“Greetings, fellow citizens of Bedford, in beautiful Dufferin County!” said Dale Westin, waving his arm out across the crowd with a majestic sweep. “I am more pleased than you can know to be here today to make the announcement that I know you have all been waiting for.” The noon sunlight glinted off Dale Westin’s forehead, as smooth and shiny as a maraschino cherry. “Myself and Sister Mary Beth Boultbee have been having an invigorating round of discussions. It has not been an easy road. But I think you will all agree that, after careful consideration, we’ve decided on what is best for the people of this town.” Dale Westin’s pause here could have felled a horse, and in fact someone in the audience fainted. “Next Sunday, when the St. Ignatius Annual Easter Picnic Auction gets underway, this magnificent specimen, provided to the town by the dear departed Mr. Theodore Kersey, God rest his soul, will be up on the auction block for all to bid on, as befits the proud tradition of this town!”
A warped cheer went up from the crowd. Cameras rolled on the scene: people clapped and whistled, others booed and hissed, some unfurled homemade banners supporting the church or the ham or both, or simply wishing everyone Happy Easter. Dale Westin, who was standing behind the ham as though it were a podium, raised his hand over it to call for silence and thus appeared to be extracting from it some kind of invisible energy comparable to that said to emanate from volcanic rock or crystals. The din lowered with his hand.
“Thank you,” he said. “I know Sister Mary Beth and I are both very pleased that this has worked out the way it has.” Behind him, Sister Mary Beth glowered, her eyes hardened into cold black flint. “The St. Ignatius Annual Easter Picnic and Church Auction embodies the qualities that make Bedford the strong, principled, and beautiful community it is. They’re the same qualities that Ted Kersey embraced in his farming, the same qualities you all embrace in your efforts to make the community a great place to live. Folks, it’s these same qualities that I, Dale Westin, have been observing and falling in love with since I arrived in Dufferin County. And so.” Here Dale Westin paused yet again, his face ruddy in the reflected light bouncing up off the ham’s honey-dark rind, his eyes scanning the crowd with concentrated verve. “And so, it is with great pride that I take this opportunity not only to bring you good tidings about the auction and the ham, but also to announce to you, the good people of Bedford, my candidacy for mayor in the coming election!”
The tumult that followed this statement is now officially considered to be the first of the Bedford Ham Riots. Upon announcing his intention to run for municipal office, Dale Westin was greeted with a chorus of sounds so ugly and incomprehensible in its emotional bent that those who heard it swear it made the spires of St. Ignatius droop. Sister Mary Beth Boultbee, already dying from humiliation but now pushed to the edge of nervous breakdown by the long collective dissonance, summoned Jeff Stooley from inside the church and had him roll the Kersey Ham back into the safety of the Lord’s house. This proved a wise decision when, mere minutes later, a masked figure emerged from the crowd, ran up the first three steps of St. Ignatius, and hurled a bucket of pig’s blood all over Dale Westin, who reeled backward and nearly elbowed Sister Mary Beth in the eye before he regained his footing and, dripping with blood, yelled into the crowd, now a roiling hive of curses, clothes-grabbing, sign-waving, and general skirmish, “Dale Westin, for the people of Dufferin County! Dale Westin has brought your ham back to you! Elect Dale Westin!”
It took provincial officers half an hour to arrive on the scene, where they found the square in front of the church littered with torn cardboard, tufts of hair, several dozen rioters, and both of the town’s police lieutenants (Sheriff Bays nowhere to be found), all of whom had met the wrong end of a foot, fist, or blunt object and were now rolling around, holding their injured parts and wailing. The closest hospital, thirty minutes away in Orangeville, had to set up cots in the hallways to accommodate the injured. A stone gargoyle on the facade of St. Ignatius had been lopped off and apparently used as a weapon. From that night on, police walked the streets of Bedford around the clock, radios cackling on their belts and glossy black batons swinging at their hips. The doors of St. Ignatius were guarded by two officers with accompanying German shepherds, to prevent violence but also to keep the new surge of nosy city reporters, who had caught the scent of blood in the riots, from turning the church into a film set. Mayor McMurrich issued a statement condemning the destruction and reminding the town’s citizens of the years of loyal service he’d provided them, including a list of all the various fixes, improvements, and blessings he’d bestowed on local businesses during his tenure.
And up the road, next to the darkened Kersey farm, a massive iron fence topped with closed-circuit cameras (beamed, they said, straight into the office of Sheriff John Bays Jr.) appeared overnight around the Westin lodge, warning anyone who approached that Dale Westin was now to be considered a town VIP, and as such would not tolerate intruders kindly.
3. “Before we begin the bidding, I would ask that we all take a moment to remember Ted Kersey, who gave his life so that this fine specimen could be shared with all of you . . . Before we begin the bidding, I would ask . . . Before the bidding, I would like to take a moment . . .”
Dale Westin faced the full-length mirror, dressed in a suit of fine black silk. He smelled of musk and woodsmoke. His hair was greased to a slick shine where it came to a point on his forehead. The glow of the dimmed pot lights shimmered off the gilt mirror frame and gave his face the brassy orange cast of an Egyptian mask, and when he smiled, his teeth blazed out with the paralyzing blue-white light of a laser beam. The room was bare except for the mirror and a desk in the shadows, and his face hovered in the gloam, a ghostly disc of light, like the halo cast by a huge votive candle burning in an empty chapel otherwise stripped of devotional ornament.
“Great deeds require great sacrifice,” he said. “Before we begin the bidding, I would like to take a moment to remember the man who gave his life for this.”
Dale Westin adjusted his powder-blue tie and turned to walk over to the window. The moon was shining over the wooded hills, tinting the view with inky indigos and pale greys. There was still some ice clinging to the pines, and the air was cold and clear, making the lines of the landscape stand out with the precision of a steel etching. No one would say it was not a perfect night in Dufferin County.
In a copse of trees not far from the window, the yellow-green eyes of a whitetail doe flashed out in the darkness. It was standing just behind a small fir, looking toward the house, silent and still. Dale could see it in the moonlight, outlined against the sky, eyes round and shining like doubloons. He walked over to the desk, snatched one last shred of meat from a plate holding the ravaged carcass of a roast duck, and picked up the long black hunting rifle lying beside it. The sound of the bolt action was dry and compressed in the warm air of the room. There was no wind as Dale opened the door onto the ghostly world of the moonlit back acres of his property, and the deer did not seem to notice him as he walked straight out into the night toward its silhouetted form, stopped six feet away to raise the stock to his shoulder, took sight, and shot it through the right eye, the crack echoing out through the night like a gavel over heaven. Blood sprayed from the deer’s face as it fell, its intact eye fading to the dull sheen of a dead fish as its routed head smacked into the mushy ground. Dale walked over and put his hand on the animal’s neck and over the soft fuzz covering its nose to make sure it had stopped breathing. Its blood oozed into a puddle around his shoe, vivid red at first, then fading to black as it seeped into the shadowed earth, its colour leaching away with its vitality. He waited until he felt the warmth go out of the deer, got up and turned, and walked back into the lodge, shutting the door behind him, the land gleaming like cold blue stone in the country night.
4. The day broke on what at first glance anyone would have told you was a lovely morning in Dufferin County, quiet streets streaked with yellow and pink, the dewy haze casting the scene in the softened lines a
nd melancholy light of an Impressionist painting. As the shadows receded from under the awnings and eaves of sleepy Bedford, the birds chirping their springtime return, the weight of human affairs not yet settled on the day, there was a palpable moment in which the tension that had choked the town since the death of Ted Kersey slackened away in the utter normalcy of the season turning over in the breeze. Sensible calm lay over Bedford and its outlying farmland like a spectral hand conferring a whispered blessing — even up at the Westin lodge, where a murder of crows had been circling the air over the wooded back slopes since before dawn.
It was in the centre of town that the first fissure appeared in dawn-time Bedford’s luminous, postcard-worthy gloss of tranquility. It came in the form of a dark figure, just a silhouette at first, seeming to hover out from the stout white-brick facade of the old county courthouse across the square from St. Ignatius. Slowly, the bulbous middle and lumpen top emerged in shades of dark khaki and burlap tan as the unmistakable gut and Stetson of Sheriff John Bays Jr., swinging his rigid black truncheon in a slow circle at his side. By the time the first rooster crowed out across the ploughed fields, the sheriff had already taken position on the steps of the little white gazebo in the middle of the square — where, in a matter of hours, the Kersey Ham would be rolled out and placed on a stone plinth serving as an auction block, offering whoever was brave or foolhardy enough to try and possess such a thing the chance to gaze on it and pledge a dollar-value worthy of its outsized legend.
The march of John Bays Jr. into the square was the first trickle of human presence in what was soon a veritable deluge. Not five minutes after the sheriff had set his haunches in a stout squat on the white wooden steps, his hand resting on the butt of his handgun, other dark figures began to flow out from the seams of the waking town, first a few lone wanderers, then huddled pairs, then groups of three and four, and finally a ceaseless and unbroken flow of people, more than the town had ever seen before, hundreds swarming out like ants and coming to surround the gazebo in a dense sphincter of humanity that pulsed in waves of tense, oily anticipation.
By the time the morning sun pulled its way up over the church steeple and the bells of St. Ignatius rang out to mark seven o’clock, the square was a solid mass, humming with chatter and barely contained agitation. Phineas “Old Pa” Deasey, said to be the oldest person in town by at least a decade, had been rolled up to the roof of the post office by request in order to witness the auction from a strategic but safe position, and, looking down on the growing multitude, declared to the sky that this gathering of souls hungry for a meal of cursed ham was the queerest and most disturbing sight ever to manifest itself within the borders of Dufferin County, and he included in this the death of his eldest son by runaway tractor and the time a rabid moose ran amok through Henderson’s Drugs in the broad light of day. The auction was scheduled to begin at nine a.m. sharp, and by eight thirty Old Pa had already finished half the bottle of Wild Turkey he’d brought up to the roof to console himself with while things went all to hell down below.
At nine o’clock, once again accompanied by the clanging of bells, came the most awkward event of the morning, the one that made many in the crowd squirm with pangs of latent guilt: the emergence, from the same church that had not one week prior disgorged Dale Westin and his surprise campaign promise, of Sister Mary Beth Boultbee. Her wimpled head was crooked forward with deeply rooted condemnation as she strode toward the gazebo to announce the beginning of the event, usually such a joyous occasion in the year, but now besmirched in her mind to the point of calamity. Sensing on the Sister the rage of the vengeful and lunatic God of Revelation, the tightly squished crowd somehow found the room and will to spread out before her, cleaving a path in the crush of skin and bones and hair and sweat, and falling silent as she ascended the white steps of the gazebo, casting a glance at Sheriff John Bays Jr. that could have rent and tanned the skin from a whole herd of cattle in half a second. Wrathful and silent, the Sister took her place behind the podium set up beside the empty plinth waiting to be crowned by the massive piece of pork that had attained both the significance of a holy artifact and the blasphemy of a debased relic, the Hope Diamond swaddled in the Shroud of Turin, the heart of Christ wrapped in bacon and cured to withstand the appetites of the eons.
The microphone whined as the Sister finally leaned forward and began to speak.
“Good people of Bedford, Dufferin County, and beyond,” said Sister Mary Beth, her voice flat, save for a trembling around the edges. “I thank you all for coming, although I would be lying in full view of the Lord our Saviour Jesus Christ if I did not admit that it is with some hesitation that I welcome you to the thirty-ninth annual St. Ignatius Easter Picnic Auction.”
The crowd convulsed in response, and the strangled, backfiring sound that issued from its thousand mouths was equal parts elation, terror, relief, blood lust, disapproval, and paralyzing stupefaction. It settled as abruptly and violently as it had begun, and Sister Mary Beth continued.
“I know that you are all here for one reason, and one reason alone, which has grown in infamy such that I need not speak its name until the time is come for it to be borne up onto its pedestal to face the eyes of God and all of you. HOWEVER.” From where Sister Mary Beth stood on the gazebo, the air above the crowd appeared to shimmer with the distorting heat of a flame-kissed grill. “I implore you at this time to let the auction proceed as scheduled, to follow the auctioning of lots as it has been laid out in the program so kindly provided to us by Alice Cahill and the good folks who run the copy machine at Henderson’s Drugs.” Sister Mary Beth danced her careful, precarious waltz with normalcy, struggling in the only way she had left to bring the auction back down to the sane and sanctified earth. “We have many lovely items, donated by members of the community to help raise funds for the parish —”
“Bring us the ham!”
This shout was clear and inflamed with rage, although its origin was impossible to pinpoint, as within seconds it was being echoed throughout the crowd, a rising wave of voices that took almost no time to move up through the registers of gabble and cacophony to cohere into a vicious chant:
“BRING THE HAM! BRING THE HAM! BRING THE HAM! BRING THE HAM!”
Sister Mary Beth’s shoulders slumped, and it is said that her face aged decades in a matter of seconds, the lines of defeat and death creeping out like cracks on a windshield from the corners of her eyes and lips. She held up her hand and the crowd’s clamour settled into the mild hissing of a nest of snakes. Glowering at them with hate-seared eyes, the Sister said, simply, “Let it be so.”
A maniacal, snarling cheer erupted among the congregants and echoed off the buildings and scraped the sky above Bedford with its unholy roar. What happened next is considered to be the moment at which the Second Bedford Ham Riot became inevitable. There is not a soul who has been asked (and many have) who can verify for certain when or how or whence the figure of Dale Westin, dressed in a white suit that beamed like polished ivory, appeared amid the crowd, holding aloft, in a feat of flabbergasting strength, the Kersey Ham: an object of near-solar radiance and power and scrumptiousness, an idol to end all idols, not merely a ham any longer, in any normal sense of the word, so much as an ark within which the secrets of the universe were believed by most everyone who stared upon it that day to be contained. Dale Westin, Atlas of the Ham, having suddenly materialized in the middle of a crowd of thousands, seemed to float toward the gazebo, his face incarnadine, his smile as wide and toothy as the great curving colonnades of St. Peter’s Square. When he finally set foot on the first step, nodding a happy salutation to Sheriff Bays and pointedly ignoring the soot-black stare of the Sister, the structure creaked under his weight — and then, slowly but discernibly, the meat he held began to hum, a low-frequency choral sound that contained within its registers both the sanctity of vespers floating upward into the dome of a grand cathedral, and the volatility of uranium on the verge of exploding into nuclear immolation. The people wer
e afraid; the people were ecstatic. Flexing his arms in a gesture of elation and strength, Dale Westin lifted the Kersey Ham once, twice, and three times, and then brought it down to rest on the plinth with all the reverence and care one might take in laying a newborn babe in its cradle for the first time. He turned to the crowd, spread his arms out wide, brought them in like folding wings to his face, touched the palms of his hands to his lips, made an unctuous smacking sound, and spread his arms out wide again, showering the aura of blessed ham over the congregants, rapturously unaware of the faint odour of carrion wafting out on the breath of his flourish.
“Good morning, folks! Great deeds require great sacrifice. Before we begin the bidding,” he said into the microphone from which Sister Mary Beth Boultbee had retreated to hide in the shadow of the gazebo’s roof, covering her nose with her habit. “I would ask that we all take a moment to remember the man who gave his life so that this magnificent specimen you see before you could be cut, cured, and finished, under the expert supervision of the finest butcher in the country, and be brought here today to amaze, delight, and edify the good people of Dufferin County, such that this wonderful tradition, a true symbol of this town’s solid, earthy heart, could be upheld!”
Different Beasts Page 13