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The Story of You

Once Upon a Town

Where do I come from?
The potato patch.
God in Heaven.
A falling star.
The stork.
A moonlit night.
A hole in the legs.
You were named for the doctor who delivered you.
Where, really?
From here. You’re from right here. The town of Meadow Lake, the province of Saskatchewan, the country of Canada, the planet of Earth. Just down the street at the Meadow Lake Union Hospital you were born, and we lived in the Carter Apartments until you were one, and then we moved to the house, and you grew like quackgrass in the backyard.
And that’s the story of you.

We always have to take someone’s word for it, that mystery of origins. Maybe that’s why I believed I was not so much from a place as from a story–or rather a collection of stories, mutually contradictory and continually evolving in the mouths of my many relatives. This was fine with me. I loved all stories. Dad told us new ones every night at bedtime, and sometimes during the day too, if we badgered him long enough. And even without such prompting, Uncle Hank and Uncle Vic and Uncle Leo told stories on each other, and then Dad would step in to contradict them all and we wouldn’t know who to believe. Mom would stretch Dad’s name out to two syllables–“Ra-ay!”–whenever she thought the shenanigans had gone too far, and Dad would say “Hmp. What! It’s true!” in a tone that suggested the opposite. Dad and his brothers told their stories the way they played cards: as if there was a nickel at stake–and that mattered–and as if the others might very well be cheating. And the point, it seemed to me, was not to get at the truth but to trump their opponents with the most outrageous lie at the most opportune moment.

The household could break into these word-wars at the slightest provocation. One brother might say, “Does it seem cool in here to you?” and another would respond, “Naahhh. Not like those times at the farm when the water froze in the wash basin.”

And the battle was on.

“Not like when I had to tunnel through eight-foot snowdrifts to get from the house to the chicken coop.”

“Bullshit! It wasn’t cold then. Snow’s an insulator.”

“Damn near smothered us though, right along with the chickens. I remember they were all keeled over when I got the door open, and the first thing I thought was, that damn weasel’s back!”

“Weasel, indeed.”

“You never did that tunnelling anyway. Uncle Corentin did–I remember him coming in with the shovel frozen to his mitts.”

“I froze my ears in bed once, on the farm. Forgot to wear my tuque.”

“Remember when the chickadees froze solid on the bobwire fence?”

“That was your noggin that froze solid.”

“They did. A dozen chickadees and a pigeon.”

“And a great big clump of bull shit!”

“They did! I plucked them off like apples and Mom baked them in a pie.”

“Ra-ay!”

We never knew how these jousts would end–with shouted accusations of bullshit, or laughter, or simmering silences that might well evolve into feuds. As a spectator sport, it was better than Stampede Wrestling, more suspenseful than The Edge of Night.

When it was just the five of us, the immediate family, the stories were not so much a competition as a reward for good behaviour, or at least a diversion from bad.

“Tell us a story, Dad,” we pleaded, several times a day.

“We’ll see,” he said. This was what he always said when we asked for anything. Once I asked if we could have an elephant to play with in our backyard sandbox and he
said, “We’ll see.” Most of the time we didn’t believe he was listening at all. But still we asked our questions, made our requests. It was part of the game, that we would try to coax him away from his newspaper or his book or his chesterfield snoozes. Usually when we had all but given up, he would turn to Glenn or me and say–as if the idea had just occurred to him–“Ready for a story, Buzz?”

He called both of us Buzz, short for Buzzard. Also Little Man. When Michelle was old enough to be something other than The Baby, she became Missy or Miss. And Glenn was Glenn D., and I was Warren G., which became Warren Jeremiah, even though my middle name was Gerald. Sometimes I wondered where these names had come from, but I didn’t ask. It seemed appropriate that, just as there were multiple versions of my uncles’ stories, there were multiple versions of me. Even Dad was Ray or Raymond or Mr. Cariou to other people, and on the diplomas in his office he was Raymondum Geraldum Cariouum. That was the funniest name of all. Mom was Melba or Mrs. Cariou, and to our English friends she was Melber. How could we be so many different things? It seemed that names
were the briefest, most cryptic kind of stories, and that it would take a lifetime to puzzle out their plots and settings and characters.

Sometimes Dad told us our stories in the living room, or the backyard, or in the car as we drove to Canwood or Leonard’s Ranch or the cabin, but the ones we counted on were the bedtime variety. Bedtime was in fact renamed storytime, in a fully successful attempt to quell our rebellions against the early hour (eight-thirty) of our appointed slumbers. For storytime we were willing to go to bed any time after supper.

Glenn and I shared a bedroom, and Dad would come in once we had said our prayers, or claimed to, and we would all climb into one tiny, quivering, plastic-sheeted bed. We lay on our backs, Glenn and I nestling under each of Dad’s arms, resting our heads on his shoulders. When Michelle was old enough she joined in too, the three of us Lilliputians on Dad’s Gulliverian body. We looked up at the stippled ceiling with its tiny winking sparkles that glimmered like distant stars. Streetlight came in through the window, seeping past the navy blue curtains. In winter the aquamarine of our outside Christmas lights illumined the frost patterns on the glass. Sometimes I would scrape my initials in that frost at night and would wake up the next morning to find the letters transmogrified by cold into curlicued rococo fonts like the ones at the beginnings of fairy tales.

“Okay. Where was I?” Dad would say, and we’d have to remind him, because each night’s story was somehow connected to the previous one and there could be no such thing as starting anew.

Sometimes he told us about where he was from, the town of Ituna in the southern part of Saskatchewan, where we had never been. He had grown up on a farm near Ituna with his mother and fourteen siblings. His dad had died when he was six or seven but he didn’t tell us about that. Instead he described the funny characters in the town and the trouble that he and his brothers got into. There was the story of Handlebar Harry, the Ituna barber who had fallen asleep in his barber’s chair one afternoon and awakened to find–eeyike!–one half of his handlebar moustache lying on the floor like a turd. (Dad always punctuated his tales with “eeyaws!” or “eeyikes!” at the many turning points of his plots.) There was the story of Jimmy Kobialchuk the bully, taunting Dad and Uncle Leo from the other side of a fence, watching them through a knothole in the wood. Uncle Leo put a rock in his slingshot and whap! shot Jimmy right through the knothole, gave him a black eye.