The Lesson

 “All rise” resounded the booming voice of the court clerk, as he began his afternoon duties in the Lutsel K’e village of the Dene First Nation courthouse. “This court is now in session. Justice Bernie London presiding”

The small log frame court room was packed with relatives and friends of August, the defendant, who looked frail and tired in his gray, tattered smokehouse jacket and rumpled khaki fishing pants.

The defendant sat, alone, with an aroma of campfire wood-smoke invisibly seeping from his clothes. The case was poorly prosecuted.

By the time the translator whispered to August, the words, “Not guilty. Case dismissed”, there was already a smile on his face.

Bernie flew back to Yellowknife, drove his Jeep to the Gold Range Hotel to call Patsy.

The next few minutes changed everything in his life.

 

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Can you count my fingers?”

“I can’t see your hand.”

Gradually, like the opening scene in a movie, the room filled with light and a doctor was holding up his hand in front of Bernie’s face.

“Five”, whispered Bernie. “I feel tired.”

“I’ll let you rest in a minute. Can you remember what happened,” insisted the doctor as he moved closer to Bernie. In the background was Patsy and a few friends who were blurry.

“I remember picking up the payphone at the whaddyacallit hotel and then you asked me if I could hear you”

“You had a grand mal seizure. You need to rest a bit then you can go home. I need to see you for an assessment tomorrow. Just come to emerg and ask for me. Can I see your driver’s licence?”

Bernie reached in his hip pocket for his wallet and gave his licence card to the doctor.

     You make sure I see him tomorrow, Bernie heard the doctor say to Patsy. Then he was gone.

“Where’s my driver’s licence?

“The doctor has it”

“Can you call him back?”

“I don’t think you should drive right now”

A cold sweat started to form on Bernie’s forehead and panic started to set in as if he were on death row and looking at the hangman.

“The men at the hotel found you on your back, shaking, heaving, frothing at the mouth and having a seizure. One of them called me and I told him to call an ambulance. Just walk slowly.”

 “Why do my calf muscles pain so much? This is nuts.”

“Don’t worry. Just take my arm and I’ll bring you to the car”

“The Jeep. Where’s the Jeep?”

“Don’t worry. I had your vice principal drive it home. Everything’s ok”

The furor of the day’s events seemed to clash with each other at a sickening speed. The confusion bashed against the reality. The present slammed against the past.

 “Here we are” whispered Patsy in her soft, caring tone. Her steady, reassuring words kept flowing and Bernie loved it. Her comforting words seem to make all the muddle go away. He felt confidence in those compassionate tones and empathetic words. Patsy’s depth of kindness knew no bounds. That, and her beauty was why he fell in love with her on that Tobago beach.

As a fifteen-year-old, Bernie had learned from his esteemed boss, Lloyd Pridham, to drive every farm vehicle possible on his farm. One day Bernie paused beside his revered mentor and posed, ‘What’s life for. What’s it all about?’ Without batting an eye at this teenage existential question, he replied ‘When my feet hit the floor each morning and when I lift them into bed each night, I have to assure myself that I have been the best person possible and have tried to make my every waking moment honourable, meaningful and helpful to make this world a better place to live in.’

As Bernie reflected on that realistic response to his reality question, he knew that the most important thing in his life was not the driver’s licence, instead it was the daily actions of kindness, honour, integrity and productivity. This reality check put everything into perspective.

That night, as Bernie was about to lift his feet into bed and kiss his wife good night, he paused and looked deep into her russet, caring eyes and whispered, “Thank you for everything you have done today. I know this world is a better place because you’ve done your very best.”

With welled eyes and a tiny trickle of tears on the side of her face, she kissed Bernie good night.

 

A Cruel Farewell

 “How are you, Belinda?” asked the doctor who knew her for thirty years. “Fine, Dr. McIntosh”, she lied. “Are those bruises you got from falling out of the apple tree going away?”, he prodded. “Let me take a look at their progress”. She stood as he searched for new signs of bruising, skin abrasions, lesions and outward signs of physical beatings, punches, and backhands. ‘No new signs’, he sighed to himself, knowing full well that a bank of broken bones lies in a deep, silent grave in her emotional sanctuary.

Dr. McIntosh knew her whole family and went out to their Innisfil farm often for corn roasts, banquets, and pig-on-a-spit dinners. He knew her family as a fun-loving solid group of people who worked hard on the land and carried their Irish spirit to Canada, for the betterment of all who graced their land. They had more humour than land, more grace than kernels of corn and more kindness than was imaginable. Everyone from Orangeville to Orillia loved the McGowan family and Belinda was at the centre. Her step-dancing, fiddle-playing entertainment had prefaced her marriage to Josie.

After they got married it all seemed to fade away. ‘He squelched her’ was the Innisfil gossip. ‘Josie took her away from us and destroyed her’. Lots of rumours and tittle-tattle made the rounds but no one could interfere. All you could do was hope he didn’t cause serious damage.

Her husband of twenty-five years was a sly person, slippery as wet moss on a shoreline rock. He had a history of violence. Slimy as oil and as toxic as poison, he continued exuding around the house and planning his cruel exodus.

She had been to the hospital many times: for each of her seven children plus check-ups and other times with the children. Getting there to the Barrie hospital had its easy times and impossible times, because she lived in Angus, a good thirty minutes’ drive away if the traffic to and from Base Bordon was light and much longer at heavy times. The long convoys of military trucks formed a strange faded green caterpillar-like line.

Dr. McIntosh finished up his examination and gave Belinda a prescription for her headaches which Belinda said were like pounding drums that were so loud that she wanted to tear out her hair. “Those pills should ease the pain. I have two you can take right now and pick up the rest from the apothecary.” the doctor told her as she put on her coat to leave his tiny office in the clinic. “Josie OK?” he added as an awkward postscript. Belinda just nodded because she did not want to burst out crying. If she started crying now, she might never stop, so deep was her galaxy of tears. There was not enough time on this earth to cry out the vast depths to empty her tears. If she started to write about her pain, it would take hundreds of tomes to contain the agony. The thought of crying in a safe place with someone who understood with kindness and care made her weak at the knees. At that thought, she could almost faint. She needed a safe place like this doctor’s office, but he had patients waiting and she did not want to bother him with her trifle.

Belinda put on a brave face as she got into the car with Josie. She forced a smile while he badgered, “What took you so long”? Silence. They drove home in brittle silence. Belinda sensed the tension keenly. Her intuition told her there was danger ahead. Her headache was almost gone, but then, she had never known a time in her marriage when her head was not throbbing. This time there was something else. There was a knot in her stomach, and she could feel the hair on the back of her neck standing up.

Fear. She knew this impending fear. She had experienced this before, many times. When Josie was diagnosed with tuberculosis, she knew severe danger several days before he went to the doctor about his persistent coughing and sometimes coughing up blood. The first night that he spent coughing almost all night, she had a tight knot in her stomach and her head started to pound. The knot dissipated when Josie came back from the doctor with the life-altering news.

That was decades ago before the seven children were born. Throughout the decades she tended the small farm by herself, nursed Josie back to health with daily and nightly care working her fingers to the bone to stave off starvation and keep the children healthy. After Josie departed by train for Muskoka with his consumptive disease, Belinda would visit him once a year and then would be pregnant with another child to raise alone under increasingly desperate circumstances.

Belinda and the children learned to survive on their wits and a government grant called Mother’s Allowance. Daily life on the farm was desperate despite the optimism which Belinda had. Notwithstanding polio suffered by Dolly, the firstborn, Belinda would play games during some of their evening meals of porridge. “This spoonful is carrots. The next spoonful will be strawberries” was how she started the youthful game. Dolly’s younger brothers would chime in with their contributions. Such optimistic games showed a deeper spirit of hope: the spirit of daydreams, expectancy, assumptions, and endurance. This spirit was what kept Belinda alive when all seemed lost, doom was upon everyone, rock bottom has been reached, and things couldn’t get any worse. Some people believed that things just had to get better. Dolly believed life could not go along at rock bottom for an entire lifetime. Belinda believed people have buoyancy with hope.

He was sent home from Muskoka to die after the birth of their seventh child. The pressure on Belinda became unbearable and the challenge seemed insurmountable. Her situation looked dire: Starvation-level income, seven children, one of them disabled with polio, a dying husband to tend to, farm to care for, a household that carried the pariah of the community and only the death of her husband to look forward to. Bleak did not even begin to describe her feelings or condition. Belinda cosseted her children and held them emotionally close.

Josie eventually got better and found work although he lied to her continuously. From his mouth came secretions of evil like an oil spill, contaminating everything his words contacted. She relied on her intuition daily and used it to sense when someone was lying, or something was wrong. She knew her body sensed danger long before she saw it. Her intuition gave her the only sense of power she had. She had a gift that others around her never exercised and she used it. It was a matter of survival.

Before Josie turned off the county road to the snakelike farm laneway, she knew she was going to get beat up, punched, or slapped around. She just knew it. It was like breathing in and breathing out: first the knots in her stomach, then the pounding headache then the hairs would raise on the back of her neck. She was never wrong. She never second-guessed herself. She had total self-reliance on this matter. She braced for the evil ahead.

As Josie into the farmyard entrance, the house seemed smaller somehow. She checked her glasses and wiped them on her apron. She looked again at the house as the car pulled to a stop. It was full size again.

Something terrible is wrong, she thought as she opened the car door and sat in the front seat.

“Belinda, I need to tell you something”.

“Go ahead”

“I’m being transferred to Tobermory”

“How long have you known”.

The knots were still there.

“About a week or so. I’ll be going by myself. We won’t be moving.”

“Will you be gone for a week or so?” she asked, glancing at him.

“No. I won’t be back”, he shot back. He glowered at her.

The sting in her eyes was blinding as cobra spit: instant, accurate and deadly.

She got out of the car to tend the farm.

He drove away.

The Card

Perhaps it was a coincidence that Robert got pulled over and asked for his licence, insurance and ownership. Perhaps not. At first, Robert was surprised because he lived in Rosedale and had graduated from Osgood Hall with his law degree and his second-hand BMW shone like a polished opal on a white beach. His father, John, had worked as a clerk at a grocery store for thirty years and had put him through De La Salle and York University by perseverance and disciplined savings. His mom and dad met at the Cabbage Town grocery store where John worked for decades without promotion. Robert came alone when his mom was seventeen and he had no sibling rivals all his life.
Good morning, officer
Your licence, insurance and ownership, please.
Robert handed over the sacred documents and noted the Toronto police badge and the stink of sweat seeping into his open window. He knew he was not breaking the forty limit on Mount Pleasant Road and he also knew his tail light wasn’t broken. He waited.,
Everything is OK, Mr. Barker. How long have you owned this car?
A strange question but now is not the time to get snotty. Eleven years.
Where do you work?
Philips and Philips on King and University. Do you want my business card?
Yes, thanks.
Robert took a card from the back lip of his wallet and handed it to Officer P. Sullivan, as his badge read.
Have a good day.
Robert toggled up the power window without a word of response and watched the glass barrier lift like a drawbridge between himself and the street noise around his shiny safe castle. He felt the stress dissipate as the distance between him and the cop increased.
Mount Pleasant was always busy with caterpillar-like chain-links of cars at this time in the morning but the sound of the siren still shrilled in his mind as he joined the automotive gridlock. It wasn’t the sound that bothered him because he heard similar fire, ambulance and first responder alarms throughout the city. He’s heard them all his life. Why am I still bothered by this incident? Why do I feel bad?
He pushed the green button with his long thin index finger and the garage parking meter stuck out its long white bar-coded tongue. He snatched the ticket, slid it smoothly into his pin-striped left breast shirt pocket and parked in his reserved space. The express elevator ride to the thirty-second floor seemed like a split second because his mind was preoccupied with the mornings’ incident that happens in rare occasions.
Good morning Gloria
Good morning Robert. The affidavits are on your desk and your ten am court case has been delayed. Judge Bruser had an emergency family matter last night and Judge Johnson will take your case on his docket.
You’re wonderful, Gloria
I’ll bet you say that to everyone, she chided
I’d be lying if I did, he deadpanned.
Robert hung up his designer overcoat and tailored Zegna suit jacket that he was still paying for. He walked to his office corner glass alcove and looked out toward Lake Ontario and the CN Tower.
The first time Robert had been stopped by police was when he and his buddies, the bad boys of Bleeker Street were having a party down by the Don River in Cabbage Town, when he was ten. Two police officers walked up to the foursome and, with Billy-sticks defensively outreached as if they were being attacked, asked the youngsters for their names and what they were doing. One officer took notes while the other menacingly approached with fact-gathering intent.
We ain't done nothin, Robert blurted
Did I ask you to talk?
When the names, addresses, phone numbers and ages were duly noted the cops vanished, for a while.
The feelings of wonder, guilt, shame, embarrassment, and humiliation crept into the boy’s lives along with the fear of police. The bad boys were often stopped and questioned until the day arrived when they designated a gawker to watch for the cops and give a whistle when they were spotted. Shame and guilt became embedded into their little lives as a coating on top of their feeling of inferiority at being poor, isolated and insignificant.
No, it wasn’t bad boys of Bleeker Street, he mumbled to himself. That was what we called ourselves. We were known as the black boys because we were the only black kids in Cabbage town.