than any merchant, no offence to your father, of course.”
This roused Aunt Rose, who was finally about to speak, but before she could Aunt Lil took the floor again. “Really, Jethro. You can’t possibly be suggesting that a successful merchant, who has ample staff to mind his store, couldn’t contribute as much to society. James, of course, is a fine example, being at this time alone, merchant, mayor, and chief of the fire department.”
Sensing that his aunt’s rejoinder was as much for his benefit as that of his Mother, John spoke before Father could reply. “It doesn’t matter, Aunt Lil. I don’t want to be a merchant.”
The look of satisfaction on Father’s face could barely be contained. While I believe my father truly liked and admired his brother-in-law, James Darling, he most surely also bore him a certain amount of envy. It clearly gave Father a great amount of pleasure to see his nephew deciding to follow in his footsteps rather than those of his father. But his satisfaction was short-lived.
“I want to be a conductor,” John declared.
“A conductor, Johnny?” his mother replied, askance. “I know you love your piano, and one day you may be a great pianist, but I am not certain one can earn a living conducting an orchestra.”
“No!” John said, breaking the tension he had caused with a quick laugh. “Not an orchestra conductor. I want to be a train conductor. There aren’t very many of them: only one per train. Every train needs one. I won’t need any capital to be a conductor. I will see all kinds of people at each train station and bring smiles to the children as I wave my red kerchief at the boys and girls along the way. When the train breaks down, I will fix it. I’m good at fixing things. You’ve said so many times, Mother, haven’t you?” By this point John was perfectly serious. He had stopped laughing, but once he asked this question, the laughter was resumed by the five adults in the room.
As they shared what they concluded was a great joke, I looked at the children around the table. John, red with embarrassment, sank so low in his chair at this point that he would surely have been reprimanded for slouching if even one of the adults could find their way out of the fit of hilarity in which they were engaged. Ina’s face contorted with pity for her young cousin, mirroring what I expected was the look on my face. My brother Jim gazed down on his young cousin with a look I recognized. It took me a moment to place it. But then it came to me. It was a look I had mostly seen in the reverse; it was a look often applied by John to my brother, Jim. It was a look of complete and utter admiration.
When the adults finally finished their convulsing, rubbing their rib cages to massage away the pain caused by the great joke, Aunt Rose ended the conversation. “John,” she said, “I am not certain that you will be a dentist one day, but I will tell you quite certainly what you will not be. You will not be a train conductor. No son of mine is going to take up a trade involving his hands.” Then, realizing that to be a good part of what a dentist does, she elaborated, “Being immersed in wet filth.” To that there was no reply. We did not then know what a cesspool of germs was the human mouth.
* * *
That night after changing into my nightgown, I slipped downstairs for a glass of milk. As I padded down the maid’s stairs at the end of the hall, proposing to enter the kitchen from the pantry at the back, I was stopped by voices on the other side of the wall. I was certain that I heard Grandpa utter the word “destroyed.”
Self-made; others-destroyed, I thought. I had been seeking to learn how these words applied to Grandpa, and suspecting I might soon attain that knowledge, I proceeded to the closed door that connected the pantry to the kitchen.
“It’s been over four years,” Grandpa said. “He was good enough to take me in when he did, but I never dreamed that I’d stay so long. I only planned to stay long enough to bring some order to what is left of my meagre savings.”
“That’s right,” Mother replied. “But Father, I suspect you have little more the means to live independently now than you did four years ago. I am sorry to pry into your personal affairs, but you must see this. You did a good thing for our community twenty-six years ago. It nearly destroyed you. But you did what a decent person would do; now let us continue doing a decent thing for you.”
“But it isn’t your responsibility to pay for my mistakes. You are not the cause of the Scottish Fiasco. Why should you and your family have to suffer the consequences?”
“Father, we are hardly suffering. Jethro, the children, and I love having you here. And you know,” she said slowly, “I know I shouldn’t. I am a grown woman. But I need you here. You provide ballast to this sometimes tumultuous ship. We needn’t speak of it, but I know that you can see that too. Please stay; if not for yourself, then for me.”
“For a while longer then,” he eventually said. “For a while longer.”
I returned to my room by the stairs I had just descended, my thirst forgotten. I contemplated all that I had seen and heard that day. We were not in the habit of enunciating annual resolutions, but as I lay in my bed that night, I came to two. Firstly, I would learn the meaning of the phrase “Scottish Fiasco.” The way it was uttered, I could tell that it was something undesirable. Surely it related to the “others-destroyed” phrase. Secondly, when I grew up, I would become a dentist. Reasonable hours, the ability to make potions out of chemical compounds and liquids, the captive audiences formed by one’s clientele: it all seemed quite compelling to me.
Chapter 6
The Governor’s Story
As a child living in Brampton in the early twentieth century, I was afraid of many things: the smell of gas emitted by light fixtures; the tongues of fire that spewed from the furnace in our cellar; the sound of my father’s voice when raised against my mother; the sound of my father’s voice when raised against me. One thing I was not afraid of, though, was the institution designed to deprive people of their very liberty, to restrain those who had committed treacheries against their fellow man, to hold lunatics who would otherwise be a threat to themselves and others: the local jail. I was not frightened by its massive three-storey size, its foot-deep stone walls, its barred windows, its massive solid door, the small, isolated cells in which the prisoners lived or the gallows from which they were hanged. I was not afraid of the jail, even though the edifice stood on Wellington Street just two doors down from our house.
I once heard my cousin Bill ask Aunt Rose if she was afraid of the jail and its inmates. The question was particularly relevant, since her family, the Darlings, lived right across from the jail. Their house, the mirror image of ours, was also built by Grandpa. Wouldn’t it be to her home an escaped convict would first go? Bill asked. My aunt assured him that if ever an inmate fled the jail, the last place in which he would seek refuge would be a house so readily available for search by the authorities. Her house, she confidently declared, was the safest house in the town.
Her words provided me with great solace. I quickly concluded that if her house—the one directly across the road from the jail—was the last place to which a felon would escape, our house, just two doors east, was surely the third last place. In fact, I began to feel sorry for those in houses on the perimeter of the town, for surely their homes stood the greatest risk of such an intrusion.
Of course, my Aunt Rose also knew that most of the inmates of the local jail were not people of whom one needed to be particularly frightened. Few within it would actually desire to escape the relative warmth of its walls or the three square meals it provided (if you could call oatmeal for breakfast, soup and bread for lunch, and cornmeal for supper three square meals). Though the jail was regularly declared ill equipped to act as a place for the infirm or destitute, and though, as a result of the efforts of the Women’s
