The bus stopped at noon, a couple of blocks east of the sharp-angled apex where the Kingsway thoroughfare and the old interurban tram line converged. It stopped right at the corner of the highway and the very short avenue on which stood the house he was headed for. Feeling very relieved to be back in town, and also feeling a little strange, Toby shouldered his duffle bag and headed down the hill. The weather in Burnaby was just as good as in the Interior.
At the end of the war, when he was nine, Toby had come down from Vernon to New Westminster on the train, and had been put on the interurban for Burnaby by the officer, a friend of his father's, who had accompanied him, coincidentally having his own reasons to travel to the Coast. When the tram emerged from what was then a lengthy stretch of forest, as it reached Central Park, his grandparents were waiting on the station platform and the family legends say that Toby was so happy to see them that he actually jumped from the top step of the exit into his grandmother's arms. His carpenter grandfather would have been a sturdier target, but it was his grandmother who had been standing directly below the tram's high platform. Toby had been away from the West Coast for over two years, living because of the War on the other side of the country, far away from the principal shrines of his boyhood, and coming back had seemed about as good a thing as could happen to him. His grandmother was a good sized woman, and strong from constant activity, but he had almost knocked her over in his enthusiasm; she had never forgotten, and regularly told the story, laughing over his eagerness.
His grandparents had not owned a car for years, so the three of them had walked the three blocks to the house and its near acre of garden, flowers, and the chicken houses Toby had known from his earliest years. He had never come to stay overnight in those days, but just to visit, either by himself on a Saturday, or with his parents for a special occasion like Christmas. He had been living with his other grandmother then, a widow, in her house just a couple of blocks west of Boundary Road. Three summers earlier, when he had first come back home from the Interior, he had stayed with his Nana. But that house was no longer in the family. It had been sold, and his Nana and his last bachelor uncle had moved out. His Nana had been recently married again, his uncle would be married later in the summer, and Toby would get to go to the wedding. So this time the Burnaby house would be his home base, though not the only place he would stay amongst his wealth of relatives.
The first time he had lived in the Okanagan had come three months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, while his father was in England, firing anti-aircraft shells at German bombers attacking London. His parents had been frightened by the thought of the Japanese invading Vancouver and Toby's grandfather had known from his mining days a man in the interior who could take in Toby and his mother and little brother.
By the second time, the war in Europe had just ended, with the citizens of Vernon thronging the train station in celebration of V-E Day at just the moment when Toby and his mother arrived from Ontario.
They were to stay in Vernon at least until the Pacific war was over. Toby's mother would collect his younger brother from the couple he had been staying with while his family was back east. Toby's Dad would be wandering about, sometimes at the Coast, sometimes at the barracks up the hill above the town. There was not much reason for him, now, to be directly engaged with the Japanese military, but the whole war was not yet over, and soldiery was still an option. Toby knew nothing about atomic bombs. His only war fright had come, while still in Ontario, and very sick, from hearing on the radio about the German V2's. But the Germans were done, now, and the V2's were not flying anywhere. But when he was sick, lying in the evening on the couch in his "uncle's" study and hearing the broadcast, he had needed to be assured that the rockets molesting England in the last days of the war could not reach southern Ontario. Toby had then been living with relatives in Ontario, as he had earlier lived in other people's houses in Nova Scotia, because of his father's various postings in Canada, where he had been returned to function as a gunnery instructor after things quietened down a little in England.
Toby's father had not been born to the Burnaby house, but had been brought to it, with his sister, as a small boy, and grown up on the property. Toby had been born from the place, inasmuch as his parents were eating New Year's Day dinner there when his mother's meal was interrupted by birth pangs. Toby was delivered sometime after midnight, and in the morning his father, having worked the graveyard shift on the green chain in a saw mill at the foot of Boundary Road, hurtled his racing bike to the Vancouver General to behold his first child.
By the time Toby was all but three years old his father had changed jobs and was working as a driver for a dairy just off Main Street in Vancouver. The milk came from the Fraser Valley and it was his father's task to bring it in from the countryside, then when it was processed to deliver it to the customers in the city. Toby was too young to remember very much of the dairy, even though they had a small apartment in the building, but he did have a memory or two of a private kindergarten where the teacher gave out animal crackers.
There was also another memory from that time, but it was much more of a supernatural recall than an ordinary natural one, because although the recollection in fact operated on behalf of grace, right from the time its beginning event took place, Toby was to have no natural memory of it until he was decades into adulthood. Then, it came easily and completely, in part because someone asked him a question about his spiritual life. Also, as he was by then approaching the conclusion of the mystical path, the attainment and divine granting of the seventh mansion, he was spiritually inclined to the most acute reminiscences of the key points of his beginnings. God was tidying up loose ends.
Spiritually speaking, Toby's beginnings lay utterly in the domain of his grandparents, who on both sides by the time he came along, were devout Baptists. That is, they knew something of the Bible; they attended church every Sunday; they prayed. On the occasions when Toby was living in her house, his Nana taught him his bedtime prayers and took him to Sunday School. To that degree, he began his experience in religion and his chance at salvation because of a grandmother's faith, like so many other youngsters whose parents had not actually grown into their full potential. But in his grandfather, the humble, quiet, Bible reading carpenter, he got something else, something not even a baptized Catholic child is guaranteed: he got a vision.
It was at Christmas, a week before Toby turned three, and his grandparents were with Toby's folks for Christmas dinner. The Skinners junior did not say grace at meals, but Toby's father was sensitive enough to his parents' feelings to ask Toby's grandfather to say grace, and as Walter humbly bowed his head and leaned into his venerable Protestant formula, Toby suddenly beheld a light around his head.
He had possibly seen a similar light some weeks earlier, in his kindergarten, but it had not been associated with any individual, and no one had been saying grace. He did not remember any prayers in the small but colorful basement space, although he always recalled a tricycle, and, as already mentioned, animal crackers, occasionally covered with chocolate.
His memory of the light around his grandfather's head vanished as soon as the light itself did, not to be recollected, as I said, for more than three decades, although it left its effect on his soul, no doubt for the sake of compensating for the regular course of instruction in religion he did not receive from his mother and father. For the most part, in fact, their comments on the subject were usually negative, if not derogatory, requiring from Providence some interesting footwork on behalf of the Holy Spirit's pre-emptive strikes against their determination to influence their first born against the ways of his ancestors.
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