THE DAWN PATROL

CHAPTER II

1939

Jack left home when he was eighteen. That was back in 1935. He fled the torture and anguish that was our small Surrey home, and worked his way across the country by riding the rails, before joining the Merchant Marines out of Nova Scotia. Only he jumped ship in England during the summer of 1938, and that was the last we’d hear from him for a very long time. I knew he’d never come home until we buried our father.

Just the same, Dad insisted on keeping Jack’s place set at the table when we sat down for dinner every night. Maybe he was thinking Jack would come swaggering through the door with that false bravado of his, saying: “Woman!” — meaning our mother — “What’s for dinner?” Maybe he was punishing himself — finally taking responsibility for his actions — or it was something more simple than that, something more base, like a reminder of what they did during the Great War when one of their companions fell?

Those first few months after he left, Jack wrote home every other week, just like he’d promised us he would. The farther east he traveled though, the less he wrote; the letters became shorter — more like notes really — with the last one being a post card with a picture of the Blue Nose at dock somewhere in Nova Scotia. Lunenburg, I think it was.

  Winnie and I thought of Jack as the Romantic Everyman, the last surviving War poet of The Lost Generation, the writer/artist in search of his identity, because there seemed to be a new-found freedom within his words. “You have to learn to read between the lines,” Winnie said to me, “because it’s always there, that little…something…in his words that’s one part longing, and one part need.” She could imagine him holding a mirror up to his new life, she said, and tossing it away because he refused to look at his old life reflected back at him.

He wrote to us of sitting perched on boxcars on bright summer nights — sometimes up to a dozen men per car — each man having abandoned one town or another — leaving wives, children, and families behind in a desperate attempt to find work. He would look up at the stars and marvel at the wonder of it all, he wrote. And some nights — clear, crisp, empty — he’d watch the Northern Lights dancing on the horizon. He said he’d never allow himself to become as desperate as other men he saw, but then, he only had himself to look out for, Dad said, and life’s a lot simpler when you’re alone. As long as he had pen and paper, Jack said, it was easy for him to believe he was a free man, which was something Dad could never understand

One could almost taste his new-found freedom locked inside the looping letters of every word he wrote. I knew it was something he never felt living here at home. Dad could be more than a cruel taskmaster, and Jack had felt the sting of his cane more often than we cared to remember. Winnie was quick to bare witness to Dad’s anger, just as much as I was — but it was probably me, more-so than her. Freddy and Jenny, he never hit, but that may have been our mother’s influence more than it was Dad’s inflexible nature. 

We’d read each of Jack’s letters aloud as we sat around the dinner table — Winnie, Jenny, Freddie and me — taking our time reading and rereading Jack’s perfect script, as we commented on and then interrupted one another — each of us marvelling at the tiny portraits he sometimes sent — and all of us teasing Freddy as he stumbled and stuttered over words he couldn’t pronounce. Dad listened in silence, munching on his Cuban like an after dinner mint, the smoke hanging over the table like the bee-hive burners lining the river. He’d sometimes scratch at the stump of his left arm — a habit we noticed whenever he drifted off, lost in thought — or else he’d stick a gnarled finger under his eye patch and rub at the empty socket.

None of us paid much attention to Mom whenever left the table on some pretext or other, disappearing into the kitchen and not coming out again until we’d fallen into arguing over what Jack meant with some obscure French word he’d picked up in Montreal. No one noticed our mother’s red, bleary eyes except Dad, who’d drop his hand on the table with a slap and tell us to take care of the dishes. He’d pick up his cane, lumbering away from the table, walking out into the back field with Mom to finish his cigar and watch the sun go down.

I don’t think anyone could say they were shocked when War in Europe finally broke out in 1939. I was just as anxious to sign up as everyone else, happy to do my part for King and country. Jack wrote home — the first time in eight months — telling us that he’d volunteered. It was some new branch of the military, he said. I believe clandestine was the word he used. He seemed well on his way to becoming an officer, he said, and we all sat around the table congratulating ourselves — as if it was something we’d done.

Dad picked up his cane and limped away from the table, locking himself in the bedroom without saying another word, and not coming out again until the next morning when he left for work.

Mom excused herself and went outside.

We fell silent as we looked at Mom’s tiny silhouette through the window where it stood tall against a darkening sky. We could see she had tears in her eyes — it was the way she rubbed at them with the heels of her palms, angrily, before folding her arms around herself and gasping for a breath of fresh air. Freddie said he wanted to go outside and comfort her, but Winnie told him he didn’t have permission to leave the table. Mom needed time to herself, she said; it was a moment of grave reflection for her.

When I told Dad that I wanted to sign up, he wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t need to tell me that he’d served in the Great War. His own injuries were a daily reminder to us all. He’d lost his left arm, and his left eye, as well as severely damaged his left leg at the Somme — a vain attempt to storm the enemy’s line, he said. He said he’d never allow me go no matter how many times I asked.

When I asked him why, he turned around in his chair to look up at me. He was sitting in the front room with the newspaper he’d brought home from work spread open on his lap. Freddy was lying at his feet reading the Funny Pages, his fingers following the words in the bubbles; Jenny sat crossed-legged beside him, reading the Sports Page.

“Do you really think you should be asking me that?” he said, folding the newspaper and picking up his cane. He pushed himself to his full height and stood in front of me. He was an imposing man — an explosive man — and with the late afternoon light coming in through the side window and his cigar smoke wreathed about his head, he seemed anxious as he stood waiting for me to answer. I looked down at Freddy and Jenny who both looked up at me. They looked like they were waiting for an answer as well.

“I didn’t —”

He brought his cane around, swinging it at me and hitting me on the upper arm with a blunt force that made me cry out in pain.

“Did that hurt?” he asked.

I nodded, and fighting back the tears, tried not to scream as he hit me again. Jenny jumped up, running into the kitchen, calling for Mom.

“And that? Did that hurt? Did it hurt more, or less than the other one?”

“What?”

“Or this one!”

He hit me a third time, this time the blow glancing off my shoulder and hitting my ear. I could see Freddy sitting on the floor looking up at me. Tears came to his eyes as he watched. I wanted to tell him to run before Dad turned on him, but he hit me again.

“I wish someone had been there to knock some sense into me when I was younger! My brothers; your mother’s brothers; her cousins — all of us!” and he brought the cane down on my back three more times, yelling at me. 

“But no! What did they do instead? They insisted we go and do our part. Do your duty, they said. Well, I say: No more! Did I never tell you there was a boy in the town where your mother lived? A nancy-boy they called him because he didn’t want to enlist.”

I shook my head, holding my ear and listening to the ringing that echoed through my head — an insistent wail that made everything else sound far away. My back felt like it was burning, my shoulders too; I could feel welts already forming on my arm where he’d hit me, and I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. My tears felt hot and tasted salty.

 Dad stood in front of me, his breathing hard and laboured as he pushed his hair up out of his eyes. He nodded his head slowly as he leaned on his cane.

“You don’t know it, do you? That’s because I never told you. They gave him white feathers, they all did. The whole town — the whole lot of them — even your mother gave him a feather. At the same time, they saw their fathers, sons, and brothers off to the Front. You see, he was a coward in their eyes,” he said before I could say anything. “He hanged himself, he did, and all because of what the people said. His own mother even gave him a feather. He was eighteen. But the worst part — and this is what kills a small place like that — the worst part is that all of those men who enlisted, were killed. Not one of them came back. And the youngest? He was sixteen. They turned a blind eye to that sort of thing if a boy looked old enough — didn’t even live to see eighteen. He was your mother’s younger —”

“Daniel!”

Mom stood in the entryway, an apron full of beans laying on the floor in front of her. Jenny stood beside her looking up at Mom, and then at Dad, where he stood swaying in front of me. Mom had a hand to her mouth and seemed to be fighting back her tears. She fell back against the wall as Freddy ran to her and threw his arms around her. Mom stroked him gently, kissing the top of his head.

“Are you trying to drive him away as well?” she said as she pushed Freddy toward Jenny and ran to my side. She knelt beside me and put her arms around me. I reached out and held on to her as though she were a lifeline. She looked up at Dad.

“Isn’t it enough that you drove Jackie away?”

“He deserved every beating I gave him!”

“Nobody deserves to be caned like that! ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’. Is that what you mean?”

“Exactly.”

“This isn’t 1900, Daniel. My father never beat my brothers the way you beat our children. He never beat them at all. Just because your father beat you, doesn’t mean he was right. Look what your beating Jackie has done.”

“It’s made him a better man,” Dad said, sounding defiant.

“It’s made him a bitter man! He won’t be coming back home until long after you’re dead. He’ll never forgive you for the beatings you gave him, and I’ll never forgive myself for letting you.”