Family

without the sentimental veneer

My brothers work together like a well-oiled machine. This chilly May morning they are wearing their hockey toques and their feed company hoodies over a mangy selection of plaid shirts gifted over a decade of Christmas’s. If my dad and my other brother were still alive they’d be dressed in a similar homeless hobo style. That clean Carhart coverall image you see in the farm magazines is a marketing lie. On the farm, for work, you wear out the clothes you once kept for good. Hundred-dollar Carhart coveralls are not a viable expense—not when fertilizer, fuel and seed are sky high in price. Thanks to the orange buffoon. We don’t talk politics around the lunch table anymore especially if my two nephews are here helping with tagging or vaccinating or fighting with some balky piece on the corn planter. They’re likely to be wearing Alberta Strong sweatshirts. Both of them have off farm jobs, as do their wives so they tend to overtired crabbiness that blows off steam at the bigwigs on Parliament Hill. ‘Spending our tax money like it’s going out of style’. I just listen, don’t remind them of free health care and education for their kids and the roads are paved albeit with the usual spring potholes and if you can believe it, four of their aunts and uncles including the ones in the hockey toques are already collecting old age pension cheques as is our century old mother living in seniors housing in the village. I’d like to remind them that Oma and Opa arrived here from war ravaged Holland after Hitler swept through Europe, welcomed by Canada which had also housed our pregnant Dutch queen, even proclaiming a section of maternity ward in an Ottawa hospital to be Dutch territory so the infant about to be born would have the proper citizenship. We read it over and over in the women’s magazines that our southern Ontario aunt brought with her each summer on their annual trip to visit us. They drove a proper car with fins and a giant steering wheel and whitewall tires and our four city cousins tumbled out full of superiority and scorn.

We hated them and we loved them. It was the only time we had company and our mother was too busy talking to her sister to pay constant attention to us. The adults sat around the lunch table telling stories in Dutch while we ran wild outside in the orchard, knowing full well that our eldest cousin was instigating dangerous activities. One year he frightened the milk cows through the barb wire fence playing cattle stampede. He broke his foot falling out of the hay mow swinging on a rope as Tarzan. He was stung by bees until his eyes were swollen shut. Our mothers were used to the little subdued parade arriving at the kitchen door with news of fresh injuries. But then there was the blood poisoning. Hidden until the streak of inflammation going down his arm was too tender for even him to ignore. My uncle was summoned from where he was shooting ground hogs in the back hayfield with our father’s 303 army rifle and our cousin was ordered to put on some clean clothes and get in the back seat. Which he did and the big car left a cloud of summer dust on the township road. The rest of you, go in the living room and watch something on television said our mother. That was serious. We had just gotten a television the previous winter and we were only allowed to watch two shows of our parents choosing every evening. With their parents gone, the other three cousins were unusually subdued. They were gone a long time, as the hospital was almost an hours drive each way. Had he died. Would he die? We were worried, somehow feeling to blame. They came back just after supper. Our cousin tumbled out of the back seat triumphantly holding a paper wrapper.

“I had a McDonald’s burger!”

We didn’t know what McDonald’s was so that achievement was lost on us except that as with everything he did, it was designed to showcase city superiority over our rural rube life.

We waited one day to make sure he wasn’t going to die. The next night we filled his bed with thistles.