My American Cousins,
July 4, 1963, St. Albans Street on the corner of Church Street, Enosburg Falls, Vermont
For Tammy MacBryde Farr
Folding chairs and outdoor dining tables festooned with colorful paper table cloths were positioned at regular intervals across the vast corner yard of our cousin Robina MacBryde Randall’s Vermont home, like a series of way stations for pilgrims in search of physical and spiritual sustenance. There were at least 30 folks of all ages milling around, with children frisking about and adults shushing or coddling them, or taking them aside to play all sorts of games. I was 11 years old and this was my extended family. I understood at a visceral level that their love was unconditional, enveloping, and complete.
The food for this Fourth of July luncheon was rich and copious, in keeping with the Vermont tradition. Every family visit to our second home in northern Vermont was a moveable feast.
During these sojourns, I would grow increasingly “fleshy,” as my relatives euphemistically termed my chronic condition.
There were sizzling hot dogs and hamburgers flanked by a vast array of condiments; glorious sandwiches, including the delectable egg salad variety made with mayonnaise and white bread; and pies, a spectacular display of succulent pies. But most tantalizing of all, there were homemade donuts, devoured with gusto, drenched in Vermont maple syrup.
Surrounded by second, third and fourth cousins, as well as my great uncle and aunt and a succession of family members sharing my first name, I felt a sense of belonging never again attained.
Robina MacBryde Randall
The prime mover behind these festivities was my second cousin Robina, who though married to Ross Randall, identified as a MacBryde through and through.
Robina’s right arm was perpetually in a sling, the limb atrophied due to childhood polio, but her condition seemed to impel her to wonderous achievements as though the affliction had been a gift, certainly not a disability, but rather an indispensable alloy for her iron will. She taught high school, raised two sons, ran her household like a battlefield general, and served as the guardian and purveyor of family lore.
Robina would never tire of recounting how my grandfather, Thomas McBryde, and her father, Robert MacBryde, arrived from Great Britain together soon after the first world war, worked in nearby St. Albans, then had to decide whether to remain in the U.S. or sally forth to the hinterland in search of fame and fortune. My grandfather finally left the States bound for the Canadian prairies, while Uncle Bob eventually bought a farm and raised a sizeable brood near the village of Enosburg Falls, Vermont.
Scots and lineage
Robina was the self-appointed keeper of the family lineage and especially the Scottish thread thereof. When my grandfather and Uncle Bob were mere lads, she narrated, family names were fluid: people chose to spell them in different ways, and officials did too. Robina explained that although Mac is more Scottish, the little line that often appears under the c in McBryde stands for the “a” that’s been elided. So Uncle Bob, a proud Scot, used the Mac version while my grandfather and the other brothers (Uncle Will and Uncle Jim) used the Mc form. She also strenuously emphasized that McBryde with a “y” is Scottish, and certainly NOT Irish.*
We MacBrydes and McBrydes are always correcting the spelling of our name, Robina asserted, and we must do so proudly, as descendants of valorous Scots.
When I was in Grade 8, we had to do a geography project. Robina was so thrilled that I chose to focus on Vermont, its history, geography, and folklore. She sent on a massive number of texts and pamphlets and shared her own tales and legends.
In the early 1980s, shortly before Robina died, my wife and I had the good fortune of visiting with her one last time, with our toddler son in tow. For her, our little boy represented the hope that the McBryde lineage would be perpetuated, a desperately touching, and ultimately unfulfilled, aspiration.
Tolerating our dad, blood being thicker than water
The interactions between laconic Vermont relatives and my manic, hysterical, argumentative father, were both hilarious and terrifying and led me to become pathologically conflict avoidant, a trait that I carry within me like an unhealed ulcer to this day.
My relatives and other pithy locals dealt with my father’s antics as they would the typical “Flatlander” from the fertile storehouse of Vermont jokes, my favorite involving the rural Vermonter sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of his home at the intersection of two diverging roads who, upon being asked whether it mattered which fork the Flatlander chose if he wanted to reach a certain destination, replied, ”Nope, not to me.”
https://justice.tougaloo.edu/vermont-jokes/
https://www.vermonter.com/vermont-jokes-wit/
https://upjoke.com/vermont-jokes
So the relatives would look on, bemused, as my father seized every opportunity to needle Robina in particular, truculently looking to provoke an argument.
I always chuckle when Vermont is described as a “liberal” state, a Democrat stronghold, for my relatives were all rock-ribbed Republicans. (Robina even sent Ronald and Nancy Reagan a gift of Vermont bone china dinnerware to palliate a putative White House shortage soon after the former lead actor of Bedtime for Bonzo was elected.) My father ribbed Robina mercilessly and sometimes viciously for her political proclivities, including her disdain for JFK and her support of the Vietnam War; Dad was nominally a Canadian Liberal, but was mainly a deliberate and gratuitous contrarian, who loved to disturb the manure rather than circumvent the cow patties.
Robina accepted my father’s parries and thrusts with remarkable poise and equanimity, while other relatives and local onlookers chortled at his outbursts in a very Vermont way and exclaimed in the crisp local vernacular, “Why dear me suz!” and “ Well Jeezum Crow, I guess so!”
https://www.waywordradio.org/dear-me-suz/
https://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/20/messages/846.html
https://www.enjoytravel.com/us/travel-news/guides/vermont-slang
https://montpelierbridge.org/2016/11/dots-beat-vermontisms-and-vermont-quirks/
Notwithstanding my father’s bombast, Robina had nothing but unconditional love for her obstreperous cousin Jim; he was a precious family member and that was all that mattered.
She would bake him plates of donuts for farewell breakfasts, smothering these luscious delights in maple syrup and fresh, thick cream.
Family vacations
For our family vacations, we always went to Enosburg Falls, a mere seven miles south of the Canadian (Quebec) border. My father was such a nervous, neurotic driver that he would never change his route to a given port of call. Jim McBryde was so perturbed about making his way through Toronto that we had to leave our home, located just west of the Ontario metropolis, at midnight. My sister and I, roused from a very truncated slumber, cowered in the back seat as the car was packed and we set off in the dead of night. We could always gauge the degree of my father’s anxiety by the amount of Scots that he bellowed and from how much he whistled or sang his favourite Scottish melodies. Jim was an inveterate whistler and when he also sang, we knew we were in BIG TROUBLE. When he reached a paroxysm of anguish, “Road to the Isles” was his go-to tune.
A far croonin’ is pullin’ me away
As take I wi’ my cromack to the road.
The far Coolins are puttin’ love on me.
As step I wi’ the sunlight for my load.
Sure by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber I will go
By heather tracks wi’ heaven in their wiles.
If it’s thinkin’ in your inner heart the braggart’s in my step.
You’ve never smelled the tangle o’ the Isles.
Every year we had to stop for the same breakfast at the same time, about 5:30 a.m.; in the same place, on the Thousand Islands Parkway; in the same rest stop, near a town called Gananoque; for the same breakfast cooked by my father on our trusty Coleman Stove. This was meant to be family fun. Sausages and scrambled eggs, which my father called “rambled scregs,” were the order of the day. Exhausted as we were and wracked by all the stress, my sister and I were never hungry and my father’s scrambled eggs were always runny.
After Gananoque, we entered true crisis mode. My father was terrified of uniformed authority figures, especially customs agents, and of chucking the little tokens he received to cross the toll bridge. (He often missed the basket.) After we finally got across the bridge at Cornwall, Ontario, we had to take a by-pass around a place called Malone, New York. If perchance we missed the by-pass and had to drive through Malone, Jim felt like he had landed in a circle of hell. With impeccable timing, my mother always chose these moments to nag her hubby, urging him to change routes for a change. (My parents always bickered, most of all in the car.) Meanwhile my poor sister, who was just a little kid, had to guide good old dad, as she often did, talking to him as though he were three years old. Jim was too anxious to decipher even the simplest road signs, so my sister would announce each upcoming turn and every lane change. “Now dad,” she would say in her best child flight attendant voice. “Put on your right directional. Change lanes. Continue for about a mile. Then follow the left exit marked Malone By-Pass.”
A good time was had by all.
Uncle Bob and Anne Louise
Robert MacBryde 1888-1973
Louise Neveau MacBryde 1885-1974
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/58957744/louise-beatrice-mcbryde
https://www.myheritage.com/names/louise_neveau
After Uncle Bob retired from farming, he and Aunt Louise bought a lovely, classic, now historic, house on North Main Street in Enosburg Falls with a carriage barn behind it, one of the early homes of folks who lived near and worked for the local sewing factory, a facility which had once produced liniments for lame horses (offering the celebrated “spavin cure”).
https://vermonthistory.org/kendalls-spavin-cure
https://preservationinpink.wordpress.com/2013/09/12/abandoned-vermont-enosburg-falls-factory/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._B._J._Kendall_Company
https://prezi.com/sb85ccpgz6h7/enosburgs-spavin-cure-building/
Uncle Bob was a kind, gentle, quiet-spoken man who loved children, a welcome antidote to my father and Uncle Bob’s own brother, my grandfather, who generally found all kids to be a nuisance, if not a plague. Uncle Bob was a horticultural enthusiast, who, along with my mother, inspired my sister to become a master gardener. He showed my sister and me how to build and fix things and shared his daily diary records, a chronicle of his full and eventful life.
Aunt Louise was another kettle of fish entirely, a prickly sort of catfish who loved to watch wresting every Sunday on TV and often seemed prepared to climb into the ring herself. A descendant of French Canadians who crossed the U.S. Canada border, moving back and forth at will during the 19th and early 20th centuries, she spoke the broad French of her Franco-American childhood. My father would trot out his few stock phrases of Manitoba French every time we visited Aunt Louise. “Dêpeche-toé,” my dad would bark…and Aunt Louise would cackle in a very Vermont way.
https://sites.rootsweb.com/~vermont/FrenchCanadianMigration.html
https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/article/view/1836/1835
https://vtgenlib.org/general/vtResearchInfo/tracing.html
When we were really small children, our family would sometimes stay at Uncle Bob’s house for a couple of weeks at a time. My sister and I both found Uncle Bob lovely, but for us the house was rather spooky, not to say haunted. There were often strange and uncouth “overnight guests” milling around and a mysterious permanent resident named Lou Ella, who seemed a bit like a servant but had apparently been abandoned or orphaned when she was a child and unofficially adopted by Aunt Louise and Uncle Bob. She eventually died of what everyone called “sugar diabetes” but not before she suffered the amputation of all or most of her limbs. This harrowing saga obviously added to the haunted house perception that my sister and I shared as tots.
Aunt Louise and Uncle Bob knew and spoke of people who remembered the American Civil War. To this day, I’m thunderstruck by the expanse of time that one lifespan can encompass through family stories as well as personal experience, in my case stretching nearly 200 years.
Malcolm MacBryde
My favorite cousins from Vermont were all huge baseball fans. I remember listening to Yankee and Red Sox games in cousin Tim’s barn while he was doing afternoon milking in the late 1950s, at a time when the cows were still milked by hand. Tim would let me squeeze the cows’ warm teats and experience the singular sound and sensation of the milk zipping into the tin pail. ( Years later, I was struck by a scene in the renowned film Witness, featuring Harrison Ford as a police detective named John Book, who finds himself hiding on an Amish farm, where milking is still done by hand. The Amish patriarch asks the nonplussed detective if he had ever held a teat before, whereupon Book answers, “not one this big.” ) Meanwhile the Yankee games, featuring legendary players including Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Whitey Ford, unfolded as the cows mooed, accompanying the color commentary of Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese.
A deep and abiding love of baseball is another invaluable legacy handed down by my Vermont cousins, and as a child I became obsessed by baseball statistics, which I calculated and recited over and over in my head, no doubt as an antidote to the rampant anxiety which has gnawed me throughout life, a tactic that I still use to this day. (It definitely beats Xanax.)
Cousin Malcolm was a force of nature. Not only was he among the finest semi-pro pitchers in northern Vermont, but he was also a remarkable workhorse on the proverbial mound, renowned for pitching full nine-inning games on consecutive days and even both ends of a doubleheader, prodigal feats back then and unheard of today.
Malcolm and Tim, along with Robina’s sons Bob and Roddy Randall, would play catch with me for hours, throwing wicked fastballs without regard for my tender age. Malcolm taught me how to throw curveballs and chortled jovially at my fumblings.
In the homeland of Camels and Lucky Strikes and the heartland of the Old Ball Game, my cousins also provided shining examples of how to huff, puff, and blow smoke, especially Cousin Malcolm, a veritable smoking machine, who rasped phlegmily whenever he cackled, punctuating each bout of chortling with the “Ack-Ack” exclamation points of a hacking smoker’s cough.
When he wasn’t performing feats of legerdemain on the baseball diamond, Malcolm was the Enosburg Road Commissioner and later in life he kept a barn full of horses. (In keeping with the oafishness that has always been a primary personal trait, I managed to get thrown off one of the horses in the summer of 1964.) Malcolm and his collaborators would organize horse shows and offer riding lessons in the ring across the road from his rural home and also ran a sulky horse racing ring up beyond Cousin Tim’s “down country” farm. Summer weekends during my teenage years featured exciting horse shows and sulky races and left me with a love of horse and harness racing…as well as a propensity to bet that I have had to learn to quell.
Thomas “Tim” McBryde and Muriel Stanton Betters McBryde
For a number of years, we spent our summer vacations at Tim and Muriel’s farm a few miles from Enosburg Falls. Tim and Muriel were a delightful and fascinating couple. Muriel was a widow who already had grown children when she and Tim married. She was 20 years his senior, and this discrepancy in age generated cruel and callous gossip in various village circles along with occasional viperous commentary within the family itself.
Tim was a childlike soul who loved kids. He would give us tractor rides and he used to take my sister, whom he adored, for outings in his truck, seated on his lap so she could shift the gears. We kids so loved his trucks! I remember riding in the cargo bed in the open air while Tim would step on the gas as he went up and over hills so we would fly through the air above the peaks and “lose our stomachs” as we soft landed on the asphalt below.
In preparation for our visits, Muriel always made sure to purchase the single-serving breakfast cereal packs which included all the varieties that we were not allowed to eat at home, including the dreaded frosted flakes, sugar pops, and coco puffs. Sunday nights we always sat around the TV to watch Ed Sullivan and Bonanza, devouring colossal ice cream cones as the Cartwright family galloped across the screen.
Tim and Muriel had all sorts of toys and games on hand, including Chinese checkers, for which I developed a special affection.
Their farmhouse had a very special smell, of freedom and fresh country air.
Fishing
Dad was obsessed with fishing, and from a very early age I would be bundled out into the Vermont bush on father-and-son fishing excursions in the company of Cousin Tim.
When we arrived at the latest outlying outpost of angling – a burbling stream or a beaver pond – Dad would bait the hook and cast my line into the shoals, where it would immediately become snagged. The celebrated author and iconic angling enthusiast Ernest Hemingway would have disowned a son like me. And although my father was in fact a city slicker and himself hardly adept with hook, line, and sinker, he would be so crabby about my snags that I would actually sit still, snarled for hours, the rocks piercing my tender behind, so as to avoid reopening the can of entanglement worms with Dad.
I also witnessed Dad shimmying, writhing, and convulsing, during our ill-fated outings, as he would inevitably step on the sharp fin of a catfish and then leap about as if electrocuted, the gilled beastie flopping wildly as it adhered to the bottom of his gored, pierced foot.
Inevitably Dad would lumber over to my solitary perch as another interminable angling afternoon wore on and would confide that he was soon going to die.
Just as inevitably, I would cry. I cried and cried. I didn’t want to lose my dad, even though he was often so mean and corrosive that, lashed by his words, I felt flayed, excoriated, gasping for life itself like the goggle-eyed fish that floundered in a more fortunate angler’s basket.
Hunting and baling hay
Dad also wanted to prove his mettle by going hunting with the cousins so as to shed the mantle of city slicker, and during hunting season visits the cousins were terrified that he would do irreparable harm to himself or others. My father was a proverbial loose cannon, and to dampen his ardor the Vermont relatives would ply him with horror stories of hunters mistaking companions for deer and administering grievous wounds and even death.
But Dad’s most egregious attempt to become an integrated rural Vermonter involved his insistence on participating in the haying rituals of late August. Our relatives and the neighboring farmers were flummoxed by the fact that Dad would spend much of his vacation in the searing afternoon heat, hurling cumbersome bales of hay unto the flat cargo bed pulled by a chugging tractor. I was forced to take part in this grueling daily rite of passage, which was even more painful than having to play my clarinet, honking and squawking for assembled relatives during regular evening gatherings.
The local farmers took turns helping their neighbors with the arduous task of haying, and I will always remember laboring like a coolie in the meadow of Herman and Waller Davis, “bachelor” yeomen who lived up a tall hill in a farmhouse near the Old Bogue Road with their sister and a spate of terrifying dogs. Herman and Waller were grizzled, plain-spoken souls, who grunted terse answers to my father’s rambling queries and whose greatest fear, I gathered, was that Dad, with all his frantic flailing, would somehow allow himself to be sucked into the baling machine and emerge, transmogrified, as a bale of hay.
Meanwhile my sister was left behind to do “chores” with our mom. Trapped on the farm , saddled with my father’s family, and feeling obliged to share household duties, Mom never really had a holiday.
Running a farm was a 24/7 enterprise for Tim and Muriel, with short breaks for lightening forays to the “outlet” in nearby Winooski or to the A&W for hamburgers and root beer.
Ancestor worship
Looking back with acute nostalgia at those long-lost days, I’m reminded of the ancestor worship and spirit houses so prevalent in my son’s home country of Thailand. Perhaps contemplating and writing about my ephemeral, receding relatives has been a form of ancestor worship, a sort of religious experience:
A prospective spirit house tenant at the front of the line for permanent admission, I will soon be passing over to the other side.
I hear my long-lost ancestors calling from within their spirit house:
All the dead voices.
They make a noise like wings.
Like leaves.
Like sand.
Like leaves.
They all speak at once.
Each one to itself.
Rather they whisper.
They rustle.
They murmur.
They rustle.
What do they say?
They talk about their lives.
To have lived is not enough for them.
They have to talk about it.
To be dead is not enough for them.
It is not sufficient.
They make a noise like feathers.
Like leaves.
Likes ashes.
Like leaves.
(Two men are speaking: Vladimir and Estragon)
-Samuel Beckett Waiting For Godot
And how did they depart this vale of tears, those McBrydes and MacBrydes of yesteryear?
The ancient forebears, the long-disappeared, and the newly-transported… Where and how to find their spirit house now?
Who By Fire
And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial
Who in your merry merry month of May
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?
And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate
Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt
Who by avalanche, who by powder
Who for his greed, who for his hunger
And who shall I say is calling?
And who by brave assent, who by accident
Who in solitude, who in this mirror
Who by his lady’s command, who by his own hand
Who in mortal chains, who in power
And who shall I say is calling?
-Leonard Cohen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=251Blni2AE4&list=RD251Blni2AE4&index=2
Who shall I say is calling me? And to what ancestral home?
“Strictly speaking, there is no difference between Mac and Mc. The contraction from Mac to Mc has occurred more in Ireland than in Scotland, with two out of three Mc surnames originating in Ireland, but two out of three Mac surnames originating in Scotland.”
Your friend,
Robert
A few paragraphs of this text were previously published in a slightly different form in my book titled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny, available to order via this link:
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/
https://www.instagram.com/robertmcbrydeauthor/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-mcbryde-44051122/