Chapter 9 of 13
From a young couple with eight thousand dollars of debt and nothing else came, in time, a whole crowd of people — four children, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren after them. This is the warm chapter, the family chapter, and John tells it with open delight.
It carries its harder threads: a young mother who spoke not a word of English getting through her first birth by finding a doctor who spoke the old tongue; a procedure done to her that she never once understood. But mostly it is the joy of the thing, and the mischief of a man who loves a good surprise. Watch for the stunt he pulled at the airport — the one he counts among the things he is proudest of in his whole life.
Let me tell you what it all came to, before I tell you how it started. Two sons. Two daughters. Ten granddaughters and three grandsons, and now one great-grandson and one great-granddaughter on top of all that. And every last one of them is just as crazy as I am. I say that and I mean it for a compliment, you understand. There is a whole crowd of people walking around in this world now because a young fellow with eight thousand dollars of debt and nothing to show for it hung in there. That is a thing to sit and think about of an evening.
But it all started with the one. It started with Eric.
He was born the eighth of July. I had the date in my head from the first and I have never let go of it. That morning we woke up and she said it plain.
“We are going to the hospital.”
And that was that, off we went, and we spent the whole day there. The whole day. Burnaby Hospital, and we were in it from the morning clear through to midnight before he finally came. And the first thing I did once he was here and I knew the two of them were all right, I got on the telephone. I phoned my parents and I phoned her parents, both sets, and I told them the same thing.
“You have got a grandson.”
That was a good telephone call to make. There is no better one.
And then the next morning I went to work.
I know how that sounds now. But you have to understand the man I was and the spot we were in. There was no use for me to hang around the hospital. She was looked after, the boy was looked after, and there was nothing for me to do there but stand around and be in the way. And the work was the work. I had to go from Vancouver out to Delta — that is where we were framing houses then, out in Delta — and that is a fair stretch to drive every day. So I went. I put in the day. And in the evening I came back to the hospital again, the way you do. That was how it went. The baby came, and the houses still had to go up, and a man did both.
Now I will tell you something about how she even got cared for over there, because it was not a simple thing for her. This was a woman who could not speak one word of English. Not one. She had come from the other side of the world into a Vancouver hospital, and what was she going to do? Well, she found a doctor. She found a doctor right there in the hospital who spoke Low German — Plautdietsch, the same as we did at home — and not a word of English himself, or near enough. And that was how she got through her first baby in a brand-new country. The two of them could sit and talk in the old language, and she could understand what was wanted of her, more or less.
I say more or less, because there was one thing they did to her that she never did understand, not for the rest of her life. Sometime in the carrying of one of them she had too much fluid around the baby. Too much. So they had her come in to the hospital and they drew some of it out of her, out from around the child. She had no idea what they were going to do. A friend of hers went along with her — they took the bus, the two of them, all the way to the hospital — and the doctors did whatever it was they did, and then she got up and went home again. And to her dying day she could not have told you what happened in there. She went in, they took the fluid, she came home. No idea. That was a frightening thing, I think, when you cannot ask the question in your own tongue and you cannot follow the answer.
She was a slip of a thing through all of it. She had come to Canada six months along and weighing a hundred and ten pounds, sick as anything those first three months, and it showed. Years and years afterward Eric came across the old photographs, the ones from back then, and he looked at his mother in them and he said to her, “Why are you so thin?” Out of the mouth of the boy she was carrying in those very pictures. She had no good answer for him except that that was how it was in those days — a young woman in a new country, worked to the bone and worried besides, and it wrote itself right onto her.
Then thirteen months later we did the whole thing over again, and that one was Eronica — Courtney’s mother, my second-born. By then we had moved — we were out on Alfred Gladden Road — but we kept the same doctor, the very same one, the Low German fellow, and it was the same nurses and the same hospital both times. Burnaby Hospital, the same faces looking after her. There was something good in that, having the same people the second time, when you already knew them and they knew you.
She came on the thirty-first of October — the Halloween night, that is the one I never forget. We had woken up here in Abbotsford that morning, and we packed ourselves up and drove into Burnaby, and by early that evening she was born. And what I remember of that day, more than anything, is sitting up on the seventh floor of that hospital, sitting there by a window, and watching the little ones down below. The trick-or-treaters, running up and down the street in the dark with their costumes on. I sat by that window and watched them run while my second one was coming into the world. Halloween baby. I have never had to work hard to remember her birthday.
And with that second one there was a trouble the first one never gave us. She would not latch on. That little girl simply would not take to nursing, no matter what her mother did, and Nettie was beside herself over it. She begged the nurses. She had her sister-in-law right there telling them, “Give her a pump, give her something, there’s a way around this” — and for whatever reason they did not do it. Nothing worked in that hospital. And then the very next day they sent her home, and once she was home, in her own place, with nobody standing over her, there was no trouble at all. Not a bit. It all went good from the minute she walked in her own door. I have thought about that since. Sometimes a body just needs to be left alone to do the thing it already knows how to do.
Thirteen months apart, those two. And I will tell you, that struck me, because me and my own older sister are only eleven months apart. Eleven months. So I suppose it runs in the family, having them close like that, one right on the heels of the other. You blink and there are two of them where there was none.
Eric came on the eighth of July, and that October the first we moved back to Abbotsford, and I started in working with a couple of good men there. Good guys, both of them. They are gone now. But that was the shape the years took. A baby, then a move, then the work, then another baby, then more work. And from there the whole thing just kept on growing, year on year, until I look around now and there is the crowd I told you about.
The other two came to us in Abbotsford, both of them, and both of them by cesarean. Michelle was the third — she was born the fifth of January. And then there was Mike. Mike came on the seventeenth of December, right there just before Christmas, so we always said he was our Christmas gift. That is how I think of him still. December seventeenth, and Christmas coming right behind him — a gift, right on time. Four of them now, all told: Eric first, then Eronica, then Michelle, and Mike to close it out. Two boys and two girls, and I would not trade a single one of them for anything this world has got.
And out of those four came the whole rest of it — the grandchildren. Thirteen of them now, ten girls and three boys, and then the little ones started arriving to them in their turn, a great-grandson and a great-granddaughter so far. A whole crowd, and every one of them a piece of my heart. But a family keeps growing another way besides, and that is by the ones who marry into it — the fellows and the girls who take a shine to one of yours and want in. And I always did like to get a good look at one of those before he was properly one of us, to find out what a fellow was made of.
There is one of those I want to tell you about in particular, and a stunt I pulled to size him up, because it is one of the things I am most pleased with myself over in my whole life. It was the year we all went to Mexico — that was 2010 — and it was meant to be the whole family going down together. And I got it in my head to do something.
Chris was not part of the family yet, not really — he was not blood, not married in, not anything official. And I figured, well, here is a way to get to know the fellow a little bit. So I went to Grandma, quiet, just the two of us, and I said, “We should maybe take Chris along too.” And then I went to Michelle and I had her book a ticket for him on the sly, because there happened to be one available, and I said, “Let’s take him.” And then I kept my mouth shut. That was the whole of the trick. I did not breathe a word of it to anybody. I wanted it kept a secret, I did not want a soul to know about it, because the whole point of the thing was the face on them at the airport. He had his suitcase hidden and the whole works, and he brought it out where the whole family was standing, and he surprised the daylights out of every one of Courtney’s family. Oh, we had them good. That was one of the best ones I ever pulled. And I figured, like I said, that is one way to get to know a young man a little bit. Bring him along where he doesn’t belong yet and watch how he does. He did fine.
There is one more thing I remember out of that whole Mexico trip, and it is a small thing, but it is the one my mind goes to. There was a boat. And I remember about my foot, and being carried — carried right into the boat, out to where we were going.
Just as crazy as I am, every single one of them. That’s the family I made.