I remember my grandfather, that fierce old man. He was one of those intimidating men who mellow and gentle with age. When I knew him, his blue eyes held sparkle, yet always he carried with him the shadow of his younger self. He fascinated me, mysterious as some wild creature caught by a momentary lightning-flash, skittering into darkness and gone.
People talked about him. Some with awe, some with humour, some with a contempt that hinted at knowledge I did not have. Yet people loved him, even against their wills. My father once told me that as a young man, he hated his father bitterly, with passionate abandon. By that time, my grandfather was dead, and I had heard some of the stories told in undertones by aunts and uncles shamed by a past they could not relate to the gentle old man they now knew. The stories frightened me, hinting of dark wells and pockets filled with hurt and betrayal and something I did not, then, call evil.
I first came to know my grandfather when I was eight years old. My parents had separated, and for some mysterious reason my mother took her children and fled three hundred miles to the Nithi Valley in northern B.C., where my father’s parents lived. Maybe it was because her own parents lived too close to my father and his new lover, my mother’s former best friend, the cause of the breakup. But that’s an old story, and one that has been told too many times already. So we moved in with my grandparents. That was a strange time, a dark and confusing time for the child I was. Everything was in flux, and mysterious undercurrents threatened to snatch me away and whisk me into a looming darkness. My grandmother was still alive, then. The cancer must have started to grow in her already; it was only a year later she died, an event which rocked that large family tree to its roots. But that came later.
In retrospect, it is easy to see omens, portents and ominous foreshadowings. Doubtless, most of those are projections from the present. One thing I know: as an eight-year-old, I saw my grandmother as a ghost, someone without substance, without an essence I could safely love. It does not matter whether I knew it as impending death or not. What matters is that my grandmother was a wraith, and my mother was in fragments, so I attached my heart and my longing for recognition to my grandfather.
It was he upon whose knee I bounced, giggling; he whose jokes cracked me up, he whom I begged for piggyback rides. And it was he who frightened me with tales of scalpings and torture by the Indians who lived on the reservation two miles away. He had a cruel streak, my grandfather.
“Be good, or I’ll sell you to the Indians,” he would whisper, or shout, or offhandedly repeat until it became a litany, a ritualistic phrase fraught with tension, guaranteed to produce a prickling in my scalp as my body anticipated the bloody moment when, torn from me by painted savages, my long tangled locks would be waved triumphantly aloft. I loved it with that painfully morbid glee which keeps children coming back for more even when tickled to the point of wetting themselves.
Oh yes, my grandfather was a dangerous man. He carried himself with a hunter’s easy grace. He was born in 1889, on an Indian reservation in Montana, though he himself had no native blood, and he married a mostly-white woman from the rez, my grandmother. The circumstances of his birth gave his stories, for me, an added credence which sometimes crossed the line from morbid fascination to actual stomach-wrenching terror, as when I was compelled to ride my bike through the dozen or so rundown shacks on the reservation, that being the only route to town back then.
My grandfather was god to me, in those days. In this he replaced my father whose clay feet had proved him unsuited to the role. At eight, I demanded a god with physical presence, one I could touch and see and hear.
It did not disturb me, then, the offhanded cruelty with which he treated my grandmother. I gave it no thought. She was nothing to me. No; that is not true, for she cooked delicious meals and patiently let me help, and she made me lovely handcrafted doll furniture for my birthday that year. She was something to me, but with a child’s cruel self-interest I was quick to dismiss her from my heart whenever my grandfather dashed her upon the rocks of his abysmal contempt.
The first of the stories about my grandfather’s past was revealed to me in bits and pieces over the years. (more…)
