But this is a real life, lived by a real river, and this is a real woman in real pain. These are components of human happiness, such as it is.
HARTLEY FAWCETT was a lifelong connoisseur of roast beef. He’d been a salesman for a meat-packing company after all, and he knew his cuts: shell bone for an oven roast, baron of beef for barbecuing, always on a rotisserie, and don’t put any Smarties on it: beef should taste like beef, not like some garlicked-up stew, and not slathered with crap that makes it taste like it escaped from a delicatessen. I don’t think I ever saw him actually put anything in the oven—the kitchen, as I’ve noted, belonged solely to my mother while she was alive—but he critiqued every roast she cooked, and without mercy. When he cranked up the barbecue, it was bugger off and don’t offer advice.
We ate a lot of roast beef, and there was just one way for it to arrive on the table: rare. Not medium rare, not blue, but rare. If the serving platter wasn’t at least a centimetre deep in juices by the time he’d carved a half-dozen slices from it, there was an uproar and it wasn’t just my father making the critique. We all preferred beef the same way, and at the close of dinner there was a 30-second period of grace where table manners were suspended so we could spoon the platter clear—now 2 centimetres deep in juices. That concluded, English table manners were reinstated and we sedately ate our desserts as if we were civilized people.
While I was a kid, corporate executives from the companies from whom my father held franchises—Orange Crush, Pepsi-Cola, and Canada Dry—periodically showed up to cavort with the country yokels, and, I suppose, to make sure we were upholding the corporations’ standards. If they happened to be in town over the weekend, these men would be invited to Sunday Roast Beef Dinner.
My mother cooked these roasts, but it was my father who carved them. He owned a carving knife with a 25-centimetre blade that he honed so finely that it was sharp enough to shave with. He used it to carve carpaccio-thin slices from the roast. Then, deploying the deep notch at the tip of the blade, he’d serve these thin slices by flicking them, Frisbee style, across the dinner table so that they landed on the guests’ plates, splat! Depending on how stuffed the shirts of these out-of-town guests were, he would warn them of what he was about to do—or not. He never missed his target, and I’m not exactly referring to whether the slices of beef landed on the right dinner plate, which they nearly always did. My mother, who officially disapproved of this practice but occasionally cracked a small smile when he did it, then passed the Yorkshire pudding, which was her specialty, and asked the guests how they were enjoying northern British Columbia.
Few of these men asked for second helpings. If they did, they received it the same way, and though they seldom understood it, they’d passed a test of character that my father took more than just a little seriously. He didn’t respect men he could intimidate.
At the last Family Reunion my father attended, and the first one at which he had not personally executed the barbecuing of the baron of beef, we also held a shareholders’ meeting for the family company so we’d all be able to write off the expense of getting there. My father was 98 at the time, and had given up control of the company several years before, so his presence at the meeting was largely ceremonial—or would have been had he not been who and what he was.
My brother gave a short recitation of the company acquisitions and expenses for the year just passed, blah, blah, then brought in his accountant to explain the fine details, blah, blah. My father listened to everything said, but asked no questions. In fact, he seemed vaguely bored, an uncharacteristic response that had me suspecting he was up to something. As the meeting wound down, my brother, looking as wary as I was feeling, paused ostentatiously, and asked my father if he had anything he wanted to say. My father said nothing for a moment, almost as if he hadn’t heard the question. But then he gathered himself in his chair, reflected for a longer interval, and said, yes, as a matter of fact, he did have something to say. But first, he wanted a glass of water. Several of us moved to get it for him, but no, he’d get it himself.
He got to his feet, shook himself like a retriever exiting a lake with a duck in its mouth, and disappeared into the house, leaving us to stew over what he was about to do to us. Each of us assumed we were in for a tongue-lashing, but about exactly what, we had no clue. I thought it was going to be about the modest directors’ fees the company paid us, which my brother had seen fit to increase. My brother shrugged when I asked if he thought that was what we were going to get it for, saying that my father already knew about the increase, and appeared not to mind. “It’s something else,” he said.
My father was gone several long minutes, and when he returned, there was no glass of water in his hand. He sat down at the head of the table, genuflected for a moment, then sat up in his chair and looked each of us in the eye, one after another.
“I didn’t like the beef this year,” he said, and launched into a detailed critique of how it had been dry, overcooked, and tasteless. My brother tried to explain that his wife’s family preferred their beef well-done, but my father wasn’t having any of that, and by this point, I’d changed sides. The beef hadn’t been very good, and my father was completely right.
We sat through the diatribe, stunned but relieved. He was almost through before I caught the slight grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. He never again talked about business to any of us except my brother. But he wanted us to know he hadn’t lost his stuff.
HARTLEY FAWCETT had a fruitful relationship with Lady Luck. His most serious scrape, in 1947, involved the car he was driving and a bull moose. The car was totalled and the moose died, but he walked away with nothing more than a few bruises and a good story to tell his customers.
It wasn’t that he was manic about risk avoidance, either. He just didn’t volunteer himself or his money when the odds were against him, and he possessed a mental and physical agility that was as much instinctual as learned. He was a frugal man, he worked hard without ever putting his head down or cutting corners, and he never made a show of whatever cards he held. When he saw an opportunity, he thought it through and if he decided it was a good one, he lunged, with coordination and absolute concentration.
He was also physically tough, and as I’ve noted, he had the courage of a man with strong convictions. He didn’t start fights unless it was with Ron and me and when he was in one he kept his wits about him, counterpunched, and when he did, he hit as hard as he could.
When I was 11 years old I was with him when a logger in a pickup truck rear-ended us. My father asked me if I was okay, then got out of the car, looked at the slight damage to his car, and shrugged. From inside the car, I watched the logger stagger out of his truck and lurch toward my father, who pointed to the back of our car and said something, probably about the logger’s lousy driving skills or his state of sobriety. The logger, a man at least 10 centimetres taller, instantly launched a haymaker. My father easily dodged the punch, and as the logger wound up for another, my father hit him with two short punches, a right and a left, bang, bang. The logger went sprawling, unconscious, across the sidewalk.
My father got back into the car, muttered “stupid bastard,” and drove off. He was scowling, but he wasn’t even breathing hard. I don’t think he was cursing out the logger as much as he was criticizing his dumb tactics.
Lucky? I guess so. But steely