Falling Backwards: A Memoir Page 7

After about two weeks, I’d forgotten we’d ever lived in town. I didn’t miss Calgary for one second. I think I wore the same pair of Levi’s jeans for two years, until I finally outgrew them. I had a braid down the back of my head that I swear held my eyeballs in place when I rode my bike up and down those pothole-marked country roads. Every morning, my mom braided my hair as tightly as she could, and when she was done my eyebrows had a hard time moving in any direction. She knew my hair would be undone by the time I came home eight hours later; I think that’s why she braided it so tight.

  In the winter I’d sit on the heat vent when she did my hair and watch Romper Room. I loved that show. There was a segment at the end of every episode where the lady host would look through a magic mirror (a tennis racket with no strings) and call out children’s names. I always prayed that she’d say mine but she never did. I don’t think Jann was a very common name. She’d always say Janice or Janet or Janine, but never Jann. I was always disappointed. I liked watching The Friendly Giant too, but I found Rusty, the little rooster who lived in the canvas bag, kind of creepy. He hung on the wall and I always felt bad that he had to live in that bag. Knowing he was a puppet didn’t seem to ease my mind.

  I have to say that I am haunted by the number of living things Leonard and Dale and I shot or snared. Actually, I am mortified. When you’re young you have no reverence for life. You don’t realize, or I didn’t at least, the value of every living thing. I was just kind of hypnotized by Leonard and Dale and I did whatever they told me to do. The first time I ever saw them kill a gopher, I felt sick. I cried and they both looked at me like I was from another planet. I learned quickly not to cry about anything. If I was going to be part of the gang, I had to acquire a much thicker skin.

  Leonard and Dale were very skilled young hunters and crack shots. I am pretty sure they had been shooting .22-calibre rifles from the time they were four years old. I had never seen a real gun before, never mind a functioning bow and arrow. Dale could kill a magpie sitting on a branch with a bow and arrow from fifty feet away. I wanted to learn how to shoot just like he did. I wanted to be like both of them. I wanted to be able to shoot at things from fifty feet away and actually hit them. I just didn’t fancy the idea of killing anything.

  Leonard and Dale started me out by shooting cans off a fence post. They had a BB gun that you’d have to pump a number of times to build up enough pressure for it to fire the pellet. By “a number of times,” I mean at least a hundred. You were exhausted trying to fire off a single shot. As you can imagine, the BB gun was not all that powerful. Even if you had enough energy to pump it a thousand times, you could still follow the shot with the naked eye and see it arc. We’d quite often shoot at each other with it. I always had several disc-like bruises on my arms and legs. It hurt, but we’d always laugh. We actually aimed that little gun at each other’s bums and pulled the trigger. We could have lost an eye but it never dawned on any of us that we could blind each other. I am surprised we didn’t end up with anything but a few bruises. We were nuts.

  I got pretty good at knocking cans off the fence. The bow and arrow was a bit trickier. It was hard for me to pull the arrow back far enough to get any power behind the shot. Eventually, though, practice turned me into a bona fide archer. We killed thousands of magpies and an equal number of gophers. Every summer we had mounds of dead gophers piled up in our field. Leonard’s dad gave us a nickel a tail, not that we needed any incentive. We’d combine our money so we could go to the Killarney pool, which was about a three-hour walk into Calgary. Leonard and Dale’s dogs would come with us too. They would sit outside the pool on the lawn. They never went anywhere, they just waited there patiently for us to reappear. I always found that amazing. Off we’d go, walking the four or five miles to the Killarney swimming pool on 17th Avenue, with our towels tucked underneath our arms. We thought nothing of going all that way. We would wear our bathing suits under our clothes, put a few apples and some Dad’s oatmeal cookies into a bag and start out on our long walk into town. I loved every single step of our adventure. I wonder how we must have looked when cars drove by, the three of us marching along with the dogs in tow. I am surprised no one ever stopped to ask us if we were okay or where we were going.

  If we had any money left over, we’d sometimes go to the Glamorgan 10-pin bowling alley. That was another two miles west, but hey, who was counting? That would really be a perfect Saturday outing. We’d walk back home with wet bums and wet hair and bloodshot eyes. Who knew you could keep your eyes open in chlorinated water for hours on end? It felt like somebody poured salt right underneath your eyelids. I am surprised we didn’t burn our eyeballs out of their sockets. We were as happy as pigs eating onions. Nobody’s parents seemed to mind us going all that way. It’s not like anybody was the least bit concerned about any of us being abducted. It just didn’t happen back then. I know I sound like I am a hundred years old, but the seventies were so much different from how things are today. No parents these days would send three ten-year-olds off on a three-hour walk to a swimming pool. They probably wouldn’t send their kids three blocks by themselves, even if they were walking to a police station.

  I was so tired by the time I got home after a long, wonderful day of swimming and bowling that I’d just collapse through the back door. I practically fell asleep with a pork chop hanging out of my head on those days. The next day we’d be out there again, running around and playing, among other things, a rousing game of “housewife and husbands.” The game would go like this: I would pretend to be the wife in the fort we made out of plywood sheets and chicken wire, pretending to make pancakes and coffee, while Leonard and Dale would drive the go-cart around Leonard’s yard, pretending to be going to their welding jobs. Not much of a game, really. I wanted to drive the go-cart, as being a wife was very uneventful. Eventually they did let me, but I was closely monitored.

  Leonard’s dad actually was a welder in real life and he made us this awesome go-cart out of an old washing machine engine. I didn’t know that washing machines had engines. It could go about twenty-five miles an hour, which is super bloody fast when you’re four feet tall, eighty-five pounds and three inches off the ground on a lawn chair gaff-taped to a piece of plywood with four wheels on it. Sometimes I wondered why in the world I had two husbands. Oh well, these were modern times, after all.

  We also played a sinister little game called “put Dicky in the dryer.” Dicky was a boy from up the road whom Leonard and Dale tormented from time to time. I don’t know what it is with young boys, but they are part dirt and part devil. The game was simple: they put Dicky in Leonard’s mom’s dryer and turned it on. Dicky would fling around like a rag doll, hollering, and then they’d let him out. It seemed like Dicky was in there for an entire fluff cycle, but it was only seconds. He came out a bit stunned. I didn’t care much for that game. Poor Dicky. I don’t know what wasn’t right about Dicky, but he was a troubled little soul. He seemed a little off, and that was before we put him in the dryer. He was one of those kids that everybody picked on. He was constantly taunted and prodded and humiliated. I was friendly with his older sister, Ley, so I knew Dicky fairly well. Ley and I always let him tag along with us when we did things, even if it was just a walk through the field to look for ditch strawberries or Saskatoon berries.

  Once, my little brother, Patrick, invited Dicky to one of his birthday parties. My mom made a cake and went to the trouble of icing it all fancy-like, with Pat’s name scrawled across the top of it. It was time for my brother to make a wish and blow out the candles and Dicky was so excited that he forgot he had a mouthful of hot dog stuffing his cheeks. You can imagine what happened next. Dicky decided to blow out the candles too and the cake got covered in chunks of wet bun and bits of half-chewed wiener. Patrick bawled his head off, and Dicky just looked around like he didn’t know what everybody was so upset about. Mom ended up scraping all the icing off and salvaging the cake as best she could. My little brother still talks about the wiener and the birthday cake
incident.

  I think God was taking notes on the “put Dicky in the dryer” game. God was writing my name down beside it with a big black marker. I was slowly working my way to hell. At least Leonard and Dale were going to be there to keep me company.

  One of the most wonderful things about living in the country was being exposed to so many different kinds of animals. When we had lived in town, the only animals I ever saw were cats and dogs and the odd bird that flitted about in the backyard. I hadn’t seen any wild animal that had any girth to it.

  Leonard had a giant red horse named Snoopy. It was the biggest and, well, the only horse I had seen in my life. It was some kind of Clydesdale. It had a huge head and huge feet. It was as wide as it was high, and all three of us could ride on Snoopy with room to spare.

  It was quite complicated to get on that horse’s back. Not even Leonard or Dale could jump up on him, although they tried repeatedly without success. We’d finally have to put Snoopy beside a fence or use an overturned bucket to climb up on him. You’d almost have to do the Russian splits to ride him. Our legs would stick straight out to the side. Leonard would always be in the front, I’d be in the middle and Dale would bring up the rear.

  Snoopy didn’t seem to mind having three pint-sized passengers. He’d turn his head around and assess us once we’d gotten aboard, and then just snort a blast of hot, wet air out of his nose, as if to say, “What now? Where are we going, you little twerps?” Leonard would cluck his tongue and snap the reins and we’d start off out down the road. We’d go for hours on Snoopy’s back. We’d just plod along, not saying a word to each other. We’d watch the fields unfold, the long wheat pulling at our bare feet, and I do mean pulling. Dale was pulled right off by long, sticky grass once or twice, as I recall. All of a sudden I’d feel his arms rip away from my waist, and there he would be, lying on the ground, winded. I was always afraid he might never breathe again. But Dale would brush himself off and we’d pull him back up on the horse and carry on. He was a really tough little boy. No amount of pain ever fazed him. Leonard, on the other hand, could be a real baby. He would cry at the drop of pretty much anything. I liked him well enough, though, and he did own a go-cart and a horse …

  Horseback riding was such a lovely way to spend an afternoon. Birds would dart out of the grass to get out from underneath Snoopy’s massive hooves. If Leonard dared break him into a trot, the farting would start almost immediately. The gas exploding out of Snoopy’s bum sounded like a tuba submerged in water. It was loud and it stank to high heaven. We’d all start to laugh as we bumped along to the sound of one fart after another. I could never quite believe the amount of air that that horse had in its arse. If Snoopy was walking, he was all was calm and quiet, but if we broke into a trot or, God forbid, a canter, he could fart for miles. When Snoopy took a poo (and he always took a poo), he’d keep walking like nothing was happening. He could leave a poo trail for a quarter mile. We could always find our way home by following the nuggets of crap he left behind him. Kind of like Hansel and Gretel, only much more disgusting.

  Snoopy knew where we wanted to go without Leonard even having to touch the reins. All we had to do was sit on his back doing the Russian splits and enjoying the view. There was a whimsical place called Twin Bridges, where a giant arm of the Elbow River was funnelled through a steel culvert twenty feet in diameter. The water shot through it like a cannon and was a constant, ferocious flow of noisy whitecaps. It was an oasis to us. Snoopy would wade out into the river with us on his back. He’d suck in a long, slow drink and then stand there like a red, hairy statue. No amount of prodding would move him an inch. We just sat there and waited for Snoopy to finish his drink. He’d look over his shoulder at us and wonder why we were still there. He was a funny horse. He had so much personality.

  There was a pool about a hundred yards down from the culvert’s mouth that was at least ten feet deep at its centre. It was bright blue and green and the water swirled around like paint on a wheel. Leonard would flick the reins and kick his heels and steer Snoopy out into the deep water. We’d giggle like mad as the water rose up over our thighs, inching towards our waists. I’d scream at Leonard to turn us back around. I was so afraid that Snoopy would sink, but he never did. (Maybe it was all the air he had in his body.) Snoopy loved to swim. I was amazed at how agile he was, and how graceful. Snoopy would paddle like a dog and sometimes, for a brief moment, the three of us would be suspended above his back in the water. I’d hang on to Leonard’s waist and Dale would hang on to mine. It felt like I was flying. I don’t know how we didn’t float away.

  The summer days we spent barefoot and bareback on Snoopy were some of my favourites.

  Leonard and Dale and I would lie on our stomachs in a field for hours at a time, hoping to snare a gopher. They’d place the loop of a string around the gopher hole, cover it with dirt, and then take the end of the string and walk it back to a bluff and wait for the poor little gopher to pop his head up. The boys were patient. They could wait for a long, long time. Then suddenly, wham! Dale would jerk the string as the gopher tried to go back down its hole. Sadly, it wouldn’t make it. That would be the end of life as the gopher had known it. Leonard and Dale could be cruel. Killing things was just not a big deal to them. They had done it all their young lives. The gopher was usually paraded around on its string for a minute or two, looking beyond terrified, and then slammed into the side of a tree or the top of a big rock. That same thing would happen about ten or fifteen times in a single afternoon. My heart hurts thinking about the hundreds of gophers that died on those hot summer days.

  The magpies were an entirely different story. The boys would climb up a tree to get into their nests and take the babies out and set them all on the ground. The chicks didn’t know what to do; they just sat there with their mouths opening and closing. The parents would swoop down on us with every bit of courage they had, trying to thwart our evil plans. They’d scream at the top of their magpie lungs and fly at our heads. Leonard and Dale would laugh and swing at them with sticks, and I would usually just scream and duck. Magpies are big birds. Their black-and-white wing span can be up to two feet across. They were cruel scavengers themselves, not that that justified the boys’ actions. Magpies eat all the pretty birds’ eggs. That’s what mom would tell me: the robins’ and the blue jays’ and the sparrows’. The magpies would go into their nests and eat all the eggs or the little chicks that were waiting for their mothers. Cruel birds indeed. The magpie chicks were usually featherless and pink, depending on how old they were, and as round as a baseball. Leonard and Dale would just smash them with rocks or hit them with old tree branches like they were swinging at baseballs. I did it too, not often, but I certainly would participate on occasion. I buried two magpie chicks in a ditch once, and I have never forgotten it. I buried them alive and I feel sick about it to this day. I felt God watching me and shaking his head. I felt like God had his big notepad out and he was writing my name down again.

  You get those flashes of memories in front of your face that steal your breath from your chest. I see piles of dead birds and gophers. I see their little faces, I really do, and am instantly ashamed. Youth and its boundless, heartless atrocities.

  As cruel as the boys could be, they often showed mercy and empathy. I saw them many times try to nurse a baby gopher back to health with an eye dropper when the wee thing had been separated from its mother (probably because we killed her). I saw them from time to time rescue a stunned bird after it had hit a window. I’d seen them gently hold kittens and ooh and aah about how cute they were. They always surprised me. They had so many layers to them. They were never cruel to their dogs; they always looked after them, making sure they were always well fed, with fresh water to drink. I came to understand that to them some animals were expendable. I would not have wanted to be a gopher or a magpie between 1971 and 1976 in Springbank, Alberta.

  Leonard and Dale’s grandparents had a whole bunch of pigs in pens and chickens running about without a ca
re in the world on their farm. (They used to raise minks in the fifties and sixties during the big mink coat fad, I was told. I remember my gram having a mink stole complete with the head still on it. I loved to play with it. Thank God they don’t have those anymore.) Their chickens had huts but they weren’t put into them very often. It was every chicken for himself, I guess you could say.

  Before we moved out there, I had seen pictures of pigs, but I had never actually seen one up close and personal. It was shocking, to tell you the truth. These were huge pigs! They were the size of small ponies and they were filthy and fat and they wanted nothing more than to get out of their pens and eat us alive. They had huge teeth. You wouldn’t think a pig would have huge teeth, but these did! And they had long, coarse hair. The hair looked more like quills than hair. Pigs have little beady eyes that follow you around like one of those creepy paintings. No matter where you go, the pigs’ eyes are glued to you, following every move you make. We loved going down to the farm and climbing up onto the pens to throw old onions at them, or rotten eggs. There were dozens of eggs all over the place. The grandparents both liked nothing more than to sit and drink their generic beer and puff away on their hand-rolled cigarettes, so things were kind of going to pot around there. Thank God they weren’t smoking pot, because that would have been the end for the pigs and the chickens.

  We spent hours pestering those pigs. They’d rush at the fence and smash into the side of it so hard that the ground would shake. We’d laugh hysterically and then lob a couple dozen more eggs at their heads. The funny part was that they ate everything we threw at them. They couldn’t swallow those onions fast enough. As soon as we pelted them with a giant rotten onion, one pig would rush over to pick it up, throw its head madly back and eat it in one fell swoop. The pigs made the weirdest sounds. They certainly didn’t go “oink, oink.” They sounded more like angry dinosaurs than anything else. They can squeal if they want to, too—it can be high-pitched and completely horrifying, like a baby being thrown down a well. (Not that I know what that sounds like.)