8 Calling a Bitch a Bitch

Throughout his life Keith remained troubled about an incident that happened when he was nine and still living in Chilliwack:

I got into a fight with a boy my age. His mother yelled at me to get off her property and quit picking on her kid. She was yelling fuck this and fuck that, and I yelled back that she was a bitch. I was riding my bike home when the boy’s sixteen-year-old brother jumped out of his car, slugged me and kicked me twice with his pointy-toe cowboy boots. Then he drove over my bike and wrecked it.

My father didn’t like getting dragged out of a city council meeting by a constable of the RCMP and told that his son Keith had called a bitch a bitch and a few other names and the bitch was filing a slander suit. Dad was embarrassed and angry. He’d been drinking since noon, and he drove straight home. Before Mother could tell him the whole story, his fist struck me down and he dragged me into his bedroom. He worked me over with his belt till I couldn’t scream anymore, kept yelling that I made a fool of him in front of Madame Chairperson.

Mom finally pulled him off and said, “Leslie, Keith was not at fault.” She showed him the bruise where Brian’s brother slugged me and this made him call Brian’s mother and cuss her out worse than she’d cussed me. He slammed the phone down, turned to me and said, “Let this be a lesson to you.”

Mom said, “Don’t you want to apologize to Keith?”

Dad said, “He probably had it coming anyway.”³

I didn’t know what to think. More than anything else in the world, I wanted to please my father. I wanted him to accept me for who I was and what I did, and I would do anything to satisfy him. He was the closest thing to God. But even when I was right I was wrong. I’d think, “Yes, Dad, go ahead and blame me. I’ll take the responsibility even if I’m not at fault. Just try to love your son, Dad.” Maybe he did, but he didn’t show it.

To Keith one of his rural acquaintanceships seemed to echo his relationship with his father. A neighbor boy was the same age and in the same class, and the two should have been close friends. But something about Keith seemed to provoke the boy. “I was his punching bag. We were swimming at Cultus Lake when he tried to drown me. He held my head below the surface, let me come up for air, then pushed me down again. After five or ten minutes of this I started to see black. I believe my life was spared by the counselor that jumped in the pool and pulled him off.”

Keith realized that he had to stand up to the bully sooner or later. “At the public swimming pool I held him under till a lifeguard pulled me off. I had every intention of drowning him. I guess you could say it was the second murder attempt of my childhood. The other was that little bastard Martin. It was like I only had one way to fight—all-out.”