Without a Worduva Lie by Garry Ferguson, Reviewed by Michael Joll

Without a Wurduva Lie: And Other Madawaska Valley Tales by Garry Ferguson, 131 pages. Published by MiddleRoad Publishers. Available on Amazon here.

Garry Ferguson is a funny man.

Born and raised somewhere in Madawaska, at one stage in his life (he won’t say which), he spent twenty years living in Bramalea, Ontario. You won’t find Bramalea on a modern map any more than you will discover Whittler’s Creek, but at one time, without a worduva lie, both existed. 

The two communities could hardly be more opposite, which makes Ferguson’s delightful collection of short stories, Without a Worduva Lie, all the more surprising.

To visit Whittler’s Creek is to acquaint yourself with the little-known and scarcely travelled Ontario hinterland beyond “The Smoke.” Whittler’s Creek lies somewhere in the valley between the headwaters of the Madawaska River and the Ottawa River, into which it ultimately flows, but exactly where remains a mystery to geographers, mapmakers and archeologists.

Ferguson’s twenty-three short stories occur in and around this fabled crossroad hamlet.

It’s a place where if rocks had value, the farmers would be millionaires. In this tight-knit but often at loggerheads community and its broader environs, hard-drinking, brawling loggers and sawmill operators rub shoulders with bootleggers of the finest, locally made, aged moonshine. Preachers, farmers and tight-assed school mistresses butt heads, and the craftiest lawyer in the valley provides unconventional solutions to tricky legal dilemmas. 

Chicken Rustling (yes, Virginia, there is such a thing, at least, in Whittler’s Creek), The Christmas Pageant That Went Downhill As Fast As Booze Goes Down A Kid’s Gullet (perhaps the funniest Christmas story you’ll ever read) and grave robbers meet ghosts and those who make a habit of attending funerals and wakes.

To know Whittler’s Creek through Ferguson’s stories is to travel back to the era on either side of “The Hitler War.” It’s a time of Model A Fords, recalcitrant farm tractors and threshing machines, horsedrawn snowploughs, homespun suits and two-holer outhouses. Roads were little more than unpaved concessions and sideroads connecting rundown farms, their “past-their-best” owners, wives, and kids unburdened by conventional school learning.

No matter where you open the book, each story is a carefully crafted vignette of life in that time and place, peopled with some of the most memorable characters you will likely meet anywhere. In the true tradition of old-fashioned storytelling, Ferguson brings a smile to the reader’s lips and frequently an outright guffaw fit to startle the sleeping dog or fireside cat. 

There’s an Aesop moral hidden in many of Ferguson’s stories, cloaked in some of the funniest, most outlandish tales this side of the best of Stephen Leacock and Mark Twain. When you come across “without a worduva lie” in one of Ferguson’s tales, you can be sure you’re about to encounter one of the shaggiest shaggy dog stories you’ll read anywhere.

Ferguson’s keen wit and use of the local vernacular bring freshness to old-time oral storytelling. Bramalea may have disappeared from the map, but Whittler’s Creek lives on in the tales of the man who once lived somewhere in Madawaska. Reward yourself – you deserve it.

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Michael Joll is a novelist and short story writer with four published novels and two collections of short stories to his credit. His latest novel is “Hacker.” He lives in Brampton with his wife of nearly fifty-five years and an elderly springer spaniel, a retired member of the Toronto Police bomb squad.

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