Chapter 1: My Father

Some names may have been changed to shield the innocent and spare me the drama of the criminally unhinged.

My dad was from a tiny island called Campobello. It's a peculiar little place off the coast of Maine, USA, and New Brunswick, Canada. He was born in December 1930 in his mother's bed at Wilson's Beach. He grew up during the Great Depression, and though it didn't hit Canada quite as hard, they did live in a border town with very little access to the mainland for many things.

His mother was a housewife, and his father was a fisherman. Grammy somehow managed to raise five children mostly on her own: Baxter, Patty, Floyd (my dad), and the twins, Glen and Glenna. I'm pretty sure the twins came after a series of miscarriages, but I'm a bit fuzzy on that. It's not super relevant to the story anyway, just that it shows what a remarkably strong woman helmed an earlier generation of my family.

Dad loved telling me stories about what school was like in his day. He didn't have fancy pens or colored paper like we do now; he had a slate and a slate pencil. School wasn't the only thing that was different back then. He also loved to tell me about how kids these days just didn't know what it was like before we had all these fancy modern comforts we take for granted every day. The entire island didn't have electricity until 1948, when Dad was already 18. He would get nostalgic talking about the car he'd learned to drive in—a Model A Ford that belonged to his uncle. It had a large hand crank on the outside that he had to wind to start it. I don't know exactly what his first car was, but he cherished that old Model A like nothing else.

Dad started working at a young age, helping his father mend nets and running errands down on the breakwater. When he was small, he would earn a dollar a week and rush over to the general store (owned and operated by Grampie John and Grannie Nellie) to buy a penny bag of candy and a frosty bottle of Coke. As Dad got older, he began making five dollars a week, and he, along with a friend or two, would row across Passamaquoddy Bay to watch movies in Eastport, Maine. I don't think it was too dangerous because he never had a scary story for me, and I'm sure it didn't take a long time because you could see Eastport from the shore, distant but holding the promise of worldly delights the island had yet to offer. He loved whatever film the small-town theater could afford to show. I'm not sure what he may have seen, but his favorite movies throughout life were always John Wayne Westerns and Jules Verne-type sci-fi.

I don't know much about Dad's teen years or how many shenanigans he got up to as a youth, but at some point, he fell head over heels for a tiny, dark-eyed lady with beautiful, shiny hair. She was his third cousin, and family stories told of a Native ancestry. At the time of this writing, I don't know exactly how or what the Native connection was. I'm not even sure how they came to be involved, but they began dating and eventually married. My oldest brother was born only eight months later, in October 1959. Dad was 29, and Marjorie was just 18. I don't know all the details, but those were different times. The island was small, and it was more common to marry young back in those days. Age differences weren't quite as scandalous either. I know Daddy loved her deeply and to absolute distraction, and from the stories I've been told, at least, the feelings were very much reciprocated. 

The births of three more boys would follow, one who passed just hours after birth, and then two little girls, all strong and healthy—a lot to carry for a woman mostly raising the family on her own. Dad was already working part-time on fishing boats as soon as he was old enough, and now he was working even more because he had a wife and family to support. It was just part of the island life cycle: another young wife trying to raise a bunch of kids while the dad did his best. But let me tell you, living that way was anything but easy. There wasn't a lot of money, and wives generally all stayed at home back then. There wasn't a lot of support either, and if you did feel low, you just choked back the tears and kept plowing through. If the bills were stacking up or the pantry was running low, if the well sprang a leak, or if you had a migraine or cramps, you got up, fed and dressed the kids, tended first to their needs, then your husband's, and if there was any time left, you could take a few minutes to have a tea, a drink, or whatever else it took to get you through your days. Sometimes it took a few drinks, and sometimes a few more. People didn't have the networks and resources they have today; you just somehow pulled yourself through.

Dad was out to sea when he received the sad news that little Baxter Wade had passed. He never even got to see his baby boy's face before he was whisked away, wrapped, and buried in the yard of the small Anglican church that served their growing family. For the rest of Dad's life, that memory and the guilt of missing it all haunted him. Darren and Jody were the oldest, and Baxter had been their third boy, named after Daddy's best friend and older brother, Baxter. Dana came a bit later on. A few years after Dana was born, and after Dad had already left the sea, they had two more children, little girls named Cheyann and Shawna. Their house was bursting at the seams. By then, the family had moved from Campobello to a place called Little Ridge. Dad was working long hours, and he wasn’t as involved with the kids as he could have been. Marjorie had grown lonely and by this time had become quite accustomed to having more than a few drinks to get her through those long, seemingly relentless days. 

Dad noticed the drinking, but it never really dawned on him that it was becoming a problem for her. He was so absorbed in his long work hours and the conditioning of men in society during that period. It was just what folks did in the '70s. I'm not sure that Dad realized at the time, or even right up until he died, that he had a problem back then too. I remember stories of him waking up hungover and with unexplained injuries, driving drunkenly down railroad tracks as a 'shortcut,' and going to taverns without Marjorie. I can only assume, even without fully knowing both sides, that Marjorie's struggle was similar. I know that at least two of the kids may not have been Dad's biologically, and I also know he loved them no less for it. I know it had to be terribly lonely for both Daddy and Marjorie by then, and certainly not to excuse either of them for it, one can't help but empathize a little. Marjorie sought inebriated comfort in the arms of receptive men at times when her husband was physically and possibly emotionally absent. 

Dad carried on, swallowed up by his own darkness, brought on, assumably, by the weight of carrying the expenses entirely on his own shoulders, the guilt of knowing it was never enough, even the general melancholia that seemed to afflict him for the entirety of his life—later in life, he'd be diagnosed with chronic depression but would refuse any therapy or medical treatment (he said he'd carried it this long on his own, no reason to change it up now)—likely knowing throughout all of this that his marriage was crumbling, his self-worth plummeting, all of it just more casualties of the harsh society they lived in and the chemicals in both of their brains creating this cocktail of failure and unmet goals that had been laid at their feet for as long as they had even been. Everyone knew that, ideally, you had a house and a car, a picket fence, a porch swing, and a retirement fund. A life flawlessly planned out from start to end, keeping up with both the Joneses and the Smiths, effortlessly without ever breaking a sweat. That's just how it was done, even though for most real people, then and now, that was the farthest thing from the truth.

The cracks in their marriage were about to widen into chasms. One night, at a tavern alone, with drinks flowing a little too freely, a curvy, freckled, fire-haired ball of youthful energy, with danger written all over her—wearing a too-small baby doll dress with polka-dot hot pants that were meant to be seen—this is where my mother comes into the picture. She was 18, just barely old enough to be in the bar. My father, exactly her type—tall, lanky, awkward, and drunk, old enough to be her father and with a visible wedding ring—caught her eye.

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