Swing Low (23 page)

Then there was the headshrinking leg of our journey. Somehow we had made it to Shell, a small military base on the edge of the jungle, and, as the name so arrogantly suggests, a town taken over by the large American oil and gas company. From Shell we were to fly to Macuma, a tiny
jungle village smack in the very heart of headshrinking territory. Stan and Marion knew of a missionary couple who lived in that village and who would be more than happy to show us around. Excellent, I murmured, have them put the water on to boil.

And so, after a sleepless night of taking cover from the bats that lived in the military barracks in which we stayed and a breakfast of fried plantains, seven of us, including the pilot, piled into a six-seater Cessna and prepared for takeoff. Stan had opted to stay behind in Shell because there wasn’t room for all of us, and because they had been to the jungle before. (I too had offered to stay behind, but Elvira told me this would probably be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I couldn’t think of a counter-argument at the time.) The seventh person travelling with us did not take up a seat of his own. He was a baby, the son of one of the Indian jungle-dwellers, and he had been airlifted into Shell for medical treatment. His mother had walked for four days through the jungle to bring him to Macuma, knowing that he was very sick and close to death. The Indians living in the jungle were, probably wisely and very likely with good cause, suspicious of the white missionaries, the doctors, the pilots, and the American oilmen, but this mother had no options at the time other than to watch her son, if not treated, die.

The nurses at the small clinic in Shell had made arrangements with Marion to have this baby travel with us back to Macuma, where his mother would be waiting for him. During the flight Elvira held the sleeping baby, wrapped in a soft yellow blanket, on her lap, and the girls crowded around him, oohing and aahing over his inch-long eyelashes
and dark head of hair. When we landed, the baby’s barefoot mother was at the door of the airplane within seconds. Elvira handed the woman her son, and she, without a word or any expression whatsoever, tied him to her back and disappeared into the jungle, presumably to begin her four-day journey back to her home. What an act of faith, what an act of love, I thought of her decision to give her son over to foreigners in the hopes that he’d be healed. I wondered what type of resistance to the idea she might have met from other people in her village. I duly noted this experience in my notebook.

Later that day, after a refreshing glass of lemonade at the home of Marion’s missionary friends, we went on a guided walk around the village, which consisted only of a few residential huts, a few more modern homes, such as the one in which the missionaries lived, a tiny landing strip for planes to land with supplies for the villagers, a school hut, and a church hut. The children we encountered were friendly but said nothing, the adults were wary, and I felt profoundly ridiculous for being there. Nevertheless, Mrs. Moroz paraded us around the place and then suggested we go for a hike in the jungle. Of course, I said, and afterwards let’s go for a refreshing dip in the piranha-infested headwaters of the Amazon. What are we waiting for?

We weren’t as far as a hundred yards into the dense, dark jungle when Miriam got her boot stuck in the muck along the narrow path. Really stuck. Cautiously I crept over a rotten log that spanned a type of greenish, mossy bog to where she stood rooted to the ground and laughing at her predicament. I suggested she take her foot out of the mired boot
and balance herself by holding on to my back. Then I leaned over and attempted to tug the boot out of the muck, nearly falling over repeatedly as Marj took photographs and yelled encouraging words to me over the muffled roar of Elvira, Marion, and Mrs. Moroz laughing.

It took ages to remove the boot and in the course of the procedure both Miriam and I became covered in jungle slime, dirt, and offal. Eventually we got the blasted boot out, and Mrs. Moroz, whose white dress had remained spotless throughout, washed our clothes in her primitive ringer washer and hung them up to dry. In the meantime Miriam wore a hilariously uncharacteristic outfit, which she, so hypocritically, refused to be photographed in: a conservative high-necked dress with a small floral print, belonging to Mrs. Moroz, and I wore her husband’s housecoat. If the villagers had needed something to laugh at, something to mock, we would have fit the bill nicely. In any case, I believed, our clown status in the village would prevent our heads from being shrunk. What prestige is there in shrinking the head of an imbecile, after all? A court jester’s life is saved by the mere fact that he’s perceived as a moron, and so I thought would be mine.

We left Macuma and met up with Stan and Becky in the bat-infested barracks of Shell and drove back towards the teeming, torrid coastal city of Guayaquil. Along the way we had many adventures, though none quite as nerve-racking as the jungle tour, not counting the shopkeeper from Cuenco who threatened Elvira with a machete for not buying a piece of fabric she had made the mistake of admiring. Marion sorted him out, surprising him into stunned submission by
speaking sharply to him in his own language. Elvira loved the fact that she had been threatened by a machete-wielding Ecuadorian.

After spending two weeks in Panama City, with its intriguing canal, and in La Chorerra, where my sister lived, I was ready to leave.

One thing I do remember when I think of Panama: the death of Elvis Presley, on August 16, 1977. I was not a fan of his music but I had been tracking his career haphazardly over the years. Well, not his career, really, but his personal travails. Many newspaper articles mentioned his mood swings, his dependency on pills, and his inability to find himself in all the hype surrounding his image. They said he spent a lot of time alone in his bedroom, depressed.

I suppose that during this time I, a conservative, well-dressed, mild-mannered small-town elementary school teacher, related more closely to Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll, than I did to my missionary family members. My daughters would have been beside themselves if they’d heard me say it, and I should have mentioned my affinity for Elvis if for that reason alone, just to hear them laugh.

From Panama we flew to Miami for a few luxurious days in a beach hotel before going home. While we were in Miami, Miriam picked up a brochure on Walt Disney World, located just a few hours away in Orlando, and decided she must go. Elvira and Marj wanted to stay at the hotel and sip non-alcoholic Margaritas by the pool, and so I offered to accompany Miriam. The next morning she and I woke up at five to catch a bus headed for Orlando, for a day of “thrilling adventure we would never, ever forget,”
according to the pamphlet, which I added to the stack of travel brochures I had collected throughout the course of our journey, for research purposes.

This was to be our last real outing together as a father and daughter, though of course I didn’t know it at the time. She was thirteen, still a child, but not for much longer. It didn’t take her long to thrill to the prospect of freedom, rebellion, and independence, and I found it increasingly difficult to know where I stood in her life or what my role was supposed to be. My only advice to her ever, aside from Hang in there, baby, had been, Be yourself, and now that she was attempting to do just that, I was confused.

It had been easier to understand Marjorie as she grew from a girl to a young woman, because she was such a good kid in the traditional sense. She was involved in church youth groups and was a formidable member of the high school Reach for the Top team, especially in the areas of art, music, and history. She was chosen, from her entire school population, to attend a government-sponsored forum in Ottawa for teens from across Canada; she had won scholarships for her piano playing, had taken on a part-time job at the library, and was determined to attend university upon graduation from grade twelve. She and I regularly engaged in political debates around the kitchen table, she from her platform of socialist idealism and I from my platform of conservative pragmatism. Even her choice of history as a major at university mirrored my own interests. I was very proud of her and of her abilities.

Miriam, on the other hand, baffled me. At the age of fifteen she quit going to church and began to smoke Black Cat
cigarettes. She ran around town with French boys from neighbouring communities and often snuck out of the house through her bedroom window late at night. She drank beer at the gravel pits, mouthed off at teachers she didn’t like, skipped out of classes, got by with Cs, and announced she would never attend university after witnessing first-hand the stress it created for both her parents and her sister.

She and I had a great time together that day at Disney World. When I mentioned I was concerned about going on the Space Mountain roller-coaster ride, after seeing all the health warnings and signs urging the removal of hats and scarves and glasses and wigs and dentures and pacemakers and steel plates, she smiled her back-seat-of-the-Land-Rover smile and told me it would be okay, I could hold her hand. At the end of the ride I made her laugh by pretending to have been fast asleep and then asking if there wasn’t something faster we could sample. I had never been more terrified, more adrenaline-filled, more awake and thankful to be alive in my life. We went on every ride she picked, and many more than once, including the giant Ferris wheel. We dangled happily in a little car twenty stories high and watched the sun set over Florida.

T
hat trip marked the beginning of new chapters in the lives of Elvira and the girls as they went on to university, career, and adolescence. They had adopted modern attitudes as well, towards things like church, authority, politics, and sex. They were still my family, I loved them very much, and they loved me, but they were becoming more and more strange to me, only because they were moving easily through time and I wasn’t and I didn’t know what to do about it. I tried to substitute the security that a parent’s unconditional love gives you with a dignified career, a beautiful home, a normal family of my own, and a Christian faith in God. I wonder if it’s possible.

I completed my master’s degree in education at the University of Manitoba, commuting back and forth after work for classes and seminars. The week I received my degree, Mother chose to highlight, in her newspaper column, Reg’s
long-ago graduation from high school, and the fact that he had been the school valedictorian. There was no mention of my degree. But then again, that was not a surprise. Mother had, over the years, often singled out the accomplishments of Reg and Diana, to the point where people would ask me from time to time if I had noticed, if it bothered me, if I had ever, perhaps, wondered why this was. I had wondered.

When it came time for Miriam to graduate from high school, I suffered another breakdown and was hospitalized here, at Bethesda. Had I been trying to avoid the inevitable reality of my youngest child leaving home, for that is what she did directly after the graduation ceremony? In fact, the only reason she had even stuck around for the convocation was for my sake, knowing that it would mean a lot to me to see her in her gown and mortarboard accepting her diploma. A day or two later, I was released from the hospital and went home to find her packing her bags, on her way to Quebec, then Europe … then, in her words, who knows? I was devastated, nervous, and bewildered. What would happen to her? Didn’t she know that the world was a dangerous place?

That afternoon, hours before she was scheduled to catch a train to Montreal, I asked her to mow the lawn. Again, it was probably a subconscious plan to keep my youngest child from leaving the nest and altering my world. She told me she didn’t really have time to mow the lawn, that she was running a bit behind. If I’d asked earlier, maybe, but now it was too late. I was adamant. I insisted that she mow the lawn one last time before she left home. I felt like a fool and a tyrant and I knew I was beginning to sound desperate
and ridiculous, but I couldn’t let go of this last-ditch effort to wield some type of parental authority, however pathetic it was. I refused to back down, reinforcing her desire to leave with every word that came out of my mouth: I don’t think it’s asking too much for you to mow the lawn one last time. Isn’t it the least you could do? Am I being unreasonable? That sort of thing, until I was literally following her around the house as she threw her belongings into her bag, pleading with her mother to make me stop “with the lawn-mowing thing.” But I wouldn’t. Never before in my life had I behaved this way with either of my girls, but that day I was out of my head. Even Elvira, who could usually calm us all down with a joke or a hastily whispered promise (Never mind, Mel, let’s have a bowl of ice cream), was left shaking her head at my utter refusal to give in. Maybe you should just do it, she said to Miriam, and I’ll get you to the city on time, don’t worry. And then, to me, She’ll do it, Mel, okay? Relax.

A few minutes later Miriam was flying around the lawn with the mower, nicking a few of my petunias and shrubbery as she careened about, looking for all the world like a psychotic killer on the loose. When she had finished I quietly retreated to my bedroom and listened to her sobbing in the kitchen, asking Elvira why I had to be that way, why I was the way I was, and Elvira saying nothing but I don’t know, honey, I don’t know.

She left for good that day, without either one of us saying good-bye, and I remained in my room for a long time afterwards, unsure of everything, afraid, heart-broken, overwhelmed, and hating myself.