by Don Gillmor
The British North America bill began its wretched halting progress through the Commons and the House of Lords, and the delegates spent their time visiting the sights. McIlvoy was grateful for the time, which he spent walking incessantly, breathing in the smoke and dust of civilization, hoping it would stay with him when he returned to North America.
On Oxford Street one day, he saw Macdonald walking with Agnes Bernard. He was talking, his hands waving, chopping the air for emphasis, and she beamed at him. That night, Macdonald called McIlvoy to his room. When he arrived, he could tell the sort of summons it was: Macdonald wanted someone to drink with. McIlvoy was no great drinker, but he was content to sip as Macdonald emptied his own glass repeatedly and spoke at length about the genius of the British North America Act. But his real subject was Agnes.
“As you have gathered, McIlvoy,” he said, “we have been spending some time together. We passed a few hours in the British Museum, extraordinary, the world in one building. We shall have to do something like that. Capture history, put it on display.” Macdonald stared across his room, which would have held McIlvoy’s room and seven more like it. “I intend to marry her,” he said. “A man needs a companion. To go through life alone, even steeped in purpose, is to die slowly each day.”
It wouldn’t occur to the politician that this was precisely McIlvoy’s plight, although his purpose was muddier than Macdonald’s. His purpose might be said to be Macdonald.
When McIlvoy left, it was early morning and Macdonald was almost insensible, though this time out of sheer happiness. An hour later, McIlvoy was wakened by Cartier’s hammering at his door, summoning him at once to Macdonald’s quarters. McIlvoy ran out in his nightshirt to find the space empty, though it was filled with smoke and the bed still smouldered. “Get some water, man,” Cartier whispered to him. “Attend to that fire.” McIlvoy filled a bedpan with water and threw it on the bed, which hissed and then fell silent. He opened the window, closed the door behind him, and then went to Cartier’s room. Luce Cuvillier was sitting on the edge of the bed in a red silk housedress, smoking a cheroot, coolly staring. Macdonald sat looking like a bewildered animal. His hair was singed, which gave its normally wiry wildness even greater drama. His eyebrows were burnt as well, and when Macdonald gingerly put a hand to his face, McIlvoy noticed that his palms were blackened, as if he had used them to pat out the fire. His nightshirt was burned partly away, revealing a flannel shirt beneath it.
“It was like the devil come to claim me,” he said. “I woke up and both my bed and nightshirt were aflame.” Macdonald and a candle, that combustible pair.
“We should speak of this to no one,” Luce Cuvillier said. Her meaning was not to tell Brown. Or the hotel, though in the morning some explanation would need to be concocted, a job, most likely, for McIlvoy.
The following week, Macdonald married Agnes Bernard at St. George’s Anglican Church in Hanover Square, and on March 29, 1867, Queen Victoria finally signed the bill into law as the British North America Act. Macdonald returned to Ottawa with a new country and a new wife.
3
OTTAWA, 1868
It was April, the last of the stubborn winter still here. D’Arcy McGee stood in Parliament and spoke passionately about the Fenian threat and the need for a united Canada. Annexation to the United States, he also argued, would produce an ignominious future of northern peasants supplying lumber for America, a feudal prison. By the end of his lengthy speech it was after midnight, and he and Macdonald went down to the parliamentary bar and ordered brandies and cigars. They drank warily with one another (Macdonald had once halfjokingly told him that the party couldn’t afford two drunkards and McGee would have to quit).
“Admirable words, McGee.”
“I wonder if they penetrated the thick heads across the floor.”
“I should hope not, or we’d be out of business. Without the obtuse Liberals, what would be the point of us?”
“There are those who wonder our point as it is.” McGee paused to take some of his drink. “I have nightmares, John.”
Macdonald sipped his brandy and looked at McGee, a man filled with Celtic dread and a poet’s imagination.
“I have nightmares that I’ll be killed, though it’s not my death that wakes me with a fright. It’s the thought of leaving my family with my debts.”
“Are they considerable?”
“They are.”
Macdonald, of course, had his own substantial debts. Why was it more profitable to create a company than a country? They were in the wrong business.
“Beware of Irish Catholics,” Macdonald said. “There’s blood in that religion.”
“There’s blood in every religion. What better way to attract new sheep? The Fenians are a threat, though.”
“Better a threat to the country than to your person, McGee. This murder …”
“I can’t bear to think of it, John. It’s as if I’m dying each night.”
“I suspect the brandy will take you before the Fenians do. Or you may be bored to death in the House, a fate that awaits us all.”
Macdonald finished his brandy and took his carriage home.
McGee stayed for another drink and then left to walk to Mrs. Trotter’s boarding house. He was wearing a black cashmere overcoat against the late-winter chill, and a white top hat that added a dandyish touch. He carried a silverheaded bamboo cane that had been a genteel affectation but was now a practical crutch for his sore knee. There was new snow on the ground and the air was fresh. A full moon threw light onto Metcalfe Street. He smoked a cigar and thought of his wife and family who were at home in Montreal. McGee was forty-two, in poor health and heavily indebted. He was still intoxicated by the newness of the country, but his own situation weighed upon him. How to rectify this? How to repay the debts? He had been having nightmares for weeks. McGee turned on to Sparks Street and looked for the key in his pocket.
His key turned in the lock and the door opened to the smells of cabbage and smoke and the punitive soap Mrs. Trotter used on everything. He heard a step behind him, quiet in the snow, and felt the presence of the gun, felt the violent Irish inevitability that had followed him to the New World. Then the explosion.
The .32-calibre bullet went into the back of his neck and exited his mouth, sending his false teeth past Mrs. Trotter’s distorted face and landing with a clatter in the hallway. McGee stumbled and turned and fell on his back in the fresh snow, his arms angled out, legs spread-eagled, his white hat, surprisingly, still wedged onto his head.
Macdonald woke up to frantic knocking at his front door and received the news through a haze. He threw on his overcoat, got in the carriage, and sped across Sapper’s Bridge to Mrs. Trotter’s. McGee was still lying in the snow, the blood on his dark face darkening it further.
Macdonald knelt down beside him, removed the white top hat, and pulled McGee’s head onto his lap. He looked at the diminutive body, almost childlike in death. His cane was lying beside him, and Macdonald stared at it. He thought about his brother James Shaw, whom he hadn’t thought of in years. Macdonald was seven, James Shaw five, and they were taken to a Kingston tavern by a family friend named Kennedy who had been hired to mind them. Kennedy forced gin on them and then drank heavily himself. John grabbed his brother’s hand and fled the tavern, heading for home. Kennedy lurched after them like an ogre from a children’s book, weaving down the street, his face black with drink and rage. John pulled his brother along, hoping to reach their house, but James Shaw tripped and Kennedy was on him, drunkenly hammering the boy with his cane. John’s cries were for nothing. Kennedy stood there, a drunken beast, as James Shaw convulsed on the ground. Hours later, his brother was dead.
The anger in this world, Macdonald thought, though he supposed he would have to include his own. A world filled with murderous thoughts. He had called McGee a brute, though not to his face, and used him to court the Catholic vote. The only man his equal in eloquence, and perhaps in drink, and in truth, it was McGee who had d
reamed the nation, a rambling poetic construct to be sure, but here was the author, dead from an assassin’s bullet. Macdonald stared into the simian face that had been caricatured a hundred times as an Irish ape in the newspapers and cleaned the blood from it with the tail of his nightshirt.
With the help of another man, he carried McGee into Mrs. Trotter’s parlour, cradling his bloody head. They laid himon the couch, and Macdonald took off McGee’s boots and had Mrs. Trotter fetch his carpet slippers and put them on McGee’s feet. Macdonald wept uncontrollably for fifteen minutes, then composed himself and summoned the lawyer within. He asked Mrs. Trotter what she had seen.
“I opened the door,” she said, her face still ghostly. “It was late but I stay up late, not one for sleeping my life away. And Mr. McGee, he was often out late.” She gave Macdonald a complicit look that he ignored. It had been necessary on occasion to help McGee up the stairs. Sometimes she had to take his boots and hat off after he collapsed onto the bed unconscious.
“I heard his key turn in the lock and there he was, it was awful, he was shot just as the door opened. I heard the noise and there was blood coming out of his mouth and he fell.”
“Did you see who fired the gun?”
“No, I just saw something slip away into the night, like a shadow of the devil. And then poor Mr. McGee laid out just like you found him. He was full of stories, how he made me laugh.”
Macdonald talked to three men who had been on Sparks Street but they had little to tell him. Surely the work of Fenians. The country’s first political assassination. A baptism in blood. He telegraphed the police, who arrived at 4 A.M.
A man was hanged for McGee’s murder, a suspected Fenian, perhaps the wrong man, but the new Dominion needed to act with authority. Five thousand people turned out to watch James Patrick Whelan swing. He proclaimed his innocence on the gallows and asked that God bless Ireland.
McGee’s funeral was held in Montreal, and McIlvoy attended with Macdonald. There was a sea of keening black, the largest crowd the city had yet produced, and Macdonald’s grief poured out and joined the deluge.
Macdonald’s government was like Macdonald himself, ruthlessly managed, with extended moments of chaos that threatened to unseat it. One of the questions he had to deal with was the North West. One quarter of the continent was still owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Five million square miles. The Russians had just sold Alaska to the Americans for $7.2 million. God knew what the Americans would pay for Rupert’s Land. McIlvoy had heard the figure $40 million.
“Brown believes the North West is our birthright,” Macdonald told McIlvoy. “That alone would be reason enough to abandon the territory to the Indians. McGee, bless his dead Irish heart, romanticized it, as he did everything. For myself, I see endless and endlessly difficult space. However, if we don’t claim it, the Americans surely will. We are bound to take it. The British government will ease our way, I suspect, push us, even, toward the arrangement.” The two men were eating lunch. Outside was the sunshine of May, one of the beautiful months.
“The North West presents as many problems as opportunities,” Macdonald said. “And there are the Indians as well. A burden.”
Macdonald looked up briefly, and McIlvoy stared with him. It was a familiar rhetorical tic, looking heavenward for a moment while he marshalled his arguments. But Macdonald’s face looked suddenly stricken, frozen into a frightful mask. Then he collapsed like a pile of dry sticks falling off the back of a wagon, and lay there motionless.
McIlvoy dropped to his knee and listened for his heartbeat, which was still present. He stood and yelled to the parliamentary guard for help, and two uniformed men came and hovered beside McIlvoy. “Place the prime minister on the chesterfield,” McIlvoy said, and they picked him up awkwardly, aided by a third guard who helped shore up Macdonald’s slumping body. He was carried to the East Block and laid on a cot. McIlvoy called for Dr. Grant and waited nervously. Macdonald seemed to be conscious, but in a state where he recognized nothing. Only a soft gasp came from him, then his eyes shut and McIlvoy once more listened for a heartbeat, comforted by its muffled sound.
Grant examined the unconscious Macdonald and pronounced that the problem was gallstones. He recommended rest, an obvious prescription since Macdonald appeared capable of nothing else. Agnes was summoned and stayed beside him as the hours stretched into days. He came in and out of consciousness, but didn’t speak. After four days he looked like death, having taken no food and only what little water could be placed on his lips. He hadn’t left the East Block and it was assumed by almost all that he would die there. His presence had taken on the macabre cast of a head of state laid out for viewing. It needed only a grieving public to complete the picture. Agnes wept for hours on end. She finally poured some whisky on his chest and rubbed it, not knowing what else to do. She poured more onto her hands and caressed his face, lightly marking the rugged contours, and pushing back his damp, unbrushed hair at the temples. Macdonald’s eyes opened.
“Do that again,” he whispered softly. “It seems to do me good.”
His full recovery took several months. Lying in the East Block, Macdonald requested oysters. They had curative properties, he had been told, and Dr. Grant allowed him half an oyster at each meal, saying it would be dangerous to indulge himself.
“Sir John, the hopes of Canada depend on you,” Grant told him.
“It seems strange,” Macdonald said, “that the hopes of Canada should depend on half an oyster.”
When he was sufficiently recovered, Macdonald spread out a map of the North West on the large table in the room he was occupying. It was an uncredited version of David Thompson’s map, his signature errors in evidence. McIlvoy stood nearby, nominally as a political aide, but more like a nurse.
“Maps create reality, McIlvoy,” Macdonald said. “You see what is there, and it ceases to be imagined. I spent some time in the British Museum examining maps. They are extraordinary things. Have you ever seen Champlain’s maps?” As usual, Macdonald wasn’t expecting an answer, though McIlvoy had in fact seen them. The detail was indeed exquisite, made with primitive means, yet surprisingly accurate. “What maps do is dispel fear,” Macdonald said. “They are replaced by new fears, of course. The unknown becomes known and soon becomes a commodity. Once it is a commodity, there is the question of who will buy it, and what will they do with it. Others will want it, as they always have. Champlain was the first cartographer of Canadian reality, his maps the beautiful templates.” Macdonald took a large sip of his drink. “Have you heard of the Italian priest Francesco Bressani? A Jesuit. He drew a map in 1657, a map that shows Indians praying to God, of course, but also hunters, animals, houses, plants, and the peaceful, productive Hurons. All of that. Bressani lived with the Hurons but was captured by the Iroquois and creatively tortured for two months, burned, beaten, and mutilated daily with the persistent genius of men who understand pain, whose own lives are defined by it. His map was drawn with a hand that had only a single finger left, the others lost to the knives of his torturers.” Macdonald stared out the windows, down to the city below, Ottawa long asleep. “Maps can tell you a great deal.”
4
LOUIS RIEL, QUEBEC, 1877
The North West was his mother and God his father. At the top of Mount Washington, God appeared to him in a cloud of fire, as He had to Moses, and told him, “Rise, Louis David Riel, you have a mission to accomplish for the benefit of humanity.”
The name David wasn’t his own, but had been granted by Him. The name of a king. The expectations were great. But what would he accomplish in here? What could be accomplished in such a place, a storage shed for the mad? Within these stone walls were the weak minded, the imbecilic and the alcoholic, as well as criminals, masturbators, and drooling enthusiasts. The doctor was a Methodist who felt dancing was the devil’s pastime, yet he allowed it at the Beauport Lunatic Asylum. He organized balls for the inmates. What grotesque sport. Twitching like dying animals, or gliding in and out of
dreams, falling onto the hard floor and staring into the next world or foaming in this one. Did he think this would exorcise their demons, or did he think they were already lost to the devil? Riel wasn’t lost. God still whispered to him.
Riel examined the walls of his cell. The stone was cold against his skin. His clothes were in the corner, ripped to pieces. His iron cot torn apart, the bars used to smash the walls, sashes, and ventilator. From the fevered blows against the stone a light dust covered the floor. He examined his naked body, its impressive bulk, as white as alabaster. Had the Philistines come to strip Saul? Perhaps not. He had done it himself. Yesterday, or was it this morning? The doctor had said he had delusions of grandeur. He was the Messiah of the New World, a secret Jew, and he had drowned his old soul in the Mississippi River and would lead his people out of the desert.
“Are you conscious of the times?” the doctor had asked him.
Conscious of the times? How could he not be? He was the times. To the south John Brown was trying to free the slaves. There was blood and revolution. Fenian raiders. Everywhere some form of madness. Here the Metis were Israelites persecuted by Egypt. After Riel set his people free he would appoint Archbishop Bourget to be Pope of the New World and move the seat of the Holy Roman Empire to Montreal.