by Fred Stenson
They wriggled along to the middle of the beer-smelling gloom. Thanks to crooked planks, they could see a bit. The long thin place was filled end to end. They began to smell tobacco smoke as men lit their pipes and cigars. There was the ping of someone hitting the brass spittoon with tobacco juice.
Finally, the hum of voices cut off and only Mr. Herron spoke.
“All you boys got your drinks? Good then. Let’s raise a glass to these lads. It’s no small thing going to a heathen country to fight for the Empire. This here was a heathen country when I came across the rocks from Ontario with the late Colonel Macleod to set the Red River rebels straight.”
Someone interrupted. It made Tommy blush to hear his father.
“Most countries were heathen if you look back that far.”
“And yet, Mr. Killam—and this is my point—the Halfbreed rebellion of 1869 is tied to the present conflict in South Africa, and to our own town. General Wolseley, now senior general in the British War Office, led the British army to Red River that year. One of his officers was Redvers Buller, General Sir Redvers Buller, who has been leading the British forces in Africa.”
Another voice spoke up rudely. “Until Colenso.”
“Yes, that’s right. There have been defeats at Colenso and Spion Kop. And when you chaps have led men into battle, you’ll be free to criticize. I’m only saying that the men who cut their teeth in 1869, at Red River, are the same men leading the way in Africa. That’s what Britain’s Empire is all about. Every corner is involved. Nobody can say these boys are going to fight a war that has nothing to do with them.”
“No one is saying it, Herron—except you. Can we drink or not?”
“Yes, yes. To the Canadian Mounted Rifles! May South Africa prove your bravery!”
Down below, the boys could hear the clinking and the repetition of the toasts.
“Hey, Brooke, what do you have to say to the boys about the war?”
The room went silent. Tommy’s father was trying to goad Lionel Brooke into saying something funny. Brooke was English, the kind whose families send them to Canada to ranch.
“Ya, Lionel,” said another, “what do you have to say about the Boers?”
“If you want me to talk, give me some space.”
The men pushed back. The cleared spot was above Tommy and Young Sam, so when Brooke entered it they could see right up his sandy pant leg. There was some kind of strap holding up his sock. Past Brooke, Tommy could see Fred Morden sitting on the bar with his spurs tapping the wood. The other soldiers, the Miles brothers, the Beltons, and Robert Kerr, were probably crushed in a corner somewhere, but Fred knew how to act.
Brooke cleared his throat. “I’ll require another drink.”
Bill Durnham, the barman, filled Brooke’s glass.
“This town has mostly Tories, and some Grits,” Brooke began. “But I back no one. That’s why my views on South Africa differ. Fact is, there are money grubbers in Kimberly and Johannesburg, and all they want out of this war is more diamonds and gold.”
“Now, hold on, Brooke. That’s not the kind of talk …”
“You hold on! You’re drinking my booze. You asked me my opinion. You’ll get it in full. I’m not against the Boers for British reasons, but I am against the Boers. If it was just about giving foreign workers the vote, I wouldn’t leave this bar. My problem with the Boers is how they took the land from the Bantus and Zulus. Killed them and made them slaves. I say that’s worth a war, on the assumption Britain will treat the blacks any better.”
The speech brought uncomfortable silence. For once, Tommy was grateful to hear his father’s voice.
“So when are you signing up, Lionel?”
Half the room laughed. Brooke laughed too.
“No, no. Me in the British army? Not any time soon. But don’t count me out of Africa.”
“What’s that?” Tommy’s father again. “A private army, like?”
“There have been many private armies. Throughout history.”
“So how big an army are you thinking of?”
“A few hand-picked men. Good horses. A clear objective.”
“Is it Kroo-jer you’re after, Lionel?”
Another burst of laughter.
“Possibly.”
“Let’s hear it, fellows. Three cheers for Lionel Brooke! Empire assassin!”
“Not Empire!” scolded Brooke, but his voice was drowned out in all the cheering.
Someone leaned down and spit tobacco at the crack in the cleared space. Some got through and onto Tommy’s neck. Young Sam started laughing.
“What the Christ? You got skunks under here, Bill?”
“Goddamn kids! You get out of there now!”
They could hear Durnham coming; saw his apron flash. First, he kicked the planks. Then he pulled down the rod he used for drawing the high window blind and started thrusting at them through the floor. Young Sam grabbed Tommy’s wet collar and gave him a yank. The two crawled hard for the light.
When the soldiers filed out of the Arlington, there weren’t many left to see them off. Fred Morden wore a scowl as he bent off Main Street and walked to the bridge. He stopped before the planks, and that was when Tommy jumped out.
“Ah, my good friend Tommy.” Morden ruffled Tommy’s hair. “Do me a favour, will you?” He pulled from his pocket some paper and a pencil stub. He turned Tommy around, and the boy felt Morden writing on his back. Then Fred folded the paper tight and printed Trudy’s name on one side. He gave it to Tommy with a nickel.
“You won’t read this, will you?”
Tommy shook his head.
“And you’ll take care of my dogs?”
“Yes.”
“Now shake hands like a man.”
Tommy gripped the bigger hand. He pulled away and turned his back, waited for a count of ten, then looked and saw Fred Morden run to his horse and spring to its back. Fred’s father was there and handed Fred his buffalo coat. Fred leaned down, shook his father’s hand, and took something else from him. Probably money. Then all the riders backed their horses and wheeled and kicked them to a canter.
Tommy went to the middle of the bridge. Below it was ice except for where Charlie Beebe had cut a hole with an axe to water the livery horses. There was no one around so Tommy cursed aloud.
“Goddamn Boers. Goddamn Kroo-jer.”
He tossed the paper at Beebe’s water hole and, though his aim was good, it landed on some mush and stayed dry. He ran down the bank and slid on the ice. With his boot toe, he pressed the paper until the moving wet grabbed it and took it away.
“Goddamn Trudy Black.”
Calgary, January 1900
Frank Adams woke cold and itchy in the hayloft of a Calgary livery barn. The liveryman had knocked a hole in the ice of his water barrel, and Frank washed there when he came down. He thought he should shave but the water was so cold he could not face it. Besides, it was time to go to the enlistment office. He wanted to be early.
In the frosted near darkness, the chewed street was an elaborate sculpture of iron ruts, and Frank hurried to the end and out beyond the last railway hotel. In the open space between the town and Ft. Calgary, a vicious wind spun off the bald hill to the north, gained speed across the river, and slapped him. It needled into every weakness of his clothing. Adams ran for the open fort gate and was soon inside where the wind was cut off. Within the palisade, horses were bunched along several rails. An old man leading a sullen grey pointed him to a door.
The room Frank entered was large and bare. A small fire flickered in a rock hearth on the short side wall, but the temperature had not risen much above that out of doors. A dozen benches were pulled into rows as in a church, and a surprising number of men were already sitting. Frank felt relief to see how many were cowboys. It further relaxed him to see faces he recognized. Jefferson Davis from Macleod. A cowboy named Ovide Smith from the South Fork of the Old Man. They huddled inside their full winter dress, and no one looked up or greeted him.
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nbsp; Other than the benches, the room had three small tables with chairs on either side. These were on the long wall opposite the outside door. Behind them was another door that led deeper into the building. To the side was the kind of screen a person might undress behind. The Cochrane Ranch’s big house had one of these screens. Mrs. Billy Cochrane had shown it to Frank because it had a Chinese painting on it. This one was blank, just cotton stretched on a skinny frame.
Frank found a space on a bench and joined the others in huddling and waiting for nine o’clock. Men kept pouring in until every space was taken and a few men had to stand or sit on the floor.
At quarter to, a young Mountie with an armload of wood came in to build the fire. Five minutes later, a procession poured through the inner door. A brisk old Mountie officer led it, followed by younger Mounties and three civilians. Frank identified the civilians as doctors by the listening tubes around their necks.
Three of the youngest Mounties took seats at the tables. Each had a pile of forms he plunked down. The old Mountie, the boss one, was at the fire. He and the doctors took turns warming their hands and their asses.
Frank decided this senior Mountie must be Lieutenant-Colonel Herchmer, the Mounted Police Commissioner. Frank’s father, Jim, knew Herchmer slightly from Ft. Macleod and had told Frank what he looked like: thick in the body, red-faced, bearded. Seeing him now, Frank would have said very red-faced and that the beard was red as well, with white splotches, as if someone had shot it with wet salt. It was coarse as a trimmed porcupine.
Franks father was an avid reader of newspapers and had read lately that Lieutenant-Colonel Herchmer was going to command the Mounted Rifles. Jim told Frank that a lot of people would be unhappy about that, partly because Herchmer was over sixty and partly because he was a known tyrant. Frank watched Herchmer by the fire, and everything that officer did was overly vigorous, as if he knew they were thinking him old and wanted to prove it wasn’t so.
When Herchmer turned and spoke to the room, his voice was several times louder than it needed to be. He yelled at them to line up at the three tables.
The Mounties at the tables asked questions and wrote down the answers. Soon, a couple of men were behind the cotton screen taking off their clothes. The doctors told them to peel to the skin and follow them through the inner door.
Frank had chosen the far right line because Jeff Davis, a slight acquaintance, was at the head of it. Now, the line was stuck as the other two lines moved. After Jeff had answered a few questions, Herchmer yelled for the clerk to stop and wait. After a while, Herchmer came over and thundered to Jeff, “Are you not aware, Mr. Davis, that this is a white man’s war?”
Frank was only four back but had difficulty hearing Jeff’s reply. He caught the words school and treaty. He reckoned Davis was telling Herchmer that he had a white father and had been to a white school in Ontario, and that he was part of no Indian treaty with Canada. If Frank was Jeff Davis, he would have added that his father, D.W. Davis, had been twice elected a Member of Parliament. D.W. had been a whisky trader before that, but, as an MP, he was in a way Herchmer’s boss.
Herchmer’s response to whatever Davis said was to yell that a telegram must be sent to Ottawa. He was yelling in the direction of one of the younger Mountie officers, and when that fellow asked, “Telegram about what, sir?” Herchmer’s face went black. He shouted, “If there can be Halfbreeds, of course!”
Jeff Davis was asked to stand up and step aside. He stood to the right of the table with his long arms dangling. The line of his eyes was at a window built up with ice.
Frank Adams, meanwhile, was in turmoil. He had entered this room feeling tense and excited. When he had seen other cowboys there, only the excitement remained. But now he had a heavy clevis pinching behind his breastbone. His face felt cold and hot at once. In all the talks he’d had with his father about why and how he would go to the war in South Africa, and through all the furies of his mother who hated the idea, it had never once occurred to any of them that Frank might ride all the way to Calgary and be rejected. He had thought once or twice that his excellent mare, Dunny, might be turned back for being a cayuse, but never himself. The kinds of things he imagined they would care about—health, eyesight, hearing, strength, stamina—he had in ordinary measure. How good would you have to be to be a soldier, was his reasoning.
But when he heard Herchmer say “white man’s war,” his notions of eligibility flipped over. It was by no means the first time he’d heard this phrase. It was often in the newspapers. But it was the first time he thought it had relevance to him. Frank had skin that freckled and burned, and his hair was a wet sand colour, same as his father’s. His father was from Ontario, the very definition of a white man in Canada.
But Frank’s mother was, if detail counted, a Halfbreed, the kind of person who was thought of as French or Halfbreed, depending on who was doing the looking and what kind of mood they were in.
What Frank was worried about was a possible cowboy—somewhere in this room—who had worked for the Cochrane Ranch and been fired by Frank’s father. As second foreman or Segundo, Jim Adams had bossed a lot of cowboys—and fired a lot, for drunkenness, stealing, or other usual reasons. Those same cowboys would have received their bunkhouse meals from Frank’s mother and seen her black hair and eyes, her brown skin.
The chair in front of Frank emptied and he sat. He could see Jeff Davis’s trouser leg out the corner of his right eye. While the clerk asked questions and Frank answered them, he was struck by another thought. What if Jeff Davis, who knew Frank well enough, took it into his head to say, “If you’re not taking Halfbreeds, why are you taking him?”
Frank’s concentration was so murdered that the clerk had to ask him several questions twice. Frank, who was good at reading upside down, saw the fellow write poor in the blank for intelligence. Finally he was told to get up and go back to the cotton screen. Frank peeled off fast and dumped his clothes beside the other piles. He held his hand in front of his pecker and nuts and followed the doctor through the door. In a smaller room, he was told to stand on a scale. His chest was listened to. The doctor said he seemed to have a nervous disposition, and Frank said he was only cold.
“Well, maybe you’ll be warmer in Africa,” said the doctor as he signed his name at the bottom of the form.
By the time Frank was back in the main room and dressed, a new table had been brought in and placed by the fire. It held a big coffee can and a few plates of cookies. Frank drank and ate, and looked often to where Jeff Davis’s tall figure still stood crucified in the air.
Frank knew that a telegram had the power to go all the way across Canada and back in one day. Whenever the one about Jeff Davis came, it could be negative. Jeff, in his disappointment, could still unmask Frank. This being possible, Frank could not relax and be cheerful like the other men. He felt more like the embarrassed few who left quickly after putting their clothes back on, having been found physically or mentally wanting.
In his nervousness, Frank needed to talk. He chose for this purpose Ovide Smith, a cowboy he had met once on a roundup near the Old Man River’s South Fork. Frank chose him because Smith was not cheerful either. Ovide was older and talked very little English because he was French.
“What’d you say for next of kin?” Frank asked him, not being able to think of a more sensible question.
“Father,” said Ovide.
“Where’s your father from? Manitoba?”
Frank realized too late that the question might be construed as insult. With the Halfbreed business on his brain, he had asked the question many used to ascertain whether someone was a Halfbreed. It was possible to be white and from Manitoba, but a good many who left there for the District of Alberta or for Montana were Halfbreeds from Red River. This was roughly Frank’s mother’s family history.
But Ovide seemed not to notice or take offence. He said he was from Quebec. Then, after a while, in a rare volunteering of information, he added, “St. Flavie.”
> It was about then that Frank saw a young Mountie charge in and rush to Herchmer with a sheet of paper. Herchmer read it and marched over to Jeff Davis. He yelled in his face.
“Says here, Davis, and I shall quote, ‘Yes, to Halfbreeds. Stop. If intelligent. Stop.’ Would you say you are intelligent?”
In the room gone silent, Davis’s low answer was heard. “Intelligent enough,” he said.
Herchmer walked away chuckling, and probably most eyes followed him as he marched around the room displaying his amusement. Frank kept his eyes on Jeff Davis. Jeff answered the rest of the questions and headed behind the screen to take off his clothes. When he was half-undressed, he looked over top of the screen and right at Adams. There was nothing more, no smile or gesture, but both of them understood why he was looking.
Western District of England
The window in General Butler’s small office overlooked the parade ground where a few raw militia recruits were drilling in the rain. He sat and watched his drill sergeant at work. Pith helmet recently painted; stick clutched beneath his arm; black boots stamping in the puddles. The sergeant’s mouth stretched inhumanly, and his white moustache rose and fell like a gull on an ocean swell.
Butler returned his attention to his desk and stared at an envelope arrived this morning from Canada. He had not opened it and would not yet. He was holding it in reserve. Instead, he flapped open the newspaper, and there on the front page was the honest pie-face of his friend Redvers Buller. The thick-inked headline above him read DISGRACE, referring to the fiascos at Colenso and Spion Kop. If Butler looked at the matter with total selfishness, there was one good thing about Redvers Buller’s miserable predicament, and that was how it had served to remove Butler’s own name and face from the front pages. The gutter press and the English public had a new kicking boy.