When Fenelon Falls. Dorothy Ellen Palmer
straight: your father had six children, two alive, three lost to death and one lost to life. How could I hate her? We are so much alike, loving the same man’s missing children, loving him despite his other women.
If I could tell you anything, my darling lost daughter, here’s what I’d say. I’d tell you that I loved you when we made you and every day I carried you. I’d tell you he remembered. A year to the day, a Birks box arrived. How he got my address, I’ll never know. It held a locket, pure silver, and a note with three little words: ‘Remembering our hurricane.’
When Walter finally made me give you up, the last time I saw you, I put that locket around your neck. I hope they let you keep it. I keep his book – I like to think of it as our book – under my pillow, with his note tucked safely inside. He’d see my sacrifice as a true profile in courage: ‘Ask not what your child can do for you. Ask what you can do for your child.’
My answer was to give you to the world. So today, when the known world mourns, I have in all my sorrow a place of secret joy. Imagine it! I alone, in all the world, know you are alive. My secret song. Who will you be, child of mine, child of ours, somewhere out in the world? Who will you be without us? Yourself, I hope, your one true self. That’s everything your father and I could have wanted.
So, my darling, be brave. Be kind. Be nice to Boy Scouts. Because, sweetheart, you just never know who may be standing right behind you, longing to know your name. In my heart, that stranger will always be me. Know that I love you forever, wherever and whoever you may be. For every second of yesterday, tomorrow and especially today, Friday, November 22, 1963. Say goodbye, my darling. Wherever you are, put your arms around the television set and kiss your daddy goodbye.
COLOR HIM FATHER
I know it’s merely Scottish superstition that a bad beginning seldom makes a good ending, but I often wonder if all the late and unappreciated arrivals in the early days of that summer added up to something so heavy that they pushed time out of joint, if we somehow jinxed the whole damn thing. Better late then never? Now there’s a proverb never uttered by a March.
As we came over the Rosedale Bridge and pulled off the highway on to March Road, the crunch of new gravel under Tessie’s tires announced the first thing we’d missed: the Rock Concert. That’s what the uncles had taken to calling the laying of fresh gravel on our winding road from the highway into March. By dictum of the Arrival Protocol, it got refreshed each summer at the crack of dawn on the first Saturday. We look like this: Hezzy – you’ll meet him in a minute – shows up with a load of gravel from Fenelon rock-’n’-rolling around in the flatbed of his ancient truck Bessie B. The uncles debate the division of the bill and pay him for it. Hezzy drives slowly with Bessie’s crib open. All male Marches bigger than a shovel display their shirtless manhood, flinging gravel as if the swamp were gaining on them. The scrunch of stone, the scrape of metal shovels on metal bed, the bellowing of Bessie B, all makes for some decidedly discordant music. Dad played backup shovel and he’d left his band shorthanded.
So when we landed in Rosedale that Saturday the 28th of June, we weren’t in Toronto anymore, but only Grandma was over the rainbow to see us. The rest of March, who probably liked Ms. Garland well enough but saw no reason why her death should change anything, had marched as ordered on Friday. They stood primly at attention beside budding red roses, glaring at our rusty brown Ford and radiating indignation. We’d better have a darn good reason. When they judged it, and us, inadequate yet again, they eyed Tessie’s overflowing trunk tied half shut with binder twine. Tessie, named after Bessie, didn’t know she wasn’t a truck and obliged MC by hauling a rig’s worth of cottage accoutrements. Knowing it would take us all day to unpack alone, knowing that the Arrival Protocol dictates that a March always helps a March settle in, they asked themselves if they owed that courtesy to a Johnny-Come-Lately March? Hmm … Maybe not. Grandma hugged Jordan and kissed her ear. Aunt Elsbeth, who had boys but no girls, smiled at her and lifted a box or two until Uncle Gavin hollered at his wife to go back to their place to get him a beer. As uncles drifted off, they each had to remind Dad that he’d missed the Rock Concert. Dad’s name got nicked by gravel that day; Uncles called him several versions of Lazy Bum, with commiserating eye rolls in the direction of the whip cracking in the kitchen.
One might expect forgiveness. One might even assume that spending all summer, every summer, cheek to jowl with every living member of March would produce a strong sense of clan, of identity and belonging. Good ones. Logical but wrong. Proximity is not intimacy. We drove north to face thirty-odd Marches with whom we shared little more than a last name, all shoehorned into our Group of Seven cottages, so many cousins we didn’t know what to do. And we’d just done the one thing March could not forgive: we’d snubbed tradition. Again.
It goes way back. My grandparents came to Balsam Lake in 1921, before my dad, the baby, was even born. The local Anglican parish couldn’t afford a year-round minister, but in summer, their ranks swelled with the owners of catamarans, they could. They offered my schoolteacher-minister grandfather a summer job on the condition that he accept in payment what was then worse-than-worthless: seven acres of undeveloped Kawartha lakefront. Hezzy’s father, the farmer who offered it, had no use for it. It had no road, much of it was swamp, and he’d lost too many calves, some to snappers and some to the misguided bovine belief that their kind could swim across the bay and live to tell the tale. Grandpa quickly accepted.
He spent a decade burning bush and building March One, painting it in English Countryside like his church, snow white with forest-green trim. He planted the same cedar seedlings and English primroses around both, hardy and red. He put in a gravel road and spent a summer up to his neck in warm water, lugging much bigger rocks into a crib for his dock. The very day he mortared the last rock in the rustic stand-up fireplace, legend has it, he stood up, keeled over and died. Grandma’s cottage had been hers alone for forty years. High on a promontory that jutted into the bay, surveying the lake from three angles and her vast Victory garden from the fourth, she had the coldest well and the best breeze.
And the rest of us? It was an era of romantic wood-burnt names, of letters blackened into slabs of heavily varnished yellow pine, sliced like thick bananas, still sporting bark: ‘Kawartha Hideaway,’ ‘Rose of Rosedale,’ ‘Cozy-cat Cottage.’ More signs than I could count stole Fenelon’s nickname and proclaimed themselves ‘The Jewel of the Kawarthas.’ March disdained signs; we named by number or, as Jordan put it, only halfway joking, by rank.
Second in command, stationed just down the hill from Grandma, sat Aunt May’s March Two, built like a mini Eiffel Tower, an exact but scaled-down replica of March One. Technically our great-aunt, Grandpa’s sister and therefore Dad’s aunt, Aunt May crossed the pond during the war to avoid the bombs. In double disappointment, not only did she fail to go back across the pond in time to get hit by one, she never returned at all. When Dad asked Jordan why she wouldn’t call her ‘Great-Aunt May,’ Jordan looked him dead on and answered smooth as Brylcreem, ‘But, Dad! The Reverend Southwell says a lie can imperil your immortal soul!’
In the fifties, Grandma’s five children, now with their own growing families, planted their roses and their white-and-green cottages in birthright pecking order, all identically replicating the curve of the bay. From out in Grandma’s canoe, we looked like teeth with spinach trim.
March Three was the only custom-designed cottage, home to cousins Grayden, Cranston Jr., Gavin Jr., Dexter and, of course, Derwood. Dad’s only sister, Aunt Elsbeth, had ‘married well’ by ‘snagging’ Uncle Gavin, who made a fortune in post-war construction. I had visions of a big cartoon hook like the one that drags Snagglepuss offstage. Jordan laughed and quoted Mom: A rich man’s wooing need seldom be a long one. She said the real hook was Grayden’s birthdate. That Uncle Gavin had been a war buddy of Uncle Howie. That Uncle H felt sorry for his pal when he had nowhere else to go one Christmas, so Uncle H brought him home for turkey and his sister. Uncle G had been so grateful to marry into March that he became one. His last name wasn’t his anyway. At ten, he’d been sent over from Wales to some farmer out in Belleville who’d used him as a hired hand and a punching bag, stashed him in the barn and beat him senseless on a nightly basis for no other reason than because he could. Uncle G flatly refused to give his kids ‘that