My Father was a Wonderful Teller of Tales

But when he told me that he had awaken one night to find an angel standing alongside his bed, I knew this was no story.

“It was a big fella,” he said in the soft tongue so common to Nova Scotia’s South Shore. His hands indicated the flow of his angel’s robes. “Your Mother thinks I’m crazy.”

Of course, she didn’t. And he wasn’t. And nothing more was said about Harris’ angel.

He was in his mid-80s at the time. Dispite disabling Parkinsons, he stood well over six feet, a big man himself. Like most of his neighbours who never left Lunenburg County, he had grown from immigrant stock. Sturdy Germans and Swiss – the ones who survived the wild Atlantic crossings of the 1750s to break open Nova Scotia’s wilderness. Germans and Swiss. With a touch of Irish tossed in, of course.

It was that small dram of blood from County Antrim that always accounted for his ability to spin a good yarn, to recall the local lore, and to breathe life into the characters who – in earlier days – had lived in or near his small community along the Pleasant River Road.

It was pouring rain the day that Harris entered the world in the summer of 1915. The First World War itself was an infant and the horrific Halifax Explosion was only a breath away. He lived to cross over into the new millenium. My Gramma, Gladys, had called him ‘Charles’ after his father and at least five generations of Charles before him. But - for the next 80-odd years - he would answer to his second name, Harris.

In Lunenburg County’s early days, farmhouses were built plain and simple. In broad hayfields. On hilltops that had been cleared of deep-rooted tree stumps and back-breaking granite boulders. In this sturdy house built by his grandfather, Joseph the blacksmith, he was the eldest of 14 children. At the age of 10, he quit his desk in the one-room schoolhouse at the foot of the hill to do a man's work with Charlie, his father, driving a team of oxen. Each day Gladys baked a fresh batch of bread and fried huge frying pans full of hashed potatoes. Each week a new one hundred-pound bag of flour was carried over the doorsill. Each year there was another mouth to feed.

My father was born in and loved the Lunenburg County woods. He knew its meadows, knolls and brooks like the back of his hard-working hands. Words like ‘Little Tumblin’, ‘The Clear’ and ‘Sugar Lake’ tripped like magic off his tongue. And he knew its secrets. The mystique of the Caribou Barrens. Malti, son of legendary Jim Charles, who camped at Wash Rock. Young Margaret who died protecting her honour. The Old Ones who heard - and feared witches.

In the summer of 1941, he married his sweetheart. Elsie was a neighbour - a quiet and truthful girl - the eldest daughter of his father's best friend, Arch. It was wartime. And – for the first and only time in his life – Harris left Colpton, his wife, two-year-old son and newborn daughter, to serve as a corporal and cook in the Canadian Army in Aldershot, Debert and - finally - England.

It was a sturdy world. A solid way of life. Arriving home on leave in the middle of a winter sleet storm - no one free to meet the train, he hiked from Bridgewater, 18 miles along the Pleasant River Road, reaching his young family at three o’clock in the morning. In Italy, his younger brother, Joe, was killed by an enemy rifle while on patrol - his body buried in a quick roadside grave. Harris’ body was in England - but his heart remained in Colpton. The brief telegram home reads: “AM FINE. MY THOUGHTS ARE WITH YOU DARLING.” When his troop ship, the Aquitania, arrived at dockside in Halifax Harbour, Elsie and his sisters, Bessie and Jean, were waiting along the Barrington Street parade.

After the war, Harris worked in the backwoods of Nova Scotia cutting line through the blackfly-and-mosquito-thick summers to mark the boundaries of the province's Crown forest. He hunted, fished, trapped, farmed, cut Christmas trees, pit props and pulpwood. Whatever it took to keep shoes on the feet of three ever-growing kids. In later years, he worked as a stevedore on the Halifax waterfront and as a carpenter in Halifax and Bridgewater. Hard work that paid the light bill and put sugar, flour and yeast in Elsie's ever-busy mixing bowl as it turned out an endless abundance of bread and rolls and cakes and pies. In the summer of 2002, Harris and Elise celebrated 61 years of married life. Together they had raised and blessed four children, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. One daughter, Patricia, had died at birth.

As his years increased, age had taken its toll on his strong body. First arthritis, then Parkinson’s Disease – and finally the occasional mini stroke slowed – then eventually stole his steps. Finally, one mid-November morning, his body failed him. Needing two strong people to enable him to move, he endured a month-long hospital wait – fighting to return to Colpton, the home and family he loved. Requiring 24-hour medical care, his heart was broken. He would never go home again.

But not his spirit. His physical being failing him, Harris’ spirit rebelled – his expression of the injustice visited upon his body. On Monday, Dec. 16, still in fury in his few failing moments of strength, Harris developed pneumonia. " I can’t get out of here,” he said. The following morning – one month after his entry into hospital – his body failed him for the final time. Within minutes, he slipped quietly away to be with the Lord and Maker he had served his entire life.

I suspect – at the last – his ‘big fella’ angel returned and showed him Jacob’s Ladder. Angry with the earth that had failed him, Harris did not wait for a second invitation. He went home to spend Christmas in Heaven.


NOTE: Charles Harris Colp was placed at rest on Dec. 20 in the hilltop cemetery he had cared for and tended so carefully throughout his lifetime along the Pleasant River Road. His great-grandson, two-month-old Charles Gabriel ‘Charlie’ Hanscomb was christened with his name on Christmas Eve. New life begins.