Chapter 9: A Deal With the Devil

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— Full chapters will appear in the printed published book. —

And so the Freaks were returning to Ontario, back across Canada, back to the bush. Somewhere not that far from where we lived before, about 10 minutes by car from Eagle River, but even more isolated and remote. We were moving onto a farm.

I quickly came to understand why my dad wasn’t coming. My mom was leaving my father for good, and moving in with her lover Cliff.

I guess the marriage therapy, moving hundreds of miles across the country, didn’t work. This is that life lesson you always hear about, that you can’t move away from, and physically escape, your problems — they follow you wherever you go.

The farm was located in a rural area called Minnitaki. I should have known that this farm was the same place where my mom stayed with Cliff during the time she left home when we still lived in Eagle River. Now she was moving in with him permanently, bringing her three children with her. Three children he explicitly told her that he did not want. But she bargained with him.

This time, if he wanted her, he must also take the three children. Perhaps my mom encouraged Doug to go to Toronto, so there would be one less child to bring along. Perhaps that was why this move didn’t happen sooner. Maybe her offer was more acceptable to Cliff now that there were only three children, not four. Whatever way it was worked out between them, in my opinion my mom made a deal with the devil.

I was not aware that my mom and Cliff wrote letters back and forth to each other over the three years while we lived in BC. My father had found out about the correspondence. That was probably when their arguments blew up, and he moved into my bedroom and I then slept with mom. I didn’t know if he left  my mom’s bed willingly, if he preferred to sleep in another bed alone, or if she kicked him out.

I was unmindful to what was happening between my parents, and I didn’t question their actions or their motivations. I suppose I wasn’t smart enough to realize there was something quite abnormal about this new arrangement of sleeping with my mom. It gave me a cozy and comforting feeling to sleep with someone. I didn’t ask why that happened, perhaps I didn’t want to know the truth. I wanted to think that it was because my mother wanted to be closer to me.

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When we finally arrived at the farm, I felt the chill of the evening air. In northwestern Ontario, it was cool and damp, and yet it was still summer, so different compared to the hot, dry climate in BC we left behind.

We finally met Cliff, the man of my mother’s infidelity. I had no feelings toward him, neither good nor bad. He seemed likeable enough. For the first day or two, I was very busy taking in my new surroundings to pay much attention to him. I hardly slept the first night because I was so excited in this new place.

In the early morning, I awoke to the sound of the rooster crowing. It sounded strange and it frightened me. My brothers teased me, saying that it was some strange animal coming to eat me. I was sure I heard that sound many times when we had our chicken coop in Eagle River, and uncle Felix’s coop next door, but I must have forgotten it.

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Blacky was Cliff’s dog. She was a medium-sized dog, mostly black with a tuft of white under her chin. She was an extraordinarily excellent watch dog. She didn’t have a doghouse, she lived under the porch in the hard-packed dirt. We could always rely on her bark to tell us what was happening. If someone stopped at the entrance gate, she immediately ran out far enough so she could see the gate, barked wildly while looking in that direction, and kept barking until the visitor drove up and parked at the front of our house. Once they got out of the vehicle, she usually greeted them with a wagging tail. I didn’t think she would ever bite anyone.

If someone was walking along the road, she had a different kind of intermittent bark. It was less frantic. She must have known that the person was far enough away so she didn’t need to warn us as much. If a person was walking on the road towards the house, her bark was different from when a person was walking on the road away from our house. To her, one must have represented a possible intruder while the other was less of a threat since the person was moving away rather than towards our house.

Someone walking on the road was actually a very rare sight. Anyone who lived around us had a truck or car because places were so widely spread apart and it was a lonely road to walk. It didn’t make much sense for anyone to be walking on our road. There were not many places to go on this road by foot.

If a wild animal was nearby at night, Blacky had a guttural, growling kind of bark. It got more frenetic if the animal came nearer. It never lasted for too long. She must have scared the animals away or they lost interest and wandered off. We did notice bear scat around the side of our house once or twice. Blacky was a smart dog with an acute sense of hearing. She never barked at a car on the road unless it had stopped and the person was opening our gate.

Blacky never barked at Old Man Crigger across the road or anyone visiting him. She protected us and our yard. She must have been able to recognize the unique sound of the vehicles Cliff drove because she never barked when he drove into the yard. If a car was entering the yard and Blacky wasn’t barking, we knew it was Cliff. For a mongrel dog, she was so smart. When we came home from school and got off the bus, she raced out to the gate to greet us, tail wagging like a propeller. She never barked at us, she somehow knew who we were and that we lived there.

Blacky would become my faithful companion. Without her, I would not have survived the years ahead.

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This was not at all the blissful farm life I had in mind when my mom talked about moving here. It was full of dimwits and headed up by a tyrant. I could have called it the funny farm — but it wasn’t much fun, and it certainly wasn’t very funny either.

It was the Freak farm. And things were about to go from bad to much worse.