Here is an excerpt from my book . . . currently in editing. This was the hardest chapter to write, since it has some technical explanations.
Whadya think?
ESTEE
Chapter 4—Fire and Brimstone
Sometimes my dad played with my brothers. They roughhoused and wrestled on my parents’ bed. It looked like they were having so much fun. I watched for awhile and I thought to myself, my dad sure likes the boys. Then I thought if I jumped up on the bed maybe he would play with me, too. No sooner had I climbed on the bed my dad stopped playing and said sternly, “Daddies don’t play with their daughters like this—only the boys.”
I choked back the tears of another stinging rejection, humiliated as I left the bedroom. I listened as my dad resumed playing with the boys.
I liked being in the attic; I liked to look through the storage boxes. One day I found a box of books and discovered Anne of Green Gables. I struggled at first, being so new to reading. I persisted though, because it was a story about a young girl like me. Poor Anne, first because she was an orphan, and second because her stepfather, who she was very fond of, died in the story. But she was loved by a daddy who wasn’t even her real dad. I wished my dad loved me. It was hard because my dad was constantly yelling, and I was too scared to let myself be vulnerable enough to get close to him. More and more I found myself hiding from his wrath, and the attic served this purpose quite well. If he was in the house, as long as I stayed still he wouldn’t hear me. Reading kept me quiet as I escaped into other worlds.
A navy blue truck with a large enclosed box at the back rolled into our driveway. As my dad approached, a short round man stepped out and swung open the two doors at the back of the truck, which revealed an assortment of interesting colors and fabrics—clothes. He asked my dad if our family required new clothes—another school year was rolling around. The motley assortment of children trickling up to investigate caught his attention. “Look at all the sons!” Turning to my dad, he exclaimed. “You must be very proud.” Then the short man looked at me, wonderingly.
As my dad and the short round man surveyed the clothes against the boys, new jeans and shirts were piled up on the running board of the truck—brand new clothes for my brothers. Just about every item of clothing inside the truck was sitting on our driveway in piles, sorted according to what to buy and what to put back. My dad sent Ritchie to the house to bring out the wallet. We all looked admiringly at Ritchie—being privileged enough to carry the precious family wallet which sat atop the fridge. My dad always claimed that as a “family” wallet, we were all entitled access to it. However, no one dared, except once. Money went missing from the wallet and when the details of the “thievery” were exposed, it was Phil who confessed to know where the missing money was to be found—hidden at school behind the library bookshelf. The inquisition that resulted was much worse than “going without.” In the end, Phil claimed he was not aware of taking the money—apparently he had been sleepwalking.
The short stout man began putting things back into the truck, and his gaze drifted toward me—who had seemingly been invisible, up till that moment.
“Something for the girl?” the man surveyed me standing against the caragana bushes on the side of the driveway. “Maybe some new pants to help out in the garden?” He pulled out some burnt-orange-colored pants from a pile and held them up against me. They were over-sized for my tiny frame.
“She’ll grow into them,” my dad insisted. My heart sank.
“Here are some new winter boots.” Yes, indeed. I needed new boots, too.
“She’ll grow into them,” My dad reasoned out loud, as he examined the monstrous size 9 boots.
I heard voices inside my head, screaming at my dad, but I dared not speak, lest the clothes go back into the truck. Maybe I could sew the pants in. Maybe I could stuff the boots with toilet paper, to stop my feet from sliding around inside the grotesque boots. And that is what I did, with my mom’s help.
When I was twelve, my dad started moving things out of the house and placing them in the attic of the tractor garage. That year his yelling escalated both in volume and intensity. He demanded the utmost obedience to the finite letter of his law. There was a reason for that, he explained, which we did not need to know—only to trust.
One morning he asked Mom to help him drag the bookcase out to the fence beside the garden. I wondered greatly about this act, since the case was full of Jehovah’s Witness books. What if it rained? Weren’t those books sacred? But I dared not voice my concerns.
Next my dad sent my brothers out alone to the field to pick stones, which was also unusual. Finally, he instructed me to come behind the house with him. I obediently followed, thinking he was going to give me some new gardening assignment. He stopped me immediately behind the house and with a more than usually serious expression said, “Esther, you go with Mom when she takes Danny for a walk.”
Danny was the sixth born—a little more than one year old. This puzzled me even more, because my mom never took any babies for a walk in the baby buggy. Granted, I had been playing with it less in the more recent days, but the baby buggy had become mine to play with. It had become my new car, since I had outgrown the trike. Ever since I had read in Dick and Jane about walking Spot and Puff in the buggy, pushing that buggy had become my new game. I couldn’t imagine why my mom wanted to use the baby buggy again. I reminded myself that Vicky did not play with dolls anymore, so logically it was fine if mom wanted to use the buggy again. Even so, the pets and the doll with the chewed up face were my only companions.
My mind drifted back to my dad’s voice, “When you come back from the walk with Mom, you come running out to me in the field yelling, ‘The house is burning!’”
I looked at him as if he had suddenly gone insane.
Finally he stated rather abruptly, “I’m burning the house down!”
His instructions were clear to him. He began walking away.
“But . . .” I followed after him, dazed. My life was quickly spinning out of control! I tugged on his shirtsleeve and realized at the same moment the futility of trying to stop his mad course.
“Never mind! Just do as I say!” he commanded.
I ran to Mom, hoping she would explain all the madness away.
As she had been instructed, my mother was calmly preparing the baby buggy to take Danny for a walk. Looking at me as she set Danny in the buggy, she asked, “Are you ready to walk with me?”
I didn’t ask any more questions. I marched down the road with my mom. I looked back and saw my dad go inside our house. After what seemed like a long time, he came out and headed for the field, to join my brothers.
My mom and I had walked about a quarter mile down the road to the west. She stopped and looked back with that faraway, worried look on her face. Mom spoke for the first time since we had left the yard.
“Shall we turn back?”
Without any more words, we turned around and walked home. We saw the first wisps of smoke coming out of the house. My mom then instructed me to run out to the field and “report” the fire to my dad.
I didn’t fully understand my acting role and probably in a more puzzled tone than genuine alarm, I repeated my dad’s instructions to him:
“The house is burning!”
He ran home and put on the performance of his life for the neighbors, who had now begun to congregate.
My Baba came waddling down the road toward our house waving her arms back and forth and wailing, “Oi-yoi-yoi-yoi!”
She took a breath and repeated over and over again, “Oi-yoi-yoi-yoi!”
My dad went down the road to her and tried to calm her. That was the first time I ever saw him concerned to keep his mother calm. I was a spectator in a play. Everything was so artificial—so scripted.
When Dad came back he described to everyone congregated how mom had single-handedly dragged the bookcase out of the house with our treasured collection of religious books. He portrayed how she had acted swiftly and decisively upon coming back from our walk and noticed our beloved home was on fire. She knew she must save the precious books.
He declared how the summer heat wave must have become too great for such an old house with all that dry wood and sawdust for insulation.
The heat of the burning house was so intense that we stood behind the pumphouse across the yard to hide from the heat of the flames. The old two-story house burned quickly. It frightened me how engulfing the flames became. They scorched the trees in the back yard. There were no fire trucks coming to rescue us—we were way out in the country. There was nothing we could do except let the flames run their course. The house was quickly reduced to ashes.
I asked my mom, “Where are we going to live?”
“The pumphouse, I guess.” Her face carried that worried, faraway look again as she held Danny in her arms and gently rocked him.
That evening when it got dark there was a warm glow of embers from the hole in the ground where the house used to sit. Neighbors offered to put us up, but my dad declined all such offers. He said our whole family would sleep in the pumphouse until we could rebuild. The neighbors quickly brought us dishes and pots and pans and utensils for our use. Spare beds, food, clothing and a great outpouring of care flowed into our pumphouse. I watched on the sidelines, my body numb with shock over the day’s events. A double bed appeared on the southwest wall for dad and mom. Three of my brothers shared another double bed on the northwest wall. My dad put up a “bunk” bed above the double bed for me to share with my second youngest brother, Timmy. Danny slept in the buggy. It was late into the night before we were all tucked into our makeshift beds.
I lay awake for a long time after the pumphouse became quiet. Trying to piece together the recent occurrences, I realized my dad had spent a lot of time prior to the fire—preparing for the fire—preparing the drama.
I began to grasp a small portion of the meaning of the late night conversations Daddy had with Mom in the old house which I had overheard. The words “insurance”—“value”—“money for the old house”—replayed in my mind.
What if Daddy had prepared all the frames for the beds ahead of time, and stood them up in a corner until the fire? I had thought he was “resourceful” without actually defining the word. Knowing Dad burned the house on purpose, that meant the beds in my Mom and Dad’s room and my brothers’ room were in the house—left inside on purpose! The third bedroom was Uncle Pete’s empty bedroom in the attic—he was now living with Baba. I took it a step further. My mind was racing. What if Daddy purposely prepared a fourth bedroom in the pantry only a month or so before the fire to increase the value of the house, old as it was? Why did Daddy recently buy a big radio that stood on the floor, then leave it in the house, while removing all kinds of other furniture which was presently being stored in the attic of the tractor garage?
My dad had spent a lot of time in the pumphouse the past months putting up a lot of new shelves. It amazed me to note the shelving frames under one of the conveniently placed shelves just happened to be the same size as the mattress. He had very much pre-meditated this entire “after-the-fire-scrambling” scenario. He built the shelf in that corner, knowing full well that it was eventually going to become a bed. During the evening, he moved out the stored items from the tractor garage, put a mattress on top the new shelf and voila!—Instant bed! He couldn’t do too much preparation ahead of time. It would have made the neighbors suspicious. On the other hand, he didn't want to appear disorganized. He mustn’t take the chance to let us go to the neighbors, lest we let some tidbit of childish information “slip out” and the neighbors learn of his arson. That is why he kept us all there together in the pumphouse. My head was spinning. I was overwhelmed. I understood only parts of the magnitude of what was really going on.
I silently wept—I was so helpless. I had learned to keep quiet anytime, anywhere. I was an invisible child. Perhaps my parents or my brothers had heard me sobbing, but everyone was too afraid to acknowledge it. There was so much more going on than I could comprehend.
The next day, when we could get near the site, everything was so quiet and eerie. Everything was so still and final. Mom warned us that the few wisps of smoke meant there were still hotspots in among the ashes. I gingerly stepped over debris and rubble to the barely recognizable fridge and pulled the door open. I pulled out two charred balls of something and showed my mom. “What is this?”
“Oranges,” my mom replied
“Oranges? We had oranges in the fridge?” I did not ever recall seeing oranges in the fridge—ever!
“Put them back, Esther,” Mom warned. “The insurance agent is coming to look at everything.”
I didn’t ask any more questions. I did not like the answers I was getting. I roamed through the ashes as if other friendlier more logical answers lay hidden somewhere in the silent ruins.
That silence changed at bedtime when Mom and Dad argued between themselves in hushed tones. Sometimes, after lunch or supper, when my brothers had dispersed and gone off to play, an eruption of yelling broke out about the deceit and the fraud that my dad was committing. I never heard Mom so upset. She yelled about what God thought about Dad’s cheating the insurance company. She threatened to tell the congregation elders. My dad informed her if we were to have a new house, this was a necessary step. Without the insurance, we couldn’t afford to rebuild. He also warned her that if she reported him to the authorities, she would go down with him as his accomplice and the children would have no parents. And it would be her fault for not trusting him.
When push came to shove, she always shut her mouth.
The insurance man came to investigate a few days later, and I ran up to the pit of ashes and started to talk about how big the fire was and how scared I was. My dad hushed me immediately, and ordered me to go play.
I didn’t recall ever hearing Daddy ordering me to “go play.” Puzzled, I went and played with the cats and dogs behind the barn.
We lived in the pumphouse that summer until the new house was built. We watched the construction, and part of my mom’s job was to log the hours of all the workmen who came and went. My dad told her to do that to make sure that the contractor was honest in what he charged my dad for the construction.
Honesty was important to Daddy?
Our new house was a much bigger, four-bedroom house and I had my own room, which was next to my mom and dad’s bedroom. There were more hushed tones at bedtime. Of course, my dad took out another fire insurance policy. At that time, my dad decided to take out life insurance on all of us children as well. “You never know when something bad might happen to one of the kids,” I heard him say.
After we moved into the new house, my nightmares about fires continued. I again overheard many a late night conversation since I was scared to go to sleep at night for fear of the horrible dreams. I had nightmares about the house burning down for years afterward. I was so afraid of fire. I saw with my own eyes the fury of fire and how destructive and hot it was.
That summer the annual religious convention was agonizing. We heard talks about how unquestioning obedience saved the lives of God’s servants on occasions. An example was recited of a father at the steering wheel of his car, commanding his wife and children to duck their heads. Because the Mom and children ducked their heads, they missed being hit by a log that suddenly came smashing through the car windshield.
I wasn’t sure I could be that obedient, because of my natural curiosity. I wondered if I would be more than a little inquisitive in a like situation, and look up instead—at the crucial moment of impact with such a log. I didn’t think I had the right kind of unquestioning loyalty and obedience to such an order. I felt guilt at my imagined failure and inevitable death due to such severe lack of allegiance to orders.
My dad became angrier as the months went by. He drank more heavily than I had ever seen. His words were crueler—and he prophesied death for some of us who were not completely obedient.
As the days became crazier, my brothers and I had begun a private dialogue among ourselves about the lunacy—mostly in the form of mimicking his voice, imitating his heavy Ukrainian accent. We made sport of it, not fully believing it, yet at the same time we wondered what this raging man who was our father might do to create the situation of fulfilling his own mad prophesies. The fear in us grew, even though we secretly mocked the madness.
Dad constantly called me a freak in his thick accent. I made fun of it behind his back, yet those words deeply stung me each time he uttered them. He spoke those words with such contempt in his voice—I was an outsider—the words stung deeply. I was so ugly and gangly as I grew taller than any of my brothers. I had very few clothes and my dad saw absolutely no urgency that I was properly outfitted, since I was “just a girl” with very little human value.
After the fire, the neighborhood ladies collected boxes of old clothes and donated them to us. I looked through the boxes and found several dresses that were full enough that if I cut the skirt part off I had enough fabric to make a slim shirt dress to wear at school. There was a rule at our school—girls were not allowed to wear pants. I found two full dresses and the fabric resulted in two new shirt dresses.
“They are a bit short,” my mom objected.
“It’s all the fabric I have,” I defended.
In addition, I found several wool skirts that I could alter enough to wear. The hems were long below my knees, which the religion required. I was embarrassed. At a time when mini-skirts were all the rage, I was forced to wear long skirts. Once I left the house, I rolled up the skirts so that I could look more like the other girls at school.
Mornings were especially agonizing. The nervousness in my stomach made it difficult to eat. I forced myself to choke down some wheat porridge that my mom always boiled up. Yet, when it came time to catch the school bus, I was hanging my head over the night slop pail, gagging and wondering if my food was coming back up all the way, or if it was just going to stay stuck in my throat.
I went to school frequently without lunch, because to me, bread and margarine sandwiches were the equivalent of eating cardboard. Sometimes my brothers gave me enough money to buy a bag of chips or chocolate milk, which was a feast. When suppertime came, I ate mashed potatoes and gravy, which my mom served. The homemade fish balls from the ground-up suckerfish pulled from the ditches upstream from the creek in the springtime repulsed me. We had very little else in the way of meat, unless Mom and Dad had a big yelling match and my mom yielded to her fear and cooked a venison roast from the strangled deer my dad had snared. The deer always tasted gamey, and Mom insisted it was because the deer was improperly bled—most unappetizing. I was hungry and weak most days as my body ached for food. I was skin and bones and I fully believed my dad when he called me a freak.
Living on the farm meant we did not receive a lot of visitors. Several times a year the Watkins man drove up with his station wagon laden with household and personal items. At the age of 12 everyone in our family received their first toothbrush, after one such visit and a reprimand from the Watkins man. I became conscientious about brushing my teeth—and my tongue. Far be it from me to have bad breath!
* * *
Another circuit convention was held in Arborg. After lunch my dad did not come back to his seat. I kept glancing over at my dad’s empty chair—where was he? He never said anything about not coming to the convention for the afternoon session. Mom did not say a word about his absence.
Much later into the afternoon session, my dad finally came back to his seat—but without a word. And of course, my mom didn’t dare to ask, “Where were you?”
When we went to the parking lot to go home, the truck had been moved to a new parking spot. Had our father gone somewhere during the afternoon session? And where was the big sign on the truck “John Spuzak & Sons” which he so proudly displayed?—and that had been on the truck during the drive to Arborg?—and that was there at lunchtime? Something was amiss, but nobody said a word, and no questions were asked.
On the way home in the truck I noticed my dad had a smirk on his face. He was unusually quiet, until he broke the silence.
“Is that a fire in the distance?” He queried, pointing almost straight ahead.
Our attention was instantly diverted to a small orange glow in the distance. We all agreed—certainly there was a fire burning, but it was very far away and it was really difficult to determine what exactly the flames could be coming from.
A few moments of silence set in again, and once more the silence was broken by an almost jovial comment by our father, “I’ll bet its Uncle Bill’s barn. I bet they were making homebrew and it caught on fire.”
The explanation seemed preposterous. “No one had been to Uncle Bill’s barn for years,” my mom countered. It was true. The farm was abandoned when Uncle Bill and Aunty Pearl moved away to Winnipeg to retire from farming. They had been trying unsuccessfully to sell the property for years. Besides, the fire appeared to be much closer than that.
I observed our father’s face. He was grinning from ear to ear and I couldn’t help but wonder why he was talking crazy like that. The possibility was just too absurd.
We drove in silence for a while longer. I became afraid that our new house was burning down, but I dared not voice my fear. Then as we approached our corner, we realized the fire was straight down our road in the distance. My dad could contain himself no longer. “It is Uncle Bill’s barn!” He was positively joyful. Was he happy because he guessed right? Or was he happy because he got away with another illegal act?
* * *
At Dad’s orders, we picked stones year after year and piled them into the farm scraper, then hauled them to the stone pile which appeared as a big treed island in the middle of the field. The scraper was a box-shaped farm implement with two wheels situated on an axle attached to the back of the box-like bin. The box was open on the top, for throwing rocks into. The bin was controlled by a hydraulic system much like the gigantic scrapers used in road-building. I fully understood things like scrapers, being a witness firsthand when our road was rebuilt several years prior. I watched the big machine scrape dirt into the bottom part that dropped slightly open. I watched the box close and get hauled over to another area of the construction site. Then I watched the two halves of the bin invert from the bottom and the dirt dumped out. Our scraper was hitched onto the tractor. We filled up the scraper box with rocks, and then my dad hauled it to the stone pile. The hydraulic levers opened the mouth of the scraper. Without even stopping the tractor, the inverted scraper emerged from the opposite end of the stone pile island, crashing its way out in a cloud of dust. The load of rocks we had spent hours picking was dumped—and the scraper was ready for a refill. My brothers and I were out in the field from 7:00 a.m. every day until supper time in the summer. If we weren’t picking rocks, it was haying season, seeding or harvest time.
I reflected about how I took pride in understanding the basic mechanics of the farm equipment. My dad made me help in the garage sometimes when he was doing repairs on the equipment. I carefully observed the intricacies of what made the machinery work. I focused hard on my task so as not to think about the ache in my little hands, as I held a wrench on a nut tightly—exactly in the “right” way to please my dad. Often I was not strong enough for the last tightening turn. If the wrench moved, my dad yelled.
Even in the field we were still children with the full capacity to play every moment that we could salvage. We often stood on the back axle of the scraper and held on to the edge of the bin. We went for a joy ride all the way to the stone pile. Once we arrived, we got off just before my dad dumped the rocks and we ran around to the other end of the stone pile “island” where we knew he would emerge. We jumped back on the axle and went for another axle ride all the way back to where we left off picking stones.
One particular day, after we piled the scraper full of rocks, Dad ordered us all to climb up onto the rocks instead of standing on the back axle while holding on to the back of the bin as we usually did. I decided to wait for their return from the stone pile and fairly collapsed into a sitting position, exhausted. I didn’t climb on the back axle, nor did I climb on top the load as he ordered. I was apprehensive about sitting on the ground, thinking he might yell at me—but I took my chances. Three of my brothers climbed on top of the load, and fully followed Dad’s orders. My dad paused for a moment as he looked at me with disdain. I breathed a sigh of relief as he opened the throttle full ahead toward the stone pile. A moment later, to my horror, I watched as the load emptied in the middle of the field. Ritchie, Andy and Phil disappeared inside the scraper. I froze as I imagined the mangled condition they would reappear in, being crushed under a half ton of rocks—and the open lip of the scraper—as it dragged its way over their fragile bodies.
My dad yelled like a madman, “Let go! Let go, you fools!”
But they didn’t let go and that was what saved their lives.
My dad closed the mouth of the scraper and my brothers emerged unscathed still hanging on to the inside of the scraper. It was a miracle. Dad then stopped the tractor, got off and proceeded to give each one of them the beating of their lives for their disobedience. Being an observer from a distance, I was puzzled, “Did he want them to die as they got crushed under the load of rocks?”
I was grateful that Timmy and I stayed behind. Timmy was too young to hold on and would have surely listened to dad’s orders to let go. I analyzed what I might have done in their situation and shuddered.
Another frightening occasion was when my dad ordered us children to go and pick pails of wild mushrooms out of the surrounding bush land. My mom questioned him on this, “May I remind you, the local mushrooms are known to be poisonous. No one in their right mind would cook wild mushrooms around here, especially ones picked haphazardly at the hands of children. How would they know which ones to pick and which ones to leave? I don’t even know that!”
My dad claimed he talked to a neighbor who had picked mushrooms and feasted on them without incident. “Never mind, just do it!” was his response over my mom’s feeble objections. He then gave us pails and instructed us to go and pick mushrooms. My mom shrugged her shoulders and turned back to her soup-making.
My brothers and I picked several pails that afternoon, and brought them to Mom. She sighed and we began washing them. My mom then confided that when they were children, they used to pick mushrooms every once in awhile. Grandma boiled them for six hours or more, changing the water every hour or so, to boil away the poison. She still was apprehensive and angry, but was willing to follow this old process to keep us safe from ingesting poison. It wasn’t until the next day that Mom, with her face full of worry, began the process of boiling them while changing the water frequently. Our family always ate supper together but curiously my dad was absent from the table that evening. My mom did not eat the mushrooms either, saying, “Someone has to be here in case anyone gets sick!”
Fortunately, no one got sick and my mom sighed in relief. It wasn’t until the next day at lunch time that Dad created a big performance, and noisily ate the mushrooms. A few weeks later, he again prophesied death—this time it was my death. My fear grew daily as I wondered what else he might do to create the circumstances of my imminent death.