Mr Bruce's Broom Closet (The Diviner)

by Jenn Ashton

In Mr. Bruce's tiny closet in the center of a busy elementary school hall sat the kindest older gentleman. He shuffled through the days with his big and smooth, quiet cart of brooms, and mops, with plastic spray bottles hanging on to its sides by the lip on their handles, sloshing pink liquid, emptying trash cans. We would all pile in, as many as we could to watch him have his tea out of a battered green thermos. He was a kind grandfather to us all, no matter what our background, skin colour, grades accomplishments or failures, Mr. Bruce loved us all equally with his kind and quiet smile. Something about him went straight to our hearts and stayed there, he reminded me of the storybook Jesus in the book in the Doctor's office waiting room.

His little room was at the end of the school division where the grades 1-4 classrooms were, and when I had graduated down to the other end of the school into grades 5-7, I missed seeing Mr. Bruce every day, and would come and visit, but it wasn’t the same. The dream had shattered. It was never the same really once us older kids discovered Mr. Bruce had a family and life outside of us, but it was even more different when the smaller kids stared at my tall frame, looking at me like maybe they were in trouble, and all I wanted to do was to shrink down into that comfortable past and watch Mr. Bruce drink tea.

Sometime in the middle of the night I'm awoken by a fist slamming into my back. I can feel my kidneys wake and shudder in my guts and I yell, "OW! What are you doing?" and the man in my bed feigns sleep. It happens most night, nights where I fall asleep and am not woken by his nervous legs shifting and kicking. He says he doesn't remember doing it, and after some months I stop believing him and feel sure it was done on purpose out of a pure hate of the world tinged heavily with self-loathing.

Being in my life at that time, realization of a wrongdoing came to me in sips and spills. I thought I was in charge, handling everything. But I never was. In retrospect, I was never in charge, and would never be as long as I kept thinking I could fix everybody and everything in my ever-growing circle. Like throwing a pebble in a calm lake, the circle grew and grew until it was so weak it would collapse. I did not have the strength of say a lasso, where I could grab and hold with one mighty hand, instead I only had a very small way about me, which would attract all sorts, and only years later could I see clearly enough to know that all I had was the ability to be a victim. I knew then that I was targeted, that somehow me and the other person were doing a dance, and where I thought everything was my decision, I understood that instead I played right into their often-fisted hand.

I grew up in the era of Men are from Mars, when the self-help genre of the 70s was in full swing. I think it started there and followed me through to the 90s, when people began gifting me those books, me as oblivious as always to their kind clues. I never read any of them and on my bi annual trip to the used books store to sell my overflowing collection, they would always fetch the highest price, their spines having never been cracked, none of my gaze left on their pages. It wasn’t until Dr Wayne Dyer came on the scene, and on a not so rare day when I lay exhausted on the couch, unable to get into my car and go to work, where the life would be siphoned out of me even more, I flipped through channels of daytime television and settled on Oprah (Ohfrah my granny called her). There I heard Wayne talking and suddenly a fog started to lift in my brain, and although it would not fully take hold until a decade later, he planted seeds then that would ripen in old age. "The wake does not drive the boat." he said calmly, inserting that grain into my wanting cortex.

Accepting to love yourself is only one part of doing it. There are in reality two parts: the decision and the doing, and because of the time spent breaking bad habits, the doing can come some decades later. I misunderstood what 'loving myself' meant and so gorged on food, men and soda, Doritos and expensive red wine. I grew bloated with empty power and then became sick, my body purging itself of all the shame and fat.

I was an infant again, unsure of everything, every relationship. That's when my real education began and with baby steps I entered another life. Unsure footing made me seek answers from those around me, is it ok if I step here? What does this mean? I read the books gifted to me, again and again, determined to better myself. At first I thought I was bettering myself for others, and again, years later did I realize I was bettering myself for me. I had to still break habits like lying in bed and counting the men I'd slept with or the number of times I'd moved, where I thought the higher the number the better or more 'seasoned' I was becoming. Notches on my bedpost I thought, but they were never even my bedposts, so I bought myself a new one , put away the jackknife and started fresh.

In my alternate school, at the end of the year it was a ritual to go camping with the class on Vancouver island. The year I was there our van was involved in a car accident on the way to the ferry terminal. Deaths were recorded. I can remember it vividly, the realization, the spinning of the van and the slam into the concrete barrier. I recall looking down at myself and wondering how my shoes had come off and where they were. Afterwards those of us who were unharmed were driven by somebody (police?), back to the school, and were dropped off in a back alley behind the building, our parents never notified. I was barefoot and covered in blood, some mine and a mix others. We didn't say anything and all went our separate ways to wherever we were living. I must have walked the few miles home in a daze because my next memory was just being there. I stood and shivered in the dark basement, stripped down and threw my clothes in the washing machine, knowing I had to get the blood out before it set. I'd already had some experience with blood and knew it was a bastard to wash out. I don’t remember anything after that, or for days after that. I do remember going back to school on the weekend like that moth to that flame where a few other kids from the accident stood. In the alley we shared smokes and related all we could recall into a sort of thick stone soup of remembrance, each putting in our ingredient. That was our therapy. And then, it was forgotten.

Some of the things that shaped my, life had nothing to do with me. I understand that now. I was only a passenger in that crashed blue van. Then somewhere back then, without guidance, I started making choices that changed my route, decisions made where I was the driver, but I continued to crash my vehicles over and over, because I was steering myself right off the road.

One hot August day, in Saskatchewan on a farm in the middle of nowhere, I climbed up onto the squeaky tailgate of the farm truck and watch the Diviner. He was a stout man wearing dark slacks, a white collared short sleeved shirt and suspenders, with a few whisps of dark hair combed over is sweaty head. He boasted scientific facts that I'd never heard before. He went around from farm to farm and helped people decide where to dig their wells. I recall the feeling of dry hopelessness as the day wore on and I grew bored of watching him, and wondered what our next plan would be if no water could be found. It wasn't until I heard the men's chorus of "Eureka!", that my heart revved up again. The diviner had found water not far below the surface and I stood back wondering at his tools, a steady hand, and a bit of a Y shaped willow branch. The same sort of wood, polished by years of use, like the handles of the mops in Mr. Bruce's Broom closet.

All these parts of my life where the sun shines through now, reveal different colours on my skin, the pieces of me, like a stained glass window fused together with the solid anchor of old lead.