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“Okay, so you got me there. But isn’t the whole point of America that a person can be anything they want? I’m a New Yorker at heart; it’s only bad luck that I was born in the ass-crack of nowhere.”
“What did your parents do for a living?”
“They were farmers.Obviously.Everyone in Saskatchewan is a farmer,” Daphne snapped, as if Ruth knew anything about Saskatchewan. Or Canada for that matter. It couldn’t be that great up there; they always seemed to be coming to Florida for vacation.
“Did you have a happy childhood?” Ruth asked.
Daphne rolled her eyes. “Have you met many serial killers who had happy childhoods? It’s hard to go to bed with a full belly and a happy heart and think: ‘Shit, the only thing missing is a drawer full of hookers’ teeth.’”
She’s trying to shock me,Ruth thought, and so she kept her face neutral, not giving Daphne the reaction she wanted. The bluntness, the profanity, it served the same purpose as the superficial charm she probably used with men; it was all to keep people at arm’s length. But Ruth needed to push harder, to get beneath the brittle surface.
“What made your childhood unhappy?”
“Ask me what made it happy; it’s a much shorter list,” Daphne said. Another bumper-sticker quip. Ruth sat there, letting the silence fill the room until Daphne sighed and continued. “My parents were dirt-poor, and they had too many kids. To top it off, I was born in the Thirties, in the Dust Bowl. It was the worst decade to be on a farm. People lost everything.”
“How many children did they have?”
“Seven. And I was the oldest, which meant I spent my childhood boiling diapers and chasing after toddlers.”
“What about your parents? Did they make you unhappy?”
“Of course they did. My mother never had time to take care of us. She was too busy working, always working, trying to keep the farm above water. That woman was the hardest worker I ever met, and it showed. She looked about sixty by the time she turned thirty, all bony and gray. I can probably count on one hand the times I saw her smile.” Her voice was a strange mixture of pride and bitterness.
“What about your father? Did you have a better relationship with him?” Ruth asked, almost certain the answer was no. Daphne had confessed to killing a lot of men. That didn’t exactly scream ‘Daddy’s Girl.’ Still, she needed to hear it out loud.
“No, we didn’t. He was a bastard,” Daphne said.
“How so?”
“If you think I’m going to talk about my father, you’ve got another thing coming.” Daphne flashed with anger, for a moment becoming a different person, a mask slipping out of place before it was thrust back into position. There was truth behind the façade, a sense of frustration Ruth instantly recognized. But Ruth needed to be careful asking about Daphne’s father. She knew there were some things that cost too much to share. So she let Daphne take control of the narrative. At least for now.
It’s hard to explain to a young person how much can change during one person’s life. The way I grew up doesn’t exist anymore. The things people take for granted today: exotic fruit, owning more than one set of clothes at a time, traveling to other countries, were impossible things to me as a child. It was a different world, a time before Hitler, the Cold War, television, birth control. Young people don’t understand that one day they’ll change countries without ever moving their feet, that the world they grew up in will disappear forever.
I’m not one of those grandmothers who constantly narrates her life story to her grandkids, hoping that they’ll memorize every detail and love me long after I’m fertilizer. Most of my grandchildren are idiots who either ignore me or try to make me dance in videos with them so that strangers on the Internet will think they’re funny.
I was born in 1932 in Lucan, Saskatchewan. It was a flat, hard place. That’s all there was to it. By the time I was born, Saskatchewan had been in a drought for two years; people called it the Hard Times. The crops burned under the sun, and everything became so dry that the topsoil was lifted up and carried away. Soon, we were living in the Dust Bowl, where rolling dust storms choked out the sun, blew down houses, and suffocated the cattle. The dust coated me, filling my hair and eyes with grit, collecting on my clothes and in the cracks of my body, drying me out, fossilizing me. Sometimes the dust was the only thing in my stomach, during the lean months. And all that dust got in our lungs, making us cough all day long. I had a doctor in New York once tell me that he could see scars in my lungs from all the dirt I breathed in as a child. He had trained in Oklahoma and said he could spot a Duster from a mile away. I never went back to that doctor. I hated the idea that my body was giving up my secrets.
Then the grasshoppers came to Saskatchewan, like a Biblical plague. They ate the rest of the crops, the vegetables from the garden, even the clothes and bedding hanging on the line. All we could hear was a strange humming sound, as if the air had been electrified. It was unsettling. There were so many grasshoppers that the trains couldn’t run because their squashed bodies were gumming up the tracks. And every time you stepped out of your house, you walked on a carpet of grasshoppers, feeling them crush beneath your feet like bones breaking.
Things got so bad that the province set up a Grasshopper Control Committee to try to stop the outbreaks that returned every season. The committee distributed Criddle Mixture (a grasshopper poison) to farmers everywhere. By the time I was born, over one hundred thousand gallons of arsenic were being used in Saskatchewan every year. People would walk through their fields, flinging ladlefuls of poison everywhere. You see, I was born in a cloud of poison. Poison was ours. It was how we fought back against a world that was trying to break us.
And it broke so many of us. There was one year where my uncle was in danger of losing his farm, but he had managed to raise a small crop of wheat. But on the day they went to harvest the wheat, they saw the hailstorm on the horizon. The whole family stood at the edge of the field praying to God, every single one of them from the parents all the way down to their four-year-old son. It was moving eastwards and for a moment it looked like it was going to miss the farm. But then, at the last moment, the storm turned and headed straight for them. In the end, they lost the farm. My uncle ended up in an insane asylum and my aunt and cousins went to a flophouse.
How can you explain to someone born in the Nineties what it was like back then? We were living in hell. Burning in a dirty, ugly world that just overwhelmed you, until you couldn’t feel anything at all. Life just happened to you back then, and you were too poor and too tired to do anything about it. You can see why I prefer to tell people I grew up in Manhattan.
Maybe it would have been manageable if I came from a happy family, but I didn’t. I was a Cowell, born into a family that everyone thought wasn’t worth shit. We lived in a one-room shack, a place so small that a person’s anger could fill the room. My father was a drinker and a real son of a bitch. We were out there alone on a patch of dirt and he acted like God, king, and country combined. He’d come in bone-tired from a long day of farming but he still found the energy to beat us black and blue. When he had no money for liquor, he doubled down on the beatings, since they were his only stress reliever.
He did other things as well, but I’d prefer not to talk about that. Let’s just say that I learned a lot about love and marriage from my father, none of it good. They say hard places make hard people. Well, hard people also make hard people.
RUTH:Was your family close with other people in Lucan?
DAPHNE:No. People saw us as trash. They didn’t like my father because he was a drunk and they didn’t like how ratty we all looked. In that town, you could get away with anything as long as you looked respectable.
RUTH:What sort of things did people get away with in Lucan?
DAPHNE:I’ll give you an example. There was a preacher, Michael Cole. He had been married but his wife, who was twenty years younger than him, had died of pneumonia when I was six. Most people felt sorry for him, especially the great and good of our little town. But there was this rumor—it probably started with their kitchen girl—that the preacher liked to discipline his nineteen-year-old wife by locking her outside the house in the dead of winter. That she would stand at the door in minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, wearing nothing but a housedress and slippers, begging to be let inside as the skin on her face and hands went white and frozen.
RUTH:Jesus, and she went on to die of pneumonia?