Hippie House Read Free

did. This was because my cousin, a tall, doughy eighteen-year-old, possessed a rather simple mind. Carl’s attention span was brief and his actions were largely motivated by impulse. Forethought and consequences seemed incomprehensible to him. Carl was known to stress machinery until it broke. He had once started a fire in the hayloft and he had destroyed many good paddles attempting to discover the amount of force needed to drive them into the mud at the bottom of the pond. My father had found them waterlogged and ruined in the long grass beneath the weeping willow next to the spillway where the current eventually deposited debris.
    But over the years, the damage he inflicted on Ruddy Duck paled in comparison to the grief he had caused Uncle Pat.
    Despite this, and in no small part due to the patient guidance of Uncle Pat and Aunt Alice, Carl had graduated with a vocational diploma at the end of grade ten. For several months he had been working at the Pike Creek Dairy. Every morning he loaded gallons of milk and pails of ice cream into trucks.
    On this August day, he had accidentally locked Mr. Chisholm, owner of the Pike Creek Dairy, in the walk-in freezer. The mistake occurred after Carl had emptied the extra pails of ice cream and chunks of ice from his truck around noon. Squatting to wipe a shelf clean, Mr. Chisholm was hidden by a pallet stacked with butter when Carl locked the freezer door and went home.
    Three hours later, Mrs. Chisholm dropped by the dairy to ask Mr. Chisholm’s opinion on wallpaper. If it had not been for the fact that there was a sale on and she needed a decision immediately, Mr. Chisholm might have become as solidified as the Neapolitan that day. Finding no one in the office, she followed the faintest knocking, only to realize that someone was trapped in the freezer! Mr. Chisholm was rushed to the hospital where he spent the night recovering from hypothermia and agitated nerves.
    Carl was given a week’s vacation for his mistake, most of which he spent well out of Uncle Pat’s sight at Ruddy Duck Farm.
    So it fell to Dad to ensure that Carl’s time away from work was spent wisely. Several times I caught sight of him with a reluctant Carl in tow, recruited to repair a fence or clean the cattle trough. My father also had him stringing soda pop cans together to create a sort of security alarm. The string was draped around the base of the large fuel drums we kept on our farm. Over the summer there had been several instances of gas thieves raiding the farms in our area during the night. Just the week before, our neighbors to the west, the Frasers, had their fuel drums drained and they hadn’t heard a thing.
    Poor Carl, that week had to be very difficult for him. I knew how much he would have preferred to be occupied in one of his own games: shooting his BB gun at the weather vane on the tractor shed or pushing Uncle Pat’s old tractor to its limits, driving erratically across the field.
    Eric helped occupy my time by assigning me sewing projects, like a vest with beaded fringing—exactly like John Mayall’s on the cover of
Blues From Laurel Canyon
. He also wanted a pair of flared jeans with satin inserts. You know, for on stage.
    My brother would sit behind me and watch his order being created. He was so good at so many technical and mechanical things, but I don’t think it ever ceased to amaze him how a piece of cloth could become something he could wear.
    One evening I returned home from Brampton where Megan and I had seen the movie
Wait Until Dark
. Susy Hendrix— Audrey Hepburn’s blind character—being stalked by a killer in her apartment had been more than either of us could stand. Shivering close together in the back of Uncle Pat’s truck on the way home, we’d had very little to say.
    â€œI thought Roat was dead after she stabbed him,” Megan whispered.
    â€œSo did I,” I said.
    â€œHe was so