FAMILIES ARE LIKE ICEBERGS. You’re looking right at them but all you’re seeing is that small part on the surface. There’s always a lot more, hidden away. You know a family’s history. You know the individuals that make up a family, their likes and dislikes, their interests, how they make their living. And you have some idea of each person’s character. But do you ever really know what’s going on inside a family, how each individual gets treated, behind closed doors?
There’s one thing for sure: Families collect a lifetime of hurts, slights, and disappointments, often burying them deep inside. And sometimes those buried feelings build up to a sharp, pointed thing, hiding just below the surface. Then, exactly when you least expect it, that pointed thing sinks your little red boat, pretty damn fast. And you didn’t even know it was there, that pointed thing. I should have understood that sooner.
I started piling up those hurts and slights in my second year of school. You’d think a person would have a pretty good idea of what life has in store for him when a bride of Christ dangles his copybook in front of his face like some dead rat and says, “If this dog-eared mess is your best work, Michel Landry, you’re never going to be the student your brother is.” The funny thing is, it was me who had begged my mother to send me to school, even though I only turned six that September. I was desperate to join my big brother on his great adventure, watching forlornly from the front window every morning when he left for school and anxiously awaiting his return each long afternoon.
My enthusiasm survived the first year or so, until the gap between our report cards became obvious, even to my seven-year-old mind. Probably that’s why they used to call it the age of reason. Andrew’s marks were a millstone around my neck all through school, especially during those long years we were in a double grade together. The more he got along with the nuns, the more I disappointed them, drawing their wrath for everything from dirty fingernails to missing benediction in the Month of Mary. The fighting started early on. For starters, every time someone told me I had a girl’s name.
There was this kid in our school that everybody hated. Gary Gillespie had no mother and his father drank. He was held back every second year and was sixteen before he got out of grade eight. I don’t think he ever went to high school. I caught up to him in grade three, where he took the heat off me with worse work habits and deportment than I had. I was grateful to him for more than that, though. That fall I fought Gary Gillespie every week for a month. He beat me every time, until I got enough licks in to force a truce. After that last time, when we both went home with bloody noses, he started calling me Mike. Pretty soon everyone else followed suit. I would have been Gary Gillespie’s friend for life if he had let me.
Unfortunately fighting had gotten to be a habit by that time. At least the nuns seemed to think so. After the first few years they started taking for granted I was the instigator. I admit I was impulsive, and quick to take offence, but I still think it was all about Andrew. It was as though making an effort to follow the rules like he did, or putting an effort into homework or church, or even admitting that I knew the meaning of the word deportment, would be an admission that I wanted to be like him. Or maybe I was just being realistic, accepting the odds against me. Because it always seemed to me that Andrew got there first when it came to brains and talent, in school and at home.
It’s not as though I gave up altogether. I tried in my own way to woo my mother. There was that one spring when Andrew started coming home through the fields along the highway, gathering violets to decorate the dinner table. I tried to copy the gesture a couple of times, only to lose my concentration somewhere in the execution. My mother had a hard time faking any enthusiasm for the handful of crushed stems and petals I would pull from my pocket in the middle of dinner. One weekend, when I was wandering by myself in the bush back of Grandma Bessie’s house, I was elated to find a patch of purple and white flowers, bigger than any Andrew had brought home.
I landed in Grandma’s kitchen to present my mother with a handful of beautiful blossoms, only to be scolded for picking trilliums. How was I to know it was illegal, I protested. It sounded pretty dumb to me, a law against picking flowers. Of course my brother was only too ready to inform them that our teacher had told us exactly that, just a few weeks earlier when we had our lesson on Ontario’s wildflowers. It was bad enough having the nuns reporting on your “lack of concentration,” without having an embedded spy in the same classroom.
And if my actions didn’t get me on the wrong side of my mother, my big mouth did. I remember one particular Sunday after mass when she spent a good half hour yakking on the church steps with this woman I knew she didn’t really like. When she finally got to the car and said she was sorry to keep us, I grumbled, “How come you were talking to her so long? Last week you said she was the worst gossip in town.”
“Michel Landry,” she practically yelled, “don’t you dare talk to me like that. I’m your mother and I’ll talk to whomever I please, without any advice from you.”
“But you said — ” I got out before she interrupted.
“And you won’t be allowed to listen to any adult conversations if you don’t learn to mind your own business, young man.” I don’t know which was worse in situations like that, her yelling at me for just being honest, or Andrew’s triumphant smirk at my discomfort.
I didn’t do much better with my father. I remember the year he hauled home this old truck, a 1928 Model A Ford, and parked it in the horse-shed back of the house. He had gotten it for half-nothing from some old bachelor on one of those rock farms in Kenyon Township. From the first day my father set out to restore that truck, it was clear who the mechanic in the family would be. That was in 1952, when Andrew was nine and I was eight, and he was already being called the mature one, who could be counted on to listen closely and follow instructions carefully.
Not me. I had no patience for standing around for hours, holding a trouble light, or handing my father tools. If he asked for a wrench he’d be just as likely to get a pair of pliers. And if he sent me off for more clean rags, or a fresh beer, I’d be just as likely to wander off somewhere. I can still hear him yelling from under the truck, “Michel! Where’s my goddamn rags?”
I wasn’t interested in fetching stuff and holding tools. I wanted to get right in there and do the important work, whatever that was. And why would I want to learn the names of all those tools when I wasn’t even allowed to use them? I wanted hands-on experience, right away. I can still see the look on Andrew’s face that day I was examining the oil can. “How does this work?” I asked my dad, as I pressed the lever and squirted Andrew right in the eye. I had them all pissed off at me for that. It took my mother half an hour to rinse the oil out of Andrew’s eye.
Anyway, my dad managed to restore that old truck to all its glory without my help. I was banned from the shed long before he finished. I guess the last straw was when I tried to figure out how the jack worked, while he was still under the truck. I could never understand why he got so mad. Didn’t he have those cement blocks under there as a backup? And didn’t they work?
At the same time as this stuff was going on the nuns were teaching us about Jesus, with stories about vineyards and talents, and rules about loving your neighbour as yourself — which, they assured me, included my brother. That made me feel guilty for not always loving my brother the way I should. Just as they planned, I suppose. For a while there, I figured I was the only one in the family who harboured evil thoughts. Then I started to realize it wasn’t just me who had problems. The summer after Andrew broke his leg I got my first inkling that my father’s life wasn’t perfect, either.
Grandpa and Grandma Landry were down from Montreal, spending a week of summer holidays with us. I had a flat tire on my bicycle and had been bugging my father to fix it for days. I finally got tired of waiting and cornered my grandpa out on the front porch, where he was relaxing after lunch.
“Ah ben, je n’ sais pas, Michel.” He puffed on his pipe a couple of times. “Ça fait longtemps . . . it’s a long time since I fixed a flat. Do you have any patches?”
“Yessir.” I gave him a big nod and held up the patch kit I had bought with my own money. “I could do it myself, only I can’t get the tire off. It keeps going back on.”
“Okay d’abord, va chercher des outils . . . get some tools. We’ll need a couple of screwdrivers, and your pump to blow the tube up. You have a pump?”
“Yessir,” I answered, elated at the idea of his helping me. I was still young enough to think my father was God, who could fix anything. It never occurred to me that my grandfather might not be God the Father, who could do even more. He smiled down at me and assured me he’d come around back and help, just as soon as he finished his tea. I ran around to the tool shed behind the house and set my bike up for the operation. Grandpa arrived a few minutes later and set to work.
After a few false starts, he got “the knack of it,” as he said, working the two screwdrivers under the edge of the tire. Then he levered his way around the rim until it was free, and pulled the tube out for inspection. We pumped it up and found a hole pretty quickly. I should have known that was suspicious, especially after all the trouble he had cutting the patch out — he said the scissors were no good — but I was so happy to have it fixed I wasn’t about to secondguess my saviour.
My joy was short-lived. After some time spent levering the tire back on, we pumped it up and put the valve cap on. With a big smile and a pat on the back I was off, for about a block. The tire was flat before I turned the corner on Dominion. When I took it back to Grandpa he had a quizzical look on his face.
“C’est bizarre, Michel. Peut-être . . . could be you’ve got the wrong kind of patch, there. You better have your father look at it. I wouldn’t want to make it any worse.”
I didn’t understand why he would say that, at least not until later that evening when I dragged my father out back to investigate the problem. Of course the first thing I reported was that it must be pretty bad, because Grandpa hadn’t been able to fix it. “Waddaya mean, Grandpa couldn’t fix it?” my father growled. His tone made me nervous.
“Uh, this morning . . . he put a patch on for me.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” he snapped, “you got your grandfather to fix a tire? Why in hell would you do that?”
Still mystified, I stated the obvious, “You wouldn’t, so I asked him.”
“Godammit. Why couldn’t you wait?”
“It’s summer holidays,” I whined. “I really need my bike.”
He kept shaking his head. “That man is all thumbs. He couldn’t fix a bicycle if his life depended on it.”
And that was before he had the tube off and blown up. My poor grandpa. He must have pinched the tube with the screwdrivers, taking it off and putting it back on, because there were seven or eight patches on it before my father finished. I kept thinking how lucky it was that Grandpa and Grandma had gone out to the farm to visit with Uncle Gustave. With each new hole came another round of cursing at Grandpa’s incompetence. My father’s last warning to me as he handed back the bike summed it up: “That damn fool is dangerous with a tool in his hands. Don’t you ever ask him to fix anything of ours again. Do you understand, boy?”
It wasn’t so much what he was saying that scared me, it was the level of anger that was pouring from him. The shock of hearing that my grandpa wasn’t perfect was doubled by the intensity of the resentment in my father’s voice. Of course I wasn’t old enough to understand what was happening to our family, and why my father’s rage was so close to the surface. I just know what I felt. Stung by the sharp point of his anger, I was more observant in the future. I began to notice things about my grandfather, and my grandmother. I noticed how she did more talking than he did, and how often he deferred to her. Eventually I came to see that my grandmother was a strong woman, resentful of a world where men took their pre-eminence for granted, and hardened after years of fighting with her father over the running of the general store.
And I began to notice my own father’s preoccupation with who “wore the pants” in other people’s families. He said a couple of other things, too, that made me wonder if he was mad at his father for not being “the boss” in their family. Funny, though, how understanding my father’s anger didn’t help much with my own. Probably because I had yet to learn that you could love someone at the same time as you hated them. Or maybe because I’ve never been convinced it makes any difference, this “understanding” crap. What people say and do to each other, that’s what makes the difference, not the reasons. All those reasons are just the rationale you come up with after the fact — just so much justification. In fact, what you say isn’t worth much, either. What you do, that’s what counts in this life. The rest is bullshit.
I did feel sorry for my old man, sometimes. Most likely he had hoped in vain for his father to do things with him when he was a kid, like take him fishing and stuff. He sure made it into a big deal with us. He bought the cottage in the forties, when he was in the money and we were just babies. He must have been pushing for us to go fishing with him pretty early, because I remember my mother saying, “You’re getting them all worked up for nothing, Ed. You’ll ruin it by rushing them too much.”
“Aw, c’mon, if they’re old enough to go to school, they’re old enough to go fishing.”
“They should go when they want to, not before. It’ll be the same as the swimming. You pushed Andrew too soon and now he hates the water.”
“That’s only because you took his side. If it had been up to me he’d have gone right back in.”
“Throwing a child off a dock is a dumb idea, no matter what your reason.”
“Aw, you’re exaggerating,” he protested. “I showed him how to dog-paddle before I threw him in.”
“You lost patience and threw him in, Ed. Admit it. He nearly drowned.”
“He just swallowed a little water. I was right there.”
“He was terrified.”
“Aw, he’s just afraid people will laugh at him if he’s not perfect at something right away. He’s too proud by half.”
I loved conversations like that, even though my mother always had a comeback. “And who does he take after for that?”
My father didn’t accuse her of trying to change the subject, probably because he didn’t like the first one any better. “You stick up for him too much. I did the same thing with Michel and he swims fine now.”
“He’s more independent, like Angus was. He doesn’t care what anybody thinks. They’ve been like that since they were babies.”
My father must have backed off, though, because I don’t remember Andrew going fishing with Dad until I was old enough to go, too. I was the big cottage-lover in the family, the one who cried to go and complained when we had to come home. What I loved best was being out in the boat. I think Andrew only went because my mom made him. “Do it for your dad,” she used to say; “he works hard for us all week and never asks for much.”
Andrew would do it, too, even though he hated it. He didn’t mind putting the minnows on the hook, or taking the fish off, like some kids do. What he hated was sitting there for hours, with nothing happening, and Dad and me not even talking much. I was the opposite. I loved it, just being out there on the water with my dad.
Sunday was when we went. Dad had to be at the store the other six days of the week. That was the one time I didn’t have to be bugged to change my clothes after church, and the one time it was Andrew who lagged behind. Me, I loved everything about fishing. Usually we’d stop at the store and my dad would make us a lunch — he’d never do that at home. He’d spread a dozen pieces of bread across the counter and slather on some butter and mustard. Then he’d take one of those huge rolls of baloney out of the cooler and slice off some pieces on his big silver cutting machine, pieces twice as thick as my mom ever used, and slap together two sandwiches each. “A couple of hours out on that water,” he would say, “and you’ll be ready to eat a horse.”
Then he’d tell us to pick out the chocolate bar we wanted and get one for him. He didn’t have to tell us what kind. He always had a Malted Milk. Andrew always had an Eatmore, and I liked a different one each time. On the way out the door Dad would pick up a carton of cokes, two for each of us, though he’d always have to finish my second one. In those days it was still the eight-ounce green bottles that he’d hang over the boat in a burlap bag to keep cold. I can still hear the big burps we’d make, after those baloney sandwiches and cokes. Andrew was convinced the coke in those small bottles was stronger than the stuff in the bigger bottles. “It’s more concentrated,” he would say.
Dad would pick up some minnows at the marina in Summerstown and if the rain held off we’d be out on the river for hours. Sometimes Andrew would ask how much longer we were going to stay, only not very often because Dad would always say, “the sooner you start asking about going in, the longer we’re going to stay out.” I don’t know if there were any limits on your catch in those days, but we sure hauled a lot of perch out of Lake St. Francis, which is what they call that wide spot on the St. Lawrence River. Not only did we catch them all day, on the way home we would stop at Jack’s Place on the highway near Lancaster and get some fish rolls for supper, which were even better than baloney sandwiches.
Sometime in the spring of 1955, going fishing with my father took on a whole new meaning, when Andrew stopped coming with us. The first few times it was an excuse, like having a cold, or some school assignment he had to do. Eventually he got up the nerve to tell Dad he didn’t really like fishing that much. Well, actually, he got my mother to tell him. He just kind of added his two cents worth after she broached the subject one Sunday morning when we were getting ready to go. I was watching all this closely, trying to keep the grin off my face, all the while hoping Dad wouldn’t try to talk him out of it.
My father must have known all along. He didn’t get pissed off like I thought he would. He just sat there for a moment or so, sipping on his tea, before he looked at me and said, “What about you, squirt? You still like fishing with your old man? Or are you getting tired of it, too?”
“Oh, no,” I assured him, “I love it. Even when they’re not biting.”
He looked at my mother and shrugged, “Well, I guess I can’t complain. One out of two isn’t bad. Bernie Leblanc’s got four boys and only one of them will go fishing with him. And Jimmy’s girls, they won’t even look at a fish.” He looked back at me and said, “Hurry up, kid. Get your stuff ready. Those fish aren’t gonna wait all day.”
I felt pretty good about that deal, being number one with my dad when it came to fishing — his favourite thing. I didn’t even mind when he started asking Johnny Gervais along. Johnny was Uncle Gustave’s son, and was working for my dad in those days, in the store. He was about twenty-five that summer and was more like a big brother, even though he was my dad’s cousin. He and my dad were always joking around and playing tricks on me, but I didn’t mind. My mother always said that when people teased you it meant they liked you.
The only thing different when Johnny came with us, except for me having to ride in the back again, was that my dad would bring a case of beer. They’d even drink it in the car on the way there. My dad would open the case from the bottom and take a couple of beers out, then sit it right side up on the floor in the back seat. He would always tell me to keep my feet on it, in case the cops stopped us. They had a lot of fun, those two, and we did a lot of fishing that year. Things were looking pretty good when we put the boat away in the fall, from where I was sitting. I guess life is a lot like fishing, though. Luck has a big part to play, bad and good.