday fishing sessions. By then I was working on weekends as a drugstore delivery boy and busy with school and matters of the juvenile heart. Still later when I was home from university, proudly independent now, or so I thought, I drove myself to the old fishing places and to new ones that I found for myself.

  I drove him, too, when the diagnosis came, choosing to take the road through the backcountry that went by our fishing haunts with their benignly descriptive names – Deerfield, Pleasant Valley, Forest Glen, and Richfield – en route to the sanitarium.