Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  “No, no, that’s okay. You’re busy. I’ll tell him.” She turned to go.

  “Rosa?” She turned back. Now what? “It’s nice to see you again. What are you doing, anyway?”

  “School mostly. Grade ten. I hate it, but Daddy says I have to finish high school. Besides, there’s only me at home now. Mama died last year.”

  “Shit, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks. It’s getting easier.”

  Now what? Keep talking. “Are you in academic?” She looked puzzled. “You know, the stream that lets you go to university if you want.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not interested in that.”

  “That’s what you say now.” He was sounding like the voice of experience, an adult talking to a child, an older brother. He didn’t want to sound like either. “But you might change your mind, so you shouldn’t let them stream you out.”

  “Sure, okay.” He could see she was losing interest. “I better go tell Daddy.”

  “Right, right.” She was staring at him now too. Expectant? Expecting what? Was Rosa feeling what he was feeling? “Uh, look, Rosa, maybe we could get together some time, have a coffee or something, talk about old times, Africville, you know, maybe I can help to, ah, make sure you don’t get stuck in the general stream.” Why couldn’t he just shut up about that?

  “That would be nice,” she said. Nice? “Why don’t you give me a call? Like I said, I’m still at home. In the Square. Daddy’s number’s in the phone book. So call me.” Yes! “I better go.”

  He watched as she walked away. Damn. She looked fine from behind, too.

  “Repeating our top stories to this hour,” the announcer intoned gravely, his radio voice pushing up from somewhere deep in his large intestine. “In Ottawa, thousands of soldiers are standing guard outside federal buildings. Meanwhile, in Quebec, police are stepping up their search for the men who kidnapped British diplomat James Cross and Quebec Labour minister Pierre Laporte. Contemporary News next at five to the hour . . . or whenever news breaks.” The news reader paused, waited while the musical lead-in to Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man” established itself, then smoothly shifted emotional gears and added brightly: “And now back to Brian’s Breakfast Club, on CHAX, 920 Radio . . .”

  Ward Justice reached over and snapped off the radio on the credenza behind Gerry Cullingham’s desk. He was thankful, relieved and apprehensive, all at once. He was thankful—though he would have been ashamed to admit it—that the FLQ had hijacked the headlines. Eight days ago, just as the Nova Scotia election campaign was moving into its final full week, a group calling itself the Liberation Cell of the FLQ had kidnapped the British consul in Montreal and threatened to kill him if authorities didn’t meet their demands—release of political prisoners, broadcast of the group’s revolutionary manifesto, five hundred thousand dollars in gold and an aircraft to take them to Cuba or Algeria. A few days later, another cell upped the ante, snatching the Quebec Cabinet minister. Then, last night—the night before voting day—the federal government had ordered the army into Ottawa. There were rumours Trudeau might declare martial law today.

  No wonder most of the reporters from the Toronto papers and the TV networks who’d come to Nova Scotia to cover the last few weeks of the election campaign had already decamped for Montreal or Ottawa. Those who remained knew better than to believe that anything they wrote about Nova Scotia politics now would make it onto the front page or the evening newscasts.

  Which was just fine with Ward.

  He’d also been relieved earlier that morning when he’d picked up a copy of the Tribune and seen that its election day set-up story, while still on the front page, had been shuffled to a less prominent bottom corner of the page in order to make room for more dramatic news unfolding elsewhere. The innocuous headline over the story—“Nova Scotians Vote Today”—made it clear this was not the exposé Ward had feared. Was that Jack’s doing?

  But Ward was also apprehensive. Had Jack really managed to kill the story? Or just wound it, holding it at bay until the votes were counted? Ward was sure that was all Jack cared about. Ward was the one whose face was in the photos, whose name featured in the affidavits. Would this mark the end of his law career before it had even begun?

  What would Victoria think? She was probably still sleeping. In his bed. In his apartment. Naked. He wished he were there. But would she still be there if his name ended up splashed across the front page? He could see the headline already: “O’Sullivan Worker In Vote-Buying Scandal.”

  Ever since a Tory campaign manager had indiscreetly confided to a Toronto reporter during the last election that the practice of exchanging votes for rum, cash and other commodities was alive and flourishing in rural Nova Scotia, vote buying—along with Africville—had become Nova Scotia’s national media shame. Toronto reporters, who saw the issue as an easy avenue to a front-page story about the backwater politics of eastern Canada, had eagerly trooped through Jack’s office throughout this campaign in search of quotable quotes, hoping he might be as indiscreet as his Tory rival. He wasn’t.

  The Tories, chastened by their campaign manager’s gaffe in 1967, were responding to questions this time by alternately claiming piously that vote buying was a myth perpetuated by mischievous outsiders, and pledging apologetically that they would never, ever do it again. Jack responded by not responding. Or at least not directly, or helpfully, When the reporters would ask their inevitable question, Jack would appear to ponder for a pregnant extra beat, then declare enigmatically, “Ah, yes. La politique du ventre.” Then, after a suitable silence: “But enough about la politique du ventre.” And he’d wait, silent and sage, for the next question.

  The reporters, puzzled but not wanting to appear stupid—at least that’s what Ward assumed—dutifully wrote the phrase in their notebooks, probably thinking they’d look it up later, if they had time and if they hadn’t misspelled it, and hurried on to their next question. They rarely followed up, but even if they did, they would have learned from Jack only that the phrase had been coined by the French—literally translated, “the politics of the abdomen”—to describe the bureaucratic infighting and petty corruption that often followed independence in post-colonial Africa, Making a direct link between Jack’s obscure reference to the political adjustments of newly liberated African nations and buying votes in backwoods Nova Scotia inevitably turned out to be far too tangled for the reporters to easily unravel, so they left it out of their stories entirely.

  Which was, as Jack explained it to Ward, the whole idea.

  That’s not to say that Jack didn’t really believe that his interpretation of la politique du ventre applied to Nova Scotia politics, and not just in rural areas either. But when he was speaking to Ward instead of a reporter, Jack preferred the looser, more colourful English translation—“belly politics”—which, even to Ward, made some sense.

  “See, it’s like this,” Jack would explain. “The farther down the political food chain you go, the more important belly politics becomes. If a man is down and out, you appeal to his belly, get him to give you his vote for something for his belly. A few bucks, a pint of rum.” He stopped then, laughed his room-filling laugh. “Works when you go up the chain, too. The difference is it costs more—a government contract instead of a few bucks, a political appointment instead of a bottle.” Then he laughed some more. “Dealing with a voter is like dealing with a whore. It’s never a question of will she or won’t she; it’s just a question of how much it’s going to cost you. Let that be your lesson in realpolitik politics for the day, Mr. Future Premier.”

  Ward’s role in this election campaign had not turned out to be the one Jack had initially promised him. Instead of managing Seamus O’Sullivan’s local campaign, Jack had put Ward in charge of belly politics in his riding.

  “This is the most important job in the whole campaign,” Jack insisted when he saw Ward’s disappoi
ntment. “Halifax North is not only the bottom of the bottom of the food chain, but this is going to be a very close race. If we don’t get the belly politics right, we won’t win. And that’s why I need you as my man on the spot.”

  Belly politics, it turned out, covered a much wider swath of electoral skulduggery than merely buying a few votes.

  One of Ward’s most important jobs, for example, was assisting the dearly departed to cast ballots for O’Sullivan. He’d complied a list of the names of every resident of O’Sullivan’s constituency who’d died since the last election, then assembled a half-dozen ringers—men and women, young and old, Liberals all—whose assignment was to go from poll to poll on election day posing as the very alive Mr. So-and-So of Roome Street or Mrs. Such-and-Such of Union Street, and demanding a ballot. Since a ringer could not produce proper identification (“My house was broken into and all my ID was stolen . . .” they would explain. Or, “I lost my wallet yesterday . . .”), each ringer was accompanied by a bona fide voter, a dependable Liberal campaign worker who would swear they were whoever they were claiming to be at the time.

  The challenge, Jack told Ward, was that since the Tories were almost certainly using the same tactic, Ward had to make sure his ringers registered to vote before theirs did. It would be embarrassing to demand your ballot only to find a Tory ringer had already cast it. The ringer got five dollars for every vote he cast; the handler got a flat twenty dollars for the day for vouching for his identity and keeping score of how many ballots the ringer cast.

  Ward looked at his watch. Eight-fifteen. With luck, the first six dead people had already voted for Seamus O’Sullivan. What if one of the ringers got caught? Jack said nobody ever got caught. But that was before Ward himself got nailed. Photographed, identified.

  Which reminded him. He needed to call Ernie Scali, who was in charge of getting out the vote at Northland, to warn him. Northland, the riding’s largest senior citizens’ complex, with more than five hundred eligible voters, was a key belly politics battleground. The Liberal weapon of choice there was chocolate, heart-shaped boxes of Moirs Pot of Gold chocolates, to be more specific.

  On Saturday, Ward had dropped a supply of them at Ernie’s apartment. Handing out the Valentine’s assortment instead of a regular, boring box of chocolates had been Ernie’s idea. Ernie was a retired math teacher and lifelong Liberal who lived in the building and volunteered to coordinate the party’s campaign with seniors. “The old gals love their chocolates, and they especially love the ones that come in those heart-shaped boxes. We gave them out in 1967 and won both our polls,” he told Ward proudly, “86 percent of the vote!”

  “We probably would have got 85 percent of the votes there anyway,” Jack said later. “But the old folks are so used to getting a treat, they won’t vote until we give them one.”

  Ernie’s most difficult task was to get the seniors to the two polling stations in the high-rise’s main lobby. Many had trouble walking, others were bed-ridden. Ernie assembled a team of younger residents to go up and down the halls with wheelchairs, knocking on every door and offering to ferry the occupant down to the polling booth and back to their rooms. “And we’ll have a nice treat for you for after,” they were instructed to say.

  The volunteers used to be permitted to accompany the seniors right into the voting booth to help them cast their ballots—and make sure they cast them the right way—but the Returning Officer had announced he was damping down this election. No one except the voter was allowed inside the voting booth today. The problem was that many of the seniors were senile or forgetful, and might not remember who they were supposed to vote for. “So we’re improvising,” Ernie had confided to Ward. “If my students could write the answers to my tests on their hands, we can do the same.” Ernie had handed out felt-tipped markers to his volunteers and instructed them to write “O’SULLIVAN” on the forearm of any senior they thought might need “reminding.” “There’s more than one way to win a vote,” he said.

  But what if . . . ? Oh, God. What if some photographer got a photo of that? Or, perhaps worse, walked into Ward’s office at this very moment and saw all these empty cartons on the floor, each with its own incriminating listing of contents on the side. Instead of working out of O’Sullivan’s official headquarters on Gottingen Street, Jack had set him up away from the rest of the campaign in Gerry Cullingham’s unused office at the law firm. “Gerry’ll never even know you were here.” The big, sparsely furnished room served as Ward’s office and—most important—his storage locker.

  During the last two weeks, Ward had gathered most of his belly politics arsenal here: five hundred pint bottles of rum, five hundred boxes of Pot of Gold, one thousand pairs of nylons of various brands, sizes and shades and two hundred crisp, fresh-from-the-bank-vault five-dollar bills. With the exception of the cash, which Ward kept in a locked briefcase he carried with him everywhere, the supplies were all stored in plain view in the office.

  Most of it was gone now, distributed to where he hoped it would do the most good. To Ernie at Northland. To the homes of various party faithful throughout the constituency who’d agreed to accompany their neighbours to the polling station and then bring them back to their own kitchens, which had been turned into portable bars and treat-distribution centres for election day.

  And, of course, to the Deacon, who was handling the handouts today in Maynard Square. The Deacon! Why had he been so stupid? Ward wondered. Why hadn’t he let the Deacon handle everything instead of—?

  The Deacon wasn’t really a minister, Ward knew. Jack called him the Deacon because he’d been involved with the church in Africville. The Deacon was a long-time Liberal supporter who served as the party’s general in the black community. Whenever there was an issue involving the black community, Jack would instruct Ward, “Ask the Deacon.”

  The problem was that the Deacon and Ward disliked each other immediately. When Ward had called him last week to arrange to drop off his election day supplies, the Deacon had imperiously informed Ward of exactly what he wanted. “I’ll need two hundred pints of rum, dark, Captain Morgan,” he’d begun, as if calling in a grocery order. “Three hundred of those Pot of Gold chocolate boxes, the ones with the extra maraschino cherries. Five hundred pairs of stockings, all sizes, light-coloured ones work best here. Fifty turkeys, fresh-killed, for that special list I talked to Jack about. And five hundred dollars in fives, ’cause nobody’s using twos any more. And make sure they’re new ones. My people like the feel of the new ones.”

  When Ward pointed out to Jack later that the Deacon was asking for more treats than there were black voters in all of Maynard Square, Jack just laughed. “The Deacon delivers, so if he wants a little something extra for his troubles, that’s okay with me. Give him what he wants.”

  “And what’s this about turkeys?”

  “Oh that,” Jack answered. “The Deacon’s got a special list he wants us to buy turkeys for. Because election day is the day after Thanksgiving. He wants to make a big show of handing out the turkeys just before Thanksgiving, he says, so other folks’ll come looking for one too. When they do, he says he’ll tell them they’re too late for this election—all the turkeys are spoken for—but if they work for him between now and the next election, they’ll be eligible for one too. And then he’ll offer them one of the old standbys, a pint or cash, for their vote this time. The Deacon calls it his bait and switch.”

  Ward was dubious. “What’s to guarantee that if we give someone a turkey on Saturday they’re going to vote for us on Tuesday?” Ward believed, though he didn’t say so to Jack, that the turkey giveaway had nothing to do with winning votes for Seamus O’Sullivan and everything to do with helping the Deacon bolster his image with his friends and neighbours.

  “You, my young friend, have no faith in the honesty of the dishonest,” Jack told him. “If the Deacon says they’ll vote for us, they will.”

  For reasons that now made
absolutely no sense, even to him, Ward decided to accompany the Deacon when he delivered the turkeys—partly to make sure O’Sullivan got the credit, and partly, perhaps, just perhaps, to bring the old bastard down a peg or two.

  Which was how he’d got caught. His own damn fault.

  On Saturday, Ward, driving Jack’s Caprice, had led a cavalcade of a half-dozen horn-honking pickup trucks through Maynard Square’s narrow laneways. Each vehicle was festooned with red balloons and O’SULLIVAN FOR PREMIER posters and jammed full of energetic, placard-waving young campaign workers Ward had recruited. The idea was to lure the residents to the main parking lot, where he and the Deacon could hand out the turkeys.

  The Deacon wasn’t amused. “Folks ain’t gonna like that,” he said. Ward ignored him, although he let the Deacon use the bullhorn to announce that Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So were about to receive a Thanksgiving turkey, “compliments of Seamus O’Sullivan, your Liberal candidate in Halifax North and the next Premier of Nova Scotia!!” On cue, the drivers all began honking their horns.

  Ward thought it went well. In fact, he was back in his apartment that night celebrating with Victoria in his new double bed when Jack called and told him to get his ass back to the office immediately.

  “Why is your friend Carter trying to fuck us over?” Jack demanded without preamble when Ward arrived.

  What? “He’s not my friend. I haven’t seen him in years.” What a stupid answer. “How’s he fucking us over?”

  It turned out the turkey giveaway had not gone as well as Ward believed. Someone from Black Pride was in an apartment above the parking lot snapping pictures the whole time. There were apparently photos of the Deacon with the bullhorn and some of Ward handing out turkeys from the trunk of Jack’s car. After the Liberals had left, Black Pride workers had fanned out, interviewing residents and collecting affidavits from some who admitted they’d been given turkeys as a bribe to vote for O’Sullivan. And now Ray Carter was trying to peddle the story to the Tribune. One of the reporters at the paper, the one who was covering O’Sullivan’s campaign, had called Jack to tip him off.