The Story of Burt - Part 4 of 4

See Part 1 Here

See Part 2 Here

See Part 3 Here

He would take the time and effort, ever after, to carry pockets full of loonies and quarters and give them to any street person who asked, always with compassion and an ear if one of the unfortunates wanted to talk. .

One thing I always noticed about Burt was how clean he always smelled and how he had an endless supply of pale blue t-shirts that matched his eyes. His favourite mode of dressing was in jeans, with a checked shirt over one of the t-shirts. He told me he showered twice a day. And he had 24 of those blue t-shirts. He managed a shipping company when I met him. He started off loading the docks and within a couple of years was promoted through the ranks.


I'll tell you how Burt saved my life. We became good friends in spite of the fact that he had never befriended a woman before and he told me this at the start. But over the years it just happened. We would look out for each other. I prepared his tax returns and arranged for his pension payments and gave him a freezer I didn't need and we would cook for each other. And then tramp the country together and fish. Two people more distinctly at odds both in background and education and interests you would be hard pressed to meet. He taught me how to live in the bush on the berries and fungi and even edible tree bark. He would shove envelopes with cards and a $5 bill into my mail box with always the same notation on the card: “Somebody loves ya!”

One night I was feeling sick. A bad flu bug. Burt had called me and was concerned. He said if I wasn't well the following day he would take me to the doctor. I told him he was making a big deal out of a flu bug. The following morning after a sleepless night I was feeling worse. He showed up at my door leaving me no choice but to go to the doctor. Who could find nothing wrong. See? I said to him I told you so, now let me go home and go to bed.

Burt kept insisting there was something seriously wrong with me so the doctor sent me off for X rays. Still nothing wrong. Burt insisted again so she sent us to the emergency department of the local hospital where they ran blood tests and my white blood cell count was through the roof. I don't remember much about all of this except lying on a gurney and Burt telling me they were going to operate immediately, my doctor was on her way over to assist the surgeon as my appendix had ruptured and I had advanced peritonitis. I don't know how long the surgery lasted. My family were at the hospital when I awoke, along with Burt who told me I had technically died a few times throughout the long night. His old Indian tracker instincts had been bang on the money.

Over the lengthy recovery process Burt was there first thing in the morning when he would leave after an hour or so and reappear again last thing at night. I've never forgotten it. I had a really terrifying experience in a hospital as a small child and Burt wiped that particular slate clean. I've never felt that purity of love and caring before or since – either given or received. A safety and a certainty of feeling that were unshakeable. Not that we didn't have our differences, we did. And they were many. But they were never insurmountable and the thread of our love for each other was woven into the very fabric of our friendship.

Burt's end was quick. He had a 24 hour form of leukaemia closely related to pneumonia. If he'd chosen his death, that would have been it. Fast and painless. I had never heard of such a disease until his doctor enlightened me. Apparently one of the more famous people who died of it was Jim Henson of Muppet fame.

I was able to be there for Burt's end as he was there for my second life. I was shocked at the number of people who overflowed the church for his funeral, he had touched many lives. I finally met his siblings. His mother had died the year before, a few weeks after his last fishing expedition with her. Fishing set Burt's life to rights. Fishing with his brothers, his mother, with me. It was something he and his father had done, you see, and he said he always felt his father beside him when he fished, coaching him on casting, on tying the flies, on gutting the catch.

I put his fishing rod in the casket beside him. So he'd be ready.

Edgar Benoit, still alive in a care home back in New Brunswick, sent a cheque to cover the costs of the funeral.

Some people leave footprints on your spirit that never leave. I think of him often, think of how he would have loved where I live now with the fishing all around and the simplicity of existence.

He would approve.

Somebody loves ya!

The Story of Burt - Part 3

See Part 1 Here

See Part 2 Here

The series of foster homes Burt was in remained a blur to him. All he remembered was getting angrier and angrier until it was like a huge ball of pain within him and then he discovered that booze and drugs would give him a short respite, that is when he managed to get his hands on them. He recalled his mother visiting a few times but he couldn't meet her eyes when she told him to be a good boy, that Mr. Benoit had his reasons for the breakup of her family and they lay between himself and God. She had no choice. He had no clue where his siblings were.

I always found it extraordinary that Burt never ever blamed his mother for her decision to put her four children into child care services and then on to foster care. I brought it up with him several times. Of course Edgar Benoit was a monster but his mother was complicit, no? Burt would become enraged, the only time I had ever seen him angry telling me never, ever spit on his sainted mother's name like that. Never. She did what she had to do, she had no choice. Door closed.


Mr. Benoit and their mother had moved into a small bungalow by a stream, far away from the town, where in later years her adult children would come and stay for a few days and fish in the nearby stream with her, circling Edgar warily, barely polite, not that he encouraged any kind of conversation, even at table.

One of his brothers joined the US army and rose to the rank of colonel during Vietnam. The other brother ran a garage in Ontario. The sister met an American friend of her brother's and moved to New York with him.

None of them ever referred to that night again or blamed their mother for condoning the disintegration of her family. Edgar became the focus of their rage and despair and hatred even though in later years he became completely blind and totally dependent on their mother and softened somewhat. They refused to speak to him. They spoke of killing him as if it were like taking him out for a beer. They invented plots where they all got their hands dirty and covered for each other. The elaborate plans for his death became pretty much their only topic of conversation when they got together over the years. Which was rarely. None of them had children, Burt by choice, and he was sure the others had made the same decision. He couldn't really tell you why if you asked him.

Burt had many years of pain and turmoil once he escaped to the vast anonymous city of Toronto. He couldn't hold down a job even though his charm and innate intelligence landed him a few good positions. The alcohol would win out every time, sending him teetering by turn from apartments to rooming houses to shelters all the way to park benches and bottles of rubbing alcohol. At times his pain consumed him, it should have killed him, he admits but for his rage at Edgar giving him a life force, a purpose. Revenge.

He recalled, one time, that in a fog, he managed to hitch all the way to New Brunswick and showed up at his mother's home, in rags, reeking of alcohol, many of his teeth rotted out of his head. His mother took him in and gave him some money and a rosary beads and bought him clothes and nursed him back to health after she insisted he go to the local parish priest and take the pledge and swear off the drink. His thanks was to rob all the valuables out of the house and find a hidden stash of cash in Edgar's tool shed and skip out of town without a goodbye.

As such men do, he found a simple loving wife to take care of him for a while, she worked hard and he spent most of her money on booze until they were forced, financially, to live with her mother. A miserable experience for Burt as his wife paid more attention to her mother's instructions as to how to run their married life and consequently withheld money from him for the first time. Which forced him to find a job yet again until the cycle started once more.

This time he was turfed out of his mother-in-law's house and there was no in-between residence in apartments and rooming houses and shelters. He hit skid row directly. Bridges and bottles, he said to me. His life was delineated by bridges and bottles. With maybe the odd blanket to keep him warm as he lay on a sleeping bag on some cardboard boxes. It was one of those charity workers that he despised who woke him up one night. These workers would come around and drop off muffins and sandwiches and hot cups of cocoa and coffee and blankets. Do-gooders. He hated them. The worker squatted beside him and said to him: “I was under a bridge a year ago, just like you, and I've not had a drink in a year and I got my life back.”

Burt told him in no uncertain terms to eff off and rolled over. The worker leaned over and put a business card in front of his face. “Now if you're sick and tired of being sick and tired give me a call and I'll be there.” And with that he got up and walked off. In spite of himself, Burt put the card into a pocket and a week later, after he fell down and bashed his nose in and lay all night in his own blood, he found a call box and put in the dime that would save his life and get him sober.

The Story of Burt - Part 2

See Part One here

By the end of the year, their brother Denis was born. A beautiful sunny child, beloved by all but never more so than by Mr. Benoit who became a man besotted. The child was given his own bedroom beside his parents and his wardrobe put the rest of theirs to shame. Burt remembered no jealousy about this. If Mr. Benoit was happy, and happy he surely was, the lavish gifts bestowed on their half-brother was a small price to pay. Burt's load was suddenly lightened. Mr. Benoit threw him the odd book to read, the extra break in the day and instructed his mother to cut down and resew some of his own pants to fit the lad as he approached his twelfth year.

Denis had just turned three when Burt awoke to smoke and flames screeching across the dark night sky ourside his bedroom window. It was moonless that night, Burt recalled. He awoke his two brothers who shared his room and they grabbed a few of their meagre possessions and then got his sister who was cowering, frightened, in a corner of her own bedroom, and he led them all to safety down the back stairs and across the courtyard to the stables so they could release the few animals and chickens Mr. Benoit kept there.

Burt told them to stay with him, he didn't want to lose sight of them as the hotel was being devoured so fast by the flames and the heat was so intense. They went around to the front of the hotel and across the street where a small crowd was gathering and the geriatric old fire truck had arrived with a great clanging of its bell and the firemen were ineffectually leaking water onto the inferno through the hose.

Mr. Benoit came staggering out of the front door, half carrying their mother who looked to have fainted. Alarmed, the children gathered around her, Mr. Benoit pushed them aside.

“You have Denis? He asked Burt, looking to the rest of the children, “Where is Denis?' his voice rose into a scream that Burt would remember all of his days.

“Denis?” and he dropped their mother to the ground, and began to race back into the building until he was stopped by the four volunteer firemen who had to pin him to the ground.

At that moment, on the upper floor, Burt saw his little brother in silhouette against a hall window, his thumb in his mouth, but only for a few seconds, for the flames were greedily snatching at him from behind until he vanished in the horrible sound of the building disintegrating in a roar of collapsing floors and ceilings. A sight spared Denis' father who was still face down in the driveway, screaming his son's name.

After that, it was all over. Mr. Benoit could not look at the surviving children and ordered his wife to put them into care for he would not have them around him to remind him of how they survived while his son died.

To be continued

The Story of Burt, Part 1

Burt with my daughters

I must get his story down before I toss off my mortal coil. I started and finished it on the ferry, that blighted ferry, so out of lemons comes lemonade, yeah? I mentioned Burt before, here. He was truly one of a kind.

Burt's father died in a mill accident in the town of Dalhousie, New Brunswick, when he was 8. He and his two brothers and sister who were younger, along with their mother, were left penniless. He still remembered the raw hunger in his stomach when he went to bed at night. His mother was a proud woman who kept their worn old clothes in immaculate condition. He would see her sitting by the stub of a candle, late at night, mending and darning and knitting if someone had been kind enough to give her some wool.

When Mr. Benoit, the owner of the local hotel, started to come around a few nights of the week the children wondered about it. Mr. Benoit had lost his wife in childbirth a few years before and the baby had only lived a week before it followed its mother to the grave. He was a tall man who never smiled and who was given to glaring at the children in such a frightening manner that they would scamper up to their attic room and stay there until dawn by which time Mr. Benoit would have left.

Burt was old enough to speculate on what went on between his mother and Mr. Benoit. Except she didn't call him Mr. Benoit anymore but Edgar.

A month later a whole series of events took place. Mr. Benoit married their mother in the side chapel of Notre Dame and they all moved into the private residence end of the Benoit Hotel. The boys shared a large bedroom with 3 single beds and their sister got her own small room. It all seemed like something out of a fairy tale.

One afternoon, their mother sat them down in her bedroom which had two windows overlooking the falls. A spectacular room, with real lace curtains in the windows and an armchair in which she sat while they lined themselves up along the edge of the bed.

“It’s a miracle,” she told them, “My prayers have been answered!” And here she bowed her head. Burt's mother was devout, saying the rosary, offering up intentions, pleading with the almighty for relief and never blaming him when things went spectacularly wrong.

“Now, Mr. Benoit is still to be called Mr. Benoit by all of you. He would prefer it that way. You are all to behave yourselves around him, he does not like noise or questions or out of control or disobedient children. We are all truly blessed that he has opened up his heart and home and taken us in. He is a good man.

“And now also, Burton, you are to quit school immediately and help him around the place, repairing and fixing and cleaning.”

This was a blow to Burt as he loved his books and had hoped to get enough education to enlist in the army. But he had no choice.

The work was back breaking and seemed never to stop from dawn to dusk with short breaks. He learned how to replace roof tiles and broken pipes, paint and repair windows, fix squeaky doors and leaky toilets and threaten unruly drunks and sweep everything that needed sweeping all day long.

to be continued