Transcribing Truth

Please note: the full version, with photos, can be found here.

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In my hands I hold a treasure chest of words: my great-grandfather’s notebook. “Pow-wow,” reads the cover. Stoic Indians sit around a campfire next to a teepee, above the words subject and name. On the back, a multiplication table. This child’s notebook, fished from my mom’s filing cabinet last month, once felt my great-grandfather’s adult pencil. What golden prize waits within? I will transcribe every word.

I suppose it comes down to DNA. In the nucleus of each cell, coded in those entangled strands, lie threads of my ancestors—living and dead. My Norwegian great-great grandmother, who never accepted her son, Thomas, leaving the priesthood. After he married, she hounded Thomas and his wife, forcing them to immigrate to Canada. My kind and gentle grandma Bessie, who faced tragedy with great courage. And finally my mom, Dorothy: writer, social worker, feminist.

This thread of DNA has led to me.

Words shaped my mind earlier than most. The first book read to me—Richard Adam’s Watership Down—flowed from Dad’s tongue while Mom’s every heartbeat still gently jostled me within the amniotic fluid. Later, Mom cooed stories about animals and fairy tales with feminist maidens, while my dad told tales through flute and guitar. In kindergarten, too shy to fight for the train set, I abandoned toys for books.

What compels me to write? To lose myself in legend and share personal wisdom? Though I work in science—teaching students about microscopic cells and the vast biosphere—writing inspires me beyond any discipline. Yet my obsessive drive to create characters, narratives, even entire worlds is not enough. To archive and preserve ancestral stories is a commitment that springs from a well of curious habit. I have transcribed writings from three relatives—mother, aunt and great-grandfather.

As the third born of four sons, I feel the closest feminine ties with my mom, Dorothy, and her sisters—Betty and Chrissie. Only through transcribing their writings have I come to understand the three bookish goddesses nicknamed “sisti-uglers” by one of Chrissie’s boyfriends.

Mom raised me to love art. She put books—everything from The Iliad to Harriet the Spy to Aesop’s fables—on my shelves. She introduced me to foreign film—Fellini’s La Strada and Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. She nurtured every creative project I undertook: wall-to-wall mazes drawn across pin-feed computer paper, a filmed fantasy adventure in the backyard, and entering my first writing contest at age thirteen. While Dad held the role of ruthless editor (invaluable to me, if hard to bear), Mom was always the encourager. The one who says, “This is great! Send it out!”

I transcribed her manuscript first. Touching: A Family Love Story is filled with sex, cancer, death, tainted love, women-scorned—the six hundred yellowed pages contain everything my parents censored. In 2002 I found the manuscript languishing in the garage. Packing tape peeled from the flaccid box marked “Mom’s book.” As I picked up the hefty stack of papers, the clack of the typewriter instantly sounded from memory.

As a kid, that noise meant one thing: Do not disturb! My mom took refuge in the study—a room built by Dad, and later my bedroom—where she pounded at the keys. I remember the rhythm of the type bars hitting the paper, the grinding carriage return. Another finished line. She spat out dozens of pages each session, yet the silences meant even more. My budding eight-year-old intellect knew something about the artist’s mind. That sacred creative space. When I drew four-meter mazes, I tolerated no interruption. I can still hear Mom’s tone of voice, still see her piercing stare when I dared trespass. I possess the same fiery conviction. The only time I ever snapped at my girlfriend is when she peered over my shoulder while I wrote. To come between artist and art is to step between mother bear and cub.

Children do not witness their parents’ adolescence; they see them as mentors, life teachers that seem to shrink with time. Little did I know, as I set Touching on the desk next to my computer, the visceral journey that awaited. I discovered parts of my mother I had never met, parts almost too painful to bear.

On page one, Mom quotes Virginia Woolf: “The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish cutting the heart asunder.”

Next page Mom holds her sister Betty in her arms as she dies, and then sings to her mother in a Pincher Creek hospital. “For almost seven hours I sang her favourite songs and hymns and slowly willed her to die. It was a labour of love. I gave my mother death as she had given me birth.”

I soon realized that in digitizing her book, I would be swimming in the depths of my mother’s anguish and grief.

As I transcribed aged typeface to bits and bytes, I moved vicariously through 1983, a year where I played with Star Wars action figures. A woman I thought I knew—mother, protector, housewife—became daughter, sister, writer, pissed off feminist, frustrated wife. I was six when her world collapsed, her older sister and mother having died a week apart. One morning, ready for school, I remember Mom breaking into tears, clutching the walls for support. My maternal pillar crumbled before my eyes. Dad said we could stay home. But my brothers and I ran for the bus, eager to escape. Our home could no longer shelter us from the storms of reality.

One hundred-and-fifty-thousand words later, I gained a fuller understanding of Dorothy Anne Lee, all the layers of onion peeled back to reveal the hidden, fragile flower. Behind Mom was a woman with admissible faults and extraordinary resilience. A woman who kept breastfeeding even when her doctor said: ‘Beyond three months it’s pathological.’ A woman who faced her own breast cancer scare—then watched two of the closest women in her life succumb to cancer. Despite her heart being cut asunder, she found strength to carry on, to write her story and live her life.

At Aunt Betty’s 50th birthday party, my mom wrote a series of clues for the family treasure hunt. As she says in Touching:

Betty started this ritual over forty years ago. The rules had always been simple. The clues must be clever, brilliant and challenging. They must be difficult to decipher but not impossible. Betty had always been the most clever clue maker. Hers were rhyming couplets often with literary references.

Nelson [author’s note: Nelson is my dad] had the distinction after he joined the family of producing absolutely brilliant clues that defied all the previous rules as to rhyme and reason…once he just gave Betty a blank piece of paper. It took her an hour to figure out that it meant “empty space”, which referred to the empty space in the crawl space above her ceiling.

Twenty years later, for Mother’s Day, I wrote clues for Mom. I organized a treasure hunt, just as she had done for Betty on her last birthday. Mine were not as clever or erudite. “Frozen chest” led her to the freezer, “hot cube” to the dryer, and eventually “music-maker’s seat” to the piano bench. Inside lay the crisp white pages of Touching.

The journey through Mom’s book led fittingly to my indomitable aunt, Betty Lambert, English professor and author of seventy plays. “Brilliant, wise, larger-than life,” my dad, her ex-student, succinctly wrote of her. While on holiday in San Francisco, she fell in love with an African American law student. Within the month she realized she was pregnant, but he did not want to be a father. Betty decided to keep the baby and raise the child on her own.

When I was young and shy, her flamboyance intimidated me. During family visits to Aunt Betty’s house, I ran in the backyard and played with Golda, her golden lab. Only scattered images remain. Russian matryoshka nesting dolls. Black-and-white family photos on the mantelpiece. A huge painting of a potted cactus. How does one build a relationship from a six-year-old memory?

Years later, my mom introduced me to Betty’s plays. Jennie’s Story, inspired by true events, examines the ramifications of Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act enacted in 1928. This permitted sterilization without consent on those deemed unfit or mentally challenged. The young Jennie worked as a housekeeper for a Catholic priest. He seduced her. To ensure she would not become pregnant, he convinced authorities she was mentally challenged and took her to Ponoka to be sterilized. He told Jennie she was having an appendectomy.

I saw Under the Skin next. Based on a real kidnapping in Port Moody, the focus is Renee’s marriage to the cruel, ruthless John, and his terrible secret. John has confined the neighbour’s twelve-year-old to the bomb shelter beneath his workshop, where he sexually molests her. Renee’s subtle reaction to what her heart gradually knows to be true underlies the play’s stark theme.

These productions were my first exposure to Betty’s vision. Her humour, honesty, and moral fury surfaced from the intensely drawn characters. As a teenager I read her sole novel, Crossings, moulding my nascent life philosophy further. Largely autobiographical, it depicts her physical and sexually abusive relationship with Mik. I began to understand woman as victims of patriarchal society, but persevering nonetheless. I witnessed violence and oppression endured with tender strength and determination.

On my personal journey to discover Betty, this treasure hunt led me to the veritable dragon’s den: Simon Fraser University’s special collections library. In that temperature and humidity-controlled room lay forty boxes filled with Elizabeth Minnie Lambert. SFU had bought her literary estate. Scripts, drafts, journals, letters, lectures…I tore into the manuscripts voraciously, feeding off her words like a coyote in a chicken coop.

For months I returned, every week devouring another few boxes. I read her notes on making love, script drafts covered in red edits, stories of teenage heartbreak, letters to an on-again off-again ex-lover, and personal diaries that shied away from nothing. Betty was always a seeker of truth. And she shared her truth, no matter how shocking. In one entry, I found a reference to me as a baby—my colicky scream filled her with an overwhelming desire to strangle me with her bare hands.

The dialogue in Betty’s plays made evident her wit. The mountain of manuscripts and drafts revealed her unwavering drive. Her entertaining letters, lovelorn confusion, and desperation for truth all danced behind the words. The aunt who died while I learned to print and spell now became a fellow writer and teacher.

In tribute to her words, I designed an elaborate website referencing every single work she wrote, published or not. But my goal was accomplished. My Aunt Betty was no longer a stranger.

Betty was a writer to the bitter end. Even when blinded by brain tumours, struck mute by pneumonia, she printed letter by painstaking letter on her yellow pad: I want to write. Her last words were on that same yellow pad.

What is the final demand in life? she wrote to my mom.

“I don’t know, Betty. But I’m sure you do.”

She nodded and wrote, every letter a tremendous effort, More and more and more nostalgia. So my mom talked about their father and mother, their childhood struggles, their bonding as sisters, how much they had always loved each other. She talked until Betty took her last breath in my mother’s arms.

Only two of the sisti-uglers remain, and my path now leads me to the youngest. Like her mother and older sister, cancer would later claim Chrissie’s body. Letters offer her only literary legacy, but she was full of story. In early 2007, given months to live, she clung to photos and family stories. During my final visits, we dug through boxes of familial treasures. As she moved excitedly from one subject to the next, I scrawled names and dates on unlabelled pictures, often including a question mark. Like a sponge, I sucked in her wit-filled anecdotes told with her wicked sense of humour.

Chrissie knew life’s importance. Hardship, injustice, ailment, and grief all tried to sour her spirit. Yet at her core, Chrissie lived for and shared story. Like Betty, she craved nostalgia.

And now, in my hands, the notebook of my great-grandfather, Thomas Craven, filled with fictional stories. This past week I transcribed the first, untitled tale about a bully named Piggoh.

Why am I driven this way, to set in stone words of the dead? Respect for ghosts of generations past? Morbid curiosity? Or perhaps, by following those who came before, I hope to find my own path.

In the lumberjack camps, Piggoh preys on Jules, a French immigrant. Thomas himself fled England for Canada in 1896 aboard the SS Mongolian, to escape his domineering mother. She demanded he stay in the priesthood. Instead, he married Bridget McGrane, a sweet Irish colleen—poor, illiterate, half his age, and soon pregnant. Thomas’s mother got him fired from a university job and threatened to disinherit him. He would have come into Westwood, a stately mansion complete with tea house, vineyard, horse stables and dog kennels. But he cut the phantom umbilical by crossing the Atlantic and taking the surname Cooper.

Thomas bought land near Cowley, a remote town 150 miles south of Calgary. He thought the scrubland would be valuable when the railway went through. But the tracks were diverted. With a third child on the way, and their barren land worthless, he became desperate for work. This man, fluent in five languages and with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, accepted the job of logging camp cook. Thomas delighted in working outdoors, concocting new recipes, soups, and—as it turns out—fiction.

The story of Piggoh and Jules is obviously inspired by his days in the logging camps. Thomas’s penciled, cursive writing makes every third or fourth word difficult to decipher. With patient diligence, I transcribed the thirteen-page story; Jules stands up to the bully with one resounding punch.

[Piggoh] lay silent and peaceful amid the wild flowers and fern like a fallen angel. Jules, uncertain as to what would now happen, stood ready. Would Piggoh rise and beat him up? If so, he would take it willingly for the pleasure of seeing his tormenter ‘hors de combat’. The fallen bully lay without movement, looking up into the face of the French youth with surprise and with fear plainly written on his face.

Then Jules returned to his work and his axe, feeling and looking like a conqueror! Piggoh’s companions left him to recover as he was able, for it is against the etiquette of the woods to interfere in a fight.

“What happened?” was a question put by the bully.

“You were knocked out in one blow,” he was informed. “Served you damn well right!”

The last story in the notebook is called “The Timekeeper.” Thomas played that role at the ill-fated Frank Mine, a job he took some years later. At 4:10 in the morning, April 29th, 1903, 90 million tons of rock fell from the summit of Turtle Mountain. The town of Frank was swept away in a thunderous wave. By chance, Thomas was absent from work that morning.

Christened Turtle Mountain by rancher Louis Garnett, the oral traditions of the Blackfoot and Kutenai aptly referred to the peak as “the mountain that moves.” Thomas wrote about the day stone fell like rain in his article “The Terror that Came in the Night.”

The mass of falling rocks poured down on the town below with unceasing and irresistible force from the summit of the mountain literally burying the dwellings beneath and their unfortunate inmates, who waking in terror were buried in their rocky tombs beneath the crushing weight of countless tons…we know nothing of the [cause]—all is conjecture. Only one thing we know for certain is that we were and are alive and thankful to be so.

My three ancestral writers possess such diverse telling of tales. I search for the common thread, the fitting motif. My great grandfather dealt with mines and lumberjack camps. Mom and Aunt Betty wrote feminist-driven memoirs. I write about rivers, Iceland, and life on other planets. Is there a link?

We all seek truth. The truth of the Frank Slide, the truth of my Aunt Betty’s abusive relationship, the truth of cancer’s devastating effects. My own personal seeds of truth germinate into reflections on Mother Nature’s spirituality, world travelogues, and insights from exploring an entirely alien perspective.

On a cellular level, my ancestors and I share the same threads of life. Yet Watson, Crick and Franklin determined DNA to be a double helix—I have only elucidated stories from my maternal strand. On Dad’s side, stories are hard to come by. One week ago, wishing to explore my other helical half, I visited my dad’s mother. My hidden agenda? Hearing tales from her eighty years of life. Her first response came as a joyful sound, “For Christmas of next year, I’m going to write out my life story.” I felt a warm shiver of anticipation. I coaxed her for a preview; she was eager to oblige. Pieces of my past fell into place.

“My father—your great grandfather—had golden locks.” Hence my bright blonde curls up to age five.

“In cross-country, my brother and I finished third in all the Saskatchewan schools.” Hence my love of long-distance running.

“I wanted so badly to be a teacher, but my parents could only send one of us to university. My brother got to go. I thought to myself, I’ll get married and start a family.” My grandmother married and a year later Dad was born. The other half of the puzzle began to fill in.

I was curious. “Grandma, are you going to use your old script typewriter?”

She shook her head. “I’ll do it longhand.”

I offered to transcribe her words. Said it would be my honour—and it grants me first reading rights.

With this future project of preservation on my mind, I left feeling more familiar with my paternal strand. DNA fulfills its vital functions—protein production, replication, growth—only after being copied and transcribed. Then its purpose is translated into physical meaning. At some point, I will stop transcribing to focus on my tale. Yet the remaining pockets of truth compel me to further unravel those familial strands. This cause is ultimately selfish. When my time comes, I will be well prepared. In those last few hours and days, when death’s shadow robs my senses one by one, I will have no shortage of precious family nostalgia to bring me comfort.

Lee Beavington
August 20, 2009

References

Beavington, Dorothy. Touching: A Family Love Story. (Unpublished manuscript).

Cooper, Thomas. “The Terror That Came in the Night.” Pincher Creek Echo, April 26, 1962 (reprinted).

Lambert, Betty. Jennie’s Story.

Lambert, Betty. Under the Skin.

www.bettylambert.com

www.leebeavington.com

Keeper of the Swords

[full version with photos can be read here]

I mounted the Chinese swords on the kitchen wall. They rest, high up, above the threshold of the hall. Two brackets—jutting from the plaster like black hands—support each bone-sheathed sword. In their stillness, they wait and observe, antique blades stained by century-old blood. To reach my home, these swords have survived a battle involving nine nations, four generations of my family, and narrowly escaped a voyage on the Titanic.

Why did I choose this spot? Perhaps they would not fit anywhere else in my modest abode, an 800-square-foot coach house above my parents’ garage. I call it The Loft. The swords reside amongst Tibetan prayer flags, Asian elephants, and Kenyan batiks showing gazelle and giraffes living in harmony with long-legged Masai. Peculiar housemates for these instruments of war. Yet perhaps my placement is not mere chance. Swords are symbols of protection, in my case guardians of the place I work and rest. I am comforted by their presence, the way a child is reassured at night by a familiar stuffed animal.

As a boy, my eyes always felt drawn to the swords’ hand-carved sheaths. Chinese figures painstakingly etched along the entire length of slightly-curved bone added an air of mystique to the already exotic blades. Taking them off the wall was forbidden, so I felt a need for stealth and gentleness when handling these sacred heirlooms. The smoothed, yellowed bone—elephant? Horse? Deer? Human?—felt at once fragile and firm. I always paused before pulling a sword free: I relished the moment I allowed the blade a brief glimpse of the light. At one time, this edge tasted flesh, perhaps separated more than one body from its soul. With that knowledge, I saw myself on the battlefield, both hands wielding a sword, a noble warrior fighting for the cause of good.

But they do not belong to me. Neither do they belong to my mom, who inherited them from her mother and father, who in turn inherited the swords from my great grandmother, Harriet Isabelle Lee. Harriet herself, nicknamed Pips (short for “pipsqueak”, for she was a tiny woman, called a “wee bit of a thing” by her husband) could not claim to be the original discoverer either. Her brother, Thomas Tuggey, came upon them during his service with the British navy. In 1900 he went to China as part of the eight treaty powers to quell the uprising called the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxers wanted to rid China of the foreigners they felt were draining their country’s power and wealth. It was near Beijing that Thomas found the swords in the theatre of war. How or why I can not say. Did he kill the original owner in honourable combat? Did he know anything about this man, this silent stranger whose only ancestral clue lay within the men carved into the sheaths? Or did my great-great uncle simply stumble across a corpse and claim his prize?

When Thomas brought these blades into our family the legend of their creation was lost. In the changing of hands, only the physical was transferred; any spirit and story imbued in the swords became a mystery best explained by myth.

Who is the rightful owner of these blades?

A solitary, thorny question often manages to multiply into many elusive forms. Did these matched swords belong to the same soldier? They are certainly light enough to be held in one hand, yet the hilt has room for two sets of fingers. What was he fighting for? In the time of the Boxer Rebellion, the Chinese Society of Right and Harmonious Fists fought against foreign influence in their country. Are these swords ceremonial rather than battle-ready? Perhaps the darks stains are actually rust, yet the nicks in the blade suggest they were used in combat. Was it he (or his ancestor) who forged them so lovingly, meticulous in whittled storytelling? I want to think this is true. His family history is carved right into the bone.

I take the swords down from the kitchen wall to study their extraordinary craftsmanship. The hilt and scabbard are both decorated bone; when sheathed, they become one complete unit. Along one edge are two small holes where the swords may have attached to a belt. By ink and groove sixteen men can be discerned. Women are absent—not surprising, given China’s patriarchal Confucian society at the time. The illustrations are the same on both swords, with only minute discrepancies; a few men are facing the opposite direction, and a couple have alternate headgear. But their faces are undeniably the same. Each stoic figure is robed, wearing a near-smile. Three near the handle are bald, resembling Buddhist monks, except their clothing is far too elaborate. The sculptor differentiated among the sixteen long, flowing, hanging-sleeved Hanfu robes in several ways: drawing cross-hatching, X’s, stars, or two concentric ovals that look like open eyes. The ornate patterns suggest noble heritage.

Hanfu is traditional Chinese clothing, dating back thousands of years to Huángtì, the Yellow Emperor. Wearing these silk robes has been carried to present from 2400 BCE. Huángtì is said to be the ancestor of all Han Chinese, the largest individual ethnic group in the world. Both the Japanese kimono and Korean hanbok were derived from Hanfu. On the sword sheaths, the Hanfu is by far the most prominent feature. All the figures have their hands folded over one another beneath the sleeves. This gives them an air of contentment, a quiet and humble satisfaction only the enlightened achieve.

The swords actually consist of seven bone segments, individually carved and glued together. The division separating each segment is carefully hidden within the design. Between each set of figures—dividing one generation from the next—is a layer of water, earth and sky. Directly below the knee level of most figures is a wavy line; within the space underneath is a series of dashes, clearly representing a current in water. Under these few centimetres on the sword is an equal-sized band of rocky earth, portrayed with jagged hexagonal lines; an observer can see one layer of stone stacked upon a second. Next, a clear band represents the sky, and finally another wavy line—filled with longer diagonal stripes in contrast to the short horizontal ones in the first water layer—shows clouds inundated with rain. This completes the hydrological cycle. The rain will fall back into the sea at the feet of the figure below.

This pattern of water, earth and air is broken only near the end of the sheath, where four men have been carved overlapping one another—three men on the reverse side. Perhaps the sculptor ran out of space? Or did these four and three belong to the same family, being brothers of the sword-bearer himself?

Still more detail exists. Besides the intermittent thin sliver of sun seen beneath the horizon of cloud, fire is also symbolized at the sheath’s top and bottom in the form of a hibiscus flower. The China rose. Thus all four elements are embodied in the bone. One full petal and two half petals are elegantly inscribed, showing half the overall flower, their edges joined to resemble a rising sun. Creeping inconspicuously from behind are two leaves with netted veins. Not only are the paired hibiscus found at either end of the 60-centimeter scabbard—removing the blade reveals flowers at the top and bottom of the 25-centimeter hilt. So even when unsheathed, both scabbard and hilt retain their radiant symmetry. The repeating images of robed men and the four elements are sandwiched between these open flowers.

In the plant world, the China rose is a curiosity. Hibiscus is polyploid, meaning it possesses multiple pairs of chromosomes, so that its offspring could resemble an ancient ancestor just as likely as a parent, or grandparent. In a way, I am the heir of these swords, a pseudo-descendant of the men drawn on the sheaths. But my DNA is only distantly related. Like the hibiscus, my sword ancestors look little like me.

Do I deserve the right to have these blades on my wall? For all I know, they could be ill-gotten. If my great-great uncle was a corpse robber, that pilfering gene has been passed on to me through these swords. Furthermore, I will never know the people carved on the sheaths—strangers that belong to a culture and country toward which I have never shown interest.

Should I not be seeking the rightful owner? The practical side of such a journey is near impossible. Over and above the geographical gap is an extraordinary distance between the customs and language of China and Canada. But at the very least, I can attempt understanding.

Why did the swords fall into my hands? For the first part of that answer, I look to my siblings. I have three brothers. Why was I granted this early inheritance? The swords are, after all, valued at over $700—or so a man at an antique show told my mom in 2004. When I moved from home, my mom offered me the swords. My two elder brothers never expressed an interest. Dan, the youngest son, has yet to leave.

Next I look to my mother. She is the one who christened me Lee. Lee is a sheltered or protected place. As Keeper of the Swords, she has entrusted me to shelter and protect them. In grade five, I remember finding a “meaning of names” book in the school library. My entry read, in full:

Lee; Chinese, plump.

Being skinny and Caucasian, this left me perplexed. In my case, Lee’s origin is English. The surname Lee supplanted Tuggey in 1898, when my great grandmother Pips married John Robert Lee on New Year’s Day, in Portsmouth, England.

My mom lost the Lee family name the day of her first wedding. It was her second marriage to my dad, Nelson, where Lee returned. Admittedly, I arrived a few months before the vows. Within my name—Lee Michael Beavington—is carried the ancestry of my father and mother. By granting me her maiden name, my mom ensured its survival at least one more generation. The middle Michael is after my godfather, Michael Wineberg. My mom has often said Michael tried to convince Nelson not to marry her, the night before the wedding, no less. (My dad tells a different story.) So Michael literally came between Beavington and Lee; to this day, that is where he resides, caught between two families merged by my conception.

Of course, I am the only son with any interest in Lee family history. This surely did not escape mom’s attention.

Then again, maybe the swords chose me. They have undergone a long, arduous journey to reach my hands. In fact, they almost ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic in the bowels of the Titanic.

Pips was responsible for bringing the swords from England to Canada. Plagued by illness as a child, she was short, slim, and courageous, with luminous eyes and flowing brown curls. John Robert Lee, a burly, bushy-browed and moustached Englishman, fell in love with her. Walking down the aisle, Pips overheard John’s aunt mutter to another aunt, “Look at that poor sickly thing. She won’t last a year!” Pips recounted this many times to her children and grandchildren (including my mom), unable to hide her delight in outliving the very prophesier of her doom. It’s a good thing too, for she needed time to birth my grandfather; by 1907, they had four children, the youngest being Kit.

John, a building contractor, immigrated to Canada in 1911. He found work in Calgary. The pay was terrible, and the hostile winter chilled his spirits. To save money, John lived in a tent with other men. He wrote to Pips, “Come in April when the weather is more agreeable.” She booked herself and the children one-way on the historic April 10th, 1912 sailing. The Titanic tickets said “third class”. They could afford only steerage.

John faced more misfortune. He lost his job. He wrote to Pips, despondent over signs stating “Englishmen need not apply.” With the arrival of Christmas, his heart grew fragile. He could not bear to be parted any longer from his Pips. His telegram read:

Miss you. Sail sooner. Love, John.

So my grandmother cancelled her passage on the Titanic. In doing so, she saved the swords—and me. When the Titanic sank, the men, women and children in steerage were locked below deck. My five-year-old grandfather, Kit, surely would have drowned. Tragically, such a terrible event struck thirty-three years later, when Kit and his nephew Johnnie drowned in a sailing accident at Chestermere Lake, just outside Calgary. My mom was six; her family life was thrown into turmoil. Thirty-eight years later, when I myself was six, I nearly drowned while swimming in a hotel pool.

In August of 1983, my family was vacationing in California. My dad’s sister—Aunt Jenny—brought two of her boys along. I frequented the hotel pool as often as I could. I have always loved water, drawn to Mother Ocean’s power and the spirit of the river. My two cousins and I were playing pool tag; they could swim, I could not. In the deep end, I pulled myself through the water by grabbing the ledge, hand over hand. I did not like getting tagged. Yet my finless feet could not help me. In order to elude my aquatic cousins, I started skipping corners. I bridged the right angle of a pool’s corner like a transient hypotenuse, leaping from one edge to another in order to save time. Each time I left more space, more distance for the hypotenuse to cover. One time, it was too far.

I leapt, pushing off with my hands, and fell into water three times my height. My world collapsed. I still remember the terror, the complete panic and helplessness, arms flailing for something solid as my lungs burned. I had lost control of my life, and it filled me with the fear of a thousand deaths. My cousin Sam, a year my senior, managed to pull me to the side of the pool.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

But I was in no condition to answer, my mind frozen by that image of eternal darkness. My Aunt, the first adult on the scene, made me promise never to tell my mom. That would strike too close to heart, what with her father’s drowning. Also, at the time, my mom was facing the cancer spreading inside her mother and older sister—they would soon die a week apart. I kept my mouth shut.

Like my grandfather, I avoided an early underwater fate. If Kit had sailed on the Titanic and subsequently drowned in steerage, I would be without experience—near-death or otherwise. I would also not feel such strong empathy for his later drowning. Over the last ten years, I have relayed my hotel pool story to my mom at least half a dozen times; not once has she remembered. Yet she can recall the time and place Pips left for Canada.

With the Titanic trip cancelled, my great grandmother booked for a ship sailing in February, 1912, from Southampton to the east coast of Canada. To the best of my knowledge, she brought the swords with her, perhaps a parting gift from her brother Tom.

After weeks on the ship, Pips and the kids took a transcontinental train. Accompanied by many immigrants following the promise of cheap land, they arrived in Calgary, utterly spent. The Canadian government wanted homesteads set up in the prairies, so the Minister of the Interior forbade copy writers from referring to “snow” and “cold” in official publications. Yet snow and cold are exactly what Pips found.

A blizzard raged through the city. John was still struggling to save money. After the happy reunion, the five of them shared a tent with other families for a few days until the tiny house my great grandfather had managed to rent was available. From that meagre foundation, he eventually started his own contracting business. Among the dozens of houses he built in Calgary were four along what is now called Fifth Avenue NW. These were homes for the Lee family; the Chinese swords were kept in the nicest house, where John and Pips lived.

Pips died in 1958, outliving her husband and nearly every relative of her generation. She bestowed the swords to Kit, my grandfather. Why he got them instead of his older brother, Bob, I do not know. Kit’s wife, Bessie, kept them safe after his tragic drowning at age 37. Thirty-eight years later, when cancer claimed Bessie on Remembrance Day, 1983, the swords moved to my mom’s house in Surrey, British Columbia. Like Pips, my mom has four children. Now the third of that line—Lee Michael Beavington—sits in The Loft, holding the centenarian swords in reverence. It feels like I’m holding the prehistory of my life. As I pull out a blade, I notice the nicks along the edge, the dents where steel met steel. My mom used to take the swords out from under her parents’ bed, despite strict orders not to touch them. She and her sisters would unfold the blanket they were wrapped in, remove the blades from their sheaths, and shiver in delight at the dark blood stains. They made up stories about who owned the swords, how he died bravely on the battlefield defending his country, how Uncle Thomas found the swords and brought them back with him to England.

These blades still hold the blood of ancient enemies. Those enemies could very well have been my ancestors. Yet the irony goes further.

When Thomas Tuggey arrived in China in the early 1900s as a British naval officer, he was part of the forces sent to stamp out the Boxer Movement. The treaty troops—from eight nations—were able to occupy Beijing and end the uprising. Plunder, looting and rape ensued.

Somewhere during this campaign, my great-great uncle discovered the two swords. I can almost feel that first touch, his hand grasping the bloodied weapons. From his hands they have passed to mine. Thus—a foreigner owns the heirlooms that would have stayed in China had not the Boxers rebelled.

For two weeks, the swords have sat with me at my desk. My thumb occasionally runs along the grooves in the bone, pondering character and meaning. They were forged over a hundred years ago, infused with story and ancestry that have since changed shape and form. Yet the legend of their journey endures. As the swords move in and out of lives, one set of stories overlays another.

I do not want to put them back on the wall. In doing so, I fear their history will be forgotten. I cannot claim ownership. In keeping the swords, am I defiling their heritage? Is my very touch sacrilegious? My ancestry brought them to me. But the ancestry of the swords belongs to a country, culture, and century to which I hold no claim. If any dignity remains, if I can offer any tribute, it is to keep telling the story of the swords. In remembrance, there is honour.