Chapter 3: Trauma, Tragedy and Tryst

— Chapters appear as excerpts only. —

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

From the time I was born until the end of the summer just before I turned seven, my small world was Eagle River, the tiny train stop in the bush with a few inhabitants to support it. There were no paved streets, only dirt and gravel roads, more of a crossroads really.

In the 1950s, the women were housewives, and the men worked for the railway or had unskilled jobs. The few who finished a high school diploma may have been fortunate enough to work for the Dryden paper mill, in a union job with a decent wage. Generally speaking, the townspeople were either lower middle class, or poor. I am not sure exactly where our family fit in that hierarchy. In terms of income level in our community, ours would have been considered average, not poor. Working for the railway, my father had a steady job and a guaranteed income, so we were never hungry or destitute, but we had few luxuries. We did have a car.

I suspect that the working-class folks in the village were accustomed to the name Freak, if they even cared that it was different. I have no recollection of anything unusual about my last name then, as I did not fully understand its literal meaning. Perhaps my brothers who integrated into the wider community before me suffered from teasing or bullying, but I was never aware that my name was too different.

My memories of my first six years are sparse. Usually it’s an emotional experience or something very unusual that has left an impression in my mind for me to remember it now, decades later. 

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An older boy from down the road took me aside a few times, far enough away from anyone so no one else could hear our conversation. “Can I see your snatch?” he whispered in my ear.

Even though I was still quite young, I knew what he meant. I refused several times, but he was persistent, offered me money, and assured me he wouldn’t touch me or hurt me. Finally, I agreed, more out of curiosity than anything else. So we snuck into the woods behind his house. I pulled down my pants, he looked at my vagina for about a minute, smiled, obviously pleased at what he saw, and gave me a dime. That was it.

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Somehow, I managed to ignore the drinking that occurred in our household. I was vaguely aware of it, and I didn’t think it was unusual or memorable. I believe it had more of an effect on my brothers and the way my dad treated them.

I remember very clearly some traumatic events that happened during my early childhood. They have remained vivid in my mind because they affected me profoundly and directly.

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Another horrible event would stand out in my mind forever. I was five or six years old. Kim, a boy around my same age, lived across the road from us, down a small hill. His family’s property had a dock on the Eagle River. My father and brothers sometimes went there to fish. Kim often came to my yard to play with me. On this particular day, I invented a silly game where we climbed on a chair and jumped onto a blanket. It was a competition to see who could jump the farthest. Over and over again, I jumped farther than he did. I tried to give him some pointers on how to jump farther, but he was getting very annoyed with my bossiness and was displeased with the fact that he was losing to a girl.

All of a sudden, he had enough of me and this game, and ran off diagonally down the path through our side yard which was full of tall grasses. At the bottom of that hill was the entrance to their driveway and just past it, a creek that fed into the river. I briefly watched him go, then collected the blanket and went inside.

I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I went upstairs to poke around in my brothers’ things. After a little while, I looked out the small window and noticed a dump truck stopped on the side of the road near the bottom of the hill. It was an odd sight but I didn’t think too much about it. I focused my attention back to sifting through my brothers’ box of small toys.

Then I heard a car door slam and the engine quickly fire up. It was nearby. I looked out the window again. My mom was going somewhere, and going somewhere fast. She hastily backed out of the driveway, dust flying everywhere. Was she going to get groceries? And what was the rush? I was sure she would be back soon. I went back to playing.

A few hours later, I was back downstairs and bored, sitting on my bed. My brothers came home from school. My mom returned, pulling the car back into the driveway, slowly this time, and came into the house. She looked bedraggled, upset, shaken and distraught, like her whole body had been put through the wringer.

“What happened?” I asked, very curiously and a little bit concerned. “Where did you go?”

My mom sat down at the kitchen table and stared blankly at the wall. “Kim has died,” she said.

My mom told me what had happened, an accident right after we had finished playing.

Just as Kim was running down the path, the dump truck was barrelling down the road towards him. Because of the tall grass, Kim did not see the truck, and the driver did not see Kim. However, the driver heard the thump when the truck hit the boy. He immediately stopped because he knew he hit something. He thought it might be a small animal, perhaps a dog. He knew that whatever he had hit was flung into the bushes by the creek. The driver got out and started searching. Kim’s mother came out of her house to see what was going on. The driver found Kim’s small body, crumpled and bloody. He emerged from the bushes carrying the limp body. Kim’s mother was aghast. By that time, my mother was on the scene, too. At first, she wondered if it was me as she did not see me go into the house.

My mother ran back to our house to get the car. Kim’s mother held his bleeding head in her lap for the half hour it took them to drive to the hospital in Dryden. As his mother held and caressed him, Kim died in her arms.

That evening, I watched as my mom cleaned up the blood from the back seat. Even at that age, I felt guilty that I had, in a small way, caused this accident to occur. Perhaps, if I had not been so bossy, Kim would not have run off so quickly, and Kim might still be alive today. I also felt empathy for Kim’s mother, knowing how difficult and sad that would have been for her to hold her child while he died in her arms. And I also knew that the dump truck driver was devastated. He was a good, conscientious driver, he always slowed down when he drove through that area as he knew there were lots of children around, but he had no chance to see Kim and avoid hitting him.

The next day, my father cut back all the tall grass.

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One particular distressing experience happened to me, and it had much more significance than I realized at the time. Not only because of the actual upsetting experience, but also because of the new reality I realized our family would now face.

I don’t remember much about my toilet habits, but this incident remains quite vivid in my mind. As I always did, I used the chamber pot in the kitchen for my poop. My mother always took it to the outhouse and emptied it. However, on this night my mother was not around.

I needed to use the potty, so I did, and it, no doubt, stunk up the kitchen. My brothers complained, so my father told them to take it to the outhouse and empty it. They protested and said it was time for me to start using the outhouse like they did. They also said that, since I made the mess, I should dispose of it. I wasn’t going to let them tell me what to do. This was the way I always did it and my mom took care of it. Also, I was not going to go outside in the dark to that freezing cold outhouse by myself.

I looked around me, I was sure my mother would appear and advocate on my behalf. That’s when I realized she wasn’t there. It became a stand-off. My father stood in front of me. My brothers angrily shouted at me to empty my own pot. I shouted back that I wasn’t doing it. My dad stood there and tried his best to calm everyone down.

Uncle Felix and aunt Emily came over from next door to see what all the shouting was about. My father moved to the background and let Felix and Emily take over and settle the fight. They talked to my brothers, got them to calm down, disposed of the potty contents, and everyone was content. I sensed a disappointment from Felix that my father couldn’t handle this situation better. That’s all I remember about that.

And then I came to learn that my mom was gone, that she had left us.

My mother moved in with Cliff Lewis, the farmer she had met at the beer parlour. I didn’t know if this was for a night, a few days, a week or more. And I certainly had no idea the immeasurable and destructive impact this new relationship would have on my life in the near future, and on my brothers’ lives as well.

I must have been oblivious to anything beyond my own self at that age not to realize my mother disappeared. Looking back, it’s difficult for me to believe that the potty-outhouse incident made much more of an impression on me than the fact that my mother was no longer around.

I was a happy child living in a quiet place, oblivious of much turmoil in my household. I had no idea about the low socio-economic status of my family and the wretched knowledge that I had a Freak name.

When I was five, I did not contemplate what the future held in store for me. I was content to wallow in the fleeting innocence of my childhood for as long as I could.