Do You Remember Hamish O'Malley?
When I first met my friend Fay at Opal Island’s small elementary school, she was one of three students (including myself) in grade three who would be fast-tracked to grade five over the following year. She and I would end up virtually “skipping” a grade, a practice that I gather is no longer considered wise. Certainly we ended up being significantly younger than our classmates when the process was complete. But how we loved those years at Opal Island New Community School, OINCS, before we left the island each day for the larger world of Kalatin Intermediate Centennial School, KICS. Ya gotta getcher oinks to get yer kicks, as we used to say.
The school, which accommodated students from kindergarten to grade eight, was divided into three classrooms: the Primary Room, the Junior Room, and the Senior Room. I became part of the Junior Room when I first moved to the Island from what would thereafter always be “the mainland” (this perceptual shift seems to happen to all islanders, everywhere). And indeed that classroom became an island for me, an oasis of consistency amid changing domestic arrangements I could barely keep up with some years. I was a novelty in the school for the first couple of years, not because I was a “new Islander” (everyone expected those from time to time) but because I kept going away and coming back again.
Every autumn, as the chill weather closed in, my mother and I, along with her sometime common-law spouse, would abandon the south-shore cottage where we spent the warmer months—and head into town to spend the winter in a rented dwelling.
Whatever they thought of me, I loved my island friends and had a sense of homecoming each time I returned to “Oinks.” I was funny enough (as much in terms of oddness as a quirky sense of humour) to appeal at some level to the close-knit group of girls I inserted myself into each spring. Perhaps because of these yearly spring homecomings, my predominant mental images of the Island are of sunny meadows, wildflower-bedecked.
The tall grass is woven into my memory by gentle gusts of air, punctuated by bursts of yellow and purple weeds, the roses of my youth. I am sitting in a field, by a blackened ancient wooden fencepost that leans ineffectually at a rakish angle, a few strands of barbed wire trailing down to the ground, where they have been trodden by people and animals, the denizens of this tranquil ocean of green. This Atlantis flourished, with bustling villages and prosperous farms, well over a century ago.
Now, a century later, dirt roads led us to overgrown clearings, where decaying wooden buildings attested to the business and busy-ness of former lives. A child could wander forever—for hours at a time, certainly—with the right companions, on foot or by bicycle. One day we spent the entire afternoon in the attic of what had been a hybrid of house and store—only to find the next day that the entire structure had collapsed.
Everywhere we explored we found new worlds—old worlds—of experience, endlessly fascinating in their mystery of long departure. What odds and ends had people left behind, and why? Toys, books, appliances, furniture: work-sock dolls whose stuffing had been pecked out by scavenging crows; black-bound, yellow-paged farming manuals, dog-eared and abandoned; rusted-out stoves and fridges—once a pristine white—where stray cats now nested with their young; worn and torn chesterfields upholstered in gray, once-garish fabrics, where tiny mice now made a cozy home.
We were supported and encouraged in these antics by our teacher, a portly yet sprightly old dame of sixty-odd who encouraged us to plan our own field trips, to pursue island lore, “our own history” (even though some of us were “from away”) in whatever ways possible. “Bring a sketch book;” she would urge, “and let’s turn that into a project.”
Mrs. Currie, memorable for, among other attributes, her bold print dresses, her striking red hair (astounding in one of her years) and stentorian voice, attempted to broaden our minds and expand our horizons—bless her heart—as best she could. It couldn’t have been easy, with J.R. writing “Gas Bay” in the wrong place on the class map (“Gaspé,” she would explain patiently, printing it in her lovely script, with a smile that told us all it was fine to smile at J.R., but not to laugh).
Ancient Egypt, the United Empire Loyalists, the fjords of Norway: all were putty in the hands of Mrs. C. She taught us songs from Broadway musicals, from Australia and other far-off lands, from—best of all—her own youth, which she must have enjoyed prodigiously. One year our entire end-of-term concert was a musical of her own devising, a cabaret-like stringing together of all her favourite tunes from bygone years. Her eyes shone as we sang and danced our way back to the era of her girlhood.
Fay and I adored her, for she was the protective, matronly presence we knew in our grandmothers, if not—well, definitively not—our mothers. Fay’s mom had married at seventeen—a marriage of necessity, as Fay well knew. Much of her energy seemed to be spent in doing the housework, in placating her husband, and in the farm work that, for Fay’s family, finally was acknowledged to be a losing proposition. Fay’s house, for the first few years I knew her, was down past the crest of a hill, almost hidden from the road, a gray tar-papered structure that had seen better days—yet it was in far superior condition to the barn, a prominent local “eyesore,” which seemed from any angle to have only two fully-standing walls.
How that barn remained standing was as much of a mystery to me as the sustenance of Fay’s family: two young parents, two young children, not much of a livelihood. They killed their own turkeys—truculent, scrawny beasts that were butchered on the stump in the front yard. Fay’s mom told a gruesome and macabre tale of a plucked, beheaded turkey that once stood up in the kitchen sink just as she was preparing to stuff it. It staggered and collapsed almost immediately, but she never forgot that haunting sight—and her telling of it evoked such a strong image for me that it is forever etched in my brain. Along with the barn, it has become conflated with Fay’s family in my imagination: I loved to visit them, and was fascinated to observe at close hand this structure that—it seemed to me—might collapse overnight.
Staying overnight at Fay’s, then, was deliciously risky; I was always giddy with anticipation as night fell, and Fay invariably caught my mood like chicken-pox. We would half-heartedly try to contain our mirth, but often kept her entire family awake with our laughter, and had to be reprimanded several times (well, Fay was reprimanded—I was not) before settling down. If unable to think of any jokes or anecdotes to feed our appetite for chuckles, we would simply repeat ad nauseam, “Ha, Ha, Ha; Hee, Hee, Hee; Ho, Ho, Ho,” until we collapsed in helpless giggles.
Of course, we talked about serious things, too—for instance, when our friend Sean O’Malley’s father, captain of the ferry, passed away. One late night (it had been about a year since Mr. O’Malley’s death) after our usual giggle-fest, I was almost asleep when Fay’s voice came suddenly from the darkness: “Do you remember Hamish O’Malley?” she asked. Now, this was a serious question, born of quiet reflection—but it struck me funny for some reason (perhaps for its sheer unexpectedness; my first encounter with a true non sequitur), and Fay soon joined in the spirit. Decades later, it is still our salutation—and we see each other only every few years now; it still brings a gurgle to the back of my throat.
When I began spending winters on the Island, my friendship with Fay strengthened and became a mainstay of my school life. Every day in class, something would crack us up—so much so that even now I have difficulty disciplining my own students who talk in class, as I was once one of them. Each of us delighted in looking at what the other had written in her workbook, particularly if some error of interpretation were possible. We hated crossing things out in our neat notebooks, and would often resort to an elaborate strategy of rewording to avoid this. Describing formal dances in a bygone era, Fay erroneously wrote, “Men and women wore long gowns” then “fixed” the problem by adding in parentheses, “men wore suits.”
“You say here, ‘Canada’s trees will fall’!” Fay exclaimed, looking over my shoulder at my project on autumn leaves.
“No, no—read the whole sentence: ‘Soon, the leaves which are so becoming to Canada’s trees will fall’!”
Hallowe’en, which had formerly been a time when I’d be saying goodbye to “Apes” for the season, was now a celebration. Having memorized “In Flanders Fields” for the upcoming assembly, perfected by my suggestion that we commit it to memory by means of a swinging, jaunty rhythm that converted the poem to a singsong parody, we were ready to devote our energies to our Hallowe’en costumes. Fay and I dressed as Gonzo and Miss Piggy from the Muppet Show—I sporting a man’s suit and a rakishly twisted beak of papier-maché, Fay wearing my mother’s red chiffon prom dress and a snout to rival that of the great performer she emulated.
Ah, those were the days when people made caramel corn and candy apples, which children ate without fear of razor blades—as long as you knew which houses to avoid. At Christmas, we went around the same village circuit singing carols for hot wassail and shortbread.
Living now in the midst of an urban jungle, I can hardly believe I really did this, so many years and miles away. Nor can I believe without difficulty the memory of the school’s winter carnival held out on the ice: if only I could skate or toboggan back through time as easily as I did out over that frozen lake, now a frozen image to be taken out at will, like an old Christmas card you save because something about it is exactly what you want Christmas to be: a platonic ideal, a Disney World of the soul.
Fay and I travelled to the real Disney World (if that isn’t an oxymoron) together, in grade eight, chaperoned by my mother and her mother (Nana Hamm) on a camping trip through the southeastern states to Florida, the promised land. Funny moments abounded on this venture, one of the best being my leaving a fancy restaurant with my enormous cloth napkin still tucked into my collar. At a breakfast truck-stop where the service was slow, we were accosted by loud Americans who were tired of waiting for their food. “Are y’all gonna eat that toast?” they demanded in strong Georgia accents—then snatched it from our table as soon as we responded in the negative. From then on, and for years afterward, Fay and I loved to have breakfast together so we could ask each other that same question, in that same tone of voice.
As the child of a “broken home” (as families like mine were called in those days), I thought Fay’s family seemed normal enough—if not ideal—simply by virtue of Fay’s two parents and sibling. Fay’s family moved into the village when her father became a regular member of the boat crew; he was also a commercial fisherman before Lake Ontario’s fish were too poisoned by pollution.
Fascinated by other people’s fathers in the absence of my own, I had an opportunity to observe Fay’s Dad at close range when I boarded with them for one term in high school (my mother was often paying someone to look after me). Although there was no spare room for me—or even a spare bed—I was made more than welcome at Fay’s house, and she was generously delighted to have me taking up half of her closet, her dresser, her bed. I could never figure it out: why was this no imposition? Why didn’t she mind, even a bit? I could only conclude that perhaps this was some sibling-dynamic I had never experienced as an only child, though it didn’t square with my notions (acquired through books) of sibling rivalry.
For a few months we were, to each other, the sisters we’d never had, and I grew fiercely protective of Fay (the self-admitted domestic servant of the family) whenever she was maligned. Fay had to make dinner for her family every night, at an age when most girls—even in the Island’s hardworking farming community—didn’t have such responsibilities yet. Her father invariably criticized these meals, just as he criticized and rejected every gift she gave him—for Christmas, birthday, even Father’s Day.
After high school, Fay realized her dream of escaping the Island: she left—as did her brother—for a college hundreds of miles away, never to return. She remained single for many years, becoming a talented librarian and world traveler.
It wasn’t until years later that I learned the truth about Fay’s childhood, although if I’m being honest with myself, I suppose I had seen the signs and looked past them. On a trip home from university, my mom told me of a hidden story, one of those family secrets that seldom sees the light of day, a shocking account of abuse, violence and cover-up in Fay’s family. I realized then the reason Fay had been so delighted all those nights I shared her bed and her young life: my presence had kept her safe.
At first, I attributed my ignorance of Fay’s trauma to my childhood naïvete, but eventually I realized that I, too, had been suppressing a similar story--an experience I had buried so deeply in my subconscious that it took Fay’s revelation to acknowledge my own past. Yes, I survived that storm as Fay did hers, and sailed on in life, love, and even laughter.
But I understand now why being moored with Fay for that season of our youth meant everything. To both of us.
Editor’s Note
Deb Blenkhorn’s story could have been written in a previous century with its Regency era, Austen-esque tone, and the exacting elocution and psychological depth of its narrator. I loved the subtle foreshadowing throughout the piece, hints that the story may not be as innocent as it seems. The final, devastating reveal demands a rereading of the girls’ experiences with newly-opened eyes.
-Josh Boldt, Editor
Story Track
Like Deb Blenkhorn’s story, Taylor Swift’s “Seven” remembers a childhood friend whose “house was haunted.” The imagery swings from youthful innocence to buried secrets. Both stories tell of pain and hope intertwined, of girls (later women) overcoming dark histories and moving forward the best they can. Even as Swift’s narrator wonders if the world can possibly contain “beautiful things,” she wishes for her friend to know that she still loves her “to the Moon and to Saturn.”