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Submitted By Derby Duncan

My family emigrated to Canada when I was a boy. We settled in a little town that was still only half-developed. I walked several miles to school every day and passed the farms and orchards of dirt-poor rural families who hadn’t yet sold their land to building companies. On the street corner opposite the modern apartment building where we lived, stood an old house and a ramshackle timber barn. The latter structure had so many holes in its walls that the neighbourhood kids were perpetually tempted to sneak inside and take a look around.

One day, at the urging of my sister and some of the neighbourhood kids, I did just that - I didn’t think that there was any harm in taking a look-see; after all, the house and barn both looked deserted, run down and unoccupied. But, barely seconds after I’d wriggled through a jagged hole in one of the barn’s timber sides and rose to stand on its hard-packed earth floor, I was seized by an irate, red-haired, freckle-faced teenager and thrown out. In the few seconds I spent inside, I saw horse collars, reins, bridles and saddles hung on the walls - all lovingly tended; all the leather parts highly burnished; all the metal parts gleamingly polished. There were no horses, though; they must have gone the same way as the land once attached to those two lonely, dilapidated buildings. I exited quickly through the same gap. My sister and the others were waiting outside - spooked enough to think about running away, but rooted to the spot by the amusing prospect of seeing my backside kicked. Even though it had been her idea for me to go exploring inside the building in the first place, my sister sneered in mock outrage and declared that she would be telling our Father about my misbehaviour at the earliest possible opportunity. She did just that.

Our Father was a cop and a domestic tyrant of the worst sort. When he was drunk (which seemed to be his natural state), he beat our Mother. He’d hit her for any damn reason that entered his head - real or imagined. Since his uniform gave him a license to drink and drive and he didn’t like being at home with his family very much, he’d generally start boozing at the end of his shifts; by the time he returned to our apartment, he’d be tanked up, belligerent and ready to impose his authority on the slightest pretext.

To us kids he was like God - all powerful, completely unreasonable and totally unpredictable. Like God, he ruled by terror and violence; I can’t recall a single instance when he ever sat down and talked to me; he just lashed out - usually with the buckle end of his belt. The really scary thing is that we didn’t know anything else - he had to be right because he was our Father. If you’ve ever wondered how or why the Israelites were persuaded to follow (and love) a deity who constantly abused, tortured and humiliated them, it’s probably because you had a decent, logical upbringing at the hands of caring, sympathetic parents. Our Mother was as much of a victim of the Father-God as I was; but I’d be dishonest if I didn’t admit that she soon picked up his violent habits. I spent a lot of my childhood being beaten by one of both of my parents - mostly for things that I hadn’t done. My sister never hesitated to lie, cheat, steal and then pass the blame on to her younger brother. I’d usually get beaten twice over - once for whatever it was that my sister had done and then a second time for daring to tell them that she was responsible.

As I recall, I was beaten for ‘burglarising’ that barn too. Our Father had robustly physical ideas about law enforcement. When he was beating me, he often used to say that I ought to be grateful that he wasn’t killing me - a fate that some of the criminals who fell into his hands only narrowly avoided. After he’d broken several night-sticks (and even ruined a couple of big, heavy duty steel flashlights) on the heads of people who ‘resisted arrest’, he was issued with a huge, spring-loaded riot baton. Two days later, he returned it - buckled and bent - and asked for a replacement.

One day he tangled with a bunch of convicts who’d escaped from a penitentiary. They tried to steal his car and he slugged it out with them - knowing that they’d leave the scene with a vehicle and several weapons if they got past him. They busted him up badly (one of them had a steel bar), but he managed to leave all of them in a heap on the ground. He had a fractured skull and lots of broken bones; it would be many months before he healed. Later on his partner’s body was found in a nearby alley - one of the convicts had bashed his brains out. He got nothing to show for his hurts apart from a commendation. It turned out that most of the escapees had been members of an organised crime family. Their criminal confederates figured that they would have got clean away if one cop had not interfered...they put out a contract on all our family. We were to be a prime example to anybody else who upset ‘the mob’.

For a while we tried to live a normal life. But it is difficult to pretend that everything is ‘normal’ when you are being taken to school in a police car and a cop is standing at the classroom door. My sister added to the pressure on a couple of occasions; she slipped away from school and hid in order to make everybody think that she’d been abducted. As usual, despite frightening everybody and sending half the cops in town on a wild goose chase, she suffered nothing more punishing than to be sat on our Father’s knee whilst he droned on about ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’. The sad fact is that my sister was (and is) mentally disturbed. I could fill a small book with examples of her abnormal behaviour - yet, like the rest of the family, I spent years covering up her anti-social behaviour; I lied for her, I even risked jail for her. But, like most psychopaths, she has a short memory and has never hesitated to stab me in the back at every opportunity.

Eventually, it all became too much and changes had to be made. I was packed off to a succession of different boarding schools. Some of those places thought they were pretty tough - the kind of institutions where they spout a lot about building ‘character’ in young men (i.e. treating them like the lowest form of slime for several years). But after my old man’s viciously unsubtle ways, they contained nothing that could scare, frighten or impress me. Three of the schools were self-styled military academies; I broke all of their rules too. They threatened to expel me; I told them go ahead and kick me out. One cadet sergeant (he must have been all of 12 years old) was so upset by my gleeful violation of every code and tradition they held sacred that he foolishly tried to appeal to my ‘honour’. I laughed so hard, I nearly threw up; then I hit him in the gut so hard that I felt my knuckles touch his backbone. That achieved the desired result; I was thrown out and on my way to an even less fascinating school.

So it came about that I ended up in the middle of nowhere - at a military school located in the Timber Country. There in the Great North Woods, the instructors tried to turn boys into men; they figured that they were a pretty kick-ass bunch - but they’d never met anybody quite like me. Every new kid was supposed to run everywhere at double-time during his first year - it was one of the many bullshit rules that they’d borrowed from better academies. Naturally, I made a point of walking at a tauntingly slow pace. They sent a group of us out on an exercise; we were dropped miles away and told to find out way back to the school with a map and a compass. I used my initiative; I walked to what passed as the highway in those parts and thumbed a ride with a an old Indian in a battered pickup truck. To the unspeakable anger of the instructors, I was fast asleep in my own bed even before they’d finished dumping kids in the woods.

My second map-reading exercise didn’t go quite as well. This time they made damn sure to desert me in a place so remote that they figured I’d have no choice but to march back under my own steam like a good little soldier. Of course, that would have been too easy for them, so I decided that I’d camp out and return to the school in my own good time. I’d brought plenty of food and (despite feigning a lordly disinterest) nobody had learned more than me at all the survival and woodcraft lessons I’d been through in all those different schools. So I wasn’t the least bit unhappy when the instructors waved goodbye and left me standing in the middle of a clearing. Before nightfall I’d build a hidden shelter and made a textbook safe campfire that would have delighted Smokey The Bear himself. For a couple of days, I was snug, smug and happy; the knowledge that the instructors would soon stop thinking that they’d outsmarted me and start worrying about my safety brought a smile to my face. I figured that it would take two or three days before they got good and scared; I was prepared to lie low in the woods and make them sweat. If they panicked and told my parents that their only son was lost in the wilderness, so much the better - though I didn’t think honestly for a moment that my loveless family would be very broken up over my disappearance.

On Day Three the weather changed. A freak storm hit the woods; gale force winds, snow, ice - you name it - everything bad and nasty fell on my campsite and buried it. My shelter was blasted away; everything turned white; the forest floor disappeared under a deep, freezing carpet of snow. Even the trees were coated in that vile white crap too. I was dressed for Autumn and I knew that I had to get back to the school quickly or else I’d freeze to death.

I started to walk. I was bitterly cold. I knew all about hypothermia; the condition was a standard part of the survival lessons taught even in city schools. The Native Americans have a name for it; I can’t pronounce it (much less spell it) - but it translates as ‘The Sly, Cowardly Death’ - that’s because it sneaks up on you, really crafty-like and it doesn’t seem at all threatening. Once you’ve got so cold that you can’t feel any colder, your metabolism begins to slow down; all your blood retreats to your centre, your hands and feet become so numb that you’re no longer sure if they are still attached. You walk on dead stumps instead of legs; your brain is gradually deprived of blood and oxygen. After a while, simply because you can’t feel things getting any worse, you sort of accept what’s happening to you; it isn’t scary, sooner or later it stops even being a worry. Yes, I’d paid great attention at those survival lessons. I remembered how hypothermic people got tired and figured that they could take a rest; how they’d sit down, make themselves comfortable and give in to the temptation to sleep. They’d go to sleep and never wake up again. Even though I knew all that stuff and I knew that exactly the same thing was happening to me, I didn’t care. I was just past caring.

There came a time when I sat down in the snow; I leaned my back against a tree and decided to take a nap. I was fully aware of what was going to happen to me; but my brain was just a lump of ice by then and death didn’t seem such a bad thing after all. I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

Suddenly, I was awake. Somebody - somebody incredibly strong - took me by the arm and effortlessly pulled me to my feet. Close to my ear I heard a voice. It was the most commanding and yet the most compassionate voice I had ever heard in my entire life. “No” it said “not now, it isn’t your time yet”. The frost began to leave my body; first my fingers and toes came to life then, by degrees, the rest of me threw off the ghastly, numbing cold. I was still exhausted and my mind was unequal to the task of placing one foot in front of the other, but it didn’t matter any more because my unknown friend was supporting me; “come with me” he said. I remember long hours of walking; sometimes I’d look upwards and see the dirty grey sky through a complicated latticework of arching, whitened tree branches. Every time I thought I was going to fall; every time I thought I would stumble and roll through the snow forever, my guide would reassure me with his powerful grip. At some stage I began to drift in and out of consciousness; yet somehow I was kept moving. I don’t remember reaching the school. I woke up in a bed in the infirmary; one of the instructors gave me a cup of wonderfully hot coffee; he smiled and told me that I was going to be one hell of a soldier when I grew up - I’d walked through the worst storm in fifty years (he said) and I hadn’t even caught a nip of frostbite.

I shook my head and reminded him that I’d only got back alive because somebody - one of the instructors? - had virtually carried me for miles. The expression on his face told me that he didn’t have a clue about what I was recounting. So I told him the whole story - just as I’ve told it to you - afterwards, he stuck his hands in his pockets, suddenly awkward and forced to choose his words carefully. He said: “Son, you came back alone. They found you just outside the main gate; you were unconscious and completely trashed...” I tried to butt in, but he shushed me “...there was only one set of footprints in the snow...and they were yours”.

To this day I am not sure who (or what) saved my life that night. Some who have heard this story are convinced that a higher power saw fit to spare me; others suggest that, even though I was already half-dead, a part of me which refused to die took control and did just enough to ensure my survival. I honestly don’t pretend to know the right answer.

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