Barnacle Love by Anthony De Sa

Author:Anthony De Sa
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2008-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

II

CAGED BIRDS SING

But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage

can seldom see through his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing …

The caged bird sings with fearful trill

of the things unknown but longed for still

and his tune is heard on the distant hill

for the caged bird sings of freedom

Maya Angelou

URBAN ANGEL

MY FATHER DEMANDED WE all speak English. “We is in Canada now. We speak Canadian in this beautiful country with many beautiful things,” he’d say. He was so certain of his chosen land that I couldn’t help but love him. I just wished he would use a word other than beautiful, which he pronounced bootiful. He had been promising to take the family on a cross-country train ride for as long as I could remember—to see the country as he had. He was proud of his early days working on the railway, walking the lines like the Johnny Cash song he couldn’t stop humming. My father never stopped talking about lakes and rivers with long Indian names. My mother tried unsuccessfully to pronounce some of the places—Chilliwack, Coquitlam, Saskatchewan—all in the hopes of pleasing my father.

The nuns who ran St. Michael’s Hospital and who first hired my father told my mother how impressed they had been with his valiant attempts at English and his determined work ethic, not to mention his blue eyes and long lashes. “Too gorgeous,” they would say to her, “to be placed in the head of a man.” The nuns chose to hire him without any experience. Under Sister Ophelia’s tutelage, my father mopped, scrubbed, and disinfected for only a short while before he was proclaimed supervisor of the hospital’s housekeeping department. It was a meteoric rise, or so my mother would proudly say. He had an office. It was located in the basement.

“Remember, I is a supervisor,” he’d announce, puffed chest and all. It was made clear to us that if ever asked we were never to reveal what exactly he was a supervisor of. It was a family secret, just like all the employee evaluations he could never fill out for himself. Misplaced glasses or a terrible headache would always lead him in our direction. My sister would roll her eyes as she typed up the forms. My father pretended not to notice. My mother would take us aside and again remind us, “What happens in this house, stays in this house.”

I was struggling with her shaky rule about keeping things within the confines of our home when I caught my Aunt Louisa smuggling piecework—stacks of pockets to be sewn on the backs of jeans—upstairs, into my mother’s workroom. My mother shushed me. “I’m helping your tia,” she said. “We need the extra bit of money.” I proudly skipped downstairs and whispered what my mother was doing into my father’s ear. His feet hammered up the stairs. He reappeared at the top of the stairwell trailed by my mother, who tugged at his

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.