Almost a Great Escape Read online

  Almost a Great Escape

  Also by Tyler Trafford

  The Métis Girl

  Alexander’s Way

  The Story of Blue Eye

  Copyright ©2013 by Tyler Trafford.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by John Sweet.

  Cover and page design by Chris Tompkins.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Trafford, Tyler, 1949-

  Almost a great escape [electronic resource]: a found story / Tyler Trafford.

  Electronic monograph issued in PDF format.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-763-7

  1. Trafford, Alice — Correspondence. 2. Müller, Jens — Correspondence. 3. Trafford, Tyler, 1949- — Family. 4. Stalag Luft III. 5. Prisoner-of-war escapes — Poland — Żaga´n. 6. World War, 1939-1945 — Prisoners and prisons, German. 7. Mothers and sons. 8. Authors, Canadian (English) — 20th century — Biography. I. Title.

  PS8589.R335Z53 2013 C813’.54 C2012-906317-7

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Tourism, Heritage, and Culture.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  For Judy, Sharnee, and Nicolas

  “Please Alice remember that I’ll come back . . . ”

  Jens Müller.

  The Campbell’s Beef Noodle Soup Box

  The Jens Album

  63 Days

  Terms of an Engagement

  Consequences

  Destinations

  My Search for Jens Müller

  Acknowledgements

  ONE GOOD THING

  My mother’s name was Alice Tyler. The story of her One Good Thing begins at her funeral in April 2004 and ends 60 years earlier, in March 1944, when 76 World War II airmen break out of Stalag Luft III, the Nazi prison camp in Sagen, Poland. The Great Escape made into a Steve McQueen film: 73 recaptured, 50 executed. Only 3 made it home.

  In 1961, when I was 12, Alice knew something was going to happen to us that I wouldn’t understand. Instead of trying to explain it, she gave me one of her favourite books: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. I still have the book. It is a first edition, printed in 1952. It could be valuable today to collectors because Hemingway won a Pulitzer Prize with it — except our dog chewed a corner. It’s a small book, only 140 pages. I still read it whenever I feel small in a big world. I have read it hundreds of times.

  The plot is simple. An old Cuban fisherman named Santiago fishes alone, far out on the Gulf Stream where nobody else dares to go. There he hooks the biggest marlin he has ever seen: 18 feet long.

  For two days and nights the fish tows Santiago’s small skiff toward the floating horizon. The line rips through the calluses of Santiago’s already scarred hands. His admiration for the fish’s courage and endurance becomes love. The fish is the most noble experience of his life.

  Waiting for his return is Manolin, the boy the old man has been teaching to fish.

  On the third day, Santiago is able to pull the marlin close. He drives his harpoon into its heart. He still loves it after it is dead. Blood swirls into the current. The marlin is too long to load onto his skiff, so he ties it to the side. Then sharks attack. Santiago uses the last of his strength defending the marlin.

  He sails through the night and into the harbour. All the sharks have left him is a skeleton.

  In the morning Manolin finds Santiago asleep in his shack. He sees his teacher’s ripped hands and begins to cry. On his way to buy coffee for the old man he sees the remains of the marlin in the harbour. He begins to cry again.

  Alice told me I must be like Santiago and catch a truly big fish — The One Good Thing in my life. Never give up. Nothing else matters. Not even the sharks that come afterwards.

  She liked that expression, One Good Thing. We all have one, she would say. When life shows up with a package and your name is on it. Take it. Don’t hesitate. The opportunity will never come again.

  She told me this in so many ways that I knew it had a significance to her wrapped around something she kept hidden.

  I often wanted to ask her what the One Good Thing in her life had been. But how can a boy ask his mother what it is she won’t talk about?

  After I read the book again, I asked her what would have happened to Santiago if his fish had gotten away.

  She kissed me on the forehead. “A fisherman like Santiago keeps his truly big fish in his heart, whether he brings it to the shore or not. What or who we love never gets away. We fight the sharks forever to remember that love. Maybe one day you’ll write a book with that ending.”

  I was Manolin. My mother was Santiago. For twelve years she had been teaching me to be just like her.

  Then I was alone.

  MY GOODBYE MOTHER

  Alice gave me her name, Tyler. My older brother got my father’s name, Ted (Teddy).

  Alice taught me everything she considered important. She taught me how to care, how to laugh, and how to live my own life.

  She taught me to read from New Yorkers and novels. She taught me to ride a horse, swim, ski, and ignore people who said a boy couldn’t decide for himself.

  Because we were more like friends than mother/son, it wasn’t hard for me to see she kept something hidden that she would never talk about. Maybe she thought I would eventually figure it out for myself. Figuring things out for myself was an important part of being with Alice.

  People often said Alice was blue eyed blonde slim beautiful. I always said she was strong. She had the strongest soft hands of any person I would ever know. You couldn’t break her grip. She always held me safe.

  When I was six, I came home from my first day of school and told her I didn’t think I would learn anything there. She didn’t argue. A month later she introduced me to Mrs. Bilton, a grade three teacher who was willing to try me in her class. Mrs. Bilton divided her class into animal groups and pasted bluebirds, squirrels, and robins on their scribblers. She rewarded students with gold stars and pinned the best pages on the walls. I tore the bluebird off my scribbler and pulled my gold stars from the wall. The last time Alice ever came to my school was to persuade Mrs. Bilton that I would do fine as a group of one. She wanted me to be able to figure things out for myself. Mrs. Bilton said I was already doing that and I didn’t have to be a bluebird.

  If the snow was good, Alice took me out of school to go skiing. If the grass was green, we went riding. We considered report cards unimportant.

  Alice protected me from my father. And paid for it. He was a charming, loveless aristocrat — and a good liar — who liked to reach over and rap my knuckles with a soup spoon whenever I spilled food or wasn’t sitting up straight. He said he was teaching me British manners. I had to take the rap then, or the belt later. He expected gold stars from a lad of my possibilities. Alice changed the subject when she could.

  My father was not my mother’s One Good Thing. I couldn’t imagine he had one, and I wished my mother would tell me what hers was.

  Maybe she had missed her One Good Thing. Maybe she had waited too long. Maybe she had made a mistake. If that were true, I had figured out who the mistake w
as.

  I may have been only a lad — as my father used to call me in his British way — but I was old enough to see he didn’t like how close Alice and I were, the way we laughed at the same jokes, and how we disappeared into the mountains leaving him at home with the children and the nanny. He worked late those days. I was too young to know what that really meant.

  But I wasn’t too young to figure out he didn’t like my ignore you attitude when told what to do by him or by anybody else. I knew he didn’t like this and many other things about me. I didn’t know why it mattered to him what I did. As far as I could tell, what I did was none of his or anybody else’s business.

  When I was 13, my mother of summer horses and rivers didn’t want me to see the slow dying coming for her: alcoholism, breast cancer, polymyalgia, and an unfaithful, bullying husband.

  The day I was sent away to boarding school, she stood beside me on the railway platform in Calgary. It was a tearless farewell.

  I would never live at home again for more than a few months at a time. My five brothers and one sister would soon be strangers to me.

  I would never see the mother again who didn’t wave from the railway platform. I would remember her as My Goodbye Mother: the mother I once had.

  When the train brought me home for Christmas, Alice’s silent blue eyes told me there was no going back for us. As much as I didn’t want to, I would have to face life on my own. I would have to figure things out for myself, the way My Goodbye Mother had taught me. She had faith in me.

  She had 41 years of dying ahead. She expected I would find better things to do with my life than wait around for that.

  I took all the memories a boy’s heart could carry and buried them in silence. No words, no flowers, no crying. Just a flat grey stone rolled onto my forgetting place. I would always love My Goodbye Mother, but it got harder and harder to remember her. Finally I couldn’t remember I had a forgetting place.

  The Alice who replaced My Goodbye Mother lived drunk fighting and drugged in the upstairs bedroom. Radiation burned lungs connected by clear tubes to an oxygen machine. Pills, magazines, and books spilling from her bed and recliner onto the floor. My father slept in his study. I visited whenever I thought he would be out.

  Some days I would sit by her bed while she slept and wonder how this had happened. When I left, I would kiss her forehead. I expected she would know I had been there. On days when I visited Alice and she was awake, she’d pour a toothbrush glass of Smirnoff from a hidden bottle and light up a du Maurier. She enjoyed a cigarette with her oxygen, the mechanical bellows pulsing spurts of life support into her nostrils. Smoking was her shrugged shoulder acknowledgment of death, not its denial. Santiago knew the sharks would come. He didn’t argue the inevitable, but he made them pay for every bite of the marlin’s flesh.

  When she was drinking hard, Alice would hit any sharks nearby with embarrassing truths, or what she decided were truths. But in all her Smirnoff fights with my father, her children, and her few friends, she never used her own One Good Thing as a weapon. I never heard her step into a fight with “If only I had . . .” She was always a no going back person.

  Before she went to the hospital for the last time, she called me into her bedroom. “I’m leaving you something special,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said. I didn’t have any expectations. I didn’t ask any questions because I knew all she had left were/was good intentions.

  She named me the executor of her estate. Anything left after her funeral expenses would go to my father.

  Her six other children voted to host an extravagant send off. They didn’t know about a 13-year-old boy’s railway station goodbye. They wanted a McInnis and Holloway departure; prayers, hymns, and a glowing eulogy at Christ Church in Elbow Park; an all you can drink public reception at the Calgary Golf and Country Club with cascades of flowers, hot and cold hors d’oeuvres, and a private supper. First class exclusive and expensive. What I didn’t know then was that this funeral would be a repeat of a Westmount, Montreal, funeral: one she hadn’t attended. I didn’t know much about Alice’s Before Me life.

  I didn’t argue the family’s big spending vote. I believed My Goodbye Mother would have enjoyed the irony of a farewell Country Club bender for an alcoholic wife and mother. She appreciated irony.

  My father kept track of the funeral expenses, insisting anything over the cost of a basic cremation, church service, and burial of ashes be covered by her children, not by her estate. He was surprised but pleased to learn she had prepaid their Eden Brook Memorial Gardens burial plots. The savings meant I would be writing him a bigger cheque.

  I didn’t have a chance to think much about ashes to ashes until the half dark Christ Church funeral service began. I sat anonymously in a middle pew as my Anglican father and siblings paraded in from the vestry. They were a grieving family of front row strangers. I was a passerby. I had rolled a grey stone over my grieving. Alone. Long ago. Silent and tearless now.

  In front of me, the altar. The deceased’s photograph on an oak table in the aisle. Behind me, the baptistery. The congregation a pause between birth and death.

  A boy wearing a red flannel shirt patterned with gold horseshoes and silver lariats walks beside the pews, searching each one, then moving on. He stops and slides across the polished oak to my side. “I remember her,” he says, his back to the altar.

  He has happy hazel eyes and is unconcerned that he might be disturbing the service.

  He says: “I remember she woke me in the almost light, tugging the blankets from my shoulder. ‘We’re going riding,’ she whispered to me. ‘Let the others sleep. Get dressed and come to the corral. I’ll start saddling the horses.’”

  This imperturbable boy seems a memory found to me.

  “I was seven years old and used to disappearing with her,” he says. “She took me places where nobody else went. I liked her crazy strong go anywhere do anything daring. I liked her a lot.

  “We followed the Bow River west. When we stopped to rest the horses, she gave me a tinfoil wrapped breakfast of thick sliced toast with bacon and jam. The grass was wet with dew.

  “‘It’s a fuck of a life,’ she told me. ‘It’s a fuck of a life if you don’t live it your own way.’

  “I wasn’t old enough to answer, but I understood what she meant. I wished I had the words to tell her before it was too late.

  “At noon,” the boy continued, “we hobbled the horses in the sun flickering through silent spruce trees. She held my horse’s reins and drank vodka from a silver flask. I could feel her blue eyes watching me as I pulled apart a handful of bacon. She never ate when we went riding.

  “‘I’m going to do something for you,’ she said, pulling a spruce branch through her hands. ‘Unbutton your shirt.’ She rubbed the broken needles bleeding sap over my chest and back. ‘Remember the smell of alone. Remember who you are today.’

  “‘Never forget what I am showing you,’ she said, sprinkling baptismal drops of vodka burn onto my lips and tongue.

  “Then she gave me the reins to my horse. ‘Close your hands. Tight. Never let go of your horse. Never let go of who you are.’”

  The boy in the red flannel shirt pauses, then says, “One day you’ll remember the sun standing still. The horses grazing. You’ll remember the slur of the river. The silent shifting trees. The gentle touch of her hands.”

  He slides across the pew to the aisle and walks out of the church.

  The mourners picked up their folded funeral notes with photos of the deceased. I stood with them to sing the hymns. I knelt to pray. The ritual of compliance. Never easy for me.

  In my wandering thoughts, I am beside Alice’s bed. She wants something to look forward to, and I don’t mind being an accomplice to that forlorn expectation. Life after death. What did it matter?

  Some people, I tell her, believe you will be reunited with everybody you love after you pass over the ocean of death. I thought this vision had a satisfyingly vague ecumenical cloud
iness. She smiled and took a deep drag on her cigarette.

  “Maybe my father will be there. Maybe other people I loved will be there.”

  Who? I should have asked but didn’t. Those impassable blue eyes of hers could always stop a none of my business question before I dared to ask. I’m glad now I didn’t ask. What tragedy her too soon for me explanation would have been.

  There are many things it is better to find out on your own.

  During the reverend’s never speak ill of the dead eulogy, I heard muffled giggles from the office dressed women gossiping in the back pews. They knew the dirt on the family. Her drinking. His women. A man needs comfort when his wife turns to drink.

  I am cold on the church steps to kissing cheeks.

  Yes, she was brave fighting the cancer. Yes, her nicotine poisoned, radiation burned lungs barely kept her alive.

  And the polymyalgia?

  Yes, nobody deserves to suffer like that.

  How’s your father holding up?

  We ignore infidelity after funerals. Fine.

  It was easy. I didn’t feel a thing.

  Then the surprise whisper in my ear. “You are so much like her.” My mother’s friend. “G.” She turns down the steps while I wonder why.

  I expect some Country Club hand shakers would have been surprised to hear my inheritance was a Campbell’s Beef Noodle Soup Box of old letters and creased photos. The top criss-crossed closed. Sealed with tape. To be opened later. It didn’t look special to me. But, if you love an alcoholic, you can’t expect her to remember or live up to her promises, so this cardboard bequest couldn’t be a disappointment.

  The box reminded me of My Goodbye Mother’s many promises to get organized. I have to get back on track, she would say with good intentions as she tried lists, notes, diaries, filing cabinets, and manila envelopes. Systems didn’t work for her. When were you on track? I would ask, and she’d laugh and kiss me. You know, she said.

  She dashed off messages to herself spontaneously writing on whatever paper was handiest. At a new home show she saw an open desk with paper and envelopes laid out as if the owner were about to write a letter. She wrote one to My Dearest Alice and people wandering through the home always stopped to read it.