Lincoln's Briefs

by Wayne, Michael

  When the faculty met to consider who would best serve the interests of the department, sentiment was divided about equally between Yale Templeton and the caterer. The debate had gone on for over two hours, with every prospect of a deadlock, when St. Clair Russell Hill, elder statesman among the historians and universally respected, rose to address his colleagues. He was a commanding presence, standing almost six feet, four inches tall, with a sweep of white hair.

  “Gentlemen,” he began solemnly, “when I first arrived here from Oxford forty years ago, this department had a distinguished reputation. Sir Graham Wright was chairman then, and Deacon Meredith was here, and Chesterton-Smythe. Fortescue had just completed the first volume of his magnificent work on the exchequer under Walpole, and Gray was well into the research that would lead to his brilliant refutation of Gibbon. Nor need I remind you of Ingersoll’s seminal essay on the role of the poultry trade in the formation of Canadian national identity. These men were giants in the profession, gifted teachers, incomparable scholars.” He paused to catch his breath. “But we all know what has happened since then. I think I can best express it in the immortal poetic phrases of Humbert Wolfe:

  Like a tall gray coffee pot

  Sits the squirrel.

  He is not all he should be,

  Eats by dozens trees

  And kills his red brown cousins.

  The keeper, on the other hand, who shot him

  Is a Christian

  And Loves his enemies.

  Which shows

  The squirrel is not one of those.”

  “Ah, I see what you mean,” said the chairman. “The decline of Christianity has led to a moral relativism in the university that threatens our values, our intellectual standards—dare I say it, even the very survival of Western civilization.”

  “Decline of Christianity?” said Hill. “Western civilization? I’m talking about squirrels, man! Look around you! We’re overrun by squirrels!” Everyone looked around.

  “Don’t you see them,” he shrieked. “Squirrels on the tables, squirrels on the chairs, squirrels hanging from the chandeliers! Yesterday I found three squirrels in my file cabinet. They were stealing my lecture notes again. I suspect it was the same squirrels who abducted my wife and children. Possibly the same squirrels responsible for the Korean War. This is no time for Armenian caterers, no matter how expert in producing a serviceable raspberry coulis. We’re under siege. We need a man of courage and fortitude. We need a man of military bearing and aristocratic breeding. We need a man versed in the historic arts of warfare.” And so they unanimously voted to offer Yale Templeton the position of assistant professor, giving him special responsibility for defence of the Edifice Building perimeter.

  Of course, Yale Templeton would have much preferred to remain at Cambridge. However, he lacked the wit and charm necessary to keep a roomful of students rapt for hours while saying absolutely nothing of consequence, a requisite of every Cambridge don. The only job in England available to him was at Birmingham, which to his mother meant factories, immigrants, and the working class. “Think of the people you’d have to associate with!” At least Toronto had Rosedale. And one of his aunts, now an elderly widow, still lived in the old family home.

  So he rented an apartment not far from Dunbar Road, just a half hour walk from his office and the university library. Two years later Louisiana State University Press published his dissertation, in greatly expanded form, under the title The View from Fleet Street and Beyond: English Observations on the American Civil War. “The final word on the subject!” read a quotation on the dust jacket, taken from a review in the Journal of Southern History by the distinguished historian Bruce Catton. (The full quotation actually read: “We can only fervently pray that this is the final word on the subject!”) A year later Yale Templeton received tenure.

  Publication of his book brought invitations to participate at the annual conferences of the major historical associations. He had promised his mother he would never travel to the United States. However, without letting her know, he agreed to serve on a panel entitled “The Role of the Press in the Civil War” at the Organization of American Historians meeting to be held in Chicago. The prospect of sharing his findings with colleagues was exciting, taking him back to those happy days when he had debated proper footnoting techniques with friends in the Caius College Historical Society. “I’ll give the talk I prepared for my interview at the university,” he decided, “maybe just adding a few more details.”

  He arrived in Chicago full of expectation. However, the militant black nationalist cab driver who picked him up at the airport harangued him all the way to the hotel about “honky imperialists,” then stole his watch for “reparations.” At the hotel the bellboy who carried his bags kicked him in the shins for failing to come up with an adequate tip. Then, when in alarmed response, he gave the maid fifty dollars, she attacked him with a mop, thinking he was offering her money for sex.

  He spent the next three days secluded in his room, using the time to go over and over the paper he would present. He paid special attention to punctuation, since colleagues had warned him that American scholars were especially crude and objectionable when they felt someone fell short of their high academic standards. By the time of the panel, he knew the talk by memory and presented it in the monotone he understood to be appropriate to such occasions. It went quite well, he thought as he sat down, although he was sorry that the chairman had cut him off after fifty-five minutes, since he had only just begun to recount the height of all the officers at the Second Battle of Bull Run mentioned by name in the Lincolnshire Sunday Post.

  To his disappointment, the commentator on the panel, eminent Princeton historian James M. McPherson, addressed most of his remarks to the other two papers at the session, noting only that “Professor Templeton has obviously tracked down a wealth of detail about the Second Battle of Bull Run, and now I’m sure we’ll all wait with interest to see what use he is able to make of it.” “Now, what in the world does he mean by that?” Yale Templeton wondered.

  But then came the questions from the floor. “What about Chomsky’s new ideas on manufacturing consent?” demanded a graduate student from Penn. “No,” interjected a graduate student from Johns Hopkins, “he needs to talk about Marx.” “Not Marx himself but Gramsci,” called out a third student. “Durkheim!” “Foucault!” Startled, Yale Templeton blurted out the quotation by Lord Namier he had been asked to discuss on his examination at Cambridge. This produced puzzled looks and momentary silence, until a feminist from Smith shouted out, “You don’t discuss how women were kept out of the newspaper industry in England.” “And out of the military in the United States,” cried another from Oberlin. “And why don’t you admit that the press lords were honky racist imperialists just like the Union soldiers,” shouted a man who looked uncannily like the cab driver who had picked him up at the airport.

  But the most humiliating moment came at the very end of the question period when a man wearing a Confederate cap and speaking in a long Southern drawl commented politely, “I’m afraid you got it wrong about Captain Bagley of the Fourth Virginia Regiment, Professor. He was five foot eight and three-quarters, not five foot six and a half.”

  Yale Templeton returned to his room, packed his bags, and asked for a cab. The driver turned out to be the same black nationalist who had driven him to the hotel. He harangued him once again about “honky imperialists” then stole his new watch. Yale Templeton boarded the plane for Toronto, returned to his room, and spent the next seven years going back and forth between his apartment and the university. And that is surely how he would have spent the rest of his days, had it not been for a conversation he had with the wife of the chairman of the History department.

  VI

  As she always did, the chairman’s wife got drunk as soon as she arrived at the end-of-term reception. And, as was always the case when she got drunk at the end-of-term reception, she looked around for Yale Templeton to torment. He was stan
ding by himself in a corner, trying not to catch her attention. But as always, his attempts to avoid her were hopeless. She jacked up her considerable bulk, carted it over toward him, and bounced him up against the wall. She moved in so close the scotch on her breath misted his vision.

  “And you’ve been in Canada how long now?” she slurred.

  He cleared his throat while trying to make himself smaller. “Nine years come August tenth,” he replied in as amiable a tone as he could manage under the circumstances.

  “And in all that time you mean to tell me you’ve never seen a moose?”

  Since moose, let it be said, are rarely found wandering south of St. Clair Avenue in Toronto, and absolutely never on the streets of Rosedale, he could only repeat what he’d already told her several times. Yes, it was true, he had never seen a moose.

  “And you call yourself a Canadian?”

  “No. I would never do that. I’m English.”

  “I know, I know. That crazy mother of yours. But you’re descended from distinguished Canadian stock. Your ancestors were among the founders of this country. They belonged to the Family Compact. You’re a historian. Have you no interest in your own personal history?”

  “Well, to tell you the tr—”

  “Forget England. England is nothing but pretence now. It was never anything more than that, really. But, Canada. Ah, Canada. Canada is honest simplicity. Canada is the yet-to-be-realized promise of human goodness and generosity. Canada is the North, true, strong, and free. Nothing symbolizes the North better than moose. Make your ancestors proud. Go north and find a moose.” And with that, she passed out at his feet, as she invariably did at the end-of-term reception.

  Over the years he had trained himself not to take her words to heart. On this occasion, however, they struck some unplayed chord deep within him. “I’ve been here a decade,” he reflected. “Mother was born and raised here. I really should know more about Canada. If knowing more about Canada means going north and finding a moose, then I’ll go north and find a moose.” Being the sort of person he was, however, he began with a trip to the university library.

  The card catalogue contained a considerable number of entries for moose. He settled on a work called The Moose Book, published by the New York firm of E.P. Dutton & Co. in 1916. Actually it was the subtitle that caught his attention: Facts and Stories from the Northern Forests. “Facts and stories,” he read delightedly, nodding his head. “Just what I need. And with luck there will be statistics, too.”

  He went to the stacks, located the book, swept off the dust and cobwebs that had collected over the years, and started flipping through the pages. There were fewer footnotes than he would have liked. However, those that the author—one Samuel Merrill—had chosen to include appeared to be properly annotated. That was reassuring. He turned to the first chapter and started to read:

  In a plea for the preservation of the moose Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the New York Zoological Society, has said, ‘Nature has been a million years in developing that wonderful animal, and man should not ruthlessly destroy it!’

  A million years! The imagination is helpless in attempting to grasp the idea of such a period of time, and the events which have taken place in it.

  Yale Templeton paused. “A million years!” he murmured. And at that moment—quite uncharacteristically—he experienced a dawning of insight. Not the sort of grand insight that might have come to someone of a truly expansive mind. Not a recognition that the proper understanding of history requires contemplation of life in all its many and varied guises, life across the millennia. No, his insight was more parochial. “Moose,” he concluded, “must be interesting.”

  He read on:

  The ancestral home of the moose (Cervus alces) in prehistoric times was probably Asia. Professor Osborn quotes Sir Victor Brooke as maintaining that the Cervidae originated in Asia, and thence spread east and west. But at just what stage in this little matter of a million years the first moose wandered into America over the land which then connected the two continents at Bering Strait, we shall never know. According to Professor William Berryman Scott of Princeton University the moose, the caribou, and the wapiti came from the Old World to the New not earlier than the Pleistocene …

  Well, who would not be stirred by such prose? He checked the book out and read through the night, and on into the early hours of the morning. And as he read his interest grew. And grew.

  Every Friday evening, almost without exception, Yale Templeton had dinner with his aunt at the old family home on Dunbar Road. On the first such occasion, back when he had just taken his position at the university, she had made the mistake of asking him about his work. Several Fridays later, as he launched into a yet another discussion of statistics on pig iron production during the Civil War, she had shut off her hearing aid in desperation. The result had been entirely satisfactory from her point of view, and so after that she had taken to turning off her hearing aid whenever he came to the house. As a result he had been regaling her with stories about moose for over a month before she finally realized he was no longer talking about the Civil War.

  “Moose? Did you say moose? With antlers?” And for a moment a light long believed extinguished was rekindled in her eyes.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I thought I would take a trip up north to see if I could—”

  “Bag a moose! Bag a moose! Good for you!” she squealed, smiling for the first time he could remember. “You know, to tell you the truth, I always took you for a Mama’s boy. Not that I blamed you, really, growing up in England, and without a father. And everyone knows the strings in my sister’s lute snapped long before you were born. But now, moose hunting! Yes, moose hunting! That’s an activity for real men!”

  “Well, I wasn’t exactly …”

  “Why, your great-grandfather used to go north every fall. Take a couple of weeks up on the French River. Hired Native guides, of course. When I was your age there was a moose head in every room of this house. I never understood why Father took them all down after Grandfather died. The one over the fireplace in the study, that one had antlers over six feet across. They noted it in the entry for Grandfather in the Cavendish Social Register for 1911. Here, I’ll show you.”

  And she wrestled her tiny frame from the chair and hobbled upstairs. He remained at the table, unsettled by her sudden and entirely unfamiliar enthusiasm. She finally reappeared twenty minutes later with a large scrapbook. There was the entry from the Cavendish Social Register she had mentioned, as well as scores of photographs taken over the course of many summers, all of which showed his great-grandfather standing proud, patrician, erect, his right hand gripping the barrel of a rifle, the stock planted firmly in the ground, and the boot of his right foot resting upon the flank of some dead moose. Next to him invariably stood an Ojibwa guide, grinning broadly.

  Yale Templeton had seen countless pictures of dead soldiers. His shelves were filled with books on the Civil War that contained image after gruesome image of battlefield scenes. But for some reason he found the sight of the dead moose far more disturbing than any photograph of mutilated human beings. And he was immediately reminded of the quotation by the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn: “Nature has been a million years in developing that wonderful animal, and man should not ruthlessly destroy it!”

  While he was contemplating the scrapbook, his aunt had hobbled off once more, this time to retrieve the .303 Lee-Enfield rifle his great-grandfather had used for hunting. The barrel gleamed, a tribute to her nostalgia. “It will make me so proud for you to have this,” she said, placing it with loving tenderness in his hands as a tear rolled down her cheek. He stood there bewildered and more than a little distressed. At the same time, however, he was genuinely touched. And as a way of acknowledging the newly formed bond between them, he took her hand and started to tell her about moose migration patterns during the Pleistocene era. At which point she reached up and shut off her hearing aid.

  VII

&
nbsp; As it happened the cherished heirloom his aunt had given him was not in his possession long. When Mrs. Cordelia Devonshire-Hoskins saw a man walking past her stately mansion with a rifle slung over his shoulder, she did what she always did when the sanctity of Rosedale was threatened. By the time she had hung up the phone, Yale Templeton found himself pinned face first to the sidewalk by a team of police officers, a cocked revolver at his head and handcuffs severing the circulation to his wrists. The experience was one of the most harrowing in his life, he later wrote to his mother (almost as harrowing, he acknowledged to himself with a shudder, as his weekend in Chicago).

  The night he spent in the Don Jail provided a fateful if entirely unanticipated compensation, however. Among his cellmates was an Ojibwa from Espanola named Charlie Lookalike, in custody for the third time in a month for impersonating the restaurant critic of the Globe and Mail. When he roused himself from his Grand Vin de Château Latour–induced stupor, he started railing at the police for racism and censorship of the press and shouting that he was going back north where at least the moose gave a man respect. (He interspersed his rant with perceptive observations about how hard it had become to find decent boiled leek dumplings in Toronto now that Ta-Sun Mandarin Garden had closed.) Intimidated but mindful of the high regard shown by his colleagues in the History department for the restaurant reviews in the Globe and Mail, Yale Templeton stepped toward him and extended his hand in fellowship. Ten minutes later, after the guards had pulled him free and treated his wounds, and after he had made the customary propitiatory offering of fifty dollars to the Moose Manitou, he found himself deep in conversation with Charlie Lookalike.

  Yes, it was true, Charlie told him—his childhood had been spent running and swimming with the moose in Northern Ontario. And, yes, he would be more than happy to take Yale Templeton to the moose grounds near Espanola. “But”—and here he paused, reflecting—“But a man of your background really needs more sage instruction than a mere restaurant critic can provide. As it happens, my great-uncle Joseph Brant Lookalike devoted ten years of his life to tracking moose and studying their habits. No one, white or Native, knows their movements better.” True, hiring the services of a tribal elder would be expensive. But it would be an investment well worth making “for someone of your intellectual standards.” And Charlie even offered to throw in an autographed copy of The Globe and Mail’s Guide to Fine Dining in Espanola at only a slight additional cost.