Clifford Read online

  Now Mom:

  Mom’s family comes from a totally different direction from Dad’s: Indians, Cree Indians, to be precise, Nihiyithaw. They’d been living at Big Trout Lake in 1928, when all that country was turned into Prince Albert National Park. Mom said, “They came and told us, ‘This is a park now, you have to leave,’ and we did. Left everything behind, our houses, our gardens, everything.”

  They moved to the north end of Montreal Lake, near where the adhesion to Treaty 6 was negotiated and signed in 1889.

  Where Montreal Lake ends and Montreal River begins, there’s a bit of high ground. A natural place for someone in a canoe to stop and stay a while, a place that Indians knew. That’s where Mom’s family moved in the early 1930s. She’d have been about twelve.

  Then they built the highway, and where the highway — the new means of transportation — intersected the river — the old system of transportation — people just naturally came and built and stayed. At first they called the new community Montreal Lake North Saskatchewan to differentiate it from Montreal Lake South Saskatchewan, the reservation at the other end of the lake. Then the postmaster-slash-schoolteacher shortened the name by taking the first two letters of each of the words — Montreal Lake North Saskatchewan — and renamed the town Molanosa.

  It’s easy to find on a map. It’s at the exact geographical centre of the province.

  This was where my parents made their life, raised nine children of their own — Jean, Jimmy, Dorothy, Clarence, Richard, Clifford, me, Stanley, Donny — and two grandchildren who came to live with us: Sherry-Ann, who was a little younger than me, and Garry, who was younger than Stanley.

  My father integrated into the Aboriginal community, became a trapper and a fisherman, and life was good. Everything we needed came from the land: meat, fish, and put a few seeds into the sandy ground and you could grow vegetables.

  That was Dad’s thing, his gardens. Three of them around the house and another larger one that he shared with my grandfather where the potatoes, carrots, turnips — the basics — were grown.

  These are my memories of my father, the garden and the pole fence where he liked to sit and absorb the sun; it helped his arthritis.

  I have an absolute clear memory of one of those defining moments that never goes away. I would’ve been days away from my third birthday.

  I stood in front of the house and watched her come walking up the road, carrying a bundle. I knew what was in the bundle. It was a stinky thing. Mom was coming home from the hospital, and I just stood there. I didn’t move. Both my older sisters went over to see what was in the bundle, but not me.

  Even my dad, he went to see what was in there, and all of them were happy to see it. Then they all went into the house together, laughing and talking, and I just stood there — mad. I wasn’t going to go in there and see no stinky thing.

  But Dad wasn’t in the house for long. He came back out. Never said anything. Just put his arm around my little shoulders and we went over to his garden, and both of us sat on the fence in the sunshine.

  And it was okay.

  I was okay.

  I understood, even though no words were spoken.

  This was Dad’s place, his garden. Here he grew those plump strawberries, and down in the back there were gooseberries and currants. The whole centre of the garden was a raspberry patch, and all across the front were his flowers.

  Why? Why would a man grow flowers?

  To attract the pollinators, of course, the bees and wasps and butterflies: practical.

  But they were also pretty, and fit in with the little Manitoba maples he’d imported and the Norway spruce that he had growing off to one side.

  This was Dad’s spot. The place where he liked to be, and it was more than sun and arthritis. This was his love.

  And he brought me here, to his special place, to show me that he loved me and everything was going to be okay. He didn’t have to use words. I understood. There was one person on the planet who loved me.

  That stinky thing — my younger brother Stanley, born a mere nine days before my own third birthday — well, that was okay too.

  There isn’t a lot left of the garden. The maples are still here. They haven’t grown much in thirty years, choked out by grass and weeds. The fence is gone. None of the plants that he cared for have survived: rhubarb and strawberries, even the horseradish patch has been overtaken. What was once abundance is now merely a half-acre square in the forest, and the forest is taking it back, reclaiming what was rightfully its in the first place. A man can come here, change it, make it into something else, make his living, but only the boreal has any permanence.

  Pencils

  There’s a memory: dim, not because the memory is poor, but because of the light. Kerosene lamps are not very bright. I am on the floor. All of the adults are above me and I have Dad’s Winnipeg Free Press, a weekly paper with a socialist bent, which comes in the mail. I have a stub of a pencil and I am copying the letters from the newspaper onto a brown paper grocery bag. It’s a game, it’s play. But it’s also an exercise designed by Dad, probably to keep me occupied.

  The stub of a pencil was from Dad. He always had a pencil for me whenever I asked for one, and I asked often. The problem was I never returned them. Years later and Clarence would tell me, fill in the blanks: “Dad used to go to the store and buy pencils and cut them up into little pieces.” Clarence wasn’t around much when I was a little boy playing in the sand, becoming aware, learning to stand up straight, to speak. He was eleven years older. School in Molanosa went as high as grade eight. So, by the age of fourteen, he was finished school and off to work in the logging camps. He came home often. When it was time to fish, both he and Jim came home to help Dad.

  I didn’t see my brother Jim very often either, or my sister Dorothy, or my sister Jean, or my brother Richard. They’d finished school and gone on, out into the world. Jean became a nurse. She went north to Uranium City, left her daughter Sherry-Ann for Mom to raise. Dorothy married an American who owned a fly-in fishing camp over at East Trout Lake, and left her son Garry with Mom as well. We saw her sometimes in the summer. But she wintered in North Dakota.

  Jimmy was married. He had a house in La Ronge. Richard lived with him and went to high school. I once overheard Dad say that Richard had better go to school, he’d never make a living at working.

  I stop at the memory. Dad was wrong. Too bad he never lived to see it. Richard is a worker, a miner, a driller. School didn’t hurt him. He never stopped having fun. Never took anything any more seriously than it deserved.

  That older group of siblings finished school, came out the other end, and went on. There’s a six-year gap between Clifford and me; then there was a younger brother, Stanley. There were Sherry-Ann and Garry and Donny. Donny was the baby. He got all of the attention. And nobody better hurt him. There were lots of older brothers to look out for him.

  Within this cosmos of siblings, of rivalries and affiliations, gravitational forces drew some home. They stayed for a while, then spun away with the momentum of their own adult lives. The younger ones orbited around Mom, and there were two planets, Clifford and I, that were caught in each other’s magnetic field and we orbited around Dad.

  The Life of Water

  It’s those two, Clifford and Dad, who fill most of the spaces, most of my little-boy memory. Between them they taught me to read, to count, to imagine.

  Clifford went to school and came home and taught me what he’d learned. Dad taught me the shape of letters.

  “See, like this.” And he draws the R shape, then the A and the Y. “See, R-A-Y spells Ray.”

  And I repeat, forcing my mouth to say the letters, “Awr, A, eye.”

  “Now you do it,” and he hands me the pencil to draw the shapes of the sounds that make my name.

  Dad taught me to count; to play cribbage. “Ace deuce trey four five six seve
n eight nine ten jack queen king.” And I repeated: “Ath duth twey fo fie tik teben eigh nie den dzak ween ning.”

  “See, a pair of deuces equals four and a pair of fours equals eight,” he said as he moved cards around on the table. He wasn’t just teaching me to count and to add. He was keeping me occupied so that Mom could get her work done. There were four children younger than me for her to look after. But there was more to it than that. It was also because Dad could understand me. When I told Mom that “I lod mu pendle” and repeated three times that “I lod mu pendle,” and she just stood there, shaking her head, Dad came over and told her, “He lost his pencil,” and gave me another stub from his shirt pocket, and I went away with it and a brown paper bag.

  “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair is six.”

  A pair of sevens, a pair of eights, and a nine makes a hand of twenty-four points. I go to Dad to make sure that Clifford isn’t cheating me. He assures me that my cards are, in fact, a twenty-four hand.

  So that’s how they did it to me, with play, with imagination; they taught me and groomed me; shaped, formed, prepared me; stood me up straight, put my feet underneath me, filled me with books and ideas; then one after the other they abandoned me here.

  * * *

  “Do you know you can read minds?” Clifford sits cross-legged in front of me. “Sure, it’s easy. Just close your eyes, make your mind go empty. I’m going to think of a word and you tell me what word you hear.”

  I close my eyes, don’t think of anything, and then say, “Rabbit.”

  “See, you can do it. That’s the word I was thinking about.”

  We practise again.

  “Rhubarb.”

  And again.

  “Meteor.”

  I like this game.

  “Willows.”

  “Wrong, you weren’t listening.”

  “I thought I wasn’t supposed to listen. I thought I was just letting my mind go empty.”

  “Listen with your mind, not your ears. If you listen with your ears and you’re making noise, you can’t hear anything. Same thing with listening with your mind; your mind has to be quiet.”

  I try again, but again the word that comes is willow.

  “You got it. Willow — not willows.”

  He’d done it to me, hadn’t he? But why? Why play such an elaborate hoax on a little boy?

  I look at the hoop in my hand, at the stub of a handle wired in place. He’d planned the whole thing, had a strategy. Of course, he needed a communication system, one that worked across vast distances, so — telepathy. That’s where it started, playing a game, little brother and practise and practise and practise, until he could call me from any distance.

  Maybe it started even earlier than that.

  “What you going to be when you grow up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should be an astronaut.”

  “Okay.” But I was only five years old. All I knew about space travel in 1962 was what I’d heard on the radio: rockets and the Russians and the Americans and a race.

  “I’m going to be a scientist.” He didn’t say, I want to be a scientist or I hope to be a scientist. Clifford was certain. He was going to be a scientist, as though there was no other possibility.

  He put space travel into my head, then developed communications.

  I run it all through my head again.

  First they taught me to read and write, then to count, to add.

  “Do it fast.”

  “Do it in your head.”

  “Faster.”

  “See, you can do it.”

  Clifford and Dad worked together; they must have.

  They put ideas in my eager little mind.

  “You should be an astronaut.”

  “You are the only real person on the planet.”

  * * *

  This is a waste of time. I’ve had these thoughts before, I’ve run through the entire scenario; piece by piece by piece, clicked all the connectors together…and still…

  I go through it again, not because I want to, but because I can’t stop.

  Okay, then:

  Read and write,

  count,

  philosophy…

  Clifford and I, standing outside, looking up at a clear blue sky that’s still tinged with the pale light from a sun that just set, and, without any prompting or questions from me, he explains: “You were a spirit, just a little dot of blue light travelling across the universe, and you met the Creator. The Creator is both spirit and physical at the same time, and you said, ‘I want to be like that.’ So you came down to Earth to experience being a spirit in a physical body.”

  There’s that space travel again.

  Ideas in a little boy’s head.

  Then there was all the preparation. He wasn’t just teaching me how to skip rope: one end tied to a tree, Clifford at the other end, and me in the middle, developing co-ordination as I learned to jump over the twirling cord.

  The lotus position:

  “Sit like this, see, cross your legs, put one foot on top of your thigh, put the other foot on top of the other thigh. See, it doesn’t hurt. Now put your hands on your knees. Close your eyes. Now you’re doing it like a real Hindu.”

  Then came the hoop:

  “Let’s play circus. I’m the ringmaster and you’re the lion. Now jump through the hoop.

  “Again.

  “And again.”

  Learning to skip rope first made jumping through a moving hoop easier. It was a set-up.

  “Now for the grand finale. As you jump through the hoop, go into the lotus position while you’re still in the air. Honest, you won’t get hurt. You’ll land on your bum here in the sand.”

  And I’d played along.

  Because that’s what I was doing: just playing with my older brother.

  Knights, Bicycles, and Aeroplanes

  Clifford showed me how the knights in the old days jousted.

  “See this?” It was a post he’d dug into the ground a little taller than my five-year-old self, with a board nailed to the top at right angles. One nail — because nails were precious and not to be wasted — and a bit of plywood on one end. The other end of the board — an eight-foot two-by-four that he didn’t trim off, either because he didn’t want to spend time sawing it or because he would get in trouble for wasting wood — was left jutting out on the other side of the post. “That piece of plywood is the shield. Now I’m going to come down the hill on that bicycle. That’s my horse. And this” — a pole about six feet long — “is my lance.

  “You watch.” He took me by the shoulders and stood me off to the side. “Now you’re going to see how it was done.”

  He came off that bit of hill on that bicycle that didn’t have any tires, just bare metal rims that rattled as he picked up speed. The hill, because the bicycle didn’t have any pedals and he needed the assistance of gravity. One end of his lance tucked up under his arm, the other end — “You have to hit the shield right dead centre. That’s the way they did it.” — out in front of the bicycle, which had a fair bit of hurry as he came past me.

  And he did it.

  I was the witness.

  The lance did hit the shield right dead centre. A solid hit.

  The shield spun away, pivoted on the single nail driven into the top of the post, and the other end of the board spun around, exactly like he planned it, exactly like he told me it was going to work. Except, I don’t think he expected the long end of the two-by-four to come around so quickly and catch him on the back of the head.

  * * *

  He’d always wanted to fly.

  “Aeroplanes are easy, I can make one out of wire and plastic.”

  And he did. It even had a cockpit.

  “See, I designed this. It’s exactly the right dimensi
ons to carry you. I’ve calculated the weight and the lift. Now you sit in here and I’ll pull you off the roof with this rope.” He probably believed it. I don’t think for a second that he would have deliberately done anything to hurt me. I was the little brother — the one to be taught.

  But there was no way I was going to sit in that contraption of plastic stretched over a frame of stiff wire.

  Wonder where he got the wire? The plastic would have been easy: the same poly that covered the windows in winter to keep out the draft. But the wire — coat hangers, maybe. Maybe he’d raided the closet and taken all the wire hangers.

  There remains a bit of what was once red roofing paper on the sagging roof of the log cabin part of the old house. The structure is in an L shape. The log house, the longer section, that was where my brothers and I had slept; the other part of the house, the tarpaper part, is a house my father bought in Timber Bay for ten dollars, put it on skids, and dragged it with a team of horses thirty-five miles across Montreal Lake and attached it to the cabin. This newer part is divided into a kitchen at the front and my parents’ bedroom at the back.

  It isn’t that high. Well, not now, but when I was a kid, it would have seemed a lot higher. I can see it, why he thought he could fly a plane off that roof with its low pitch. It could have worked.

  “See this rock? It’s the exact same weight as you.” I don’t know how he knew that. He never weighed either the rock or me. “I’m going to put it in the plane and you’ll see. It will fly.”

  And he did. Put the large rock in the plane, pulled on the long rope as he ran across the yard.

  And the plane did fly.

  It came off the roof, lifted into the air, tilted, and made a large arc.

  For a half-second there, I had actually wished that I hadn’t been so chicken. I could’ve been up there — flying.

  Then the arc turned into a dive, and the plane crashed nose-first into the sand and became a crumpled mess of wire and plastic.