Stones (21 page)

“What’s going on here?” he said, as my mother came abreast of him.

Mother did not know what he meant.

“Where is Mister Schickel, Lily?” he asked her.

She had forgotten that, as well.

“Mister Schickel has left,” she told him—trying to be calm—trying to steer my father wide of the butcher’s window and in towards their own front stoop.

“Left?” my father shouted. “He’s only just managed to pay off his mortgage! And who the hell is this imposter, Reilly?”

“Reilly?”

“Arthur Reilly the bloody butcher!” My father pointed at and read the sign that had replaced
Oskar Schickel, Butcher
in the window.

“Mister Reilly has been there most of the winter, David. Didn’t I write and tell you that?” She knew very well she hadn’t.

My father blinked at the meagre cuts of rationed meat displayed beyond the glass and said: “what happened to Oskar, Lily? Tell me.”

And so, she had to tell him, like it or not.

Mister Schickel’s name was disagreeable—stuck up there on Yonge Street across from Rosedale—and someone from Park Road had thrown a stone through the window.

There. It was said.

“But Oskar wasn’t a German,” my father whispered. “He was a Canadian.”

“But his name was German, David.”

My father put his fingers against the glass and did not appear to respond to what my mother had said.

At last, my mother pulled at his arm. “Why not come back home,” she said. “You can come and see the shop tomorrow.”

My father, while my mother watched him, concentrated very hard and moved his finger over the dusty glass of Oskar Schickel’s store.

“What are you doing, David?”

“Nothing,” said my father. “Setting things right, that’s all.”

Then he stepped back and said to her: “now—we’ll go home.”

What he had written was:

Oskar Schickel: Proprietor in absentia
.

Mother said that Mrs Reilly rushed outside as soon as they had reached the corner and she washed the window clean.

This was the only remaining decent thing my father did until the day he died. The rest was all a nightmare.

I had never seen Dieppe. I had seen its face in photographs. I had read all the books and heard all the stories. The battle, of which my father had been a victim, had taken place in August of 1942—roughly six months before he was returned to us. Long since then, in my adult years, I have seen that battle, or seen its parts, through the medium of documentary film. It was only after Cy and Rita had vetted these films that I was able to watch. Till then, I had been afraid I would catch my father’s image unawares—fearful that somehow our eyes would meet in that worst of moments. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him destroyed. So, I had seen all this—the photographs, the books, the films—but I had never seen the town of Dieppe itself until that day in May of 1987 when I took my father’s ashes there to scatter them.

Before I can begin this ending, I have to make it clear that the last thing I want to provoke is the sentimental image of a wind-blown stretch of rocky beach with a rainbow of ashes arching over the stones and blowing out to sea. If you want that image, let me tell you that had been the way it was when Cy, my brother, and Rita, my sister, and I went walking, wading into the ocean south of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia—where our mother had been born—to cast her ashes into the air above the Atlantic. Then there was almost music and we rejoiced because our mother had finally gained her freedom from a life that had become intolerable. But in Dieppe, when I shook my father’s ashes out of their envelope, there was no rejoicing. None.

I felt, in fact, as if I had brought the body of an infidel into a holy place and laid it down amongst the true believers. Still, this was what my father had wanted—and how could I refuse him? Neither Cy nor Rita would do it for him. Gone, they had said.
Good riddance
.

And so it fell to me.

I was always the least informed. I was always the most inquisitive. During my childhood, nobody told me—aside from the single word
Dieppe
—what it was that had happened to my father. And yet, perhaps because I knew the least and because I was the youngest and seemed the most naive and willing, it was more than often me he focused on.

His tirades would begin in silence—the silence we had been warned of when he first returned. He would sit at the head of the table, eating a piece of fish and drinking from a glass of beer. The beer was always dark in colour. Gold.

Our dining-room had a window facing west. Consequently, winter sunsets in particular got in his eyes.

Curtain
, he would say at his plate—and jab his fork at me.

If I didn’t understand because his mouth was full, my mother would reach my sleeve and pull it with her fingers.
The curtain, Ben
, she would say.
Your father’s eyes
.

Yes, ma’am
. Down I’d get and pull the curtain.

Then, no sooner would I be reseated than my father—still addressing his plate—would mumble
lights
. And I would rise and turn on the lights. Then, when I was back at last in my chair, he would look at me and say, without apparent rancour,
why don’t you tell me to shove the goddamn curtain up my ass?

You will understand my silence in response to this if you understand that—before he went away—the worst my father had ever said in our presence had been
damn
and
hell
. The ultimate worst had been
Christ!
when he’d nearly sliced his finger off with a knife. Then, however, he hadn’t known that anyone was listening. And so, when he started to talk this way—and perhaps especially at table—it paralyzed me.

Cy or Mother would sometimes attempt to intervene, but he always cut them off with something worse than he’d said to me. Then he would turn his attention back in my direction and continue. He urged me to refuse his order, then to upbraid him, finally to openly defy him—call him the worst of the words he could put in my mouth and hit him. Of course, I never did any of these things, but the urging, the cajoling and ultimately the begging never ceased.

One night, he came into the bedroom where I slept in the bunk-bed over Cy and he shouted at me
why don’t you fight back?
Then he dragged my covers off and threw me onto the floor against the bureau. All this was done in the dark, and after my mother had driven me down in the truck to the Emergency Ward of Wellesley Hospital, the doctors told her that my collar-bone was broken. I heard my mother saying yes,
he fell out of bed
.

Everyone—even I—conspired to protect him. The trouble was, my father had no wish to protect himself. At least, it seemed that way until a fellow veteran of Dieppe turned up one day in the shop and my father turned on him with a pair of garden shears and tried to drive him back onto Yonge Street. Far from being afraid of my father, the other man took off his jacket and threw it in my father’s face and all the while he stood there, the man was yelling at my father:
Coward! Coward! Yellow Bastard!

Then, he turned around and walked away. The victor.

Thinking for sure the police would come, my mother drew the blind and closed the shop for the rest of the day.

But that was not the end of it. She gathered us together out on the porch and Cy was told to open a can of pork and beans and to make what our mother called a
passel of toast
. He and Rita and I were to eat this meal in the kitchen, after which Cy, who’d been handed a dollar bill my mother had lifted from the till, was to take us down to the Uptown Theatre where an Abbott and Costello film was playing. All these ordinary things we did. Nonetheless, we knew that our father had gone mad.

It was summer then and when the movie was over, I remember Cy and Rita and I stood on the street and the sidewalks gave off heat and the air around us smelled of peanuts and popcorn and Cy said: “I don’t think it’s safe to go home just yet.” For almost an hour, we wandered on Yonge Street, debating what we should do and, at last, we decided we would test the waters by going and looking at the house and listening to see if there was any yelling.

Gibson Avenue only has about twenty houses, most of them semi-detached—and all of them facing south and the park. The porches and the stoops that night were filled with our neighbours drinking beer from coffee cups and fanning themselves with paper plates and folded bits of the
Daily Star
. They were drinking out of cups—you could smell the beer—because the law back then forbade the public consumption, under any circumstance, of alcohol. Whatever you can hide does not exist.

Passing, we watched our neighbours watching us—the Matlocks and the Wheelers and the Conrads and the Bolts—and we knew they were thinking
there go the Max kids and David Max, their father, tried to kill a man today in his store with gardening shears
…

“Hello, Cy.”

“Hello.”

“Ben. Rita.”

“Hi.”

“Goodnight…”

We went and stood together on the sidewalk out in front of our house.

Inside, everything seemed to be calm and normal. The lights were turned on in their usual distribution—most of them downstairs. The radio was playing. Someone was singing
Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition
.

Cy went up the steps and turned the handle. He was brave—but I’d always known that. Rita and I were told to wait on the porch.

Two minutes passed—or five—or ten—and finally Cy returned. He was very white and his voice was dry, but he wasn’t shaking and all he said was: “you’d best come in. I’m calling the police.”

Our father had tried to kill our mother with a hammer. She was lying on the sofa and her hands were broken because she had used them trying to fend off the blows.

Father had disappeared. The next day, he turned himself in because, as he told the doctors, he had come to his senses. He was kept for a year and a half—almost until the war was over—at the Asylum for the Insane on Queen Street. None of us children was allowed to visit him there—but our mother went to see him six months after he had been committed. She told me they sat in a long, grey room with bars on all the windows. My father wore a dressing gown and hadn’t shaved. Mother said he couldn’t look her in the eyes. She told him that she forgave him for what he had done. But my father never forgave himself. My mother said she never saw his eyes again.

Two weeks after our father had tried to kill our mother, a brick was thrown through the window of Max’s Flowers. On the brick, a single word was printed in yellow chalk.

Murderer
.

Mother said: “there’s no way around this, now. I’m going to have to explain.”

That was how we discovered what had gone wrong with our father at Dieppe.

Our mother had known this all along, and I still have strong suspicions Cy had found it out and maybe Rita before our mother went through the formal procedure of sitting us down and telling us all together. Maybe they had thought I was just too young to understand. Maybe Cy and maybe Rita hadn’t known. Maybe they had only guessed. At any rate, I had a very strong sense that I was the only one who received our mother’s news in a state of shock.

Father had risen, since his enlistment in 1939, all the way up from an
NCO
to the rank of captain. Everyone had adored him in the army. He was what they called a natural leader. His men were particularly fond of him and they would, as the saying goes, have followed him anywhere. Then came Dieppe. All but a handful of those who went into battle there were Canadians. This was our Waterloo. Our Gettysburg.

There isn’t a single history book you can read—there isn’t a single man who was there who won’t tell you—there isn’t a single scrap of evidence in any archive to suggest that the battle of Dieppe was anything but a total and appalling disaster. Most have called it a slaughter.

Dieppe is a port and market town on the coast of Normandy in northern France. In 1942, the British High Command had chosen it to be the object of a practice raid in preparation for the invasion of Europe. The Allies on every front were faltering, then. A gesture was needed, and even the smallest of victories would do.

And so, on the 19th of August, 1942, the raid on Dieppe had taken place—and the consequent carnage had cost the lives of over a thousand Canadians. Over two thousand were wounded or taken prisoner. Five thousand set out; just over one thousand came back.

My father never left his landing craft.

He was to have led his men ashore in the second wave of troops to follow the tanks—but, seeing the tanks immobilized, unable to move because the beaches were made of stone and the stones had jammed the tank tracks—and seeing the evident massacre of the first wave of troops whose attempt at storming the shore had been repulsed by machine-gun fire from the cliffs above the town—my father froze in his place and could not move. His men—it is all too apparent—did not know what to do. They had received no order to advance and yet, if they stayed, they were sitting ducks.

In the end, though a handful escaped by rushing forward into the water, the rest were blown to pieces when their landing craft was shelled. In the meantime, my father had recovered enough of his wits to crawl back over the end of the landing craft, strip off his uniform and swim out to sea where he was taken on board a British destroyer sitting offshore.

The destroyer, H.M.S.
Berkley
, was ultimately hit and everyone on board, including my father—no one knowing who he was—was transferred to another ship before the Berkley was scuttled where she sat. My father made it all the way back to England, where his burns and wounds were dressed and where he debated taking advantage of the chaos to disappear, hoping that, in the long run, he would be counted among the dead.

His problem was, his conscience had survived. He stayed and, as a consequence, he was confronted by survivors who knew his story He was dishonourably discharged and sent home to us. Children don’t understand such things. The only cowards they recognize are figures cut from comic books or seen on movie screens.