THE DAWN PATROL

A reading

After the Great War, Mom and Dad moved out West with Jack and Winnie. They wanted to get as far away from their old life in Ontario as they could, or maybe they just wanted to get away from their families, friends, and the memories of their youth? They left to start a new life in British Columbia. I’m sure for Mom it was more than just the other side of the country; for her, it might as well have been the other side of the world.

They didn’t understand that they were part of the Lost Generation though; that they were part of a cohort of war weary veterans and civilians in search of something they’d never find. For them and their generation, the war came with a heavy price — it was the loss of innocence for an entire generation. Dad came home in search of the former life he’d lost, not realizing he’d be coming home to a child he didn’t know, and a wife who didn’t understand him.

Those feelings he felt — the sense of loss as well as the losses he suffered — affected Mom as much as they affected him. She lost two brothers at the Marne. There were five cousins, as well as every boy she’d ever known growing up in her small town in northern Ontario. Dead. The man who was her husband when he left, wasn’t the same man who returned home; he wasn’t the man she’d fallen hopelessly in love with before the War; not the father of her son, or the man she invited into her bed so soon after his return.

It became a time of great mourning, for everyone.

Shortly after his return home, Mom found herself pregnant, while Dad became morose. The crying of a newborn in the house brought back the memories of children he saw dying in Europe. Every time the baby cried, Mom found Dad sitting up in the middle of the night, weeping; I’m sure it broke her heart. The only thing she could think to do was to let him hold the baby — his daughter, she reminded him — and let the scent of warm breast milk on Winnie’s breath, of talcum powder, and fresh soap, bring him out of his misery.

“This is life,” she told him. “This is all that matters. It’s what you are giving this world; this is what you will leave behind.” I don’t think he loved any of his children as much as he loved Winnie.

Dad had worked as a surveyor for the CN before the War. He met Mom in a small, northern Ontario town he stumbled across during a freak snowstorm. Losing his left arm and eye— and almost losing his left leg as well — he was unable to trudge over hill and dale any longer, and was forced to look elsewhere for work. He found nothing in Toronto that didn’t make him feel as though it were an extension of another man’s pity. Mom said it was something he was going to have to get used to. But the idea of people meeting him for the first time and feeling sorry for him, was hard to accept.

They packed up Jack and Winnie, sold everything they had, and set out by train to the West coast. They stopped when they ran out of land and couldn’t run any farther. Mom said she’d be willing to follow Dad to the other end of the country, because she so desperately wanted to love him again. He deserved that much, she said, and maybe he did; maybe every man having gone through what he had, deserves at least that much?

The smile he’d once had, faded. The square jaw and his grey eyes, the Roman nose, and high cheekbones, were now distorted with age. His face showed itself as a road map of scars. His dark hair turned grey. It pained him to walk, but unable to afford a car, he was forced to walk. He looked at it as a form of penance he said, and that he’d willingly endure the pain for the weight of his sins during the War.

He found a job as a prison guard at the Penitentiary. A skilled marksman — even with his one eye and his one arm — he passed every test they put him through. He’d stand in his guard’s tower with his thermos of tea and lunch pail, not coming down until his shift ended. He was a man in need of solitude, and had few friends.

He left the house every morning at 5:00 a.m., walking three blocks to the river where he met with Evan Campbell. Together, they’d cross the river in a small boat. Even with the new bridge, the two of them still used the boat because neither man owned a car.

*

When the phone rang, it was usually Mom who answered it. That afternoon, she clenched the dishrag she’d been using to wash the walls — strangling her fist around it — as Winnie and I watched the water running down her forearm in long, dirty ropes. She brought her fist up to her breast in alarm as she gasped out a response — biting the rag and nodding as if the speaker on the other end could see her, before finally hanging up the phone.

“Bobby, go down to the wharf and see to your father,” she said, leaning against the wall.

“What’s wrong?” Winnie asked, dropping the rag she was using into the bucket at their feet.

“There’s been a hanging,” Mom said.

“Oh my God, no,” Winnie paled, her voice hushed. She wiped her hands on the front of her dress.

“Your father had to help,” Mom added.

“Why?”

“Because that bastard warden is a cruel man who takes pleasure in seeing men suffer — especially men like your father,” Mom said, throwing the dishrag across the room and collapsing on a nearby chair. With three quick steps Winnie had her arms around Mom and let her cry into her dress as she motioned me with a nod to get down to the river.

Over the course of the last weeks, Dad spoke to me only when he had to, choosing instead to leave the room whenever I entered, or else opening the newspaper on his lap, and ignoring me. I spent my time in pursuit of my studies; school was a one and a half hour bus ride in both directions.

Spring ended with a heat wave, the heat melting into summer without anyone noticing the difference. Dandelion puffs filled the air, and dusters sprouted up from the gravel roads like I imagined a geyser looked like. Cottonwood floated heavy in the air, hanging over everything as if it were a mild fog.

I followed the rail spur that turned off from the train bridge and led to the worn out dock at Brownsville. The track hadn’t been used for over thirty years, and there was grass growing wild between the weathered ties. The rail line ended at Brownsville —  all roads led to Brownsville once upon a time. It didn’t matter whether you came from — San Francisco, New York, or London — if you were searching for gold and wanted to go up to the Klondike, all roads ended at Brownsville; just as surely as all roads led to Rome once upon a time. The once thriving community had four hotels and half a dozen sporting houses once upon a time, but died a quick death once they built the railway bridge at the beginning of the century.

Over the past thirty years, the Brownsville dock had been replaced with a sawmill, and I looked up at the huge beehive burner rising into the air with its thick miasma of blue smoke hanging over the river like a dirty halo.

Dad was sitting at the end of the old ferry dock smoking a cigar. The sun behind him caught his figure and cast his shadow to the side like it was a neglected memory. His grey hair shone in the late afternoon light as he watched boom-men dancing huge cedar logs across a closed pocket of water. The mill bought logs which were bundled up into booms and brought downriver from Port Kells by tug, having been cut out of the waning forests at nearby Sullivan Station. The booms were secured to huge pylons at the mill by ropes, while the boom-men swore at one another and set about breaking the bundles down and sorting through the logs. Their voices echoed across the water as they pushed and walked the logs across the pocket with the grace of dancing girls on a stage.

Dozens of fishing boats dipped up and down on the river, their flags fluttering in a gentle wind as fishermen pulled nets out of the water like a tangle of weave — each net glistening like silver dollars in the sun, filled with hundreds of fish. The boats drifted in both directions as far as the eye could see — upstream toward Port Mann, Port Kells, Fort Langley, and beyond — and downriver when the tide changed, toward Annieville, and the abandoned fish cannery there. I looked across the river at the new cannery being built.

“Dad?”

He turned a brief frown toward me, and then just as quick turned away. He had a bottle in his hand — the contents as black as coffee — and he took a drink from it, grimacing as he swallowed a mouthful down.

“What d’ya want?” he said, looking out at the water.

“Mom sent me to come get you. She’s worried,” I said.

“Worried? And what’s she got to be worried about? I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself,” he replied, taking another swallow from the bottle.

“I know.”

There followed a moment of silence that hung between us like the smoke from his cigar — something without explanation and defying definition. I looked up at the bridge, the sun was playing in the steel girders, throwing elongated shadows across the river — looking as if a Giant from some bygone Age had cast sticks off to the side like a child done playing with his toys. Cars and trucks passed by overhead, the sunlight winking off their windshields, their tires singing across the new surface.

“So what d’ya want then?” Dad asked, and I turned my attention away from the bridge before he turned his back on me completely.

“I want to say I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sorry? Sorry for what?”

“For everything.”

“Everything? That’s quite a lot to be sorry for.” He looked at me with a sideways glance. “Are you sorry for my boy leaving home an’ going off to war? Are ya sorry he broke your mother’s heart?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

He turned fully around to look at me.

“You’re not, are you?”

“Let’s just get you home. Mom’s worried,” I said, and reached out for him.

“About what?” he asked, shrugging himself away from me and almost falling into the river. I grabbed at him, and found myself holding his empty sleeve as I pulled him away from the edge of the wharf. I looked down at the muddy beach a dozen feet below. The tide was out.

“Let’s get you home,” I said again.

“Does she know I’m drinking?”

I nodded. “I think so.”

“She doesn’t like it when I drink.”

“I know. I guess that’s why she’s worried,” I said, taking the bottle from him. It smelled horrible. “She always worries about you.”

“Not when the river’s in freshet; not when the rain’s pelting down on us, an’ the wind’s howling in our faces — me and Evan — or it’s pitch black out, an’ all we’ve got are the lights on shore to guide us. Just as long as I come home with my pay, that’s all she worries about. That’s all I’m worth to her.”

“Dad,” I said softly. “You’re not sailing across anymore. The boat has a motor. And even when it didn’t, you sat at the tiller — just like you do now.”

“Does she know that? Has she ever seen me off in the morning, like Evan’s wife? No. An’ don’t you be telling her no different, you hear?”

“I won’t. Where is Campbell?”

“I left him behind. I took the boat an’ said for him to get his own way across, because I needed to be alone.”

“Well, I’m not about to leave you alone.”

“And what’s at home for me?”

I smiled. “‘Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.’”

He laughed and puffed on his cigar.

“Apology accepted.” He added a nod and a grin.