Wilson Tom - Beautiful scars: steeltown secrets, Mohawk Skywalkers and the road home

I remember waking up in a wooden crib, crying. I was an infant, no more than a year old. There was a lamp, a pink lamb or elephant I think, and its low-wattage bulb filled my corner of the room. The faded walls were the grey of a 1950s institution, and were patchy, like the painter had dropped the roller and split before finishing the job. Right beside me a tall dresser was overflowing with stuffed animals, as if someone had had a lucky night playing skee-ball at a Conklin midway. Some of the animals were hand-sewn. Scrawny, confused-looking creatures, crooked eyes made from hand-me-down flannel pyjamas. Clean but worn.

I never bothered much with these stuffed toys, but my one cherished friend among them was a cloth-bodied, plastic-headed rabbit. Peter, of course. I never went anywhere without him. The story goes that Bunny, my mother, and my cousin Janie were looking out through the back-bedroom window at the snow falling when they saw Bunnys dog, Trixie, tossing something up in the air, dashing across the snow, wrestling it in her mouth and tossing it up again. The dog came in through the side door and Bunny grabbed the dirty object from her, washed it and put it in my crib. And that, Tommy, was your first toy, Bunny used to proudly tell me.

I loved when Bunny told that story because she didnt have any other stories about me as a baby, and I remember thinking that maybe Id been dragged in by Trixie from that same yard and pulled from her mouth by Bunny because there was no conceivable way I belonged here with these people. Even as a kid my existence as the son of Bunny and George Wilson seemed far-fetched to me. When I went over it in my head, none of it added up. The other kids on East 36th Street in Hamilton used to tell me stories of their mothers being pregnant and their newborn siblings coming home from the hospital. Nobody ever talked about Bunnys and my return from the hospital. In my mind my birth was like the nativity, only with gnarly dogs and dirty snow and a chipped picket fence and old blind people with short tempers and dim lights, ashtrays full of Export Plain cigarette butts and bottles of rum.

Once, when I was about four, I asked Bunny, How come I dont look anything like you and George? How come you are old and the other moms are young?

There are secrets I know about you that Ill take to my grave, she responded. And that pretty well finished that. Bunny built up a wall to protect her secrets, and as a result I built a wall to protect myself. I tried to hide how I felt from everyone, including myself. I knew I would be judged harshly if I were to reveal what I was thinking, what I was feeling, so I just dulled the edges of my existence so no one would know who I had living inside me. I became a secret to myself.

I still have those toys, stuffed in a garbage bag tossed somewhere on the third floor of my house. Theyve survived dozens of moves and have stayed in that garbage bag for the better part of fifty-seven years. I come across them once in a while, usually when Im cleaning out one area of my house and fixing up another. The bag only gets opened when someone has to check to see whats inside. My ex-wife, old girlfriends, movers and band crews have all looked down the open mouth of the green Glad bag and into my beginnings. Like Rosebud.

Hey, do you want these? Theyre a bunch of old kids toys, or Fucklook at this weird shit.These things are scary, or Throw them out, throw them all out. Jesus Christ, what are you keeping them for? girlfriends have said. Over the years, Ive managed to hold on to the toys but not the girlfriends. I kept the toys as a reminder of where I came from, or at least where I thought I came from. That green plastic garbage bag hung around for years to honour my first memory of feeling hollowed out. Like an outsider in my home, like a stranger not knowing what the heck was going on. The first time I felt I was in the wrong place, like a spaceship had dropped me in the wrong yard.