Savage (30 page)

W
ithin the confines of early half-sleep, I saw Mom's coal eyes up close as she prepared the salad for her new family. In her eyes, I saw the Reich eagle's wings spread wide and slow, as Mom glanced down to watch a carrot being chopped. But it was Christmas, and how quickly the satanic bird-Mom mirage changed its tune to a Christmas choir, Christmas foil, sleigh bells and endless belly laughter: ho-ho-ho. I couldn't get back to sleep. My restlessness was a long-playing vinyl groove, thick and succinct as a Gordon Lightfoot CD played on repeat, his voice ghosting on about heroes, Lake Ontario, highways, faces, longing and briny lost love.

I thought of Mom in Dallas. Time difference was an hour earlier. I'd call her later, before dinner, my corduroy pants silent, store-fresh, my sweater in its pre-gravy-stain virginity, my hair without grease, a nice light-brown sheen, and Mom would be elbows deep in mashed potato triumph. Today Holly and I were heading to her in-laws: the plan was to visit them, Dad, and whoever else we ran into on the short road trip.

It was now nine a.m. I had shaved, showered, watered plants, taken out garbage, put the remaining laundry away, packed up two-days' worth of clean underwear, socks, shirts and a suit jacket. A frantic urge besieged me to read my interview previews online at
Shooting Star Wrestling Review
.

Four interviews had been carefully prepared to go "live" online January 3rd.

I yawned hard, hand through hair, opened my eyes and they watered. A fat cloud greeted me outside. It began to fall apart.

The sun broke it open.

The phone rang. It was Holly.

"Holy shit," she said into the phone. I imagined Holly's nostrils working like well-timed pistons and gears redistributing moisture. She raised her red face and blurted out—"Liz was in a car accident last night...she's dead."

"What?"

"It's so fucking sad; we just started to talk about visiting each other, like maybe me going to BC."

"What happened?

"She flipped over in her car and broke her neck on the highway, like midnight or something last night, on the way to her parents' place."

"That's awful."

"I just called to wish her a Merry Christmas, and Jake answered, he said he called me at home but I guess—"

"That is horrible."

"On top of all that, the rental property tenants or whatever are complaining there is no heat or water, so I have to go back to Toronto. Do you want to come or stay with Dad? I can come get you later, it's not that bad driving. I'll take Sarah to her friend's place for tonight."

"Whatever is easiest."

"Plus, you have to call Mom, she thinks we're on the hook for some sort of Texas Chainsaw New Year's Eve party. Forget it, too much is going on. I feel like I'm losing my mind."

"Yeah, she said something about that last week."

"Dad's gonna pick you up, at the train station as planned. I can't go though, OK?"

"Yeah."

By two in the afternoon, I was in Dad's Elgin, Ontario, trailer clutching my backpack full of clean underwear and gifts. Having travelled over three hundred kilometres, I was overheated, half asleep and not exactly ready for the drastic change in air quality.

"Dinner will be ready at five," Dad said, immediately returning to what appeared to be an overzealous all-day cooking marathon for two people.

"So you heard about Holly's friend then, I guess. Liz?"

"Yes. Very sad news."

I walked into the living room to see the same sad pink couches, aged eleven years from the last time I logged any serious time on them, statues of a once seemingly arranged life: these are the couches we'll put in our house; this is where we'll sit and read
The Globe & Mail
and drink coffee before we go to work in the morning—

Along a small wooden shelf, I saw a doll on a mantel, and my crummy acrylic lithium-based art, with a baby-blue and sand coloured-décor that looked ghastly like a small child's memorial bedroom.

Christmas Day passed like a warm Polaroid in crinkles: presents with rips fixed up, family-driven holiday movies on television complete with banter, snow being brushed off of shoulders, a wacky uncle careening into a snow bank, a gluttonous shellacking of Christmas stock footage, sopped up off the cutting room floor and remixed one more time.

"Things are busy, lots of activity in town today," Dad said, lighting a cigarette.

"Oh yeah, which town is this?" I asked

I put on an Anne Murray CD and listened to "You Are My Sunshine." A tickle of pain crept into my stomach, so I focused on every dusty particle in the room.

The kitchen table was full of clutter and paper-route evidence, confirming my father's peasant status in this makeshift village.

"Fuck off, coffee," I said, blowing over the steam billowing from my cup. "Dad this coffee is crazy hot. I'll let it cool 'til St. Patrick's Day." I always spilled coffee when I first woke up, walked down the street or wobbled with a cup through subway traffic. Now sitting completely still could be added to that magical list.

I hadn't been in Dad's bunker in eleven years. Inside this cocoon of discolouring, a nicotine film of brown had formed along the ceiling and walls.

This yellowing behaviour.

Dad was now outside with his dog, Jazz, a stray he picked up one morning on his route two years ago, and who had some growth dangling from her chin that resembled a cancerous testicle.

The trailer was compact, smelled of rust and bristled with modulated carbs.

I looked down the hallway at the open bedroom door and crept into Dad's room; the smell of dog hair had reached a state of alchemic stagnation. My dresser and bed (1981–1994, bought at the Art Shoppe on Yonge and Davisville) lay dormant and snug in the eight-by-twelve bedroom. On the dresser's surface, a series of progressive photographs were garnished in theatrical dust in chronological order: his childhood on a couch with his siblings (1952), the love-locket-sized picture of Katie Flint (1965) and the classic (1982) family portrait of Mom, Holly, Dad and I taken for Northlea United Church. The final photograph came in the form of my father's living and breathing form asleep between eight at night and three in the morning, when he'd wake to do his paper route, snapped by God himself.

The coffee table was in a tool shed out back, as if it now served as a prop closet for some later re-enactment. Dad and I locking horns in the living room, his body going stiff, the low table getting the worst of it.
Why did you always turn your head and back, it's not self-defense and I'm not going for your head, and you watched boxing, so I don't get the positioning; it's like your body is pretending you are not being aggressive, when you are, it's frustrating. You're a dream, one I've conquered, now you're just static in the hallway Christmas morning, Boxing Day, April Fool's, St. Patrick's, and Halloween and back again—my father the boomerang
.

As I stared at Dad, all I could see was this extremely deflated version of the husky dinnertime character. He must weigh 114 pounds now, I thought, glancing at him sitting on the dusty-rose couch, as if he were preparing to tell the story of his life for the first time, like a stage actor delivers a monologue: the Sunday feasts, thick gravy, the family growing up in black and white on a farm house in Dunnville, moving to the big city, getting a big paper route, picking up the bundles from a drug store at Dundas and Ossington, at a store he would later work at as a delivery boy in 1953 when his brother Patrick, the last of five children, was born. Dad fiddled with an opal pushpin brooch, which he placed in a small dish, looked over a brochure and moved some plastic wrap from the kitchen table to the indoor stove. No one would ever pay twenty-five cents to stand in the rooms he grew up in.

"I'll be back in a minute and fix us something to eat," Dad said, disappearing down the hallway. For a millisecond, I imagined body slamming Dad through his floorboards.
Ohhhh yeeeeaaaahhhh! History beckons the Macho Man!

Elizabeth's death was a fresh psychic scar that gouged the day. There were the mid-summer appearances at our dinner table after sprinkler prances, the three times Holly and Elizabeth locked me out of the house and laughed until my tears somehow lubricated the locks and they let me in, the time she kissed my cheek in my room and then vanished.

Dad's brow was knotted in a perplexed state. "Sound is off," he said, playing with the remote. "Did you turn it down?"

Holly said she and Elizabeth had met up a few times over the last few years. The early hours of Elizabeth's death and the vague details reminded me of Dad and his tragic pre-Mom life.
There was an accident
. That was the way it was laid out for me.
Someone
had died. Over time, Mom's reticence to speak on the matter rescinded, but she warned me that she had fought tooth and nail with Grandfather and my aunts never to speak of that time in front of her children. "I told them, ‘I won't stand for it!'" she had once re-enacted for me with fierce facial struts.

"No," I answered. "Gonna take a shower."

*

This is how I pieced it together in my head in a tableau of near memory:

As Dad smoked outside of Old City Hall's large unfriendly doors, the image of his own father, (Grandfather) and his candle-illumined face moving towards him is inescapable. Grandfather slapped Dad hard in the chest with the ceremonial oil. "Remember David," Grandfather began, "those who receive unworthily do not actually receive Christ but rather their own condemnation," he said, pulling his shirt completely off...

It's the morning of the inquest: Dad feels the nicotine and sincere toxins on his lips.

Two nights earlier, the group had circled Katie's body at the morgue, a prayer and a chant and her body on the slab, no motion from her closed eyes. The stillness of her cold brown hair and tiny mischief nose. Dad stared at her form, blurring his eyes. Beauty and love and Katie extinguished. He felt militant in the morning, not refreshed. He combed his hair a hundred times. The calls from her parents and from Allan, her older brother. He downed his orange juice and in the bathroom, wiped his mouth on a facecloth.

The communal belief, equally digested, was that Katie had let the Devil inside her, so cult members spanked her to force her to push the devil out.

Satanic midwives.

Inside, Rachel Weir, a cheaply dressed, chirpy, gum-chewing twenty-year-old with bright eyes, scanned the entire courtroom, never settling on anyone, and took the stand at quarter-past nine. She rose when her name was called, and whispers scratched the courtroom floor. Rachel claimed the real leader of the group was Marilyn Williams. "She was the real leader. Whenever something went off in the dynamic of the group, like with one of the priests or something, they'd run to her … the weirdest thing was, or troubling, that is, was the more sad you were, the more attention you got, like it was a badge of honour to come from a broken home or to have been abused somehow."

At five past ten, Dad (Katie's fiancé, twenty-six years old), who the press said could possibly be a clergyman himself someday, took the stand. Dour and strait-laced, Dad stated the facts with an icy speech. Some snickered and snapped their tongues in teeth sockets. Shocked at what can only be called a callous recollection of Katie's final days.

"On Tuesday, I paddled her a couple of times."

"Why?"

"It was childish behaviour." Gasps in the audience. His narrow face, wolf-eyes were a mask.

"Did you see Katie the morning of her death?"

"I cannot recall if I had gone into her [Katie's] room and spoke with her that morning."

He spoke in cold, formal language. Facial posturing and breath were carefully expressed, exacting, as if meticulously extracted from a guarded vault.

The doctors began to testify at 11:15 a.m. Katie Flint died in brutal pain.
An abscess in the brain stemming from a recurring ear infection broke, swelling into meningitis—killing her. The abscess was caused by inflammation and collection of infected material coming from the ear infection.

The newspapers all had the same chilling vibe: a cult horror in a church rectory...Grandfather using bizarre rituals and brainwashing to control parishioners was no joke.
Katie Flint died an agonizing death and was not given proper medical attention when she needed it. When the paramedics found her, Katie was naked except for underpants. The Anglican Church continued to see exorcism as legitimate practice
.

Early the next morning the inquest continued with Grandfather walking boldly to the stand, his hair raven black, his voice chalky, boomed in parts, adding
hmmms
? to the ends of speeches. His answers were slow, puzzling and evasive, while his mouth remained at half-mast, false, never veering off into the jubilant or souring to droopy, faithless frown. He denied spanking Katie. Two days before her death, Katie complained of stomach aches and did not eat anything after breakfast Monday. She had a plate of crackers later that night and did not join the group for evening prayers. Tuesday was more shrieking and moaning. The day of Katie's death (Wednesday), Grandfather described her beaming smile as he entered her bedroom, how she was full of life, trying to get better from whatever was ailing her.