Some Great Thing

by Lawrence Hill

  Waiting for Mahatma at the airport, Sandra avoided the crowd of journalists and camera technicians. When reporters were hungry for a story, they would scrum anybody. Sandra didn’t want to be scrummed. She didn’t want to be followed and badgered. She wanted thirty seconds alone with Mahatma. She had done something crazy in New York. She had picked up Mahatma’s suitcase and brought it home. “It’s at my place,” she planned to tell him. “Want to get it?”

  They were standing in a bar at the airport. Everybody was drinking. Bob Stone, however, stuck to orange juice. He hadn’t been planning to be back on the job the day after his trans-Atlantic return from Cameroon. But this was his story. He had broken it. He wanted to follow it through before taking any time off. A CBC-TV reporter had a word with Bob. “All right,” Bob said, striving to sound nonchalant. He was told to face the camera. Lights shone down on him.

  “Bob Stone,” the TV reporter asked, “tell us what happened when Mahatma Grafton was stopped by immigration officers at the John F. Kennedy Airport.”

  Bob assumed his radio voice. This was his third interview that day.

  Don Betts and Lyndon Van Wuyss stood at a coffee counter opposite the door through which Mahatma would appear. A pack of reporters pressed in on them. “Come on, Don, tell us about it,” one journalist said.

  “Not on your life,” Betts said. “You’re wasting your time. Mahatma Grafton isn’t going to talk to you, either. We’re taking him straight to the office for a debriefing.”

  Camera lights shone on Van Wuyss. Someone called out, “Can you tell us about the detention of your reporter in New York?” Reporters stuck microphones close to the M.E.’s face.

  “The Herald is outraged by the blatant harassment of one of its best reporters. We did everything in our power to make Mr. Grafton’s detention as brief as possible.”

  “Sir,” an other reporter said, “we have sources saying that Mahatma Grafton was denied entry to the United States because his father was a socialist and labour activist in the 1950s. How do you respond to that?”

  “I’ll have to discuss that with Mr. Grafton.”

  Another reporter spoke up. “A spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service admitted this morning that Mr. Grafton was detained under Section 212(a)28. That is the section barring communist aliens from the U.S.A. Mr. Van Wuyss, is your reporter a communist?”

  Van Wuyss ignored the question.

  “Here he comes,” someone shouted.

  Twenty-five journalists, seven camera technicians and thirty onlookers pressed toward the arrivals door. Betts fought to the front of the pack. Sandra was hit on the head by a television camera. She dropped her tape recorder. She knelt to retrieve it, but the crowd surged forward, knocking her over and leaving her at the outer edge of the scrum. A hand touched her shoulder. Softly. An old, lined, brown hand with long, slender fingers. From behind her came a melodious voice. “Let me help you.”

  Ben Grafton gently took her elbow. Sandra felt dizzy. Her forehead was sticky.

  “You’ve got a cut on your face. Come sit down.” The smiling man led her to a bench and sat beside her. He pressed a tissue against Sandra’s temple. She moaned. “You’ll be just fine. I looked after cuts and bruises for forty years on the railway.”

  Flying west over the Atlantic for the second time in two days, Mahatma no longer felt impatient about getting home, or irritated about missing Corbett’s funeral. He felt calmer. He ate a little but skipped the wine. After the meal, he prepared a statement. He practised reading it until he had it memorized.

  Then he slept until the plane landed in Toronto. He made a connecting flight and slept most of the way to Winnipeg. As the plane began its descent toward the prairies, Mahatma shaved in the john, washed his face and picked out his hair. He wished he had a clean shirt.

  The first person he saw was Don Betts, pressed against the side of the glass door which had been swung open for arriving travellers. Mahatma shoved past him and through the humming pack of journalists. He stood up on a bench to be seen and heard better. He thought he saw his father sitting with Sandra. But a cameraman on a stepladder blocked his view.

  Mahatma said he wanted to make a statement. The scrum grew silent. He described his experience in New York.

  “The measures were intended as harassment. The authorities knew I wasn’t stopping in the United States, but only attempting to fly to Canada. Why they harassed me, I don’t know. I’m not a communist. I belong to no political party. I sat on the student council of my high school ten years ago, and that’s as political as I’ve ever been.

  “But there is something else I wish to say. I am resigning from The Herald, as of this moment. I am resigning because reports I filed from Yaoundé were distorted and falsified by The Herald.” Mahatma added that Don Betts had twisted two of his stories and killed others outright.

  A reporter asked, “What are you going to do now?”

  When Mahatma stepped off the bench to answer, Betts shoved him. Three reporters jumped into the fray. Betts punched one of them. Airport security officers ordered Betts from the terminal. Lyndon Van Wuyss, bombarded by questions, left of his own accord.

  It took Mahatma an hour to conduct all the interviews. He didn’t care how the journalists presented his border trouble. He just hoped they let people know that he hadn’t written the stories from Africa that had run under his byline.

  A thin, pale man approached Mahatma after the last interview. “I’m Frank, ’member me? Jake lived in my place.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “How’d you like to come clean out Jake’s room?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He’s got all sorts of diaries and papers and documents and suchlike and if you don’t want ’em I’m junking ’em on trash day.”

  “Don’t throw them out. I’ll come see you in a day or two.”

  “I’ll give you a hot dog. Deluxe. On the house.”

  Mahatma walked up to his father, who stood beside Sandra. He would have hugged them both, but the cameramen would have filmed it. He winked at her and shook his father’s hand. “Did I get the message out to enough media stations?” Ben asked. Mahatma smiled. Ben introduced his son to Harry Carson. Mahatma put his hand in Harry’s big palm.

  “Jake Corbett loved you a whole lot,” Harry said. “He wanted me to give you a message. It was the last thing he said. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget. But my spelling’s awful bad, and I’m sorry about that.”

  Mahatma read the note. “Jake says you’re supposed to write a story on him. A big story or a book. On the life and time of Jake Corbett.” “I’ll come see you soon,” he told Harry.

  “Do that. I make good flapjacks. Jake liked ’em, anyway.”

  Lyndon Van Wuyss tacked two announcements to the message board at The Herald. The first read: “Mahatma Grafton resigned from The Herald, effective July 25, 1984.” The second read: “Don Betts has been suspended for one week, effective July 25, 1984, for unbecoming conduct at the Winnipeg International Airport.”

  Mahatma could go to Crete. He could live in Spain. But he didn’t want to. Cameroon was more appealing, but he didn’t want to go back there. Not right now. For the present, he wanted to be involved with his own country. He wanted to do something.

  Jake Corbett must have been some kind of saint or something. Frank could tell. He had never seen Jake do one bad thing. But beyond that, Jake had done something unique. Twice, without even being there, he had drawn couples to the Accidental Dog and Grill. Frank had seen these couples come looking for Jake, in body or in spirit. Couples never came to the Dog and Grill. Bums, yes. Bums and winos. And guys out of work. But couples? First, that African journalist had come to Frank’s with that woman reporter from New York. And now, upstairs, there was Mahatma Grafton with a woman called Sandra. There was something special about these two couples. In both cases, the man and the woman were hot on each other. They weren’t clinging or kissing or carrying on like horny kids; t
hey just gave off a certain feeling. There was something going on. They were discovering each other. They were discovering Jake Corbett. It could only mean one thing if such distinguished people were running after Jake, even when he was dead. It meant he was a saint.

  Jake Corbett had kept a diary. It spanned several years. On the first page, he had written: “This journal is dedicated to Section Seven of the Charter of Rights. And to telling things straight and true.”

  Mahatma flipped through the pages. Certain lines caught his eye. Mahatma lingered over the entry for July 11, 1983—that was the day he had joined The Herald. “I been going to Burger Delight on Osborne Street but today they wouldn’t let me in. The man at the door said try Robins Donuts across the street. I never seen anyone else stopped in a restaurant. Except some Indians, one time. Robins let me in. I had two crullers.”

  Corbett had documented everything he had ever done. The day he flew to New Zealand. The day he learned his welfare would be cut off to compensate for his trip to Christchurch. The day he was arrested for vacuuming mail from a letter box.

  He had boxes and boxes of welfare-related documents. Court decisions, news clippings, booklets setting out welfare rates, letters from welfare officers, notices that his benefits were being curtailed, doctors’ certificates…

  Sitting on Corbett’s concave mattress, Mahatma said, “It’s going to take weeks to go through all this stuff. But there’s a hell of a story in it.”

  Sandra, who was sitting behind him on the bed, rested her chin on his shoulder. “Write it, Hat. I’ll kill you if you don’t.”

  Mahatma and Sandra visited Harry Carson at his café. They sat at the counter and ordered coffee. Harry served up stacks of banana flapjacks with hot maple syrup. He served juice and pie and coffee. And he wouldn’t take a cent.

  After the meal, when Mahatma went to the john, Harry leaned over the counter and whispered to Sandra, “You’re his girl, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Sandra said.

  “I’m too old to put things the right way,” Harry said, pouring her another cup of coffee. Mahatma and Sandra sat with Harry for two hours, past the closing time of the Flapjack Café. Mahatma took notes and said he also wanted to write about the Rabbi one day. Harry said, “Yes, come back. I’ll tell you all about the Rabbi, ’cause he’s worth a book just like Jake.”

  It was a Saturday morning, three days after his return. They were in a simple room, with a big window and a big bed and one big pillow. Sandra was still sleeping. Columns of sunlight poured through her window and burst against the mirror. Mahatma heard the breeze. He heard the leaves conversing. He rose, slipped on his clothes and stepped outside. He bought The Herald, The Star and The Toronto Times, held them under his arm and crossed the street to a deli. There, he bought two large cafés au lait and, in memory of Jake Corbett, two crullers. He brought them back to Sandra’s room, and then ate and drank and read in bed until she rolled over and opened her eyes and laughed.

  Mahatma devoured the news, pausing over weak articles to calculate what he would have added, deleted or improved.

  Reading The Herald and The Star, four story ideas came to him. He wondered who he could sell them to. But then his thoughts skipped to something else. He sifted again through The Star.

  “Hey,” he asked Sandra, “where’s Slade’s byline?”

  “He was fired for his Bloodbath in the Tropics screwup.”

  Ben was out. But he had scribbled a message and a telephone number on a piece of paper.

  “Son, call Christine Bennie at The Toronto Times. Urgent.”

  Christine Bennie asked about Yoyo, of course. Mahatma told her Yoyo had given him a gift to pass on to her. Christine was glad to hear that. And she wanted to know more about Mahatma’s border troubles. Mahatma said he planned to sell an article about the incident to a newspaper. She asked if he knew that she had left The New York Times to take a new job as city editor of The Toronto Times. Christine said she had given her boss several of Mahatma’s clippings about Jake Corbett. The managing editor liked them. Could Mahatma come for an interview in two days?

  EPILOGUE

  Edward Slade moved to New York City. He proved himself on The New York Sun, the raciest tabloid in North America. He broke apart some major scams. He liked New York and respected its tabloid reporters. They hated cops and cops hated them. But after two years there, Slade began thinking beyond New York. He branched out. He studied French at night school. Two hours a night, five nights a week, for a year. His teachers, at first, were taken aback by his questions: “How do you say slash? How would you translate bullet hole? What about rape?” Slade listened to French radio, watched French TV, went to French movies, met French women and devoured all the French tabloids that he could buy.

  After his year of study, Slade became The New York Sun’s first foreign correspondent. He moved to Paris, where he demonstrated a remarkable ability to dig out news about French lovers and their fits of jealousy. He became the first reporter in North America to tap the exotic crime beat. New

  Yorkers ate it up. They constantly phoned and wrote to The Sun to complain about the revolting stories from Paris. Slade’s salary doubled. He became the world’s most famous tabloid scribe.

  Helen Savoie lobbied until Lyndon Van Wuyss finally agreed to let her drop the horoscopes and return to reporting full time. She covered municipal politics from a press office at City Hall. Helen strove to build up an impressive portfolio. She worked harder than she had in years and paid careful attention to her writing. Within a few months, she had ten solid articles to her credit. She mailed them and a resumé to The Toronto Times. Mahatma Grafton put in a good word on her behalf. Helen was called for an interview and she got the job. And she requested a slight change in her byline. At The Times, she would be known as Hélène Savoie.

  Mahatma Grafton found a scoop and gave it to Hélène.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Hélène said.

  “I know. But this will make it easier for you. They’re looking for you to break The Big Story. You know how editors are. So here’s the scoop.” Mahatma had researched every fact. He had prepared a list of all his sources. All that remained was for Hélène to double-check the details and write the story in her own words.

  “I owe you one,” Hélène said.

  “We’re friends, remember?”

  Hélène’s story appeared on page one of The Toronto Times. It was picked up by the Canadian Press and printed on front pages all across the country.

  United States immigration authorities reactivated John Novak’s name on a computerized list of unwelcome aliens the day he retired as the mayor of Winnipeg.

  Novak, a long-standing member of the Communist Party of Canada, learned Monday that…

  Mahatma was close to completing a long feature about the life and death of “Rabbi” Alvin James. The Toronto Times was going to publish it in its weekend magazine. Two months earlier the same magazine had printed another long piece by Mahatma Grafton, called “Straight and True; the Life and Times of Jake Corbett.”

  Someone put his hand on Mahatma’s shoulder. Mahatma swivelled in his chair to face a copy editor. The stocky, middle-aged man had hazel eyes and dark hair.

  The Toronto Times had hundreds of employees and Mahatma hadn’t met this man, although he had often noticed the man looking at him. Mahatma now looked back for the first time, studying the thick lips, the loose, black curls and the skin colour, which was faintly brown.

  The man coughed nervously. “I’ve been assigned to edit that story you’re working on. I just took a look at it on my computer screen, to see what it was about.”

  Mahatma nodded, patiently.

  “My name is Alvin James.”

  “Alvin James? Alvin James was the Rabbi!”

  “Yes, I heard he was called that. He was also my father.”

  Mahatma jumped up. His mouth fell open. He pumped the hand of the Rabbi’s son.

  “I know about you
r father and what he did for my family,” said Alvin James, Jr. “My mother told me all about it.”

  Mahatma nodded and smiled. He had learned, through his research, that the Rabbi’s wife had died in Winnipeg fifteen years ago. But, scouring the Winnipeg telephone directory, Mahatma hadn’t been able to find any relation to Alvin James.

  “I have pictures and some old railway documents if you’d like to see them,” James said. Mahatma gaped at the man. “And my wife and children would love to meet you. They always ask about my father, and I can never tell them enough. Why don’t you come to dinner tomorrow night?”

  Mahatma clasped the man’s shoulder. “Tomorrow night will be fine.”

  Ben Grafton bought a subscription to The Times. Each day, he unfolded the paper and scanned it for his son’s byline. Seeing Mahatma’s name made Ben feel closer to his son. He would read the story line by line, imagining his son’s voice, wondering which parts were truly Mahatma’s and which parts had been modified by editors. “Did you write it the way it came out, son?” he would ask later, on the telephone. Mahatma liked it at The Times. He told Ben that he wanted to stick with journalism. He wanted to see what he could do.

  Mahatma came home for Thanksgiving. Ben baked a turkey and stuffed it with chicken livers, home-made croutons, onions and herbs. Sandra loved it. She and Mahatma spent most of that weekend together. Ben didn’t mind. Just to see Mahatma’s suitcase in the hall, to hear him in the shower and to chat with him in the kitchen were enough to make Ben happy. He had a son, and his son loved him. He also had a daughter-in-law who loved him. Well, she wasn’t a daughter-in-law yet, but she was heading that way. What else did a broken-down old former railway porter need?

  Over the next year, Ben visited Toronto a few times. He considered moving there. But what was the point? Mahatma had a whole career in front of him. And he had started writing a novel at night. He said he was looking forward to showing it to Ben. Wouldn’t talk about it, though, wouldn’t even give the name of the title, except to say that it had something to do with one of Ben’s favourite lines.