Kanata (11 page)

His son John had died a month before Emma, and perhaps he'd never been properly mourned. He hadn't spoken to his son Samuel in six years. Thompson had felt the boy's resentment building and hoped his son was merely going through a passage, would emerge a man, an equal, that their relationship would resume. Samuel would be silent for days, and then yell accusations at his father.

And of course Tristan was gone. The child he carried in his heart, never glimpsed, still perfect, the offspring of his only experience outside Charlotte. He would be forty-two now. Perhaps he had his own family, children, grandchildren even. Sometimes Thompson found himself staring into the faces of men Tristan's age on the streets of Montreal. His son could be anywhere, could be anyone. Occasionally he'd see a man with a dark face and an intense look, and Thompson wondered if this was indeed his son. Once, he stared so intently the man walked up and inquired if he was well. Thompson stared into the man's eyes, looked at his dark hair; there may be native blood, he thought. He wanted to
ask him, but how to phrase it? Are you my son? Thompson couldn't manage a word, and the man simply walked away. Tristan was a ghost.

His money was gone too, invested in his children's unsuccessful schemes, and in his own ill-fated plan to supply the British army with firewood. He had left the employ of the North West Company with a share of the profits, not rich by any means, but comfortable. All of it was gone now. Arrowsmith, the British publisher, which had reprinted his map without his knowledge, had finally compensated him: 150 pounds for a life's work, and that too was gone. He had lobbied the British government for a modest pension, but his request was denied. He received the letter last week.
After diligent investigation, it is our view
… He hadn't shown it to Charlotte. He also hadn't told her about Washington Irving, the American writer who had offered to buy his journals and turn them into a novel. The idea that his work would be reduced to entertainment filled him with despair and he turned Irving down, even though he and Charlotte were living in penury.

Thompson had spent his life gathering: information, knowledge, miles, a family, and now each year brought fresh loss. He had lost four children, his money, and he was losing sight in his remaining eye. He might lose the use of his leg. On winter mornings, it felt as if it were a wooden crutch, inanimate, useful but limited, not really part of him. He had lost most of his friends, though perhaps
friends
was too grand a word for people you had spent a few months with more than two decades before.

He thought of Welland, drowned, a big man who thrashed in the Saskatchewan River like a harpooned whale must thrash. He was gone before they could reach him. He thought
of MacKay often. They had travelled together through thousands of miles. He missed his cheer, his Orkney doubt, his companionship. He had married finally and settled at Fort Augustus, and then took a fever and slipped away, gone.

The sun was low in a morning sky smudged with winter clouds. People in dark clothes moved gingerly through the snow. Thompson was dressed in his best clothes, which were musty and mended and long out of fashion and could no longer mask his poverty. His appointment wasn't until nine, but he had left at six to avoid lying to Charlotte, and he walked the streets of Montreal for three hours.

The sheer boredom of clerking is what had driven him toward exploration. He mulled this irony as he finally trudged to the Hudson's Bay offices and was directed to the ill-lit office of a young man named Pritchett whose job it was to hire clerks. Companies needed an endless army of clerks. They got bored or left for more lucrative employment, or they drank or stole goods or met with misadventure. It was a full-time job replacing them.

“You are seventy years of age, sir?” Pritchett said, surveying Thompson's face and worn clothes, assessing his lifespan, his intelligence, his desperation. “It's not an age when most men seek employment.”

“Most men are dead at seventy,” Thompson said.

“Yes. Do you have any experience clerking, sir?”

“I worked as a clerk for the Hudson's Bay Company. It was some time ago.”

“When, precisely.”

“Seventeen hundred eighty-four.”

“I see. Much has changed, sir.”

Yes
, thought Thompson.
The Hudson's Bay Company has been roused from its torpor by competition from the North West Company. A world has been discovered and mapped. And I am one of those who discovered it. I am the one who mapped it. In any event, what could have changed? Was there a new method of counting? Were there new numbers, new pens, new black notebooks to keep records in?
Pritchett's office was filled with dark folders. His desk was dark oak and there was a faint smell of something like embalming fluid.

“I invented the North West,” Thompson said, surprising himself.

“Indeed.” Pritchett made a note in his black book. “I'm afraid, Mr. Thompson, that your services won't be required by the Hudson's Bay Company.”

Thompson left the man's office. He wouldn't tell Charlotte of this new humiliation, though perhaps the job itself would have been more humiliating. He had once shared everything with her, but as his life veered into decline, he doled out his failure in small doses. He was protecting her, he thought. Perhaps he was protecting himself. She was sixteen years younger, a fact that had never been more glaring. She had borne their poverty without complaint. She would love him regardless of their circumstances, regardless of his occupation, or his infirmities, which were worsening. But these failures were adding up, and would soon present a terrible sum. He didn't want her to be faced with doubt. What was love? What could it be reduced to? Habit, certainly. The city was filled with marriages that were simply legal partnerships. Some of these men had had other wives in the country, and they had separated those two parts of themselves with some success. In the North West, there had been passion and lust, the warm scent of savagery. What man hasn't smelled it somewhere and embraced it as kin? But they moved back to the city, back to perfumed corsets, separate bedrooms, and a polite touch.

T
he light never quite arrived. One of those days that is held in abatement, a lengthy prelude to something that doesn't come. He recalled showing the constellations to Samuel when he was a boy, locating the pole star for him and showing him how to calculate their position. But the heavens were of no interest to Samuel; he saw only its emptiness, not its potential. There was no story up there for him. Surveying wasn't romantic work, but it was honest and it was outside, though neither of these advantages appealed to his son. Standing in an autumn rain, wet and shaking with cold, his face pale, his eyes hard and resentful, Samuel had yelled, “This is your world, not mine.” The cry of most sons. Thompson supposed he was right. Samuel saw his father trudging other people's land, marking off the parameters of their wealth, a servant.

Thompson wondered if his son was still alive. There was a period when Samuel appeared in fevered dreams, dead on the prairie, stretched under the western sun, birds tugging at the wounds on his thin body. Thompson would wake up and convince himself that Samuel was simply a young man looking for a place in the world, like thousands of other young men, like Thompson himself, and that one day he would walk through the door, returned from the Orient with pockets filled with diamonds.

He remembered John sitting in the canoe at the age of four, seated on the blankets, watching the wilderness quietly go by, looking for dragons, clutching his father's leg instinctively. Save me from this savage world. But Thompson hadn't managed to do that. What father had? He hadn't saved John or Samuel or Tristan or Emma. Children go out into the world equipped with curiosity and naïveté and rage, and then seek a place where these things are welcome.

And now Henry was gone.

Henry was thirty-one, and the melancholy that Thompson had glimpsed in him when he was a child had fully flowered. It was a black mood that held no violence, unlike his brother.

Henry was a mapmaker. He had followed his father into a dying art. Ungifted, melancholy, and without work. When Thompson went to his rooms after hearing that he was missing, he was confronted by Henry's wife, Barbara, who was pregnant with their first child. She stood weeping, and she had a look that was both grateful and accusatory, suggesting that Thompson's blood was weak, and that she feared the same fate for their unborn child.

Thompson began looking for him in St. Charles, stopping in at shops and alehouses, asking after him. He walked for six hours in a meticulous grid, his leg stiffening. The winter light was fading, the deepening of afternoon. He had walked and paddled more than fifty thousand miles in the wilderness, and now he was once again an explorer. He turned down an alley streaked with urine. Three men squatted against the brick, sharing a cloudy bottle.

“Do you know Henry Thompson?” he asked them.

The men stared up at him, their eyes rheumy and empty. The question hung there and Thompson moved along the alley. A woman was splayed against the brick, her pale, bruised legs exposed. She gave Thompson an awful smile. There was a wooden door near the end of the alley, held on with rope hinges. Thompson opened it and went inside. A dozen men sat drinking out of pewter cups in the dim light. He asked them if they had seen his son. One of the men looked up.

“Henry Thompson?” he asked. “I know a Henry. Young man.”

“He's lost.”

“Lost,” the man echoed dully.

“I intend to find him.”

The man shrugged. Thompson continued looking until after nine, then walked home.

F
or four days, he walked the streets of Montreal, searched makeshift taverns that were hidden away, blighted spaces. In a few of them, Henry was known, but no one had seen him.

On the fourth day, Thompson found Henry in a dismal room in Lachine, sitting on the floor, his head resting at an angle against the stained wallpaper. His eyes were hollow and dark and filled with such despair that Thompson pulled his son's head to his chest and sat down and cradled him for an hour. He held him as he had held him through his sickness at the age of two, when the fever wouldn't break and Thompson had held him because he thought it was the last of him.

2

N
EW
Y
ORK,
1850

New York was the colour of an old blanket. Thompson walked streets that were crowded with children selling chestnuts, heavy old women hawking stained material, and men selling roasted meat, tin plates, knives, hats, and hairless dogs. He couldn't fault this ragged army. He was there to sell as well, to find a buyer for his maps. He had written to Sir Robert Peel, the British prime minister, beseeching him to take the maps; they would be invaluable when negotiating a border with the Americans. Proof of what was there. How could you divide it up if you didn't know what it was?

London had refused him, perhaps America would embrace him. It embraced everyone, whether they wanted embracing
or not. They had just embraced Texas, despite Mexico's protest. The new president, James Polk, favoured westward expansion. He coveted the Oregon Territory, and Thompson had drawn the most detailed map of the area. Perhaps Polk himself would buy the map, he thought, to see where he was expanding. On the northern border there was negotiation; on the southern, blood.

He remembered the dinner seven years ago with George Simpson, governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, a Highlander who had closed dozens of unprofitable trading posts and fired half the employees. A man of appetites and efficiency who abandoned his country wives and children when he moved to Montreal. Thompson wanted to sell him his maps of the Oregon Territory, and Simpson said he was interested and invited him to dinner. Simpson's house in Lachine was dark and opulent, and Thompson walked to it through ten miles of rain, clutching his rolled maps that were covered in oiled canvas. The dinner had been sumptuous and Simpson told him stories of his travels, throwing his head back to laugh at every absurdity. A Highlander in all things, he saw no point in paying Thompson for his maps. Those rivers and lakes and boundaries would surface elsewhere. Every occupied territory eventually yielded maps; pirated and inaccurate and marred by self-interest, perhaps, but delivered without charge. A miserable walk back to Montreal.

Thompson passed a dense huddle of buildings on Tenth Street and found Coleman in a shop that was five steps down from the sidewalk. He was bent over a desk, a thin, fluttery man who looked up and saw Thompson with his maps under his arm. Neither was buoyed by the other's appearance. Thompson introduced himself and tapped the large canvas roll.

“The maps I wrote of,” he said.

“Yes, yes.” It was clear Coleman didn't recall.

“The North West, the Oregon Territory.”

“You're a mapmaker then.”

“Yes.”