I sometimes need to give my creative brain a nudge and this is one of those times. I've been doing a great deal of writing lately. Business writing - in hopes of landing a paying gig, personal writing - in hopes of getting to the deep dark recesses of my soul and list writing - in hopes of getting things organized and able to check them off. I haven't done much creative writing and won't make it out to the writers group that meets this morning, so I thought I would dazzle the page with the following.
I'm using a little help
prompt help to get me started.
“Unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.” ~ Jeannette Winterson
The revelation came
in a manila envelope with the symbol of the Manitoba Provincial Archives in the
return address folder. I ripped it open hoping not to rip any of the pages
inside, but too impatient to find the letter opener that was likely tucked under
something on the side of the counter.
The gasp of the
archivist heard from the other end of the phone had been true to it's
sound. This was shocking and stunning
and caused the ground to shift a little beneath my feet. The bastard hadn't
been divorced when he married Mom. That meant that their marriage was not real
and instead of him being a bastard there were seven of us.
We all suspected for
decades that Edward was either born out of wedlock or at least conceived
there, but it turns out after a check with the church that they shared their
nuptials in that had been a truth. One of very few that made up the foundation of
the marriage.
I had started this
journey in order to give my mom something special for her 80th birthday. A
little link to her past and some information about where her parents had come
from. She had rarely spoken much about
her growing up years. The stories few and far between never went any further
back then her childhood on the prairies during the depression and drought of
the thrirties. Any stories were fraught with the prairie version of Dickensian
depressiveness and with sorrow and economic hard times. Occasionally she alluded to fun games of kick
the can or taking the gopher tails to town to sell for candy money. Gophers were a big problem on the farms - they ruined the fields and that's the last thing they needed during the midst of the drought.
What I came away
with though, aside from one picture of her parents sitting on kitchen chairs in
their Sunday best in the middle of a snow bank, was more information on her
husband, my father.
My father was out of
my life, thankfully, at the age of 12. He was a large, imposing man who abused
his wife and children and made our lives hell. We didn't need the priests to
tell us about hell on Sunday mornings - we lived it. Sure, there were good times. Times when we
laughed ourselves silly, played pranks, or just amused ourselves with whatever
we could get up to, but most of the time we were all just hiding from the
horrors that we knew would come with the next bottle of rum, rye, moonshine, or
just because someone had said something his warped sense of decorum didn't agree with.
I guess, in
retrospect, I was lucky. I was one the last child and learned quite a bit from
example. I watched what others did to bring on a rage and I avoided it as best
I could. I hid in my room a great deal. I hid in my head much more than that. I
knew that things could get very bad and I prayed that I could stay out of the
way long enough to keep it at bay.
Jack had been
married before. Apparently in 1947 in
his hometown of Winnipeg. The wedding took place in the family church in which
he and his siblings had been baptized. I
imagined that they had all had their first confessions, first communions and
confirmations to the Catholic church in that building surrounded by a
tight-knit congregation.
His first had filed for divorce in February of 1953 stating
infidelity as the cause. In those days, the divorce law was a national law and
you had to petition the federal government after having published your intention
along with the reason in the newspaper. This small one-liner is where I had
seen the first clue to the original marriage. After that I had contacted the
church that had been named in my aunt's wedding announcement to find a record
of my father's birth. Turns out he had lied by a year about the year of his
birth. On the baptism certificate I found a one-liner at the bottom noting the date of the original
nuptials and the year of the wedding.
Eventually, I
tracked down the archivist in Manitoba who was more than happy to supply me
with a photocopy of the divorce paperwork. Included in the package was the
original petition. That petition not only stated the reason as fidelity, but
also named the party with whom my father had been accused of cheating on his
wife with. The woman shared the same name as his first wife. Given the surname and
address of the co-accused I knew it had to be a relation. Unfortunately, by looking at the original
marriage license application I determined that Jack had been stepping out on
his wife with his wife's mother.
The subpoena for
divorce was served upon Jack as he was at work on a military base in northern
Manitoba - working as an airplane mechanic. The paymaster confirmed that the
paperwork had been served in March. I
have not yet received a copy of the military records, but I am certain that any
stories told about his service overseas during the Korean war will prove to be
untrue. How he managed to leave his post shortly thereafter and make his way to
Banff in time for a summer romance with my mother is still unknown.
He did make his way
to Banff though. Why Banff? It wasn't a destination of note for most in those
days. Certainly not for prairie people from Winnipeg. They were more apt to go
east to Toronto to make their fortune in the big city. The answer to that might
be in the fact that the divorce decree was actually granted in Vancouver, BC -
the new home of his first wife and the child of the original marriage.
My suspicion is that
Jack either ran out of money, or train tickets on his way to Vancouver and
wound up stopping over in Banff to try to make enough to get him the rest of
the way to the coast and his lost family. However, during his stopover he met
my mother. A prairie girl who had no doubt not had the best upbringing in life
on the farm and had left it at 15 with her younger sister in tow.
The romance must
have blossomed or my mother held fast to her Catholicism and wouldn't allow him
to go past a certain point without a ring on her finger. The part that had
always confused us, though, was the fact that both had grown up Catholic, but
chose to marry in a Lutheran church. This was another reason that we were
suspicious about the timing of Patrick's conception. Their anniversary was
September 14 and Edward was born September 17, 1954.
I was desperate to share my findings with someone, but who? If I shared them with mother it would send her into a spiral of depression that she may not be able to climb out of at this stage of the game. Edward didn't like to hear of anything unseemly unless it was political in nature and worldly in interest. It would cause Michael to go into a drinking binge and that would spiral much like mother. I didn't know where the other boys sat on this, so for now I would keep it to myself lest my precarious position in the family tree change.
