A Good Home: A Memoir

Prologue

A House Imagined

The fire glows brightly, the wood floors nearby reflecting its warmth. The burning logs smell of maple and apple wood. Embers spark. Wood ash sifts through the grate.

It’s a quiet evening in our old farmhouse northeast of Toronto.

It should be dark outside, but it isn’t. A thick blanket of white covers the ground, lighting up the garden. High above it, the snow traces the bare limbs of the old apple trees and tops the thick branches of the evergreen spruce. Everything is tranquil, motionless.

The photos on the fireplace mantel, taken several years before, show our mothers and daughters. Smiling, laughing, playing together. Images of happy times, family, love.

The shelves nearby house books, precious books. A copy of The Secret Garden, the inside page containing a few handwritten words to our younger daughter, Lauren, from her sister Nikisha. An old book of poetry that’s been thumbed through at least a hundred times. The large burgundy-covered family Bible, thumbed through less often, mostly in times of leisure or times of trouble. A photo album containing scenes from Nikisha and Tim’s wedding day. A book about Jamaican culture, along with one on Canadian history.

My husband, Hamlin, lies sprawled on the sofa, his face hidden behind the science-fiction book he is reading. At just under six feet tall, he has to bend his legs to fit.

A dog is curled up by his feet. Lauren’s puppy, here for a visit. Julius Caesar, the tiny part-Pug, part-Chihuahua, the little brown dog with the big name. He opens one eye suddenly, making sure we haven’t sneaked out of the room. Satisfied, he closes it again. In a short while, he’s snoring.

Hard to believe a little thing like this can make such a big sound, Hamlin says, laughing.

We’ve been in the farmhouse now for five years.

When we first put in our offer to buy the house, in the winter of 2004, I imagined Christmas lights strung through the branches of the tall blue-green spruce trees at the far end of the large back lawn.

I imagined the family dinners, the birthday parties, the beautiful gardens visible from every window, the warm glow of Christmas in every room.

Our daughters called it a Christmas house and were already planning the decorations. Hamlin – determined that this would be our last move as a family – called it our forever house. I called it our grown-up house because of its elegant, traditional rooms.

When we move into the new house … we’d say as we packed boxes and crates with items from the kitchen, bedroom, and dining room of our former house.

When we move into the new house … we’d say as we put off hosting dinners with friends.

When we move into the new house … we’d say as we decided which items of furniture would fit nicely where we were going and which had run their course.

Then, just two weeks before the move, on a mild evening in June, another car crashed into mine.

Much later, I would look back and say: A thing that’s going to change a person’s whole life shouldn’t be so quick. It should take more than an instant. But that’s all it took.

Injured from head to toe, on many days I couldn’t walk, talk, or even think. The move into our new home barely registered in my mind. The tall maple staircase, a welcoming feature of the house when we first saw it, was now an obstacle.

The family dinners and parties, the gardening, stringing Christmas lights in the welcoming arms of the spruce trees – none of that took place.

The active, happy times with my husband and daughters did not take place.

Overnight, my life changed so drastically I could neither believe nor accept it.

On days when I descended the stairs but couldn’t climb back up, I stared balefully at them, and at the house around me, giving in to a helpless feeling or two, giving voice to a swear word or three.

I was trapped. Trapped inside an old house whose thick walls blocked out all sounds, creating an unbearably pure silence. The house’s spacious, high-ceilinged, traditional rooms, beautiful and grand when I had first seen them, now intimidated me as my independence diminished.

What happens to a gardener who can no longer garden? A public speaker who no longer speaks? A writer who no longer writes? A mother who no longer mothers? I asked my husband on one of those dark days of fury. Am I still a gardener? Am I still a writer, a public speaker? Am I still a mother?

I stopped there, not voicing the question I was too afraid to ask him: Am I still a wife?

Alone by myself one day, lying in bed, I faced the silent, empty house and asked those questions, all of them this time. The walls stared back.

Before the accident, I had enjoyed a busy, award-winning career. In my spare time, or while travelling to foreign destinations, I had also written more than fifty stories, getting some of them published, filing and forgetting most of them, moving them from house to house along with the furniture. I couldn’t remember them all, but I knew that many were about the unusual homes in which our family lived, the people we met, our unexpected adventures. Some were even about my childhood home.

We need to find them, Cynthia, Hamlin said one day, as he walked into the bedroom. He sat at the edge of the bed and patted my injured leg through the bedspread. We need to find your stories. Can you remember where we might have put them?

I stared at him. Remember where we had put them? I couldn’t even remember what day it was. But he was determined to find them.

Perhaps in these stories, he thought, I’d be reminded of the woman I was. And perhaps this discovery would help me find the strength and faith I would need to face the uncertain future. This I saw in his eyes, the way some couples do, even before he said the words.

For minutes here, an hour there, Hamlin searched.

Over the course of nearly one year, he found the stories in old computers, ragged boxes, and envelopes, and even faded and torn plastic bags. Some were typed on pages that had yellowed with age, with the paper clips now rusted and crumbling. Some were handwritten.

One by one, Hamlin handed the stories to me, as though presenting me with precious jewels. Each time, he gave me a long look, saying very little other than, Here’s another. You must read this.

I started to read. In the pages in front of me, a new world opened up. An old world came to life.

Part One

Island

Home

I say Mother.

And my thoughts

are of you, oh House.

~ Oscar Milosz

Chapter One

The Little Pink House

After a heavy rainfall, the stream that ran through the grounds of my childhood home, in the countryside of west-central Jamaica, turned into a swift-moving river. To my two older sisters, Yvonne and Pat, and me, that made it all the more appealing.

Bet you can’t go through the culvert! one of my sisters would call out when the stream finally settled down but the water level was still high. What this really meant was: I dare you to wade through the stream where it flows through the culvert under the road. I dare you to get to the other side without drowning.

The thing is, none of us could swim. You’d think that would have made us think twice. But we were daredevils, three girls ages six to twelve for whom resisting a dare was an admission of cowardice.

You go first, said Pat to me one lazy afternoon.

We were standing at the stream bank watching the heavy water flow into the dark concrete tunnel. She poked me with her elbow, pushing me toward the entrance.

I had never dared to go through the culvert when the water was so high. I also didn’t understand why I had to go first. But at only six years of age, I was three years younger than Pat and six years younger than Yvonne and anxious to earn their respect.

I walked along the bank of the stream and stopped. When I reached out my hand, my fingers almost touched the mouth of the culvert. From that safe distance, I peered into the tunnel. All I could see was dark water. High, dark water. It looked and smelled very different from water that flowed in the sunlight.

A lot was riding on my decision, and I knew it. Despite being only inches taller than the water level, I took a first tentative step, holding on to the side of the culvert wall. Then, after finding my balance in the moving water, I took a second step. Then the next.

My foot slipped, and I staggered. My fingers lost touch of the wall. I felt the cold, heavy water around my neck.

Heart racing, mouth clamped shut just above water level, hands thrashing, I found the wall with my right hand at the same time that my feet found their balance on the concrete floor. Then, taking a deep breath, I walked slowly, slowly, so my feet wouldn’t slip again.

To reduce the terror, I closed my eyes, opening them again quickly when a truck rumbled over the road above. Daylight, at the other end of the culvert, still seemed miles away.

At last, a lifetime later, I was out of the water, safely in the sunshine. Heart still pounding, my whole body wet and shaking, I turned to face my sisters, certain they would be impressed by my great feat.

They weren’t. They had been right behind me all along, ready to save me from drowning.

My first time through the culvert had been as much a test for them as for me, but neither of them ever said so. We were doing a bad thing by disobeying our mother’s order to stay away from the stream on days like this one, but they were the older children and that made them responsible for my survival. This journey had been all about survival.

When you’re little, everything looks big.

The home of my early childhood, in the late 1950s, was a one-storey house painted light pink, with a tin roof and green trim at windows and doors. A wide stream flowed at the side of our land, and there were too many trees to count.

Our house had four small rooms: a front room, a dining room, and two bedrooms, one for the four girls – Yvonne, Pat, me, and our youngest sister, Jackie – the other for our mother and father and our brand-new baby brother, Michael.

A passerby might have wondered how a house that small could comfortably hold a family of our size, especially when one room, the front room, was used for our father’s business. Both of our parents worked at home, our mother as a dressmaker, our father as a barber.

But to my six-year-old eyes and mind, it was a huge house. It gave us a place to eat, listen to stories, play tricks on one another, plot the next day’s mischief, go to sleep.

Our family belonged to this house and it to us as though we were extensions of each other. Not once had it ever even occurred to me that we would live anywhere else but here. Or sleep anywhere else but in the beds we children shared at night. Or eat at any other table than the one where we tucked into the food on our plates half a second after one of our parents had finished saying grace.

Look over there! one of the older girls would whisper loudly during dinner, elbowing the smaller child seated beside her. Over there!

As all heads swivelled to look at a faraway spot, a quick fork speared a small dumpling on someone else’s plate. The dumpling found its way into a mouth, and was swallowed almost immediately. When the family’s eyes turned back, the culprit sat with an innocent look on her face, while a younger child stared at her plate. Maybe she’d made a mistake. Maybe, just a moment ago, only one dumpling sat on her plate, not two.

The house never seemed crowded, even when our cousins came for summer holidays. We spent almost the entire day playing on the acres of land around our house. We ran barefoot through the fields, climbed the trees, and waded noisily across the wide, sometimes muddy stream that flowed, flooded, and sometimes only trickled, through our property.

The sounds of home and family were everywhere: children yelling and laughing, water splashing, the anxious call of our mother when we climbed too high up a tree or wandered too far away in the stream.

The trees were tall, but my sisters, cousins, and I were monkeys, scampering easily up their trunks and branches to pick fruit, or just to prove that we could. That any tree should think itself beyond our reach – the very thought insulted our pride.

If a tree trunk was too thick for us to climb from ground level, we simply climbed the smaller tree next to it, then swung to the large one, yelling and squealing as we let go of one branch and fiercely grabbed the other, pretending to be Tarzan. Then we continued climbing to the very top of the big tree, competing to see who could get there first, yelling triumphantly once at the top.

Danger was all around us, but it didn’t usually scare us. With loving mother, father, and siblings nearby, with our perfect house, wide stream, and many trees, we felt perfectly safe.

Mama had five rules for her own children and those visiting.

We – especially my older sisters and cousins – tried to obey those rules. But as we tore through our breakfast, eager to start the day’s adventures, we remembered only the last two: we minded our manners every time we came across an adult, and we always travelled in a pack.

We had a small farm with goats, chickens, and sometimes pigs. The children’s job each morning was to lead the goats across the road to the grassy pasture facing our house and tie their long ropes to the trees there. Only then could we visit our friends. Every morning, we crossed the road together, goats trailing behind or alongside us.

We knew all the neighbours, and they knew all of us. We slipped through fences to play in their fields, climb their trees, and break yet another of our mother’s rules, picking and eating their fruit as if it were our own. Only one neighbour was offended. Unfortunately, she owned the tree that bore the sweetest oranges.

That tree reminded us of a kind, shapely, and well-dressed lady, so we called her Nanny Tree. We loved her and felt certain she loved us in return. But her watchful owner was a problem.

Late one evening, acting on a secret plan, Pat and I sneaked out of the house and made our way across the property line to Nanny Tree.

The oranges were ripe, their brilliant colour glowing in the dark. The lower part of the tree was surrounded by tall grass and shrubs, but on our earlier visits, we had created a narrow path through them, like a short tunnel leading to the open space below the tree.

You go in through the grass, Pat whispered, reminding me of the plan. I’ll hit the branches with the stick, and when the oranges fall, you pick them up.

For a moment I felt irritated and longed for the day when I’d be big enough to be the one wielding the stick and Pat the one forced to crawl on hands and knees. But right now she was taller and stronger.

Pat proceeded to whack the bunches of fruit from their branches while I crawled into the darkness under the tree.

My senses came alive in the dark. I smelled the powerful fragrance of the oranges every time my sister’s stick made contact with the branches and heard the soft thud of the oranges as they hit the ground.

I felt my way around the ground in the dark, joyfully scooping up oranges one by one and dropping them into the front of my bunched-up skirt.

I was so intent on what I was doing that I didn’t hear the telltale sounds until they joined together into a loud, buzzing roar.

It came at me from all sides. A swarm of angry bees.

My feet soon found the open space in the thick grass, and I quickly backed out through it. My sister, unaware of the bees now swarming around my face, neck, and arms, kept pushing me back in, telling me to pick up more of the oranges. Howling, I finally broke free. My upper body was covered with bees.

We stumbled back home in the dark, oranges long forgotten, my sister saying, Shut up, shut up – remember, we were stealing, whenever I cried out in pain. I do not remember sleeping that night, and it seemed my sister, too, was awake. Every time I started to whimper or cry out loud, she covered my mouth softly with her hand and urgently pleaded for me to keep quiet.

It was no use. The next day, my face, arms, and neck were covered with the evidence of my crime. My mother listened to the story without scolding us, and when she wrapped her arms around me I thought I saw tears escaping her eyes. That had a bigger impact on me than any punishment. I had never seen my mother cry.

I promised myself then that I would never steal the neighbours’ fruit again. And I kept my promise. For at least a week.

It must be true that children have their own guardian angels. By all reasonable estimations, at least some of the children in our family should have been seriously injured before reaching adulthood. But the worst that ever happened was that we repeatedly got stings, cuts, and bruises – and painful infections between our toes – and had to suffer through the remedies, which seemed just as painful.

As we children played, or snuggled into our beds at night, strange things were taking place in the adult world.

A man had recently been sent to prison for stabbing his wife. Another man returned home after serving a long sentence for raping a woman he knew. Half a mile from our house, a third man hanged himself on the tallest, widest tree in the large field we passed every day on our way to and from school. If you didn’t know about the hanging, you would have wanted to climb that tree.

The adults whispered these things to keep the children from knowing, but children have their own communication system. About twelve of us walked to and from school in a pack: my two older sisters and me, and girls and boys from four neighbouring homes.

Between all the bits we’d overheard from the adults’ conversations, we settled on these facts: the man killed his wife after she did something in bed with another man; none of the adults believed that the man imprisoned for rape had really done so; and no one knew why the other man had hanged himself, but everyone now said that the tree was unlucky. A long time ago, another man had hanged himself on that very same tree.

Of the three brutal events, I understood only one: the hanging. The other two required a knowledge I did not yet have.

The adult world seemed full of men and their deeds and misdeeds. Women who came to Mama to have their dresses made often told her stories about their husbands or boyfriends. As Mama took out her tape measure and jotted down the size of their hips, waists, arms, bustlines, and shoulders, the women talked, sometimes ignoring a child standing nearby.

Walls have ears, my mother would warn. Her dark brown eyes tried to flash a signal to her visitor.

Little pigs have big ears, she would say next, if the woman kept talking.

Even at six years of age, I understood my mother’s signals, but some of the women didn’t. My belly about to burst from trying to hold the laughter in, I finally ran out of the room.

In our father’s barbershop, the men also talked about the deeds of men. I sometimes stood outside, under the window, listening to their comments about the men who wanted to rule the island or just the nearby town, about the men who had sold their land to the Alcan bauxite company, about the men who had left for jobs in England. The men’s conversations were puzzling. They were never as interesting as the women’s.

Before dinner each day, Yvonne, Pat, and I had to fetch the goats. The older girls got the bright idea one day that we could tie the goats’ ropes around our waists. The goats, as though acting on a secret plan of their own, took off down the hill, dragging us along, as we screamed at the top of our lungs. We never did that again.

After dinner came the ghost stories, told by our parents or visiting uncles. The headless corpse who wandered around looking for his head. The rolling calf, a big brute of a bull with fire in his eyes. The sneaky ghost that stole the hearts of children who had wandered too far from home.

We children gasped and squirmed as the scary story got close to the end. Then, as darkness fell, Mama sent us to wash ourselves in the outside room where the bathing and washing were done.

On the way there and back, we shrieked at every shadow and every sound. Then, when our parents had settled us down, it was time for bed. Tired from our day’s adventures, safe from the responsibilities that belonged to our loving parents, we fell asleep almost as soon as our heads hit the pillows.

We didn’t know that something big had already been put in motion and was about to change our world. And if we had known, we couldn’t have stopped it.

For my older sisters and me, perhaps even for our little sister, Jackie, and baby brother, Michael, the pink house with the tall trees and wide stream and loving mother and father was a magical place and we expected that it would go on forever.

Chapter Two

Grandmother’s House

Our grandmother lived in a big house a mile up the road. She didn’t have to go outside to bathe because she had an inside bathroom.

It had the first flush toilet we’d ever seen. We children lined up to use the bathroom just to be able to pull the chain that brought water flooding into the toilet bowl.

The house, Mama said, had been handed down from our grandfather’s side of the family, which, just two generations before, had owned almost all of the land in the district.

Each time the house changed hands, another