This is a story of
fiction. A story pulled together from bits and pieces of what’s left of
my mother’s memory. Those long-forgotten memories now seem clearer to her
than what we did together last week or yesterday or this morning. But this
story, this sweet, terrible, sad story has haunted me and must be told and told
again to keep his memory alive.
I can imagine him. This
sweet man-child. Twenty-something and tall, and always a smile on his
boyish face. But his eyes give him away with their vacancy, and he’s more
ten than twenty, lost within himself most of the time. My mom had a way
with him, despite her young age, and they had their own way to communicate with
each other, like a secret code. In those days, he would have been spoken
of as being “deaf and dumb”, only able to communicate through gestures and
expressions.
His existence was a quiet one,
but he had joy in his heart, and my mom remembers the fun times together,
chasing butterflies and picking berries and fishing in the creek. Picnics
of jam on thick slices of homemade bread. Bubbles made with Sunlight dish
soap. Rare trips into town with his mom, who occasionally, if there were
a few cents left over after her purchases, would treat them to a small bit of
candy to share. She remembers watching the clouds together, and the dog,
panting in the heat, too old and tired to chase away the flies around
him. The warm sun, the smell of sweet grass and the hum of crickets on
those late summer days. And their aunt, never far away, keeping an eye on
the two of them and constantly scolding over this or that.
His name was Curtis. The
only son and younger brother to a sister, Isabelle, who had been sent to board
in Fredericton to attend the Normal School, despite their families’ meager
finances. Their mother, Myrtle, worked twice as hard to make up for the
loss of income Curtis couldn’t help the family with. She cleaned other
people’s homes, took in laundry, and saved every penny she could to make sure
they had enough food on the table at night, warm clothes for winter and sturdy
shoes for their feet. Her pride kept her from asking for assistance and
it was her older sister, Mary, who agreed to keep an eye on Curtis while Myrtle
worked herself towards an early grave. Had she been able to see into the
future, she might have made different choices but, widowed too early and
without an abundance of options, she did her best to care for her family and
could not have imagined that her own sister could twist a knife so deep into
her heart she would end up going fifteen years without speaking to her again.
The day that everything
changed, the sun was beaming overhead, and mom and Curtis were in the yard,
“blowing the stink off” as Aunt Mary called it, and enjoying a game of marbles
together. Curtis was always thrilled to find a cat’s eye when he could,
instead of playing with the usual clear glass balls cut out of spray
cans. Neither of them understood the actual rules of the game but just
getting a marble into the small hole they’d dug was enough to make mom hoot
with laughter, which rang out in the clear air, louder than Aunt Mary cared for
and causing her to tsk and glare. Yelling at my mom to quiet down and,
disturbing the neighbors more than they were, she sat there stewing about being
left in charge and wasting her day. Aunt Mary could be harsh, too harsh
as it turned out.
Curtis wandered off that day,
to relieve himself behind a bush and this, this innocent moment, was the
catalyst, the final straw for Aunt Mary who, seeing him do this, lost what was
left of her miserable temperament and promptly stomped into the house and
called the police. My mom remembers first seeing the police car pull up
and, with the innocence of her young years, being excited over it. But
she remembers then standing in silence, the nervousness that came over her when
she realized something was wrong. When the officer got out to speak with
Aunt Mary, Aunt Mary’s abrupt finger- pointing made it obvious it had something
to do with Curtis. Unsure of what could have happened, they waited, glued to
the spot and watching. When the officer walked over, he made no attempt
to explain and simply took Curtis by the arm to guide him towards the
car. Curtis started to panic and cry and my mom, crying too, was promptly
ushered into the house by Aunt Mary, who never once looked back at the policeman
or Curtis. He was placed in the back of the car and driven away and my
mom never saw Curtis again.
Years went by before her
constant questions to family were finally answered, partially at least, and she
was a grown woman before she fully understood what had taken place that day and
what had actually happened to poor Curtis. Aunt Mary, catching Curtis
relieving himself in the yard, had called the police to make a complaint of a
young man acting inappropriately in front of a young child, alluding to
something more than the facts. Curtis was taken away to Centracare in
Saint John, an hour’s drive away from his home and family, where he would
remain for the rest of his life.
Centracare was a psychiatric
hospital, known in its early days as the “Provincial Lunatic Asylum”, and I
imagine that Curtis was never really able to comprehend what he’d done wrong
and why he was in such a place, suffering a lonely existence until his early
death at the age of fifty-nine. His mother, Aunt Mary and Isabelle all
passed on years ago, his mom passing suddenly and peacefully in her sleep, Aunt
Mary dying after a long battle with cancer and Isabelle tragically in a car
accident on her way home from a birthday celebration.
This story hurts my heart and
I can’t begin to imagine the nightmare Curtis lived, the helplessness his
mother must have felt and the anger, oh, the anger that must have boiled up,
sour in her mouth, at the very thought of her own sister doing such a vile
thing. How cold and evil-hearted must someone be to have made that
call. Did she have regrets? Did she try to make amends? Did
Curtis suffer? Or, because of the tender-hearted, sweet child he really
was, did he simply go about his days, watching butterflies, enjoying his
sandwiches and whiling away his time with a soft smile on his face, until the
day God called him home. That’s how I hope his story ended.
My mom is now in her late
seventies. Her stories from those long-ago days are always wistful
childhood memories of the innocent days before he was taken away. Her own
father, a brother to Aunt Mary and Aunt Myrtle, had his own struggles and hard
life, first working in the mines and then later putting every penny the family
had into buying a farm. It became a hard life for all of them, eight
siblings in all, and the days of picnics and blowing bubbles were gone,
replaced with tending to the animals, working in the garden and going to
school. Her memories from those days are harder. A father, worn out
and slowly dying from the dust in the coal mines, the loss of a younger brother
to leukemia.
And now, another loss.
The loss of all that was vital and life-affirming in my adorable mother.
She’s fading away and it’s so hard to lose her little by little. She
raised me, cared for me, and now I return the favour. A beautiful woman
with her diminutive stature and delicate voice. She was always a bit of a
flirt, with men and women alike, had the biggest heart and would bend over
backwards to help anyone, often taking a big chance by picking up stranded
motorists, hitchhikers or street people or handing out a little cash, if she
had any extra and thought someone might need a meal or a hot cup of coffee to
get them through the day.
I visit my mother often
now and we always have a cup of tea and sit side by side on the porch swing,
enjoying the fresh air. Sometimes she’s quiet and we just listen to the
birds and watch the cars go by. She’s lost in her thoughts on those days
and I miss her. She sometimes gets angry and she isn’t the woman I knew
before. I try hard to not take it personally. I read books about
how to care for her. To go along with whatever her reality is at that
time. It is easier for us both that way, but truthfully, it isn’t easy at
all. I remember a conversation years ago, about getting older, and she’d
laugh and say “please make sure to dress me cute”. And now here we are,
and I make sure she’s dressed cute. I know it’s a small thing but it
makes her happy. And on the good days, her eyes light up again and she’s
back, full of old stories with patchy details and giggles. Her smile
bright. I tell her how much I love her.
We chatter on about this and
that, but she often says “did I ever tell you about my cousin? His name
was Curtis”.
Leslie was born in Ottawa and raised in Fredericton. She is a full-time office manager, a wife, mother, grandmother, and an avid reader. With a life-long interest in writing, she completed two creative writing classes, offered by UNB’s Leisure Learning, with the late Barbara Buckley. This is Leslie’s very first writing submission and her story was loosely inspired by a true event.
