Son of a Critch Read online

  She spoke as if the person on the other end was listening to Megadeth on an iPod on maximum volume from the other side of a wide cavern. She spent long stretches of time talking to my aunt Alice, who lived several miles away. On a clear night, with the window open, you’d figure that Alice could surely hear my mother talking even without Mr. Bell’s invention. Still though, Aunt Alice was deaf as a post, and wore hearing aids that constantly gave off feedback whenever she used the phone. She’d bought them from a door-to-door salesman and they didn’t work very well, so she had them turned up so loud that, when placed next to the handset, their feedback would rival that of Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock. Sometimes the electrical scream would be so loud that it left Mom momentarily stunned.

  MOM: My​God​Girl,​Shockin’​Connection​Here​Today​Isn’t​It? The​Line​Isn’t​Very​Good​At​All!

  AUNT ALICE: What?

  MOM: I​Said​The​Line​Isn’t​Very​Good​Here​Today​At​All.

  AUNT ALICE: What?

  MOM: THE​LINE​GIRL,​THE​LINE!!​YOU-CAN’T-HEAR-ME-CUZ-OF-DA-LINE!!!

  AUNT ALICE: I can’t hear ya, Mary, girl. Must be a bad line. WEE-OOO-SCRAXHT-SQUEEL-WEE-OOO. Oh my ears. I feel right stunned, now.

  My father, on the other hand, planned his phone calls with a military precision. When Dad expected a call he made sure we all knew it in advance. He’d address the family at dinner or during a TV show when all hands were in the same room, making an announcement as if he were Walter Cronkite reporting the exact time of Kennedy’s death. “I’m expecting a phone call Sunday night at six p.m. Let’s have everyone do their part, hey?”

  TVs and radios had to be turned off. All doors to the telephone hallway had to be closed a good half-hour before the call. The cat would be let outside and we’d all go to our stations. I’d sit with a comic book in the living room. My brother went to his bedroom to listen to his cassette player with headphones on. Mom sat in the kitchen having tea from the pot. We couldn’t risk boiling a kettle during a phone call. We all sat in relative silence waiting for the phone to ring, like parents waiting for kidnappers to call with details about where to bring the ransom.

  RIIII­IIIII­IIIII­IIINN­NNNGG­GGG

  DAD: Okay, that’s the phone ringing. That’s my phone call. I’m going to answer it now.

  We sat in silence.

  RIIII­IIIII­IIIII­IIINN­NNNGG­GGG

  DAD: I said, I’m going to answer the phone. Hello?

  What to do? Tell him that I already know to be quiet? That would mean talking. I’d been told not to make a sound.

  RIIII­IIIII­IIIII­IIINN­NNNGG­GGG

  DAD: Will somebody answer me?

  ME: Okay, Dad. I know.

  DAD: Mary! Will you keep Mark quiet? I have to answer the phone!

  MOM: Mark! Be​Quiet​Your​Father​Is​On​The​Phone.

  RIIII­IIIII­IIIII­IIINN­NNNGG­GGG

  DAD: Will you two keep it down? I’m going to answer the phone!

  RIIII­IIIII­IIIII­IIINN­NNNGG­GGG

  DAD: Hello? Oh, hi, Frank. What a nice surprise. Awfully clear line, tonight. Where are you calling from?

  Dad was always surprised by line clarity. He would ask the location of all his callers like he was Larry King. The answer was always St. John’s, unless he was talking to Frank, and then it was Bell Island.

  DAD: Bell Island? Hell of a clear line for an overseas call.

  The only other uses of the phone table were the shining of the shoes and the washing of the cat—the two chores Dad took very seriously. Dad had one colour and type of shoe: black dress shoes were for work, formal events, jogging, beach wear, and shovelling. He went through a lot of polish. Shampooing our Siamese cat was more involved.

  The cat was as old as I was. Dad brought home the newborn kitten the same week I was born. He’d won it in a card game. Dad had won all his opponents’ money, and in an act of desperation, the poor loser had wagered the animal. Mom had never wanted the cat, and so it was my father’s responsibility. He was proud of his prize and would heap praise upon the cat as if it were a Grand Prix–winning show horse. “Look at that cat! That’s some cat. See the way her tail moves. When a dog wags its tail, it’s happy. But when a cat wags its tail, it’s angry. See? Look at her tail wagging. Something has her—ow! The damn thing scratched me!”

  The cat never liked Dad. She would hiss at him and scratch him. This did nothing to deter him from pursuing the object of his affection.

  Perhaps Dad was so adamant about this cat-cleaning chore because he wasn’t otherwise what you’d call a handyman. He had what he called a “tool kit.” It was an old metal biscuit tin with a picture of a young Queen Elizabeth on it. Inside was a half-used roll of black electrical tape, some random screws, a small flat-head screwdriver with a wooden handle, a can of black shoe polish, one roll of black thread, one roll of white thread, one roll of tan thread, eight buttons (mixed), a brand-new roll of masking tape, some change, and a seven-inch record of “A Night at the Copacabana with Tony Martin.” Next to the tin he kept a rusty hammer and a collection of dried-out paintbrushes. If something needed fixing, Dad would open the tin and ponder which tool was right for the task at hand. Usually the electrical tape would win out and the old man would apply it sparingly to the broken glass, loose hinge, or wobbly table leg. There was never need of a second roll of tape in my entire lifetime.

  Whenever there was work to be done around the house he would put on his work clothes. These consisted of a white T-shirt, a pair of tan pants, and dress shoes. This was also his preferred outfit for cat grooming.

  Someone had convinced Dad that cats needed to be shampooed. So, once a month he would get a blanket and put it over his lap, don winter gloves, and shampoo the cat. Afterward, the cat would lock eyes with him as she licked herself, seeming to say, “See? This is how a cat cleans itself. And I would enjoy it a lot more, too, if you hadn’t spayed me, asshole.” Of course, first the cat had to be caught.

  Whenever it saw Dad in his handyman uniform it would hide under the biggest thing it could find—the stereo. The old man would reach underneath it, the cat digging her talons into his thick winter gloves in a timeless battle of man vs. beast.

  Eventually, she would dig her nails into the carpet as he tugged at her hindquarter. “See? Her tail is wagging, that means she is—ow!”

  Then he would carry his hissing prize to the telephone table and rub in the cat shampoo. Sometimes I’d be called upon to rub the cat’s fur with a damp tea towel to “activate it.” This didn’t so much shampoo the cat as anger her fur, making it stand up in little matted waves on an arch-backed sea of feline fury.

  Dad would admire his handiwork and the “cleaned” cat. Now covered in shampoo and somehow drier than she was before, she’d hurl herself off his lap and disappear for days.

  At least the cat got to spend some time away. We never took a family vacation. I don’t remember Dad ever taking a holiday except for a couple of days at Christmas. Occasionally we would go visit Uncle Frank and his family on Bell Island. Frank Leonard was Dad’s cousin, thirteen years his senior. In the only baby picture I’ve ever seen of my father, he sits atop a toy horse in a professional photo studio. On either side of him are Frank and his sister Alice. Frank looks like a young Bing Crosby in short pants and Alice’s long hair flows straight down her back. Alice and Frank didn’t speak to each other. Frank told me that Alice never got over the time he set fire to her hair because his friend told him that hair couldn’t burn. Hearing this as a kid, I thought it was a perfectly reasonable experiment.

  Frank owned a store on Bell Island called Leonard’s Dry Goods. Bell Island was a mining town, but the mine had closed in 1966. You had to take the ferry to get to Bell Island, so I was always excited about a trip “overseas.” Frank was a very funny man with a deep voice and a stutter. Frank’s stutter fascinated me. He told me that he used to go to a school with a kid who stuttered and he wou
ld tease the boy mercilessly. One day, he made fun of him so much that he couldn’t stop stuttering. It was a real-life case of “if the wind changes your face will stay like that.”

  Frank was also a bit of a conspiracy theorist. He believed in ghosts and aliens. His house was the perfect place to hang out if you were an impressionable kid. He had a library full of books like Chariots of the Gods, which claimed that aliens had built the pyramids. He thought Newfoundland might be the tip of Atlantis and knew all about Stonehenge and Easter Island. He was also a ham radio operator. Back then, if you wanted to talk to strangers halfway around the world, you needed a lot of technical know-how and equipment. Now you can just use an iPhone. Frank had a whole room devoted to his hobby. He even had a map on which he marked places in the world where he’d made contact.

  After all, this was Newfoundland, where in 1901 Guglielmo Marconi sent the very first transatlantic wireless communication. Free long distance was in our blood. Mindful of his geography, Frank’s handle was “Polaris.” It takes guts to get on ham radio with a stutter. I remember being a little kid on his lap, hearing him calling out into the night. The room was dark, the only light emanating from his short-wave radio and amplifiers. Buttons and switches activated, needles flicked, knobs turned, machines hummed, and we cast our line into the ether.

  FRANK: C-c-c-c-c-CQ. C-c-c-c-c-CQ. T-t-t-this is P-p-p-p-polaris. Is an-n-n-n-nyone the-the-the-there?

  STRANGER: Polaris this is AD5UAP, Alpha-Delta-Five-Uniform-Alpha-Papa. Check your equipment. You seem to be breaking up.

  FRANK: T-t-t-this is Pol-Pol-Pol-Polaris.

  STRANGER: Hello? Are you messing with me? Get off the frequency, man. Don’t be a dick.

  FRANK: P-p-p-p-

  Frank would keep trying until he got a polite person on the frequency. He’d ask where in the world they were and what the weather was like. Things would proceed pleasantly until somebody would start talking about sex. Ham radio was basically an Internet chat room without the dick pics and Islamophobia. You couldn’t be on there fifteen minutes before someone would start telling you how much they wanted to turn your knobs until they gigahertzed. All new technology eventually devolves from bringing all of humankind together to finding new ways to show someone your genitals. Marconi made history when he succeeded in sending the first radio transmission across the Atlantic. The message, simply the Morse-code signal for the letter S, travelled more than two thousand miles from Poldhu in Cornwall, England, to Signal Hill in Newfoundland. The second message sent in response: “Want me to describe my penis?”

  Frank was filled with fascinating stories of life in old St. John’s. He once told me about the gang of street kids he hung around with as a boy. They would run up and down Water Street looking for any little hobble they could get to earn money to help feed their families. This crew of street urchins was a tough bunch, and to join their ranks you had to prove your mettle. They had an initiation ritual that would deter any cowardly applicants. To join, you had to meet them after sunset at the Anglican Cemetery. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Robert Earle, had been the caretaker there. A simple wooden cross marks his grave today in that same cemetery where he spent every day of his working life. Talk about being into your work. The cemetery was in the shadow of Her Majesty’s Penitentiary. Several men were hanged in the yard of this Victorian-era prison. Any child venturing onto the grounds at night would have to be a brave boy indeed. One of the Water Street irregulars would wait at the entrance to the graveyard and another sentry would mind his post at the bottom by Quidi Vidi Lake. The hopeful applicant would have to be seen entering and leaving on his own to become part of the gang.

  “T-t-this kid was a real m-m-momma’s boy,” Frank told me. “We n-n-never thought he’d make it. He w-w-went in but he n-n-never came out.” The boys assumed he got spooked, hopped the fence, and ran home to his mother. After an hour of waiting they called off the ceremony and went home. The next morning brought news that the boys were half-right. He did get scared, but he didn’t run away.

  A funeral had been planned for early the next day, and gravediggers had dug a fresh grave for the deceased. The terrified little boy was running as fast as he could through a dark cemetery on a moonless night and he fell into the open grave. The gravediggers came to work in the morning to find the corpse of the little boy, his hands still clawing at the rocky soil. He was literally scared to death.

  Now I don’t know if that was a true story or not, but you could see why a kid would love talking to a guy with stories like that. How could any child my own age compare? Sure, I could be out with other kids creating my own stories, but Frank and his friends were street urchins, not highway urchins. For me to cross the street I had to first cross two lanes of highway with trucks and cars going seventy kilometres an hour. Then I’d have to stand on the double solid yellow line until I got enough of a break in traffic to boot it to the other side. I’ll take your cemetery any day of the week. The only problem with having old people as your friends when you’re a kid is that they keep dying on you.

  My best friend died when I was four years old. She was an eighty-two-year-old woman. Her name was Catherine Tobin Critch. Everyone called her “Auntie Kate.” I called her Nanny. I played with Nanny because there was nobody else to play with. Remember, my brother Mike was eight years older than I was. When you’re three, seventy-nine years is nothing, but an eight-year age difference is insurmountable. My brother couldn’t stand me. Mike had expected to get a sibling he could play with. Instead he’d been burdened with a baby.

  I was always desperate for anything close to playtime with another human. I have no real memory of my brother playing with me at all. The closest thing is when Mike once pushed me down a stone staircase that led to a neighbour’s well. I guess you could categorize that as the start of a game of Extreme Tag. It sounds malicious, but it was less a case of attempted murder and more one of adolescent curiosity. He was testing me the way a momma bird does when she pushes a hatch-ling from a nest, or the way an alcoholic uncle teaches you to swim by pushing you off a wharf.

  I landed at the bottom, cut and bleeding. I looked back up at my brother in silence. He seemed disappointed that I hadn’t caught myself on the way down, but impressed that I wasn’t crying. My stoicism, however, wasn’t a choice. I couldn’t cry; I’d had the wind knocked out of me, and now I lay there in shock with lungs as empty as the bellows of a closed accordion. I gasped for air, but it wasn’t oxygen I craved. I wanted the attention and satisfaction brought by a good cry.

  Realizing that he had a short time frame in which to act, my brother started to bargain with me. He was like a fugitive in a movie who suddenly appears at the home of the only person who’d believe his innocence. The type who’d cover their friend’s mouth and implore, “Don’t scream! Hear me out.”

  “Don’t cry,” Mike told me. “Don’t be a baby.”

  My eyes welled up. My lungs strained to take in air as I gasped like a freshly landed cod. “Don’t be a baby,” I thought. “I am a baby. You might as well tell a ballet dancer not to dance or an artist not to paint. It’s who I am. It’s what I do.”

  “Come on. Don’t tell and I’ll play with you.”

  Then began the negotiation. “Play with me? What do you mean, play? Would you play Dinkies? Would we make a road out of mud in the yard and make ramps? Or would we play catch? Define play.” Nobody ever taught me to catch a ball. Dad tried once, but when I was born he was in his fifties and no longer had a zest for sport. Mom must have nagged him to toss around the ball with me one night, so he took me outside and presented me with a big black leather mitt almost the size of my head. He lazily tossed an underhand pitch at me, which right away made me tense up and close my eyes. Then, when I tried to throw it back, my limp-wristed release sent the ball back down to earth mere inches from my feet. After a few depressing back-and-forth attempts, Dad looked at me with the same supportive smile you’d give a friend who’s just been diagnosed with a terminal illness
.

  “I think that’s enough, don’t you?” We went back inside and I heard Mom asking if we’d had fun.

  “He’s not athletic,” Dad replied, retreating to his newspaper on the bed. I made my way back to the TV set, my brief sports career behind me.

  But now I was being offered authentic play with another youth. Sure, he was a youth eight years my senior, but a youth all the same. The air came, but the tears didn’t. Neither did the playtime. I’d been swindled. Later, my brother’s friend came over and playtime consisted of them trying to see if I could fit in the oven with the door closed.

  “It’s like a spaceship,” they insisted. It was good to have friends.

  It probably didn’t help that my parents dressed me like Little Lord Fauntleroy. It’s a good thing that I didn’t live anywhere near any other children, because if I did they surely would have killed me. Mom kept my hair long and it flowed from my head in golden ringlets that looked as though I’d spent my young life preparing to star on Broadway in The Shirley Temple Story. For some reason, I was usually dressed in plaids and tartans. I had a tartan vest with matching pants and a white turtleneck sweater. I dressed the way you’d expect the manager of the Bay City Rollers to dress. I looked exactly like I should be hanging out with an eighty-two-year-old woman. This did not endear me to my preteen brother, who was desperately trying to look cool.

  ME: What you doing?

  BROTHER: Go away.

  ME: Can I do it, too?

  BROTHER: (hits me)

  ME: Where you going?

  BROTHER: Go away.

  ME: Can I come, too?

  BROTHER: (hits me)

  ME: Want to play—

  BROTHER: (hits me)

  Nanny, on the other hand, didn’t ever try to hit me. And if she did, she’d be far too slow to connect. Once, when I’d broken a lamp, Mom threatened me with a spanking. I ran to the talcum-powder-covered safety of my nanny. “Don’t you dare spank that boy,” Nanny decreed. I taunted my mother from the safety of my place behind Nanny’s knees, and the second Nanny left the house I got a hell of a spanking.