Friday night he lay in bed. It was winter and very cold. The light from the housing project glowed behind his curtains. His eyes finally grew restful, and he drifted off to sleep. As he drifted off, he felt steady thumping. The drifting stopped. He recognized the thumping. It was like the bass music he heard from the housing project all the time. But it was coming inside his house.
This time he was ready. He turned on his side table lamp and pulled out a slim nail file and two bobby-pins under his mattress. He felt a refreshing nervous energy as he stalked towards his door. He felt so alive. So electric. There was a clarity to his senses that he had forgotten the feel of. He had become so used to a sort of dullness, it was almost painful, the exhilaration, like it was too much at once. He struggled to control his breathing as his shaking hands brought his tools to the lock. He shoved the slim nail file into the bottom of the keyhole. It seemed so loud! He listened hard to hear feet thumping down the stairs. Nothing. He slipped the bobby pins into the upper keyhole. Pushing them in as he tried to turn the door knob, as quietly as possible. He was covered in nervous sweat already. Concentrating so hard he had to remind himself to breathe. He had been practicing this while his mom was away and had it down pretty good. But this was different. Every sound he made seemed amplified. Would he get caught? Would he open the door to see his mom glaring at him on the other side of it? He struggled harder to jiggle the lock open. So loud! He didn’t care anymore; he just wanted the door open now. Click!
He fell backward onto the floor as the door swung open. He shut his eyes hard as he fell. Laying there for a moment, he lifted his head, slowly opening his eyes, expecting to see his mom standing over him. All he saw was his open door. He breathed deeply. He noticed the light was on upstairs. The smell of artificial grapecherry vape smoke and spicy food invaded his room.
By now he didn’t really want to go upstairs anymore. He was scared. He had to see what was happening up there though. Something was happening up there.
Creeping up the basement stairs on to the landing he finds a spot where he can view the living room without being seen. The living room is packed with people, mostly men. He sees his mom. She is the only white person in the room that he can see. It looks like a party, but no one looks joyful. Everyone is downcast, mostly looking at their phones while expelling huge vape-clouds from their mouths. His mom is the only one laughing and carrying on. She is dancing with some African guy. She keeps trying to hug him, but he keeps turning her around and grabbing her hips. The boy is boiling with rage.
The dancing leads them towards the hallway where the bedrooms are. He watches their feet go by him from his spot on the stairwell. They disappear from his sight and he hears the sound of a bedroom door closing. At that sound the dark eyes of the other partygoers light up as they look at each other with laughter, before going back to their smartphones and vape clouds, softly bobbing their head to the afrobeat music playing on CBC radio.
Some time passes, and some of the other men head towards the hallway. As their feet go past the stairwell a Costco card falls to the ground within the boy’s reach. He grabs it.
The boy didn’t leave his room for the entire weekend. The room stunk of urine from his chamber pot as his mom entered the room to wake him for school. The boy was awake, but did not stir at her entrance. He felt her standing over him and rolled over to face her. She was staring at the Costco card on his night table. Beside the name “Dikembe Ooowatelaa” was a fuzzy ID photo of a black guy.
“I know what you are doing up there at night. I know where the smells come from.” He said.
“How can you do something like that in our house?”
She cackled “Our house?! This is my house. You think because your dad made this house it somehow belongs to you too? Ha! This is my house, just like it’s my body! I pay the bills around here and I’ll do what I want in this house.”
“And how dare you judge me! You wouldn’t even be on this earth if not for me. I buy you all your food, your video games, your TV, your clothes, everything you have; and you think you have the right to question how I live my life?!”
“Men in this country think they have the right to control everything they touch!”
“Well, here is a thought for your selfish little brain: if I didn’t have to pay for you to be alive, I wouldn’t have to do what I do upstairs. Those men and I are partners in a diverse video production team that happens to be making a lot of money fulfilling a demand created by you men! Money that I can use to achieve my dreams and look after myself in retirement.”
“But mom,” said the boy “When I grow up, I can help you with your retirement. You don’t have to do that stuff to yourself.”
“Rely on you? Why would I ever rely on any man, or boy, when I can give myself so much more? More than you could imagine. I can give myself a property on a beach somewhere where the sun shines. People like you have no imagination.”
“You are a nice boy, but you are so naïve. People who think like you have had your time kid. You want our house to stay the same, you want to keep around old books and decorations that remind you of your past. You want to keep everyone else in the past with you. Well, people like me hate your past. Your past is a world where a young girl is judged for getting an abortion. A world where girls like me were robbed of the chance to reach their full potential simply because they didn’t have full control over their bodies. Who knows how far I could have gone if I wasn’t stuck in your outdated world.”
“And there are thousands of people coming to this country everyday who don’t give a damn about the world you are trying to hold on to. They can’t wait to destroy your world of racism and misogyny so we can create our own future. A future where we can all live to our full potential without selfish little boys like you trying to control us and hold us down!”
The boy couldn’t listen anymore. He didn’t know what to say. He only knew he needed to leave. To be anywhere but there. Still in his pajamas, he grabbed his plaid jacket and walked past his mom. She grabbed him by the hair and threw him back towards his bed.
“You think you have the right to just walk away from me!? Poor little boy doesn’t like hearing the truth? You aren’t leaving this room for a long time. Not until you get with the program!”
His mother’s strength surprised him. She stood in front of the doorway, there was spittle on her lips. She looked crazed. Seeing her like that made him want to escape all the more. No thoughts went through his mind, only the sensation of needing to escape. He charged for the door, she grabbed him again trying to throw him into the corner of the room. With all his might he resisted, her nails clawing into his neck, trying to grab a hold of him. Her grip slipped and she lost her balance. The boy slipped past her. Ran up the stairs, grabbed his boots off the landing and fell out the door, scrambling to his feet as he heard his mom thrashing up the stairs behind him.
He ran, carrying his plaid in one hand and his boots in the other, until he began to feel sharp pains in his lungs from breathing in the cold air so heavily. Falling back against a snowbank, he slipped into his plaid jacket and put his boots off. The air was crisp and the sun was shining.
The boy realized he had nowhere to go. All the family he had ever known had died or moved away years ago. He dimly recalled that his dad’s family owned a farm by the old pioneer museum on the outskirts of town. He remembered going there with his grandpa when he was little, what direction it was in, so he went.
He walked for hours. The sun had long gone down. He was beginning to recognize that he was getting close to the old pioneer museum. He came upon an unkept cairn made up of rocks from the creek nearby. He was barely able to make out what a plaque on it said: “In Tribute to the Pioneers Who Built our Community-1905”.
He looked around for the farm. Across the highway, down a range road, he saw a farmhouse with a truck running in front of it. The boy was getting overcome by the cold and the fact that he hadn’t eaten for a few days was making itself felt. He was feeling desperate. He made his way towards the house.
As he grew closer he saw that the truck was a large diesel model with a lift kit and all the fixings. It was trailered up with a couple of very expensive looking snowmobiles. It idles loudly as the boy came up to it. The driver window rolled down. The boy knew it was his dad immediately.
“Are you Daniel Smythe?” Asked the boy.
“Who’s askin’?”
“Do you know Margeret Laurier?”
“Maybe. Long time ago.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m your son.”
The man sneered a little bit. “What do you want?”
“I don’t really know. I’m really cold though.”
“Well, get in then I guess.”
The boy climbed up into the passenger’s seat.
Without really thinking about it, the boy went into explaining how his life had been without his dad. He told him about his mom and what she was doing. He said he ran away from home and could never go back to that house.
His dad looked straight ahead as his son spoke. He sat and listened to everything his son had to say, occasionally checking the text messages on his phone.
“Yeah, that’s a shitty deal bud. You can’t trust women these days, especially not her. I can’t believe she gave me the boot after I built that house for her. Good thing I inherited this farm or I would’ve been screwed!”
“I can’t really do much for you. Your mom didn’t want me coming around and I was always busy working anyways. So, it’s not like I’m your legal guardian or anything.”
“I can give you some advice though.”
The boy looked at him imploringly, surely, he will have a solution for him.
“Don’t trust anybody and only look out for yourself. This country is going down the shitter and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. All you can do is get as much for yourself as you can before the wheels fall off.”
“That’s all I have to say. Anyways, I gotta head out now. Me and my buds are meeting up to do some shredding in the mountains tomorrow and I have a long drive ahead of me.”
“Can I come with you?”
“Have you ever sledded the mountains before?”
“No, I’ve never been on a snowmobile before.”
“Probably wouldn’t work out then bud. Anyway, I gotta get rollin’, so you better get out now.”
Crestfallen, the boy jumped down from the truck.
The diesel engine growled deeply and the boy’s dad and his snowmobiles were away, disappearing into the darkness.
With nowhere else to go the boy made his way to the old pioneer village. The museum closed down a few years ago when the funding dried up. Mayor Abelman transferred the money to fund the new Mas-Graves Indigenous Genocide Museum that was being built by the 2SLBTG Holy Church.
The boy looked for a structure where he could find shelter among the old pioneer buildings. The wind had picked up, blowing the drifting snow into his face, filling his boots. He tried to get into a couple of old cabins and a schoolhouse, but they were boarded up. He came up to an old pioneer church. A plaque by the door said it was made in 1885. Even out in the cold he could smell the stench of old cigarettes and beer, so he knew that people were getting into it. He went around the back of the church and found that a window had been ripped out. An old barrel was placed under the window, which he hopped up on and went through into the church. It was still very cold, but it was good to get out of the blustering snow. The boy took out a small flashlight and looked around. The building was just one open room. It felt quite impressive with its high vaulted ceilings despite the piles of smashed furniture and bottles that littered the floor. The walls were covered with crude graffiti of penises and pentagrams. He came upon a little pile of Holy Bibles that had been burned long ago. What he was looking for was something he could use as a blanket, something that could warm him. He was feeling the effects of walking over ten kilometers on a cold winter’s night with no food in his belly. A sickly sweat covered his body. His teeth were chattering. He moved some rubbish around, but found nothing of use, just an old photo that he put in the chest pocket of his plaid jacket.
Growing tired and weak, he gave up on his search and sat down on the ground. He thoughtlessly pulled the nearby garbage around him onto himself, craving warmth.
He thought about his home. How it was the only home he had ever known and now the thought of it revolted him. He thought about how he should go back, but the notion filled him with utter disgust. He just didn’t belong there anymore. And those smells! His home had become something that was for other people. At first slowly, then all at once.
His mind wandered as he shivered. What is it to be a child of Canada? Is it being told that something is yours, and to love and cherish that something, only to find out it belongs to everyone but you? To be forever encroached upon with strange smells and foreign chatter, to give way ever more, until you are relegated to a room in a basement? To have nowhere to turn where you are not regarded as a nuisance? To feel a complete sense of abandonment?
He was sweating more now, but his cold wet feet weren’t bothering him as much. Hyperthermia was taking over his body. The boy knew it too. He didn’t care, his mind felt as numb as his body. Maybe he would live through the night, maybe he wouldn’t. Why fight it? Just to live another day with nowhere to turn? He knew a Native kid that died in the cold. That kid got lots of attention after that, everyone talked about how great of a kid he was. Last year they renamed a park after him. Maybe they would do that for him too?
He could feel the old museum photo crinkling in his pocket. With stiff numb fingers he pulled it out. It was an old pioneer family. He turned on his flashlight for a closer look. There was a man and wife with three sons and three daughters. They stood in front of a little house that looked to be made of dirt. The man wore a black suit, his wife a white blouse with black dress. Their older children were dressed like their parents, the younger ones just wore what looked like rags or potato sacks. Nobody smiled and they looked straight ahead. There was nothing heroic looking about them at all. They looked small and unassuming with an uneasy countenance among them.
The boy looked at the photo for a long time. It comforted him, like looking at old family photos. He wondered what things were like for them on nights like tonight under the darkness of the prairie? Maybe they were his ancestors? He wondered what they would think about how things have turned out in the land they pioneered?
The boy noticed his reflection in a piece of broken mirror lying against the wall. In the moonlight darkness his reflection looked black and white like the old photo. His eyes were uneasy, desperate; just like the pioneer family. Looking closer into the eyes of the family he felt their fierceness. Yes, they were poor and desperate, but they had fiercely refused to give up and die. The eyes of a family that refused to allow the harsh, immense, and unyielding landscape defeat them.
Was he that different from them? On his own in an immense landscape that is hostile to him. His ancestors were pioneers too, did he not have the same blood coursing through his veins? Yes, he does have that blood and people of his blood are not meant to freeze to death in piles of garbage. They are meant to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield! They can’t take that away from him unless he lets them. He would not yield.
The boy pushed away the garbage and slipped the photo back in his pocket. Walking back to the broken window he peered out down the windswept road. He knew he had to move if he was going to stay alive and stay alive he would! He wasn’t lost anymore, he had a mission. He had to stay alive, to keep the blood of his ancestors thriving on this land. This little Canadian bastard was going to make his mark somehow; the blood will carry him through. The boy smiled as the bracing wind hit his face. Jumping out the window, he made his way back to town making a fresh trail in the snow.
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Epilogue:
It was a clear blue spring day when the man opened the front gate in preparation for the season-opening of the Pioneer Village and Museum. There was a new strip mall development being built down the road on his dad’s old family farm. Despite the traffic delays due to the construction, the man expected a good turnout for the opening festivities. The man’s dad ended up leaving the farm to his Filipino wife and two kids when he died of a sudden heart attack at a Mexican beach resort. They sold the land to one of those box store developers and moved back to the Philippines. It didn’t seem very traditional for a pioneer village museum to be down the road from a strip mall development, but the man didn’t mind at all. It would bring more traffic to his museum and that was good.
The developer almost got the land for the museum too, had the man not stepped in. Tirelessly, he worked to rally interested parties to help him buy the pioneer museum before the city sold it to the developer, even putting up his own life-savings and mortgaging his house to help pay for it. Even after he put together the money, the town council still wanted to see the land developed, insisting that a pioneer museum didn’t suit the town’s progressive direction. Once again, the man was tireless, organizing a grassroots campaign to pressure the town council to keep the land as a museum and sell it to the newly formed Pioneer History Preservation Society.
He went to his office to put away his keys. He could hear his wife and kids getting ready to set up the May Day pole in the center of the village fairground. There was the old photo of the nameless pioneer family framed on his wall.
The End
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Post-Script.
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What happened to the boy’s mom you ask?
She became a highly respected policy analyst for the Liberal Party of Canada and part-time CBC media personality.
