The Governor of the Northern Province (13 page)

Meanwhile, Hopewell turned out to be more interested than he'd planned for. Initially, he'd accepted the invite to dinner with hopes of little more than a non-microwaveable meal and perhaps some no-strings rebound scoring. Sex and casseroles, these were his hungers, given his current situation as a new teacher in a nothing school in a nowhere town northwest of the capital. He had applied for a transfer outside of the Ottawa–Carleton board because he needed distance from a former live-in colleague who had recently dumped him for, as she put it, “forcing me to wait through five years of your shit in case someday I find a diamond in that coal pile.” Because they were both gym teachers, this meant many things lost. Twenty-five-cent wing and trivia nights, midnight coed hockey, annual road trips to see the Bills play, and other personally loved, professionally enriching pursuits had grown unworkable. So, having had little of either in the months since his transfer, sex and casseroles were the thing.

Extending his post-prandial exercise at the Thickson place, Rick had climbed up into the barn after Jennifer, allowing himself a view that led to a quick calculation of her presumptive merits, though this was merely the topographical confirmation of what his squash-happy hand had already intimated at lower rungs. There was a lot, space-wise, to work with here. Her uniform silence, before small-talky questions and casual feel-ups and other such magnetic punning and probing, was received as an openness to more intensive business. But Rick could tell she was a little nervous, sitting in the straw beside him and twirling her hair like a little girl, so he prepared for a soft landing and took an oblique approach.

“I think our little global villagers are really hitting it off, eh?” he opened, pointing out the loft window in the general direction of Bokarie and Trinh. Those two had ventured into the cornstalks when Rick broke Jennifer away from the pack and asked her to come see the sunset from up in the barn loft.

“Doesn't surprise me, you know, those two getting along so naturally. Both living here and being from away—she's from the east end of Toronto, originally, and he's from, well, I never caught which one—plus she does ESL, as you can tell, and also”—softening his voice to sensitive potential husband tone—“you know, she's done courses in special ed, and, well, given what your dad said about Bokarie and from what I can tell, I thought that would be a bonus in their getting together.”

She was staring, mutely, so he changed tactics.

“Well, you're acting the shy type, but that's not what I hear from your old man. He says you can talk up a storm about politics, which is fine by me, I lived in Ottawa for years. A little loosen on your lips, maybe?”

He brought out one of his hammered steel flasks, the fifth he'd been given the previous summer for having served as groomsman. This streak, which showed no sign of abatement, had in part led to the live-in colleague's
rock or walk
ultimatum and the subsequent breakup. Jennifer immediately grabbed after the rum, which Rick took as a sign that this tractor just needed a little oil to get its gears working.

“Ottawa? You've lived in Ottawa? You know Ottawa?” Jennifer asked this with hot wonder, a little studied, but most immediately brought about by the scorch she'd just sent down her throat with a swig at his flask. But her stomach started gurgling and popping, not so much from the swig as from the suddenly potentially marriageable prospect sitting beside her in the barn, who had just taken the place of the lumpy grabby jackass that her dad had brought to dinner. Jennifer wasn't so resistant to the trajectory laid out before her, all of a sudden. If this man could give her a little entree to Ottawa and, after the vows and the Legion reception and a Thousand Islands bed-and-breakfast honeymoon, if he would take over the farm while she found rooms in the capital and they together oversaw the family's and nation's business, wasn't this both a perfect compromise between Gus's wants and Jennifer's plans and a more reasonable outcome than her drowned and out-of-Africa approach?

But she forgot. He was a gym teacher.

“Yeah, I lived in Ottawa a few years. But I didn't really get it, the whole politics thing. I tried to follow for a while, but the Hill and, well, the entire city, Ottawa, it's about as interesting as licking a phonebook. And that explains why I moved out here, you know, to be with the good people of the country, and maybe, I don't know, you know, to settle down or something.” He leaned closer, her face distending in the dusk-light reflection of his wraparound sunglasses.

Having gone some months in monkish isolation, being tummy happy with a mummy-made meal, liking the idea of becoming a gentleman farmer and more so the opportunity to spite his ex with a wedding announcement only a few months after she had dumped him, Rick was mostly serious in his implied proposal. He was looking for no commitments or head games, just some country matter; but if he didn't bother double-bagging and she got pregnant enough, why not?

And though Jennifer knew better, she was, for the moment, considering it herself. Because while she could tell the man was plainly retarded when it came to matters political, he was nice enough looking and clearly had hands for her—which was virtually unprecedented, Jennifer's prior physical experience being limited to games of football Kennedy-style with uncles and cousins when she was just a little too old to present as nose tackle. But also, maybe this man was the better choice. Her chest and stomach heaved a little when she imagined abandoning her design on Ottawa. There was sadness at this, but also relief, exhaustion, ending.

Because Jennifer had been going at it since losing Graduating Class President by acclamation in high school, and she'd thumbed through enough of the encyclopedias and the LBJ book to know that politics never stops, politicians can never stop or else the gills get stuffed up and the lampreys attack and the carcass sinks to an indifferent end. So why not just accept her notch in the Middle Canadian grain, why not take this Rick onto her here and now and keep at it for a few minutes and months and go back to her HR job and gain what acclaim and dignity she could by showing off a new champagne diamond and then register for garden gnomes and push one out a few months after the I do's and then—what? A life of looking forward to casual-wear Fridays at the office and measuring out morning and evening medicines for her parents and waiting for the weekly call from a daughter of her own who was trying to remember how many cups of peas it was for the tuna casserole.

Her lips opened.

V.

After explaining his no-strings rules for dating colleagues and then finding himself a fresh pair of underwear, Rick went to his laundry basket to get Trinh a T-shirt. They started trading stories of what had happened on their respective mini-dates at the Thickson place, the frustrations of which led them to decide on a nightcap at Rick's apartment. After some subtle-like wordplay in the kitchenette, a tour of old hockey trophies in the living room, a little teasing and tickling before a montage of oh so cute pictures of the bachelor as baby, boy and young man carbuncular, and then, climactically, a chin-up demonstration on an iron bar wedged across the bathroom door, it had been a straight shot to the bedroom. And now the couple shared their most immediately available secrets in the body-sapped after-burn of their mushed lovemaking, in hopes of investing the explorations of the previous few minutes with some significance beyond the groans and short shocked cries.

Trinh was especially up for this, having wiped away the tears and redness with as much dignity as allowed by the gulch spot where she lay on Rick's aged futon. Her story from the dinner was comparatively mild: She'd walked the African around the corn and asked him about his homeland. His quick answers were suggestive of a greater cognitive capacity than she'd originally assumed, but he wasn't for her, in the end, being just a little too skinny and smiley. Anyway, she was looking for a manly man. Marvelling at her words, she felt womanly herself, fuller in the hips than she was, someone her mother would refuse to recognize as virginal daughter and her father would disown for no longer being one.

Rick had hip-buckled at the implied compliment and then agreed, explaining that he knew Jennifer wasn't for him either because, after just one little swig from the bottle, she'd thrown up all of her casserole dinner beside them when they were talking up in the barn loft. For all her size, he reflected, she was just a little girl and couldn't hold her drink. To turn this chit-chat more immediately productive, Rick further reasoned that Jennifer had gotten sick because of how nervous she was to be so close to, you know, a manly man, especially one who was treating her like a real woman.

Here he started pressing and moving in again, the conversation-making recharge complete. Trinh flashed a wrinkled smile, feeling a little lost, her eyes tearing up once more as she winced and took stock, winced and took stock, winced and took stock of what she'd done. It was so great and courajust and they could make the necessary wedding plans in the morning and, if necessary, discuss baby names on their second date.

VI.

Even from the back of the funeral home's main showroom, where Jennifer and her parents were standing along with other latecomers and last-minute porch smokers and shrewder types who'd planned to be near the exit so they could beat the traffic on the way out, the noise was fit to bleed ears. Before the Unitarian-licensed deacon finally, delicately stepped in to adjust the microphone away from the penultimate speaker's throat, the assembled masses were grimacing their way through the prologue to the eulogy proper. Which was delivered, in a manner of speaking, by the late councillor's dearest friend and former colleague, Blaise Maurier.

Like the rest of the crowd, Jennifer could make nothing of what Maurier was saying, about the man with whom he'd once shared a modestly thriving real estate and mortgage consolidation practice in town. That was before George left the legal profession to take up his civic duty as an alderman and Blaise was felled, partially, by the Big C. Partially, because cancer had eaten away at Blaise's famously honeyed tongue until he had to accept the necessary indignity of an automated voice box that he held to an incision in his throat to speak. In the pack-and-a-half-a-day past, many clients had been soothed by Blaise's mellifluous sounds into agreeing to take on the short-term cost and long-term benefits of higher fixed rates, or to disregard the matter of capital gains because now now now was the time to sell. In time the community had accepted, even come to like, the lawyer's now-monotonous and corrugated sounds; he continued to practise part-time, as per doctor's orders.

But in all his post-operative dealings prior to speaking at his friend's memorial, Blaise had never been in front of a microphone. Holding the voice box directly in front of it had the unanticipated effect of garbling and reverberating and chainsawing his considerate words into a barbarously electrified yawp. His mournful reflections were lost on the crimping faces before him, though he never knew this. He had started with the universal opening questions of small-town oratory:
Can you all hear me okay? How about at the back?
These were answered with a silence that he took as ready assent.

Her frontal lobe ground down as much as everyone else's by Blaise's speech, Jennifer was nonetheless impressed. Faye had been smart in arranging the order of speakers this way, softening the crowd up like this by force-feeding them the courageous, violently amplified words of the cancer-stricken as a prelude to her own. Jennifer watched how smartly Faye took to the podium at Blaise's buzzing conclusion, how she embraced the speaker and swivelled him back to his seat. How, fully in control of the stage, she then looked up to her audience and readied to end the evening's proceedings. To start the campaign.

The crowd, Jennifer could sense, was keen for this. They wanted to hear from Faye as a respite from Blaise's metalled tonguing, and also because when she was done they could get to the basement reception hall for the sandwiches and pastries and coffee that, the deceased having passed while in office, the Incorporated Town itself had put up for, according to rumours circulating through both of the funeral home's bathrooms. This meant more than the fridge-hard ham rolls and jam-glop Danish offered at plebeian wakes. Jennifer could also feel something more in the hungry crowd, for whom this alderman's passing was an event about as close as they had come to experiencing, from near at hand, one of those fancy celebrity funerals that go on these days, for popes and former sitcom stars and such. The Little Caitlin Event, Jennifer stoically accepted, was for the immediate time forgotten, having happened some months earlier. Like the rest of Middle Western Civilization's members, her fellow citizens' memories were not those of elephants, even if they did move and snuffle for stirring words and tearful embraces and other such emotional pornography like palmfuls of peanuts.

Having checked the program to see what she had missed in addition to the receiving line by coming late to the service, Jennifer knew that George Gallagher's funeral was a properly ecumenical affair. Hymns were selected in equal number from the Wesley brothers and Andrew Lloyd Webber. At one sobbing rise in the service, the Gallagher daughters had together read aloud their personalized version of “Footprints” so as to thank their father now in heaven for having carried them through the hard times. And just before Blaise's speech there had been a slow-fade slideshow montage of Gallagher family imagery, set to a medley of Mendelssohn and
Les Miz
arrangements and projected onto a screen temporarily, respectfully, set up in front of the casket. The funeral home's willingness to grant this request explained the location of the memorial service; no church in town, not even the low Anglican, would agree to audiovisuals in spite of the unprecedented numbers such a prominent passing would have attracted to the pews.

Now it fell to Faye to bring the evening to the right climax. As she readied to speak, Jennifer leaned in, waiting to see how Faye would use the black-draped podium to her advantage at the coming polls. No longer expressly studying, as she once did, her former mentor at work, but now hoping that Faye would go long enough for Jennifer's first rebuttal to take to windshield.