Clickety clack, clickety clack. The sound went on hour after hour. Farmboys, all twelve of them, hitching a ride on a coal freight train that had three empty cars. Plenty enough room for a dozen strapping young men traveling 2,000 miles from their farmland homes in Northern Saskatchewan to the big city of Toronto with nothing but the shirts on their backs. Kids of immigrants, mostly, they each had their own story and plenty of time to mull upon them. 

"Ride like the wind, Bill. Ride like the wind!" he'd yelled after his brother.  His mother had gone to the neighbors on foot so Bill could take the horse to get the doctor. He'd prayed, but it was of no use.  His father was dead before they got back.  He was eight years old; a so small boy cradling his dead father in his arms and sobbing when his mother burst through the door of the farm house.

It was hard for her to be a single mother in the dirty thirties, raising eight strapping boys and two girls by herself.  Too many men didn't want to do business with a woman, but they'd sure enough come 'round at night and buy the home brew she made in the still out back before the authorities shut her down. She'd cried, then. She thought they didn't hear, but he heard.

But, that was ten years ago. He was 18 years old now and going to war. It paid pretty good, he heard, and he could send his pay home to help his mother raise the rest of the kids. The younger boys could help on the farm, he reckoned. There would be no more babies dying, like his baby sister, because they didn't have money. Not if he had anything to say about it. That's what family does.

Their faces were getting blacker by the hour.

"We were black as a black man when we got there", he would say years later. " Had to sneak onto a farmer's field and wash our clothes in a trough and hang 'em up to dry. That coal dust got everywhere."

Six years in the Royal Canadian Regiment was enough to widen any farmboy's horizons. Never one to curse his fate, he made an adventure of it, best he could. When they sent him overseas into battle, he learned each language.  Came home six years later speaking fluent Italian, French and German on top of the two other languages he already knew.  He was proud of that.

"Only got sixth grade before I had to help Mother on the farm, but I speak six languages," he'd say proudly. "Lived through Malaria, overseas, too."

After the war, he met a pretty lady with dark curls and golden skin. Married her less than a year later, too. "Worked like an ox," he'd say, to feed the eight little mouths that came along, one after the other like stepping stairs. He could pick up a bale in each hand and fling them like they were weightless. Apprenticed as a contractor and, later, started his own construction firm when farming didn't pay enough. Cared for his mother in her last years, too.

"That's what family does," he'd said. Buried his brothers and sisters, one by one, until only he was left.

"That's what family does."

The nights -- the nights were his undoing. He'd bolt from sleep, screaming. 

"His legs. Oh, God, his legs were blown off and he was screaming. I took his belt and my belt and I used them to make tourniquets to stop the bleeding. He just kept screaming and my tears were swirling in his blood.  My hands were shaking and I had his blood all over me, but I got the tourniquets on.  I got 'em on and I kept him alive until they got him to the doctor, but he died anyway.  He was my friend. My friend..."

Year after year he sobbed in the dark. Haunted. Undone.

At eighty, he was going down a windowed stairwell when a car backfired. He knew that sound and dived for cover. Broke two ribs. At eighty two he started to lose his vision and as darkness closed in, the flashbacks haunted him all the more. At eighty eight, the dementia started to creep in, replacing old haunts with new ones. Floating heads and sinister people following him. Paranoia crept in, not quietly.

He lives with me, now, for as long as I can.  In lucid moments, he often looks at me through milky eyes and remembers the day he came back from the war. March 17, 1945.

"I looked around me at the men coming home.  Men hobbling on one leg, missing one arm, or both arms.  Blind men, men with no hands and men in wheelchairs.  How would they support families? How would they live? What kind of life would they have? And there I was, walking on both legs.  And sometimes, I wonder why I got so lucky."

He stops to wipe a solitary tear.  Mine are streaming.

"What would I do without you?" he asks.

"Eight kids and you're the only one that would take care of me."

I smile and repeat his words to him. That's what family does, Dad. 
He sighs.

"Anyway, I love you," he tells me before hobbling off to bed.

As his life slowly winds to a close and his mind drifts into worlds I cannot even begin to fathom, I can't help but think of the mettle and the metal of one Canadian Veteran. Thank you, Dad, for my freedom.

Anyway, I love you