A Good Man

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  From beginning to end, the attack could not have lasted more than a minute. The Southerners offered no resistance to arrest, meekly held out their wrists to be manacled. The constabulary showed no interest in the victim, who was creeping about the floor, bloodied and dazed. When I went to him, he seemed incapable of understanding that someone was trying to help him. His hands kept pawing, his knees jerking, as he scrambled about the floor. I had to take hold of his collar to stop him from going under a table. Feeling my knuckles touch the back of his neck, he gave a small incoherent cry, rolled over on his side, pulled his thighs up against his chest, and began to whimper something hrough his broken teeth. I had to put my ear to his mouth to hear what he was saying. “Done. Done. Bloody done,” he muttered, over and over. At the time I took him to mean he was done for, or done in.

  It seems strange to me now that I gave so little thought to the exemplary speed with which the Toronto Police had arrived on the scene. But knowing what I know now, I see that they must have been standing at the ready, or perhaps been summoned by the Helmsman, who had left the hotel in such a hurry. After all, he had bought himself a fiddler, told him what to play, and knew what the consequences would be.

  Two musical provocations in two saloons, both of which offended the sentiments of the South. Seeing Dunne hunched over Ada Tarr like a black bird of prey summoned the image of the cringing fiddler. Bloody Dunne. Keeping close watch on the Confederate table for weeks had made him familiar with all the Lilies. Perhaps our friendliness with the secession men had made us subjects of suspicion for whomever Dunne was working for – the Police, maybe Union agents. He may even have been charged to make inquiries about us. I certainly had no interest in him. Until the night Pudge held the Lugubrious Helmsman up to public ridicule I had paid him no more notice than I did the chairs and tables that I walked by in the saloon bar of the Queen’s.

  Pudge Wilson and Michael Dunne, two figures from the past, linked in my mind by the former’s humiliation of the latter. Michael Dunne, no stranger to the auction block, paid to provoke the secession men, eager to sell himself to Walsh, owned at present by Randolph Tarr. So contemptible a creature he doesn’t merit a second thought.

  Pudge Wilson is a different matter. If I refuse to think of him by day, he visits me in my sleep. All these years he has burrowed himself deeper and deeper inside me. There seems to be no ridding myself of my malignancy until some surgeon inhabiting my nightmares miraculously cuts it out of me, or I do it myself.

  August 11, 1876

  Fort Benton

  My dear Walsh:

  Your initiative in sending Cpl. Rampton and Sub-Const. Charles to deliver mail to Fort Benton has caused astonishment in the town, seeing as overland postal delivery here on the American side is still suspended, it being considered too risky a venture with the Sioux still at large. Rampton and Charles’s arrival is a fortunate circumstance for me since I have recently met with Ilges, and am pleased to report he appears ready to cooperate in every way with the proposal I put to him on your behalf. You will see evidence of that in what follows.

  The latest news has come to him via two half-breed scouts, Baptiste Pourier and Frank Grouard, who until lately were attached to Gen. Crook’s force on the south fork of Goose Creek. They rode into Fort Benton a few days ago. Grouard was granted leave to receive treatment for a venereal complaint that had rendered him unfit for duties. Pourier accompanied him because Grouard was judged incapable of making the journey alone.

  These men told Ilges that Crookas avoided pursuing the Sioux ever since he engaged the Indians at Rosebud Creek six weeks ago. The only step he took to prosecute a campaign was to send out a large reconnaissance party of what he described as “hand-picked men,” led by a green young officer, Lt. Sibley. Grouard and Pourier were Sibley’s civilian scouts. Pourier said that not long into the mission he spotted Sioux on their trail and informed the Lieutenant they were being followed. Sibley dismissed his warning and halted his troop so he could brew himself a pot of coffee. The coffee had scarcely begun to boil when the Sioux attacked and drove the soldiers to take refuge in thick timber. Pourier was certain the Indians would set fire to the tinder-dry woods and burn them out. He managed to convince the Lieutenant that their only chance of escape was to leave their horses and make their way on foot through the forest. It was a catastrophic retreat. Carbines were lost fording streams; men discarded their ammunition to lighten their flight. The half-breeds report that one exhausted soldier who couldn’t keep pace was abandoned and that Grouard, incapacitated by his disease, would have met the same fate if Pourier had not carried him on his back. The scouts related to Ilges a litany of hardships they had suffered: days of heavy rain succeeded by freezing nights, a starvation diet of wild turnip augmented by a few fledgling ground birds the troopers captured by hand. If one of Crook’s civilian packers had not stumbled on them, they maintain the entire party would have perished from hunger.

  A correspondent from the Chicago Times, John Finerty, was a member of this sorry expedition. You can be sure his account of it will be cast as a tale of heroic survival rather than the debacle it was. I advise you to present the full details of this fiasco to Secretary Scott to drive home to him that the American troops in the field show few signs of adapting themselves to war as it is fought by the Indian. No doubt Scott is receiving optimistic assurances from American sources as to the progress of the campaign. Military leaders will always assure their political masters of a sunny outcome – it is what their bosses desire to hear. But it is better that Scott hears the truth. (I suggest you say that this information came to you from your Métis scouts who in turn received it from their kinsmen Grouard and Pourier.) There is a bad smell about this business and it is wiser to accustom Scott’s nose to it by degrees than have the stench break full force in his nostrils at some later date.

  It is Ilges’s opinion that the only chance the Americans have of crushing the Sioux before winter comes rests with Gen. Crook and Terry who, after many weeks of delay, are finally preparing to launch a campaign in the Rosebud–Powder River country. They have four thousand men at their disposal. However, Ilges confided to me that he is not optimistic about their chances of success. He judges such a large force too difficult to supply in the wilderness, too slow and cumbersome to pursue a well-mounted foe. What’s more, Terry and Crook share joint command and Ilges says that may prove a recipe for disaster. Every officer in the West is aware of the personal antipathy that exists between the two generals and their long-standing professional jealousy.

  The bad relations that exist between Terry and Crook is, I suggest, not a point you should raise with the Minister, but I think you might offer Ilges’s opinion of the military situation as your own – that such a large force is not suited to the hit-and-run style of fighting favoured by Indians. On the other hand, the Army’s likely inability to come to grips with the Sioux does have a silver lining – for the time being the Sioux will feel no need to seek sanctuary in Canada.

  I would advise that you also send a copy of whatever report that you render to the Secretary of State to Commissioner Macleod. Make it a ditto. Two identical copies of a report in two different sets of files provide you with a record of diligence that cannot be disputed.

  Sincerely yours,

  Wesley Case

  P.S. I was disappointed that Rampton and Charles brought me no communication from you. You may have nothing yet of consequence to pass on, but I still believe it is important that you remain in touch with me so that I can provide Ilges with assurances that you are living up to your end of the bargain.

  NINE

  TIME HANGS HEAVY on Ada Tarr’s hands; she feels her home has become a penitentiary. Her daily chores completed, she has nothing to do but fill the interminable hours with her thoughts and Daniel Deronda. Yesterday she came across a passage in the novel that she underlined with a sense of savage vindication. Miss Eliot had written, “Some of them were a very common sort of men. And the only point of resemblanc
e among them all was a strong determination to have what was pleasant, with a total fearlessness in making themselves disagreeable or dangerous when they did not get it.” Randolph described perfectly.

  But then she fell on what Miss Eliot had to say about Gwendolen Harleth, a most exasperating, arrogant, preening female character. “Whatever she could do so as to strike others with admiration and get in that reflected way a more ardent sense of living, seemed pleasant to her fancy.”

  Ada has to ask herself if that wasn’t exactly what she had done during Mr. Case’s visit. Hadn’t she attempted to impress him with her intelligence, her love of literature, her enthusiasm for things intellectual? Hadn’t she wanted to receive the admiration of a cultivated man, so as to stoke her own more ardent sense of living? What else was that but a coy opening gambit, to ask him if one could not know a person best by studying their library? Hadn’t she hoped to be extolled for reading Bentham and Mill by someone Hathaway had described as a “university man”? Her face goes hot to think of it.

  Peregrine Hathaway’s praise of his friend had led her to believe Mr. Case and she would have much in common; she had made the assumption he would be just as eager as she to discuss something, that an educated gentleman would be pleased to have a little enlightened conversation. So she had proceeded with headlong self-confidence. She had darted at him, which is a habit of hers, giving way to her impulses because they too encourage a more ardent sense of living.

  She admits she created an awkward situation, but Mr. Case hadn’t eased it by greeting friendly overtures in such a chilly and superior fashion. Pleading that he was stupid hadn’t fooled her. That was pure condescension, his way of saying: Permit me to be gallant. Permit me to pretend to be just as empty-headed as you undoubtedly are. It’s only good form.

  But when she had continued – maybe pushed him is nearer the truth – in a direction he did not wish to go, he had reacted as Miss Eliot said most men did when displeased; he had turned disagreeable. Distinctly disagreeable. True, it was hardly her place to accuse him of not being very forgiving towards his friend Hathaway. That was impertinent. Another reminder not to dart at people, people she hardly knew, with her opinions.

  Laying down her novel, Ada glances out the window and sees Dunne staring out across the prairie. He looks utterly absorbed. What, she thinks, can he find in a blanket of brown grass, a cloudless sky, to hold his interest?

  The answer to Ada Tarr’s question is nothing. Nothing in the landscape interests Dunne. What interests him is the contemplation of a sensation new and utterly foreign to him, a vast, oceanic contentedness. Hour after hour, day after day, his mind fondles those small favours dear Mrs. Tarr so generously bestows on him, those little gestures of esteem and affection that speak more loudly and truly than words ever could. He dwells on angel food received from the hands of an angel, on the way she hovers about him, fluttering like a butterfly around a flower. Are you thirsty, Mr. Dunne? Is there anything I could bring you to eat? He has heard her try to persuade her husband to let him take his suppers inside with the family. It doesn’t matter to him that the argument was lost. It’s enough that Mrs. Tarr wants him close to her.

  Her regard for him is the sweetest victory he can imagine over all those – like Randolph Tarr – who believe he can be used for their purposes then dropped down the privy hole like the corn husks they wipe their arses with. Lately, he had sensed that Tarr was about to do just that, that he had convinced himself that the threat from Gobbler Johnson had passed and he had no more need of a guard. But Tarr had been very wrong on that score because one morning he discovered Gobbler had killed a dog and dropped it on the threshold of his office. After that scare, cowardly Randolph had come home in a panic and ordered him to redouble his vigilance. As if a man like him needed to be told how to protect the ladies of the household. Did Tarr think Michael Dunne would ever let any harm come to that dear lady? Did he take him for a feckless idiot?

  He has compiled a long list of such people who had treated him as though he didn’t own a thought of his own, beginning with his father, who had thought him no better than a dumb beast of burden. “Strong back, weak mind. It’s a waste of money trying to teach him anything” was his father’s explanation when he dragged him out of school at the age of eleven. The elderly, doddering schoolmaster, Mr. MacIntyre, had attempted to convince his father he was making a mistake. As young Michael looked on from a corner by the stove, MacIntyre and his father had debated his future as if he were no more capable of understanding what hung in the balance than the three-legged stool on which he was perched.

  MacIntyre had said, “You must understand, sir, your boy has a most remarkable mind. Let me give you a proof. One afternoon I showed him a chronology of the kings and queens of Engand. He looked at it for only the briefest of moments, turned it over on its face, and repeated them letter perfect, names and spans of reigns exact! I tested him again with an ornithological album of South American fowl – birds he could not possibly be familiar with. I gave him an instant to study each page, closed the book, and asked him to give the name of each bird. He did so without hesitation, omitting none!”

  “Parlour tricks,” Dunne senior grumbled, glaring at his son, who was making himself as small in his corner as he possibly could. “On all other counts, the boy’s a simpleton.”

  “Yes, yes,” agreed MacIntyre, “young Michael is a little tone deaf to other subjects, no feel for higher literature, or poetry, perhaps –”

  Dunne’s father leaned over, spat into the tobacco can between his feet. “That ain’t what I mean. Left him to rig a pulley the other day. He couldn’t figure it out. Came back and it was a cat’s cradle. The lad is a dolt.”

  “But Mr. Dunne, the narrow mind is frequently a concentrated mind. One might say it specializes. Now your son’s attention to detail, his remarkable memory, these are qualities that go to make a prodigious clerk. Give him a little more schooling, then you might put him in a bank.”

  “Where I’ll put him is betwixt plough handles. One thing I’ll give him, for his age he’s strong as a ox, but no more suited to thinking than one. What he’s fit for is swinging a axe, a mattock, a scythe. I know what that boy’s good for, and I won’t waste him on what he ain’t.”

  And that was that. For the next twelve years Dunne wasn’t wasted. The yoke settled on the ox’s shoulders. He pulled stumps, picked rocks, shucked corn, ploughed, reaped, and sweated. What no one realized was that the ox was growing horns. No one suspected its fury. One day, glancing up from hoeing the corn patch, his father saw smoke writhing up between the shingles of the barn. Flames were shaking a red rooster comb along the roof by the time he reached the farmyard, bellowing for every Dunne on the property to form a bucket brigade. When Michael did not turn out to sling water on the flames his father assumed the worst, ran circles around the barn, howling and beating his temples, calling, “My boy! Michael! Michael!”

  But Dunne was not inside the barn; after leaving the candle burning in the manger straw, he went into the house and calmly chopped his father’s strongbox to pieces with a hatchet. From its splinters he scooped up two dollars in paper banknotes, thirty-seven cents in American coin, and a single English shilling. By the time his father gave up shouting his name into the conflagration, Dunne was nothing but a silhouette stamped at the end of a country lane.

  Heading southwest, the ox plodded down the Ottawa Valley. For the first week, fearing an arrest warrant might have been issued for him, he travelled only by night, under cover of darkness. When day broke, he wormed his way into thorny thickets, haystacks, whatever hidey-hole he could find. He made no attempt to buy supplies at country stores, but provisioned himself by foraging in gardens and orchards and raiding chicken coops for eggs. Once he got well down the road from the scene of his crime, he breathed a little easier and ate a little better. It was harvst time and farmers were willing to exchange a bed in a barn and three square meals for a day’s labour. This made for a long, slow journey but it le
ft the money from the strongbox untouched.

  It was early October before Dunne reached his destination. Following the long, sloping artery of Yonge, he walked down into the heart of Toronto, a country boy dazed by the city. Everywhere pedestrians were sprinting recklessly in and out of traffic, risking life and limb in daring street crossings. Vans, wagons, carriages, cabs racketed by, iron-rimmed wheels shrieking on cobblestones, their chassis rattling like a load of bouncing planks. Even though the sky was serene, clear of clouds, Dunne heard a low, ominous rumble of thunder gather behind him. Perplexed, he turned, and scarcely had time to spring out of the way of two men rolling empty beer casks down the edge of the street.

  Newsboys on every corner brandished papers in his face, gleefully announcing famine and epidemics in places he had never heard of, battles lost and won in the War Between the States, stupendous loss of life in train wrecks and ship sinkings. A man, his beard clotted with egg yolk, stood on the sidewalk proclaiming the end of time in a spray of spittle. A drunk was yelling at him, “Shut it! Shut it! Or it’ll be the end of your time! I’ll see to it!” Passersby scurried by without giving them a second glance. Farther up the street, two goods wagons blocked an intersection. The drivers were up on their feet in their vehicles, shaking their fists at one another, hollering, “Give way, damn you! Give way!”

  The roadway was a relief map of cobbles, yellow lagoons of horse piss, slippery hillocks of manure flapping canopies of iridescent bluebottles. The whirling flies made Dunne’s brain swim as he stared down at them. He had come to the city imagining he would find streets paved with gold that would lead him somewhere. Instead, beset by noise, havoc, confusion, he had no idea where to turn. In a panic he stumbled down Yonge until he found his way blocked by the lake. He gave it the briefest of glances, turned and tramped back uphill, desperately sucking air. His feet hurt and a headache was pummelling his temples. In front of a tailor’s shop, he squatted down on his hams to take stock of things, but the pawky-faced owner came out and ordered him off. The man had a tape measure hung around his neck. Dunne was tempted to strangle him with it.