For my mother and brother
&
For Vanderhoof, the people and the place
A time to rend, and a time to sew...
—ECCLESIASTES 3:7A
Contents
II. WINTER
Target Practice
On Beauty
The Carol Sing
Gloria
Christmas Eve, Loop Road
By and By, Lord
III. SPRING
The Higher Kingdom
Ask Now the Beasts
The Typewriter
All the Ways to Fall
Sunday Dad
The Pledge
IV. SUMMER
Barbecue, Baptism
This Little Light
The Horse Story
Every Hidden Thing
The Lady of the Lake
Rules of War
Taking Up the Remnants
Acknowledgments
THIS IS A memoir—a work of remembering—and while I have set out to be as truthful as I can from my present vantage on the past, I know that memory is imperfect. I have purposely altered some details to preserve the anonymity of certain folks—details like names, identifying traits, occupations, and the like. I’ve also compressed some events and recreated dialogue for the narrative’s sake. But I’ve tried to write with honesty, and to fit the pieces of the story to the pattern of the truth.
Patchwork Crazy Quilt
EVERY SEPTEMBER, AS the last green of summer dropped to umber and rust, and the winds chilled toward frost, we ushered in the fall with a bonfire. This was no celebratory rite. This was cleanup from the season past and preparation for the winter ahead. In a clearing in the trees, on the same ground where last year’s fire had burned, a pile of ashes hinted at the future. Over a starter of bark scraps, lumber odds and ends, crumpled newspapers, and a few punky blocks of wood, my dad dumped gasoline from a jerry can, then took the half-smoked cigarette from his mouth and flicked it on the heap. The spark flared to sizzle, then to high-flame shock within seconds, threatening to singe our eyelashes with the heat. When the surge had calmed enough to let my mother relax her grip on the garden hose, our purge began in earnest.
Down the trail through the trees, my brother and I dragged brushwood and deadfall. From the garden, my mother carted wheelbarrow loads of ragweed, chickweed, clover, and purple thistle. We hauled paper feed bags full of feathers and chicken heads and an assortment of creature debris that crackled like live wires when tossed into the flames. My father backed up his pickup truck as close to the burn as he could get without bubbling the paint, then stood in the box, chucking out whatever garbage had accumulated. Empty cigarette cartons, warped 8-tracks, grease rags, last autumn’s Ritchie Brothers auction catalogues—the fire took it all.
After the swell of acrid smoke mellowed, we peeled willow branches, and on their whittled spear-tips jabbed half-frozen wieners, then propped them over a burning log and let the embers do their work. Weed, rot, and scrap—we fed the fire with our junk, and the fire fed us. We ate the char-dirty hot dogs roasted over a cocktail of chemicals and swore they tasted better for the blackened, ashy crust. We wore smoke in our eyes, our hair, our clothes, marking us with proof that we had eaten from the all-consuming fire and survived.
“MOST OF IT was junk,” says my mother. “Most of it not worth holding on to.”
Still, she holds on to the story, tells in snapshots and fragments of how she came to leave her Oregon childhood farm and move to a small town in the interior of British Columbia. At the mouth of the wide hole her father dug in the field beside the farmhouse, my mother, ten years old, stood with her seven siblings.
“You can each keep one thing,” their mother had told them, “that’s all we have room for.”
Into the pit of old chairs, crockery, horseshoes, twine, shingles, worn tires, and pairs of too-small shoes, they flung in what they couldn’t take—old toys, a rusted tricycle, books so warped and waterlogged the pages stuck together.
What did she take with her, I want to know, what did she save.
She tells me she can still see the wicker buggy tied with rope to the back of the overloaded truck, and the doll she held in her lap on the three-day road trip—that doll and buggy her “one thing,” what she chose to save. When I ask her why they dug that hole in the first place and left so much behind, she shrugs, lifts her hands in a “who knows?” gesture. They only took what they needed. My mother can’t recall the full catalogue of all they tossed into that pit—whatever’s gone is gone, she says—but does remember her older brother sneaking away, not wanting his possessions to end up there. Somewhere along a creek shore where the waters run from the Gooseneck river bend, he dug his own small hole in the earth and dumped in his prized marble collection, burying the aggies and shooters, the rainbows and cat’s eyes, then patted the dirt back in place and stared at it a while, as if to memorize that patch of ground for when he might return and rescue what he couldn’t keep.
The doctrine of redemption runs blood-deep and won’t let go. Below some suburb of swept sidewalks and tidy lawns lie artifacts of her childhood—of my mother’s old life—and I want to go back, to excavate the site, dig up what’s lost. I want to pick up the bits and pieces left behind and put them back together, to see the pattern in her story—our story. My story.
Everything that happened in life—every accident, argument, tragedy, and delight—pointed back to an ancient narrative. From the beginning, I learned to see the physical world as a shadow copy of a spiritual realm, that bigger story in which our smaller stories live and move and have their being. When I lay back on the scratchy grass to watch the sky, the clouds morphed into imagined creatures—this cumulus fluffball a fat hippo, that white wisp a lizard. From a