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Back by Margaret (Olafsson) Cantelon Before retiring, in the late 1970's, Margaret Cantelon taught at The day I went to live with Uncle Bodvar and Aunt Gudrun is as clear in my mind as yesterday,
though it is more than half a century ago.
It was on the day of my mother's funeral, and I was eight years
old. This was to be my new home, and I
sat on the stairs leading up to the bedrooms, feeling lost and desperately
unhappy. Then Uncle Bodvar
approached me, and handing me a dishtowel, he told me to dry dishes for
Eleanor. He gave me no words of comfort,
just an order, and it was his abruptness on that day which startled me and made
me remember. Immediately, I was pitched
into the reality of that boisterous family of seven children, and my new life
began. I knew that the universe revolved
around my Uncle Bodvar. He was tall and powerful with
reddish brown hair, flecked with grey.
His face was round and florid, adorned with a bright mustache. He was big and blustering and with his
presence any room in the house appeared to diminish. I can see him to this day at the head of the
dining table, talking most of the time, spearing potatoes and slapping large
slices of meat onto his plate. At the
table he held everyone's attention with whatever topic chose his fancy. Children were to be seen but not
heard at his table, and transgressors were abruptly banished. Around the household his discipline covered
every conceivable situation. A glance
from him was usually enough, but upon occasion an offending child within his
reach would receive a cuff from one of his gigantic hands, and I was no
exception. Aunt Gudrun was a small, pretty
woman. Her large brown eyes would light
with sympathy for the offender, but she never intervened. I never heard her argue and I never heard her
laugh, but her smile was the sweetest thing in the house. This big rough man never raised his voice to
her, and often he would sit beside her at the spinning wheel with his big hands
delicately sorting the wool for two-ply yarn.
I was astonished when he removed a foreign object from Aunt Gudrun's eye -- with his tongue. Even this act of gentleness was in
keeping with his line of direct action, for my aunt's eye was badly swollen,
and several attempts had been made by others to remove the irritant, but Uncle Bodvar solved it in a few seconds. This was typical of his approach to
unexpected problems. Once at a picnic,
when a boy had been injured in a fall from a horse, Uncle Bodvar
came and looked at him while the other adults were wondering where they could
find a doctor. The boy was moaning, and
with a sudden movement of those big hands Uncle Bodvar
put his dislocated shoulder back in place.
The boy let out one sharp cry and then laughed in relief. Uncle Bodvar
walked off while the others stood around expressing admiration, and I felt very
proud of my strange gruff uncle. In the
years that followed there were several other examples of his method of direct
action, which always surprised others. I remember the time a neighbour's
horse broke its leg, and there were several people gathered around the injured
animal as it lay there with its big frightened eyes. Uncle Bodvar came
up, took one look, and returned in a few minutes with a rifle. Without a word to anyone, he shot the horse
in the head, and it was all over -- no fuss. Throughout my childhood, I was
aware that my Uncle Bodvar was a complex person: his
iron rule over the farm chores to be performed by his children and me, his
gentleness with his wife, and his direct solutions for unexpected events, which
he applied without consulting others. In
each field he seemed to have a complete and distinct character which gave no
hint of the other facets of his being, and I'm sure that very few people, with
the possible exception of Aunt Gudrun, knew the all round man. Throughout the district, it was
his direct action, which was best known and he demonstrated this at our field
day. Suddenly, there were cries of alarm
from the far side of the field. There
was a runaway tem coming down the track, and people were jumping aside and
grabbing children as a team with a wagon came hurtling towards us. Uncle Bodvar stood
alone on the rutted track; he grabbed the reins as the wild team passed, and
then pulled them to a halt single-handed.
There was applause and cheers for him as he stood there comforting the
horses, and then he walked off without a word. It was a big heroic episode in the
life of the district, but Uncle Bodvar never referred
to it in his conversation when neighbours called, nor would he allow much local
gossip in his house. Instead he would
boast of other exploits involving nature and ghosts, swearing to most of them
as personal experience. He had an
inexhaustible store of preposterous stories, which he paraded as solemn
fact. In all of these he was the hero,
and when listeners tried to confirm them with Aunt Gudrun, she kept a face just
as solemn. He was a "no fuss" man
and he applied the same rules to himself.
When his hand was caught in the threshing machine, he managed to
extricate it, and walked into the kitchen with three fingers badly mangled, and
two of them broken. Aunt Gudrun was as
calm as he was, as she prepared the splints and bandages according to his
directions. He set the fingers himself
with his good hand and they healed, and although disfigured for life, they
worked. He never saw a doctor; he'd effected the cure himself, with no fuss. One night when the fish flies were
piled up about a foot deep along the lake, our visitors were saying they had
never seen a year like it, but Uncle Bodvar said they
were not nearly as thick as when he had first started homesteading. Then, he said, the dead fish flies had
completely filled the bay, and in testing them he had found them as sound as
the sand at the bottom. So in coming
back to his farm, he had saved himself many miles by driving his team right
across the lake on a "fish fly road" as solid as any dirt road in dry
season. Aunt Gudrun would neither
confirm nor deny whether she had travelled over that road, but Uncle Bodvar never waited for confirmation, he was off on another
story. The man's extraordinary
personality has been with me for more than fifty years but only two of his
daughters survive, and I recently checked with them to discover what remnants
of memory still linger of their father.
One immediately recalled his compassion when she was stricken with
rheumatic fever, and the other recalled his harshness when he had compelled her
to take a job as a housemaid in the city. But I remember his kindness, his
roughness, his understanding, his sensitivity, his silences, his garrulous
boasting, his courage … I have met many successful people, but the most
unforgettable person I have ever met was my Uncle Bodvar. |