John Wayne

PART ONE: REVERIE

I’m sitting next to my dad in the passenger seat of his car. I can’t see above the dashboard to the windshield but can look out the passenger window. Maybe I’m five or six.

It’s a really hot southern Alberta summer day. The kind of day the locals say, “you can fry eggs on the sidewalk.” My dad is wearing his trademark Stetson—a beige felt cowboy hat he used to order by the half-dozen from my uncle’s hat store. They were made by Biltmore and were a cut above the average. Biltmore is out of business now, and my uncle is, too. He died many years ago. I never liked him much.

My dad has all the windows rolled down to get some breeze through the car as we drive along the highway. His left arm is half out of the car, resting on the driver’s window ledge. That arm is more deeply tanned than his right one. It’s marked off from the rest of his white body at his shirt’s short sleeve line from day and days of driving just like this: a farmer’s tan line.

He’s humming a song as we drive along. I curl up beside him. We rarely speak. Just drive along all day, stopping at one farm, then driving some more and stopping at another one. These are all his farms, and he’s been up since five am doing his daily rounds: checking on all he owns. In summer, I’m allowed to go with him.

I feel the wet heat of the day and hear the slap, slap of grasshoppers hitting the bug screen attached to the front of the car. I can smell the manure coming off the fields. But nothing bothers me. I’m in bliss, feeling his presence and the strength of his body beside mine.

He is a kind man. Beneath his rough exterior and often brutal ways, there’s an undefended heart he dare not show anyone except this dependent child at his side. We are both happy now, content in each other’s silence and innocence.

Years later, he will become my hero and my greatest foe. We will be gladiators in the ring of power. Me fighting for autonomy against the guardian of the gate to freedom.

Years later still, we will be friends again. I am in his hospital room. He is hooked up to an intravenous drip. He struggles to remove the oxygen mask that sits, like a white bandage, on his face. Finally, he rips it off and I can see fear in his eyes.

“Dad,” I say quietly, bending my head closer to his ear so he can hear me, as I offer him a pen and the legal document that gives me control over his life and death. “Dad, I know how hard this is for you. If you can’t do it, it’s okay.”

He takes the pen and paper from my hands and I hold my breath. He hesitates for a moment, then slowly begins to scrawl his signature across the page. When he is finished, he looks at me, quietly studying my face. His eyes turn from a wild panic to calm.

We sit side by side again, the two of us—father and daughter. Content in each other’s silence and new innocence.

PART 2: SASKATCHEWAN

My father’s name was Harry. He had dark brown hair with a hint of curl where it fell onto the back of his neck. His light hazel eyes often looked more green than brown, except when he was mad. Then they would narrow to snake slits so you couldn’t really tell what colour they were.

He was a formidable athlete in his youth. He liked to run, and he was FAST, faster than anyone else around in those parts. But what really set him apart from other people was his drive. He was a competitor, fueled by the insatiable drive to win—to win honourably, mind you, but to win nonetheless. Winning was everything to him. When there was nothing to compete against, he created his own challenges: occasionally playing professional football, boxing a heavyweight champion, wrestling alligators in Florida, winning a sugar-cane cutting contest against the mayor of Havana, Cuba—even beating a quarter-horse in a race. That last event got him onto the cover of Time Magazine. He told the reporter in this interview: “I like to win; I like to beat everyone. It gives me a purpose in life and without a purpose, life has no meaning.”

He was born a Jew at the turn of the 20th century on a farm on a tiny speck of earth in rural Saskatchewan, one of the poorest provinces in Canada. His parents had fled the violence of the pogroms of eastern Europe. They settled in a small community that had been populated by hardy European immigrants in the late 1800s—all of them refugees, too, not from war and anti-Semitism, but from poverty and feudal caste systems. These were communities of Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians, but in their escape to a better life for themselves, they had brought with them their own historical cultural cruelties. To be a Jew in the early 1900s in these Saskatchewan communities was to be labeled a “Christ killer,” a ritual drinker of Christian children’s blood, a pagan, a monster, a partner of the Devil.

Harry never forgot the first time he became aware that he was Jewish and therefore different. When he was in the early grades, he had noticed that he was not treated the same as others in his school but didn’t think much about it. He was a farmer’s son and a poor farmer at that, and he didn’t have expectations of rising in social circles. But by the time he was nine, he began to be aware of boys sniggering behind his back when he passed them in the school hall, and he even heard the words “dirty Jew” with more and more frequency.

One day in the middle of winter, he was walking home after school in the late afternoon. It was a five-mile walk along the main road, which had been covered in snow by a recent blizzard. He had almost reached the crossroads where he always turned off onto the narrower path that led to the farm when he saw a group of boys waiting there. As he got closer, he could make out they were five of his classmates. It struck him that something was strange about this gathering: these were town boys who lived in the opposite direction—not out here in the country.

As he was puzzling over that fact, he saw the five boys turn and, with a holler, start running towards him. He knew in his bones they meant no good. In the instant of time before the boys reached him, thoughts coursed through his brain. He knew he didn’t have many options. Under normal circumstances he could outrun them all, but these weren’t normal circumstance; this was deep winter, and the road was covered in heavy snow. Even if he got a head start, he could slip or stumble and they would be on top of him in a flash. At least if he stood his ground he would be upright with his feet firmly planted. Most important, he would be facing them.

For a moment, he thought about taking off his warm wool jacket and tossing it aside, so his arms would be free, but he rejected that idea in case he was left beaten up and lying in the cold. He could freeze to death in this weather. He had a sense that if he could keep the boys in front of him, he might be able to take them down one at a time, since he was stronger them any of them. If they spread out around him, though, he knew he would be in trouble. Instinctively, his fists came up ready to fight.

It was over before it really began. Running at full speed, the five boys didn’t bother to stop when they reached the spot where he stood. With one quick motion that had clearly been planned, they threw themselves at him like a hurtling cannonball, four boys targeting an arm or a leg while the biggest one aimed for his head. Harry fell backwards with a thud into the snow.

“You dirty Jew—we’re going to fix you this time,” he heard the big heavy guy saying over and over as he stood above him, his face red from the exertion. Harry could tell he was the ringleader. “Yeah, you and the rest of you kike bastards. We’re going to make an example of you no one will forget.”

My father would tell this story over and over, and when he got to this part, he always paused. His eyes would narrow into the familiar slits when he was mad, and his mouth would tighten. Then he would take a deep breath and go on, “Those bastards buried me in the snow with only my head uncovered. Afterwards they stood there, looking at me and laughing. When I saw them moving toward me, I thought they were going to kill me, but they walked right by. I could hear them digging a hole behind my head. Then I saw two of them dragging two boards that had been nailed together to make a crude cross. They planted that cross above my head, and I heard them put something on the cross. They started to laugh again and then walked away leaving me there. I would find out later that what they put on the cross was a cardboard sign with two words printed in big letters: “THE JEW.”

My father always paused at this point in the story too, whether overcome, by the memory, or for dramatic effect.

“I lay there for what seemed like hours as the sun sank in the horizon. I wondered if I would die out there—be found frozen to death,” he would say grimly, continuing the story.

He might have, too, if not for his father. My grandfather had gotten worried when Harry didn’t show up as usual to milk the cows and had started down the road to look for him. “My father found me all buried like that and knew that he had to get help. So he rushed back to the farm and rounded up some neighbours, and they hustled up a wagon, horses and shovels. It was dark when they got back, and I was unconscious by then, but they dug me out and carried him back to the house. They said my mother almost went out of her mind when they brought me through the door.”

Their small farm house didn’t have any running water or electricity. They only had a wood stove for cooking and heating.

“It took my family all night to boil water and wrap me in hot towels to bring me back to consciousness. I survived, but it would take many weeks before I could walk again.”

His parents did not go to the principal of the school. They did not go to the police or the parents of the boys who had attacked him.

“It will do no good,” his father said, much to Harry’s astonishment, when he insisted on seeking justice.

“The only justice out here, son, is in your fists,” his father told him, his voice angry and hard. “You must learn to fight. You must fight all the time—for yourself and for others—and you must always fight to win.” That message was branded onto Harry’s soul that night.

As the years went by, my father grew into a handsome man, tall and rugged and muscular in a western cowboy way. His body was powerful. You sensed its strength immediately. With his ten-gallon Stetson hat and hand-tooled cowboy boots, he became the John Wayne of Alberta: famous as a farmer, a rancher, a businessman, a philanthropist, a showman, and the iron-fisted mayor of a small city in Southern Alberta for 25 years, winning four terms by acclimation. He became famous for his fights as well, and once hit a man who called him a “dirty Jew” so hard he sent the man’s body clear over a parked car and into the hospital for a week. People either loved him or hated him.

In business, he became one of the richest men on the prairies, almost by accident. He wasn’t after money or status. It was the challenge that inspired him to amass thousands of acres in three different provinces on 18 different farms and ranches, raising the largest number of sheep and cattle in western Canada. And when that wasn’t enough for him, he became a captain of industry, too, buying failing factories, plants, and stores and turning them around to be successful. During World War II, by sheer will and grit, he rose to the rank of Lieutenant-colonel in the army.

I always thought of my father as a giant. As a little girl I looked up at this immense male form towering above me. That perspective lasted my whole life, even when his spine shrank a few inches in his eighties and his shoulders bent forward just a little, and the photos of him at the time reveal an average-looking man.

When he died, I gave a speech to over a thousand people who gathered at his memorial service, and I wrote the epitaph on his tombstone: “He was a legend in his own time.”