Butcher Knife

Trigger warning: This story suggests child sexual abuse.

                 I only vaguely recall Grandpa coming to the door of our bedroom that evening and asking us to come to his bedroom. I do remember that it was not the first time.  My older sister, Evelyn, at age seven and myself, five years old, were already in bed. We shared a room that was just down the hallway from our grandfather, in the basement of the duplex where our family lived in a small city in Alberta. Our parents’ bedroom was upstairs. Grandpa had always lived with us, my father being the eldest son, and the Japanese tradition being that the aged parent lives with him. We never knew our grandmother; she died long before we were born. To me, it seemed that my father and grandfather had always lived together. Grandpa had come from Japan to Canada in the early 1900’s, to seek his fortune. He had later sent to Japan for a wife and married my grandmother. They had four children. However, she had died a horrible death from ovarian cancer, and my grandfather had been a widower for many years.

                 Our relationship with our grandfather was not close. His English was limited and

his presence reminded us of our heritage, which we were embarrassed about. We also thought he was very eccentric, so we ignored him as much as possible.  In any case, he always seemed to be distracted, his mind on other things, like his work. Having been a farmer while previously living in British Columbia, he was now mainly employed as a gardener for other families, as well as tending our own garden. He didn’t seem to pay much attention to us, his grandchildren, except to instruct us occasionally in the correct way to wring out a washcloth, or how to dig dandelions. 

The laborious process of digging dandelions involved kneeling on the lawn in the bright sunlight, with a linoleum knife that had string tied around its handle, for a good grip. Although this implement was designed for another purpose, he liked to use this type of knife, which featured a hooked blade, with a sharp tip. He would pull the plant to the side, then dig deeply into the soil to reveal the bright white dandelion root, which he then deftly cut, tossing the leaves aside. 

Grandpa also had a taste for butter rum-flavoured Lifesavers. He always seemed to have a half-used roll in his pants pocket and would sometimes offer us one. We didn’t really like the flavour, and thought they were a little grimy, seeing the wrapper dangling from the roll. We would each take one, to be polite. However, it felt a little like taking candy from a stranger. Perhaps Evelyn even threw hers away.

When my mother married my father, she moved into the household, taking over as “woman of the house.” She relieved my father’s younger sister, Ruby, who had taken on that responsibility after the elder sister had married and left home. In that role, Ruby’s obligation was to tend to the needs of the three men in the household: her father, older brother, and younger brother. Ruby wanted to get married and move away, but this would mean leaving the men to fend for themselves, a situation that would not stand in a Japanese household. 

Ruby was desperately in love with my mother’s brother, Sam. The two couples had double-dated—sister and brother paired with brother and sister--and my mother was a close friend with Ruby, and sympathetic to her desires to get married. My mother and father had actually met as they were designated as chaperones for their siblings, since it was not seemly for couples to be dating one-on-one, in those days. The obvious solution seemed to be that the older brother, my father, should get married first, which would result in my mother taking Ruby’s place. This would leave the way clear for Ruby and Sam to get married, and for Ruby to leave the home. Such a simple solution to such a difficult problem, and my mother welcomed the idea, showing no hesitation when my father did propose.

My mother had always felt a little intimidated by her new in-laws. She was a little older than usual for brides in her day, and she had managed to marry an eligible bachelor, whom she used to say she “caught on the rebound.” She thought of herself as unattractive and ungainly. She was big boned, with generous facial features, rather than being tiny and delicate, like her sisters-in-law. She had large eyes, different from most Japanese. Her own mother even called them “cow eyes,” instructing her to try to keep her eyes half closed, to appear more culturally appealing. Ironically, decades later, young women in Japan would spend thousands of dollars to undergo surgery to make their eyes appear bigger, following the Western beauty values that would spread throughout the world after World War Two.

My father used to have an Irish girlfriend when he lived on the west coast of Canada. We only learned of this as adults, standing around his death bed, and looking at faded black-and-white photographs in an old album. When we discovered the full-length picture of a white woman smilingly posing in a bathing suit, this was quite out of place amongst the family photos. We asked our father who this was. He replied sheepishly, “Oh, that’s Trixie O’Ryan. She used to be my girlfriend.” He had been forced to give her up when all the Japanese Canadians were moved inland during World War Two. Immediately after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, anyone of Japanese origin was labelled an “enemy alien,” and suspected of being a spy.

With the rounding up of all Japanese people from the west coast, people from different prefectures in Japan were thrown together. My parents never would have met and married, had it not been for this turn of events, which turned out to be fortuitous for me. She had lived on Vancouver Island, and he had lived on a farm near Surrey, B.C.

However, once she was married, my mother had to make many adjustments. She had to learn a higher class of the Japanese dialect, since her own family would be what she called “hillbillies” in Japan. She also had to learn to refine her cooking skills, since her own mother had been a haphazard cook, who didn’t bother to measure ingredients, and whose cooking was acceptable to her husband in any state it was presented. Hard-textured cakes and burnt rice were all fine for my grandfather, and as a result, my mother had never learned to cook any better. 

In her new role, however, as woman of the house, my mother had to give in to whatever my father deemed correct and necessary in the household. One of those things was to put three meals on the table each day, and in the process, to accommodate her father-in-law’s food requests and peculiarities. 

Like many people raised in Japan, Grandpa ate rice three times a day. For the morning meal, his rice needed to be specially cooked, softening leftover rice from the day before, by cooking it with extra water-- what the Japanese called okai.  Eggs were then dropped in, and it was all steamed together in a saucepan on the stovetop. He had a good appetite, and would eat large plates of food for lunch and supper, which he sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper, and then doused with copious amounts of ketchup and mayonnaise.  This was in total disregard for whatever seasoning or flavouring had been carefully applied in the cooking process, as a result of my mother’s concerted attempts to serve appetizing and nutritious meals. 

But Grandpa’s morning coffee routine was the real test of the family’s fortitude. We all winced, as he dipped his peanut-buttered toast into his mug of day-old, cold coffee. I suppose it would now be called “iced coffee,” and what is called a “double-double” at Tim Hortons:  liberally-creamed coffee that has been sweetened with two heaping spoonfuls of sugar. The rest of the family looked on with askance, but since he was the patriarch and the nominal head of the house, everyone went along with his requests.

                 So, that night, trusting Evelyn’s judgement as I usually did, I followed Evelyn to our grandfather’s bedroom. 

The next morning, I remember being suddenly awakened by my mother’s shouting. This was surprising because she was usually a mild-mannered person, who rarely raised her voice. She had come into my grandfather’s bedroom and found me in bed with him. I automatically looked around for Evelyn, but she was not in sight, which was puzzling. I was sure we had been there together earlier, one of us on each side of our grandfather. I had been reluctant to go with Grandpa in the first place, but had followed along with my sister, on whom I depended for security in many things.  Panic-stricken, I hastily got up to go, and can still remember the sticky feeling, as I disengaged the skin of my grandfather’s bare thigh from my own leg that had been intertwined with his. 

My mother was livid! I had never seen her so angry. She shouted at my grandfather in Japanese--a language I could not understand--and directed me, in English, to go to my room immediately. Furthermore, I was “never, ever to get in bed with Grandpa again.” I was chastened. Somehow, though a mere child, I seemed to be at fault.  I did not even know what sin I might have committed.

                 I don’t remember there ever being any conversation afterward about the incident, and I knew it was a taboo topic that I couldn’t broach on my own, with either of my parents. There was very little discussion in our household of anything remotely intimate or sexual. My parents never displayed any affection for each other, and my mother would become visibly uncomfortable, avoiding eye contact, and skirting around any subject that involved sexuality. 

However, one time--many, many years later--my mother let it slip that if she would have to be alone in the house at night with her father-in-law, she would sleep with a butcher knife under her pillow.