My uncle, his wife, an axe
A personal story of love and family
[Editor's note—this ain't an easy read. You've been warned.]
My uncle did not kill his wife with an axe. I don’t know where that idea got into my family’s shared memories of the incident, but clippings from the North Bay Nugget confirm that this was not the case: the mad Indian beat his wife to death in a drunken rage with a blunt object. Does that make me feel better or worse about it all? I suppose the addition of the axe has the power to turn Uncle Stanley into something out of a slasher movie, a spectre to haunt nearby summer camp fireside ghost stories—x years ago a mad, drunken Indian chopped his wife up on this very night—but the infliction of blunt-force trauma lends a different feel to it all. I don't know what.
My grandmother met her mother-in-law for the first time in the bathroom of Uncle Stan’s funeral, after he died in an institution for the criminally insane, where her mother-in-law proceeded to offer her visibly-pregnant daughter-in-law the last dregs of a mickey of rye (she refused, and instead my great-grandmother downed it herself). My great-grandma was arrested later that day for beating up her own sister on a streetcar, which I’m sure made a terrific spectacle, like her brother’s murder of his wife, to the true barbarity of “red savagery.”
Are we really “survivors” or just a legion of walking dead? I think of this when I watch drunk Indians yell at each other incoherently on the sidewalk. They probably sound a lot like my great-grandmother and her sister! Guiltily I drop a loonie in one of their cups where it gets sticky with the remains of this morning’s whiskey. The man’s face is puffy and flush both with drunkenness and ethnicity. I feel my race like a lump in my throat, that’s where it lives since it’s retreated from my bleached face, maybe I could kill it or feed it with a descent into alcoholism, what seems at times to be our one true calling—it’d certainly make me more red.
It must take longer to kill your wife with a blunt object than with an axe. All that time spent looking at the thing you love and then coming down on it over and over again until it finally breaks. I guess he was mad, after all, the courts certainly thought so considering they threw him in the loonie bin, but maybe he was just an Indian and maybe that’s the same thing. Stan is dead so I can never ask him how they broke him and his sisters, I don’t know what happened to them in those schools, I just know they taught them how to be loonies and it stuck to them. My great-grandmother looked into the face of a thing she loved on the Bathurst streetcar and then put her fist into it. Maybe given the time, maybe out in the savage country and not the beacon of white man’s civilization, she’d have beat it until she broke it. Alumni, they were, of the loonie college. A loonie for every Indian, sticky at the bottom of every coffee cup, sticky with the thing we love.