We all recognize the stereotypical “redneck” in movies and novels, the working class guy. You know, the guy who comes up to the protagonist in the bar and, for no apparent reason, starts spouting racial slurs and being an asshole to women. He’s definitely a racist and probably a rapist, and we know him right away. He’s a bad person.

He’ll be beefy and ruddy-faced in his checkered shirt and jeans and have bad teeth. Or, he’ll be fat and pasty-faced in his checkered shirt and jeans and have bad teeth. Or, he’ll be skinny and balding and weak-looking, but you get it, he’s a bad guy.

And, of course, he’ll sound dumb as hell, misusing words, saying “ain’t” and “youz,” he’ll frown and scratch his head at the protagonist’s witty putdowns, and be generally incapable of stringing a sentence together. That’s the cherry on the cake of being a bad guy—poor grammar.

In the world of movies and in many novels, bad grammar associates with being uneducated, which associates with being stupid, and that associates with being a bad person.

Of all the classist tropes today, this is possibly the one I hate the most. I find it offensive, in part because it’s so hatefully inaccurate. Most of the working class people I know—family, friends, co-workers—regularly make grammatical errors and they are not bad people. Neither are they stupid, regardless of their lack of college degrees. Stupid and uneducated are not the same thing. 

My own father, “unskilled labourer” though he was, was one of the smartest people I ever knew. He could drive anything, load anything, build anything, fix anything, and learn anything. He was self-taught on guitar and a wonderful singer. He had a million stories.

He was also, however, often grammatically incorrect. He used to say he “already done that” or that he “brung” something home with him, he’d tell you that he “borrowed” his buddy the sawhorses and who he “seen” uptown. 

As a teenager, I loved to help with his many chores and projects, but sometimes, let’s face it, I just didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground. He’d chuckle, head shaking, and tease me, “Can’t learn ya nothin!” before showing me again.
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Often, he would say this with a toothpick at the corner of his mouth or sucking at his teeth because a dentist for dad was one of the many things we just couldn’t afford.

In writing A Seven Year Ache, I was not unaware of the function, often at an unconscious level, of bad grammar as a signal of stupidity and bad character. But I knew that Rosie’s story was powerful and I knew the truth. That good people, especially if they’re poor, often have bad grammar.

In part because I recognized these insulting and untrue stereotypes of working class people, I made a conscious decision to stick to the voices I knew and be accurate in portraying them. My aunts and uncles born in the 1910s and 20s had little or no education and they did not speak standard English. And all my main characters’ lives were based on theirs.

So I wanted to show that these characters, whom I had portrayed as interesting and complex people, worthy of respect though flawed in various ways, also made grammatical errors. Rosie begins her story with the striking statement, “My Momma ain’t no girlie-woman,” telling the tale of the time Momma rescued Poppa from a rampaging bull, even though the men thought there “weren’t nothin’ nobody could do about it.”

One of Rosie’s many characteristic errors is to substitute the present tense verb when speaking about an event in the past.  For example, in describing their first encounter with the bear, she says that it was in their second year on the homestead “when me and my little sister Carleen first come upon the big animal.” This is a convention of our oral storytelling that establishes immediacy and involvement.

Although readers can find Rosie’s grammar a little confusing at first, many have shared that, captivated by her rapidly unfolding story, they usually accommodate very quickly to Rosie’s voice, truly enjoying her engaging way of putting things. Her voice, like her imperfect character, does not diminish her worth, or their experience of her story.

But I went a little further because I wanted to turn the stereotype on its head; the one that says good and decent people speak correct English and bad people have bad grammar. I gave all the good characters, even those who would have had more education, a tendency to sometimes follow the grammatical patterns of the poor.

For instance, after the death of Eileen in chapter three, when Constable John Elliott is trying to stop Kenny and the boys from killing Ed Welsh, he says “You would have justice for a day. But then what? All of yuz in big trouble! And yur mother losing more childern” (page 92). And in dismissing the men afterwards, he says, “This here is alright. This is all took care of now” (page 94).
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Likewise, when Old Albert is diagnosed with throat cancer, Doc True tells the family, “If a person had money, you could take the train to Winnipeg and get the tumour cut out. But it wouldn’t make no difference. Cancer is cancer” (page 109).

This act by professionals of taking on some of the expressions and grammatical structures of the poor was not meant as patronizing or talking down. Rather, as with many of the teachers and business people of my youth, it was perceived in the spirit of the interaction, as their way of being courteous and agreeable.

Perhaps this is why, after the council by the fire in Welshes’ yard, Rosie says of Doc, “Apart from that faded bow tie and the battered old black medical bag he’s never without, you would think Doc was just a regular fellow. He never puts on airs” (p. 94).

So, in A Seven Year Ache, I flipped the social class stereotype of bad grammar as signalling bad character. In fact, the only people in the novel who speak impeccably are the truly bad. The pompous eugenicist Mrs. Murphy has a stunning vocabulary and speaks with precision and eloquence. Her leering, sexist husband, the Major, also speaks perfect English. As does the racist, child-molesting, union-hating cad, Ronald Thorne-Finch.

In using bad grammar as a signal for good personhood, and reversing standard narratives about social class and personal morality, I wanted to stand up for working class people, highlighting their unique voices, and their smarts and strength and worth, in spite of a lack of education.
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Thus proving, perhaps, that my father did not “learn me nothin’” after all.

*Spoiler Alert: You may want to finish the novel BEFORE reading this essay.
 
We don’t know exactly what is going to happen to Rosie at the end of A Seven Year Ache, but there are reasons aplenty to suspect that it’s not going to be good.
 
Not only has Rosie lost Culain forever, but Doc True has passed away, Mitch is terribly sick and gone to the sanitarium, and Baby and Sunshine, Mother’s oxen, have both died, leaving the family more isolated than ever. Rosie seems determined to head north where there are “six men for every girl,” a plan with which we know Mother is absolutely not on board. The symbolism of Rosie’s intention to leave (baby) Hope behind is not lost on us, and Rosie’s dreams, often disturbing, certainly do not bode well at the end.
 
Most readers of novels expect, and are granted, a happy ending. Writers are taught that protagonists, over the course of the novel, will usually resolve the central conflict and, by changing themselves or their circumstance in some way, should obtain happiness, or at least hope, in the end. So even if it’s not a happy-ever-after ending, at least the reader is left with a sense of optimism and satisfaction.
 
The main reason A Seven Year Ache doesn’t have a happy ending is because it’s based on the lives of real working class people in the early Twentieth century, unconventional women with unconventional lives, and those kinds of lives just rarely had pretty endings.
 
All of the devastating things that happened to characters in A Seven Year Ache actually happened to my relatives on whom those characters were based. My little auntie Kathleen (Carlene in the book) really did die of fever in the early days. My Auntie Eileen really did get pregnant by her married employer and die of a botched abortion in 1937. My actual grandfather died excruciatingly of an untreated throat cancer.
 
And my then-thirteen year old Auntie Beatrice really was sexually abused by two adult men for whom, when my Gramma reported it to the constable, the only repercussions were that each was fined $5.00. But Beatrice was incarcerated in the Winnipeg Home for Girls, where she was sterilized and physically and sexually abused over a period of eight years, eventually emerging as a damaged and tragic, often violent, woman.
 
Similarly, I knew my Auntie Rosie well, and although A Seven Year Ache is a snapshot of her life and decisions in the early days, Rosie’s life went on in that same formative direction. A parade of new-man solutions, invariably turning into new man-problems. And I know where that pathway led her. It was not the devastating journey taken by Beatrice, but hers was also certainly not a fun fall.
 
So, having a view of Rosie’s story in the context of her larger life, I could not in good conscience weave a happy resolution at this point.
 
For those of you who were truly saddened by the novel’s ending—and I’ve heard from several—I can offer the consolation that you will meet our Rosie again in the second novel, Three Days Till Rapture. The protagonists for that one are Grace Kirk and Valentine Labeau, but Rosie will be there too, and you’ll have a chance to catch up on where her life has gotten her at that point.
 
Poor, dear Rosie.
 
So the truth of my aunties’ lives determines the resolution of A Seven Year Ache. But I feel that the lives of working class people today also demand resistance to the expectation that we “play nice” and smile for the camera.
 
You know, life is getting harder for the poor today, not easier. And when I look around me at my relatives, neighbours and friends, it is not a pretty picture I see. Many, many lives of quiet desperation, unmet dreams, failed relationships, and abandonment by adult children and extended family. Poverty. Addictions. Poor health. Hopelessness.
 
Years ago, when I had suffered yet another upset in my personal life, a beloved therapist posed this question to me. “Oh Fisher, when are you going to get your happy ending?”
 
These years later, I find humour in the actual wording of her question. In my writings as a therapist now myself, I have referred to the multiple and seemingly unending problems suffered by the poor. And to the lack of awareness of many counsellors about the persistence, and the sheer magnitude of problems we typically bear. The unsolve-ability. That’s why we just need therapists to listen! And midwife us along our way. Instead, they get discouraged with us, primed as they are for a privileged client and their typical one-time issue—then back to living the dream.
 
So, understanding the larger context of the lives of the poor, I do quite willfully write this subtext into my stories. That poor people, and particularly poor women, are dealing with myriad challenges and abuses that are unlikely to result in pleasant returns.
 
In Rosie’s case, there is also the lesson of the ethic, taught to every poor girl of that era at her mother’s knee. Be a “good” girl, follow the rules, marry the right man, and you should be okay. But break the rules, be a “bad” girl, and you will reap the whirlwind.
 
In Three Days Till Rapture, we will see how the “good girl” ethic works out for Grace when she meets her undoing in the person of Valentine Labeau.
 
But for Rosie and the story before us, the possibilities seem pretty bleak.

​And that’s the truth.