How to Save the World

Behind the truck were three more, all piled with apples from the orchards. There was no market for them anywhere in Canada and rather than give the fruit away it was burned. The trucks rumbled onto the flat and then backed up to the tip where they disgorged their loads.

The edge of the dump was a cliff of fruit. At the bottom were women and children. They were chinks, ragheads, injuns, bohunks, polacks or wops to us. They were at the dump to scavenge apples. They leaned into the charred pile and tried to find fruit that hadn't been burned. When they found a fresh lode they carried armfuls to small wagons and wheelbarrows they had pulled or pushed all the way from town. The man on the tip watched them and when they began to cluster around a spill of fruit he would pick up a can and fling a twist of kerosene and diesel down the slope. When it flowed through the burning air, it exploded and the women and children dragged their wagons back. The man on the tip rolled cigarettes and smoked as he watched them sidle back into the billowing smoke and flame.

Quiet among the rusted car bodies, we watched as the empty army trucks returned to the orchards and packing houses for more apples. Then we made our way to the bottom of the drift away from the slope of burning fruit. There was almost no fire where we were. Here and there a pocket of thin flame flickered among torn clothing and broken chairs, but most of what was there was still intact.

I remember poking a stick into a mottled paper bag. The thin paper tore and a small cotton bundle fell out onto the inverted curve of a rusty fender. The bundle was knotted in the middle and I took the stick and picked at the knot. My brothers were below me, sifting through the discarded effluvium of the town. The knot gave way and I flicked at what looked like a cotton shirt. It slowly unfolded at my prodding and a tiny arm fell out, its fingers clenched, its skin a pale blue.

I stared at the thin arm and then prodded until the rest of the cloth gave way. It was a baby, a girl, and I gazed at her infant limbs, her swollen belly, and the bruises that suffused her skin. I pushed the edge of the fender with my bare foot. The metal tipped and the body fell into a crevice, the fender coming down and covering it. I looked at the flaking paint and moved away. The small body both existed and and didn't exist in my mind. I walked away from the secret grave and placed the dead baby somewhere deep inside where it could be lost.

There was no one I could tell, not even my brothers and not my mother or father or friends. If I did, it would somehow be my fault. We were not supposed to be at the dump. The last time we were caught our father had taken us to the woodshed and beaten us with a strip of boxwood. I didn't want to be beaten again...

Those were hard and brutal years. There was only one policeman in town and he was ineffectual at best. That wives and children were murdered and babies aborted with coat hangers or boots was a thing left to a family. Privacy was the measure of freedom. My friend's father prostituted his Down syndrome daughter for twenty-five cents to anyone who had the money. When his father wasn't home, my friend sold her to older boys for half a popsicle. I learned early to hide such knowledge, for whatever I might tell would have repercussions, involve my family in things that were better left alone.

Dead babies, the dump, memories of childhood, swirl around in me. Who should I tell now? What good comes out of the past? To go back over those days brings down on myself the caul of childhood. That a neighbour beat a small friend to death in his woodshed when I was six, that another neighbour locked his idiot daughter away in an attic for years, and that a man my father worked with beat his wife insensate every weekend were what I thought was normal. Secrets and the silences that surrounded them governed my young life. To do or say anything was anathema. Grief and memory are burdens that cannot be lifted by going back.