The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  Life on the porch really got complicated when the justice system and the lumbering business collided. When one of his men appeared before him in court and he needed more time to pay his fines, he might show up on our porch two or three times in the following week. He’d ask for an advance on wages to pay his fine one night and an advance for himself another night. Such was the world of finance on my father’s porch.

  Sometimes those arrested got to the porch before the case even came to court. They’d arrive as they were let out of jail to personally plead their case. More than one inebriant would throw his arms in the air proclaiming innocence. It was to no avail. They got nowhere with my father, who would never hear cases anywhere but the courtroom at the town hall, Saturday night at seven o’clock. He had his rules and he stuck to them even if they were confounding to a youthful observer.

  Women also showed up on our porch, sometimes with threadbare children in tow. There were wives whose husbands had wandered away or run off, leaving them penniless with children to feed and no money in the bank. A small-town mayor, a judge, and an employer in the 1950s saw it all. It was the last decade before a more substantial social safety net, when the poor in Canada were really poor. My father did a bit of counselling at times, reuniting feuding families and tracking down wayward spouses. The business on our porch was varied and never-ending.

  Supplicants came asking for winter wood but without the money to pay for it. “Down the road,” as they often put it, they would have a little money. Some kept their promises, some didn’t. Money was tight; a truckload of wood cost five dollars.

  As mayor my father was expected to fix everything broken in the town. An irate woman stood on our porch to complain the ditch in front of her house had overflowed and the water had gone into her basement. This was the town’s fault and what was he going to do about it? My father promised to fix it. A man arrived with a petition to get his son out of penitentiary. He was a hard man who made people cower. He had gathered signatures of the town’s most prominent citizens. My father refused to sign and the man left our porch in a fiery bluster of curses. Later I asked him why he would not sign the petition. He replied the son was a troublemaker and in the unlikely event a petition would help release him, what lesson would he have learned, except that Daddy could get him out of any scrape?

  My father seldom sat down while conducting business on the porch unless it was something that required his signature or something more complex than handing out money to his men, promising winter wood or a dry basement, trading stories, or listening to political observations. He liked to put one foot on the windowsill and talk and listen while looking onto our front yard.

  I never stayed when he was conducting business. That was an unspoken rule at our house. A certain degree of confidentiality was required.

  But I came to court with him a couple of times and sat quietly at the back. The town police or Mounties presented the charge and the accused pleaded innocent or guilty. Most of the fines were for illegal possession of liquor, which carried a fine of thirteen dollars and fifty cents. Almost everyone pleaded guilty. My father said that was because they were caught red-handed – even if they were hurling bottles out the window while driving sixty miles an hour with the Mounties in hot pursuit. Many asked for time to pay their fines. He gave them a week. I knew I would soon see them on our porch.

  It was only after I left home that I realized other families didn’t have a stream of people at their door every day. After living away for forty years, I’m back in Parrsboro these days and often drive by our house on King Street. It hasn’t been in our family for decades, but I still look at that porch and remember the cast of characters who had reason to go there. Upon reflection now, the porch more resembled a theatre stage than a sunny room. It may have been my grandmother’s furniture, but I always considered it my father’s porch. I still do.

  The Death Of A Father

  Lesley Choyce

  My father, George Choyce Jr., known to many as Sonny, passed away early in the morning of December 3, 2014. I had arrived home the afternoon before to find him holding his great-grandson, Cooper, who was just a few months old. My ninety-three-year-old dad looked happy and content and, although he was having some breathing problems if he exerted himself, he seemed to be more or less in good shape. And if a bit tired, he was most certainly in good spirits.

  I had been down this road several times before – flying in from Nova Scotia thinking this might be the last time I saw my father alive. That same drama had played out a number of times with my mom, Norma Willis Choyce, who had declined slowly but steadily over her final years from some form of dementia. During that time, my dad had watched over her and taken care of her and always, always, worried more about her than himself.

  She had died in late November of the previous year with her family by her side in the living room of their house. She had waited for me to arrive, I am sure, and she took her last breath only minutes after I had kissed her forehead.

  And so here I was a year later visiting my father and wondering if it was near the end. The two of us sat in the same living room reminiscing and occasionally watching TV. I was convinced that here was a man of ninety-three, fully alert and, although knocked down from his former physical self by a lingering cancer, who was most certainly living his life. He may have been waiting for his time to die but he intended to live, really live, up until that moment caught up with him.

  So it was a kind of funny scene that evening. He liked to watch RFD TV, which was a channel dedicated to farmers and farming issues. On my previous visit we had watched a half-hour show about how to deal with farming problems caused by a growing wild boar population in the South. It was produced by the Tennessee Department of Agriculture and, and had anyone stopped my dad and me on the street and asked us how to deal with their wild boar problem, we could have instructed them on how to build a pen made of chain-link fence, how to lure wild boar in at night, all the while watching from a hidden camera using infrared technology, and how to close the pen by remote control from the comfort of your farmhouse kitchen.

  Tonight the shows concerned how to get higher crop yield of corn and soybeans and why any farmer with half a brain should now be growing sorghum as a rotation crop. While Midwestern farmers spoke highly of the new breeds of corn, my dad was also thumbing through a carton of pay stubs from 1957. “Sixty-seven dollars a week before taxes,” he said, holding one up to show me. He had been working at Millside Farms in those days, servicing those old milk trucks – the ones where drivers drove standing up and delivered glass bottles of fresh milk to your doorstep to homes around South Jersey. I would have been only six in 1957 and we would have recently moved into the new house – the one he and my mother built, cinder block by cinder block, board by board. This was the house we were sitting in now. The one they would live most of their adult lives in, my mother and father, the house where they would both die – as was their desire.

  My father had had enough of hospitals and wasn’t going back to one no matter what. These days when anyone came into the house, he showed them the notice he had put on the fridge. “Do No Resuscitate,” it read ominously, but he always would smile when he pointed it out. Not that it was a joke, just that it was the way things should be.

  After a bit, we got talking, so we gave up on a crash course in sorghum fertilizers and I picked out an old photo album from nearby. This one I had not seen before. The year was 1942 and my father looked impossibly young. He had a “new” car – an old Plymouth, I think. In the photo, he leaned against the car and smiled at the camera – so young and cocky and, I suppose, preparing to go off to war. But this was one happy young dude.

  He pointed out people in the photos that I could not recognize and knew every name and detail about who they were. Page after page of smiling young men and women of the 1940s: brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, friends and his own parents. And along the way, there were photos of a young Norma Willis, a beautiful woman who would be his w
ife. It was a black and white world, but it was not short of glamour and optimism and it was a place where a young couple could start a family and build a home. We looked at some other photos from the early ’50s when they had started building the house. He reminded me that he had begun to dig the basement with a shovel, one shovelful at a time, sometimes with the help of a brother or two kind enough to assist with the task, until they discovered a bulldozer could do the whole job in about an hour in the soft South Jersey soil.

  He told me some stories that evening – some new, some familiar, all tinged with the happy inflection of a man who had lived a good life, a happy life. A man who had no regrets and was at peace with the world.

  Somewhere around 2:30 the next morning I woke to the sound of my brother Gordy’s voice in the living room where my father lay in his borrowed hospital bed. I got up to see if I could help and found Gordy had Dad sitting upright in a chair as he had requested. Margaret, Gordy’s wife, arrived as well. Within minutes, he said there was a pain in his chest. He said that he just wanted to be held. While Gordy gave our dad a small dose of prescribed morphine under his tongue, I held my father for a few short minutes until his body relaxed and he slumped forward in my arms.

  It’s a tough thing to watch a father die, but his sons were there with him. He was in his own home and he was most certainly looking forward to his reunion with his wife. In so many respects, a death doesn’t get much better than that.

  Some would have considered Sonny to be a fairly simple man. He was most certainly humble, modest and unpretentious. He had not finished high school because he needed to work in the farm fields to help feed the large family he grew up in. He had gone to war but never fired a shot. Instead, he drove military trucks without headlights down the dark narrow roads near Cambridge, England, and hauled airplane parts to Land’s End where a bomber had crash-landed. He returned home after the war, married, had two kids, and he worked. He was a truck mechanic, often going off to work before dawn to get a fleet of diesel trucks on the road. He did road calls and changed truck tires on the Jersey Turnpike in the middle of snowstorms. He worked long and he worked hard.

  Sonny was a farmer at heart and, in his teenage years, had done every dirty job imaginable on a farm including dowsing cabbages with insecticide – pure arsenic – all day long until he returned home at night covered head to toe in that white poison. After he built that legendary home, he always had a garden in front of the house in a triangular piece of land at the intersection of Church and Lenola roads there in Cinnaminson, New Jersey. He grew the best corn, peppers, green beans, lima beans, onions, eggplant, and squash any man could. And the tomatoes. He grew tomatoes the size of softballs that had a taste unequalled in the realm of world agriculture.

  When he retired, he worked his garden, he grew Christmas trees, he tore down old buildings for wood to build garages, and he collected scrap metal to haul to the junkyard for spare change. And all of this was his idea of a good time.

  But the sum total of the man was far more than the basic facts. The legacy of my father was his sense of giving. More than anyone I can think of he was a selfless man. He helped others, he did good, and he did not do so out of a sense of duty but because it was what he wanted to do. In his sixties, he helped look after some friends in their eighties. In his seventies, he helped look after other friends in their nineties. By the time he hit his mid-eighties, there just weren’t any folks much older around for him to help.

  He had grown up in poverty and yet he claimed he had not felt much deprived of anything. As a result, he rejoiced in his good fortune at having a home and a wife, a job, sometimes some chickens to raise for eggs, and a well-appointed garden.

  He showed compassion for others and, even though there were a lot of things about the more modern world he did not understand, I believe he had an appreciation of those who were different from him. He had an innate tolerance of his fellow men and women. In his own way, he lived large and he lived well.

  Gordy and I were supremely privileged to be raised by two such fine parents. More than ever, I can appreciate that I get to go about my daily life as an adult without any real emotional scarring or baggage from my youth. Sonny and Norma gave my brother and me a good start. Homemade meals. Homemade sandwiches – liverwurst (my favourite), ham and homegrown tomatoes, or meatloaf. Yep, even as recent as the year 2000, my mom was sending me on the plane back to Nova Scotia packing one and a half meatloaf sandwiches with homemade relish.

  When Gordy and I were kids, our meals had almost always included food grown by my father and preserved by my mother: stewed tomatoes (not my favourite), but also frozen corn, lima beans, potatoes grown by my grandfather, and homemade tomato juice including four kinds of vegetables and so thick you could float a quarter on it.

  It seemed odd that, as my mom was fading and after she was gone, my dad ate mostly prepared food coming from plastic containers or purchased by Gordy from McDonald’s or Wendy’s. But for him it was at that point a matter of keeping things simple. He seemed to approve of any dish that involved ground beef, but he was also a fan of a good breakfast – most especially a Spanish omelette on a Sunday morning at the Penn Queen Diner in Pennsauken.

  Of course, there is much, much more to his life than that and the details will come back to me in the weeks and months ahead in small images and fragments of memory.

  It’s safe to say my dad was always there for me. He accepted his son as a hitchhiking hippie and an overly opinionated young man, and a restless soul in his late twenties who believed he needed to leave the U.S. for a new life in Nova Scotia. He treated me fairly always and was never harsh to judge. I knew he was always my dad and my source of strength.

  Sonny loved people and he loved to talk. I doubt many would call him a philosopher but I would. He taught me patience and persistence and compassion and optimism. He taught me to be fair and to be understanding. He taught me not to expect too much from the world but to work hard and accept whatever small rewards the world may give back with humility and gratitude.

  It’s a bit of a cliché, but his passing is truly the end of an era. You won’t see another Sonny Choyce in this new century.

  Not long after he died, I was fixing a flat tire on a rental car by the side of the road in a small town in Italy. My wife, Linda, and I had pulled off to the side of that road near the wall of an imposing granite church. I discovered I didn’t have all the tools I needed, so I walked back to the cottage we had rented and brought back a knife to pry off the plastic wheel cap. On the way back to the car I picked up a brick. If there was one thing my dad had taught me, it was to always block one of the wheels of a car when you change a tire so the car wouldn’t roll. I guess I felt he was there with me in Italy changing that tire with a spindly jack on the sloping pavement. That brick kept the car steady as we removed the lugnuts and mounted the spare.

  And I guess that’s the final thing I have to say about him. He was steady. He was reliable. He kept us safe. He was dependable and always there – even in Italy or anywhere else – when you needed him.

  Zann And The Art Of Tennis

  Lenore Zann

  I started playing tennis recently. I didn’t mean to. I kind of stumbled into it, so to speak. It was during March Break for Nova Scotia’s schools, and I had decided to make a conscious effort to create a closer bond with my younger nephew, thirteen-year-old Lachlan.

  The older boy, Aidan, is sixteen, and we have managed to bond through music – he plays, I sing – and I feel a little tug of satisfaction knowing I gave him his first couple of instruments, which I’m sure helped him develop that form of creative expression. He’s a natural musician. As am I, and many of our ancestors, as we’ve recently come to discover.

  Tennis and music: they both connect me to my father, Paul Zann.

  The musical gene comes from both sides of our family. We have singers on my mother’s side, and several generations of band masters and brass horn players on Dad’s. My first instrument was trum
pet, Aidan plays bass and trombone, and Dad plays … nothing.

  Well, I do have fond memories of Dad teaching himself to play the guitar once in the ’70s. The guitar looked great cradled in his arms with his long hair, dark soulful eyes, ever-constant headband, and colourful dashiki – he really did look like a very early Cat Stevens … But I can’t really remember Dad actually mastering the guitar much beyond songs by Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, and Donovan, which usually require only three or four chords. So “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Father and Son,” and “Mellow Yellow” seemed to get a lot of play at our house. And Dad did compose a song once for my baby sister, Tamara, about all the animals on the wallpaper in her room. It seemed to help put her to sleep, which I was never sure was a good sign of Dad’s songwriting abilities.

  My father was first a teacher in Australia, then a university professor in Regina, Saskatchewan, and finally a teacher of teachers at the Nova Scotia Teachers College in Truro, Nova Scotia. A couple of years ago we learned that many of Dad’s forebears were artists, writers, poets, musicians, teachers, and political leaders. In fact, our genetic predisposition for political leadership, music, and storytelling supposedly dates back to the last of the Great Kings of Tara via Dad’s great-great-great-grandfather Michael McMahon of Limerick, Ireland, who immigrated to Australia in the 1800s and became the first mayor of North Sydney.

  The McMahon roots go back to the Thomond Mac-Mahons, who were part of the great Irish tribal grouping known as the Dál gCais, and claimed direct descent from Mahon O’Brien, grandson of Brian Ború, the very last High King of Tara.