Carla Funk - Every Little Scrap and Wonder: A Small-Town Childhood

Copyright 2019 by Carla Funk

19 20 21 22 23 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Greystone Books Ltd.

greystonebooks.com

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-1-77164-466-2 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-77164-467-9 (epub)

Editing by Paula Ayer

Proofreading by Doretta Lau

Jacket and text design by Nayeli Jimenez

Jacket photograph by Casey Horner on Unsplash

Greystone Books gratefully acknowledges the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples on whose land our office is located.

Greystone Books thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada for supporting our publishing activities.

For my mother and brother

&

For Vanderhoof, the people and the place

A time to rend, and a time to sew...

ECCLESIASTES 3:7A

Contents

THIS IS A memoira work of rememberingand while I have set out to be as truthful as I can from my present vantage on the past, I know that memory is imperfect. I have purposely altered some details to preserve the anonymity of certain folksdetails like names, identifying traits, occupations, and the like. Ive also compressed some events and recreated dialogue for the narratives sake. But Ive tried to write with honesty, and to fit the pieces of the story to the pattern of the truth.

Patchwork Crazy Quilt

EVERY SEPTEMBER, AS the last green of summer dropped to umber and rust, and the winds chilled toward frost, we ushered in the fall with a bonfire. This was no celebratory rite. This was cleanup from the season past and preparation for the winter ahead. In a clearing in the trees, on the same ground where last years fire had burned, a pile of ashes hinted at the future. Over a starter of bark scraps, lumber odds and ends, crumpled newspapers, and a few punky blocks of wood, my dad dumped gasoline from a jerry can, then took the half-smoked cigarette from his mouth and flicked it on the heap. The spark flared to sizzle, then to high-flame shock within seconds, threatening to singe our eyelashes with the heat. When the surge had calmed enough to let my mother relax her grip on the garden hose, our purge began in earnest.

Down the trail through the trees, my brother and I dragged brushwood and deadfall. From the garden, my mother carted wheelbarrow loads of ragweed, chickweed, clover, and purple thistle. We hauled paper feed bags full of feathers and chicken heads and an assortment of creature debris that crackled like live wires when tossed into the flames. My father backed up his pickup truck as close to the burn as he could get without bubbling the paint, then stood in the box, chucking out whatever garbage had accumulated. Empty cigarette cartons, warped 8-tracks, grease rags, last autumns Ritchie Brothers auction cataloguesthe fire took it all.

After the swell of acrid smoke mellowed, we peeled willow branches, and on their whittled spear-tips jabbed half-frozen wieners, then propped them over a burning log and let the embers do their work. Weed, rot, and scrapwe fed the fire with our junk, and the fire fed us. We ate the char-dirty hot dogs roasted over a cocktail of chemicals and swore they tasted better for the blackened, ashy crust. We wore smoke in our eyes, our hair, our clothes, marking us with proof that we had eaten from the all-consuming fire and survived.

MOST OF IT was junk, says my mother. Most of it not worth holding on to.

Still, she holds on to the story, tells in snapshots and fragments of how she came to leave her Oregon childhood farm and move to a small town in the interior of British Columbia. At the mouth of the wide hole her father dug in the field beside the farmhouse, my mother, ten years old, stood with her seven siblings.

You can each keep one thing, their mother had told them, thats all we have room for.

Into the pit of old chairs, crockery, horseshoes, twine, shingles, worn tires, and pairs of too-small shoes, they flung in what they couldnt takeold toys, a rusted tricycle, books so warped and waterlogged the pages stuck together.

What did she take with her, I want to know, what did she save.

She tells me she can still see the wicker buggy tied with rope to the back of the overloaded truck, and the doll she held in her lap on the three-day road tripthat doll and buggy her one thing, what she chose to save. When I ask her why they dug that hole in the first place and left so much behind, she shrugs, lifts her hands in a who knows? gesture. They only took what they needed. My mother cant recall the full catalogue of all they tossed into that pitwhatevers gone is gone, she saysbut does remember her older brother sneaking away, not wanting his possessions to end up there. Somewhere along a creek shore where the waters run from the Gooseneck river bend, he dug his own small hole in the earth and dumped in his prized marble collection, burying the aggies and shooters, the rainbows and cats eyes, then patted the dirt back in place and stared at it a while, as if to memorize that patch of ground for when he might return and rescue what he couldnt keep.

The doctrine of redemption runs blood-deep and wont let go. Below some suburb of swept sidewalks and tidy lawns lie artifacts of her childhoodof my mothers old lifeand I want to go back, to excavate the site, dig up whats lost. I want to pick up the bits and pieces left behind and put them back together, to see the pattern in her storyour story. My story.

Everything that happened in lifeevery accident, argument, tragedy, and delightpointed back to an ancient narrative. From the beginning, I learned to see the physical world as a shadow copy of a spiritual realm, that bigger story in which our smaller stories live and move and have their being. When I lay back on the scratchy grass to watch the sky, the clouds morphed into imagined creaturesthis cumulus fluffball a fat hippo, that white wisp a lizard. From a cirrus streak to a serpent to a clue about the kingdoms of light and darkness, which were always at war, the cloud shifted, became a hint of higher meaning, like the ghost handwriting on the wall above King Belshazzars banquet table: numbered, numbered, weighed, divided. Above me, all around me, the earth kept speaking, sending messages from a story that began in Eden and ended in Armageddon, authored otherworldly. When my brother and I fought over the last Fudgsicle in the freezer, and no amount of verbal wrangling could sway either of us from our respective cries of its mine, my mother raised a knife above it and said, Remember Solomon? Of course we did. No child easily forgets the two mothers arguing over the one baby left alive, both claiming that its hers, that the dead baby belongs to the other, until Solomon calls for a sword to divide the living baby in twoone half for each mother. In our illustrated