Wigford Rememberies. Kyp Harness
English and Scots and Irish came to steal and squat, and before that massive glaciers one time sailed these fields majestic as any cruise ship.
But for a while there was simply an old man who sat at the kitchen table reading a newspaper through a magnifying glass, who got up periodically to spit his tobacco into the fire of his old stove, who looked out the window and made note of the very occasional cars that slowly passed by, knowing each one and whom they belonged to, who got up and pulled his chair up to the telephone in the next room to make a call, who was lonely and old, who looked expectantly down the road for company, who had thrown a lifetime of work and sweat into the land, who had known hardship and tragedy and sickness, who had found comfort in tissue paper hymnals and sunlight through painted glass and a fifty-year favoured pew, and who still lay in a darkened bedroom and feared death.
For a while there was just an old farmer the world was passing by at the speed of light, and he rose in his plaid shirt, put down his magnifying glass, opened the door and called out, Well! Come in, come in! and You’ll be staying for supper, won’t you?
The Hole
On a bright Sunday summer morning a young boy plays in a hole at the end of the laneway by a gravel road: the purpose of the hole being to serve as a receptacle for an intended fence post—he can crouch in the hole and hide himself entirely from view, looking at the side of the hole, the brown-grey earth freshly dug, cold, damp, with the severed gnarly roots of weeds and assorted stones embedded in it.
From the house (his home) a distance behind him, he hears the voice of his mother shouting angrily, in slashing-white flashes like the edges of breaking glass. The boy stands up and turns to see his father come trudging silently from the house with stoic determination, his pace as matter-of-fact and blank as the expression on his face, a bag of golf clubs slung over his shoulder.
The boy ducks down in the hole as his father comes walking to him, then slowly raises his head to take a quick peek, noting how his father has magically appeared closer in the interim, grown larger. He ducks back down and counts to three, then looks up from the dank clay and cold, quiet smell of the earth to see his father now looming above him against the sky, squinting down the road.
The boy allows his gaze to travel down his father’s pants and focuses on his shoes now so close beside him he can see the texture of their canvas, the metal around the eyelets where the laces come through. He hurriedly ducks down again, making enough movement so that his dad will take note of his presence.
“Hey, partner,” comes the deep, quiet voice with a chuckle. “Playin’ out here in this hole again, eh?” He takes the golf clubs from his shoulder and sets them down on the gravel. The boy looks up at him, his eyes level with the ground, seeing his father’s face and shoulders floating high above the blades of wild grass.
“Be sure you don’t get those pants too dirty,” his father says, pulling a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his shirt.
The boy pulls at a root sticking from the wall of the hole, looking over and up at his dad from the corner of his eye. “Why’s Mom yellin’?” he asks.
“Oh, she’s mad,” his father begins, pausing to light his cigarette and replacing his lighter in his pants, exhaling a swift stream of smoke. He squints off down the road and resumes. “Oh, she’s mad, I suppose, ’cause I’m goin’ out golfin’ and, you know, she don’t like that.” He stands with one hand in his pocket, smoking his cigarette, gazing down the road.
“How come?” his son asks, now staring at an ant crawling on a leaf at eye level, hearing the constant hum he always hears on bright summer mornings and smelling the different smell cigarette smoke always has outside.
“Oh well, your mother doesn’t understand, or…” He pauses, revising his thought before delivering it emphatically to the end of the road, “…doesn’t want to understand, I guess, that a man has got to be able to go out and relax himself every so often after he’s been workin’ like the devil all week long to keep the bills paid.” He frowns and shrugs, offering the proposition: “I mean, it’s only reasonable, eh? I mean, what the hell, ol’ Dad’s gotta be able to go out and play sometimes, too, eh?” he asks, looking down at his son in the hole.
“I guess so,” says the boy, watching the tiny legs of the ant.
“Sure,” says his father, tilting his head. “Go out, see his buddies, have a good time. I mean, what the hell, eh pal?”
The boy looks up at him, smiling, and nods, to not have him ask the question again, as far in the distance a swelling cloud of dust announces a car coming along the road…
“Maybe,” the boy says quietly, “if she gets too mad you can come out here and stay in the hole with me, and we can live out here.”
His father turns to the car coming up the road, his arm outstretched and waving at it, then he reaches down for his clubs, swinging them over his shoulder as the car comes up, crackling on the gravel. He looks back at his son for a moment, blankly, as if he’s forgotten something. “What?” he says, then smiles with a short, surprised laugh. “Thanks, little buddy, but I don’t think there’d be enough room for the both of us in there, do you?”
“Hey, Buzz! Let’s go!” the men are calling from the windows of the car. There are two in the front seat and two in the back, all smiling and chuckling.
“Right-o!” he replies, jogging over to throw his clubs in the trunk.
“Get out okay this mornin’, Buzz?” a grinning red-faced man asks from the front seat as the boy’s father reaches for the handle of the door.
He shares a quick teeth-flashing smile with the man then turns to his son as he climbs into the car, pointing at him. “You be good now,” he says sternly with a sudden frown, then bows and shoves himself into the back beside the other men. The car door slams and they drive off, the gravel crackling and the dust billowing behind them as they roar down the road.
The boy stands in the hole, crouching low and counting to three, then popping up again, noting how the car grows smaller, suddenly leaps up the road farther. He ducks down again then slowly eases his head up to peer solemnly over the edge of the hole, noting now how the car has suddenly and magically become no more than a distant billow of dust, now shrinking, now dissipating into the still morning air.
A Man Who Really Could See
In the years in the country on the days when our parents were working, my brother and I were left in the care of Daddy Jack and Momma Simpson and their family at their pig farm on the highway.
Daddy Jack sits at the kitchen table in the early predawn hours—the sky through the window purple, almost green. He sits there beneath the yellow light bulb, a butt between his fingers, the ashtray before him overflowing with the broken brown tobacco crumbling from the half a pack he smoked before we rose—his face pulpy and clustered, a reddish brown, his large, hawk, Native nose (he’s part Chippewa) and his tiny black eyes rimmed with weary satchel bags bespeaking a tiredness and a sadness beyond his years. A FARMER’S CO-OP calendar is on the wall behind him—the month is April.
Fat Momma Simpson serves oatmeal from off the stove. Daddy Jack don’t want any—Daddy Jack don’t eat much, mostly just drinks beer. Sometimes when he gets hungry, say three in the morning, he hauls a big steak out from the freezer in the basement, fries it rare and eats it out of the pan, the blood sloshing ’round in the bottom of it.
Now from his bed comes Daddy Jack’s son Jack Junior whom they call Bud—his long black hair ruffled up and sticking out all over, tall and thin, his ribs like ladders. He sits down at the table and lights up a smoke. Momma Simpson is talking about the retarded kids again—she does volunteer work with the retarded kids—wants to bring them around to the farm for a day.
“We don’t want no fuckin’