By Wayne Weedon
Note: The contents of this story deals with religion and may offend some people. You may wish to avoid reading it.
Pregnant and deserted by her lover, a young girl moves in with her grandfather. When the baby boy is born, the grandfather agrees to look after him so his granddaughter may go to work. Despite the age difference, the relationship between the boy and his great-grandfather was more like two siblings than that of an adult and child. As this boy grew into a young man, he loved to look back and tell stories about his great-grandfather, whom he always called “Pops”.
When I came home, I told Pops about how I got into trouble at school, “When Judy told me I would go to hell because I was never baptised, I told her there was no hell, no heaven, and no God, and it was all just a fairy tale. When Judy told the teacher what I said, I got into trouble.”
Pops surprised me when he told me that things were improving. He told me what had happened to him at school, “In those days, each morning in school, a passage from the Bible was read out-loud. One morning when we had a substitute teacher, the Bible passage was about Noah and his ark. I stated it was just a fairy story and this teacher went berserk. He hauled me to the front of the class, pulled out the black strap and beat my hands black and blue on both the front and on the back. He was like a man-gone-wild.”
“Did the teacher get into trouble?”
“No. In those days it was against the law to question the veracity of the Bible, so I was in the wrong, and the teacher had every right to beat me. Today, teachers are no longer allowed to hit children, and in December 2018, Canadian blasphemy laws were finally repealed. Atheists may finally come out of the closet.”
Pops continued, “Several years later, Hannah, a friend of mine, explained how people will often go berserk when someone questions their irrational beliefs. This teacher was desperately trying to believe what he logically could not believe. He was paranoid about going to Hell if he stopped believing. He became violent with anyone who opposed him.”
According to Hannah, besides this acute berserk behaviour, there is chronic berserk behaviour and going berserk by proxy. In the chronic form, people blow off steam on a regular basis, so the pressure never reaches the point to cause them to blow up. Going berserk by proxy is someone watching and enjoying another person going berserk. Berserk by proxy allows bullies to put across an image of them being nice, non-violent, people, when, in fact, they are full of schadenfreude, which, Hannah told Pops, is a German word that has no English equivalent. This word refers to a person’s enjoyment in watching pain and suffering in others. Bullfights, cockfights, boxing, and hockey are all forms of berserk by proxy. The audience enjoys the blood but convinces themselves that these activities are just healthy competitions and games.
Pops first met Hannah when he was working on a grain elevator maintenance gang. She was a spinster schoolteacher living in Toronto who came back to Plum Coulee every summer vacation to visit with her widowed grandmother. One Sunday, Hannah came into the grain elevator where Pops was doing his work while the elevator wasn’t in operation. Hannah made a strange request. She asked Pops if she could ride the man-lift to the top of the elevator. Pops explained to her that there was over two-hundred pounds of counterweight, she could easily go up on the man-lift, but she would never be able to pull herself down. When she begged, Pops consented, telling her the two of them together would probably equal the counterweight. To ride up they needed to squeeze tightly against each other which made Pops a bit uneasy. Hannah stepped off and stood silently gazing at an overhead wooden beam for a few minutes. When they got back down, she explained to Pops how her friend had gone up and hung himself from the beam above them.
Pops had assumed she had been saying a silent prayer, but she laughed and told Pops she was an atheist who did not believe in prayers. She just wanted to remember her friend Joe. This shocked Pops because, in those days, in Canada, anyone who admitted to being an atheist in public could have been arrested and sent to prison on charges of blasphemy.
Hannah told Pops Joe’s story, first explaining how most people living around Plum Coulee were German speaking Protestants, but, to the east, the inhabitants were French speaking Catholics. There was animosity between the two groups. On Saturdays, it was common for young men from the Morden-Winkler area to come to Queen’s Hotel in Plum Coulee to have a few beers and look for a fight. One evening when the beer parlour closed for supper hour, a group of these young men came into the restaurant where Hannah was alone with a customer, Joe, a French speaking Catholic who was working on the railway. One of the bigger fellows made fun of Joe’s accent and told him to get back into the ditch with his frog relatives. This brought a hoot of laughter from the others. Joe, being half the size of this fellow, just got up and walked away. But, the loudmouth, begging for a fight, and backed by his friends, followed Joe outside where they grabbed onto Joe and threw him into the ditch. Later that night, Joe hung himself. Hannah explained that this German speaking group were chronically berserk. They enjoyed slamming opponents up against the boards while playing hockey, and looking for a fight after they had a few beers.
Hannah related Joe’s troubling background which led to his suicide. He had gone to his father for help and support. He told his father how he had witnessed two priests sexually abusing his younger brother. His father went berserk, beating Joe until he lost consciousness as he yelled that priests don’t do such things. Joe was ordered to never mention this affair again.
A while later, Joe came across a tiny announcement hidden on page 16 of the Winnipeg Free Press dated March 30, 1946, “Starbuck Man Jailed: Sentence of 23 months in jail was imposed on Lionel Joyal, 34, of Starbuck, Man., after he pleaded guilty before Magistrate D. G. Potter, in provincial police court, Friday, to four charges of gross indecency.”
Joe went to the police, telling the officer on duty that this man who had been convicted was one of two priests who had abused his younger brother in the church vestry. The reason this priest from Starbuck was in town was to help the local priest with a funeral mass which called for two priests to officiate. The police officer seemed sympathetic as he politely listened to Joe’s request to have this second priest arrested. The officer then escorted Joe home where he told Joe’s father that his son needed to be straightened out as he was making up stories about priests. Even before this police officer was out the door, Joe’s father was already undoing his belt buckle. Soon after, Joe left home and got a job on the railway. That’s how he ended up in Plum Coulee.
After Joe’s suicide, Hannah began asking questions and soon found out that one of several boys being abused by Joyal was the nephew of Father Lucien Vinet, a priest, who publicly stated that Joyal has met his Waterloo. Vinet demanded that Joyal be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. These actions resulted in Vinet being defrocked and excommunicated. He had placed his nephew’s welfare above his own livelihood.
Hannah made it a point to meet with Vinet who stated it was a shame the newspaper did not give the whole story along with the accuser’s name. If they had done this, Joe may have come to him instead of the police, and Joe would be alive today.
Under Pops advice, the next day when I was at school, I apologised to Judy, and I told her how I appreciated her concerns about my suffering in Hell. Pops believed it is best not to be dogmatic and force one’s opinions onto others. Judy seemed shocked, but she accepted my apology, and she has never mentioned religion to me again. I suppose that’s a good thing.
Wayne Douglas Weedon is a Manitoba author who writes a combination of fictional and factual stories, essays, and novels.
