Oliver's Twist

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Book: Oliver's Twist Read Free
Author: Craig Oliver
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rebuff at bedtime when I forgot myself and called her “Mommy.” For that slip I was sharply reprimanded. I had a real mother, Mabel told me, but she was an immoral woman who had left me behind.
    Life with the Skinners was not all bad. Jimmy and I shared the makeshift attic bedroom with a boarder, an elderly man whom I knew as Frank Redman. While puffing on a long pipe that was never out of his mouth except for its ritual daily cleaning, Frank held me spellbound with romantic stories of life in the Old West. All his tales, he assured me, were based on personal experience of the lawless frontier. He claimed to have been a Montana cowboy during the 1880s, forced to flee across the border after shooting someone in a fight over a horse. His accounts of cattle drives, cowboys and Indians, and the rugged independence of the lone man on horseback—possibly lifted from Zane Grey dime novels—enthralled me and set my imagination free amidst clouds of Ogden’s Fine Cut Tobacco. After the guilty excitement of women’s lingerie, my favourite pages in the Eaton’s catalogue were those devoted to saddles, chaps, and firearms.
    I fantasized about being anyone else, anywhere else: a secret agent, a benevolent dictator, a gun-toting frontiersman living the free life on the plains with a faithful horse my only companion. It was lights out at seven o’clock, but in that attic and under the covers by flashlight, I read any book I could find or borrow.Later, lying in the dark at my end of the attic beside the lone window, I always looked for the North Star, comforted by its constancy in a life that so far had been quite unpredictable.
    Books and reading were welcome escapes, although an astute teacher had discerned a vision problem. I confessed to her that I could not read the blackboard, and glasses were prescribed. When the optician diagnosed crossed eyes, Mabel took me to Vancouver for the necessary surgery. The day after, Dad surprised me in the hospital room with my first pair of cowboy boots.
    Brick had a cousin named Bill Bickle who owned a cattle ranch at a place called Grassy Plains near Burns Lake, British Columbia, a spot long since drowned by a hydro project. I spent glorious summers there with the welcoming Bickle family, who kindly assigned me my own horse, Lazy Dick. I rode the dusty country roads into town to pick up goods at the general store and was thrilled one day to be photographed by an American tourist who mistook me for a genuine ranch hand.
    Ranch life held a few rude surprises, though. One morning I watched Bickle shoot a steer, then cut a hole in its side with a knife to bleed it. The steer fell on its front knees while yelping dogs lapped up the blood. This was my first experience of violent death and the episode became the stuff of nightmares for weeks afterwards. Surely this was nothing Gene Autry or Roy Rogers would ever be part of.
    Growing up under the roofs of strangers imparted some inescapable lessons. Too soon perhaps, I learned to judge people with cold logic, by their actions rather than their words. I guarded my own emotions carefully, even while drawing out the feelings and motives of others. Engaging with those who controlled my fate, carefully fitting in with a minimum of fuss, became asurvival technique. At the same time, I formed a conviction that every person must look out for himself before all else.
    Despite a growing independent streak, I longed for my father’s occasional visits. These were increasingly rare as Dad looked to expand his booze trade into new markets, but they were frequently memorable. Thanks to liquor rationing in Canada during the war, I spent many an hour standing in line at the government outlet, holding a place for Dad. In Alaska, however, booze was unlimited. Ketchican, the nearest Alaskan port to Rupert, was a wide-open town in what was then wilderness territory. It had its own red light district of tiny shacks, bars, and bordellos built on

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