Chapter eleven

Another chapter in the life of Jackie D'Acre. Now a teen and living in the country, Jackie experiences the usual teen angst but also the strange mix of her former memoir chapters, laughter and violence. Told with honesty and brio, Jackie's voice recalls early Thunder Bay.

Hovering Above Myself

A Memoir

By Jacqueline D’Acre

Chapter Eleven

It was 1956. The Hit Parade on the radio played great songs: Bill Haley and the Comets, doo-wop, Elvis, the Platters. I listened and danced to the tunes. (Yes, suddenly I was transformed into someone who could dance.) I continued at high school, the Fort William Collegiate Institute. Mother had attended Collegiate and had graduated from Grade Thirteen, the first person in the family to do so, despite she was blind as a bat and only put her glasses on out of desperation. (Her favourite movie was How to Marry a Millionaire because in it, Marilyn Monroe wears thick glasses, just like hers and, Mother was as glamorous as Marilyn. Mother hated them so much she continuously lost them. Every day her cry would ring out: “Kids! I can’t find my glasses!” And we’d all scatter to search for the scratched–up, thick-lensed spectacles.) Not being able to read the blackboard very well, her glasses hidden, Mother memorized what the teacher said. Somehow, she got top grades.

We had moved out to the farm this year, my thirteenth year. As far as I can remember I graduated Grade Eight with the highest grade average in the history of the school, 96 point something. This was not good enough. So when Father said, “Why didn’t you get 100%?” I couldn’t think of a good rejoinder, so I was silent. I took my report card next door to Tom Perrons and he said: “Well done, my girl.”

In high school I was put into a special class for students with good grades. We were to take more than the regular classes. For example, our English teacher was a professor, which meant she had a Ph.D. I was very excited to have her because she’d had some work published, so I thought she would know a lot about writing, something which I was anxious to improve at. Maybe she would give us topics for compositions other than, “How I spent My Summer Vacation,” and the most dreaded: “My Earliest Childhood Memory.” How could I write about that? Impossible.

And this was the time that I was the most ugly. Even my hair was made ugly, in those skinny braids. It had not been cut in many years and it was so long I could sit on it. It was gorgeous (dyed) red hair. The summer before high school started Mother and I decided it was time to cut my hair. I would start high school with a whole new look. She undid my braids and brushed them out. Then I sat at the piano, with my hair hanging down my back, while Father and UncaBill took pictures. There was silence in the room. I just knew they were quietly admiring my hair. Weren’t they?

Then Mother commenced chopping. She washed my new short hair in the kitchen sink and set it in pin curls. (Twirl a piece of hair around your finger like a little donut, then slide a bobby pin into it to hold it. Put a hairnet over all to keep the pins in place.)

I hardly slept that night. I woke up in the early dawn and just couldn’t wait. Had the hair cutting transformed me into a beauty? I desperately hoped so. I wanted to look good in the new community out in the country. I ran upstairs to the kitchen and stood in front of a small mirror on the kitchen wall. Quickly I pulled the pins out of the little donuts of hair. I grabbed a brush and brushed all over my head. I stopped brushing and stared at my image in the mirror. Then sagged in despair. I had not been transformed into a beauty. Now all my hair was gone, the only beautiful thing about me. I would have to face the community of Riverdale and the student body of Fort William Collegiate Institute as a plump plain Jane. Maybe people would like me for my personality.

Fort William Collegiate

James Bond, my cat, is in the doghouse for a misdemeanor. I was dozing while watching a movie titled Special 26 starring my favourite Indian actor. I watch him avidly. He is not perfectly handsome, although he’s not bad looking. I don’t know his name. They run it though the credits too quickly to read. What he has, though, which is superior to looks, is intensity. Nothing is sexier than intensity. So I was mooning over this guy when CRASH! I’m sure I levitated from the bed. I looked to my left, the origin of the sound. The hospital table at my bedside is crammed with Important Stuff and now most if it was on the floor. My little MacBook Air, for one thing, and it’s piled high with blister packs of my medications—opiates and other pills for blood pressure, cholesterol and depression. (They all work.)

 The other bad thing about James Bond’s misdemeanor was that it was an hour or so past the time to take my medications, so I was feeling some pain. I get a little frantic when I feel pain. I’m never 100% confident the pain killers will actually kill.

So I jolted upright when I heard the crash and instantly realized the culprit was Janes Bond. He’d been sleeping on the window ledge adjacent to the hospital table, and he must have awakened and stepped out onto the pile of medications and the MacBook Air. They all fell down, breaking a white dish. There was nothing I could do but wait for my caregiver.

Vickie is here. Hurrah. She is retrieving the things I can’t reach. But just before she arrived I was able to grab my medications, take the morphine and Percocet, and wait until the pain subsides.

About my lusting after men at my current advanced age of seventy-five and doing things like writing a book, I believe all this is part of your essence. You never lose your essence. Your essence is that part of you which differentiates you from others and also makes you the same as others. It is your living energy, your ‘vibe,’ your vibration—as demonstrated by quantum mechanics. Everything is a vibe. A vibe powers particles which form the world, the Universe, you. Even rocks have vibes. They look solid, but they’re not. I wonder if this is what Vincent Van Gogh was seeing when he painted “Starry, Starry Night” or “Sunflowers.” Everything in those pictures is wavy, seeming to depict vibrations. Was that part of his genius? That he was seeing and attempting to paint reality? Maybe it’s what they used to call your soul. My soul, among other things like writing, ogles. I’m as attracted to men now as I was at age thirty. Age did not dim this. I check out good looks in men, sure, but mostly, I admire intensity.

Now I had to ride the school bus. I was to catch it at 7:30 a.m. I grabbed my new-smelling books and left the house. It was dark as I walked, Lisa trotting beside me down our gravel driveway in the chill air and across Highway 61—that’s where we lived now—Highway 61. I waited and watched. The snout of Mount MacKay gradually appeared out of the darkness.

Highway 61 originates—or ends—at Thunder Bay and goes all the way down the Mississippi River to end at Basin Street in New Orleans: A path to my destiny. The Mississippi River originates near Minneapolis, Minnesota, about three hundred miles south of Thunder Bay.

What would these new country people be like? I was afraid. Then the big yellow bus squealed up, a door opened and I got on. I said “Hello,” to the lady bus driver and she said, “Hi. Grab a seat anywhere. And welcome aboard.”

The bus started up and to the tune of the Platters singing ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ issuing from the bus’s radio, I lurched down the dark aisle to an empty seat. Most of the other riders seemed to be asleep. I sat and looked out the window. In the bus’s headlights I saw silver Lisa sitting by the side of the road, yearning toward the bus. This was not good. She’d have to cross the highway to get home and she might be hit by a car. From now on, I’d have to put her up before I left for school.

Collegiate was a plain yellow brick building on a pleasant, tree-lined street. It was in a higher-end neighbourhood. A few concrete columns graced the front entrance, which nobody used. Instead we all herded up the side stairs, into the school.

Inside, I joined a long line of students waiting under a sign that said: Grade Nine. After an interminable wait, I received a packet of papers and was told to go wait in another line. (I was able to sign up for all the classes I wanted.)

I waited in lines most of the day, but finally got to my home room, which serendipitously, was also the art room. I found my locker in the cloakroom and shed my winter coat. I went back to my home room and shortly thereafter the end-of-school bell rang and I headed out to where I caught the bus. I rode in silence all the way home while the other students laughed and gabbed. No one spoke to me. I didn’t know how to speak to them.

At home, Lisa was waiting for the school bus by the side of the road. How did she know? Some sort of doggie ESP? I got off and she mobbed me with affection. I hugged her and told her to heel and we walked across the highway, up the driveway to home.

I called out “Hi!” to Mother. She called “Hi” back from the depths of the house. I immediately set to work. I had to do some chores, (with so many kids there was no getting out of them,) so I thought if I picked a chore I liked, I’d get out of doing the ones I didn’t like. This only worked part of the time. I still got stuck doing dishes. I liked cooking. (And, funnily enough, washing and waxing floors. Moving a rag back and forth, back and forth, over a smooth surface was meditative, peace-inducing.)

So I started peeling potatoes for supper. Little kids played around my feet. I think Roy was born by then, so he’d be crawling around. Roy looked different from the rest of us. He had brownish-blond hair and big ears. Mother despaired over his ears. We all prayed he’d overcome this disgrace and grow into them. Roy (Jonathan Roy Shawn) was always getting into mischief, even at an early age. Once Mother and I came into the kitchen to find the green tile floor covered with a whole canister of Quaker oats. Roy sat in the middle of it, making car sounds, pushing a toy truck through oatmeal roads. We laughed and Mother jokingly called him “The Monster.” Well, it stuck. We all laughingly called him The Monster, unaware we were inflicting deep psychological wounds, that would only be apparent once he became a teenager. Actually, deep psychological wounds would be exhibited by every one of us, once we became teenagers. Also, Roy became the only boy in the family who learned to ride a horse. And he did so, very well.

Speaking of horses. Around this time Father actually allowed us to get a horse. I don’t know how we afforded it. Plus, we had no fencing, no stable, just a 2-acre backyard. I remember going with him, just the two of us, to Dixon’s Stable out on Oliver Road and picking out a dark brown gelding we named ‘Darby Dark.’ We had no clue as to how to care for a horse—except that they ate hay. Somehow, miraculously, Darby survived our ignorance. We built a corral out of trees we chopped down on our property; Mother, I and the girls did it. To afford to do it, we chopped down fence-post sized trees at the back of our property, then attached a rope to one and handed the rope to someone riding Darby in a western saddle. They dallied the rope around the saddle horn. Darby gamely dragged the log out to the front of the property. Our corral looked rickety, but it held up. My sisters, who were home more than me, became expert riders. Eventually, Jennifer acquired a bay mare named ‘Cindy Lee.’ And both she and Della competed and won on these horses.

Sometime in the evening, Father came home, expecting supper to be served the moment he arrived. Some nights he was very late and we’d already eaten. So had he, apparently. He also started buying real butter. We kids were forbidden to eat it: We had to eat margarine. This affected Della profoundly. When grownup she never allowed margarine into her kitchen—only real butter. Without daily access to Grampa’s store, getting groceries proved a problem. We just could not afford them. Many nights Mother served pasta with margarine. No sauce, no meat, just the pasta and the melted margarine. Yuck. After a while we all broke out in boils. Also, around this time, Father was elected President of his union. So he was out many nights, late, eating steak dinners with other union officials. He was so good at negotiations, the dealership where he worked hired him into management to get him on their side. He did this with only a third grade education. He was raised in a succession of tents and log cabins in the bush where his father could prospect, far from schools. Given half a chance, he seriously would have made an excellent lawyer or politician.

We were saved from plain pasta by Father’s brothers, Uncle George and Uncle Joe. They each shot a moose and gave us a whole, butchered, moose for the freezer. Mother got very creative at cooking various cuts of moose. We had some form of it every night. Finally, one evening, Mother set down a platter of moose burgers and little Roy cried out: “Oh no! Not wolf again!” He started his avocation as a satirist early.

When I got home Roy’s revving sounds echoed through the empty house. When we first moved we had almost no furniture, the tile was not laid over the plywood flooring in the hall and the living room and there was no door to the bathroom, only a yellow plastic shower curtain strung up over the doorway. This was embarrassing. You made awful sounds when you went to the bathroom. People out in the hallway could hear you. And of course, there never was enough time. People were always clamouring for you to “Hurry up!” right outside the curtain.

I dreaded being the one to follow Father into the bathroom. After him, the room stunk of feces and cigarette smoke. Holding my breath, I got in and out as fast as I could.

When Roy became a teenager, the only trouble he had was dropping out of school. I don’t know why it seemed so much worse when Roy did it. We all dropped out of school, some earlier than others. But Roy had the last laugh. In elementary school his IQ was tested and his score was, I think, 170. It was so high, his teacher actually phoned Mother to tell her. He was overactive in the classroom and it was because he was bored silly. Actually, we all tested with high IQ’s, but I believe Roy’s was the highest. The other thing was, as a teenager, he morphed from cygnet to swan. His ears suddenly were the right size. They did not stick out. He was tall and he had the body of a sculpture by Michelangelo. The nearest movie star lookalike I can think of is Brad Pitt. They have similar, spectacular bodies and similar faces, although I think Roy is handsomer. Roy once told me he had never asked a woman on a date. He never needed to. They mobbed him. He always had a girlfriend. I thought it was a shame he hadn’t become an actor: He would have been a star. Besides being matinee-handsome, he could do any accent. He acted out joke after joke and kept us all screaming in laughter. Tracy and Jeffrey turned out to be hilarious comedians as well. After a dinner filled with amusement, before doing the dishes, we were accustomed to sitting back and letting one of the comedians take the floor. I sat back and cringed away from Father while I laughed at my talented siblings. He sat kitty-corner from me at our breakfast nook. I had to be careful, lest our knees brushed. We roared in laughter for an hour, until Mother, even as she laughed, broke it up so we could clean up and do homework. (Despite many horrors, laughter was frequent. Jeffrey and I laughed at everything: Nothing was sacred. I’d read some Freud and passed this knowledge along to Jeffrey. We had begun to analyze people, especially our parents. We called it ‘analyze’ but really it was more like ‘judgment.’ We declared Mother a narcissist, Father a narcissistic psychopath and we decided they had given us ‘inferiority complexes.’ That was the popular expression of the time. Later it would be ‘self-esteem.’ Nobody had self-esteem, suddenly.

           

Homework. I had never had so much homework. Some nights it took four hours, but I never begrudged a minute of that time. When the dishes were done and the kitchen table wiped clean, I happily sat down in the now-empty kitchen—others off watching TV or even, tackling their homework. I did the least favourite subject first: Algebra. The rest I loved: History, science, geography, art, Latin, French and English. Science was especially exciting: Our classroom was a lab so we could do experiments. Maybe we’d take genetics! I pulled a math text book and a spiral notebook toward me and wrestled with an equation. Now, in the kitchen, I was in a cocoon of low sound surrounded by the dull roar of humanity: TV blaring in the living room, laughter issuing from the upstairs bedroom. Upstairs was one long bedroom with four single beds—me, Jeffrey, Jennifer and Della—placed around the unfinished room. The floor was covered with some sort of pre-flooring canvas, the walls along the length of the room were upright 2 x 4’s, with empty attic crawl space behind them. We stored Christmas decorations there.

I came home one day and was looking for a snack in the fridge, when Mother from behind me said: “Jackie. You have shoulders like a football player.” I stared hard into the fridge, blinking back tears. She only noticed bad things about me, never anything good. So there was nothing good, right? She continued. “I’m sending you to Dr. Moran to see if he can help.”

So there I was, sitting fully dressed in Dr. Moran’s office, post examination. He was wiping his hands on a paper towel. Besides my sweater and pleated skirt, I wore a poufy light green angora hat that made me look almost cute. Dr. Moran was cute. And he was easy to talk to. There was an air of flirtation in the room, so I was blushing. (Lots of men liked me; why not boys?) He also had gone to Collegiate so we talked about that. Then he said, “Jackie. Stop worrying. Your shoulders do not look like a football player’s. Guess your Mum doesn’t watch much football, so stop fretting about that. You’re a pretty girl, Jackie, but truthfully, you could stand to lose, maybe…ten pounds? Okay then. I’ll write you a prescription. This is just to get you started. You are not to take them indefinitely. Ok? If you take them exactly as prescribed, you’ll do fine.”

Well, wow! Those pills were magic. I had absolutely no appetite. I had energy beyond belief. I was Superwoman. I cleaned Gram’s vast hardwood floors with steel wool and a special wood floor cleaner on my hands and knees, then got up ready for more. And, by now at the farm the tile had been laid, so I washed and waxed it (on hands and knees—the only way to get it really clean.) But the pill-effect was not limited to the physical: I discovered a penchant for writing terrible poetry, so I stayed up almost all night writing long, saga-ish poems.

One magic pill drawback: My mouth was always dry and chewing gum was a no-no, so when a teacher asked me a question, I could barely get out a response. They thought I was stalling because I didn’t know the answer. I was stalling because my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.

I ate once a day, very slowly, my favourite things. A small bag of Old Dutch Bar-b-que potato chips and since I was usually at Grampa’s store where this feast took place, a Pepsi.

I lost weight. All the ten pounds and more. Gram made me a new skirt, calf-length. It was avocado green, with a kick-pleat in the back, in a slim cut. Of course I continued to wear the iron maiden corset contraption.

No one complimented—or even mentioned—my new skirt or my new weight loss. No boys asked me out on dates. It was a total mystery to me as to how you got a boy to ask you out. Sit around and hope? That got me nowhere. The only boy at school to talk to me was a skinny little guy, maybe my height at the time: 5’2”. (By age sixteen I reached my full height: 5’5”. Now, with age shrinkage, I’m 5’4”.) He wore glasses and was covered in freckles. More than me, even. His hair was black, cut short. His name (not really) was Christopher Black and we sat side-by-side for our art class with Mr. Brown, whispering about how much we did not like our fathers, as we drew and painted. I liked him. We giggled a great deal.

One evening at supper Father announced it was time for me to learn to drive a car. This delighted and frightened me. He would teach me and we would commence tonight. I got in behind the wheel, shrinking up against the door on my side, so as to keep a distance between me and him. The car, our old blue Ford, was a stick shift so I had to learn the sensitivities of the clutch. I drove to the end of the driveway and beyond, out into the big field behind the house. We bumped around the field, me stalling the car frequently. After a couple of nights bumping around, I got the hang of it. After that, on drives to camp at Ignace, when we got out onto the open highway, UncaBill stopped the car and we traded places. I drove for miles, and we switched places just before entering the precincts of Ignace.

After a month or so it became apparent I was separating from my siblings, not by choice, but more by geography: I was city, they were country. This made me sad. I loved them all passionately. They were now having an upbringing far different from mine at 544, in some ways, slightly better. They’d only be criticized by two people, not five, like Jeffrey, Tracy and I were. Another phenomenon, Mother stopped spanking. Completely. (One exception: Tracy committed some infraction which infuriated Mother. He was just entering the kitchen when she lit into him, hitting as he protested heartbreakingly: “No, Mother. Please, please, no.” I watched, paralyzed. My poor little brother.) The country children never knew Mother as someone who hit. Of course, bonus, she also stopped hitting me. I gave this a great deal of thought, replaying in my mind episodes of spanking at 544 and after reflecting, I noticed every time, Gram stood to the side, silent, arms crossed over her bosom, and watched in grim, approving silence. The spankings were for her benefit. “See?” they demonstrated. “Look, Mum, I’m a good mother. I’m not spoiling my child. Please approve of me.”

I become even more aware of my appearance. One thing I settled on was I wanted to become beautiful. I stared at pretty girls, trying to figure out exactly what formula constituted beauty. I decided Elizabeth Taylor was the most beautiful woman in the world, with Marilyn Monroe in second place. Many women were merely pretty. Not what I wanted. I wanted beauty. I didn’t even know what I wanted it for.

Grampa’s store had a big mirror in the office. When no one was around, I scrutinized myself in this mirror. I pressed my face up so close to the mirror I was practically looking up my nostrils. I couldn’t find anything terribly wrong with my face, my nose wasn’t big and hooked like Grampa’s, my mouth was full, like Mother’s, my chin looked normal—all fine except for those pesky freckles and the blonde eyelashes and eyebrows. The eyelashes themselves, I observed from very close up, were long and quite thick. Too bad they were invisible. Mascara would probably fix that. Mother wore it. Why wouldn’t she let me?

“You’re too young for makeup.”

Oh.

“But I’m in high school!”

“You’re only fourteen!”

Darn. (Darn is not a word I’d dare to use out loud. It’s a swear word. Swear words were not permitted. Of course we assiduously avoided the worst word in the world: ‘Fuck.’) It went further than that. My Wiley Street friends Janice and Marlene said things like: ‘Youse guys.’ This put Mother’s teeth on edge. “It’s simply ‘you!’” she’d exclaim. “And never say “ain’t. Ignore your father. He doesn’t know any better than to say it.” She corrected our grammar and diction and railed at us about expanding our vocabularies. When I took acting in university my professor singled me out and embarrassed me in a rather nice way by admonishing the remainder of the class to pay attention to my excellent diction. It was also very important to have a big vocabulary. No makeup—big vocabulary. Got it. That’ll really attract the boys.

Summertime in the country. I started waking just before dawn and sneaking out of the house with Lisa. I went barefoot, naked under my nightie. With Lisa close by my side I walked back on our property. My feet, legs and the hem of my nightie got wet from the dew. Soon I came to the place of the wild violets. Here, the ground was covered in pale mauve violets, growing so thickly the footing was pure mauve. They scented the air with violet. I stepped carefully past the violets and continued on until I left our property. Then I was surrounded by thick bush. Birdsong echoed around the trees. I went down a slope to a thin little creek then up the other side until I came to a barbwire fence and a cleared meadow. The enclosure of the bull. I looked everywhere and couldn’t see him, so Lisa and I went through the fence. The meadow was indeed empty, except for a few buzzing bumblebees and yellow and black butterflies fluttering over green grass dotted with daisies and buttercups. Where was the bull? At any rate I carried on. I jumped to avoid stepping on an anthill seething with huge black ants. Then I ran across the meadow just in case the bull was lurking somewhere. The sun was rising and a shaft got me in the eyes. I went through more barbwire to another bush downslope. I went down it and came to another clearing. The trees, mostly poplar, thinned. The sun shone on a pond below. I ventured closer until I found a fallen tree and I sat down on that, Lisa beside me. It was quiet for a while, then birdsong started up and there was a splash on the water. I stared. The sun rose fully and made the pond a crimson mirror. A little brown triangle poked up. A beaver! Ripples of water vee’d out from his head. He swam to the shoreline of the pond and clambered out of the water. He seemed oblivious to our presence, but Lisa alerted. I put my hand on her shoulders. I felt her hackles rise beneath my hand, and she commenced a low growl.

“Lisa!” I hissed. “Hush.”

Wet and dark brown, the beaver sat up and looked around. He still hadn’t seen us. Then he waddled up to a tree—his favourite dish, poplar—and began to gnaw on it.

I watched until my bum got numb and little branches were sticking into me. Mother would be up soon. I wanted these morning excursions to be my secret, so I’d better get back and pretend to be in bed just waking.

Jackie's Mother

             

One afternoon when I got home, I was peeling potatoes and Mother came into the kitchen.

“Jackie. There’s a teenage group that meets every Friday at the Mountain Road Community Centre. I found out about it at the Women’s Institute group I just joined. It’s social. Apparently they dance.”

“Dance? Sure. I’d like that.”

The next Friday, Mother dropped me off at the Centre. All the kids from the school bus were there. There was one adult chaperone. A record was playing ‘Peggy Sue’ by Buddy Holly and a guy asked me to dance. Well, this was kismet. He could dance! He rocked and rolled and flung me around in the jive, a dance I’d practised with Jeffrey. Woo! It was fun! That record ended and another started up. Frankie, I had just learned his name was Frankie, asked me to dance again. Yes! Frankie wasn’t much taller than me, but he was really cute, in a Fifties kind of way. His black hair was styled in a sort of tall pompadour, Elvis-like, errant strands falling sexily over his forehead. He had long sideburns on chiselled cheeks. He wore a pink shirt and black, pleated-front ‘drapes.’ Drapes were wide-legged pants that were cinched in at the ankle. Pink and grey were the ‘in’ colours. Frankie danced with me almost the whole night, but I knew it wouldn’t turn into a boyfriend-girlfriend kind of thing, because for starters, I’d been off the diet pills so I was a little plump and I knew plump girls didn’t get boyfriends. Frankie and I were strictly dancers. But that was pretty good. I’d take that!

I did something very bad. It happened while we were still at 544. I started a year ago and I lost track of how much I took. Every night Gram did the day’s take from the store, counting up all the bills, totaling the receipts, counting the change. She put the change in a cigar box and stored that deep in a dresser drawer. One day I just opened that drawer and took some change—two quarters, I think. I went to the store and bought pears. I craved fresh fruit, and except for oranges and bananas, we never had any at home. Grampa didn’t carry any in the store so cash would have to be spent at another store and no one wanted to do that. So little fresh fruit. I craved pears and peaches and cherries and grapes and melons. So I bought them with stolen money and hid between the houses and furtively bit in. I felt frightened and guilty and very sorry I was hurting Gramma and Grampa, but I couldn’t stop myself. Then I got caught. I don’t remember how, but Gram caught me. I wished I could die. Gram walked away. Next, I heard Mother’s voice: “Jackie! Come here this instant.” I went downstairs, slowly. Gram and Mother were standing in the kitchen. Mother dragged a chair noisily out from under the kitchen table to the centre of the floor. Her lips pressed into a thin line, she gestured to me to sit. I sat, head hanging, knowing something awful was happening and it was all my fault.

“Did you steal money from Gramma’s change box?” Slap. “Did you?” Slap.

I whispered, “Yes.” I stared hard down into my lap. Both Gram and Mother stood over me. The overhead kitchen light seemed too bright.

“Why?” Slap.

“I d-d-don’t know.” Slap. Sob.

“You must know!” Slap, slap. Slap. Sob.

“I d-d-don’t know. I j-j-just took it.” Weeping.

This continued for quite a while. Mother was furious because she couldn’t get a ‘why’ out of me. I genuinely didn’t know why, except I wanted fresh fruit, and if I asked for it, they’d refuse me. Finally, with my face near-raw from all the slaps.

“Okay. Obviously you’re not going to tell us why. I’ll let your Father deal with this tonight when he gets home.”

This was a rare threat. Mother was the main disciplinarian. I slunk off to my basement cave and waited in dread for Father. He came. I heard his footsteps above my room walking across the kitchen. There was a murmur of voices. Then:“Jackie. Come up here.” Father’s voice.

Slowly, I slid from the bed. I plodded upstairs. My feet felt like they weighed a hundred pounds. I was shaking with fear; my little black cloud materialized and hovered. Father and Mother were in the kitchen.

“Jackie. Your Mother told me what you did. Very wrong. You know I’ll have to punish you. Come with me.”

He turned and went out the kitchen door, through the back shed and onto the back deck. I followed. He walked across the backyard to our tree. There were some sprouts shooting up from the base of the tree. Father took out a knife and cut off a branch. It was as thick as his thumb and over a meter long. He walked me back into the house, talking all the while about the evils of stealing. Which I already knew and actually agreed with. I was getting what I deserved. He spoke in a kindly way, which surprised me. I expected anger. He led me to his bedroom—a terrifying place--and there told me to lie down, face first, on the bed. Terrified, I did. Then: Whap! He hit me with the branch across the buttocks. I yelled in pain. He kept on. Whap! Whap! Whap! I cried, loudly. Eventually he stopped. I had marks from my shoulders to the backs of my knees for the next two weeks. It’s a cliché, but I could barely sit. But I never stole again. Now that is just not true! What about the shop lifting that time? Okay. I almost never stole again.

By now there were six of us kids: me, Jeffrey, Tracy, Jennifer, Della, Roy. Now Mother was pregnant again. No one was particularly excited about this seventh child that was on its way. We were all burned out by babies. We went around exclaiming: “Why does she have to have so many?” People asked: “Are you Catholic?” I could only speculate that in having babies, she had found one thing she excelled at. All of her babies were big, now weighing in at over ten pounds, so at birth they looked like three-month infants, all plumped out. She was proud that, except for Della, they had full heads of hair, usually in a spectacular colour: Blonde or red. They learned quickly and all of them walked before they were a year old. Tracy, for example. When he was an infant Mother took him to the baby contest at the Lakehead Exhibition. She had high hopes of winning: Tracy was ten months old and he was walking and even running around. Also there was precedent: Both myself and Jeffrey had won. At the competition, he walked and ran. He was disqualified. They thought Mother was lying about his age. They couldn’t believe he was walking at such a young age. Mother came home furious and she never entered again. 

For over a week now I have been battling a virus. Mainly I am nauseated. I spent a couple of days throwing up. I thought I was on the mend until I threw up again last night. I am shaky and tired, despite a good night’s sleep. And it’s going into Week Two now. It’s got to get better soon. I had to cancel an appointment to get my medical marijuana renewed because of a new tidal wave of nausea. My stomach aches right now, a small ball of pain, deep in my intestines.

Mother’s belly swelled up. A seventh child! Gawd! She was delivered of a baby girl weighing more than twelve pounds. There was some difficulty in birthing her, Mother told me. The actual delivery took a long time, the doctors put her in strange positions, which Mother could not understand. A much longer delivery than usual, and Mother would know, she had lots of experience. But born she was and soon little Jamie Lou—a name that was Mother‘s choice; she ignored me when I said I hated the name. It sounded like a hillbilly name. Welcome to Dogpatch, Daisy Mae, Jamie Lou.

Jamie Lou had golden red hair that soon grew lovely curls. Her skin was an opalescent alabaster. She had enormous blue eyes and long golden eyelashes. But she never smiled. You could grin at her, make faces and koochie-coo all you wanted, she just stared up at the ceiling, impassive. Holding her, she felt limp. There was difficulty feeding her, too. Mother spent hours coaxing her to eat. So Jamie Lou grew, but never turned over in her crib, never reached for a rattle dangled over her, never tried to crawl. It was heartbreaking. Poor Mother. She started going to different doctors in Fort William and even, Winnipeg, seeking an answer as to what was wrong with Jamie Lou. She was frantic, desperate for some way to fix her. After all, Mother was the queen of baby producers, she could never have a defective child. With the birth of this strange baby, Mother no longer had much time for the rest of us. For the next four years, all of her energies and her time were poured into Jamie Lou.