Clockwork Canada

by Dominik Parisien

  I stayed that night and every night thereafter. Isaac sent a post to Sir Manager and to Momma, letting them know that I’d been seconded to be the General’s Aide-de-Camp. I liked the sound of that a lot more than Camp Follower. At least in French it sounded good.

  Days, Isaac would take me into a field and show me how to shoot a hydroelectric gun, sizzling crows straight off the farmer’s fence. At night, he’d caress me with Old Toby. Good thing there warn’t any neighbours, account of our screams of passion would’ve waked the dead.

  Once, after we were both spent and Old Toby set aside to re-charge, Isaac asked: Did you enjoy being a Camp Follower, Laura?

  I told Isaac life was hard and short for us CF girls. Even told him some of the abuses Sir Manager had visited upon me.

  Isaac started to weep and pulled me into his arms: Laura, you are no longer a Camp Follower, but my own true sweetheart. Then he went down on his knee before me and said, When this war is over, will you do me the honour of marrying me?

  Well, I was struck right dumb at the thought of it: me, the ruined daughter of a cook from Dago-land, getting proposed to on bended knee by a General of the Realm. I thought he must be pulling my leg. Only when I saw the tragedy on his face, did I understand he were serious. I searched for the proper words but could not speak them, so overwhelmed I was with emotion. Instead, I fingerspelled my acceptance: Isaac I wish to wed you with all my heart.

  He kissed me and took off his regimental ring, placing it on my hand – so big, I had to wear it on my middle finger like a knuckleduster. He asked me to accept it as a symbol of his promise.

  Sadly, that were the only promise Isaac made me that he didn’t keep.

  * * *

  One night, while I waited for Isaac, the lights all went off at once, something that never happened before at the stone house, the generals being the last to get their power rationed. Off in the distance, I could hear the zinging sound of an electrical bombardment and smell the scorch of battle. I knew right away my Isaac were in trouble. While I rooted in the kitchen for matches and candles, a knock come at the door – I should’ve been suspicious but I throwed it open to three Staters, ugly as sin, on the stoop.

  Where’s your master? the leader of the thugs demanded, seizing my wrists.

  Don’t know and wouldn’t say if I did, I answered – ’twas God’s truth, but as soon as the words was out of my mouth, they set upon me, holding me to the floor by my arms and legs. The leader unbuttoned his trousers and shook his bits at me. I’ll give you this ’til you bleed information, girl, he said, but before he could make good, his body jerked in the sizzling blue light of an electrical gun and he fell to the ground in a death-seizure. Isaac stood over the thug’s still-jerking body, pointing the muzzle of his gun straight at the head of the man holding my arms.

  Let the girl go or you shall meet the same fate as your dog of a master, he said.

  Even though they outnumbered him two to one, they run off, leaving me on the floor. Isaac give chase, shooting volts into their traitorous asses until one of them turned and got a lucky shot off; fortunately for me, they didn’t see Isaac fall. I pulled him into my arms and could see by the smoking hole in his chest that he warn’t long for this world.

  Laura, it’s an ambush, he gasped. Take Alfred. Warn Sir Manager. Tell him the time has come to turn the Ring of Death against our enemies, ready or no. Let slip the sluice gates of war, my Hydro-Girl.

  I was crying and begging Isaac not to leave me when he died in my arms. I were just a child in many ways, Excellency, but I knowed my duty.

  Stupid with grief, I ran to get Alfred and found him out of power: the wily Staters had cut his electrical feeding line. I went back to the house to fetch the Good Book, a wooden stepladder and Momma’s asbestos gloves, trying not to look at my poor dead Isaac on the stoop. Dashing tears from my eyes, I made myself think about how to fix the wire and get Alfred charged up. The Good Book explained the steps clear enough, although I could barely see for weeping. Before I got the horse charged halfway, I grew nervous that the Staters would return and mounted Alfred too soon, taking off at a gallop. Alfred ran out of juice a couple of miles into my jour ney, his mechanical legs collapsing beneath him into a heap of metal. I had to follow the transmission line on foot, through the bush and the swamps, all ten rugged miles to the Falls.

  Every schoolchild in Upper Canada knows the rest of the story, Excellency. How I came upon a lost cow that give me cover as a wandering milkmaid. How the Mohawk scouts found me, almost fainting from my exertions, and kept me going, protecting me from bloodthirsty Staters creeping in the darkness, whilst Lieutenant Barnfather tracked the scoundrels who murdered Isaac and meted out swift justice in the silence of the forest, cutting them ear to ear. The Indian troops were as big a part of the victory as me and Isaac, yet they never got their due. Thanks to those good men, I reached the Falls and stumbled into the Diggings, shouting to rouse Sir Manager from bed but finding him in his cups, insensate. Miss Lola and I had to alert the Diggers by fingerspelling WABA, for We Are Being Attacked, the alarm to get them to man the turbines and trigger the Ring of Death. The Camp Followers worked alongside their boys. That day the Diggers became Royal Fusiliers and the Camp Followers, Loyalist Defendresses of the Empire.

  When we flooded the tunnel and charged the turbines to transmit power, the volley of cannon fire could be heard all the way to York, the screams of the Staters across the gorge louder than the transformers exploding over their heads. The surrender of the Staters to the rule of Her Majesty that day was absolute and unconditional.

  Sir Manager were clapped in irons for dereliction of duty. At his trial, it come out that he was the two-faced traitor who’d bribed Isaac’s housekeepers and sent the Staters to the stone house to kill Isaac and do with me whatever vile things they seen fit. I watched him swing by his neck, and took no small pleasure in the justice of it.

  * * *

  Today, when I stare at the pounding cataract, I see thousands of lost Loyalist souls, none more dear than my Isaac. They built a statue of him raising his sword in one gallant hand as he looks toward the Kingdom of the United States.

  Now, here you are, Excellency, a Stater yourself. I hear King Edward married himself a common Stater lady – the woman he loves, my foot, he took up with her to buttress the loyalty of his realm to the south. The King’s grandmamma would be rolling in her grave, if she knowed that skinny American bitch was calling herself Queen of the United States and British North America.

  After the war, the last real queen, Victoria, honoured me with a title, as well a hundred fertile acres and this very stone house of Isaac’s where we’re taking tea. I shared these rooms ’til recently with my dear companion and comradess-in-arms, Lady Lola, as she was so designated. We lived like sisters, ’til I took her to Isaac’s big bed and introduced her to the touch of Sir Toby. For fifty years we slept in one another’s arms. Losing her was as bad as losing my Isaac, only Lola were killed by Father Time, not the Staters.

  My only other true friend, Lieutenant Barnfather, were offered a title and land, too, but he turned them down to live with his mother’s people, the Mohawks. No offence to Isaac, but I couldn’t stomach turning myself into a British gentleman, he told me. He’s gone now, sad to say, but not before reaching the ripe old age of ninety-four.

  Oh yes, Excellency, and the Queen made good on the promise of a Letter of Thanks from her heirs and successors at Buckingham Palace every Victory Day, personally delivered by whatever codswallup had been recently installed by our government as Vice-Regal Representative of the King. I may be half-blind but I’m guessing you have this year’s letter in your pocket, Excellency. Hand it over, if you please.

  Thank you.

  Now, if you don’t mind, I’m done in. Time for my afternoon nap with Old Toby. Kindly show yourself and your viceregal scribe out of my house.

  END TRANSCRIPTION.

  * * *

  The above is classified “eyes only” and will b
e sealed as part of the historical record for 200 years, by order of H.R.H. King Edward VIII, King of the United British American Empire, May He Reign Forever.

  I swear all statements set down here by my hand to be accurate and true, so help me God.

  JAMES HANSOM, ESQ.

  Transcriptionist to the office of the Governor General

  October 12, 1949

  EQUUS

  KATE STORY

  At dawn, the woods fall silent. Birds, wind, even the bright murmur of the river seem to falter.

  “When’s she coming in, sir?” asks Albert, one of the three St. John’s boys assisting the survey.

  “Soon, I think.” Sandford Fleming gets to his feet, eyes fixed on the east. “If I am not mistaken, very soon.”

  First Albert then the other boys, Edward and Andrew, let their breakfast dishes fall around the campfire with a clatter. Conne River Joe comes to stand next to Fleming, shading his eyes with his hand. “Do you hear it?”

  Fleming shakes his head, but he feels a smile spreading across his face. “Not yet. You?”

  Joe nods. “A…” He searches. “A sound from your Empire.”

  A great clang makes them all jump. Jack, the cook and campmaster, a Scotsman like Fleming himself, has dropped a cast-iron pan into the fire. He does not apologize. He stands, eyes fixed eastward, arms stiff at his sides.

  Then Fleming hears it: a mechanical noise, cutting through the silence of the ancient boreal forest. It grows louder; they can hear the rhythm of it now, and the hissing. Unconsciously, the boys draw together. Fleming scrubs his hands through his mane of red hair and his thick ruddy beard, and moves in front of the group, straightening his jacket, pulling himself up to his full height. His skin prickles, his heart beats faster. He feels a laugh bubbling up inside as he notes his desire to tidy himself for the encounter.

  He’s not seen the Theodolite for almost five years. Not seen Emmanuel Smith since that time either, the wee quick English mechanic hired by the East India Company when he was sixteen, no older than these boys here now, to drive the first prototype of the Ramsden Steam-Propelled Theodolite commissioned in the 1830s to complete the Indian Survey.

  Closer still. A grinding noise, then the sound of dragging chains, like an approaching visitation of ghosts from that fellow Dickens’s imagination, burdened with all their past sins – good! With a touch of theatricality, Manny has released the measurement chains! The first railroad surveying team in the history of Newfoundland will see how this thing works in its entirety.

  The creature comes lurching into view, then, along the rough trail the team has cut – a long and gentle, railroad-friendly curve. Surely the entire vast island holds its breath in astonishment, for who has seen such a sight?

  Manny rides the Theodolite, or rather, controls it the way a marionetteer controls a puppet. Straps on his hands and feet enable him to walk-ride the creature. It strides along on clever jointed legs, brass and mahogany gleaming. There’s a spring to it for, of course, the carriage must be level and the precious mechanism on top must be preserved from the worst of the jolting. The boiler clanks and hisses, releasing a gentle steam, tinged shell-pink in the morning light.

  “Lord, she’s beautiful!” breathes Albert, at the same time as Edward and Andrew utter religious oaths, quickly suppressed. Joe says nothing.

  Jack – dark-haired, handsome Jack, who had the St. John’s girls hanging off him the entire time the team was being assembled in the city – steps backward, away, into the sheltering shadow of the trees. When they’d met in the city, Fleming had instantly recognized Jack’s accent, from his own region of Scotland. “You’re from Fife?” he’d asked.

  “Aye,” Jack had answered. From Fife almost instantly, too, if Fleming can judge the edge of the accent, for he mourns the loss of his own, so many years now in this new country. Fellow Scotsmen barely recognize him as their own, but Jack had. “You’d be from there yourself.”

  “What is it, man?” Fleming asks him now. “That’s no way to greet our lady!”

  But Jack’s eyes are wide, his feet in his big boots shuffle from side to side, and with two, three, four trembling steps he disappears into the cool shadows of the dawn forest.

  Fleming, concealing his irritation, turns back. He raises his hand in greeting as Manny clanks up to the party, executes a saucy turn, and comes to a halt. He releases a valve, and the Theodolite settles down with a mechanical sigh, its legs bending so that Manny can slide out of the saddle onto the ground.

  Fleming senses the boys trying not to back away.

  “Manny, Emmanuel Smith!” he yells, and embraces the small Englishman in a bear hug.

  Manny pounds Fleming on the back. “Good to see you, sir.” He steps back and looks searchingly at Fleming’s face. “You look fine, just fine, sir.”

  “I am fine.” Fleming puts a touch of asperity into his voice. Manny will have heard the gossip of course; it is a topic of interest from London to the west coast of new Canada. “I am glad I merit your approval.”

  “That you do, sir!”

  “How was the trip out from the city?”

  “Took me almost an hour to lose the entourage.” The two men laugh; the gossip, the weakness, are banished. The Theodolite is a magnet for children of a certain age and, of course, men – and women – of a mechanical mindset. Any time it has appeared in public it has garnered a following; in Truro they’d had to control the crowds with the help of the police.

  Fleming introduces Manny to the others. Manny hesitates to shake hands with Conne River Joe, until Fleming coughs meaningfully and the Englishman takes the Micmac guide’s hand. “And there’s Jack, but he seems to have disappeared entirely.”

  “Can I touch her, sir?” young Albert asks, hands twitching at his sides.

  “Certainly,” says Fleming, adding rather unnecessarily, “Watch the boiler,” for these boys will know not to touch the scalding thing, cradled underneath and to the rear of the gorgeous telescope and frame. Joe has already given the mechanism a circuit, making a particular survey of the leather reinforcements and brass-and-steel jointing. The woodwork is ornate, carved with artistic exuberance by the unnamed craftsmen who constructed it back in England; the East India Company can afford the best, paid for with plunder. Horses – some with wings, some with tails scaled like fishes, some centaur-like with human faces – adorn the Theodolite; and suns, radiating light and heat and power.

  “What is it like to ride?” asks Joe.

  “Smoother than you’d expect,” Manny says.

  Albert points. “And on top, there, it’s just like a regular theodolite. Only, does that frame rotate, sir?”

  “Indeed. One hundred and eighty degrees,” Fleming approves. Albert is an unusually bright youngster; he reminds Fleming of his own son, Frank Andrew.

  Fleming encourages the youngsters to climb the creature, and soon they are scrambling over her like magpies. They immediately grasp the utility of the retractable measurement chains that run between the middle and back sets of legs. The Theodolite’s stride pulls the chains taut with every step, with mechanical precision, even on a mountain slope. It is a far cry from the usual way of measuring distance, where the survey chief sets the end point, then the chainmen set the chain, and the crew inchworms along the ground.

  “The inchworm has been transformed into… well, if not a butterfly then at least a six-legged twelve-foot-tall spider,” Fleming sums it up.

  “Caw!” squawks Edward, overcome.

  “How much does it weigh?” Joe asks.

  “About a thousand pounds,” Manny says proudly.

  “Caw!” Edward squawks again.

  “That’s less than her predecessor, a Great Theodolite of the non-self-propelling kind. That one weighed almost fifteen hundred pounds in its travelling cases. They wanted it to survey the Himalayan mountains. Imagine.”

  “They, meaning your East India Company?” Joe asks.

  “The very same,” Manny confirms.

 
; “They needed one they could ride,” Joe muses.

  “Yes, and isn’t she a beauty?”

  Everyone agrees that she is.

  “And she can climb a mountain like a monkey.” Manny looks a bit uncertain. “If monkeys climb mountains.”

  “Never mind. If they do, they’d be left in the dust by our lovely girl here.” Fleming pounds Manny on the shoulder. “Wish I’d had her last year in the Rockies.”

  He wishes – as soon as the words leave his mouth – that he’d not evoked last year. His weakness, pain, the opium. Doubt, intolerable hesitation, morbid introspection. He turns, bellowing into the woods to banish the memory. “Jack! Jack of Fife! Where are ye? Come and have a look at this, will you, man?”

  * * *

  Fleming, pedagogically committed to instilling traditional surveying methods despite the arrival of the Theodolite, has all the boys counting strides as well as cutting the trail. And Albert, so intent on numbers that he failed to gauge the terrain, has walked straight into a bog.

  “Hold on tight, now, I’m going to give you a heave.” Fleming braces his feet and hauls Albert out of the sucking quicksand by brute force.

  “Thank you, sir!” gasps Albert. “Lord, this mud stinks.”

  “Indeed it does. Wash yourself off in the creek.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Fleming laughs as the tall, gangly boy, ears red with embarrassment, scampers off. His strides are so long that he always comes up with a smaller number than the other boys. Fleming remembers his own apprenticeship with John Sang, back in Scotland, when he’d been fourteen. “Ye great lummox, yer strides are too long!” the man would yell at him, not without affection.

  Sang and his sons had had to sell their surveying equipment, Fleming heard from his father, some years ago. To have stayed in Scotland would have meant that same fate for Fleming: financial and professional stagnation, and ruin. In coming to this New World, he’d made his fortune.