Til the UFOs Come

Fictionalized memories of my grandfather, an unusual character

I remember my grandfather, that fierce old man.  He was one of those domineering, intimidating men who mellow and gentle with age.  When I knew him, his blue eyes held sparkle and light, yet always he carried with him the shadow of his younger self.  He fascinated me, mysterious as some wild creature caught by a momentary lightning-flash, who skitters into darkness and is gone. 

 

People talked about him.  Some with awe, some with humour, some with a contempt that hinted at knowledge I did not have.  Yet people loved him, even against their wills.  My father once told me that as a young man, he hated his father bitterly, with passionate abandon.

 

By that time, my grandfather was dead, and I had heard some of the stories told in undertones by aunts and uncles shamed by a past they could not relate to the gentle old man they now knew.  The stories frightened me, hinting of dark wells and hidden pockets filled with hurt and betrayal and something I did not, then, call evil. 

 

I first came to know my grandfather when I was eight years old.  My parents had separated, and for some mysterious reason my mother took her children and fled three hundred miles to the Nithi Valley in northern B.C., where my father's parents lived.  Maybe it was because her own parents lived too close to my father and his new lover, my mother's former best friend, the cause of the breakup. But that's an old story, and one that has been told too many times already.  So we moved in with my grandparents.  That was a strange time, a dark and confusing time for the child I was.  Everything was in flux, and mysterious undercurrents threatened to snatch me away and whisk me into a looming darkness.  My grandmother was still alive, then.  The cancer must have started to grow in her already; it was only a year later she died, an event which rocked that large family tree to its roots.  But that came later. 

 

In retrospect, it is easy to see omens, portents and ominous foreshadowings.  Doubtless, most of those are projections from the present.  One thing I know:  as an eight-year-old, I saw my grandmother as a ghost, someone without substance, without an essence I could safely love.  It does not matter whether I knew it as impending death or not.  What matters is that my grandmother was a wraith, and my mother was in fragments, so I attached my heart and my longing for recognition to my grandfather. 

 

It was he upon whose knee I bounced, giggling; he whose jokes cracked me up, he whom I begged for piggyback rides. And it was he who frightened me with tales of scalpings and torture by the Indians who lived on the reservation two miles away.  He had a cruel streak, my grandfather. 

 

"Be good, or I'll sell you to the Indians," he would whisper, or shout, or offhandedly repeat until it became a litany, a ritualistic phrase fraught with tension, guaranteed to produce a prickling in my scalp as my body anticipated the bloody moment when, torn from me by painted savages, my long tangled locks would be waved triumphantly aloft.  I loved it with that painfully morbid glee which keeps children coming back for more even when tickled to the point of wetting themselves. 

 

Oh yes, my grandfather was a dangerous man.  He carried himself with a hunter's easy grace.  He was born in 1889, on an Indian reservation in Montana, though he himself had no native blood, and he married a mostly-white woman from the rez, my grandmother.  The circumstances of his birth gave his stories, for me, an added credence which sometimes crossed the line from morbid fascination to actual stomach-wrenching terror, as when I was compelled to ride my bike through the dozen or so rundown shacks on the reservation, that being the only route to town back then. 

 

My grandfather was god to me, in those days.  In this he replaced my father whose clay feet had proved him unsuited to the role.  At eight, I demanded a god with physical presence, one I could touch and see and hear. 

 

It did not disturb me, then, the offhanded cruelty with which he treated my grandmother.  I gave it no thought.  She was nothing to me.  No; that is not true, for she cooked delicious things and patiently let me help, and she made me lovely handcrafted doll furniture for my birthday that year.  She was something to me, but with a child's cruel self-interest I was quick to dismiss her from my heart whenever my grandfather dashed her upon the rocks of his abysmal contempt. 

 

The first of the stories about my grandfather's past was revealed to me in bits and pieces over the years. 

 

It began for me on a summer day when I was ten years old. We were living just down the hill from my grandfather, who had sold the family home to his daughter, my aunt Carol, when Grandma died.  We lived, my mother, stepfather, little brother Jack and sister Linda, in a cramped little house on an acre of land, between the old house and the new cabin just up the hill, which Grandpa had built for himself. 

 

I was playing outside that day, making up space-operas with my Barbie and Ken dolls.  Barbie had been captured by evil space-pirate Ken, who was about to subject her to unspeakable tortures, when a heavy-laden, dust-covered, rattletrap station wagon pulled into our driveway. Instantly hooked, I peered from the bushes where I was playing alone -- something about the vehicle spoke to me of long weary miles and bridges burned behind, and something about the people struck sparks on my always voracious imagination. 

 

A hawk-faced dark man who looked oddly familiar to me stepped from the driver's side of the ridiculously overloaded vehicle.  The rabbitty woman beside him, anxiously shushing a brood of four noisy kids, looked pale and tense.  I imagined a quiet dread settled into the air around me, weighty and tangible. 

 

The man knocked on the door of my house.  It opened, after a little time. He spoke intently to my mother, whose face I couldn't see.  My mouth was dry, my body was tensed in anticipation.  It was a moment of pellucid certainty.  I had no thought.  I waited as an animal waits, intensely, with every muscle alert. 

 

A measureless time later, my mother called me in.  Things had happened.  The station wagon was emptied of people. Everyone was in the house.  "Honey," my mother said, in careful tones, "This is your uncle Bill.  He's your father's brother, from Ontario."  I was introduced to the aunt, whose name was Liz, and to the cousins, ranging downward in age from nine to three.  Their names were Billy Junior, Sarah, Lenny and Sam. 

 

I think I probably smiled and said hello.  I probably said some of the correct things.   Inside, my world was being rearranged, new connections were being forged, new rooms being opened and aired out. The uncle's familiarity was explained by his uncanny resemblance to my grandfather, which was ironic in the light of the story which emerged. 

 

It happened during the lean years, the Thirties.  My grandparents, Harvey and Bridey Pierce, were a troubled couple.  The Depression had come at the worst possible time, in the early years of their marriage, when their farm was struggling and the children kept coming, none of them old enough to be a real help, constantly hungry and enragingly fractious. 

 

Harvey was a philanderer.  You could say it was his way of dealing with the pressures of hardship; you could make any number of excuses for him.  He was well-liked, a generous hunter, first to lend an arm to a neighbour in need, so excuses were made. 

 

There were some who had difficulty swallowing the way he rubbed his suffering wife's nose in his dalliances.  Disrespectful, it was.  Cruel, some claimed.  "That Harvey Pierce, he's got a mean streak in him," the whisper ran; but cruelty to a wife was not enough in those days to dull the edge of men's respect.  Neighbours were more valuable than gold in that hard country, where a man's life and his family's survival might depend on the right sort of help at the right time. 

 

It happened that Harvey had an affair with the next-but-one neighbour's wife, a generous, large-bosomed lady named Meg Wilson. Her husband didn't like it much, Harvey being indiscreet as usual. A confrontation took place and the affair was ended, with a minimum of hard feelings, or so it was thought. 

 

But for Bridey, it was the last straw.  She'd had all she could take; a woman could tolerate just so much.  Meg Wilson had been her best friend.  The women in that remote country depended on one another's support far more than did even the men.  That Harvey would betray her friendship with Meg was hard, but after all, Harvey was Harvey.  That Meg herself had participated in the betrayal was intolerable to Bridey. She planned revenge.  Something that would hurt the transgressor as she herself had been hurt.  Something that would show them all she would not be taken for granted any more.  For tender Bridey Pierce, it was to be the first overtly rebellious act of her adult life. 

 

She waited for an opportunity.  Finally the night came when Harvey was gone on an overnight hunting trip, and she knew Meg had been called out to midwife young Frances Woods, ten miles down the road.  She would likely be gone all night and maybe even the next day, since Frances had a history of difficult labour. 

 

When her children were tucked in asleep and the oldest had been sworn to secrecy, Bridey saddled the old plowhorse, Maisie, and rode the five and a half miles cross-country to the Wilson homestead.  She had dressed in her least faded cotton print dress.  Beet juice stained her lips deep rose, and excitement stained her cheeks bright pink.  Gulping for breath, feeling as though she might drown in a night grown suddenly thick around her, she rapped sharply on the rough-hewn plank door. 

 

Three times.  "Oh God, maybe he's out somewhere... Oh God, if he answers the door, I'll die!  Oh, God, what am I doing here, I'm not this sort of woman, I'm not..." Her terrors galloped and strained at the walls of her skull, their pounding visible in the hollow of her throat. 

 

So it happened that Gerald Wilson and Bridey Pierce came together, briefly, and it happened that Bridey conceived and bore a child, near enough to nine months later that its fathering stood in question.  Of course she had told Harvey of the incident, and Meg as well; she had screamed it out in defiance and pride, had informed him of passion discovered and manhood compared, not in Harvey's favour, mind you. 

 

Bridey got her revenge, all right, but no satisfaction was forthcoming.  In those days, a proud man would kill or die in defense of his manhood; and kill her he did, over and over, every day for the rest of her life.  When the time came for the child to be born, Harvey refused to acknowledge it his.  "Give it to them," he snarled.  "I want no part of the little b*****d." 

 

In spite of all her pleadings and tears, in spite of the miniature hawk-nose which was a replica of Harvey's own, he remained adamant. "Keep it, and I'll wring its scrawny neck," was all he had to say.  The Wilsons were overjoyed.  Children are precious in the hard north, and Meg had buried her last three before they'd lived a year. 

 

In those days there were no papers to sign, no forms to fill out.  The child was handed over by tearful Bridey to tearful-joyful Meg.  The men ahemed and well-nowed and shook hands.  Gerald gruffly said, "We'll take care of 'im, Bridey, don't you worry, love 'im like..."

 

After a tense pause, Gerald cleared his throat abruptly and looked away from the sharp tightening and whitening of Harvey's lips.  The two families were never close after that, and eventually, when Billy was eight, the Wilson family packed their bags and cleared out for Ontario, taking with them the sad silent little boy with the hawk nose and the buck teeth. 

 

Sure, they had agreed to keep it a secret, but those stories have a life of their own, and Billy's nose and teeth spoke for themselves.  The children knew.  The Pierce child who was youngest when Billy was born, Fred, he knew.  No one ever told him, not out loud, but he knew anyway.  When the other kids in the schoolyard picked on Billy, calling him b*****d and worse, it was Fred who came to his rescue.  It was Fred who protected him, who called him brother when no one else was around to hear. 

 

There were tears, then, when young Bill was eight and Fred was nine, when the great war started and Gerald Wilson packed his family back East so his family could be closer to his relatives while he was off fighting.  Billy never forgot he had family in B.C. 

 

That story, at least, had a more-or-less happy ending.  When grown-up Bill Wilson risked everything to bring his wife and four kids west to the family he could never get out of his mind, he found welcome.  Even the old man had to admit, belatedly, that no one but himself could have sired this one, certainly not baby-faced Gerald Wilson, now long dead. 

 

All right, so he never exactly opened his heart to his long-lost son; the two of them never did become close; but he was welcomed by the rest, welcomed into a huge extended family tighter than most in these times. 

 

There are other stories, with less satisfactory conclusions; and Harvey sits like a spider in the center of them all. I first heard the second story about my grandfather's past at a party at my Aunt Carol's house.  I was fourteen years old; I did not drink yet.  She, my aunt Carol, was "three sheets to the wind", as they said in those days.  She took me aside in a drunken auntly fashion, and told me the bones of her story.  Time has since fleshed it and filled in the details. 

 

Fourteen years had passed since the birth of Gerald Junior.  Carol was thirteen, and considered to be pretty despite her buck teeth, the unfortunate Pierce legacy.  This was a time of prosperity and pain for the Pierce family.  The war had just ended, bringing with it their share of grief and loss:  the oldest boy, Brent, had been killed, stupidly, a week before Armistice. 

 

A week!  Another week and he would have been home!  Harvey was mad with grief. He aimed his poisoned rage at his second son, Darryl, who had escaped the horrors of war alive and nearly unscathed.  Brent had been his golden boy, the repository of his hopes, eldest son and heir to his dreams. 

 

Tall and handsome, heroically built, Brent was "a fine, upstanding young man", the neighbours said.  And as for Darryl, "Well, there's no accounting for blood," the same neighbours clucked.  Darryl somehow never measured up. 

 

So when Harvey hooked up with that fast-talking stranger from the South, excuses were easy to find.  "He hasn't been himself since poor Brent kicked off, you know," the talk ran.  That smooth stranger was a troublemaker, everybody else saw it plain as day.  But Harvey fell for his talk hook line and sinker, got pulled right in.  He called him friend, welcomed him into his family, stayed up late every night spinning wild dreams of get-rich-quick. 

 

They were going to go logging, way down south on Denman Island, that's where the fast easy money was, according to the stranger, who should know.  Harvey needed cash though, to finance the trip and to see his family through the time he'd be gone.  The boys could take care of the farm well enough, but still, money would be needed for staples and and supplies. 

 

The stranger had money, or so it seemed.  Was rolling in it, with his shiny car and starched shirts.  "Tell you what, buddy," he whispered, with a conspiratorial wink in the direction of the demure girl serving coffee, hoping for a closer glimpse of the fascinating stranger, "Tell you what... that there girl of yours is one fine-looking piece, you catch my drift?" 

 

Harvey caught the drift, and what passed through his mind in that moment is anybody's guess.  The result was, the stranger had a fine time for awhile, continuing to spin his silky yarns, til Carol's belly began to swell.  The money he bragged of failed to materialize, and when the pressure to marry the girl started to build, he climbed into his fine car and drove off, with Harvey running behind, shouting threats and waving his fists in the air. 

 

Carol had a baby at fourteen, which was given up for adoption before she ever saw it.  She'd been dirtied, she told me, with tears rolling down her cheeks, and she would never feel clean, ever. 

 

But she never blamed her father for it; only that slick con man who pulled the wool over his eyes.  She loved her father, she claimed.  She cried, telling me her story; I grew chill, not wanting to hear.  But I did hear it, and that makes it mine. 

 

I have wondered in the past whether my grandfather was a good or an evil man.  Certainly he did evil things, and as certainly, he did good things as well.  He molested his daughters, terrorized his sons, and mistreated his wife.  He also placed himself repeatedly in danger to help a neighbour or even a stranger in need.  He took me fishing, and he told me stories.  He grew lighter as he grew older; everyone agreed on that.  Perhaps he died in peace.  Perhaps the stories do not matter so much. 

 

I have not forgiven my grandfather.  He did not do the things he did, to me. They are not mine to forgive.  Neither can I say I understand him.  He lurks in my memory like something wild, something amoral and untamed. He moves too far away to touch, when I reach; he slips through my fingers like a fish. He becomes real only in the stories, and perhaps that is why I tell them. 

 

My grandfather believed that Earth was a spaceship, and that at the end of the journey, the UFOs would come and save humanity from its own stupidity.  Near the end of his life, he believed that the journey's end was near. He told me he planned to rewrite the Bible from beginning to end, to tell the real truth which had been revealed to him. This was to be his life's work, his purpose. 

 

He never began it.