By Rose Simpson

  After her husband died, Vera was never the same.

Her altered state was quite understandable given the manner in which

Russell had dispatched himself. Alone, drunk and despondent, Russell had died instantly in a car wreck. At times, Vera would say she wished it had been her in the car instead of Russ. But there was no time for self-pity for a mother raising three small children alone.

Vera made a pact with her parents. They agreed to allow her and the children to move back to the family farm. She agreed to a life of servitude in a household defined by dysfunction.

Her ornery and demanding mother, Ina, had hands and feet ravaged by rheumatoid arthritis and had lost her breasts to cancer. Her distracted father, Loyal, was kept alive by a cocktail of pills and elixirs. He took spells off the front porch when he wasn’t watching his blood sugar.

Her brother, Ivan, discharged from the army for mental illness, worked the farm because he couldn’t find a job anywhere else. Ivan regularly flew into rages against the taxman, the government and lawyers, for no apparent reason.

Her step-brother, Vern, lived his life as a bumblebee. He was a 50-year-old with the intellect and emotion of a 10-year-old, spending long days playing a fiddle on the front step and singing tunes he’d heard on Don Messer’s Jubilee. 

For the most part, Vera fulfilled her duties quietly. It was only when she fortified herself with beer that her anger exploded, full throttle, in high pitched tirades that sent her young daughter scurrying for the car, where she would hunker down for the night while her mother slept it off. Her sons survived by staying away.

These dramas were rare, but they were unforgettable.

Once, enraged by Ivan’s stupidity, Vera reached for a bottle of whiskey and spent the next few hours puking while her 10-year old held her head over a bucket. It’s the kind of the image that stays with a person, the sight of a 40-year-old mother being eaten alive watched over by her distraught little girl.

Vera’s burden seemed to lighten as she watched her relatives die one by one. Vern was the first to go, felled by a heart attack in the middle of an apple orchard. Loyal went next, after riding the lightening of a massive stroke. Ina died a year later in hospital, following hip surgery.