Heart Berries: A Memoir(21)
My mother wanted to heal him. I remember several trips to visit him in rehab. She sent him to islands, and I remember wearing a lifejacket, crossing water to somewhere in Tofino, British Columbia. I remember each hope given to me by my mother: that our father would be okay and things would be different.
In the past, I wanted to tell her that some things can’t be loved away, but I think she knew that.
We left my father a few times. We stayed in my uncle’s home. Mom took all four of us, along with my grandmother. We all slept in one room, and I had chicken pox. I slept in a green upholstered chair and had an accident. My brother Ovila was the only one awake. He told me to undress and took off his shirt for me to wear. I went back to sleep with a sour stomach and woke up as my father was forklifting me from the chair to his van. He always found us.
Once, I packed my bags, mimicking my mother. With a bag of dolls and wooden cars, I told him I was leaving. I told him I would not come back until he stopped drinking.
“Come here,” he said.
“No,” I said.
He promised me he would quit and then left.
My brothers told me that he didn’t really leave. I misremembered. My grandmother saved money and asked our cousin to kill my father. The man beat him well, and, when my father came home, we were gone. He ruined every artwork we possessed. He tossed every can of salmon and beets that my grandmother had prepared for the winter. He took jewelry and money.
When we got home, everyone told me to wait on the porch. They went inside and cleaned while I stared at my spit. For years, they were happy to let me imagine he left on his own regard.
After my mother died, I went to find him. He lived in a town called Hope. He had a new family, and our van sat in his front lawn on bricks. When he answered the door, he told me he knew who I was. He had a thin, dirty white shirt on. He looked ill, and his face was gaunt. His hair was still black in some parts.
His wife, Winnie, was my older sister’s childhood friend. My father had met her when she was a girl, visiting my sister. After years with Ken, her front teeth were gone. She smiled at me and said my father had old videotapes of theater work I had done in the community. I had five new brothers, so young. They looked like the archetypes my own family had formed in the presence of my father. I found myself in the youngest child, who formed bonds too quickly and needed holding.
My father and I sat across from each other in lawn chairs in his basement. I resisted the urge to sit poised like him. Instead, I held bad posture and slunk in my chair.
“You have my nose,” he said.
I said I missed him, feeling awful that it was true.
“The best thing I could do was leave.”
“I know,” I said.
“Your mother was a good woman. I told her I was an asshole, and she took me in—like a wounded bear.”
“I know,” I said.
A month after this, he showed up at my house with a white documentary filmmaker. I answered the door but could not let him in the house. My brother Ovila was still scared of him, still angry and confused.
“They’re doing a documentary about me,” he said. “About my art.”
I was anxious, standing there with him at my door.
“I know,” he said. “I’ll go.”
I hugged him in my driveway. I know that the whole rez was watching, even my sister, who knocked on my door after he left to look me in my eyes so I could see that I betrayed her. Even she, who was as tall as him, and bigger, had to come to my door with backup. Even she was scared of him. I didn’t know any better back then.
The National Film Board of Canada debuted the documentary as a piece with immediacy and no external narrative. I’m a woman wielding narrative now, weaving the parts of my father’s life with my own. I consider his work a testimony to his being. I have one of his paintings in my living room. “Man Emerging” is the depiction of a man riding a whale. The work is traditional and simplistic. Salish work calls for simplicity, because an animal or man should not be convoluted. My father was not a monster, although it was in his monstrous nature to leave my brother and I alone in his van while he drank at The Kent. Our breaths became visible in the cold. Ken came back to bring us fried mushrooms. We took to the bar fare like puppies to slop.
His smell was not monstrous, nor the crooks of his body. The invasive thought that he died alone in a hotel room is too much. It is dangerous to think about him, as it was dangerous to have him as my father, as it is dangerous to mourn someone I fear becoming.
I don’t write this to put him to rest but to resurrect him as a man, when public record portrays him as a drunk, a monster, and a transient.
I wish I could have known him as a child in his newness. I want to see him with the sheen of perfection, with skin unscathed by his mistakes or by his father’s. It’s in my nature to love him. And I can’t love who he was, but I can see him as a child.
Before my mother died I asked her if he had ever hurt me.
“I put you in double diapers,” she said. “There’s no way he hurt you. Did he ever hurt you?”
“No,” I said.
If rock is permeable in water, I wonder what that makes me in all of this? There is a picture of my brother, Ovi, and me next to Dad’s van. My chin is turned up, and at the bottom of my irises there is brightness. My brother has his hand on his hip, and he looks protective standing over me. I know, without remembering clearly, that my father took this picture and that we loved each other. I don’t think I can forgive myself for my compassion.