A Pair of Shoes

“I thought you might like to have these.”

My mother handed me a small battered box - obviously an old one - with ‘Ganong’s Chocolates, one half pound’ printed on the yellowing surface. I slipped off the top. Tucked inside there was a tiny pair of scuffed leather shoes. I felt a sudden shock of recognition tinged with grief.

“Are these Murray’s shoes?” But I knew that they were.

I didn’t hear the story until I was in my teenage years. Then I heard it from my aunt Mame, not from my mother who chose the name I carry.

It was a hot day in the summer of 1914, one of those days when the fields buzz and the air is so full of humidity and shimmering heat that it distorts vision. My grandfather was digging a well - so that they wouldn’t have to carry water from the brook, so that they could drop a bucket to the water in the dead of winter without chopping a hole in the ice. It was as close to a luxury as they would have in their newly-built home, an easy source of water for the growing family. Gram was carrying her fourth child, Mame was six years old, Fred was four and Murray was only two.

They used dynamite to loosen the ledge. With pick and shovel they would scrape away as much as they could, then bore a hole with a steel rod and a maul and set another charge. Old mattresses soaked with water were heaved into the crater to keep the rock from flying like shrapnel. It was dangerous work.

Grandfather’s younger brothers worked with him and they were warned again and again to take care. Gram was increasingly nervous about the men climbing into the deepening hole and about the little ones who needed continual distraction from the work they were drawn to by their curiosity and excitement. They all did their best to keep the children well out of harm’s way - and they thought they had.

Before each blast: “Where are the children?” And when they were sure that everyone was at a safe distance: “OK. Let ‘er go.” WHUMP! The blast added to the heat of the day.

At supper time my great grandfather carried Murray into the house and said, “I am afraid you have a sick little boy on your hands.” At first, they thought he was simply exhausted, overexcited and played out. But his fever was sky-high. He went into convulsions. It was sunstroke.

They lost him.

After Mame told me about that terrible day my name felt, for the first time, as if it had some substance and meaning. My mother had not yet been born when Murray died, but she was to learn of this grief and feel its weight. Over thirty years later she named me after him as an offering of consolation to her mother.

We bought the old place from Uncle Nels in 1981. One of the first things I did was clean out the well. I borrowed a sump pump, ran several hundred feet of extension cord from a neighbour’s place and pumped it dry. I climbed down, nervous at first about the stability of the field rocks lining the sides, but they had been expertly placed. There was broken glass and some old metal at the bottom and a few inches of silt that had built up over the years. I scooped it up and lifted it out by the pail-full. We let it fill again, shocked it with Javex, splashed the water over the rocks and pumped it out a couple more times. It has been fine ever since.

One day during the first summer we spent there, I was walking down towards the house from the back hill. I was full of the smell of the fields and of gratitude for our new place when I thought of Murray. The thought was more in my vitals than in my mind and it stopped me. It was as if he had suddenly entered me. I looked at the new well-house I had just finished and marvelled at the turn of fate - or of providence - that had led me here to live the life that my namesake didn’t get to live.

The little box is in my closet. I keep it on a shelf along with my t-shirts so that I see it regularly. I take the shoes out from time to time and think how the meaning they carry would be lost on anyone who didn’t know the story - like an old photo with no history attached.

Mame found them in my grandmother’s trunk after she died. Eventually she gave them to my mother. They both knew immediately, as I did, where they had come from. Now they have come full circle. I don’t feel I need to pass them on to anyone else. But I will keep them as a reminder of what a gift it is just to be here.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I wrote that account over twenty years ago.

In retelling it, I again feel the grief that my grandmother carried for her whole life. Since writing it, I have learned of another dimension of her grief that I had not known at the time so did not include in my telling. Because she was pregnant and because they feared her little boy had some sickness that might infect the child in her womb, she was kept from the room as Murray died.

In May of this year, news broke that two hundred and fifteen unmarked graves had been found in Kamloops, British Columbia, on the site of a residential school. Children had been buried there, children who had been forcefully taken from their homes, whose parents had been kept from visiting them, whose mothers knew nothing of their deaths. It was the first of many such discoveries.

My grandmother’s grief, as deeply felt as it must have been, pales in comparison to the unacknowledged and unfathomable grief of the mothers of those children and their communities.

Shortly after that discovery in Kamloops, children’s shoes were placed on the steps of the BC legislature, an act of remembrance repeated here and there across the country. Because of this bit of personal history, the act seemed especially appropriate and all the more heart-wrenching. So I have taken Murray’s shoes out of my closet and made my own memorial. I added a bit of orange ribbon and an eagle feather that floated to the water as I paddled in one of my favourite places on the Nashwaak. They hang at the booth I have at the market, largely unnoticed, but heavy with meaning for me.

I took the photo of the shoes last Saturday. This morning I drove over to the Cameron Hill Cemetery, not far from the old place my grandfather built, to take another photo that I felt was needed to complete this story.

The grave markers for my maternal grandparents and my namesake.