Over the Spiked Picket Fence

By Angela Aloisio Sander & Denvil Buchanan

In one of the most Multicultural cities in the world, Kate, a young rebellious woman from Old Europe meets the mysterious Dan, a man from the islands. Theirs is a story of the challenges and struggles they face as a multiracial couple living amidst the natural cross-cultural fertilization of Toronto. Kate s parents, although good people at heart desperately cling to hang onto their old world values which include respecting the rules, doing what parents want and marrying within ones own culture. Kate is headstrong and torn between abiding by the wishes of her parents and her desire to wet her appetite by exploring the possibilities of life beyond the confinements of her sheltered world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Jan 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781922381194

Book preview

Chapter 1

Kate

He came to me speaking truths that melt like icicles against the late morning sunlight. It was a time when the desire of this man was at its peak, unfulfilled and full of fire and wanting to satisfy his aching heart.

His name was Dan. I woke up from my reverie thinking about him. Dan had been a man who had travelled from a very different place that was contrary to my world. Toronto was the new Grand Central Station, where many weary travelers crossed looking for a place to rest. Dan was one of these travelers. Any woman who had known him, and he had known many from what I was told by him, knew he would impose his will. As a rule, he would never consider anyone but himself. He lived in and for himself in his world of past and present.

Dan said he had worked a day job in a fish shop on the corner unloading boxes of metal with fresh fish like snap-per, grouper and kingfish. These were the provisions that the people who lived around there wouldn’t have done without. Like Dan, these people had traveled 3,000 miles to this shield of frozen earth where a new life could be made. But, like Dan, like my father, like all travelers, they would continue to live in the old world in the new.

Much later, I came to understand that there were others whom Dan Matthew had called ‘Family’, people who lived

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in Scarborough townhouses, not far from Grace Hospital, right in front of the two high risers with manicured lawns and numerous security cameras that look for possible infiltrators from dusk to dawn. Among the people who lived in these townhouses was a woman who had born Dan’s son.

In time, I had come to question my hope that a man like Dan might actually know how to love a woman like me, a woman who had blossomed from a little girl who had been taken away from her home by the Azure shores of Italy. And, how could I live with this man whose world was a place that I would never understand? Still, I was hopeful that sooner or later, he would come to understand the value of life in this new land. After all, America was the place where all strangers were welcome to join this beautiful humanity.

And I, the naive woman that I was then, thought that if I accepted and loved this solitary stranger, he would come to learn and share with me the joys and simple pleasures of life. Certainly, in this new land far away from his remote, sunny world, I believed that someone like me could change him.

To be honest, I do not think Dan had prepared to make my life a living hell, even as he had walked around with a kind of island bop and bravado that attracted both praise and scorn from the guys in the neighborhood. The guys who were too chicken to challenge him and the women like me who thought that we could come to tame and claim him as our own.

In my mind, Dan Matthew had come to see this new city, as a no-man’s land. Any attempt to claim that I owned him, he resented. He thought it as an attempt to tell him how to live his life in this country miles away from his home. Little did I know, he was just another unknown, peeping at the door. He moved in and out from house to house, from one table to another, from one warm bed to another one.

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Over The Spiked Picket Fence

Wherever he could find a woman willing to keep a clean bed and cook a good hot meal, he would stay for a while.

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Chapter 2

Dan

It was strange, my constant, undefined and untamed emotion that I could not put a name to, but it was now at its most intense, and I would be overwhelmed with the feelings of excitement that threatened to suffocate me, beginning deep down in my pelvis. There was always a strange feeling that something within me was not quite right, that something was festering deep down in my heart waiting to come rushing to the surface and explode.

It was this feeling that had come rushing over me as I had stood in an empty spot not far from the church on the hill. It was the one with the high steeple, the bell-house and the cross across from the hillside cemetery. I had longed to be up and away from this quiet one-horse town with its one main street of simmering tar in the middle of the valley. I had always felt that this old man river would one day come rushing in during the dead of night to reclaim the basin that was his.

Everybody called me Dan. I was a kind of a pilgrim, travelling to and fro across the village and beyond, all over this green and fertile land of cane-piece, banana-plots and back-yard yam-hills, charting my own rite-of-passage, scoffing at any feelings of despair and anything that would block my passage out of this dead-end town.

I leaned upon the lamp pole on which perched the long-neck-garlins, by the

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quiet street scattered with shady poinsettia trees bursting with bright red and orange bloom. I knew then that I would have had to get away from this valley of my childhood. This place was a rolling-calf in the dead of night when its chains clanked to the beat of the restless spirits coming down from Cemetery. These spirits would call out from their groves for the weary and lonely to come join them in the place of eternal rest. Come home, come home – ye who are weary come home – Good night- good night –good night.

I was determined to run far away from this place, to turn my back for good on the stories of my father, Mr. Selwyn Green, a man whom I had heard about through the whisper of the old men in the bar with the juke-box by the corner at the foot of sleepy Shelly- Hill across from Cemetery Corner. What a great place to tell tales, looking over at the yard with the mango tree, and the goats and donkeys feasting upon the shrubs growing over the bones of the dead.

They said that I was a bastard, that people were unsure about who my father really was, that a boy like me would most likely amount to nothing, just like my rumored worthless father before me. Speaking for myself, I had known no love that I could see from my foster mother who had only seemed to care about the few paltry government dollars delivered to the post office every month-end by the red Royal Mail van as it limped into town along the hot and dusty road, a pittance from the government for my care. The money was for flour, mixed-meal, rice, cod-fish, sugar and such-de-like.

And now here I was standing in this new great white city of dreams with its shimmering yellow lights, I Dan, happened upon the fair and the beautiful. I was here, the new man in hog-town, the city of endless dream, the country-man that I was, I had to take my chances. Instinctively I really wanted to touch her smooth