1934 WAS A YEAR I WILL NEVER FORGET. The year started with both my mother and me expecting children. My mother was thirty-four, and although she had had several pregnancies, she had only three living children, apart from me. Mark in that year was fourteen, Alec was seven, and the youngest, Melanie, was five years old. In 1934, I was twenty-one years old and expecting my fourth child.
So there we were, mother and daughter, both of us young, both of us in the family way.
Johnny Paul, my stepfather, was forty-three years old that year. He was still the sociable, loud, happy-go-lucky man who had taken me into his home as a child of five and had treated me, from the beginning, as his own flesh and blood.
Johnny was renowned in Stoney Creek as a hunter, a trapper, a provider. He was also known in the village as a man who enjoyed a drink. He was not a steady drinker, but we always knew that when he went into Prince George, he would return with a bottle of rum or whiskey bought from a bootlegger or in the local liquor store for him by one of his white friends.
In those days, Natives were not allowed to go into beer parlors. They could not buy liquor at a liquor store, or have alcohol on the reserve. Sometimes people made homebrew, but unless my memory of those years is wrong, there was very little alcohol abuse in our village. The two or three people in Stoney Creek who drank to excess stood out like lights—the villagers did not approve of them, and the chief made life as miserable for them as he could.
In January, 1934, Johnny went with a friend of his, James Antoine, to visit Johnny’s brother Gus. Gus lived down at the other end of the lake and it was known that he sometimes made home-brew. When Johnny and his friend James returned to the village, they were very sick and in great pain. Day by day, their health got worse. Within one month, both men were dead. Their deaths were talked about only in whispers, for the making and drinking of homebrew was illegal.
My mother did not discuss the cause of Johnny’s death with me or with anyone, but from the little bits I heard here and there, I learned that Gus had made homebrew in a coal oil can. The can had not been washed to cleanse it of its deadly liquid. Johnny and James must have drank coal oil along with the home brew.
When the two men were dead, one of my friends whispered to me, “That coal oil ate their insides clear away.”
I thought, when my mother lost Johnny, that nothing worse could happen to her. There she was, a thirty-four-year-old widow, pregnant, and with three young children to sup-port. There was no help from the government or the Department of Indian Affairs, no widow’s allowance, no welfare, nothing.
Little did I know that there was worse to come. A few weeks after Johnny’s death, my mother went out to help fourteen-year-old Mark put a hay rack on the sleigh. Mark was going out to the meadow to get a load of feed for the horses. The hay rack was too heavy for Mark to lift alone; my mother was strong, and had never spared herself when it came to heavy work. She helped him to lift the rack on to the sleigh.
Within a few hours, she began to hemorrhage. For one month the blood kept coming. She tried to keep up with her usual work, but we could see that she was becoming weaker each day.
My Grandmother Ann, my Aunt Monica, and I were with her on the twenty-eighth of April when her labour started. Within a short time, her dead baby was born, and in a few hours, my mother was dead too.
Her last hours on earth were not peaceful. Johnny’s sister was at her bedside. This sister did not know what had caused her brother’s death; she was half crazy with grief at the loss of her brother and seemed to blame my mother for not telling her why Johnny had died. My grandmother and aunt and I could only stand by helplessly as this woman said terrible things to my mother. Once, I remember, she screamed at her, “You say you’re sick! If we’re sick we die!”
My mother turned her face to the wall, tears streaming down her cheeks. She spoke once. “I only wish she knew what her brother died of,” she said. And then my mother died.
By the time my son Ray was born, it was all over. The cabin where Johnny and my mother had lived with their children stood empty. That empty cabin meant the destruction of a family. Where once my young mother had moved silently, where Johnny had shouted and laughed until the walls seemed to echo with his high spirits, where Mark and Alec and Melanie had played their childish games and told their little stories in their own home—all, all, was silent.
The church bell tolled. The village grieved.
My own grief . . . there are still no words to describe what the loss of my mother meant to me.