Free Savage Love by Douglas Glover

race-baiting, poverty, animal abuse, overwork, incest, and casual, daily violence.
    His father was Neil Nedlinger, a name of infamy and universal opprobrium, and his mother was Pearl Broadnax Nedlinger, a waspish, termagant enabler of the worst sort, given, I was told, to drinking Alberta vodka from the bottle and a lifelong subscriber to Reader’s Digest . Nedlinger himself affirmed that throughout his childhood the Holstein-Friesian cows in the milking herd and a dog named Saturn were his only friends and companions. Oddly enough, Melusina revered Nedlinger’s parents, a fact that enraged Nedlinger, who could only lock himself in his study when Neil and Pearl came to visit, turning up his favourite Cape Breton fiddle music to full volume to drown out the tinkle of teacups and drone of cheerful conversation filtering obscenely through the soundproofing.
    When I went to visit Nedlinger that day, I had already been an intimate friend for twenty- odd years, dating back to the first glimmer of his fascination with the mysterious Southwold Earthworks complex, Canada’s Stonehenge, our Great Pyramid, the Iroquoian Palenque, near Iona Station on the north shore of Lake Erie, where he did the work that eventually made him world-famous, a darling of the glamour set, rich beyond imagining. Nedlinger, a graduate student with goggle eyes, a huge body and long flapping arms and legs, clad always in his trademark coveralls and clodhopper boots, would often show up unannounced at our farmhouse door to examine the baby Indian skeleton my father had exhumed while putting in the foundation for a milking shed in a corner of the property adjacent to the archaeological site.
    We kept the bones on display in a glass case on the dining room table, still half buried in a shovelful of sand, discoloured with a dusting of red ochre, a white bone pendant dangling from its fleshless neck and somehow caught in the fingers of its right hand as though the baby had been playing with it at the moment of death, a tiny, decayed moccasin dangling from the remaining toes of the left foot. The dead Indian baby, soon to be known as a result of forensic research as the Royal Child, fascinated Nedlinger, who would sit for hours at the table with his camera and notecards, staring at the diminutive skeleton, snapping pictures, occasionally jotting down an observation or wiping away a solitary tear.
    Later, during his reclusive period but before Melusina ’s spectacular and grandiose suicide, he used some of that untold wealth, earned from practising forensic archaeology, to buy the farm next to ours, claiming that he believed there was a hitherto-undiscovered ancient ossuary on the property. I was still living with my mother and father at the time, two immortal, or so it seemed, hell-hounds, typical southwestern Ontario troglodytes who considered Iona Station next thing to Paris, City of Light, and drank instant Nescafé laced with Alberta vodka from morning till night, and believed themselves, practising United Church communicants, to be seated at the right hand of God and smarter than any university-trained forensic archaeologist or their own son, for that matter, who, though untrained in forensic archaeology, had nonetheless absorbed enough of the techniques from his master to have made personal discoveries adding a footnote here and there to the prehistory of the province, accomplishments that drew only cruel hoots of derision from those people who were closest to him and bound to support and love him unconditionally. “Who do you think you are?” my parents would sneer. “Another Armand Nedlinger?”
    Nedlinger once told me my parents reminded him of his parents, and it was true that Melusina also idolized my parents, just as she doted on Nedlinger’s parents, and would sit in the kitchen drinking Nescafé and Alberta vodka (which they called tea ) with my parents while Nedlinger and I measured and remeasured the dead baby