With Faith and Joy in the Land of the Giant Maple Leaf

By Celia Crotteau

In 1966, Alice Mucklehausen moved with her family to a small town where she found herself the new girl in her seventh grade class and, as an American, experienced the coupled hospitality and hostility greeting those from south of the border the Canadian border, that is. Half a century later, prodded by an insistent Memory, Alice reviews those poignant and often comedic days of adolescent despair and immigrant angst and reconsiders her role in the relationships and events that transpired.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503584488

Celia Crotteau

A Biblical scholar and educator, Celia Crotteau's fascination with women's roles in ancient civilizations has inspired her to imagine how certain Old Testament heroines might have told their own stories. In earlier novels she gave voices to the prophet Hosea's wife Gomer and Ruth's sister Orpah. Now, in her sixth book of historical fiction, she does so with Jephthah's daughter. Celia has also published award winning essays, poetry, short stories, and textbooks and has taught literature, history, and writing to students from sixth grade through college level.

Book preview

Chapter 1

I, who weep at the spider’s demise in Charlotte’s Web and make regular hefty contributions to local animal shelters, was not always so tenderhearted. Once there was a young girl who watched the spectacle of death with unblinking acceptance and did not suffer in her dreams. What, I now wonder, happened to that girl? Where did she go?

I close my eyes and travel back all those years, to glimpse the ghost of both who she was and would become. She is half-formed, spectral, but the memories of her sensations and emotions emerge more colorful and palpable, more poignant, than they ever were in life. Memories are like that, you know. We carve them as we wish them to be, not as they were.

In Spain, in 1966, spring was feria time, and ferias meant bullfights, or, to those of us in the know, corridas. On sunny weekend afternoons we aficionados crowded onto local buses, to be transported to the center of the city and the bullring. Being seated on buses was not required in those days. We often stood in the aisles, swaying with the bus’s jerky accelerations and sudden stops, sandwiched in jubilant and noisy togetherness. I stood with my face pressed against my mother’s shoulder, inhaling her powdery softness, nervously shifting my buttocks away from the groping hands of the sweaty man behind me. Beside him my father, his head turned while he conversed in broken Spanish with another reveler, was oblivious to my torment. I twisted and turned till my mother demanded sharply that I be still and stop treading on her new shoes. For the rest of the ride I submitted sullenly to the stranger’s stealthy probing. My little brother Tim watched with interest.

From the bus stop we walked several blocks through a raucous crowd to the bullring. I am sure that memories lie, but I recall all the women as beautiful in their lacy mantillas and the men, with the exception of the stranger on the bus, as handsome and dignified. Did drunks vomit into the gutters or grimy gypsy children whine shrilly for pesetas? Not that I remember. In my mind’s eye I glide down the boulevard, my pink cotton skirt swirling around my skinny knees, feeling graceful and desirable, my recent molestation conveniently forgotten. My family trails in my wake.

At the bullring we rented cushions to protect our backsides from the hard concrete seats and squinted into the harsh sunlight as we scanned the amphitheater for friends and my father’s business associates. Often tourists, German, Scandinavian, or English, and sometimes even American, sat beside or below us, obvious in their Bermuda shorts and sneakers, loaded down with cameras and Spanish language books I looked askance at and did not claim them as mine.

To Tim also they appeared incongruous, creatures from another planet, with their pink, perspiring faces and unabashed questions and comparisons to their own lives back wherever.

Say, Betty, don’t this remind you of the football stadium at the university?

Naw, Howard, that’s much bigger than this place. And the stadium’s filled with grass, not sand.

Gosh, I sure would like a hot dog with all the fixin’s right about now. What I wouldn’t give for one! The people here are friendly as can be, but I don’t care much for the food. Give me a hot dog any day!

"Son idiotas," Tim whispered to me.

Aware of the similarities between the Spanish and English words and apprehensive that the strangers would interpret his remark, I stared straight ahead, pretending not to know the tow-headed little boy next to me.

Soon the toreros processed into the ring, and I forgot the strange foreigners as I gazed at the slim men in their tight fitting suits of lights who strutted so haughtily before me. I avoided glancing at where their pants melded to their thighs, but I was acutely aware of those slight bulges and felt a strange restlessness that was the awakening of an innocent’s lust. Oh, those men! They were sure enough of their manhood that they dared parade in pink tights and ballet slippers. I have seen the greats perform: Diego Puerta, Paco Camino, Antonio Ordonez whom Hemingway lauded, Romany Curro Romero, and the upstart El Cordobes. I applauded and cheered and did not know that in a few short months those names would mean nothing to Canadian seventh graders who thought my ignorance of ice hockey odd and totally unacceptable.

There was blood, and there was torture, and now I find it difficult to explain how unaffected I was. The bull was usually black and bulky and also possessed of a bulge between his legs that I assiduously avoided studying but of which I was conscious. Instead, I studied the muscular bulge on his neck, which the picador lanced and the torero’s helpers pierced and the torero sighted as he moved in for the kill. The bull snorted as he slowly crumpled to his knees, the sword hilt protruding from his neck, blood seeping slowly down his dark coat to the white sand of the ring, his red-rimmed eyes blinking in bewilderment as he died.

Often I would hear a whispered I feel sick. Let’s get outta here and turn to find the camera laden, wiener craving vacationers gone, in search of, I assumed, public toilets up to their standards for barfing into or, when they recovered, sausages that reminded them of the food they so sorely missed.

Had they waited, they might have learned of a link between those sausages and the, to them, obscene oddity they had witnessed.

For, if the dance between man and beast had been graceful and the kill clean, body parts were awarded to the victor: one ear, or two, and sometimes a tail. The torero slowly circled the ring, his grisly trophies borne aloft, speckles of bright red blood spotting the richly colored silk and gold brocade of his suit. He often tossed his prizes to a beautiful woman in the stands. Once I made eye contact with a young and languid Paco Camino. I tossed my dirty blonde braid over my shoulder and gave what I hoped was a provocative smile A second later a ragged bloody ear landed in my lap, smearing my pink skirt with rusty clots. Both flattered and repulsed, I stared down, dumbstruck.

No, said my mother firmly, you are only twelve. That was not meant for you.

She plucked the ear from my lap and passed it to the heavily made up teenager above me. The German woman sitting beside her paled.

It is mine! I cried hotly. He threw it to me!

Aw, Mom! Tim, excited about the prospect of carting home an actual bull’s ear to scrutinize, for once sided with me.

My father said nothing and, as usual, my mother prevailed. My cheeks burned, but my thoughts soon turned to the prospect of the long bus ride home and the possibility, no, the probability, of another groping stranger.

No one stayed to watch the dead bull dragged from the ring. His huge carcass was dismantled and hung, raw and dotted with flies, from hooks in butcher shops the next morning. And some of the bloody meat, ground and spiced, was cased in sheaths to make plump, succulent sausages that surpassed any hot dog I ever tasted.

But what, I wonder, happened to the girl?

Unbidden, a skeletal finger reaches over my shoulder and taps on the keyboard letters that morph into words on the computer screen: CHARLATAN! YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED! SO – TELL US!

I sigh and surrender.

All right. I’ll tell you.

The finger, suspended in midair, lifts in warning.

MIND YOU, NO LIES. WE WANT THE TRUTH. THAT GIRL WAS NO PRINCESS. HER FOREHEAD WAS PERIODICALLY RIDDLED WITH PIMPLES AND SHE TRIPPED OVER HER OWN FEET. AND YOU ARE HARDLY COMPLIMENTARY ABOUT THE GIRLS’S BROTHER. HE CAN’T HAVE BEEN THAT BAD.

As I watch, the finger shimmers and, twisting and turning, transforms from a single digit into a wet, wiggly tentacle, one of many emanating from a ghostly blob, a huge octopus of unspoken hopes and dreams dashed.

I nibble my upper lip. This may turn out more complicated than I already fear.

WELL? WE’RE WAITING!

I don’t yet know how the little brother figures into all of this. He led his own life even then. He fit in immediately. As for the girl, yes, I’ll admit she was no beauty. But she was bright and eager to please.

SHE WAS STUBBORN AND JUDGMENTAL.

So was Susan, I retort.

AH – SUSAN. WHAT BECAME OF HER?

I have no idea. I only know about the one girl. What follows is her – no, my – story. I – the girl – left the land of the blue-green sea that melded into the cloudless sky. Of dark purple and deep red flowers dripping down white-washed walls like colored tears—

COME ON, YOU’RE DWADDLING. GET ON WITH IT.

This is painful.

NOW!

Yes, yes. Well, in 1966, that fall after the feria, we moved once again. And not back to the U.S. No, this move was crueler. Occasional car trips that winter to a discount clothing store in a dismal strip mall took us on a road winding along a flat, sandy shoreline. From the passenger window I could look across an icy iron gray river to a stretch of land which, though unfamiliar, my mother pointed out as our country. I liked to think I would have encountered immediate and comfortable acceptance there. Instead, I found myself in a place where, though I spoke the same language and looked like most of the other awkward adolescents who gawked at me that first day on the school playground, I was the perennial outsider. I was American and they were Canadian, and this was a border province that gave them stomping rights.

SOME GOOD CAME OUT OF THIS EXPERIENCE. THOSE TWO.

Yes. Them.

FAITH AND JOY.

Her name was Jocelyn. Joy was a nickname.

DON’T NITPICK. YOU CALLED HER JOY.

I did. But here I am adamant: they were Faith and Joy, not faith and joy.

YOU’RE QUIBBLING.

No, think of the difference: two girls versus two virtues. I didn’t befriend faith and joy –

IT’S A SHAME YOU DIDN’T. YOU MIGHT HAVE BEEN BETTER OFF.

But I didn’t. No, what happened was that I spent a year with Faith and Joy there –

IN CANADA. YOU DESCRIBE SPAIN SO POETICALLY. SURELY CANADA HAD ITS OWN POSITIVE QUALITIES.

Well, Faith and Joy.

AND?

I liked the Canadian flag – a giant red maple leaf against a white background with large red rectangles on either side. Quite striking.

LET’S START WITH THAT THEN. YOU SPENT A YEAR WITH FAITH AND JOY (SMIRK: NOTE THE CAPITAL F AND J) IN THE LAND OF THE GIANT MAPLE LEAF.

Chapter 2

They took a correspondence course last year instead of going to school, did they? The principal sounded perplexed. He looked it, too, furrowing his forehead till I wondered how far in my fingers would reach if I dared stick them into those overlapping creases. He was a tall, thin man who, despite the autumnal snap in the outside air, wore a short-sleeved white shirt.

Not exactly a correspondence course, my mother responded.

Beside me Tim, one finger up his nose, slouched in his chair, humming tunelessly under his breath. He trusted the adults to eventually reach a decision regarding his future and tell him what to do, and when, and how. Until then he concentrated on his nasal contents. He pulled out his finger and inserted it tentatively into his mouth.

Surely there are schools in Spain, Mrs., er – The principal glanced down at the pile of papers on his desk.

Mucklehausen, my mother answered, Mrs. Mucklehausen. I detected a note of weary impatience in her voice. How often had well-meaning but dense strangers required an explanation of how she educated her offspring? Yes, Spain had schools, but the children didn’t speak the language when we moved there, and their father and I decided…