UNCLE REG WAS one of the regular visitors to our house in Petty Harbour, as he had a myriad of health problems that required frequent visits to the St. John’s area for attention.
My mom’s oldest brother was a wonderful tall, lanky fella of well over six feet, much like his younger brother, my uncle Bob. The Doyles of Petty Harbour are not particularly a tall breed, so my uncles from Marystown always looked like Goliaths to me. Reg, in particular, looked like a giant sorcerer who’d just taken off his pointy hat, revealing a balding head with just a few hairs on one side combed over to the other. His long arms, which had not an ounce of fat along the sinews of muscle that ran from his short shirtsleeves to his wrists, looked perfect for casting spells, especially when they waved and spun about when he drank too much. Which was quite often. I kept expecting lightning to shoot from his index finger when he’d point it to the sky after slamming a card to the kitchen table during a game of 120s hard enough to wake the dead.
“Take that, ye bastards!” he would shout, sending his false teeth sliding out his mouth before he licked them back into place with his long, lizard-like tongue.
His supernatural status was bolstered by the fact that we believed all his legendary hunting and fishing tales. Little did we kids know our parents were rolling their eyes behind us while he held us spellbound.
“I caught eight trout yesterday in about ten minutes. All on the one worm. And when I finished, I put that worm back under the rock where I found him. I swear to Jesus he winked at me before he bore back down in the ground,” Reg said, pointing to the ground with a lanky finger and winking with a wrinkled eye. “And the size of the trout! All’s I can tell ye is that I couldn’t lug ’em all the one time. I brought them up to the truck two by two. That’s all I could manage. And when I finally got the seventh and eighth one up to the truck, I couldn’t fit the bastards in the back. Had to sit two of them up in the cab next to me with the seat belt wrapped around them. I’d say I’ll be eating them till next spring.”
Me and Bernie looked at each other, silently nodding in agreement that this was not only likely but wicked cool.
No wonder we thought him capable of superhuman activity. A stubborn moose once took two of his bullets in the neck but refused to lie down. “I chased that bastard till me boots were full of sweat, yelling at him the whole time, ‘You’re not getting away with my hard-earned bullets!’ I ran him down to the edge of the pond and he finally stopped. Turned round his head and I was sure he would drop there on the beach. Well no, b’y, he gets this defiant look in his eye that just says, ‘No b’y. Not today.’ And with that he jumps in the pond and starts kicking and paddling across for all he’s worth.
“Well all I could see was me two bullets gone to waste and I couldn’t have that, so I ran up to the highest rock I could find, and I dove, sweaty boots and all, as high and as far as I could.”
Uncle Reg bent forward now and assumed a Superman flying position.
“Well I landed right on the bastard’s back and rode him right around in a circle like a cowboy on a wild buck. He headed back from where we came and was still twisting and lifting when we got to the beach. I figured he would give up for sure, but the bastard starts galloping as fast as he can. Jesus, we must have gone a quarter-mile when he finally starts to give in. I’m holding on to his antlers and what do I see in the distance but the truck! I steered his head in that direction, and I’ll be f—ked if he didn’t turn and start walking that way. I steered him left and right as the path bent back and forth to the truck.
“I was like Willie God-Damned Shoemaker up there.
“When we got to the back of truck, I slid off his back. I didn’t want to be shooting off the gun that close to the road, so I was glad when the poor bastard dropped to the ground right there and then. Pretty agreeable, he was. I’m sure if he had one more breath, he would have opened the tailgate for me. And if he had two, he would have jumped in.”
Me and Bernie looked at each other, silently nodding in agreement that this was not only possible but happened pretty much as described. Reg was strong as a bull and tough as a boot. Any one of the many injuries and illnesses he encountered would have killed a mortal, we figured.
My father once said of Reg’s strength and resilience, “You could run Reg over with a cement mixer and when you stopped to check on him, he’d already be up off the pavement, down on one knee to make sure he hadn’t knocked the base off the bottom of ’er with his head.”
We all figured nothing could ever befall him. Fate’s many attempts to bring him down were all thwarted by his heroic hardiness: Pneumonia cast aside by a hot toddy. Congestion shook off by a hard cough and a couple of fists to the chest. As Fate could not beat him, it did the only thing it could. It started removing him. Bit by bit.
Fate took its first few cuts of Uncle Reg on top of a hill in Marystown, Newfoundland, in a makeshift sawmill he erected out back of his house. Although “makeshift” does not accurately describe the contraption he assembled.
Reg’s house was nothing short of spectacular. He was an incredible woodworker and could make anything from a rough workbench to an armoire fit for royalty, and his beautifully crafted doors, cupboards, tables and desks decorated the home he’d built for himself and his family. A walk through the halls of that house was like a trip to the Governor General’s residence as far as we Petty Harbour kids were concerned.
In stark contrast, the barn-like structure in the back that housed his sawmill was bare and simple, not unlike something you might see on any farm. There was one massive difference, though: Uncle Reg’s barn had a hole in one wall the exact size of a 1977 Dodge pickup. I know this because right there, jutting out from a wall, was a 1977 Dodge pickup. It was as though someone had careened off the road, spun a circle or two and then drove the tailgate of the truck right through the side of the barn. Even more odd was the fact that the tail and flatbed had been torn off, leaving the long driveshaft exposed. On further inspection, you could see fitted to the tip of the driveshaft a thick steel disc with large, razor-sharp teeth.
“That’s the biggest saw blade I ever saw!” I was afraid to touch it but could not take my eyes off it.
“Yes, my son,” Reg said, rubbing his hands. “That could cut a twenty-four-inch log down in seconds. Just let me jump in the truck and start her up.”
He proudly slipped through a crack in the wall and hopped into the rusty cab of the truck. He turned a key, and the engine started, first flick.
“Mind your hands now!” he shouted, pressing his foot to the accelerator. The blade spun with dangerous speed. He reached to the floor and grabbed a rock about the size of an American football and lay it on the gas pedal, then slipped back into the barn, leaving the engine running and blade spinning full blast. I swear you could have cut a German tank in half in ten seconds.
“Like a James Bond movie!” Bernie shouted at me over the din.
“What?!” I leaned in.
“Like a James Bond movie! Where they try to kill the spy buddy!”
Reg could hear us, no problem. “Yes, Jesus, you’d split James Bond and Scarface and the friggin’ Grinch right down the middle right there I’d say!”
I was transfixed by the blade as they continued to yell-chat.
Bernie, ever the engineer even as a kid, said, “So it’s a direct-drive thing?! Full pedal, full spin?!”
Reg, leaning way too close to the blade, “Yes, drop a rock on the pedal and let her go full on till she runs out of gas!”
“And is there any gears?!”
“Yes, my son! One gear. High gear!”
“And do you have a safety switch or emergency-off pedal or something!? You know, if something goes wrong?!”
The lack of response made me look to Reg. He had an expression on his face that so clearly told me he’d just been asked a question that had never once occurred to him.
Mom hung up the phone after receiving the news and shouted what would be a recurring, all-too familiar call. “Reg’s on the way in to Emergency. I dare say he’ll be in here for the night. So pull out the couch.”
Fate had taken two of Reg’s fingers in the mill after his shirtsleeve got hooked in the nub of a bow and pulled his hand into the blade, severing the middle two fingers on his left hand.
Later that night, after his trip to Emergency, Reg strolled in our back-porch door with a bandage on one hand and a bottle of rum in the other. The doctors had managed to reattach part of one finger, but it left him with the most peculiar drinking hand, as he called it. In a day or so he’d have the bandages off and be back at the 120s table, slamming down a trump with his good hand while the other, recently mangled one wrapped what fingers it had left around a rum glass.
I can still picture him clutching the glass of black rum and Coke with his newly chiselled claw. His thumb was fine, pressed against one side of the glass to steady his drink. But on the other side, where four long, straight fingers should be, was a grotesque mash of swollen fingers and half-fingers and fingers that were missing altogether: Near the rim of the glass, a swollen index finger wrapped around the circumference of the glass and almost touched the tip of the thumb. On the base of the glass was a badly broken pinky with a number of stitches oozing what I hoped was blood. But it was between these two fingers that the real horror show played out.
His middle finger was, well, not there. Its stub stuck to the glass with a bloody tip, leaving nothing but a ghoulish space between the index and the ring finger. And as for his ring finger, two-thirds stuck straight out and was clearly missing its tip. It looked like they had sewn it back on, if “they” were a couple of drunken fellas on the back of a speeding moving van. Rough black stitches were crudely tied off and flesh was forced back together like the edge of a catcher’s mitt. “Frankenstein finger,” I whispered to no one.
“I’m not sure what’s grosser,” my sister Kim said with a face like someone had just let one go, “the fingers that’re there or the ones that aren’t.”
Reg would get a few more fingers nipped and arms and legs gashed in that sawmill, but Fate was not satisfied with the pace of his bit-by-bit disappearance.
So Fate took a chainsaw to his face.
Yes, that’s correct. Fate would have it that while deep in the woods, Reg’s chainsaw bucked just as he slipped on a wet bow. The spinning chain blades passed through his cheek into his mouth, cutting off half his tongue and almost passing through the other side of his face.
“Reg’s on the way in to Emergency. I dare say he’ll be in here for the night. So pull out the couch.”
A day or so later Reg strolled in the back door with a bottle of rum in one mangled hand and “a face on him like Freddy Krueger,” we all agreed. Including Reg.
So now Reg was down a finger and a half, half a tongue, a few teeth and about a third of a side of his face.
But Fate was not finished with him yet. I imagine Fate felt there was still too much of him in one spot.
So Fate gave him stomach cancer.
Yes, that’s correct. Fate gave him the kind of cancer that was treated by, you guessed it, removal of part of his stomach and “other bits of guts, I suppose,” as Reg described it. The procedure was to happen immediately.
Not long later came a familiar call from the kitchen.
“Reg’s on the way in to Emergency. I dare say he’ll be in here for the night. So pull out the couch.”
A week or so later Reg strolled in the back door with a bottle of rum in his mangled hand, a grin on his chopped-up face and a zipper in his chest from chin to bellybutton.
We all figured he was not long for this world, but he seemed unfazed by the whole deal. No facts of the matter could break his stride. Hard as nails.
To keep the chat light, me and my brother spoke one after the other as he sipped his rum.
“Jesus, Uncle Reg. You’re half the man you used to be.”
“Yes, b’y, they’re getting rid of you one part at a time.”
“There are more parts of you somewhere else.”
He rubbed his two-fingered hand over his half-face and said with the certainty of someone who knew something no one else did,
“Or I suppose I could be just rebuilding meself somewhere else.”
Me and Bernie looked at each other silently. And then we nodded in agreement that we found this not only possible but quite likely.