When Fenelon Falls. Dorothy Ellen Palmer

      Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges and appreciates the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

      Although the places in When Fenelon Falls are real, the characters are fictional, the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblence to real people, living or dead, is coincidental – except for Yogi the bear, who really did live in a cage in Rosedale, Ontario.

      This epub edition published in 2011. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 277 6

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Palmer, Dorothy Ellen, 1955-

      When Fenelon falls / Dorothy Ellen Palmer.

      ISBN 978-1-55245-239-4

      I. Title.

      PS8631.A449W44 2010 -- C813’.6 -- C2010-904980-2

      To my good witches of the north, Dale Nevison and Marianne Froehlich, and to the wonderful wizard who is my daughter, Severn Nelson.

      If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

      – George Bernard Shaw

      It was a wind with a woman’s name that caused the trouble ... Hazel, fickle and frantic, had come to call with all her fury.

      – CBC Archives for Hurricane Hazel, October 15, 1954

      Now many moons and many Junes have passed since we made land.

      A salty dog, this seaman’s log: your witness my own hand.

      – ‘A Salty Dog,’ Procol Harum

      ALONG CAME JONES

      In the summer of 1969, I ran full speed into a bear cage – one complete with bear. But don’t break out the bagpipes. That August 17 at 4:37 p.m. was one clean moment in an otherwise down and dirty summer, a heat of error, envy and malevolent stupidity. There’s no easy explanation and little excuse. I was a kid; I was sick of being blown around by my baby sister; I had to put someone out of her misery. All true, but not all the answer you deserve. The only answer my reckless teenage self could see was a dancing bear. So I partnered one.

      The tale is forty years and counting, years I’ve spent asking, ‘How do I begin?’ Jordan would have called that ‘The Seminal Question, Pun Intended,’ but I lack her wits and her wit. I’m kiltless, so bear with me. Unless you count the impersonal sagacity of Scottish proverbs, this memoir has no wardrobe of family lore to dress the scene. I own no letters tied with ribbon, no journals from front or farm, no family Bible that survived a perilous Atlantic, Gaelic motto intact. For these beginnings, there’s nothing to do but pull up your stool and sit down.

      We’ll make do with living memory. With the sound of a cowbell ringing on the night of the moonwalk, Sunday, July 20. With a sunset on Balsam Lake, one rude day’s end that left my sister on the dock, her feet in the water, her back to the path. Like her, you’ll have to make do with me. Me at fifteen. One year her elder and an easy foot taller. Straight black hair, bone thin and criminally self-important. What am I doing? Memory has me fetching her, running from the cottage in a flickering of shadow like one of my father’s home movies. I’d call myself her less-than-dutiful errand boy. Her legs man. Her second pair of worse-than-useless shoes. But when memory isn’t lying outright, it leaves things right out. There’s always a more inclusive truth, and here it is. That night and any other day? Same difference. I was always out to get her. It was the hallmark of that silver summer. My lone hunting season.

      That’s pathos you’re hearing, not self-pity. And good intentions, but President Kennedy was bang on when he said we all know where that paving leads. For me it leads to our dock, to the moment where for once I arrived in time, just as the sun melted into the bay beyond. Flame encircled my sister’s head. When she turned to me, I was blind and she was beatified – a corona of wild copper, a Medusa ablaze. Do myth and martyrdom seem improbably entwined, this early in the story? Good. This is a yarn of tangled tale ends, unravelled by me, a classic tail-ender. Ghastly puns? A snocksnarled lore of mixed metaphor and multiple beginnings? Welcome to the clan.

      ‘C’mon! It’s almost time to walk on the moon!’ No reaction. ‘It’s safe, kiddo. They’re acting like nothing happened.’ In the slightest of movements, my sister lowered her head. Cicadas answered for her. Impatience answered for me. ‘Can it, BS! I won’t miss Neil Armstrong just because you’re slower than molasses in January.’

      Splashing stopped. A spine slumped. Corkscrew curls drooped red on worn grey boards.

      BS? Short for Baby Sister and the obvious – terms more than synonymous in my book. And molasses in January? Perhaps it flows faster the other eleven months of the year. In any event, here’s your first taste of Marchspeak, my family name and mother tongue, and the first tinge of regret. Mine, that is – yours comes later. Truth be told, twenty-plenty awaits us both.

      The cowbell commanded a second time. Still in Sunday best, BS pulled off her glasses and scoured them on the hem of that stupid yellow sundress. Like they held all the dirt on the planet. Twisting it like a length of rope, she knotted her hair. She sighed, coaxed a reluctant left foot, struggled into shoes. A clear moment to stop for sorry, a gift I didn’t take.

      She stood, gained her balance and shrugged. ‘Lead on, MacBluff!’

      ‘What? We’ve been counting down for weeks and on the night, you don’t care?’

      Her answer took eons and was, of course, another question. ‘Guess what Leonardo da Vinci called the greatest engineering device known to man?’

      ‘What? The rocket? Something he invented? The helicopter or the submarine?’

      ‘Nope. The human foot.’ She hefted one of hers. ‘See?’ The heavy black leather of her new corrective oxfords caught the last line of sun. ‘It’s imperfectly perfect.’

      I didn’t know what to say to that. None of us did. Never at a loss for words, my family has no language for loss. So I got snarky. ‘Well, Miss Imperfect, it’s the twentieth century. Leo would be far more impressed by us, by our feet on the moon! Now that’s perfect.’ I figured I’d topped her. For once. She let me gloat the length of the path. More would have been illusory.

      ‘Our feet? Really? And who is this us?’ She’d clomped each stair for matching emphasis, but turned on the landing. ‘And just exactly what will a dirty footprint or two on a dead and distant celestial body actually change? For us, I mean?’

      ‘Don’t be a retard. It changes everything!’ I beat her to the door.

      ‘Sure thing.’ She pushed past me. ‘Presto! It’ll heal the lame. Presto encore! It’ll find the lost and free Yogi. And presto miraculous! It’ll turn Aunt May and MC into – ’

      ‘Jordan May March!’ MC’s stilettos announced her arrival from the addition. She folded her Toronto Star under one arm to retie the silk bow on her pink sweater. Combat-ready, her orders followed: ‘Speak when you’re spoken to. Do what you’re bidden. And for goodness’ sake, come when you’re called! If you want to join us, Missy, you’d best be silent.’

      ‘Roger Wilco, Mother Control!’ Jordan saluted her. ‘Per-Mission Controlled. Maintaining radio silence, as