The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  It was a quiet drive, the pall of what we feared weighing heavily upon each of us. As we drove away from the town and the sea and into the interior of the county, the vegetation changed, at first gradually, then abruptly, from wind-stunted spruce to the lush leafiness of hardwood, as if one had been suddenly transported a great distance to a more southerly latitude.

  It was spring, fishing season, and the trees were again gathering light, cells dividing, pushing out new growth hourly.

  Dad broke the silence, leaping into a territory that I had not before visited with him. “There’s no green like the green of beeches,” he said.

  A line of poetry spoken with his usual economy but unforseen lyricism.

  Later as we left the bay and entered the valley – a true valley with mountains deserving of the name on either side, north and south – we drove past the white, wood frame house of the novelist who had made this place known throughout the country.

  “He has made something that will last,” he said.

  “But you have built houses,” I protested.

  “It’s not the same,” he replied, implying that a house of words had more staying power than mere wood.

  Of course, we engaged in some small talk during the three-hour drive to the institution where the doctors would give him the news that the lung cancer was terminal, but I do not remember any of it, except these passages. They had a sharpness and frankness that perhaps only come with finality.

  “If you knew what the future would bring, you wouldn’t want to live another day,” he used to say. It was the stoic wisdom of a man who had had his share of tragedy, an unhappy first marriage that had ended with the death of both wife and first child in childbirth. The death of a beloved younger brother in his own childhood for which he had been unfairly made to feel in some way responsible. There was always a reticence and reserve to him, which, I now think, were armour covering those old wounds.

  Of course he did want to live. “I don’t want to die,” he said to people in his last months, not in a pleading way but as a simple statement of fact.

  He died in midsummer when the waters in the rivers were low and the trout drowsy in their deep and lightless holes.

  * * *

  It is more than four decades since I set out from the town to go fishing in the old places where my father and I went when I was a boy. It is something that I have for too long been promising myself. It is May, fishing season, and the leaves are bursting with pent-up energy, a kind of green fire. Already the chokecherry and shadbush have shed their fragile petals, but the hawthorn is in bloom and the lilac bushes that everywhere mark abandoned farmsteads are beginning to unfurl their cloyingly perfumed blossoms shaped like pagodas.

  It seems to take no time to leave the confines of the town and its connecting communities and to enter the country proper. I recognize this contraction of space for what it is, a trick of time and memory. What has not changed, however, is the quickening sense of quietude and solitude as I approach the old fishing haunts.

  There comes a time when all that can be done is to hold memory, or to refresh it when it begins to fade by marking the places, stories, and emotions that were shared.

  It is time now to revisit Lost River. As I drive into Yarmouth County, I do so through the stands of beeches that Dad had so beautifully described, on that fateful trip four decades before. They are gnarled by blight, as are all the beeches in this part of the country, but still vital, erecting a wall of greenery beside the road.

  “There’s no green like the green of beeches,” I hear my father say again, as a kind of approbation – intended or casual – of my chosen vocation of poetry, though he did not live long enough to see me put it into practice.

  When I come to the white country church, I turn onto the dirt road toward Lost River, cross the bridge, and park.

  It is a new bridge that I cross, perhaps thirty metres upriver from the old one, whose concrete abutments are partially overgrown, showing faintly through the unfurling spring foliage. Upriver, I am curious to see what if anything of the old dam remains. I can see where it had been, where the river widens into a still flat section, and, to the side, what might be slabs of concrete, which are now covered with lichen and tipped at an angle as if tectonically. But if you did not know there had once been a dam there, at this distance, you would never guess it.

  I decide to fish downstream, the direction my father would go. I make my way down the steep embankment below the bridge and wade into Lost River. The water is surprisingly shallow, a fact hidden by its blackness and obscured until now by faulty memory. And the river is narrow – a river in name only – as I can easily flick my fly across its meagre breadth.

  Below the old bridge site, as I remember, the trees lean dramatically out over the water. They are not birches but ancient red maples whose trunks bend over the river like long-necked creatures trying to take a drink. If I was still a boy I would want to climb onto them, for they make a natural bridge from one bank to another.

  No trout rise to my offerings as I carefully cover all those riffles that might, or should, harbour fish, which only adds to the nagging sense of loss and absence I am already feeling. Suddenly, I hear gulls crying, in that always hungry voice that is theirs alone, and looking up I see a small flock suspended over the river. Returning my gaze to the water, it is only then that I see the ki’ak shooting upriver, their silver bodies flashing through the darkness. Now I can also smell them, that sexual, animal odour insinuating itself through the vegetable smell of new green growth. I never remember ki’ak being here, in Lost River, and it seems odd as I am so far from the sea.

  Or am I?

  * * *

  We are not always in the place where we think we are, and, at this moment, I am lost – in memory and in reality – as if I had stepped into the River Lethe, the waters of forgetfulness.

  I am about to make a discovery almost as revelatory as the one I made atop the dam on that long-ago Saturday. The Lost River is the Annis River – so the sign says at the bridge. For the first time, in my mind, the Lost River has a name other than the one I have given it, a name, I learn later, that in Gaelic by way of Greek means “holy.”

  Naming it has not changed its nature, however. A river has a mind of its own. As it always has done, it is making its way faithfully to the sea through a series of lakes and runs, widening and pooling, turning over in season, then narrowing again and running swiftly with purpose, working the way thought and memory does. Near its mouth, a half-century ago my father and I stood in the early spring dusk, waiting for the olive-skinned fishers to dip a shad from the mass of ki’ak running the river, as they urgently sought the still waters of their birth. Where I am now standing, my father and I dropped our lines into these dark waters on Saturday afternoons, calling the river by the name of the place it ran through, Pleasant Valley, never by its given name – the Annis River.

  * * *

  It remains a mystery why my father and I did not quickly recognize the clues that would have solved the identity of Lost River, with its derelict dam and dramatic trees that leaned out over its coal-black waters. Perhaps it was simply too obvious, too near. Or truer still, perhaps there is a part in all of us that conspires to maintain mystery in our lives, and it was this need that gifted my father and me the time together to explore the earthy and watery pathways on those long-ago Saturdays until darkness drove us home.

  Lost River remains lost, and always will be. It belongs to that boy of dreamy disposition, who, in his reverie, created a river almost perfect in every way – its proportion, its colour, and even its productivity in the form of a few fat pan trout strung on a forked alder. He could not find it because no reality could match the alchemy of what memory and imagination had brought together. A watery place populated by the people whom he loved and who loved him – and home to brightly speckled fish.

  I look downriver.

  I see him now, his rolling walk along the bank where the red maples lean far out over the
water. From one of his brown arms, thick as Popeye’s, projects a split cane rod. Hung below the other is a catch of star-flecked trout strung on a forked alder cut for the purpose. He looks up, quizzically, from under his train conductor’s hat, as if he sees me standing on the bridge. Or it seems to be me, though I have grown surprisingly old since we went our separate ways, me upstream and him downstream. There is a cigarette forever-smoking on his lips and a selfconscious smile telegraphing his good luck.

  Real Men Drive Stick

  Lorri Neilsen Glenn

  What the –?

  The windows of the Studebaker are closed, but dust seeps in anyway. All I see are pines and billowing clouds. My father’s back is a bull’s-eye of sweat and he is cursing the road crew: What the hell do they think they’re doing? Jesus Christ.

  Tsuh! Sharp intake. My mother, glaring. You’re too close, Elvin. This is the wrong way. She sucks in her breath every few minutes when he’s driving, as if she is being stabbed in slow motion. I wish she’d put her blouse on.

  And what other goddamned way would you suggest? There is only one highway to Edmonton.

  You think I don’t know that? You’re driving into the construction. And we need to stop. The kids are hungry.

  My father doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even look at my mother, whose flowered blouse is tucked under the visor as a shield against the sun’s rays and who is now opening the cardboard box that holds egg sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. I am hoping she packed the store-bought marshmallow puffs with the chocolate tops, even though they are expensive; I’m hoping she didn’t bring sultanas. I’m also hoping the highway crew doesn’t see her half-naked.

  Then, out of the dust clouds ahead: a yellow road grader. Its wide, insistent blade.

  Well, isn’t this fun, she says. Carry on, Mr. Know-it-all. I’m feeding them. She opens a Mason jar filled with celery sticks and pickles.

  This bastard’s pushing me into the ditch. Watch out! my father yells, and he yanks the wheel to the right.

  My mother’s hands fly up; the jar’s contents scatter. I remember her scream, the smothering dust fog, the metal of the blade as high as the hood of the car. Something – a pickle? – ricocheting off the dashboard. My little sister Punky, who loved to curl on the floor hump behind the front seat, jerks to attention, rolls with the car, falls into my brother’s legs, ripping his brand-new comic book in the process.

  I think that’s how it happened. All I know is the car tips sideways, heading for the ditch. We three are a tangle of legs and arms against the back door, the ripped and crumpled comic between us. Why do I remember my brother’s comic – because they were precious to him?

  All I know is the world is crooked: I close my eyes and hear gravel spray against the windows.

  Several years later, and about 450 miles further east, in Saskatoon, I take the car keys from my parents. This time the car is an old salmon-coloured ’57 Pontiac. I had stalled that car in high school, the day after I passed driver training, flooding it driving through puddles on 8th Street until it stopped in the middle of the intersection and blocked traffic. By the time my father drove up in the neighbour’s car, white-lipped and silent, my friends and I had coaxed the ignition into life. When I got back to the house, my father grabbed the keys, picked me up, and threw me across the table into the corner.

  Don’t ever embarrass me like that again.

  By the next summer, I am living with a roommate near the university. Brian, who is in his early teens, calls around midnight. You have to come over, he says.

  Now? You should be in bed.

  They won’t stop.

  I don’t remember how I get across the city – perhaps a lift from my roommate. It is a clear night. Brevoort Park looks desolate – the poor struggling sapling on the front lawn; the boxy four-bedroom one of the bland, cutrate developer constructions on the block. My father has taken every promotion he can at the CNR to buy this ’60s marker of success. My mother has packed and moved our belongings across the Prairies at least six times since those years in northern Alberta. Now she has a fourth child to add to the mix.

  From the street, I can hear shouting. The kitchen light is on. In the neighbours’ window, a television flickers light, dark, light.

  When I open the back door, Brian’s wide brown eyes and horn-rimmed glasses are right there at the top of the basement stairs. Around the corner in the kitchen, my mother is screeching as though she’s speaking in tongues. Usually we hear shouting, hours of eerie silence, several bouts of cupboard-door slamming and pots landing heavy on the stove or cutlery tossed like coins on the arborite. Usually it passes. But this incoherent screaming is new.

  From the back landing, I hear a chair turn over, glass breaking. The low growl of my father’s voice; then, abrupt silence.

  I peek into the kitchen to see the table, overfilled ashtrays, a few bottles. My mother at the sink, a carving knife in her hand.

  I’m going to kill one of us.

  Gracie. My father’s voice is firm. Put that down.

  I whisper to Brian to run upstairs, get Punk and Colin out of bed, bring their blankets, and go out the front door by the driveway. My parents seem not to notice as I reach around by the fridge to take the keys to the Pontiac, rummage in the hallway closet for jackets.

  Outside, Brian has opened the garage door. Colin looks dazed. He climbs in the back seat of the Pontiac with Punk, his pillow in his arms. I shift the car into reverse, Brian pulls down the garage door, hops in the passenger seat.

  We can listen to any station we want now, he says. Even now, I think of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” when I remember that night, but I don’t know why – the dates don’t add up.

  We sure can, I say. For as many hours as it takes. We might even go to the Dog n Suds, if they’re open. Did you bring any of your allowance?

  I turn at the end of the crescent, shift into third, and head toward the neon lights of 8th Street.

  My father loved cars – the old Studebaker, a brand-new green Mercury he bought when I was ten or so. I remember Saturdays outside 1131 Main Street in Saskatoon; he’d wash down the whitewalls on the street, give the grille and bumpers a good going over with a chamois, while I poked 24-D into the lawn with a wand-like dispenser, then gathered up all the dead dandelions to pile them up in the alley behind the garden. The sickly sweet smell of the herbicide; the tangy lemon of the car wax; the heat of early summer sun.

  To pass driver training, my friends and I had to drive a standard and parallel park on a hill. When I was fifteen, my father took me south of the city to practise the basics of steering and gear-shifting on flat roads, but took me up to Saskatoon’s north side – what I called the Avenue Alphabet – to find a decent hill. Parallel parking was easy, but Dad cursed and muttered as I wrestled with shift and clutch as other cars sped by close enough to whack off the side mirror. I was rattled, in part because I knew how important it was to him that I master this. Perhaps my mother was right – he wished I’d been born male. And I give him credit: not once in my childhood did he disapprove of my instincts to climb trees or sheds, get mud-filthy, or whittle with a knife. When I asked for a cap gun and a holster at six, he didn’t bat an eye. When I wanted to drive – and who didn’t, on the Prairies? How else do you escape? – he seemed pleased that his daughter might do him proud, after all: drive stick like the best of them, and finish high school early.

  Now, decades later, I still prefer driving a standard. When asked, I use all the usual rationalizations: I feel closer to the road, more in control, more driver than driven, which helps in Nova Scotia, where coastal roads can be a loopy string of switchbacks and hairpin turns. Although I learned to drive out west, I’ve always thought an automatic better suited the landscape, especially in southern Saskatchewan. Point the car, hit the gas.

  Of all his cars, I think the salmon-coloured Pontiac was Dad’s favourite, but after I’d left home at seventeen, he had dalliances with a late ’60s Dodge with a push-button transmission and
perhaps a Buick or two. His Chrysler 300 with a 383-cubic-inch engine pulled a trailer across Canada to Expo 67. Even now, at my advanced age, I think of those cars as gas-guzzling old men cars. By the time I hit my twenties, it was clear my father and I had different ideas about status and power. Dad wanted new and big, anything that seemed like an upgrade; I adopted my grandmother’s phrase – use it up, wear it out, and make it do or do without.

  My father’s longest relationship with a vehicle – an ’80s Chrysler – lasted fifteen years, all through the protracted divorce proceedings with my mother. It was low-riding and wide, an insipid taupe I’m sure the showroom marketed as gold. In the early ’90s, after he’d disappeared for a decade with his girlfriend, my sister tracked down his whereabouts and I called him from my in-laws’ in Winnipeg. He had yet to see his three-year-old grandchild. Did he want to meet for coffee?

  How did you find me? I duck his question. I’ll pick you up in an hour, he whispers. We can go to a Tim’s. He is furtive: the call lasts only a few seconds.

  Jesse and I wait on the steps; a knot forms in my stomach when I see the Chrysler drive up. (Later, over coffee and a doughnut, he will say my mother’s demand for spousal support is the reason he doesn’t have a newer car.) Jesse, wearing his red fur-trimmed parka, bounces down the icy sidewalk. Grandpa! My father emerges from the car, looks directly over Jesse to me.

  Well, you got fat, I see.

  As much as he loved cars, travel flummoxed my father. Trips we took in the early years – Edson to Calgary, for example, or Saskatoon to The Pas – always ended up as wrong turns and bad decisions; he’d incur my mother’s wrath, then drive in cold silence until we pulled up to our destination. Our trip to Montreal in the late ’60s was a comic sketch that involved map-reading, map-tossing and ripping, long stops at the bottom of exit ramps, and – what we feared most – the need to turn the trailer around, a laborious effort that involved turning the steering wheel in the opposite direction, reading large mirrors, following my mother’s abrupt and extravagant hand motions, and her shrieks.