Clifford Read online

  I remember those hands: large hands for a woman, strong from years of work, of stretching moosehides, bending trap springs, chopping wood. When Garry was fifteen and thinking he might be tough enough, he challenged Mom to a finger fight. They locked fingers of both hands, and a quick moment later he was on his knees with his fingers bent painfully backwards. He learned respect.

  There’s no avoiding it. My mind won’t be distracted. It wants to remember the beating, so I let it go there. But the memory is like the memory of the funeral. I am not in my body. I am standing aside, watching her — out in front of the house, the sun is high, slightly to the west, she’s wearing a long dress and her hair is in two black braids. I am watching her hold a little boy and flailing, over, and over, and over, until the boy doesn’t have any strength left to stand, and still she holds him up by the hair and whips down with the cable.

  I don’t remember the pain. I try to, but it won’t come back. All there is to the memory is the dislocated perspective, the view from the spirit whipped from its body.

  * * *

  The explanation came many years later. It wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t even an acknowledgement that it had occurred. It was simply a story, one told during a quiet, peaceful moment when there was only she and I together: “You used to cry all the time, for no reason. You’d just be sitting there and you’d start crying. My mother told me, ‘You have to beat that boy, make him stop crying or something bad is going to happen.’”

  That was it. She never said anything more about it, and I never asked. We both left it there. We both understood.

  Maybe something happened to her as she beat me.

  Maybe.

  It’s hard to know.

  Was she following her mother’s instructions? If she was, it was too late. My father had already died.

  I try to imagine a forty-something-year-old woman with six children left at home, five of those children under the age of eight, and no husband. She can’t leave her house or her brothers come and steal everything. The community is trying to take her trapline away from her. She’s hurt and alone and she has a little boy who won’t stop crying.

  I suspect that something happened to her, either while she was beating me or shortly after. I have no memory of how it ended, how she finally stopped.

  But there definitely was a change.

  There are moments in a life, cataclysmic moments that last only a moment or two or three or four that alter the course of that person’s journey. The beating didn’t change me. It changed Mom. It changed how she treated me.

  She never hit me again.

  I passed through that moment of metamorphosis and emerged on the other side of it in a totally new environment. In that moment I earned my freedom.

  Riches

  Another explanation: when I am an adult and again my mother and I are alone together, sharing a quiet moment.

  “Hey, Mom, why the hell did we ever move to La Ronge?”

  “Well, you remember that old house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There was a program, a government thing, they would help us to get new windows and doors. So I applied for it. I had to tell them how much money I made. That’s how they found out I was taking you kids out of school in the spring to go up the trapline. They said I couldn’t do that anymore; I had to move to La Ronge and go on welfare, so you could go to school every day.” She paused, looked down, then directly at me. “The social worker said if I didn’t, they’d take you kids away from me.”

  That’s where my hatred of social workers comes from. All of them, every damn social worker who ever walked and breathed; what a pitiful excuse for a human being. They go where they’re not wanted, bring their misbegotten ideas with them, and impose their values on people who were better off before social services were created. They don’t come and try to persuade people; they use government power, the force of law, and the police.

  So we went from being rich to poor, from Mom’s being so successful at trapping that others in the community became jealous and tried to take her trapline away from her. A glimpse of a memory: Mom, home from a trappers’ meeting, still seething. “I told Frank Nelson, ‘What the hell do you want with another trapline? You don’t trap anyway, your wife does all the trapping.’”

  It must have seemed like a conspiracy to her, everyone around working in unison to force her off the land, to drive her into town, to make her poor and useless, just a woman. Trapping and making money was for men.

  She used to go up the river, trapping in the winter, tell us to go to Aunt Annie’s after school and wait for her. I loved Annie’s house, it was full of cousins and play, and she fed us macaroni and tomato soup.

  Mom came home, well after dark, and it wasn’t good. She said she had walked through slush and her moccasins got wet.

  I am back under the tree, lying on top of my sleeping bag as the darkness increases into night, remembering and thinking and trying to make sense of it all. She knew better. I know she knew better. If your feet get wet, you stop and make a fire and dry them out right away. Anyone who has travelled in the winter knows that.

  So why didn’t she?

  Probably because there were six kids at her sister’s house waiting for her to return, for her to get them dressed in their parkas and mitts and hats and walk them across the little community to their house, where the fire would have gone out during the day and the house would be cold, and she needed to start a fire and put them to bed before she could begin to skin and stretch the animals she had caught that day.

  She had kept walking, in her wet moccasins, and by the time she arrived at her sister’s house, her feet were frozen. Uncle Simeon knew what to do. He made her sit on a chair and used kerosene that had been stored outside to slowly thaw out her feet. He got her moccasins off, and all of us kids, me and my siblings and all of Annie’s kids, stood around, watching. Her feet were white and solid as Simeon massaged them with kerosene. The pain must have been incredible. She never said a word, never made a sound. She wouldn’t in front of us children, but she couldn’t keep it from showing on her face, the tightness around her mouth as she clenched her teeth, the stern lines on her forehead, and the way she looked up from watching Uncle work on her feet to force a smile at us, so that we wouldn’t worry.

  That incident might be one of the reasons she took us out of school in the spring to accompany her up the trapline. She hired a babysitter, Elsie, a beautiful young woman, to come stay with us and look after us during the day. Elsie was great. She had a spirit that came alive out on the trapline, her laughter ringing in the forest. She kept us entertained and out of trouble and taught us about living outside.

  But six kids are too many to watch all the time. I went into the cabin by myself, took down a .22 rifle from the wall, put a shell in the chamber, and fired it into the dirt floor.

  When Mom came back that evening, my siblings told on me. “Ray shot the gun inside the cabin.”

  Mom had a quizzical look on her face as she very calmly asked, “Why did you do that?”

  “Because I never fired a gun before.”

  She took me outside and showed me how. “You line up that front sight so you can see it through the notch of the back sight. Then, keeping them lined up, you put that front sight on what you want to shoot, then pull the trigger nice and slow and easy.”

  Either I impressed her with my ability to shoot during that short target practice session or she needed someone to help paddle the canoe.

  I have two clear, connected memories: first, of shooting that muskrat — Mom was checking a trap, bent over the bow. We were at the tip of a long, narrow island a few miles north of the first cabin. The ice was gone from the river channels that flowed around the island, but a large piece jutted out between us and the channel on the other side.

  I had Dad’s .22, a rifle she had bought for him from the Army and Navy catalogue
for seven dollars. It was a single-shot Cooey with a long, heavy forestock.

  “Hey Mom, there’s a rat swimming over there.”

  “Well, shoot it then.”

  “It’s too far. It’s on the other side of the ice.”

  “Just use more sight, aim high.”

  So I did.

  Careful aim with that big rifle, heavy and steady in my hands, used all of the front sight — it covered that rat’s head — then squeezed the trigger, and a rat was flipping and tossing in the water before it floated and was still.

  “I got it!”

  “I got it!”

  “Hurry up, Mom, let’s go get it.”

  “Just wait until I’m finished. It will still be there when we get there.”

  And, of course, it was, it wasn’t going anywhere, a clean bullet hole through its eyes, the largest muskrat of the year and I shot it. Not only was it the largest, it was an odd colour, almost blond instead of the usual darker brown.

  The corresponding memory is of selling it, standing beside Mom at Bert’s General Store. There’s a large pile of muskrat pelts on the counter and Bert is counting them, sorting them. I reach out and take my rat, separate it from the pile. Mom takes it and puts it back with the rest. “It’s okay, my boy, you’ll get paid for it.”

  Eight dollars; that’s what Bert gave me — a lot of money in 1969.

  The average price was five dollars, and Mom had hundreds of muskrat pelts. Not only the muskrats that she trapped; she also received a third share of whatever others trapped.

  Her younger brother Johnny came up the river along with my brother Clarence. Mom sent them to trap the far end of the trapline. Her excuse was that there wasn’t enough room for them in the little cabin where we were. But after they left, I overheard her say something about not wanting them sniffing around after Elsie.

  Johnny and Clarence averaged a hundred rats a night. They paddled a canoe and used a flashlight. When a blinded rat swam toward the canoe, the one not holding the light shot it.

  They kept Mom busy skinning rats. I heard her mumble about how her share of Johnny and Clarence’s rats seemed to always be the ones that had been shot through the body, as she sewed up the bullet hole and hid her stitching so that Bert wouldn’t see it when she sold it to him.

  * * *

  I remember Uncle Ben again.

  We were at the first cabin, and Ben had a dog team down on the river. He’d stopped at the cabin to give Mom her third share, and Mom stomped down the hill to the ice, to his dogsled, pulled back the tarpaulin, and sure enough: Ben had killed a beaver that he never said anything about.

  “I knew that bastard would try to cheat me.”

  Either Ben wasn’t as sneaky as he thought he was, or Mom knew him too well.

  I don’t remember how much money she made. She probably never told me. But I do remember one spring — I don’t remember if it was the spring that I shot the big rat or if it was a different year — I made two hundred dollars from the rats that I shot while paddling the back of her canoe and from trapping in the bay in front of the first cabin. I might have had half a dozen traps set out there, and she didn’t take a third.

  Freedom

  Something has a hold of me.

  I am tangled.

  I struggle through sleep and whatever it is that has me wrapped, sleeping bag and a rope, or a cable around my shoulders, pinning my arms.

  Keep still.

  Don’t move.

  Listen.

  The night is empty of sound.

  Wakefulness increases.

  Even this close to equinox the nights are never completely dark; there are stars and a pale light in the northwest. The air is warm and still.

  I feel for whatever has a hold of me, something stiff: a tree root, maybe, or a branch.

  I carefully free myself, sit up, and examine it.

  Clifford’s hoop. I’ve somehow pulled it into my sleeping bag. I must have laid it on the ground beside me before I fell asleep.

  I set it aside, well out of the way, pull the sleeping bag back up, and curl back into the hollow at the base of the tree. I note the position of the stars before I close my eyes again. It’s a little after midnight.

  What was I trying to do?

  Go travelling.

  Maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe the hoop came on its own. I try to remember. I thought I had put it in the back of the truck. I must not have.

  Travelling with Clifford, going, doing, being.

  By the time I was thirteen, I had complete freedom. I learned to hitchhike. Simple: walk out to the highway, put out a thumb, a ride, another ride, meet interesting people on the way, and go visit Clifford in Saskatoon. Spend a few days, maybe a weekend, walk the length of Idylwyld Drive North out of the city, and put out my thumb again and go home.

  I’ve done it so often, Grandma has a new name for me: Saskatoon. She pronounces it like a Cree word with the emphasis on the second-last syllable. She came and lived with us for a while after Grandpa died and Uncle Johnny, drunk again, burned down their house.

  There’s a memory, another one of those defining moments. But this wasn’t a moment of change. It was more of a milestone or a moment of realization. Hitchhiking is always a bit of a game of chance. Sometimes you get a ride right away, and sometimes you have to walk for a while.

  I was delayed getting home. Either I left Saskatoon too late or the rides didn’t happen. I walked into the house in La Ronge well after dark on a Sunday evening. Mom met me with a calm “There’s supper on the stove,” and went back into the living room to her big chair and her beadwork. I was expecting more, something angry.

  Supper was good, her usual thick soup; lots of meat and vegetables and broth. I asked Stanley in a quiet voice, “Did Mom say anything about my being away?” I hadn’t told anyone I was leaving. I had simply decided on the spur of the moment to go, and then I was late getting back.

  “No.” He shook his head a little. “She did seem a little worried when it started to get dark, though.”

  I lie awake and wonder how that gift of freedom altered the course of my life. Nothing stood in the way of my growing up; there were no restrictions, only choices and consequences. I was free to go and visit my brother whenever I wanted.

  Did she see that? Did she see the connection between us?

  Or did she simply come to the realization that to try to restrict me would’ve been pointless? I was going my own way regardless, and it was simply easier on everyone not to fight with me about it.

  * * *

  Yes, she gave me my freedom. Let me become the man I was to become. But she also played a huge role in shaping that man. I was fourteen. Not much interested in school, not much interested in anything. She insisted that I accompany her to the doctor. She told him that she was worried about me. “He doesn’t seem to have much energy.”

  After a full examination the doctor determined that he couldn’t find anything wrong with me. Told Mom: “It’s pretty common for teenagers his age to be a little lethargic.”

  After the doctor’s visit, especially whenever there were relatives from Molanosa visiting us in La Ronge, she would say, “See that boy, there’s nothing wrong with him. I took him to the doctor and the doctor told me he’s just lazy.” It was embarrassing. Lazy is not something anyone wants to be called.

  Then my friend Russ Merasty got a job at the gas station beside the river. If Russ could get a job, so could I. So I asked the owner, John Merriman, if I could get a job. He said, “Yeah,” but because I would be working with the public, I needed to get a haircut. There were only two hippies in La Ronge in 1971, myself and James Quandt, who was a couple years older than me. I wasn’t as dedicated to the cause as he was. On the way home I stopped at our neighbour Allan Thompson’s house and asked him if he would give me a haircut. He did.

  I was
scheduled to work pumping gas after school and on Saturday.

  After my first full day of work, an eight-hour shift, I came home and found that things were different. There was a place set at the table, plate, knife, fork, a small plate off to the side with a few slices of bread. “Sit down, my boy.” She held the chair.

  Normally the plates are in the cupboard, supper is on the stove. You get your own plate and utensils, serve yourself, and put your dirty dishes in the sink when you’re done.

  But today she serves me. Brings the food to the table. And while she is serving me, she says in a loud voice: “You boys — Stanley, Garry, Donny. You are responsible now to bring in the wood, take out the pail; your brother here doesn’t have to do that anymore. He’s a working man now.”

  When I was lazy, she embarrassed me. When I worked, she praised me. No wonder I became such a workaholic.

  So it wasn’t just Clifford and Dad who shaped me. Mom also helped, only she was more subtle about it, and it wasn’t apparent to me until now, here, sitting in the dark down the little hill from the old house where my earliest memories began.

  I pick up the hoop. That’s all it is, a piece of plastic tubing, big enough to fit over a boy five — maybe I was six or seven — years old.

  Clifford’s bubble maker.

  III

  Mind Expansion

  I open my eyes and check the stars. They’ve moved very slightly. I tuck some of the sleeping bag between my shoulder and an uncomfortable rough piece of root, shut my eyes, and lie listening to the emptiness of the night. There’s nothing to hear, other than the sound of my own breathing.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have had that last cup of coffee. I’m not going to sleep very well. But coffee is just coffee and I’ve had it all my life. I probably got it in my bottle when I was a baby.