Eggshells

High winds lashed driving rain into rivers of floodwater. Trees toppled onto houses, ripped out power lines and blocked roadways. Through this storm a middle aged couple drove, the woman almost beyond child-bearing years in hard labour. They pulled up to the hospital entrance. Why were there no lights?

The difficult delivery was punctuated by the thrum of a power generator. Near midnight, a premature girl clung to life.

Encrusted with gore from the birth, the nurses wrapped me up and placed me in an incubator, my home for the first three weeks of life. Years later my father told me he thought I was the ugliest thing he had ever seen. Not thinking in the moment, he left the car’s windows down outside. The next morning leaves and twigs covered the rain-soaked seats. Mom considered naming me Gail in commemoration of the news making storm, but it was too secular for her strict Catholic upbringing.

A fervent non-smoker, my father eschewed the traditional handing out of cigars. Instead he purchased a case of Mickey-sized bottles of Wiser’s Deluxe Rye, tied pink bows around the necks and passed them out for birth announcements.

I have a photo of Mom around the time of her engagement to Dad. She’s wearing a cap-sleeved, teal full-skirted dress with white collar and sitting on the green lawn at the chicken farm. A bed of crimson annuals stretches across the background of this three-inch-square moment in time.

Mom lived in a small wood frame house next door to our farm, one field west and closer to the village, tucked back from the road down a long gravel driveway. She worked as an office clerk in Belleville, taking the train home on weekends to be with her family. She purchased the property for her parents and two brothers to live in. The house was clad in red shingle siding like the outhouse in the backyard. An old wooden kitchen chair sat on the cement stoop by the kitchen door, the chair’s two back legs worn down slightly from her brother Joe’s habit of rocking back on them. The screen door opened into the kitchen. A washbasin sat on a stand to the left full of tepid, dirty water. A small cabinet above stored toiletries. The kitchen was dominated by a black wood stove with white enamel trim. A granite coffee pot simmered on the stovetop. A supply of firewood lay stacked behind the kitchen door.

My mother and father were next door neighbours when they started dating in the late 1950′s when Dad returned from Vancouver to take over the family poultry farm after the passing of his father.

My father became a successful and well off farmer. He and Mom were getting older and wanted a family. When queried about marriage, Dad joked he’d do it “Some Tuesday”. On a Tuesday morning in spring 1960, Raphael Courneya and Mary Langevin were married. Despite her family’s warnings about my father’s hard drinking and bad temperament, Mom joined him at the poultry farm. In their third year of marriage, Mom got pregnant with me.

Their farm house had solid bones. It stood on the hill to the east of town, a brawny two-story red granite landmark. The locals called it Hen Shit Hill, referring to the aroma emanating from the long, silver, four story high barn full of cackling white Leghorns.

Dad’s father Denis (pronounced Denny) cut and laid every rock in the walls. A stonemason before marriage, he travelled by steam train from Ontario to British Columbia and back, building banks. He returned to his hometown in eastern Ontario during the First World War. Farmers and married men were not eligible for conscription, so he bought the first farm on the hill east of town and began a poultry business. To make doubly sure he would not have to serve his country, he approached my grandmother’s parents, who gave their youngest daughter away in January 1918.

An avid photographer, my grandfather left a legacy of sepia tone pictures from his cross-Canada travels pre-World War I. I was a preschooler when my father discovered a couple of water-stained cardboard shoeboxes forgotten under the floorboards in the attic. As a child I sat and pored over the pictures, marvelling at the clothing, buildings and postcard-sized negatives.

There were Women with long dark dresses and starched white aprons, hair upswept under an elegant hat like a Gibson Girl. One photo depicted a native family on the prairie wearing white man’s clothing but living in a teepee. Men in their Sunday suits and straw hats lounged in Stanley Park. Others showed them in overalls with sleeves pushed up, moving stone and mixing mortar. Pictures of grain elevators, the tallest structures on the prairie. Pictures of train wrecks. And pictures of banks – great pillared structures in the expanding Canadian west.

Occasionally I found a word or two written on the back in faded ink. Often it was a place name. None provided information identifying the strangers staring back at me. When I got older, I sat with a pile of these ancient photos and a Canadian atlas, tracing the path my grandfather’s journey must have taken him – Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Lethbridge, New Westminster - all the way to the west coast and back, building edifices of commerce that may still stand today.

I read an anecdote in a long out of print local history book about my grandfather. My great-grandfather sold produce to the locals, bringing eggs and butter to their door. One day a customer asked if he had news from his son out west. He responded in his thick French-Canadian accent “They were building something with a stone arch. They build the arch, they labour one, two, three, four days, they stomp on it and she fall. And then they build it again, they leave it two, three, four days, they stomp on it and she fall. So then they say to my son ‘YOU build it,’ and my son he BUILD that arch, and they leave it and they stomp on it. SHE STANDS!”

The narrator mentioned my great-grandfather wore a wig. He had two – a red one and a black one. The black was the formal one he wore for photographs and on Sunday for church. I have one photo in which the hairpiece is obvious – seated like a slick black bowl on his large bald head.

Dad identified the subjects in one picture. Seated on the front steps of a wood frame pioneer home were my great-grandparents surrounded by their adult children. Their creased faces and dour expressions exemplified their difficult lives during the Dirty 30′s. My grandmother on Dad’s side, whom I adored, rarely spoke about her mother-in-law. If she did, it was about how unpleasant she was, how critical her sharp tongue. The mean old lady in the photograph scared me. With her long dress buttoned up to her neck, starched white apron and greying hair drawn up in a tight bun, she epitomized my childish vision of a surly old woman.

Like all children, I was curious about the people I came from. I did not think I looked much like either my mother or father. Whenever I asked, Mom said “You look like the LaJoie side of the family.” Oh, No, I thought, Not that nasty old lady!

I fretted looking like her when I grew up. At the time I did not know about her hard life of poverty, poor health or the infidelity of my great-grandfather. I’d rather die young than end up like she – a dour old woman no more than a bad memory in a faded photograph.

In 1934 my father was the eldest son of 10 siblings, with three more to come. The original single story wooden farmhouse was full to bursting. His father transformed the house as it stands today. He used the most abundant material available he could turn his past expertise to. The fence rows in that part of eastern Ontario were built from granite stones picked from the fields by horse and stone boat, stacked in neat rows by settlers from the previous century. Dad learned to drive a car while helping his father with the house reconstruction. His father attached a block and tackle to the Model T Ford. Dad drove the car forward and back, lifting the boulders into position.

The stonework included long granite retaining walls, cut and laid a stone at a time, the tops edged with flower beds where irises, gladioli and other flowers grew. My grandfather regularly donated his floral bounty for Sunday Mass at St. Carthagh’s Catholic Church. Dad inherited his father’s love of flowers but while he preferred perennials, Dad grew bright red geraniums, yellow dwarf marigolds and petunias in all hues.

A prim, ten foot tall blue spruce grew in the centre of the southwest lawn. It looked much bigger to a preschooler. “It’s a strong tree because of the fertilizer,” said Dad. “A work horse died and my father buried it beneath the raised part of the lawn.”

One hot summer evening Dad invited me to lie on the lawn beside the spruce. Soon we were jumping around, scratching and trying to rid our clothes of a swarm of tiny, biting red ants. We made quite a sight, me hopping around and shaking the ants out of my peach pajamas, Dad trying to slap and pick the bugs out of his abundant chest hair. We itched and scratched for most of the next day, but laughed about the incident.

My preschool world consisted of our upstairs apartment. I watched the Monkees, Gilligans Island and the Flintstones on our black and white TV and Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday. Sometimes I played with my Barbie dolls or Tinker Toys. On Sunday nights Mom set a metal folding table up in the living room and we ate in front of the TV picnic style while watching the Wonderful World of Disney.

On rainy days my mother emptied out a low cupboard so I could play house with my dolls and stuffed toys until Mom put away her canned goods to mop the kitchen floor. A couple times a year she made thimble cookies and allowed me to help. After mixing the sweet dough she formed it into balls, dipped them in egg white then sugar and placed them on a cookie sheet. My job was making the indentation in the centre of the dough ball with her sewing thimble on my thumb – the only digit big enough to hold it. After they came out of the oven, Mom filled each hole with jam. Delicious.

Mom made me a special cake for my third birthday. She formed the white cake into a dome about the size of a globe cut in half, and stuck a dime store Barbie doll in the middle. She piped frothy white and pink icing around the cake and doll. When she was finished the cake looked like a Southern Belle with a wide hoop skirt.

Before dinner my father stormed into the house in a rage. He must have been fighting with Mom earlier that day. He stood at the kitchen table and smashed his fist into the cake, destroying her work.

Inconsolable, I sobbed to my mother “He broke my cake.” There was no birthday celebration that day.

In time, I realized my Grandma downstairs lived alone. Mom and Dad had my company all the time. Wouldn’t it be fair if I ate breakfast with Grandma? One morning I picked up my bowl of oatmeal from the table.

“Where are you going with that?” said Mom.

“I want to go eat with Grandma.”

“But why? What’s wrong with eating right here?”

“Nothing. I just want to keep Grandma company.”

I started down the dark back stairs, balancing the bowl of hot cereal in both hands. For several mornings in a row I breakfasted with Grandma, until one morning my mother broke down at the table.

“You don’t love me anymore”. “Why won’t you spend time with your mother? What did I do to deserve this?”

Sliding onto a kitchen chair, I nibbled my oatmeal. I didn’t understand my mother’s outburst. She harboured an intense jealousy of my paternal grandmother and felt she was competing with her for my affection.

A long black wrought-iron porch on the south side of our second story apartment boomed and groaned as the metal expanded in the heat of summer. In winter it was slippery with frost. More than once I caught myself on the handrail when my feet skidded out from under me, avoiding a hard fall onto the unforgiving cement steps below.

As careful as I tried to be, the cement caught up to me anyway. The summer I turned three, I spent evenings beside the house playing on the lawn, or sitting on the cement “stoop”, feeling the heat of the day dissipate through the warm, rough steps. One evening I watched Daddy taking the stairs two at a time. I thought I would try too, but my three-year-old legs could not handle the gap. I slid down the four cement steps on my face, scraping a layer of skin off my nose and cheeks. For the next two weeks my mother trimmed the dry thin scab as it gradually peeled off my cheeks and nose.

More than the blood or pain, I recall the fight my parents got into over who should have been watching me more carefully. I watched my father strike my mother, wondering how hurting my mother would make me hurt .