My mother’s brother, Alec, confronted by stupidity or injustice beyond his comprehension, would ride his white mare into the northeast corner of his farm. There, in a grove of scrub oak, with one hand wrapped in his horse’s mane and the other around a whiskey bottle, he’d lecture God.
Although, or perhaps because, he was a bachelor, he always had us over on Sundays after church. My mother would bring lunch in a picnic basket. Alec cooked supper.
Sunday was a ritual. We’d arrive still imprisoned in our good clothes, reeking of mothballs and virtue. Alec would hand my father a homemade beer. There was always a pitcher of cider for us kids. My mother had a delicate stomach, and for her, he made rose hip tea in a china teapot. His cupboard was a mishmash of mugs picked up at gas stations or through the mail, and they said things like North of Fifty-Four or Campbell’s Soup. However, he had purchased one belleek cup and saucer from Eaton’s. It was in this fragile bone china that he served my mother a pale, nearly transparent liquid with just a touch of honey.
He lived in an old-style prairie house, two storeys high, narrow, with a steep peaked roof. It had two front doors, one above the other. The first door was at ground level, but the second door was directly above it and opened out from his bedroom. There were no stairs, no balcony, from this second exit, just a flat clapboard wall and a door that opened into thin air. When asked about it, my mother said that it was his door to heaven, and the day Alec died, he’d step through it into God’s hands. Alec said it was there because the local carpenter, when hired to build a two-storey house, used the same floor plans for both levels and didn’t have enough brains to leave the door out.
In Alec’s new bathroom of white tiles and gleaming porcelain (he had the first indoor plumbing in the municipality), the toilet roll holder often sat empty. When my mother, with a touch of exasperation, would mention this, Alec would say he’d just run out and promise to buy some the next time he was at the Co-op. He was thrifty—some said miserly—and besides keeping his own garden so that he could lay down pickles and relishes and fill his root cellar with cabbages and carrots and potatoes, he sought every way he could to economize. Besides his work clothes, he owned one suit and one white shirt and, as far as I know, never took a holiday. Because of his early days on the prairies, he was also a political radical.
Under the wash basin in the bathroom there was a wicker basket. Here, his thrift and his political views came together in an unexpected way. The basket was filled to overflowing with advertisements exhorting the reader to buy things such as aluminum windows, a new furnace or an encyclopedia. There were endless letters asking for donations. These ads were his substitute for the missing roll of tissue. Because of the high quality of the paper, it frequently plugged the toilet, but Alec never complained. He just took out his snake, and while I and my brothers and sisters watched, fascinated, he cleared the pipes. This stock of pamphlets was always being renewed, because if he saw something advertised that promised to make him wealthier, happier or healthier, Alec automatically wrote a letter requesting information. According to the postmaster, my uncle got more mail than anyone else in the district.
Although there were always lots of political brochures (every year he faithfully sent a dollar to each political party and, in response, received an endless supply of information and solicitations), his political radicalism revealed no particular bias. Occasionally, he had a kind word for Tommy Douglas and the CCF. What he had to say about the NDP, the Grits and the Tories was too slanderous to repeat.
The result of all this reading and discussion was that by the time I was in grade three I was able to astound my teachers by knowing the names of the different political parties and their platforms. Once, when I asked my uncle how he voted, he outraged my mother by telling me that if he ever voted, his choice would be based upon the absorbent qualities of the paper each party sent. The slicker the paper, he maintained, the less the party was to be trusted.
Prominent in this pile were brochures and letters from religious organizations, begging or demanding money. During the years of our visits, I became an expert in the many devices that can be used to part the guilty, the weak, the sick, the fearful, the elderly and the ignorant from their savings. In third-year psychology, I wrote a paper on the emotional component of fund raising and called it “The Evangelism of the Dollar.” I received an A and an offer of a job from the college alumni association.
He was, as I said, a strange man, morose and brooding, dark-complexioned, dark-minded, fiercely argumentative about politics, religion and economics, but he hardly ever talked about himself. Once, late in the evening after half a dozen homemade beers, he claimed to be without any ambition except one, and that was to nail a banker to every hydro pole lining his property. Since the circumference of his property was four miles, if he had ever been granted his wish, bankers in the Interlake would have become as scarce as bobcats.
That night, as she was washing my hair, my mother explained (we still did not have waterworks and having our weekly bath at Alec’s place on Sundays saved hauling water and heating it on the stove—an enormous, time-consuming chore when you have five children) that during the Depression, the bank had foreclosed on their parents’ property, and in spite of the fact that the farm lay abandoned and all of them homeless, the bank manager would not let the family stay in the house or plant a crop. Although she was only thirteen, my mother was forced to move to Winnipeg and work as a domestic. What she remembered most about the time was how terribly hard she had to work and how, sick with fear and loneliness, she spent many nights locked in the bathroom, crying and throwing up. Her wages, small as they were, she sent to her parents. Alec was seventeen. He’d been planning on taking a course in agriculture. Instead, he was forced to leave home and he spent the next few years shuttling back and forth across Canada, riding the rods, struggling for a day’s pay, stealing from gardens, even begging, before he found a job in the mines and earned enough to eventually buy another farm.
When anyone would come out of the bathroom, Alec would yell, even if we were in the middle of our supper—he was prone to yelling as a form of communication—”Well, what did you learn in the last fifteen minutes?” And then we’d be at it. For hours, we’d argue the politics or religion or financial information that someone had read. The walls of his house were lined with books, and as we argued, sometimes half a dozen of us or more—anyone who wanted company felt free to drop by—he’d pull books from their shelves, flip them open and astound us with facts. What subject was debated on any given evening depended upon how many visitors went to the bathroom. We might be in the middle of an argument about freight rates and the subjugation of the western provinces by eastern interests when the toilet would flush, the door would open and my uncle would shout, “Well, what did the friends of the common man offer you today?” and we’d be off on another track.
The arguments never really ended but twisted and turned, were temporarily stopped, then started again. Some arguments went on for years, with new proofs, new opinions, with the participants sometimes changing sides, then changing back again. Driven by frustration and rage—I was not allowed to stay out of the arguments but, at the same time, was unable to out-argue my uncle—I’d hunt for sources that would support my opinion. The local library with its mix of nearly unreadable classics (Sir Walter Scott) and trash (cowboy paperbacks) was of little help, and Alec would not let anyone touch his books. However, he never locked his doors, and sometimes, in desperation, when I knew he was working in the fields or shopping in town, I would sneak in and read voraciously, both eyes on the page and both ears tuned to the sound of a tractor or truck coming into the yard. If he caught me in the house, I’d pretend to be on an errand or to have come to ask his advice. At first, my surreptitious reading was not as great a help as I had hoped. While I learned to read at great speed, I did not retain the complex arguments and examples. Desperately, I began to write down important points, summarizing long material that I then could memorize in the safety of my room.
A pamphlet declaring that happiness could be achieved by applying for a loan to purchase a new car led to a labyrinth made of interest rates, usury and the Bible. In the city to help my father sell freshly killed chickens door to door (they’d quit laying and soon would be so tough they could be chewed only by a young bear), I flung myself into a secondhand bookstore where for fifty cents apiece I was able to get an economics textbook and a set of interest tables. The proprietor tried to sell me a novel about children spending their summer at the cottage (I was thirteen), then seeing that I was adamant about usury, told me to try the public library and gave me its address. It took me three weekend trips to figure out how to use the card catalogue, and at first, I was overwhelmed by too many books. The arguments, in the meantime, ranged far and wide, but I had a bone I was determined to chew. I secretly coveted a red convertible and already planned, the moment I finished school, to get a job with the Highways Department and to spend my meagre savings as a down payment on just such a vehicle. At night, I lay awake for hours rehearsing how I would drive down Main Street and bask in everyone’s admiration, and I wasn’t going to let anyone get away with saying that buying a car on time was a sucker’s game.
The only one Alec did not attack was my mother. Anyone else expressing an opinion, no matter how dearly held, would be challenged with “Where’s the proof?” Proof became the centre of my life. Every time I opened my mouth, I had three examples to back up my opinion.
One Sunday, my mother said to one of my younger brothers, “Drink your milk, it’s good for you.”
Before the last word had died, I jumped out of my chair and demanded, “Where’s your proof?”
Stung that women’s wisdom passed down the centuries should be publicly challenged, she answered, “It builds bones. And teeth.”
“Strontium 90,” I shot back.
For the next month, she wouldn’t serve me anything with milk in it. Rice pudding, chocolate pie, ice cream—my portions all were divided up among my brothers and sisters. As a mother, Alec said, she had many virtues, but she was not as open-minded as she might have been. He also read me a description of the trial and death of Socrates.
I feel Alec sometimes planted certain papers at the top of the pile. Why else would I find letters denouncing the United Nations as a communist plot? Do you know where that can lead you? The League of Nations, the use of military conflict to settle disagreements, the formation of city-states, national pride, the military-industrial complex, balance of power and the biblical description of the final destruction of the world.
One winter evening as we struggled home through the snow, full of peroghi and holobchi, my father said, “He thinks too much. It’ll be the end of him. A man like that.” He shook his head as if to suggest the dire consequences of so much thought. But it didn’t happen that way. Instead, water and gravity conspired to undo my uncle. Unseasonal rains had kept him out of his fields. Although he frequently rode his white horse into the oak grove to set God straight, rain continued to fall. When the sun finally appeared, Alec was in a rush to get his crops planted and started work before the ground was ready. His tractor got stuck, and when he tried to get it out, it tipped over backward and fell on him. He lay in the field for two days before our neighbours discovered his body.
That spring, his fields lay fallow. Sometimes, I’d slip through the poplar bush, over the barbed wire fence, and let myself in a back window and just sit there as if, magically, my presence would bring him noisily stamping through the back door, ready to continue our unfinished arguments. When school was out, I went to Winnipeg to work in a warehouse. In July, my parents sold Alec’s house and forty acres to someone from the city who wanted it for a hobby farm.
The first thing the newcomers did was throw out all the books and put up a TV antenna. They didn’t even put the books in boxes but just unloaded them at the garbage dump. I heard about it while I was eating a hamburger at Mary’s Restaurant. By this time, I was eighteen and had my car (not the sleek red convertible I’d imagined but a beat-up Chevy for which I’d been able to pay cash) so I drove out to the dump. Someone had set the books on fire and they sat in a charred pile. I kicked the pile apart and salvaged what I could (117 books on everything from the lives of the saints to farming in New Guinea).
By the time his will was found, probated, everything sold, it was the end of summer. My mother got the teapot and cup and saucer, my father, the beer-making equipment and a hundred dozen bottles. The rest of the estate—every cent he’d been able to save plus the money from the farm—was to be put in trust so that my brothers and sisters and I, if we wished, could go to university. Although we all were good students, university was not something we had ever considered. Doctors’ kids, lawyers’ kids, city kids, they went to that mythical and rumoured place. Country kids with foreign names like Wishnowski got jobs driving trucks and shovelling gravel.
To everyone’s surprise, most of all my own, in September, I found myself sitting beside the carefully tailored children of River Heights who spoke in carefully modulated voices, drove carefully chosen sports cars and skied in the Alps during Christmas break. Twice during my undergraduate years, I was asked into their homes. Although my sport jacket puckered between my shoulders and I still had difficulty remembering to put articles before nouns, I was a great hit with my classmates’ fathers. I knew every advertisement their companies had ever mailed out.
After the University of Manitoba, I went to Waterloo, and from there to Harvard. Next month, I’ll have my Ph.D. in political science. I’ve had some American job offers, but I’ve decided to come back to Winnipeg. I want to study the General Strike and the socio-political structure of the North End.
The committee that interviewed me for a job at the U of W asked me who had made the greatest contribution to my education. I fobbed them off with praise for one of my illustrious professors. I wonder what they would have thought if I had told them the truth—that a dark and brooding farmer who never could remember to buy toilet paper and who regularly lectured God was the best teacher I’d ever had.