One day in North Vancouver, my younger sister and I walked home together from elementary school. I was twelve years old. The time was the cusp of the Sixties becoming the Seventies. When we got inside our second floor apartment, our mother told us that she, myself and my two sisters would be moving to Texas to stay with her parents. Our father wasn't going to be coming along with us.
We had moved to Lynn Valley from Baton Rouge, Louisiana only six months before. We had all left our friends and possessions in an “emergency” move that was never explained to us. The house we suddenly vacated in Baton Rouge had been home for five and a half years. It was the place of my longest residence up to the writing of this story in the 2010s.
I had many complex reactions to that news of imminent change. Among them was relief at getting away from my father, but also distress for having to endure another abrupt change of residence. Woven into my emotional fabric was the angst of going to another new school and attempting to make new friends. My experiences had already taught me that friends would surely be lost after our next, inevitable family emergency move. I was happy at the prospect of being near my beloved grandparents, but I was not overjoyed at being a permanent resident of their city, Beaumont, Texas.
The gap between hearing about the change of plans and being driven to the airport by my father was very short and there was no time to process any feelings on the matter. We were dropped off at YVR and I remember that my father looked sad but not overly worried.
We arrived in Texas and were quickly suitcase settled into the tiny duplex apartment of my grandparent's house. It was a small one bedroom, so my two sisters and I slept all around the living room at night.
We were soon checked into local schools. I had the same history teacher that my mother had had only nineteen years earlier. I superficially knew a few of the neighbourhood children from my previous Summer vacation visits to my grandparents. There was much rejoicing between my grandparents and us four at first, but a terrible malignant tension ran silently through us children and our mother.
We were given a very grave warning by our mother, prior to starting our first day at our new schools. We were admonished, under no circumstances, to get in a car with our father if we saw him. I was to escort my younger sister to and from school as usual and to make sure that she avoided our father. We were told that he had threatened to kidnap and kill us.
My mother was convinced that he meant to actually do it and because of my personal experiences with him, she easily convinced me. We were not to speak to him, to follow him, to talk on the phone with him, to write to him nor to approach him. It was made clear to us that our grandparents weren’t to know of these threats, which made being in their company and acting happy very difficult. Evidently, he had also threatened to kill our grandfather.
The only bright spot I perceived was that he had two and a half thousand miles of desert, mountains, evergreen forests and swamps to traverse before he could reach us. I was addled by my mother’s surrealistic choice of keeping the truth from both grandparents on this dark subject. It was as if they had never been told anything else about their son-in-law, either. My father's behaviour, up to that point in my life, had been so violent and cruel, that I was genuinely worried for our lives; while another part of me suspected bullshit and manipulation by fear.
An exquisitely high state of tension thus ensued. A screenplay that could have been a co-production of Oscar Wilde and Dante is a good description of that time. My grandparents went about their normal business and were oblivious to the fear element. I was unable to grin and play a happy child, due to having been born with an inability to engage in subterfuge. My choice was to internalize my agony, fear and anger.
Several years prior, on the occasion of my best friend’s first sleep-over in Baton Rouge, my parents had engaged in a loud, heated marital argument. I was very embarrassed. A few days after that fight, I was woken up in the middle of the night and asked by my mother what I thought about my parents getting divorced. I was nine or ten years old at that time and I remember asking her what the word meant, as I had never heard of it.
When I was told the definition, I became extremely upset at the thought of such an arrangement. Rising up from the back of my mind, was a clear picture of my two sisters going to live with our mother. I saw myself living alone with my abusive father, spit-polishing twenty pairs of alligator shoes, between regular nude beatings, detentions and the constant anticipation of violence.
I had never felt safe in my family home since I was three years old and the thought of being alone with my father in the absence of witnesses, even silent ones, was overwhelming. Simply put, it was not an option I could then entertain. My elder sister was OK with the idea. Many years later, I would learn why.
Since I was asked my opinion, I voiced my strong disapproval of the suggested divorce and although I cannot say that my protestations were what kept their eventual divorce from happening at that time, I ever-afterwards, believed that they had. For that reason, I now felt responsible, in part, for our present predicament in Beaumont.
My grandparent's house was in a very old neighbourhood. Over the half-century that they had occupied it, the borders that materialize between races, cultures and ethnic groups had shifted. Thus, one had to be on one's guard not only for filicidal fathers, but also hostile people, when going about the neighbourhood on foot. Every walk to and from school was akin to the final dash to the woods from the barbed wire perimeter fence of a military prison.
I remember a local man, the bachelor heir of one of the local aristocratic families. He was much younger than my father. He spent the night on our couch and took my mother, sisters and I touring around the city. We went to a golf course, a private country club and other fancy places like his house. The man took me aside on the golf course and asked me how I would like to live in his well-appointed, civilized world, as his own son. I couldn't find any words able to navigate the massive lump in my throat and congestion in my heart. Soon afterwards, I became withdrawn.
One afternoon, when I couldn't find my favourite socks in a chest of drawers. I slammed shut the drawer where they should have been and demanded to know who had stolen them. It was something characteristic of the behaviour of my father and I discovered that it felt good to slam that drawer. Really good.
I slammed it again and it felt even better. I slammed it in a primitive rhythm with steadily increasing force. My mother came into the room to investigate the commotion. She told me sharply and succinctly that she would rather see me dead, even if she had to kill me herself, than to see me behave as my father, whom my tantrum reminded her of. I stopped cold, internalized her threatening statement and began to build a pearl around that emotional manipulative grit.
Another adrenal day, very shortly after our arrival, and near to my youngest sister's birthday, I walked up our white cockle-shell driveway and nearly buckled at my knees. My father's green car sat in the driveway like a notorious gunslinger's horse tied outside a saloon in a frontier town taken over by conscienceless bandits. Part of me expected to see a blood-soaked crime scene inside the suite. I mustered my courage and took one of the longest walks of my life, up the driveway and into the front door. There he was, sick in bed with the flu and my mother was taking care of him. The situation was now akin to a screenplay co-written by Wilde, Dante and Kafka.
A few days after his appearance, the adults held a little birthday party for my younger sister and within a week my parents rented a vacant house two doors away. There were no tears, no testimonials, no healing nor any explanations forthcoming. It was just family business as usual under a new rented roof.
An old-fashioned family Christmas with all the trimmings was had just before we predictably moved to a cheaper apartment across town and away from the eyes, ears and good influences of my grandparents. I had to give away a rabbit that I had raised in the backyard in a beautiful hutch that my grandfather had built with me. I found out several years later from the boy I had given it to, that the big Dutch bunny had won first place in a local Beaumont agricultural fair.
On the first day at our new apartments, I said, “Hi” to a girl my age and she immediately pushed me into the swimming pool with all my clothes on. It was full of shopping carts and trash. I never asked her why she did it. We moved away to Houston soon afterwards anyways.
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