WIGFORD REMEMBERIES
Copyright © Kyp Harness, 2016
all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, .
Nightwood Editions
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Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0
Canada
cover design & typography: Carleton Wilson
Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.
This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled,
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Printed and bound in Canada.
CIP data available from Library and Archives Canada.
ISBN 13: 978-0-88971-319-2
ISBN 10: 0-88971-319-7
Gentle Mighty Hands
And no I never will forget—no no—howling winds, flurries of snow through the grey sky down the gravel sideroad down the hill over the creek up the hill to the little farmhouse with the linoleum floors and an old white stove burning a constant fire over which there was a black iron lid over a hole through which he spat his tobacco and a door opening at the top of the stairs. Well! Come in, come in! and You’ll be staying for supper won’t you? with the thermometer and the barometer and the ticking clock and back a while to the house down the old sideroad with the weeds and the ditch and the verdant green forest alongside a creek brown and flowing by the wire fences, oh yes, and foxes and rabbits in the thickets, all very strange.
She went to give me a lickin’ but I ran—I was trying to draw musical notes on staff paper, five years old, I was sitting on the floor using a footstool as a table. In a characteristic fit of rage I kicked the stool, maddened by the failure of my efforts. She chased me to give me a lickin’, she turned me over a chair in the living room in the bright white morning, she had me down but my one hand over my bum trying to protect it held a pen.
The pen went clean through her hand with the force of the blow—memory of her standing screaming with stunned disbelief, shock, looking at her palm just starting to bleed, pen protruding from both sides of the hand like a fake protruding arrow through someone’s head—the blood then starting to flow thick and ketchup-like down her wrist.
She swore cusswords with the pain, called Aunt Maxine and Uncle Elmer to take her to the hospital—in the waiting room the utter, dour, sour silence of adults, me knowing the first stabs of guilt, blame, shame, self-reproach. What words are there to say to the child who would do such a thing to his own mother? Especially by the normal day-in-day-out dreary blind-to-time humble workers in the mine?
The mark of Cain indelibly branded on me that moment—all pretense of innocence stolen away very early by this grim circumstance of chance. Afterwards her bandaged hand an accusative reminder: What happened to your hand, Mona?
“Ask HIM what happened!”
All eyes turning and waiting as I stumbled trying to explain. Of course there was no explaining—we’re human beings, we hurt each other, it’s a bad show… But still in this my fifth year, in the house by the gravel road, by the creek and the dark greenery of the mysterious woods, I sought in my way an explanation as to how and why this should be.
Was it because of the garter snakes I saw sliding through the grass, whose dry smooth flow disturbed me so (especially after sighting a rain-drenched, cardboard wrapping paper spool lying in the forest which I also took to be a huge monster snake), that I determinedly placed thorny branches in the ditch I thought they emerged from in order to kill them?
Was it because of the raccoon I saw rotting by the side of a corn field, half its body brilliantly alive with an infinitude of glistening maggots?
Was it because of the harsh words and the harsh silences of the exhausted bodies at the end of a long day of work, the fierce pain and fury of the parts of them still unresigned and unreconciled to the shapes life was forcing them into—their tongues and hands blindly flailing out as the waves of anger and boredom and wounded pride pulled them back, back from their visions of glory and swept them into the hungry oblivion of old age and death?
Was it because of the bitter and inconsolable misery I sensed, passionately cursing existence behind the masks of goodwill and earnest well-wishing everywhere—the worm of discontent that wriggles behind each amiable smile, the misery that gives the lie to all decency?
But as the seasons turned, the yellow school buses crackled down the leaf-littered gravel roads, and the snow later swamping the roads in a grandstanding display of prodigiousity (closing schools and businesses for miles around), and on the blackest freezing night of Christmas, when in the streaking blear and blur of impossibly colourful lights, so many expectations are raised and so many are mercilessly disappointed, in the thawing muck of springtime when butterflies land on milkweed stalks and the creeks rise turgid, swelling, musty, embarrassing the shores, when the tractors like armadillos nose the awakening earth and the sun rises high to its vantage point, raining its fire upon the land and the lake all through the hallucinogenic empires of summer—as all the fine and brazen youth, who scorn and ridicule the customs and advice and infirmities of their elders, and who then become the elders themselves, their customs and advice and infirmities being scorned and ridiculed by yet another generation of strong and brazen youth—until all ages become consigned to the graveyard, under whose blanket of earth and grass and moss and stone they lie being gradually forgotten, expunged from the minds of all living as the leaves gather on the ground above them, then the ice and the snow, then the rain and the butterflies, then the hot sun heating their gravestones, then the leaves rushing enthusiastically back to provide their yearly throw blanket, as the bodies melt into dust.
Above and beyond the parade of sufferers marching to their graves and the sour drunkenness vandalizing the sacred miracle of consciousness, still in my mind’s eye I see a farmhouse on a hill, the silence in the air all around it like the soundless infinities of the universe itself, the earth sprawling from all its corners, and up the back steps coming into the kitchen, with the thermometers and the barometers and the clock ticking on its shelf, is an old portly man who through the eyes of a child might be as old as the earth itself, or God, or Santa Claus who says, Come in! Come in! and Won’t you stay for supper?
His working days through—yet it was he and these gentle, mighty hands that had pulled a living from the earth, pulled a life from the soil, drawn out of it this very house and all of its scattered inhabitants and descendants.