I remember 1956. I remember 1956 because I was young, growing fast and usually hungry.
My youngest brother – a chubby, happy guy – had been born in February. Those were the days when pregnant women were put to sleep to give birth, and children weren’t allowed inside the hospital, except as patients. My dad held my hand as we stood in the thick snow outside the nursery window and a matron in a long-sleeved starched uniform held up the blue-swaddled bundle as if he was a ham on display. I remember that I wore a dark brown hand-me-down coat with a fake black Persian lamb collar. My rubber over-the-shoe boots zipped up from the toes halfway up my skinny calves. I remember that my fingers and toes always felt thick and stiff in winter, no matter how many pairs of hand-knitted mittens or socks I wore.
We were living in an old farmhouse in Ontario Wine Country. My father – always the dreamer – had spied the ‘for sale’ advertisement in a weekend newspaper in Montreal, and had decided that if he couldn’t be a coffee farmer in Liberia (thank you, Mom, for saying no to that insanity), he could be a fruit farmer in the Niagara Peninsula. Back then, the Queen Elizabeth highway was more like a two-lane suburban road, but he set out after his machinist job on a Friday night, drove the old Studebaker half the night, walked the 16 acres and decided to buy it. Without consulting my mother, of course, because she undoubtedly would have said that the idea was madness.
We left behind all of the family we’d ever had – uncles, aunts, cousins, and our community – to start over in rural Ontario. We were dirt poor but stone rich on that blighted piece of property. There was a house – barely. It was poorly insulated, with a leviathan furnace in the basement complete with a coal bin. Thin concrete floors over dirt. No running water – unless you’d call an indoor pump in the cellar, ‘running’. No indoor toilet, no central heating. An attic that turned into a sauna in the summer and grew icicles in the winter.
My mother was a city girl, convent school educated. She didn’t have a driver’s licence and was stuck at the farmhouse with four children under twelve. I was the eldest, but oblivious as only a bookworm on the cusp of puberty could be. She died before I could gather the courage to ask her what it was really like back then, and push for her to tell me the unvarnished truth.
With a family of six and no indoor plumbing, my mother was seldom still. Sometimes though, after school, when the baby was asleep, Mom would stop what she was doing for a moment and sit at the kitchen table with her hands in her lap, staring into the air. I’d ask what was wrong. She’d smile a tiny smile and wrap me in a mother-fragrant hug. Her hair was soft against my cheek. Mom would give me that special raised eyebrow.
“I have something to show you,” she’d say, as if it were the first time ever. “Go wash your hands and face.”
She’d flip up the kitchen curtain to make sure my younger brothers were within earshot and hadn’t impaled themselves on a farm implement. Then she’d turn off the stove and climb slowly up the narrow wooden stairs to the attic, wiping her fingers on her apron, her shoes squeaking on the rubber risers. The narrow stairway smelled of soup. She would stop about four steps from the top and wait for a minute, head bowed, her breath loud in the shadowy passage.
Beside her right shoulder was a door sunk into the dark wood paneling. There was a small brass handle in the middle, with pointy edges like a small bird’s beak. She’d turn the handle, then fold the door back so that it wouldn’t bang. I’d push by to stand a step higher up so I could see inside. She’d stretch her arm in – it was as if her fingers had eyes – and she’d tug the rusty chain that dangled from the rafters. The lemony light would cast her smooth brown features into sharp shadows. Dust swirled around the bare bulb, disappearing deep into the shadowy attic and reappearing in the beams of light from random gaps in the shingles. Our breath fluttered the cobwebs like pale sails. I remember shivering, wondering if we were disturbing someone who hid there and who’d only come out when the door wasn’t open.
