Three Brothers

Aug 13

Three Brothers

The Youngest

I never met the youngest brother but I think I would’ve liked him. Based on what little information I have, we seemed to share some things in common. He liked to drink more than he could handle and hang around the border between funny and insulting. He never punched down though. He knew the score. Sometimes his jokes would be perceived as clever by those around him and his charisma would shine through his inebriated state, yet other times, his slurred attempts at humour would cut a little too close to the bone and he’d find himself in hot water. I’ve also been told a few other tidbits but the details are scarce and at times, far fetched. Like the time he and my father bought a car for $50 and deliberately rolled it into a ditch solely for the adrenaline rush. Or the legendary tales involving his disregard for personal hygiene. Instead of changing his clothes, he’d simply layer a new set on top of the old. He’d go from the haymow directly to a dinner date, dress shirt and pants over top of straw covered overalls. I still haven’t figured that one out. Was it just laziness?

He was a wild man with unkempt hair, a wry smile, and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. That’s the enduring image I have, the only photo of him I ever saw. I wish I knew more than just a few less than flattering stories. I’m sure he was much more than a fleeting anecdote or two. We all are. He is a mythic figure in my mind who was tragically prevented from writing his own ending. All I have is my interpretation based on a faded outline, which is unfair to his memory.

He was my father’s best friend but he didn’t like to talk about him. Even when I asked, it would only be a sentence or two. Maybe it hurt too much. But the more you’re kept in the dark, the more you want to know. One day, after more prodding on my part, my mother showed me a yellowed newspaper cutting. It was a winter evening only two weeks before I was born. The setting was a dilapidated drinking hole in a forgotten town. One of his jokes didn’t land as intended. Or maybe it did. He was kicked in the head multiple times by an irate farm boy in cowboy boots and later died of his injuries. He was 33. A bittersweet pill for my father to swallow. A new child and a dead brother.

The Oldest

I have met the oldest brother and I hope to see him again. There’s a picture of us sitting on a stone wall somewhere in Southern Alberta. It’s 1986. I’m four and he’s in his forties. We are both flexing our biceps or lack thereof and posing for a mystery photographer. Our family was there on summer vacation. My mom and dad, myself, and my two siblings. My dad wanted to visit his brother and the rest of us had never seen the mountains. My uncle showed us around his adopted home province. We saw the dinosaurs in Drumheller, the grain elevators that dot Alberta’s vast farmland, and the natural gas fields of Medicine Hat that Rudyard Kipling famously referred to as, “all hell for a basement.” He even gave me the rattle off a Prairie Rattlesnake as a souvenir. I still have it.

He first travelled west when he was 17. He left Ontario on his motorcycle without telling anyone and ended up working as a hired hand on a farm in Saskatchewan. He was employed there for seven years before he finally called home to tell his parents where he was. They thought he was dead. He came back east briefly before leaving again to settle permanently in Alberta.

I saw him again when I was 19. This time I was the lost soul who found myself in The Prairie provinces. I thought I’d drop in and say hello to a kindred spirit. I found him and my aunt on a gravel road that was too remote to be mapped. I drove out to the general vicinity and asked the proprietor of a gas station if he knew my uncle. To my surprise he did, and gave me directions. He was still a hired hand. We drank coffee, ate Dutch almond cookies, and watched The National on the CBC every night I was there. He told a lot of stories in a slow, deliberate manner and then he drove me around his employer's farm in a beat up pickup truck. It was a slice of another time and I quite enjoyed it. He’s still out there on that unmarked piece of land, away from the insanity of the modern world. I salute his commitment to solitude.

The Middle

The middle brother was my dad. He had the same independent streak and attraction to solitude possessed by his older brother, while displaying the same inclination toward daring and reckless behaviour as his younger brother, but he also had something that set him apart from his siblings; a strong conscience and a tendency toward traditional family values, perhaps driven by a fear of shame and/or a self-inflicted pressure to try and do right by his parents. If it were up to my dad, he would’ve wandered aimlessly his whole life, seeing as much of the world as possible, but that would’ve racked him with guilt. Instead, he found a middleground between these contrasting life trajectories. He chose marriage and fatherhood while also carving out as much time as possible for travel.

He did however take a few detours on the way to accepting this compromise. He, like his brother before him, travelled west as a young man, searching for something more than a formulaic existence. His car broke down in Winnipeg so he hitchhiked the rest of the way to the Pacific Ocean. I asked him why he didn’t stay in British Columbia and make a life there and he glibly responded that after staring at the ocean for a couple of hours, he had had his fill and was ready to come home. I suspect it was more complicated than that but dad held his cards close to his vest, especially in conversation with me. Maybe he thought I couldn’t handle the truth or maybe he was embarrassed of his reason for returning home.

Upon arriving back in Ontario after his dalliance with the west coast, he met my mom. Even after marriage and his first child, he was still looking for an escape hatch and dreaming of greener grass. When my sister was only a few months old, my folks, led by my father, decided to try their luck at a new life in Saskatchewan. He had a lifelong obsession with “Canada’s Breadbasket” that none of us ever quite understood. Was it the wide open spaces and sparse population of the province that attracted him? He was a solitary figure so that would make sense. Whatever the reason, he talked of his love for the place abstractly and often. They only stayed in the Prairies for three months, citing a lack of job opportunities, before it was back to Ontario where two more anchors were thrown down in the form of my brother and eventually, me. This would cement my father’s legacy as a family man and cut off at the knees his freedom to wander whenever he pleased. Taking the place of his nomadic tendencies were pre-planned vacations to kid friendly destinations and if he was lucky, he’d fit in something he enjoyed too such as a museum or a bookstore. A man caught between two competing paths, never able to fully embrace either one.

I think about the three brothers a lot. My two uncles and my father. The sense of kinship is obvious to me and I wish I could’ve forged a deeper relationship with all three. The problem is that deep, transparent relationships seem to be a foreign concept in our lineage. From my perspective, they all seemed to be enveloped by a melancholy that prevented them from expressing themselves fully. This melancholy manifested in different ways for each of them. For the oldest, there was an urge to run from humanity and build a quiet life away from the noise. For the youngest, he attempted to deaden the sadness through drink and a wild lifestyle. For my father, he accepted his melancholic state stoically and tried to do what was expected of him, reluctantly of course.

I feel that I’ve gleaned something from each of them. A desire to be alone and removed from societal expectations from the oldest, an urge to escape my thoughts through drink and other mind altering substances from the youngest, and from my dad, an inner voice that advises me to keep my shit together and be a responsible adult. I haven’t leaned into any one of these influences exclusively. Instead, I’ve mixed all three together into a strange and confusing brew. I’ve become a solitary nomad and occasional substance abuser who manages to pay the bills and feed myself most days. Eccentric? Sure. Lacking ambition? At times. Immature? Definitely. Would I change anything? Probably, but that’s the conundrum we all find ourselves in. This isn’t some fairytale we author with a perfect narrative arc. It’s a struggle with intermittent highs and lows and a whole lot of mundaneness in between. If all this sounds a bit cynical or lacking in optimism, it does to me too, but my perspective is a work in progress and can change in short order. How I feel today is not how I’ll feel five years from now so I’ll carry on, unattached from my volatile thoughts while tipping my cap to the three brothers for exemplifying what a weird, beautiful, and sad ride this life can be.

#raisedbywhoops#storytellling#storytime

Andrew Couch

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