Jack of Diamonds Read Free Page A

hair. Not only did she have Iroquois Indian blood but also French Canadian, and in the summer she’d develop a nice, dark, even tan. I was the same. No doubt her olive skin and dark hair were yet another reason why she was ostracised by the Dolly McClymonts of this world.
    My mom referred to Dolly as ‘a nasty piece of work’, not only because of how she treated us, but also because of what happened when Mac was occasionally in his cups. A harmless drunk, he was nothing like my dad, and yet Dolly McClymont would always beat him up. We’d hear him begging her, his voice gone shrill with fright, ‘Dolly, Dolly, stop! I’ll be good. I promise, I’ll never touch a drop!’ But Dolly lacked a forgiving nature and would abuse him, cursing him as a ‘useless little shit’ and far worse. My mother said she had a mouth like a dock worker. Sometimes we’d hear the twins sobbing when Mac was being beaten up. The following day his face would be a mess – both eyes almost closed and a split lip were pretty normal. That woman was capable of doing as much damage to a face as my dad, but I never got to see her knuckles afterwards.
    Mac McClymont was an upholsterer by trade but I guess not too many people, even among the city’s upper and middle classes, were too fussed about their tatty couches in those hard times, so he only occasionally got work at his trade. No more than five feet tall, he was seldom chosen from the dawn labourer’s line he diligently joined most mornings. But I have to say this for Mac McClymont, he was the only one of the family upstairs who would always smile and say, ‘Hello, young Jack’, if he was on his own. He once gave me a marble he’d found somewhere, a good aggie any boy would be fortunate to own. No one else had one anything like as good as it, and I never put it in danger when we played marbles at school. It became a precious possession.
    Mac would have made a much better husband for my tiny mom, and a much better dad for me. Once, in the winter, when Dolly and the twins went to stay with her sister and Mac was on his own, he must have noticed my mom’s broken and battered snow boots. ‘Mrs Spayd, forgive me for being personal like, but  . . . ah, er, me trade is, er  . . . I’m an up-upholsterer,’ he stammered.
    ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ my mother said with a smile, not knowing where Mac’s announcement about his trade was leading. Seeing she was friendly and wasn’t going to bite his head off, he immediately lost his stammer. ‘What I meant to say is, will you let me fix yer snow boots? No cost, of course. I’m not a shoemaker but I can darn well repair them boots.’ He took them upstairs, returned two hours later and they were as good as gold. He had a cup of tea with us in the kitchen and we talked. It was nice.
    See what I mean? He was the same size as my mom and they’d have been good together and I wouldn’t have minded. In fact, I’d have been happy to swap my dad for him. But then I suppose Dolly and the twins wouldn’t have agreed to take my drunken father at any price. Even by Cabbagetown’s standards, Harry Spayd stood out among the drunken bums and bastards. But here’s the weird thing: he never came in for much criticism and the men liked him, so their wives left him out of their bitchy gossip, even though he was lucky enough to have a job. It was my mom who had to take it on the chin and silently accept all their abuse, and she’d never harmed a fly.
    I’d like to be able to say that I looked up to my dad despite everything, and that we’d shared some kind of father-and-son relationship, even a half-assed one. But that would be a lie. The only role he played was, like I said, to keep my mom and me in a state of constant terror.
    I remember four things in particular about my father.
    First, of course, was his drinking. In the summer we’d wake to an atmosphere that smelled like a brewery, even long after he had gone to work; in winter, the freezing