When Fenelon Falls. Dorothy Ellen Palmer
Ph.D dissertation: The Cultural Anthropology of Illicit Mid-twentieth-century Refuse. Pun intended. I’m sure my father’s exuberant landfill practices violated every known dumping code, even back then. Was any of it toxic? Let’s hope the oil drums were empty. Let’s hope they were oil drums.
Whenever a patch of swamp solidified into chunky duckweed stew, Dad would whistle for Balsam. He’d say the same thing every time: ‘Gotta see a man about a rock.’ A few days later there’d be a familiar threatening sound, a mechanical growl that by the time it reached us sounded like some fool firing a machine gun at a tank, a din that only got worse until Mr. Eustache Hezekiah Gale cut Bessie’s engine and she dropped her load.
Jordan dropped whatever she was doing and ran. She loved Hezzy. The rest of us kept double distance. It’s not kind but it’s true: he looked like both of them, Popeye and Olive Oyl. Short and muscular, he had the longest arms I’ve ever seen; brown and bandy, he carried them curved like a ready gunslinger, hanging to his knees. But he also had slicked-back black hair and tiny black eyes set much too close together. He had a chipped right front tooth that had turned equally black. He shaved on Sundays and on the other six days had a face full of Brillo pad. Jordan would launch into his arms and he’d say, ‘Here’s a girlie wants to be tickled pink!’ He’d swoop her up and give her a whisker rub that could’ve scraped paint. She’d sit in his lap and ask yet again how he got his name: ‘Well, girlie, it seems I got me one grandaddy from Kee-bec an’ another from In-ver-ness. My mama, she called me after the Frenchie one, but I stuck with the one that wouldn’t get me beat up after school.’
Hezzy knew where to dump without having to ask. He’d cut the ignition of his rust-green 1930s pickup, get out and lean on the door. He’d slip his key, that’s key singular, not keys, into his overalls chest pocket, trading it for his Buckinghams and a book of matches from the Pattie House, his watering hall in Coboconk. Then he’d pat his best girlie’s ass and say, ‘Good one, Bessie B.’ Twice the size of the putt-putts we call trucks today, Bessie Behemoth would call a Hummer ‘junior’; she hauled rocks enough for a personal mountain. And Hezzy had one. Thanks to a glacier that paused and took a dump between Cobie and Rosedale some uncountable number of years ago, creating a rock face that still stares at you as you’re driving up Highway 35, local farmers had more rocks than they could ever use. The first settlers, many of them rock-savvy Highlanders, tried. Better bend than break. You can still see stone houses, stone fences and old stone roads. But there are only so many ways to bend a rock, and a century has dated their usefulness. Hezzy saw them as vermin, as big obstinate bugs. He was as happy to be rid of them as Dad was to get them, but they both stayed framed in the same scripted dance of distance. A good-old-boys flick, two aging cowpokes who’d known each other forever, but, beyond hat tipping, don’t know each other at all:
Dad: So, buddy boy, what do I owe you?
Hezzy: Tommy, it’s rocks. Himself owns ’em. Hain’t a selling what I don’t own. It’s illegal, see? I tol’ja finishin’ school wouldn’t make you smarter ’n me.
Dad: That you did, pal. So can I pay for your gas then, and your time?
Hezzy: Nope. I’m gettin’ a field ’n’ all you’re gettin’ is a buncha disappearin’ rocks.
I like to imagine Hezzy’s response to the fact that forty years later people part with big bucks for big rocks, that they’re a hot commodity in newfangled stores called garden centres. I can just hear him, ‘Garden what? City pissers are dim, I’ll gran’cha that, but y’gotta be a special kinda stupid t’pay for rocks.’ He’d be slapping his knees and coughing. He’d suck on his Buckingham and try again, ‘Whatcha going to sell ’em next? Water?’
His kind has all but passed from the planet, but his settler common sense plays a central role in these pages. Hezzy didn’t call a spade anything; he was too busy digging. He figured folks had more use for lawn than swamp and he was quite prepared to look the other way to help us get it. Hard to ignore the stove top jutting through the duckweed? Not to mention the helter-skelter Rosedale Roxy? Not for him. ‘Don’t go a-huntin’ guilty,’ he’d say. ‘It’ll find you just fine.’ Or, ‘When a ewe’s drowned, she’s dead. And folks? Same difference. We’re all just walkin’ fertilizer.’
To solidify the rocky patch, Dad drove into the Canadian Tire in Fenelon and ordered a load of gravel to be followed by a load of soil, both of which – insert sigh here – you have to pay good money for. He skimped, surprise, surprise, because after a heavy rain we’d get up in the morning and discover that the swamp had belched up a tire, a distasteful lawn chair or an indigestible chunk of couch. Jordan and I would run on deck shouting, ‘All Hail the Swamp Vomit!’ We’d lean over the rail chanting our version of Donovan’s song, also from Centennial Year: ‘First there is a bedspring, then there is no bedspring, then there is.’ Or ‘First there is a toilet, then there is no toilet, then there is.’ We sang in an unstoppable loop, the way a bus of kids will shout themselves hoarse at ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the wall.’ And then we had to end it properly.
‘SNAFU,’ she’d pronounce seriously. ‘FUBAR,’ I’d respond with equal gravity. We’d pause, nod and shout together, ‘Sayonara, SNAFUBARRR!’
Dad couldn’t criticize. He’d been the one to tell us, privately of course, what SNAFU and FUBAR meant. Seems in the days of wartime rationing, you could even economize swearing. It had, of course, been Jordan’s creative economy to combine them. Dad had grinned, until he heard high heels, at which point he shook his finger in Jordan’s direction, gripped his shovel and force-fed the unpalatable back down the swamp’s gullet. As I guess you’ve figured out by now, Dad was too busy feeding the swamp to raise us and too busy filming the script of our lives to help us write it, so MC pretty much directed the show. She plotted as she wished, but the universe was listening, so she also got its opposite.
A case in point: take the review of the Summer Protocol that MC launched into once we came in from the bonfire. Accentuating her points with the hairbrush as she made Jordan’s night braid, she ran through her expectations and came to Kronk. ‘What cannot be cured must be endured. Boozers are bums. Avoid him.’ Well, that would have been pretty hard to do because Jordan was, in fact, his business partner, the main supplier of the baby brown leopard frogs he sold for bait. When he’d been mean to Yogi, we’d repay him in his own coin. We’d sell him a dozen little baiters one day, swipe them out of his Coke cooler at night, and sell them right back to him the next: two dimes a dozen. For Jordan’s collection. Other denominations went straight down our gullets via Mrs. Miller’s General Store. MC should’ve listened to herself, to what she said often enough about her daughter: forbid a fool a thing and that he will do. Us fools figured what she don’t know couldn’t hurt us. So assuming one of the things MC might have wished for was obedient children – ones who didn’t consort behind her back with the local drunk to make under-the-table cash for better treats that she was willing to provide – she didn’t get it.
Did she deserve our deception? Good question. One, I never asked. When you’re a hungry kid, any notion of just desserts for adults flies out the screen door. MC fed us the way she fed the swamp, with reluctance and resentment, and wouldn’t let us be fed any other way. Enough is not as good as a feast. There was no long table sit-down, no Who Pudding and no Rare Who Roast Beast. We ate alone. And that pushed us another fork length away from March, busily potlucking each other’s cottages. In Almost, the purchasing, preparing, consumption and clean-up of food was pure Protocol, never pleasure. Monday: bangers and mash. Tuesday: Salisbury steak. Wednesday: chicken potpie. Thursday: Spam or Spork. Friday: fish and chips. Saturday: bubble and squeak. Sunday: roast beef and Yorkshire pudding if you’d been good. If not, Spam tastes just as good reheated. What we ken first we know best.
For years, I honestly believed every family ate like mine, believed that all mothers buttered their kids one slice of day-old white bread each and plated portions in untouching triangles: potatoes mashed or boiled on the right, canned vegetable on the left and meat below. Food got served on Melmac green or brown, and you ate it. All of it. No questions asked. No Biafran children necessary. No Oliver Twist audacity. The very concept of asking for more, of more existing to be asked for, never occurred to us. Mom’s