That dammed beaver, p.1
That Dammed Beaver, page 1
Formatting note:
In the electronic versions of this book blank pages that appear in the paperback have been removed.
THAT DAMMED BEAVER
CANADIAN HUMOUR LAUGHS AND GAFFS
THE EXILE BOOK OF ANTHOLOGY SERIES NUMBER FIFTEEN
SELECTED BY
BRUCE MEYER
Publishers of Singular Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Translation, Drama and Graphic Books
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
That dammed beaver : Canadian humour, laughs and gaffs /
selected by Bruce Meyer.
(The Exile book of anthology series; number fifteen)
Short stories.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55096-691-6 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-55096-692-3 (EPUB).-- ISBN 978-1-55096-693-0 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-55096-694-7 (PDF)
1. Humorous stories, Canadian (English). 2. Canadian wit and humor (English). 3. Canadian prose literature (English)--21st century. I. Meyer, Bruce, 1957-, editor II. Series: Exile book of anthology series ; no. 15
PS8323.H85T53 2017 C813'.010817 C2017-906150-X / C2017-906151-8
Copyrights are indicated in the Permissions pages.
Design and composition by Michael Callaghan.
Published by Exile Editions Ltd ~ www.ExileEditions.com
144483 Southgate Road 14 – GD, Holstein, Ontario, N0G 2A0
PDF, ePUB and MOBI versions by Melissa Campos Mendivil
Publication Copyright © Exile Editions, 2017. All rights reserved
We gratefully acknowledge, for their support toward our publishing activities, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Exile Editions eBooks are for personal use of the original buyer only. You may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the content of this eBook, in whole or in part, without the expressed written consent of the publisher; to do so is an infringement of the copyright and other intellectual property laws. Any inquiries regarding publication rights, translation rights, or film rights –or if you consider this version to be a pirated copy – please contact us via e-mail at: info@exileeditions.com
CONTENTS
PREFACE:
BEHIND THE BEAVER’S TEETH
Bruce Meyer
UNDELIVERED LETTERS HOME
FROM JUNIOR MIDSHIPMAN ARCHIBALD PONSONBY-CHOLMONDELEY, RECOVERED RECENTLY IN THE SEARCH FOR ADDITIONAL REMAINS OF THE FRANKLIN EXPEDITION
Bob Armstrong
AUGUST 7, 1921
Stephen Hayward
WHEN MONSTERS SMOKED
Joe Rosenblatt
SALOME WAS A DANCER
Margaret Atwood
CANADOLL
Myna Wallin
HOW THE OLD MAN DIED
Jacques Ferron
THE COW THAT SWAM LAKE ONTARIO
David McFadden
THE STORY OF WEASEL TOSSING
Gail Prussky
THAT CHAMIONSHIP SEASON
Marsha Boulton
KING LOG IN EXILE
Margaret Atwood
THE LESSON
Andrew Borkowski
THE CARNATION
Louise Maheux-Forcher
EATING AROUND THE HAIR: A LOVE STORY
Shannon Bramer
STRYCHNINE BLUES
James Dewar
CRITICS’ TAKE ON THE PREMIER SHOWING OF TANK’S DOCUMENTARY OF THE CLOSING EYE
Leon Rooke
DOUBLE DOUBLE AN’ CHOCOLATE GLAZED
Jamie Feldman
EVERLASTING LOVE
Claire Dé
TIMOROUS IN LOVE
Christine Miscione
THE PING-PONG AFFAIR
Larry Zolf
PSYCHE FROM HERE
Anne Dandurand
NARCISSISTIC EB AND UNLUCKY FLO
Leon Rooke
’TIL DEATH
Julie Roorda
THE CANADIAN ACCENT
Mark Paterson
QUEEN ELIZABETH VISITS THE ELKS BINGO HALL
Karen Lee White
LESSONS IN THE RAISING OF HOUSEHOLD OBJECTS
Helen Marshall
DOING RIGHT
Austin Clarke
REVULSION
Heather Wood
A PREDICAMENT
Morley Callaghan
GOODBYE, GOD
Marty Gervais
SAINT AUGUSTINE
Alexandre Amprimoz
THE DEAD COW IN THE CANYON
Jacques Ferron
TALMUD
Matt Shaw
IT’S NOT EASY BEING HALF-DIVINE
Margaret Atwood
CONSPIRACY
Priscila Uppal
THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
Darren Gluckman
I AM A SPECIAL BOOBY
Gail Prussky
THREE STRIKES AND YOU’RE OUT
Linda Rogers
PECULIAR PRACTICES IN ALBERTA (POSSIBLY RELATED TO THE OIL BOOM)
Leon Rooke
THE TOWER OF BABEL
Jonathan Goldstein
WILLARD AND KATE
Barry Callaghan
THE DAY I SAT DOWN WITH JESUS
ON THE SUN DECK AND A WIND CAME UP AND BLEW MY KIMONO OPEN AND HE SAW MY BREASTS
Gloria Sawai
KING LEARY
Paul Quarrington
AFTERWORD:
CANADIAN WRY
Barry Callaghan
THE CONTRIBUTORS
PERMISSIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE EXILE BOOK OF ANTHOLOGY SERIES BOOKS ONE TO FOURTEEN
PREFACE
BEHIND THE BEAVER’S TEETH
BRUCE MEYER
With his buck teeth, that damned beaver may seem to be Bugs Bunny’s cousin, busy damming up our world, but if so, he’s a distant cousin many times removed. Instead of being a wise-cracking Brooklyn boy, our beaver gnaws all day on the poplars and maples of his own bizarre neuroses. He must know what is funny (presumably he can see his buck teeth in the dark still waters), yet he maintains a hunched inscrutability. He never goes for the big laugh. He knows at the core of his being that he has turned forests – all those trees reaching for the sun – into stump-stubbled swamps. In his realm of murky water, whether he is Monsieur le castor or the beaver on an English-Canadian beer bottle, he knows in his heart that he is a rodent.
Laughter, the restorative comic view, is not easy to find in beaver country. Oh, there are stories that set you laughing out-loud, such as Steven Hayward’s “August 7, 1921” or Larry Zolf’s “The Ping-Pong Affair.” There is Austin Clarke’s farcical Green Hornet working the city’s windshields, the sly hilarity of Jonathan Goldstein’s “The Tower of Babel,” and Bob Armstrong’s sideways take on the madness of the Franklin Expedition in “Undelivered Letters Home;” but these and their like are as rare as nudes in a Group of Seven landscape. We all too often wear funeral crepe around our laughter. Our ghosts – amputated – peer over our shoulders, as in Julie Roorda’s Valentine’s Day tale, “’Til Death,” or, in the case of Jacques Ferron’s “The Dead Cow in the Canyon,” they peer out of the attic windows of places we call home but cannot stand to inhabit. Perhaps this is the same cow that David McFadden chases the length of Lake Ontario in a motor boat – a cow determined to return to its home as an assertion of life, though we know its destiny is to end up on the poet’s plate.
This is the country that has produced the pie-eyed wit of Tommy Chong and The McKenzie Brothers, a land of the in-ebriated revelation, as in Gail Prussky’s “The Story of Weasel Tossing,” the absurd perception of Andrew Borkowski’s ”The Lesson,” and the hallucinatory certainty shared by Leon Rooke and Barry Callaghan’s characters. But essentially, the bush country of our minds, the mythic madness therein, is our turf as in Joe Rosenblatt’s vision where nothing is ever what it seems as camels criss-cross in a coal cellar in which the author meets Frankenstein having a smoke. We find delight in such moments when we don’t know where we are or where we will arrive, or, as Northrop Frye put it, “where here is.” An idea further advanced by Atwood who said, our “here” is not an “absence of order, but an ordered absence.” In this enchanted “absence” we explore love in all it mysteries and comic extremities…in the gallows humour of Claire Dé…the fumbling couple in Leon Rooke’s story of Eb and Flo, the dream lover in Anne Dandurand’s “Psyche from Here,” a moment of ecstasy in heat in Christine Miscione’s “Timorous Love” (only a beaver high on ashwood or St. Teresa of Avila could achieve such a state), or the high-tech love craft of Myna Wallin in “Canadoll.” We run blindly into what we cannot see, smack into a birch tree where a beaver is busily at work on the trunk. At such moments, naked in the throes of passion of one kind or another, we are most vulnerable. At our most vulnerable we are at our most laughable.
For all its complexities, delusions and illusions, love is the beaver’s secret entrance to the innermost sanctum of his lodge, the tabernacle of his heart and soul: in Gloria Sawai’s “The Day I Sat Down with Jesus,” Alexandre Amprimoz’s “Saint Augustine,” Jamie Feldman’s “Double Double An’ Chocolate Glazed,” and Morley Callaghan’s “The Predica-ment.” Even hockey, played by mad priests, reminds us that the damned beaver is always out and about, pursuing one of his passions, in this case busy on an outdoor
And so it goes…from Atwood’s story of Salome the stripper holding her own head on a platter, to tales of old country weasel tossing, to the far north country where we find our very own young Queen cheating at bingo in Karen Lee White’s “Queen Elizabeth Visits the Elks Bingo Hall.” Illusions, delusions, laughs, gaffs – many of our particular peccadilloes are here open unto you like a toppled forest, pulped and put to paper, spread upon the pages that you hold in your hands. You have been beavered – those razor-sharp Bugsy teeth are not merely the tools our rodent uses to survive: they are his weapons for the carving out of his dammed world; they also allow him to hide his world behind his polite, oh-so-nice-nice smile.
UNDELIVERED LETTERS HOME
from Junior Midshipman Archibald Ponsonby-Cholmondeley, recovered recently in the search for additional remains of the Franklin Expedition
BOB ARMSTRONG
“Canada hopes to finally solve one of the Arctic’s greatest mysteries this summer: finding the remains of two ships lost in the doomed 1845 Franklin Expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage.” —The Telegraph (U.K.), July 1, 2011
“Even more than the discovery in 2014 of Sir John Franklin’s ship HMS Erebus, historians expect this latest find – a carefully preserved cache of private papers – to provide insight into the tragedy that has been called Canada’s legend of the Holy Grail.” —The Telegraph (U.K.), July 1, 2021
19th of May 1845
Dearest Mother,
The departure from Greenhithe was frightfully exciting, though trying for the men. We had our vessels almost fully loaded when Sir John arrived at Port and discovered a dreadful error on the part of The Admiralty. It seems our Expedition had been assigned the wrong ships. Sir John soon put things to rights and in short order I was securely ensconced in my cabin on HMS Terror. What an ill omen it would have been had I put to sea aboard HMS Sunny Daze!
Your loving son, Junior Midshipman Archibald Ponsonby-Cholmondeley
1st of June 1845
Dearest Mother,
Do you remember last year when Uncle Algernon told me that a sea voyage would make a new man of me? (This was on the evening when he so generously offered to rub me down with goose fat and teach me the sport of Greco-Roman wrestling.) Well, it has come to pass. I am a new man. Your son, Junior Midshipman Archibald Ponsonby-Cholmondeley, has become a bounder.
I know that you and Father both warned me to keep away from bounders, rotters, and cads, but I think you would change your mind if you met my cabin mate Reginald Butterworth. He’s a bounder and he’s a capital fellow. And the nephew of a Baronet, no less. Butterworth says bounders are simply misunderstood by people who feel threatened by our cravats and our unrestrained language, which I admit can be d—ed shocking. He swears, however, that bounders do not deserve to share in the richly earned opprobrium heaped upon rotters and cads, whom he describes as “douchebags.” Butterworth has such a way with words. I believe the douchebag is a French Invention. Perhaps Grandmama can bring one back from Vichy so that I can better appreciate my cabin mate’s bon mots.
Your loving son, Junior Midshipman Archibald Ponsonby-Cholmondeley
10th of June 1845
Dearest Mother,
Today began with a great to-do on the Quarterdeck. I was awakened by sprightly dancing and gay laughter. When I reached the deck, I found many of the men wearing petticoats and Butterworth brandishing a paddle on the bare bottom of one of the cabin boys.
“Not to worry, old sport,” he said. “This is a time-honoured Royal Navy tradition that occurs whenever a ship crosses the Equator.” That put my mind at ease.
Your loving son, Junior Midshipman Archibald Ponsonby-Cholmondeley
PS: Today we sighted Greenland. Huzzah!
8th of December 1845
Dearest Mother,
Rum luck today, I’m afraid. A few of the deck hands came down with a bad case of the Ague, characterized by much coughing and expelling of bilious humours. Sir John, being a good Christian as well as a man of Science, ordered his personal physician to see to the sick men. Unfortunately, the common English sailor is so steadfast in his Ignorance, that the men had to be physically restrained before the physician was able to bleed them. Terrible idea, thrashing about when one has a scalpel held to one’s jugular.
Worse still, we were unable to give the men a Christian burial at sea, as the surface of the ocean is now quite frozen. Terrible shame, as Butterworth has a lovely singing voice and I had looked forward to a few good Hymns.
Your loving son, Junior Midshipman Archibald Ponsonby-Cholmondeley
19th of May 1846
Dearest Mother,
Today, on the anniversary of our departure, I give thanks for British Innovation. We have now been receiving daily sustenance from our new-fangled canned food for one year, and are as hale and hearty as on the day we set sail.
I am well aware that there were those Cassandras who feared ominous side effects as a result of our scientifically preserved Diet, but the airtight lead seals on the containers have steadfastly kept Miasmas and Ill Humours out of our food. Not only do I find our meals delicious, but so does Azazoth, the Archangel who speaks to me through Sir John’s Yorkshire Terrier.
Your loving son, Junior Midshipman Archibald Ponsonby-Cholmondeley
15th of July 1846
Dearest Mother,
Today we celebrate St. Swithin’s Day by resuming our Voyage of Discovery, after what was, I must confess, a rather longer than expected time in harbour. I cannot, in good Conscience, recommend Beechey Island as a location in which to spend the winter. Fortunately, we had good British woollens to see us through the long months, unlike the poor, desperate Savages, forced to rely upon nothing more than the fur of northern beasts.
I hope deciphering my handwriting is not too trying for you, as I have been learning to use my left since the bothersome loss of some digits on my right hand. Do not worry about me, though, as I am much better off than poor Butterworth, who walks in circles now that he has lost all the toes on his right foot.
Your loving son, Junior Midshipman Archibald Ponsonby-Cholmondeley
22nd of September 1846
Dearest Mother,
Excelsior! Following his most recent astronomical Observations, Sir John has declared the Expedition a success. Sharing in so momentous a Victory for Science fills me with great satisfaction and with a certain amount of regret for poor Cousin Edmund, whose sea voyage on HMS Beagle turned out to be of so little Consequence. As if anything of consequence could be discovered on the pitiful Galapagos Islands!
We have now proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Northwest Passage is navigable and will soon become a Sea Route of great importance to the British Empire. All aboard both of our ships are confident that China lies just beyond the large, flat, white island that stretches out to the horizon in all directions.
Your loving son, Junior Midshipman Archibald Ponsonby-Cholmondeley
14th of March 1847
Dearest Mother,
As we wait out another Arctic Winter, the state of our food supply grows increasingly parlous. Yesterday we ate unrecognizable pieces of leathery animal flesh cooked with colourless and tasteless roots utterly lacking in nutritive value. Our last good English meal.
Good old Butterworth helps us keep our minds off our difficult situation. He selflessly spends his free time offering massages to help those men whose lumbago has been exacerbated by the weather. Each day I hear his call to action: “Come along, Ponsonby, time to tenderize the men.”
Your loving son, Junior Midshipman Archibald Ponsonby-Cholmondeley
2nd of April 1847
Dearest Mother,
Resourceful thinking by Sir John has resolved one of our most vexing dilemmas: the shortage of space in the aft cabin that serves as our makeshift morgue.
Your loving son, Junior Midshipman Archibald Ponsonby-Cholmondeley
PS: Before I return, please tell Cook not to use the expression “tastes like chicken.”
10th of June 1847
Dearest Mother
I hope my previous letters have not caused you disquiet. I remain in good hands under the leadership of the brilliant Sir John Franklin, who today made the decision to abandon ship and continue on foot to the nearest post of the Hudson’s Bay Company. While we were filling the sleds with the emergency silverware, Sir John was struck by the kind of Inspiration that has characterized his Naval and Exploratory Career. It took some time, but, using the remains of our food containers, Butterworth and I were able to fashion a hat made of tin to prevent the dastardly French from reading the Great Man’s mind.
