When Fenelon Falls. Dorothy Ellen Palmer
ever get. ‘So who is to blame?’ you ask. Good one. That’s your Seminal Question. Remember it. If you don’t, who will?
The March clan certainly didn’t. We took our lead from the three monkeys: what evil? Our Yogi didn’t even have a cautious Boo Boo sidekick to keep her from hoovering every goodie in sight, let alone a Mr. Ranger to step in and take it away from her. Even Grayden quickly forfeited his in loco parentis status. For a summer or two, he exercised his visitation rights. He went right into the cage to play. When baby gave her daddy a bear hug that broke ribs and ripped an incision down his back that sent him into Fenelon for twenty stitches, Grayden became a deadbeat dad. No one admonished him. Not word one.
Now in her sixth year, our teddy bear on permanent picnic barely resembled her cute baby self. Bored and bloated, she wept from a permanent sore on her left eye, one inhabited by flies. Did this stop the tourists? Give those turdists a moment’s cause for pause? Of course not. When preconceptions rule, human eyes don’t stand a chance. They couldn’t see what they were looking at: a sick, sad, overfed, aging bear, one trapped in permanent babyhood in a glorified playpen. No one saw bloody footprints. They saw ‘a real live bear!’ They said, ‘He’s sooo cute!’ Do bears get cavities? Do bears on a Ding Dong diet become diabetic? I don’t know. I know she got lethargic. She learned to snarl. She abandoned her swing and cowered, rubbing her weeping eye against the wire, making it worse, perhaps deliberately so.
Why did no one come to her rescue? Even Mr. Ranger is always more concerned with the property of tourists than the well-being of one he has sworn an oath to protect. MC would say: Once a thief always a thief. Little beggars don’t choose their own nourishment. (You march, March! You shut up, suck it up and be grateful that you’re fed!) As Yogi’s Mr. Ranger, Kronk viewed his charge likewise, saw himself as her benefactor, noblesse oblige. In the wee hours he’d sprawl over the picnic table, munching tarts and lullabying at the top of liquored-up lungs: ‘Now if I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly! I’d fly to the arms of my poor darlin’, and there I’d be willing to die.’ Sometimes persons unknown called the police. When the local constabulatory arrived, they found no crime beyond country music and lawn vomit – both of which should be indictable offences, but sadly are not.
In typical March, the last word got rendered without words, with family, tourists, locals and the law complicit: Kronk had saved a motherless child. He could raise her or kill her as he pleased. Only you can prevent forest hires, and back then we didn’t even try. Back then the almighty tourist dollar turned more than one wild beast into a sideshow attraction. Take Overall Boy, a case in point. He was a local and our neighbour, one of farmer Hezzy’s sons, not the one who delivered the mail, but the one we called OB for reasons obvious. He bred a whole hockey team of coons. Kept them in a roadside pen at the Fenelon turnoff.
When a car pulled over and a window rolled down, OB tapped his chest until a kit poked her nose out of the big front flap of his greasy overalls – a trick that wowed ’em every time. He sold those babies down the river or anywhere else, no questions asked or offered, five bucks a pop. Canada’s first drive-thru, eons before Tim Hortons. If the new owners drowned the kits next week or put them down once they got uncute or bit little Janie, so what? Plenty-twenty where they came from. Last summer, at Jordan’s insistence, we’d turned one of our Saturday morning meanders through Fenelon into a forced march, hoofing it all the way from the dairy, over the canal, past Hanley’s Lumber, to the Rosedale-Fenelon turnoff, all to ask OB to stop.
‘But city pissers like it,’ he’d grinned with brown teeth, ‘and I doan like them.’ When Jordan looked dubious, he moved his plug from left cheek to right and frowned. ‘Lookit, girlie. Us locals have a right to make a buck offa tourists. Yer daddy’d agree. Ask him.’ When Jordan shook her head he spat over it. Spittle showered her hair. When she suggested raccoons had rights too, a brown blob grazed her cheek. ‘What are ya anyway, one’a them there hippie tree huggers?’ When Jordan said maybe, he spat on her shoes. ‘Git lost, girlie. Now! Unlest y’want me to whistle for m’dog. His name’s Calvin and he doan like yellow.’
So we were used to cages and all they stood for, and specifically used to all manner of sounds both ursine and human being broadcast from the top of our road. But that first Sunday afternoon the hullabaloo was neither tourist nor intoxicated, at least not on booze. It was a greener version of Gray: his youngest brother, cousin Derwood. Our feet built little speed on the fresh gravel, but crunching round the last bend we saw him, still in church clothes, crouched prostrate and preying: firing handfuls of gravel bullets scatter-force into the cage. Most found their mark: Yogi, curled in fetal whimpering, little black-gloved fists clenched into her eyes.
Jordan’s wish? It cuts near the wood: ‘I’d give everything I am to free her!’
I lost mine by yelling it: ‘You dirty little bastard! I’m gonna shove you in that cage!’
It only alerted him. Proving what Grandma often said in his direction, that a bully is only as brave as his unfair advantage, Derwood dropped his free ammo and took off, quickly gaining a safe lead on the all-too-public asphalt. He turned. Running on the spot, he stuck his thumbs in his ears, wiggled his fingers, jiggled his bum and stuck out his tongue. ‘Na-na-na-na-naaa-na!’ Such a juvenile asswipe.
Then he leaned toward my sister and did something far worse. He smiled.
GET BACK
You are maybe three years old. You have two sets of pyjamas. They stay the same, even when The House and The Family don’t. When they’re going to move you, they iron your yellow dress stiff, snap the silver locket around your neck and the silver lock on your red suitcase. For now it’s empty, stashed under This Crib, and waiting for next time. Your pyjamas have lived here, safe in a drawer in This House, for more than seven sleeps: your soft green nightie with the bunny rabbit, your thick winter sleeper with snaps. It’s yellow too. Tonight you are wearing it. Good. Sometimes snaps confuse him. Smile at the bluebird. She’s how you know you’re not in the hospital. She’s like This Crib, baby blue. Hospital cribs are metal. This one has a happy picture pasted on its wooden head. This Lady has made it herself, a birdie cut from a magazine, perched in apple blossoms, bursting pink. Happy notes come chirping out of her tiny beak. You know only the first line of her song, ‘Bluebird! Bluebird! Smile at me!’ That’s what This Lady sings as she drops off your bottle, ‘G’night, baby. Kiss, kiss! Now close those eyes.’ Bouncy brown curls all soft round her face, she pats your tummy, flicks light into night, and rap-tap-taps down the hall. You sit back up. You drink half your bottle. Never more. You crawl into the farthest corner. Press your back against the bars. Chant the alphabet – you know most of it. Just keep chanting. Hum. Sometimes when he hears how good you are at ABCs, This Man changes his mind. There’s the slow crunch-thud, crunch-thud – his step in the hall. Sing louder. ‘A-B-C-D … ’ There’s the slower grind of doorknob. ‘E-F-G.’ Can’t you see me? ‘L-M-N-O-P!’ He looks right at you and lowers the bar. Such a racket! Surely This Lady must hear it This Time? He yanks the bottle from your hands. He grabs your feet and drags you to him by the ankles. It hurts to kick him, but you try. A damp palm clamps your mouth, smothering ‘W-X-Y and – ’ ‘Shut up, you little bastard!’ He smiles.
For now, dear reader, let’s stop for sorry. You see, in order to understand Derwood’s smile, you had to see that other smile too. It needs to hang over your head and menace each moment the way it did ours. So later in this story, when you chastise me for reading Jordan’s diary, please remember, so have you. It’s a cruel violation of her privacy, but she left us little choice. I’d say no choice, but there’s no such thing. You’ve opened this book in time and you’ve got plenty of it. My mistake? Thinking I did. At fourteen, unlike yours truly, Jordan already saw time like an adult, as a finite ball of yarn. To recast an analogy my crafty sister loved: ‘Find fallen loops. Go back to knit forward.’ To do so, you need to know that one of us could knit and the other never had a clue about loop one. Now, in this telling, I’m holding the needles, but back then I was the one with hands outstretched, watching the yarn unravel.
What’s that? Narrators aren’t supposed to admit to spinning a yarn, let alone recuse themselves for doing so poorly? Says who? Says