Road Ends (19 page)

But nobody told my father that and he wouldn’t have believed them if they had. He believed—because he wanted to believe and because, as time went on and the days became weeks and then months and then eventually years, he
had
to believe—that beneath the next rock he turned over would lie a seam so rich, so pure, he’d be spooning out the silver like honey from a pot.

I don’t know how he met my mother but my guess is he went looking for her, or someone like her, soon after arriving in the North, not for the normal reasons but because prospecting costs money. You need to eat, your boots wear out, you run out of dynamite; maybe you want to buy a stake in a promising claim. You don’t want a job because that would mean time away from prospecting, so what better than a wife from a well-to-do family? By that time my mother’s family, canny hard-working Scots that
they were, had a prosperous farm and shares in several profitable mines. So no mystery there.

The mystery is what attracted my mother to him and what possessed her parents to allow the marriage. Possibly they were starting to fear that time was running out for her. She had a strawberry mark on her cheek, not a very large one but maybe it counted against her in the marriage stakes. By the time she and my father married she was twenty-four, which was old to be unmarried back then. And of course my father was a stranger to the North so they would have no way of checking whatever story he told. He could be very charming, very convincing.

He was handsome in a rough kind of way. From what I’ve read (I’ve finally started going through her adult diaries) it’s clear that my mother thought he was the man of her dreams.

Emily thought I was the man of her dreams. I know that because she told me so after I got home from the war. Tears streaming down her face. She said I had deceived her, which was not the case. In fact, it was the other way around; she deceived me. She made me think we shared the same dreams when in fact her dreams were limited to a ring on her finger and a baby at her breast. She had—still has—no more curiosity about the outside world than an oyster.

But that is by the way.

I spent the whole of yesterday in a welter of frustration, trying to do justice to the books about Rome and instead reliving things from the past that would have been better left forgotten, and as a consequence, of course, I couldn’t get to sleep last night. I kept seeing the image of my father I dreamed about a few weeks ago—him standing on the roof of the farmhouse,
outlined against a wall of flame so vast that it seemed to fill the whole horizon.

Anyway, after lying awake for what felt like half the night I came downstairs and got out the box file containing the diaries from my mother’s adult years. It wasn’t that I expected to learn anything from them, just that I decided it was better to know what was in them than to keep wondering.

As I believe I said earlier, very little of what my mother wrote in adulthood survived the fire, and many of the scraps that did survive were so frail and brittle they began to disintegrate as soon as I touched them. It took me several hours last night and most of today to get them into any sort of order, and it would have taken longer had my mother’s handwriting not provided a clue. I was able to see straight away that the writings related to two separate periods in her life, one at the beginning of her marriage and the other about fifteen years later. In the early ones her writing is firm, rounded and flowing—the writing of a confident young woman. In the later ones it is tight and cramped, as if scribbled in great haste; there is a kind of fearful urgency about it, as if she was afraid of being discovered, of being “caught in the act.”

I haven’t got as far as reading those later portions yet and I don’t think I’m up to it this evening. But in the earlier ones I did find the answer to a question I have wondered about for years, namely why, given that they lived less than thirty miles away and must have known at least something of the situation, my mother’s parents didn’t help the young couple out in the desperate early years of their marriage.

It turns out that they did; in fact, they were extremely generous. As a wedding present they gave my parents a considerable sum of money, enough not only to build themselves a house but also to start up an outfitters in the nearest mining town, supplying necessities to prospectors and townspeople.

So the four of them had discussed the plan and my father let them think he went along with it. But then, shortly after they had moved to the new mining town and before work on the new house had begun, came this:

There is no suggestion that she was concerned about abandoning the plan they had agreed on. Perhaps my father told her it was just a temporary detour. In any case, at that stage she probably trusted his judgment; she hadn’t had time yet to find out that he had none. What he had instead was a lethal combination of pride and stupidity that was going to take them straight to the bottom, but she clearly had no inkling of that.

Conditions in the mining camps back then were very primitive but that didn’t seem to worry my mother either; in fact, she seems to have enjoyed the challenge.

I find it painful even to read those last two sentences. The writing is all fast, looping, free-flowing curves, the hand of a young woman carefree and optimistic almost to the point of foolishness. And still not the faintest hint of concern about my father’s use of their money.

Unsurprisingly, her parents weren’t as happy with the turn things had taken. My mother wrote to them regularly (she mentions receiving their responses) and I imagine her tone was much the same as in her diaries. They must have been appalled. The letters would have taken months to go back and forth but eventually, having learned amongst other things that my mother was pregnant, they decided enough was enough, and my grandfather set off to track them down. The result was a furious confrontation between him and his son-in-law. My mother’s distress was so great that when she recorded it later the nib of the pen scored through the paper.

In the end she broke that promise for our sakes and I will be forever grateful to her for that. But she stuck to it for eight long years, refusing to see her family or to accept help of any kind from them, and those years must have been punishing even by the standards of the day. Her pregnancy turned out to be twins, my elder brothers, Alan and Harry. They were born in a tent. Less than a year later, so was I, though by that stage the tent was pitched in a different mining camp.

We moved many times in those early years, in pursuit of one rumour after another, and later, when the money ran out altogether, in pursuit of jobs, and each time we moved there were more of us. Mostly we lived in shacks thrown together out of whatever timber was lying around. There was never running water, far less electric light. My mother’s days would have been spent in a constant struggle to feed and clothe us. She was the most resourceful person I have ever known, but it must have called for every ounce of her strength and ingenuity.

I don’t know how long it took for her optimism and her faith in my father to be worn down. Quite some time, I imagine; a commitment as strong as hers would have been hard to break. Pride probably came into it too—she wouldn’t have wanted to
admit, even to herself, that her father’s assessment of her husband had been right. Nonetheless, the time did come. I found proof of that on a long thin strip of newsprint torn from the margin of the
Temiskaming Speaker
.

The “but” says it all.

I remember him doing that—picking her up and whirling her about the room, whooping with joy. God knows how many times she had to endure that over the years, each time trying so hard to believe in him, hoping and praying, for all our sakes, that this time he would be proved right. I remember watching her as she laughed and danced, seeing the tension at the corners of her mouth.

The next day he’d take a sample of the ore to the assay office and it would turn out to be worthless. He’d be dumbfounded. Absolutely dumbfounded. And then incredulity would give way to rage. The assayers were out to swindle him, to get him to abandon his claim so that they could take it over themselves. Or they were in cahoots with some mining consortium from the USA. Anything but accept that he’d been wrong again. In fact, the more often it happened the less he could accept that possibility, because as time went on the only conclusion you could draw about someone who was so consistently and repeatedly wrong was that he was a fool.

Then the drinking would start, fuelling his fury.

“I fear that Stanley does not take disappointment well,”
my mother wrote.

That was for sure.

The carefree loops and swirls of the early days have gone from her writing but it is still fairly firm, fairly confident. I’m guessing that means he hadn’t yet started to take out his “disappointment” on her physically. She wasn’t frightened of him yet, in other words. Knowing her, knowing her inner strength, I imagine she didn’t become truly frightened until he started taking it out on the rest of us. Specifically, on me.

If I start thinking about all that I will never get to sleep. I will stop this now.

A very strange thing has happened. I had just put the papers back in the file and was closing this ledger when there was a knock at the front door. I waited for someone to answer it but of course no one did, so eventually I went to answer it myself, glancing at my watch as I did so. It was one o’clock in the morning. In this town everyone’s in bed by nine, so I wondered what catastrophe had taken place. When I opened the door there was no one there.