by Mark Lisac
“At least you didn’t take me to one on our honeymoon. But our first trip together after that. Of all the things to do in Montreal, we ended up taking half an afternoon to visit Howie Morenz’s grave. I could understand that. You were a hockey player and he was a great one. Then there were all the others. Wherever we went, there would be another cemetery to walk through. I ended up worrying that every vacation we ever took would be built around cemeteries. Either that or we’d start travelling apart.”
“I never begrudged you that, Sandra. I wish I’d been able to explain better. All I can tell you is I feel I know something when I see them. People change. Or they never can or will tell you what’s going on in their minds. In the places where they’re buried, there’s no more evasion. They have to be who they were.”
“Have you visited Rachel’s grave yet?”
Asher waited to make sure his words would come out evenly without catching in his throat.
“No. I know who she was. I see her filling in colouring books and helping you cook and playing with her sister two minutes after they scrapped over something. I saw her buried. I don’t want to see her there anymore. I want to remember her alive.”
“I’m sorry, Harry. I shouldn’t have asked you that.”
“It’s all right.”
“No, it isn’t. You’re going to think this is crazy, but I resented your cemetery visits more than ever after that. Resentment isn’t the right word. It was… it was craziness. I felt like the cemetery visits were linked with her dying. Like one led to the other. I know it’s nuts, but I wasn’t able to shake it off. It was like a superstition.”
“You have a right to feel what you feel. Grief comes out in funny ways sometimes.” He pushed out the next few words in a whispered sigh. “Maybe I’ve felt that way myself.”
“Oh, God, I didn’t mean to talk about that. I’m sorry, Harry. I should be apologizing to myself, too. What about that job you’re working on? Am I going to read about it in the papers someday?”
“I think the point is never to have anyone read anything about it. Find out if there’s anything there. If there is, get rid of it and put it away quietly. Shoot, shovel, and shut up. No markers for people to see. Leave only flat ground that looks undisturbed.”
“Your pal must really be worried.”
They gathered their coats and headed toward the door.
“He is — to a point. Jimmy worries about things. He doesn’t let things worry him. The difference is that he’s in control. It’s a matter of taking care of details.”
“Is that what you like about him?”
“I’ve known him since we were kids in school. By now I don’t ask why I like him. He’s better company than most of the people I deal with every day. If all I was doing was writing up leases for strip malls or exchanging gossip about what lawyer is growing dope at his lakeside cabin in B.C., I’d be out. I’d probably find a job as an assistant coach at some small college. Wouldn’t be buying too many dinners in Italian bistros then. Or driving a car that I need to watch the speedometer on.”
“Keep watching that speedometer, please. But not if I’m ever riding in the passenger seat. I like a little excitement too.”
“Good to see you again, Sandra.”
“You too.”
She kissed him, more warmly than she had when she arrived. He watched her walk a few steps down the sidewalk. She stopped, then turned her head. “Don’t ask me anything about this,” she said, “because I don’t know anything else. I think Devereaux was one of Angela Finley’s fleeting boyfriends.”
He stared at her as she resumed walking the half-block toward her car. Most of him was thinking about what she had just said. Part of him was watching the way she walked and wishing he could see it more often. Then he watched the taillights of her car as she drove off into the night traffic.
8
FINLEY WORKED THE TIRE-MOUNTING MACHINE, HELPING the last of the fall stragglers get ready for winter.
He concentrated on the task. It helped him keep from being bored. Paying close attention also helped keep him from getting hurt. The civilians around Barnsdale would probably be surprised at how close their jobs were to being as dangerous as serving in the army. The army trained people to deal with inherently dangerous situations. It had developed ways for them to stay as safe as possible.
He knew veterans with prosthetic arms and legs, others with drinking problems and the weaknesses left by run-of-the-mill injuries like torn ligaments. He also knew plenty of people around Barnsdale with missing fingers. Others had diseases caused by too much food, too much drink, too much stress, and too much sitting in bars or in front of the TV. You could learn to drink in the army too, but not as part of the daily erosion of wits that civilians seemed to prefer. Anyway, he had already known the main useful trick of drinking before he joined up — at a party, find a wall to lean against and stick there. That was much more effective than trying to keep your balance in the middle of the floor or slouching ever further into a chair.
He wondered what was in the metal box that he had delivered to his sister. But curiosity did not afflict him. He was used to separating different levels of need-to-know. He also tended naturally to mind his own business. He expected that other people would mind theirs.
When he took a break to have a coffee and survey the day’s activity on Railway Avenue, he found himself drifting back to a subject that set him to wondering more than the contents of the metal box — Orion Devereaux.
Finley had never paid much attention to politics. His father and grandfather had taken care of that. They had seemed to regard politics as an offshoot of their furniture business as well as a hobby and a fraternal club.
He got along nicely without it. After coming home from Afghanistan, he began to change his views. Wars were fought by soldiers but started by politicians. He decided that many of Afghanistan’s problems resulted from too much politics. Factions abounded. So did the opportunistic or dogmatic men who saw any organized group as a lever for pursuing their own ambition or wealth. He was used to that kind of behaviour back home. In Afghanistan, the normal crude appetites were made worse by an insidious layer of looniness — a need to control other people’s behaviour. When he came home to Barnsdale, he still stayed away from the local party organizations.
Then Devereaux appeared. He had a personality that attracted crowds. Finley saw that as a reason to be suspicious. He had nevertheless seen some appeal in what Devereaux was saying and doing. Devereaux wanted to make the government do more and dither less. He talked about ethics and morality. He wanted to stop the slide toward slow and ineffective justice, but he wanted to protect individual rights; too many laws were being passed giving police and the government the right to collect fines and put people in jail even before they were convicted of anything. He wanted the government to pay its way without borrowing money — Finley was trying to keep his business operating on the same basis.
Devereaux also had a way of suggesting he was not completely wrapped up in the usual game-playing that made politicians pretend they were the most serious folks in town. He happily talked about his party, the Western Wildcat Party. The name was a nice play on words. It reflected an independent spirit, scrappiness, and the legacy of the early oilpatch pioneers who had drilled unexplored ground in hopes of striking a big find.
Finley couldn’t bring himself to give money or to work on campaigns. But he was in the crowd at the Wildcat headquarters on Railway Avenue when Devereaux won the spring by-election and replaced Turlock as the local member of the legislature.
Finley recalled the atmosphere. It was a rented storefront. The furniture had been cleared away. A board had been set up near the back wall to
display the polling station results. A stuffed lynx that appeared to have died of mange stood in the corner doing its best to look like it was snarling. About forty people were packed into the room, nearly all of them men. Their faces had a feverish glow and their shining eyes were riveted on Devereaux as he delivered his victory speech.
He began by telling the crowd, “I think we all sense the presence of God here tonight.”
Finley thought it was more like the presence of faith looking for something to believe in, like lightning looking for a tall tree. He saw glassy eyes. He heard no sound other than Devereaux’s voice proclaiming a new era. Then he heard Devereaux say he wouldn’t mind if news of his upset by-election win made the premier have a stroke. “It would be a stroke of good fortune for the province,” he said. The crowd laughed, some taking a second or two longer than others to catch the joke.
Finley didn’t laugh. He thought about where the scale might tilt when the bullshit was balanced against the good things he hoped Devereaux might accomplish. Then he went home.
He talked to his sister the next day. She was more skeptical about Devereaux’s potential. She said he was attractive but not to be trusted. He asked how she came to that conclusion and she replied, “When I met him in university he never told an obvious lie, but he left me feeling that he was not always telling the truth. He wanted too much to have people think he was telling the truth. He hasn’t changed.”
That had been half a year earlier. Now Finley was more certain of what his sister had sensed and tried to express. He still liked remembering the stuffed lynx. You didn’t have to trust a devious and short-tempered cat to admire its survival skills.
He went back to work. That weekend, he talked his sister into going to a public meeting that Devereaux had set up in the small park down the block from his office. It was the most entertainment either of them was likely to see in Barnsdale all month.
A few dozen people showed up, stamping their feet to shake the snow off the tops of their shoes and breathing plumes of white vapour into the chill air. Devereaux walked rapidly down the sidewalk toward the other side of the crowd, shaking a few hands along the way. He climbed onto a makeshift platform, thanked them for coming, and launched quickly into a review of what he had seen and heard in the legislature over the last few weeks. He talked rapidly. His dark, wavy hair flopped over his left eye and he pushed it back now and then.
Finley lost interest. He half-listened to Devereaux’s inventive sarcasm and flaming denunciations. It was taking him some time to wind the talk to a rousing end. Angela didn’t seem to mind.
He looked around the crowd, saw who was wearing a scarf and who wasn’t, counted the number of men he could remember from the victory speech the night of the by-election, classified the converted and the merely interested. A dirty half-ton cruising slowly down Railway Avenue caught his eye. He followed it as it approached and saw the Rat Brothers inside — Mournful Rat and Busy Rat, more formally called Kenny and Lenny Carswell. They shared pointed features and patchy pencil moustaches. Kenny always looked sad and confused, apparently never having come to terms with the foibles of the men and women who shared the earth with him. Lenny had a ragged goatee as well as a moustache. He was always looking at people inquisitively and giving them a smile that looked more like a smirk, as if to show he was wise to the ways of other people and more amused than disappointed.
Like most of the people who grew up in Barnsdale, Finley had known them in their youth as dope smokers and rumoured small-time burglars. Now the brothers dealt more dope than they smoked. They were thought to run a grow-op somewhere west of town. There were also rumours about the origins of the vehicles that could always be found in various states of disassembly in their yard or in their farmyard shop, but the police had not caught them at anything — or ever laid charges against them that stuck. Kenny was driving and staring disconsolately down Railway Avenue. Lenny was looking at Devereaux.
Trying to figure out what had brought the Rat Brothers to town wasn’t worth the effort. It was bound to be secret and to involve money. Still, Finley decided the drive-by was worth remembering.
He turned back to the show and saw Devereaux looking in his direction. But Deveraux’s gaze seemed to be directed off to the right, fixed on Angela. The look didn’t last.
9
IT WAS AN AVENUE OF RELICS. THE ROAD WAS LINED BY TALL elms. They were the last survivors of the great plague of Dutch elm disease that had destroyed most of their cousins across North America. Many were disfigured. Some of their limbs had interfered with streetlights and electrical lines and been cut off. The remaining bone-like branches spread starkly across the sky, burdened here and there with heavy lumps of twigs that served as nests for crows or magpies.
The house that Asher and Jackson walked towards was a few years older than the trees. It was a remnant of the great 1912 building boom that had grown out of the boosters’ dreams of endless bumper wheat harvests and a vast trading empire stretching to Japan and China.
Many of the other houses on the block had been redecorated or rebuilt. The owners had favoured the addition of colours and enclosed entries. Some had put on artificial stone fronts. All the houses were still recognizably the two-storey, wood-sided emblems of membership in the small group of local businessmen who had been the original owners. They had tried to project optimism and stability as they built a remote city near the border between arable land and frozen northern forest. They did not know then that they were dancing on a cliff edge, enjoying a boom that was about to stall, then be rendered irrelevant by a horrific war.
The house looked older than its neighbours. Asher wondered if that reflected a lack of money or a wish to avoid coming to terms with the present. He climbed the wooden stairs to the veranda, waiting for Jackson to follow in the stiff-legged gait that he would have to endure for several weeks as the price of a new knee. The white paint on the front was in adequate shape but was showing bubbles and cracks. The windows seemed to be the originals; the glass had the waves left by antique manufacturing.
“Must be a bugger to heat,” Asher said.
“Oh, it doubtless is,” Jackson replied. “But the bills probably hurt less when you have no idea what modern insulation can do.”
Asher lifted the knocker on the front door and brought it down twice. A middle-aged Filipino woman in hospital scrubs opened up. “I’m Harry Asher and this is Morley Jackson,” he told her. “We made an arrangement to see Mr. Manchester this morning.”
“Yes. Come in. He’s doing well this morning. He has been looking forward to your visit.” She grinned and added, “I think he’s been rehearsing.”
Asher glanced at Jackson as they walked through the living room — parlour seemed a more apt name — to the dining room. Jackson smiled benevolently.
A mahogany table loomed into view first. At the other end, clad in a blue suit with a white shirt and regimental red and blue tie, sat the Parson. He was concentrating on a teacup as if it held the mystery of why he was still alive and which day he would die. He looked up but did not otherwise move or speak. The nurse-housekeeper showed Asher and Jackson the chairs that the Parson preferred they use, and went to stand beside him.
“Mr. Asher and Mr. Jackson are here. I’ll bring you more tea before I go out for groceries. Would either of you like some?”
Jackson said, “Yes, please, with a little sugar.” Asher disliked tea but thought it would fit the occasion and asked for a cup plain. He hoped the flavour and aroma of the tea would cut into the stuffiness of the atmosphere inside the house. Something was off. It felt winter-dry and smelled like dust faintly moistened with urine. He wondered what kind of shape the Parson was in these days.
He said, “Good morning, Mr. Manchester. Thank you for taking ti
me to see us.”
Manchester looked at Jackson and said, “You seem to be in the pink, Morley. It must be a solid recovery. I know you’d have come to visit before now if you had been well.”
“I try to pretend they need me at the office,” Jackson said. “And I know you were travelling to London and Ottawa and Bermuda, and then I heard you weren’t receiving many visitors here recently. I assumed you were working on your memoirs and wanted minimal disturbance.”
“Yes. London. I was there to receive the medal from the Queen for services rendered to the Commonwealth. It’s an extremely rare honour for a premier, you know. It usually goes to the fellows in Ottawa, the ones who managed to find enough competent help to keep them from stepping into one cowpie after another. That’s the medal there, in the walnut frame.”
Manchester pointed up at the wall beside him. Asher glanced at it but concentrated on taking in his first close-up view of George Manchester — the Parson, the man who had used luck and shrewdness to run the province for a little over a quarter-century. He had cultivated the executives of the companies drawn in by vast pools of oil and gas. He had intimidated opposition parties, mostly by ignoring them. He had issued ceaseless warnings about the dangers of socialism. He had fulfilled his side of the silent bargain with voters by presiding over a steadily growing economy that had seen money ooze across the landscape like oil from a blown-out well, only to lament as he approached retirement that money hadn’t seemed to make people happier or improve their moral capacity.
He had once got Turlock out of a bad scrape that embarrassed the government and could have embarrassed it much more. The escape plan was simple: the Parson ordered a judicial inquiry, and ensured that it was led by a judge the Parson knew was trying to hide his son’s homosexuality.
Asher looked at the great man’s profile, once often described as flinty but now rearranged into soft jowls. The quick eyes were still jewel-like, although now set in rheumy lids and held captive behind thick spectacles. The spectacles were moulded in the same round style that appeared in photographs of him from forty and more years earlier. Asher suspected he was being examined in the corner of the Parson’s field of vision but knew he would undergo that examination one way or another, straight on or sideways, probably both.