Kanata (36 page)

There had been trouble at the last seance, and the unresponsiveness of the spirits was put down to a lack of receptiveness among those present (a lack of faith, really, and certainly King wasn't guilty of this). Or perhaps there had been a mysterious absorption of ectoplasm in the twilight. It happened on occasion, he was told. The spirits unable to communicate, like a static-filled phone line. The session before that had been so electric! From the grave Laurier praised King's loyalty (though he had also stressed that he must redouble his efforts to learn French).

—What is the best course, Wilfrid?

—The best course is to follow history, Mackenzie. History is a like a swift river. You can fight the current, but you rarely win. The Conservatives inherited the Depression, and they have become the Depression. People are afraid. They are looking for certainty.

—How can I give them that?

—You can't. Any certainty you utter may come back to haunt you. We can never be certain. But you can bring them calm.

—Will I be re-elected prime minister?

—You were predestined, answered the voice from beyond, coming from its resting place near the corseted sternum of Etta.

—Wilfrid, will I be loved?

King waited for the reply, patient with the spirits. Five silent minutes, Etta's expressionless face staring upward. Then, a faint sound of something. Trumpets, perhaps, thought King, ever hopeful.

“I'm afraid he's gone, Mr. King,” Etta finally said, her face drained and pale.

Laurier was right; it wasn't a good time to be in power. The last five years had seen locusts and dust storms. The Nile turned to blood, frogs raining down, a darkness over Egypt. A million men without work. In Quebec, priests were charging fifty cents to say Mass. Out west, men were setting forest fires in order to get work putting them out. They were burning the wooden sidewalks on the prairies in winter to stay warm. The barter system had returned; rural doctors delivered babies in exchange for live chickens. And through this torment, men made alcohol out of potatoes in their kitchens. It was the colour of milk and made them blind and they sat on their porches and felt the seasons change against their skin while children spooned oatmeal into their slack mouths. Out in the relief camps, men were busy doing useless work, simply a way of quarantining their misery from the rest of the nation, keeping them hidden. All those men without women, a constant war between flesh and spirit, skirmishes that went on for months. King understood that battle: the eternal struggle.

What politician could save these men?

He would bide his time, consult the dead. His campaign slogan came in a vision, “King or Chaos!” He would bring a judicious stillness to the country, a determined lull. His rhetoric was as flat as a Presbyterian hymn; he roused no one. This was his gift, to keep the country unroused, to keep it from rising up against the impossibility of itself.

2

M
ICHAEL
M
OUNTAIN
H
ORSE,
A
LBERTA,
1935

Michael's first ride was with a truck driver carrying a load of sallow horses, their bony frames visible through the wooden slats. The spring was dwarfed, unwilling to bring much life, and Michael looked at the wreckage of the prairies go by. A grey farmhouse sat abandoned, sandy soil drifting to the windows. There had been reports of topsoil ten thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, a black blizzard that moved a million tons of earth across the continent, the last grains taken out to sea.

The driver talked about women the whole trip. “Thing about women is, they like a man with the gift of the gab,” he
said. “I got regular work, and I got the gift, and that makes me Rudolph Valentino.”

Michael looked at him, maybe sixty, a short man with an honest homely face and small hands that gripped the large wheel like a child's. “What they got, most of them, is loneliness. Got it like the Spanish flu. Some of them have husbands. That makes them twice as lonely. You know why?”

Michael stared at the brown fields. Unhelpful clouds scudded east, dust swirling in the dry wind. “Why?”

“Their husbands are in the relief camps or on the railway. They're gone and there's a hole to fill. They need someone to come along, tell them they're swell, show them you know what they feel.”

“And what do they feel?” Michael asked.

“Alone, mister. Every day is hard and there ain't any relief.”

“You're relief.”

“That's it. They're sorry to see me go. I get in my truck, they go back to their kitchens and cry in their aprons. Some of those gals, they learned some tricks somewhere. Take me all day and a chalkboard to explain.”

Michael had heard versions of this story from dozens of men. The whole world was filled with lonely housewives, all of them panting and inventive, and judging by the storytellers, not too choosy. How was it that Michael never encountered them?

“Good-looking boy like you. You don't have work, don't have a girl. Some times we live in.”

“If I had a girl, I wouldn't tell you,” Michael said.

“You'd be smart,” the man said, laughing. “They get tired of good looks. It's a scientific fact. Me, I make an impression.”

Michael stared at the hair growing out of the truck driver's ears, his erratically shaven face, grey skin drooping at his jaw. He thought about Marion. Love is a flame, they say. Love is a woman with a gun. Love, you murdered my heart.

The truck stopped outside of Gleichen to let Michael out, the driver implying with a broad wink that he had a romantic liaison to attend to. Michael walked along the road in the spring heat. A family slowly passed him, their small house on wheels, being pulled by four draught horses, the caravan moving only slightly faster than Michael on foot. Michael guessed from their clothes that they were Ukrainian. A girl, maybe twelve, stared at him from the side window for fifteen minutes. Michael waved to her but she didn't wave back. Another team pulled a few pieces of farm equipment and Michael supposed they were heading north, to where the drought hadn't caught hold, though the land was unbroken and less arable there.

Michael walked until ten that night, the red glow faint behind him, and then lay down in a copse of elm trees that were half a mile off the road and slept. In the morning he ate the last of the bread he had taken with him and hesitantly drank from a slow, small stream, the water tasting faintly of wood. He walked until noon and then stopped at a gas station. A man pulled up in a Model T that was so covered in grasshoppers it looked like a living thing. The man offered Michael a dollar if he'd clean off the hoppers, and he spent an hour with a rag and a bucket of kerosene before he got them all.

M
ichael walked for three days, sleeping outside and occasionally taking a fish from a stream with the line he had. Outside Brooks he set his bedroll down beside a rusted truck that sat in a field and slept. When he woke up, the sun was a muted glow over the flat horizon. He walked east until late afternoon and then approached a farm that was a half mile off the road. The white paint had almost completely faded and there was a stain on the west wall the colour of tobacco where grasshoppers had congregated and left their sticky juice.

The soil outside the farmhouse was patchy and eroded but it wasn't buried in sand like some places Michael had seen. As he got closer he saw a field behind the house that was a lush green. It seemed like a mirage. He hadn't seen anything like it on the prairies. It was on a slight downward slope behind the house and barn, hidden from the road, hoarded.

Michael walked up to it and felt something like awe. When he stooped down to examine the miraculous crop, he saw that it was Russian thistle, a weed, an extraordinary field of useless green.

“Come to see the miracle, mister?”

Michael turned to see a woman who looked to be about forty but was probably closer to thirty. The Depression scoured faces. Her skin was raw, as if scrubbed with a stiff brush, and she had a man's hands. She was pretty though, or at least capable of prettiness. So many faces were occupied with more pressing wants. Her eyes were a pale blue.

“I was wondering what could grow like this.”

“There's the devil's trick for you. Green as paradise and useless as sin.”

“I'm also wondering if you have any work,” Michael said.

She looked at him, assessing—he wasn't the first to stop by—then looked past him to the barn and the slouching fence. “I got lots of work, mister,” she said. “What I don't have is money to pay you for it.” She gave him another hard look. “I can feed you,” she said simply.

Together they stared out to the property. “Tools are in the barn,” she said. “That might be as good a place as any to start.”

Michael retrieved the tools and laid them out on a piece of stiff canvas. There were some grey timbers outside the barn and a few pieces of odd-sized wood inside. He spent three hours patching the barn where the boards had rotted through, straightening bent rusty nails on a stone and reusing them. As the sky darkened into heavy blue, clouds collecting in the west, the woman came out with a bowl of thin stew and some bread and introduced herself as Hannah. Her husband had gone off looking for work and maybe he'd found it or maybe he'd found something else. He'd been gone six months, she said.

After he ate, Michael took his bedroll to the barn. In the morning Hannah gave him some tasteless porridge in a shallow bowl. The heavy clouds from last night had come to nothing. The house was plain inside, with a few photographs on a small varnished table that had a tissue of lace on it. There was a photograph of a balding, unsmiling man who Michael assumed was her husband. There was a piano, and when Michael asked if she played, she said no.

H
e worked for three weeks, repairing what he could, working the garden, spreading poison for the hoppers. In the evenings they sat on the sofa in the parlour and one
evening she undid his shirt buttons and pulled her dress over her head. Her breasts were heavy and her skin was white and milky and shone almost. They made love on the sofa and afterwards she got up and walked naked over to the piano and sat down and played “Flying Down to Rio,” singing the words in a sweet tenor. Michael asked for another song.

“You just get the one,” she said, smiling.

There was a knock at the door and for a moment Michael thought it might be her mirthless husband, though he realized it would be odd for a man to knock on his own door. He scrambled into his clothes and Hannah slipped on her dress and answered the door. It was still light, and in the doorway were two boys, maybe ten and six, obviously brothers. They each had the same homemade haircut, and each one carried a pail filled with dead gophers.

“They're a nickel apiece,” the older boy said, the smaller one just staring ahead. Both their faces had the dark cast that came with strong winds blowing dirt into their pores and a monthly bath.

“A nickel,” Hannah said.

“Yes ma'am, killed fresh today.”

Michael wondered how far the boys had walked. The nearest farm was two miles away, but they would have come farther than that. Michael felt a light breeze trying to move the dead air.

“Good for stewing,” the boy said. “Or frying. You can fry them up.”

Hannah looked at the two boys and said, “Give me one pailful.”

“I can let you have a better price on the second pail,” the boy said, not relishing carrying them all the way back home.

“Let me see how this first one works,” Hannah said. She went into the kitchen and came back with a tiny purse, counting out forty-five cents for nine gophers.

The boy thanked her and he and his brother walked off down the road.

Hannah cut up the gophers and rolled them in flour with some salt and pepper and heated the skillet. She served them with some bread and they sat down. From the radio came the folksy tone of Bible Bill Aberhart, a preacher who was running for premier. “So now, radio friends,” Aberhart said, “let us sit close to the radio and get a little more friendly with each other.” He paused to let everyone pull their chairs closer. “You remain in the Depression because of a shortage of purchasing power imposed by the banking system. This is a wealthy province, no question, yet you don't have access to that wealth. I am challenging you today, then, to do two things.
First
, to commit yourself to the God of Heaven.
Second
, ask God to maintain the prices of grain and livestock this year. Let us ask
Him
to help make our religion practical.”

Michael had seen Aberhart preach once. The founder of the Prophetic Bible Institute was a stout bald man with large liver-coloured lips, an unlikely-looking radical. His plan to pull everyone out of the Depression was to print money, a childish, magical solution. But who didn't love magic? Especially in these times.

“That holy roller is going to get himself elected,” Hannah said. “People get desperate enough, they'll believe anything. I hope he prints some money for me.” She stared at her plate. “My God this gopher is awful.”