The Western Light (29 page)

54

I NEVER SAW JOHN AGAIN. KELSEY FARROW CLAIMS THAT SOMEBODY told him John is playing hockey for an important team in Chile. My father and Little Louie are sure John drowned in the early spring thunderstorm that blew up around noon. We went home that afternoon on the coast guard boat after a seaplane noticed smoke coming out the chimney at the Light. Below deck on the coast guard, we had been protected from the hail and high winds, but a small-craft warning had been issued. John would have found his journey long and difficult.

I preferred Kelsey's story of John playing hockey in South America, and I was beginning to understand my right to my own interpretation of things.

As we sailed home on the coast guard boat, we told Morley that John couldn't remember who started the fire, even though he told Dr. Shulman that his wife did. Morley knew Peggy as a child, and he said that Peggy was quick to expect the worst from people. She'd been treated unkindly by her family and school friends, and Morley could imagine Peggy riding John hard until he lost his temper; but he didn't think Peggy was the type of woman to set a fire. Morley said John had a father who beat him and then he couldn't play for the NHL after his concussion so there was plenty of reason for John to take his bad luck out on somebody. Of course, anything is possible, Morley said, and that's when he told me that people are unpredictable, and he meant it was true of him too.

THAT SPRING, THE MONTREAL CANADIENS won their fourth straight Stanley Cup, defeating the Toronto Maple Leafs. A day later, Big Louie drove up in her new tomato-red DeSoto and picked up Little Louie to take her back to Petrolia. Years later, my grandmother died at eighty-six, although she had lived long enough to see Petrolia put up an oil museum, which exhibited Old Mac's letters. My aunt went back to her reporting job at
The London Free Press
. A few years afterwards, when Max divorced his wife, Little Louie married him without my grandmother's blessing. My aunt kept working at the paper and she and Max raised their three children plus the son Max had with his first wife. My aunt and Max also helped Ben when he started out as a cub reporter. Now Ben is an anchor on one of those sports channels on television.

Sal had good luck, too. The summer after Little Louie left, Morley explained that he needed a wife to help him look after me and he married Sal, who had no doubt that Morley was the man for her.

I never did learn to skate very well, but on June 15, I stood before my classmates at the Regent Street School and read them my composition on my great-grandfather. Standing on the school stage, I finished with the following conclusion:

In closing, I want the reader to know that I have my own reasons for admiring Mac Vidal. No matter what anyone says, my great-grandfather was a seeker who found more than he sought and I intend to borrow hope from his success …

Following my recital, I was awarded first prize in the Georgian Bay School District competition. Sal sat in the front row beside Ben and the Bug House kids. They all clapped politely while I accepted a check for twenty-five dollars. Morley came in afterwards, so he didn't hear my talk, but Kelsey Farrow quoted from my speech in
The Chronicle
. Morley read it aloud at the breakfast table. When he left for work, he was grinning like anything.

As for Morley, he spent the rest of his life working the way he always did. Socialized health care had come in by then, but it arrived too late to help my father. Sal said you couldn't teach an old dog new tricks, and a few years later, when he was dying of heart disease, and I was called back to Madoc's Landing, no one was surprised. During his final hours, most of the town showed up on the hospital hill, carrying lighted candles; I lit a candle too and went out to stand with his well-wishers who stayed on the hill far into the night. Sal made Morley get out of his hospital bed to look. He had shone his light on them for decades, and now we were shining some of that light back on him, and he was pleased and surprised to realize what he'd meant to people.

As for me, I still don't know what goodness is, but it feels more mysterious than evil, although few of us are bad in the way we've been taught to think. Most of us are too busy to notice what we have to offer while some of us, like John Pilkie, are afraid we're going to be abandoned by the ones we love so we leave them before they can leave us. In any case, I've made my peace with Morley, and with John, who was the boy Morley saved at the Western Light and the man who sailed off from the lighthouse for the last time while I stood and watched him go. The next year I was shipping out myself, heading for the city and boarding school, away from rugged weather and lonely stretches of water and pine islands and men like John and my father, starting a new life for myself in the world that I hoped was waiting for girls like me.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THIS NOVEL WAS INSPIRED BY MY FATHER'S LIFE, ESPECIALLY BY the story of him helping a lightkeeper save his son when the lightkeeper's family was trapped on a remote lighthouse on the Georgian Bay. But my book is a work of fiction and I purposefully didn't make the landscape identical to Midland, where I grew up, although there are a great many similarities. So readers shouldn't look for mistakes of fact in the novel's geography.
Hansen's Handbook to the Georgian Bay
is a fictitious text, for instance. And so is the other text mentioned in the story,
How to Survive in the North
. I've also taken liberties with some of the earlier practices at the Waypoint Centre, as the psychiatric hospital in Penetanguishene is now called. As far as I know, no leashes or guns were used at the hospital then. However, I've tried to be accurate about cultural events in the 1950s.

I owe my largest debt of gratitude to my editor Marc Côté who believed in me at a time when I needed a champion. Another debt is owed to my friends on the Midland, Ontario — Then and Now Facebook page for helping me remember those faraway times.

And I am especially grateful to Sylvia Sutherland, Gayle Hamelin, Barb Rutherford-Ivory, Catherine Dusome-Hayward, Roger Attridge and others who kindly read an earlier draft of this book. Thanks also go to York University, the Canada Council of the Arts, and the Toronto Arts Council who gave me assistance in the early drafts, and to John Fraser at Massey College who provided me with a place to finish my book.

I also want to thank Paul Gross for reading an early draft of my novel and very special thanks go to my mother, Jane Swan, for her generous help with my research as well as Charles Fairbank and Patricia McGee, who provided invaluable information about the early days of oil in southwestern Ontario. In addition, I'd like to thank Bonnie Reynolds, Midland librarian; Vincent Lam, author; Janet Iles, researcher; and Robert Duff, sports columnist for
The Windsor Star
, who helped me with my research into head injuries suffered by hockey players in the 1950s and early '60s. Particularly valuable was his research into the case of Jack Gallagher, a Canadian player who suffered from post-concussion syndrome while playing for the Detroit Red Wings. After the injury, Gallagher was confined to an Ontario mental hospital. I've borrowed some facts from Gallagher's tragic life such as the decision by American border guards not to let Gallagher back into the US after he'd been confined in a psychiatric institution. As a result, his career with the Red Wings was over.

THE SHAMEFUL TREATMENT OF HOCKEY players like Gallagher by their managers is a stain on our national sport, and deserves more attention than I was able to give it in this novel. I am also deeply indebted to Robert F. Nielsen, who wrote
Total Encounters
, a history of Waypoint Centre in Penetanguishene. Nielsen's research revealed hospital practices going back to its early days as a boys' reformatory and also directed my attention to the Bug House kids, the children of the hospital staff who enjoyed a freedom on its grounds that would be unthinkable today.

MANY OTHERS HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO this novel. Thanks to many of the staff at the Waypoint Centre: Dan Parle, Waxy Gregoire, and psychiatrist Russ Fleming. Some of the historical information about the Waypoint Centre has been conflated for dramatic purposes. My story also borrows from the life of Mel Wilkie, a mental patient who was incarcerated there for murdering his wife and child in a fire. Wilkie escaped many times, trying to draw attention to his case, and when I grew up in Midland, Ontario, he was notorious for his “elopements,” as they were called, and a bogeyman to children and parents alike. While I was never a Bug House kid myself, my father, a local gp, operated on its patients if they were sick and I sometimes drove through its grounds when I went on calls with him.

FOR HELP WITH MY RESEARCH, I would also like to thank the former executive director of The Writers' Union of Canada, Deborah Windsor, and Toronto writer and producer Geraldine Sherman. Thanks also to Canadian editor, Ellen Seligman; American editor Lorna Owen and especially to my daughter, the literary agent Samantha Haywood, who read numerous drafts, as did writer Katherine Ashenburg, and my patient partner, editor Patrick Crean.

The final debt is to my father Dr. Churchill Swan, who didn't live long enough to see my portrayal of the working conditions of small town doctors in the 1950s in this novel. Although he formed the basis of the character known as Dr. Morley Bradford, the other characters aren't autobiographical. The aunt and grandmother of Mary Bradford are fictitious inventions as are the Shulmans and the rest of the figures who appear in this book.

Some parts of this novel appeared in
Exile
magazine Volume 30, Number 4. An essay about my father used as research for this novel appeared in the anthology
The First Man in My Life
, edited by Sandra Martin, Penguin Canada, 2007.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SUSAN SWAN'S CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED fiction has been published in fifteen countries and translated into eight languages. A former chair of The Writers' Union of Canada, her impact on the Canadian literary and political scene has been far-reaching. Swan's previous novel,
What Casanova Told Me
, was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Canada and the Caribbean Region; it was named a top book of the year by
The Globe and Mail
,
Calgary Herald
,
NOW Magazine
, and the
Sun Times
. A finalist for the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Trillium Prize, Swan's third novel,
The Wives of Bath
, was made into the feature film
Lost and Delirious
, shown in thirty-two countries.
The Biggest Modern Woman of the World
was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award and the
Books in Canada
First Novel Award. Susan Swan is a graduate of McGill University and has taught at York University, Humber College, the University of Toronto, and the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto.