The temperature in Winnipeg dropped to -40 degrees Celsius, which was the same as -40 degrees Fahrenheit, on November 22, 1983. This was a record for the month of November. It was colder in rural Manitoba. Automobile gas lines froze. Block heaters had to be plugged in, but even then, many cars wouldn’t start. Yoyo was horrified. He feared the sub-zero merging of Celsius and Fahrenheit. Imagine! So cold that it didn’t even matter whether you were referring to one or the other! For a while, Yoyo refused to go outside. Inside, he wore a hat. He wondered what would happen if the heating system broke down in his house. He had stepped out two days before it hit -40. At that point, it was -20 and dropping. The cold had bitten his forehead. Yoyo had never suffered from headaches, but the stinging cold gave him one. He longed for the summer and for his country.
Midway through this cold snap, and shortly after Mahatma Grafton passed his probation at The Winnipeg Herald, Manitobans woke up to news of the most bizarre crime story in years.
It happened in the St. Albert-Princeton hockey arena, thirty miles south of Winnipeg, on a Thursday night. St. Albert, a predominantly French-speaking town, was bordered by Princeton, which was mostly English. Each town had its own mayor and city hall and bylaws, but they shared a library and recreation centre. Each town had its own hockey team, but they shared the St. Albert-Princeton arena.
The fight started around 8:30 p.m., peaked five minutes later and faded abruptly when the police arrived. Georges Goyette, who was watching his son’s St. Albert team play Princeton, witnessed the brawl. It started when a sixteen-year-old St. Albert player punched a Princeton player in the face. He hit him again and the Princeton boy fell to the ice. The players on both teams cleared the bench. The results: two broken noses, one concussion, a fractured wrist, a broken ankle, many cuts and much bruising. Nothing serious happened to the original two combatants. But a St. Albert player who had broken one nose and blackened four eyes in the brawl ran into fatal luck as police stormed the arena. When he turned to look at the cops, someone—nobody seemed to know who—clubbed his head. The boy died before he was carried off the ice. His name was Gilles Baril, the son of the town baker.
Some parents joined the fighting, but Goyette hopped over the boards and towed his son off the ice before the brawl had reached that point.
Edward Slade dived into the story. A good one. At last. He called the cops in St. Albert. A constable gave him the basics: one kid killed and six hospitalized. But the constable wouldn’t name the dead boy.
“Can’t you tell me anything about him?”
“He’s dead.”
Slade eased off. He started chatting about violence in hockey. Fighting was getting out of hand these days, wasn’t it?
“Yeah, but you haven’t seen the likes of this before,” the cop said. “You wouldn’t have believed it. Those kids went wild.”
Slade, who was unmarried and childless, said such incidents made him worry about the safety of his own kids.
“You got kids too, eh?” the cop said. “I got three little terrors.”
“I’ve got two,” Slade said. “And we’ve got another on the way. Try living on my salary with kids.”
“Don’t I know it,” the cop said.
“My boys will be hitting the hockey age pretty soon. I worry about what’s going to happen to them in those leagues. I mean, today’s violence, you think we’ll see more of it in the future?”
“Between you and me,” the cop said, “I think we can expect to see more of this. Things could get worse.”
“Even for kids that age?”
“You bet. They’re the worst. They’re animals.”
“How old did you say that boy was? The one who got killed?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, but you didn’t get it from me. Sixteen.”
“Thanks, buddy.”
“Sure. See you.”
“Bye.” Slade scribbled out a possible lead: “‘Bloody brawls in boys’ hockey will skyrocket after yesterday’s brutal slaying of a 16-year-old player in the St. Albert-Princeton arena,’ police predicted yesterday…”
Slade consulted a rural phone book and made several random calls to St. Albert residents. The third person he reached was able to tell him the name and number of the hockey coach. After dialling it, Slade got the coach’s twelve-year-old son. His father was talking to police at the arena. The boy answered all Slade’s questions: the name of the deceased, his address, his parents’ names. But he wasn’t able to provide directions to the victim’s home. Slade asked for the phone number of someone who could direct him there. “Who is calling anyway?” the boy asked.
“This is The Winnipeg Star,” Slade barked. “And it’s urgent. We need someone else’s phone number. Someone who can give us directions.”
“I don’t think I’d better,” the boy said. Slade pushed the boy but it didn’t work. The boy simply hung up. Slade drove to the town. Someone there would direct him.
Ben was flipping through a magazine and chewing a toothpick. Mahatma, who lay on a couch, watched his father. Neither moved when the phone rang at 8:50 p.m. It reminded Mahatma of work. It made him think of hanging around court, taking notes, interviewing crime victims, squeezing information from cops. He wondered, as he let the phone ring, if he would dream of work that night, which he had been doing with increasing frequency. Mahatma hated dreaming of work. The phone finally stopped.
“What kind of foolishness is that, calling at this hour!” Ben said. “Anybody who phones at this time of night has been raised upside down!”
It started ringing again. Mahatma took it.
“It’s Don Betts. I need you to do some overtime. Got a car?”
“No.”
“Then take a cab over here, on the double.”
Mahatma hung up and turned to his father. “Don’t wait up for me.”
Only a few minutes ago, Ben had been planning to go to bed. But now he no longer felt like it. The house didn’t seem right with his son gone. Since Mahatma’s arrival four months ago, Ben hadn’t slept well until the boy got home from work. Ben would stay up and leave the porch light on and be watching by the curtains when Mahatma came home. He would greet his son, lock the doors and then sleep deeply.
Mahatma knew that Slade was onto the story. It was inconceivable that Slade would not be working on this. Slade would expect to clobber him. But Mahatma had no intention of letting himself get scooped. Not this time. This time he was giving it everything. He drove a Herald car straight to the town, knowing that his job would be impossible if Slade got there first. Slade had a reputation for erecting roadblocks for his competitors. When he could, he would cart off a family’s entire photo album so no one else could get it.
Mahatma arrived at the arena seventy-five minutes after the riot ended. Pushing into the crowd, he got the name of the boy who was killed. Then he found a boy with a Princeton
Hawks jacket. Peter Griffiths had been in the penalty box when fighting broke out. “Why were you in the penalty box?”
“I was doing two minutes for frog bustin.’”
“I see,” Mahatma said. “A penalty.”
“I speared a frog. Big deal. Everybody does it. You’re not putting that in the paper, are you?”
“I’m just doing research right now,” Mahatma said. “I don’t know what will go into the paper.”
“If you’re just researching, I guess I can talk to you.”
Griffiths said he had been waiting for his penalty to end when a St. Albert player—Emile Moreau—clobbered an English opponent—Jack Hunter—right in the face. Hunter was so stunned that Moreau was able to hit him again. This took place by the boards, after a whistle, and so close to the penalty box that Griffiths could almost touch the blood on Hunter’s face. Griffiths hopped over the boards and crosschecked Moreau, knocking his helmet off. Moreau fell to his knees. Hunter recovered in time to break Moreau’s nose. He cut him over the right eye with a second punch. And a third.
“Why didn’t you pull Hunter back?” Mahatma asked.
“Because Gilles Gendron from St. Albert hit me when I wasn’t looking,” Griffiths replied. “Then Ernie Cohen took Gendron out. Then a frog knocked down Ernie. I took on that frog. Then everybody got into it.”
The more Mahatma heard, the faster he wrote. Griffiths said the tensions were nothing new. “We’ve always hated them and, I guess, they’ve never been exactly crazy about us.”
“Why do you hate them? Why was that kid killed?”
“Hey, I didn’t do it, I didn’t kill him. You’re not going to put in there that I killed him, are you?”
Friends led Peter Griffiths away. “Hey man,” one said, “don’t talk to that guy. He’s a fucking reporter.”
Mahatma interviewed another player and three parents. The teams apparently fought a lot, but nobody could say why the French and English hated each other. “Why don’t you get along?” Mahatma asked a player.
“We just don’t.”
“And where are all the French people now?”
“They hang out at the community centre. You’re not going to talk to them, are you?”
“Maybe. Where’s the community centre?”
Slade spent half the time Mahatma had spent in the hockey arena, and interviewed half the people Grafton had seen, but still managed to extract vivid quotes. “People say you guys are getting rowdy and that local hockey should be banned for kids your age,” Slade told a few English hockey players. They replied that the fight was the fault of the French, that Gilles Baril deserved what he got, and that English hockey players were banding together in the streets. “What if they came after you in dark alleys?” Slade asked. “Have you thought about that? How will you protect yourselves then?”
“We’ll break their skulls with hockey sticks!”
From this, Slade wrote the lead for one of his many stories: “Teen-aged anglo goons have vowed to prowl St. Albert-Princeton at night, carrying hockey sticks to fight the French…”
Slade asked boys in the arena where the victim’s family lived.
“You wanna go there?” someone answered. “That’s not where the other reporter was going. He was going to the French community centre.”
“What reporter?” Slade asked.
“Black guy.”
“Mahatma Grafton? Shit! Where’d he go?”
“To the community centre. What kind of name is ‘Mahatma Grafton’?”
“Not sure,” Slade said, “but it could be French.”
“You telling me that black guy’s a frog?”
“Could be,” Slade said.
“Get off it! Black guys aren’t French! They’re English!”
“Well, this one’s a bit of everything. See ya.”
“What explains the violence?” Mahatma asked a woman at the French community centre.
“We’ll have to look into that,” she shot back at him. “What do you want from us?”
“Something to help people understand what happened tonight.”
“You’re not interested in our pain,” the woman told Mahatma. “You can’t know our pain if you’re an outsider.” She was accusing him, excluding him, but it was a good quote. He wrote it down. It wasn’t until he had lived in Quebec six years ago that he had been forced to see himself as an anglo. People there were keen to categorize him. He was a man, Canadian, a student, black, but there, in the eyes of those living around him, Mahatma Grafton was an anglais.
“Why can’t anglophones understand your pain?” he asked. “Aren’t English parents suffering today too?”
“When people see an English boy in the streets tomorrow, are they going to say: ‘There’s the one who killed Gilles Baril’? Of course not. But when they see a French boy five minutes later, they will say: ‘There’s the one who started the riot.’” Mahatma wrote that down. “I don’t want that in the paper,” she said. He kept writing. As far as he was concerned, it was too late: she had already spoken. And anyway, what harm could it do her? Now, he simply needed her name. How would he get it? She would refuse, of course, to give it. At that instant, two men swept up to her.
“Louise,” one man said, “I’d like you to meet Pierre Gagnon. Pierre, this is Louise Robitaille, one of our town councillors.”
There. He had her name. Then he had another stroke of luck: he spotted Georges Goyette! “Georges! What are you doing here?”
“My son plays for St. Albert. I came to watch the game.”
“You saw it, then?”
“Yes.”
“Is your son okay?”
“He’s fine. I dragged him off the ice when the fighting began.”
While Mahatma scribbled, Goyette described the fight. “It was tragic. I saw two fathers going at it in the stands. Part of the age-old hatreds around here.”
“By the way, do you know where Gilles Baril’s family lives?”
“You’re not going to bother them?”
“I have to.”
“You have to? Just tell your editors the family was out.”
“This is my job.”
“That’s how you see your job? To invade families in times of shock?” Goyette, for once, wasn’t smiling. The comment didn’t affect Mahatma. He had no time to think about it. He spent half an hour finding the modest bungalow on an icy rural route fifteen miles out of town.
“Qui est là?” The woman didn’t want to open the door.
Mahatma knew that getting her to open it would be the hardest part. He held up a card with his photo. She unhinged the chain and opened the door. “Police, encore?” She urged him in so she could close the door.
“No, Madame, I’m with The Winnipeg Herald,” he replied in French. “I’m awfully sorry to trouble you.”
“With The Winnipeg Herald and you speak French like that! My Lord, you speak well. You speak better than we do. We’re simple folks out here, but we never hurt anybody, either.” She was a thin woman, about five-two. She had grey hair and clear blue, baggy eyes, and she wore a pink nightgown and knit slippers.
“I’m terribly sorry about your son, Madame.”
She hung her head to the side, then looked at him again. “What can you do? The Good Lord needed him.” Mahatma slipped the pad out of his pocket and noted that down. He could picture the quote on the front page.
“I won’t bother you for long. It’s just that…”
“Sit down. My husband and my other son have gone out to take care of everything. It’s hard, staying alone at home when your son has died.” Mahatma got that down too. She asked, “Would you like some tea?”
“You speak a very nice French. Are you from Haiti?”
“No, I was born in Winnipeg.”
“Vraiment? Such good French.”
She walked into the kitchen. Mahatma studied the room. Pictures of the boys playing hockey, playing baseball, at communion, at Christmas. Family pictures. A simple living-room. A rocking chair, a blanket-covered couch, a TV. An ashtray, five times bigger than necessary, and a statue of Christ and, in the corner, a photo album. In his notepad he described these objects, as well as the dim lighting, the simple wallpaper and the thin rug. She brought him tea, milk and sugar. And a slice of pie. “You’re young. I bet you love sugar pie. It was Gilles’ favourite.” Mahatma jotted that down. “So this is for the paper?” she asked. The idea pleased her. “When will it be out?”
“Tomorrow, Madame.”
“Please, call me Gisèle.”
“All right, Gisèle. May I see a picture of Gilles?”
“That is him on the wall.”
Mahatma looked at the sixteen-year-old with a peach fuzz moustache. “Do you have any other photographs of him? We would like to put his picture in the newspaper. Perhaps one with the whole family.”
She reached for the photo album. “You can borrow this album. Just bring it back next week.”
Mahatma placed the album in his briefcase. He asked for Gilles’ full name and the other son’s name, and their ages, and her husband’s name, and her husband’s work. She offered surprising details. “I burnt a pecan pie yesterday; Gilles was furious. He told me if I didn’t watch so much television it wouldn’t have happened. I don’t think he really meant it. Do you? I think he really did love me. I do watch television, that’s true, but I’m not lazy. It’s a lot of work taking care of a husband and two boys. And I drive the school bus in the morning and the afternoon too.”
“Why do you think this happened?” Mahatma asked. “Do you think there’s tension between the English and the French?”
“I don’t know about things like that. Ask my husband.”
“But you, personally? Do you sense the tension?”
“Sometimes. The other day I was shopping in Princeton with a friend, talking to her, you know, in French, and this man passed us and said, ‘In Manitoba we speak English!’ Why would that man tell us that? What would he care what language I was using?”
“Did Gilles have English friends?”
“His best friend was English. And he had an English girlfriend.”
“Had Gilles been in any fights recently?”
“My boy almost never fought. But last week he had some problems with an English boy. It wasn’t about language, though. The English boy was after Gilles’ girl.” Mahatma took that down. The doorbell rang. “You’re a nice man, would you please send them away?” Gisèle asked. “I’m very tired now.”
“Certainly.” Mahatma walked to the door. “Who is it?” he called.
“The Winnipeg Star!”
“Mrs. Baril doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Mahatma said. Two eyes stared through the glass at him.
“Sorry,” Mahatma said cheerfully.
“How’d you get in there?”
“Tell you later.”
Turning back to Gisèle Baril, Mahatma suppressed a grin at the shouts from outside. “Let me in, Grafton!”
“Who was that?” Gisèle asked.
“A reporter.”
“His language is not very Catholic.” The doorbell rang three times. “Who are you?” Gisèle called through the door.
“I’m with The Star,” Edward Slade shouted. “Please let me in, Ma’am. I’m freezing.”
She opened the door. “You’re a reporter too?”
“That’s right, Ma’am,” Slade said.
“Can’t Mr. Grafton tell you about all this later? I feel tired now.”
“I’m afraid that won’t do, Ma’am. If you let him in, you have to let me in too. It’s only fair.”
“Oh dear.”
“I’m awfully chilled, Ma’am. Do you mind if I close the door? You wouldn’t have a sip of something hot, by any chance?”
“Well, if you’re cold, do come in. We have tea and sugar pie.”
She went into the kitchen again. Slade elbowed Mahatma. “Nice try, jerkoff.”
Gisèle returned with tea and pie. Slade got to the point. “If you don’t mind me asking directly, Ma’am, who killed your son, and what do you think should be done about it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, would you say the anglos are a bad lot?”
“Some of them, sure. I mean, as I was telling Mr. Grafton here, my son Gilles was fighting one of them a few days ago, but it had nothing—”
“So they are a bad lot, are they?” Slade scribbled. “And your son was fighting one of ’em, was he? When was that? Last week?”
“Yes, I think it—”
“Fighting an anglo last week,” he said, flipping a page of his notepad. “He get roughed up badly, Ma’am?”
“He came home with a black eye, but he said—”
“They gave him a shiner, did they? I see, I see! Can you spare me a photo, Ma’am?”
Gisèle turned to Mahatma. “Could you give him one from the album?”
“Certainly,” Mahatma said. The door opened. Gisèle’s husband and second son came in.
“Dehors!” the husband shouted.
“What’s he saying?” Slade asked.
“He wants us to leave,” Mahatma said, tugging on his boots. Gisèle began to sob.
Slade approached the father. “Sir, the two of us should have a chat. Man to man. People want to help you through this tragedy, but, to do so, they need to hear from you. The Star can help them hear from you.”
“Sacrez-moi ce tabarnac dehors,” the father shouted to his second son, who, although only fifteen, was bigger than Slade. He pushed the journalist toward the door as Slade continued to protest, “Sir, I have a job to do, and the public is very upset about this and is demanding to know why this happened to your son, and how to prevent it in the—”
Slade found himself flung outside, where Mahatma was buttoning his coat. “My boots,” Slade shouted, pounding on the door. It opened. Two boots sailed out into the snow. Slade ran after them in his socks.
Mahatma had locked his doors and put his key in the ignition when Slade rapped on the window. “The photos,” Slade said, “give me some photos!”
“Can’t hear you!” Mahatma revved his engine.
“You heard me! Turn over those photos. She said we were to split them!”
“Call me later.”
“Bastard!” Puffs of vapour formed and vanished outside Slade’s mouth. “You sneaky bastard!”
Mahatma drove off, leaving Slade gesticulating from behind.
The next day, Mahatma’s story provided pictures of the family, quotes from the mother and a detailed description of the riot. Slade had quotes from the mother, a photo he’d dug out of a school yearbook borrowed from the victim’s school principal, and quotes from English and French hockey players. Murder at Anglo-Franco Battle, read The Winnipeg Star headline. One Killed, Six Wounded in Hockey Riot, read The Herald. The news flashed across the country.
Mahatma didn’t get to bed until five that morning, and had to be up early to attend a press conference given by the Manitoba Amateur Hockey Association. He arrived with bags under his eyes. He felt shame when he saw the headlines and his byline. He hadn’t misquoted anybody, and there were no errors of fact in his story, but the incident seemed repugnant now. His intrusion on Gisèle Baril seemed ugly.
St. Albert—One boy died and another six were hospitalized here last night in a hockey brawl which pitted English players against French opponents and raged for ten minutes until police burst onto the ice.
Gilles Albert Baril, 16, of St. Albert, died immediately when struck by a hockey stick in the back of the head. Manitoba Provincial Police homicide detectives have questioned Baril’s teammates on the St. Albert Lions and players on the opposing Princeton Hawks, but no charges have been laid.
Held in the Manitoba Legislature, the news conference was packed. The Toronto Times, CBC-TV, every local TV and radio station, and newspaper reporters from across the country had crammed into the room. Out-of-town reporters kept stopping Mahatma for questions. The press conference did not go well. Jean-Guy Robert, the hockey association president, condemned the riot. He vowed to do everything possible to prevent such a thing from happening again. He said the league had cancelled the hockey season for boys in the sixteen-to seventeen-year-old division. Journalists demanded to know why English and French players were fighting. “I don’t know. We’ll look into it.”
“Who do you blame for the altercation?”
“I don’t have enough information to say.”
“Did a French player begin the fight by punching an English opponent?”
“We haven’t had a chance to look into that yet.”
“Do you think this fight reflects language tensions in the province?”
“No,” said Robert, biting the hairs under his lower lip into his mouth.
“You deny there are tensions?”
“Boys started fighting. It got out of control. Several were hurt. One was killed. I knew his parents. They—” Robert bit his beard again, then, suddenly, his face collapsed into his hands. This made national TV.
Meanwhile, word spread that an opposition member of the Manitoba Legislature was available for comment. The reporters rushed into an adjacent room.
Facing the scrum of journalists, the politician accused the government of ignoring violence in amateur sport and fomenting language tensions by planning in secret to extend French language services. “This may have been avoided if the government had listened to the people instead of plotting to ram French down our throats.”
Slade continued to chase the story. One day, he cited police sources claiming the killer was one of the few anglos on Baril’s team. The next day, he wrote that a source revealed the killer was an anglo from the other team. On a third day, he penned an article under the headline Mystery Killer Eludes Cops. Slade was interviewed on national television and quoted by reporters across the country. But his wave of popularity subsided. His predictions about retributive violence didn’t materialize. And the people of St. Albert and Princeton began to dislike him.
They grew tired of his interviewing every hockey player in town. They found it offensive that he attended all subsequent games in the arena, hoping to witness fresh violence. Mostly, they resented his depiction of the townspeople as hockey fanatics steeped in language hatred.
And Slade, for his part, grew bored with the story. Nothing was happening. Nobody was arrested, nobody charged. After four days, the story had fallen off the front page. Slade felt he was wasting his time hanging around St. Albert-Princeton, living out of a motel room. Moreover, his stay was growing unpleasant. Somebody slashed two of his tires. Someone else jostled him as he entered the hockey arena. Even the waitress in the café where he took his breakfast grew sullen after he asked her a question, wrote down the answer and asked her name. His editor made him stay put a little longer—“just in case, Slade, you understand, just in case.”
Seven days after the brawl, on the night Edward Slade intended to return to Winnipeg, something did happen in St. Albert. It was what Slade had been waiting for. It happened around midnight, on an icy road eight miles out of town. Slade heard about it on his police radio scanner, which he had been monitoring in his hotel room. He heard the name of the victim: Peter Griffiths. Slade raced to the scene, arriving minutes after ambulance workers had carted away the body.
Peter Griffiths, the sixteen-year-old Princeton Hawks player, had lost control of his car on the highway leading out of town. His vehicle shot over a guard rail and down a ravine. The boy’s body was found in the front seat. His head and chest were crushed. Slade had a way with cops. He had learned, long ago, how to talk like them. Edging down the slope toward the officers, he said, “Hey Sarge, what’s it look like?” He sounded casual. Vaguely interested. Slade had met this cop. They had spoken after the hockey riot.
Standing on the hill in the darkness, with his back to Slade, Sergeant James Hetler grunted, “Some prick forced the kid off the road.”
“The rear left bumper and rear left side of his car are smashed. Paint from another vehicle on them.”
Slade asked, “Homicide?”
“Damn right.”
“You giving this to the press?” the other officer asked Sgt. Hetler.
“No way. Not yet. We’ll just report a highway fatality and release no names until we reach the Griffiths family.”
“Who do we go after?” asked the officer.
“The frogs. The kid knocked the shit out of a few of them in that fight last week.”
Slade memorized every word. He climbed back up the hill. “Gotta make a call.”
Sgt. Hetler grunted. He was still looking over the car.
Slade drove into town. There was only one Griffiths listed in the Princeton telephone directory. Slade drove to the house, saw a police cruiser in the driveway and parked down the street. He waited and watched. The door opened. An officer stepped out and drove away. Slade rang the doorbell three minutes later. “Mr. Griffiths? I’m Slade, from Winnipeg. I was just speaking with Sergeant Hetler.” Bill Griffiths invited Slade in without any questions. Slade asked a few general questions, noting the boy’s age, his hockey background and details on the family. Continuing to write and glancing occasionally at Griffiths’ face, Slade noted the man’s appearance from close up: “His eyes, wrinkled and sleepy, light blue, struggling to grasp the fate of his son,” Slade scribbled. Colour was what he needed, more colour: “Six feet, easily 180, Bill Griffiths says his son was already bigger. ‘Just this evening, he took me in an arm wrestle,’ the man said.”
“Where was he going?” Slade asked.
“He had a girlfriend.”
“Who do you suspect?”
“Some French kid.”
“You sure of that?”
“Who else? Peter hammered half a dozen of ’em in that fight last week. But my son did his fighting on the rink. Off the ice, he was a gentleman.”
Slade took that down, word for word. He rose from his chair, mumbled something about how he might be in touch again, wished the father good luck, expressed his condolences, and opened the front door. “Oh, can you lend me a photo of your son?” Slade said. Bill Griffiths gave him one. Slade thanked the man and left.
A girl in pyjamas ran to her father. “How come you talked to that reporter, Daddy?” said the girl, who had seen Slade all over town. “Everybody hates him.” Walking down the street with friends three days ago, she had been stopped by Slade, who wanted information about the hockey fight. Did they know who had killed Gilles Baril? he asked. He tried to interview her and every one of her friends. They jeered at him and ran off.
Edward Slade incinerated his competition. The Star splashed Peter Griffiths’ picture all over page one. No other paper had a word of the story. Slade outraged police, the Griffiths family and the Princeton community so thoroughly that it was impossible for other journalists to match the story. Nobody would speak to the media.
Mahatma Grafton was taking two extra days off when Slade got his scoop. Mahatma immediately unplugged his phone. He wasn’t getting roped into anything by any editor! He couldn’t stop thinking that he had taken advantage of a woman in shock to get his hockey brawl story. He couldn’t stop thinking of Gisèle Baril offering tea and pie and the photo album. Mahatma had vowed never to interview the family of a dead victim again unless there was a compelling reason to do so.
Nobody was arrested for the murder of Peter Griffiths, or for the slaying of Gilles Baril.
Edward Slade flew to the Caribbean for a vacation.
On a Saturday in late November, the Francophone Association of Manitoba held a demonstration outside the Donald Street office of the Department of Francophone Affairs, a government agency responsible for the rights of French-speaking citizens. Mahatma attended. Reporters from every news outlet in town attended. But only a few hundred demonstrators turned up. They listened to some speeches urging the provincial government to proceed with its plan to recognize the constitutional rights of Franco-Manitobans. Nothing of interest happened and no reporter found anything new to write about.
Then in early December, FAM announced it would stage another demonstration on the following Sunday, again outside the Department of Francophone Affairs. FAM promoted the event vigorously, plastering posters all over the city. It struck out with reporters, who remembered the last demonstration and declined, for the most part, to attend. But FAM pushed ahead anyway. Media or no media, FAM organizers believed they would attract a good crowd this time. Maybe four hundred people. Maybe more.
Mahatma decided to attend. His editors had refused to agree to pay him to work on Sunday, but Mahatma planned to do it anyway. He wanted to hear the people speak, see how they felt; see how many came out. He had a feeling that something was going to happen.
They met in the Renaissance Café on Portage Avenue. Yoyo came to eat and to talk. In that order. He had accepted Helen Savoie’s offer to purchase lunch for two, and he ate unreservedly. He ate minestrone soup, bagels with cream cheese, quiche Lorraine and a side dish of perogies. He drank tea before the soup and coffee after the salad, loading both drinks with cream and sugar. He ate carrot cake for dessert. Throughout it all, he kept up a conversation. “People here in Canada love democracy,” he noted. “They ask the name of my country’s leader, then they look sad when I explain that our leaders are not elected by popular vote. But I have read that not all people vote in elections here, Helen. Is that true?”
Helen leaned back in her chair. “In federal elections, we get a seventy-five percent turnout. In local elections, a lot less.”
“Exactly,” Yoyo said. “So if so many people don’t vote, why do they care about democracy? It’s like religion: you don’t go to church, but you believe in God.” Helen laughed long and loud. “May I ask you a personal question?” Yoyo said. “Why do you have no children?”
“I’ve never really wanted them. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to do it on my own, and there’s no man I’m serious about.”
“Very interesting! I suppose you want no babies because you work? In Africa, we have heard much of North American women who like work more than babies.”
“Plenty of women still like to have babies,” Helen said. “The world won’t fall apart without my contribution.”
“The world needs babies! It needs your babies too! Helen! Marry me! Marry me and have my child!”
“Nice try,” Helen scoffed. She thought he was kidding. When she realized he wasn’t, she told him, “No man tells me how to run my life.” He stared at her, perplexed. “I have to go now,” Helen said. “But do you want to meet next Sunday?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know Polonia Park?”
“Sure.” They agreed to meet there at 9:00 a.m.
It had seemed a perfect day to eat a potato outside. He had the potato carefully wrapped in his pocket, a leftover from a reception for the Ukrainian community. Jake Corbett sometimes went to such receptions, looking for free snacks. Last night he had eaten three sausages on the spot and pocketed the potato for later. Jake didn’t mind eating cold potatoes. They were filling and, he had heard, healthful. He thought it might be nice to eat his potato in a park. His room was damp and smelly, but outside, it was a stunning December day: on this first Sunday of the month warmth was calling out to every Winnipeg resident. Even the papers were talking about it. On Friday, when Winnipeggers were prepared for Arctic winds and snowstorms, the temperature had risen to 12 degrees Cel-sius. On Saturday, it went to 15 degrees—an all-time record. Today it was sunny and going up to 18 degrees. All the snow had melted. Everyone was out in the streets.
Jake took the Main Street bus south to River Avenue. There he got out and, with his right hand balled around the potato in his pocket, walked west to Polonia Park. A young woman wearing a T-shirt and track shorts rode by on a bicycle. Jake smiled, watching her round a corner. The girl on the bike made Jake think of Eva, his barber. Eva was the only woman who had ever touched him. She touched him every month. She worked at a Greek barbershop and she cut Jake’s hair, and she didn’t seem to mind that his face looked like the potato in his pocket. Jake often went to see Eva. Once he had his hair cut twice within seven days. Eva didn’t mind. She didn’t grimace and stay at arm’s length and treat his head roughly, as if it were rotten. Eva was eighteen. She wore safety pins for earrings. Jake was happy about that. He didn’t feel so ugly, going to a young lady who had pins for earrings and her hair up in spikes. So Jake closed his eyes when she cut his hair. He liked it when she shaved the back of his neck. He smiled when she shampooed his hair and rubbed it with a towel. Sometimes, alone at night, he imagined her shampooing his hair and it made him long to see her again. She gave him little shivers when she whisked the hairs off his cheeks and forehead. Eva was a wonderful barber.
Jake entered Polonia Park on the south bank of the Assiniboine River and found a bench free of bird shit. He sat down.
It was like a spring day. He barely even needed his jacket, which held his potato, but he kept it on, feeling the sun against his face and thinking it would be sad to die and never feel the sun again, or have a potato in his pocket, or watch a girl in shorts ride her bicycle in December, or feel Eva’s hands on his scalp.
Walking along Provencher Boulevard with two bananas in his hand, Yoyo wondered if white storekeepers in Canada raised prices for black customers. Whites paid more than blacks in Cameroonian markets; Yoyo wondered if the opposite were true in this country. He was hungry, having eaten little the night before. Heading toward Polonia Park, he could have devoured the bananas in seconds. But in Cameroon, it is uncivil to eat in the street. Though Yoyo had frequently seen Canadians snacking in public, he had his dignity to uphold. He ignored his stomach cramps, walking upright so that no one could detect his pain. Canadians liked to put benches in their parks; there would surely be a bench in Polonia Park. There he would sit and eat his fruit in peace.
Yoyo had never experienced such hunger. Before coming to Canada, he had been told that his billet in St. Boniface would provide him daily with breakfast, lunch and dinner, and that he would require only a small sum of pocket money to meet expenses. Twenty Canadian dollars a week, amounting to $840 for his ten-month stay in the country, had seemed, while he was still in Cameroon, a generous stipend.
Yoyo found himself on Portage Avenue on his first full day in Canada with $840 in his pocket, face to face with signs outside a department store announcing Super Sale, Prices Never Lower and Bargain of the Century. Remembering his expectant relatives, and concerned that he might never encounter such sales again, Yoyo purchased several pairs of shoes and slacks, as well as three sports bags, two soccer balls, two pairs of ladies’ slippers, four transistor radios, two ghetto blasters, six cartons of radio batteries, one Sony Walkman, twelve blank cassettes and three wristwatches, thus spending three-quarters of his cash.
That same afternoon, entering the St. Boniface home where he’d been given a room, he asked about the supper hour.
“Jeune homme,” said his landlady, “I fed you last night from the goodness of my heart, but don’t expect more such favours from me!” Yoyo was baffled. “That’s correct, jeune homme! You will receive a continental breakfast here between the hours of seven and seven-thirty, and lunch at half-past noon, but you are not to have supper here. I have been paid only to provide you with breakfast and lunch, and I shall not be taken advantage of!”
Yoyo nodded and went upstairs. He entered his room in a state of shock, not at the prospect of eating only two meals a day—which was standard fare for many of his countrymen—but at how the woman had spoken to him. He, a guest in her home, subjected to such verbal abuse! The shame! Had he offended her by his dress, or his manners? Why did she dislike him so? Yoyo was too upset to join the woman for breakfast the next morning. He met her for lunch and received one cold cheese sandwich with a pickle, a glass of milk and a cupcake, which he liked very much. He skipped the next day’s breakfast as well, and began eating one light lunch a day at the home of his host. Sometimes he would buy bananas and Joe Louis chocolate discs. They went well together.
On this first Sunday in December, Yoyo felt hungrier and weaker than usual. Arriving in Polonia Park, he sat exhausted on a bench, oblivious to the man beside him. Yoyo felt a brittleness in his chest. There, with his feet on the ground, he felt rooted to the universe and distinctly mortal. Listening to a bird peep, he looked up at a branch.
“A chickadee!” muttered Yoyo, who had read two books about Canadian wildlife before leaving Cameroon. “I believe that’s a black-capped chickadee!”
Jake Corbett said, “Goddamn nice day, isn’t it?”
“Very nice,” Yoyo agreed. Someone would have to explain this English word to him. Yoyo heard it everywhere. “God” meant Dieu, and “dam” meant réservoir. Could this mean un réservoir de Dieu? God’s reservoir? By calling warm winter temperatures “Goddam” weather, were Canadians suggesting that it was issued from God’s love for the universe?
Corbett said, “Nice to see birds out, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Very nice Goddam birds,” Yoyo said.
Corbett began laughing. “You say that real funny.”
Yoyo turned to look again at the man on the bench. “I know you! You are the famous Jake Corbett. We met in your room! I was researching an article for my newspaper in Cameroon.”
“Right,” Corbett said. “I knew you but I forgot your name.”
“It’s Yoyo. Would you like a banana? I have two.”
Corbett accepted and ate his banana in three bites. “Do you got people on pogey in Africa?” Yoyo didn’t understand the question. He smiled uncomfortably and nodded. “They treat them better over there?”
“Goddamn!”
“Goddam,” Yoyo repeated shyly. Looking up, he saw Helen approaching. “I must go now.”
“That your lady friend?” Corbett asked, admiringly.
“Yes.”
“Goddamn,” Corbett said.
“Yes, Goddam and goodbye.”
Helen Savoie made up her mind as she walked to Polonia Park. Her relationship with Yoyo had to end. He was taking this fling the wrong way. Talking about babies and marriage. Helen put off her decision when she saw her lover in the northwest quadrant of the park. He was so beautiful! He sat on a bench, back straight, feet properly planted on damp grass, posture fine enough to balance a book on his head. Dressed immaculately, he was eating a banana. So was the man slouched next to him, who tossed his peel behind the bench. Yoyo followed suit. Then he saw her. He jumped up to greet her! When was the last time someone had done that for her? She threw her arms around him. “Kiss me!” Yoyo hesitated. Helen cupped his head in her hands and devoured his lips.
“I needed that,” she said.
“I was going to give you a banana,” Yoyo said, “but the gentleman beside me wished to eat it. Say, what’s that noise?”
“I don’t hear any noise.”
“Listen!”
Helen turned to see a dozen people sprinting down a slope into the park. They were yelling and pursued by others, including a cop who ran with a club in his hand.
“A fight?” Yoyo asked.
“There’s a demonstration outside Francophone Affairs,” Helen said. “Must be that.”
“A demonstration? I can cover it for my newspaper.”
Jake Corbett stretched his sore legs out on the park bench. He closed his eyes. He thought he heard rumbling in the distance. Voices, shouting. Many voices, many shouts, indistinguishable but growing louder. He opened his eyes. People by the dozens were running down a slope into the park toward him. Police pursued some. Others pursued police.
Screams of pain and anger fused. One policeman fell down and someone kicked him in the head. Police swung sticks. People threw rocks. Jake saw a police officer club Yoyo. Men and women swarmed around. Someone hurled an unopened Coke can at a young police officer, striking him on the temple. The officer fell on Jake’s outstretched legs. Jake screamed in agony and began shoving the officer, pounding on his back, trying to get the weight off his legs. This was the last thing he remembered when he regained consciousness in a paddywagon. His head was pounding. The potato was still in his pocket. He had no idea what had happened. He wasn’t sure if he could move his legs. He lost consciousness again.
At 8:30 a.m. the same Sunday, Judge Melvyn Hill was listening to Handel’s Water Music. He opened his back door to test the temperature. He felt lonely but free. Lonely for company, for somebody to admire all he had made of his life, or, at least, for somebody to like him. And free of the second Mrs. Judge Melvyn Hill, Doris, who had decamped five months ago, leaving not a word, a letter, or any furniture. Doris had hated him. In their last years together, she didn’t sleep with him. Didn’t even sleep in the same room. Didn’t allow him to touch her and, if he happened to, she would turn and level the coldest of stares, ask what exactly he wanted, and remind him that he was a pompous jackass held in contempt by every citizen of Winnipeg and by the souls of most of the dead.
But today he was lonely. So, on that gloriously sunny and springlike December morning, he set out for a lengthy walk. He had no wife and few friends, but Melvyn Hill had perfect health. He was a short, slender man with a full head of hair, normal blood pressure and a good heart. He kept in shape by walking. In all but the worst weather, Melvyn Hill walked to work, to do his shopping and to go to the cinema. He was probably the only judge in Canada who owned no car.
Today, the sun blazed. The sky took on the hue of a subzero prairie day. A couple rode by on bicycles, with a hockeyhelmetted tot perched behind each parent. A woman jogged past. “Good morning,” she sang out. Melvyn Hill felt happy to be alive. He walked parallel to the curving Assiniboine River, which rose high on its banks. Someone ahead of him threw a stick. A springer spaniel tore after it, its ears flapping like wings. The dog dropped the stick and chased a squirrel. The cold, grey river ran on, its current flexing around rocks and bends.
Melvyn came to River Avenue, proceeded east and crossed Osborne Street. He decided he would turn back at Polonia Park, now half a mile away. Polonia Park was shaped like a cereal bowl, its low, flat surface about the size of two football fields. Old, sprawling elm trees were posted like sentries around the park’s upper perimeter. Through them passed a walking path.
Melvyn planned to rest there before returning home. He had some thinking to do. Particularly urgent was his age problem. He would be sixty-five soon. Normally, when Provincial Court judges hit sixty-five, they could choose to retire. To continue, they needed a contract renewal from the provincial attorney general’s office. This was Melvyn’s preference. He pictured retirement as sad and useless—no family, no woman and not even a job. Melvyn had written the attorney general three months ago, requesting permission to carry on past age sixty-five. But he had received no response. And his sixty-fifth birthday was less than a year away. What was the hold-up?
Shouts and cries pulled Melvyn from his thoughts. Looking down into Polonia Park, he saw a scene of madness: demonstrators screamed in anger and in agony. Melvyn Hill edged down the slope and into the hub of activity. Placards were waving in the air, falling to the ground, being swung as weapons. One slammed into the face of a man in blue who was swinging a club. Several men in blue rushed into the crowd. Policemen! Ten, twenty of them, rushing down the hill. Two young boys, no older than twelve, ran into the park, stopping near the judge. Melvyn told the boys to leave the park immediately.
One boy said, “Up yours, you old fart.” The boys ran into the fray. Melvyn sighed. He would have to talk some sense to the hotheads who had let this thing get out of control. He edged into the melee, which involved several hundred demonstrators and a growing body of cops. Melvyn found himself sandwiched between demonstrators and cops. “Let me through,” he shouted, pushing desperately. “Let me through this instant! I am a judge! Son, let me through. Young lady, let me pass. Officer. Officer! Let me go! I’ll have you know, I am a judge! I am a—” Melvyn Hill was knocked down.
It was a pleasant walk from Lipton Street to the Department of Francophone Affairs, and, at eight on a Sunday morning, no slower than waiting for a bus. It was a fantastic, springlike day. Mahatma Grafton was happy to be outside—even though he was working.
With the lean build of an ex-swimmer, Mahatma swayed as he walked, shoulders ho-humming from left to right, flat feet slapping the ground. He passed Mrs. Lipton’s restaurant, stopped at a bakery for a hot cinnamon bun and munched on it as he walked east along Westminster Avenue past treed lawns and modest homes.
During his twenty-minute stroll, Mahatma reviewed all the kinds of people he had been mistaken for in his life. Moroccans had spoken to him in Arabic, Jamaicans had assumed he was Syrian, Peruvians thought he was Andalusian and Spaniards had taken him for a Mexican, but nobody, not even in Winnipeg, believed he was Canadian. Oh well, Mahatma thought. You can’t win ’em all.
Arriving early, Mahatma sat on a curb across the street from the office and waited. He wished he had brought a camera. Georges Goyette, who was setting up a table with flyers denouncing the English-French violence, spotted Mahatma across the street. “Hey, Mahatma, come on over here!” They chatted while FAM volunteers unfurled banners and erected effigies of bilingualism opponents.
A rented bus pulled up along Donald Street, dropping off sixty demonstrators. By 8:45, a throng of people had arrived on foot, some bearing their own signs, others chanting slogans, others watching and waiting. The demonstrators attracted a growing crowd of spectators.
Mahatma climbed up the fire escape to one side of the office. To estimate the number of people, he divided the crowd into ten equal sections and counted every head in a section. He came up with thirty people, so he multiplied by ten. “8:50 a.m.,” he wrote in his notepad, “about 300 people outside.” He descended to conduct interviews, but few people would speak to him. Many didn’t believe he was a reporter. Others were hostile: “I don’t talk to the press. You’ll fuck it up anyway…You slant everything…I don’t want my name in the paper.” The hostility troubled Mahatma. He didn’t mind antagonizing businessmen known to pollute rivers; he didn’t object to harassing politicians about lies the week before. But ordinary people sensed, perhaps rightly, that most journalists would rather highlight the crowd’s idiosyncrasies than discuss its message.
Mahatma finally found a middle-aged woman who would talk. Her name was Hanna Masson. “My teen-aged daughters think I’m crazy to come here.”
“So why’d you come?” Mahatma asked.
“Because you should stand up and be counted when you believe in something.”
Georges Goyette addressed the crowd with a megaphone. Mahatma wrote down most of what was said. Then he climbed the fire escape again, ascending three storeys. He sat on a metal platform and let his feet dangle in the air. Leaning against a horizontal bar, he counted heads again and made notes. He spotted an unmarked police cruiser with two officers fifty yards north on Donald Street. Swivelling around to look west, he saw three marked police cars in a lane parallel to Donald Street. Then he heard the shouting.
Georges Goyette, who had been winding up his speech and urging the crowd to follow him north to Polonia Park for skits and more speeches, was rushed by three young men dressed in combat fatigues. They looked like teenagers. American flags were stitched onto their shirts, swastikas etched on their sleeves. “French scum,” one spat into the megaphone, “go back to Quebec!” Two of the young men knocked Goyette off the platform; the megaphone fell down with him. The boys pushed aside a woman who had been standing with Goyette. They hurled eggs at the crowd, jumped off and escaped down a side street. Shouts erupted in the crowd. Several people—the same people Mahatma had seen earlier setting up the demonstration—supplied protestors with eggs. Mahatma made notes of that, and of the barrage of eggs and stones thrown at the office. Glass smashed. Cries grew into mayhem. Police cruisers appeared on Donald Street. Demonstrators pelted them with eggs, cheering each time a white shell exploded into yellow guts on a police car. Sirens wailed. Goyette hollered to the crowd to go to Polonia Park.
In the confusion that followed, Mahatma saw many people run the wrong way and come up against a line of police cruisers. Some took advantage of the mayhem to kick the cruisers. Police warded them off with billyclubs. They pinned two demonstrators against a cruiser and frisked them, handcuffed them and shoved them into the car. Mahatma scrambled down the fire escape, through a back lane and over to the west end of Polonia Park. Hundreds of people ran into the park, spilling like dice down its slopes.
“Vivent les Franco-manitobains!” cried Goyette.
“Aaiieee,” screamed a woman, “you bastard! Let me go, tabarnac!”
The voice seemed familiar. It came from down a slope, near a bench. Mahatma located the voice; a cop was dragging a hollering woman by the arm. It was Helen! Mahatma pocketed his notebook and ran down the hill. Two young demonstrators ploughed into the cop, who released Helen and swung at the men, felling one of them with a blow to the head. The officer pursued the other, taking three furious strides after the man, who fled in the direction of a bench where Jake Corbett sat. The cop collared the man. But someone hurled a Coke can through the air; it struck the cop on the temple, thudding audibly. The cop fell on Corbett’s outstretched legs. Corbett began to scream. He screamed like a man being tortured but the big cop remained inert.
Helen tried to roll the cop off Corbett. She couldn’t budge him. She grunted, tried again, grunted. Mahatma stepped in to help, pulling the weight off Corbett and easing the officer to the ground. Another cop charged toward them, shoving through the crowd. Helen and Mahatma eluded him by pushing deep into the crowd. Helen only noticed him when they were safe.
“Mahatma! What are you doing here?”
He grinned. “Reporting.”
“Not any more you’re not,” she said. “You’re involved now. I have a friend over there who is hurt.” She led him in another direction. The crowd was scattering as more cops and cop cars raced onto the scene. A paddywagon had driven onto the field. Mahatma reached for his back pocket, but his notepad was gone. Shit! It must have been knocked out down below, near Corbett. What was that crazy bastard doing at the demo, anyway?
Helen knelt by a black man. His eyes bulged. He made no noise. Spittle clung to his lips. He lay on his side, head bleeding on the grass. “Ça va Yoyo, ça va?” Helen patted his shoulder desperately. She clasped his hand and spoke rapidly. Seconds passed before Mahatma grasped the fact that Helen was speaking French. Perfectly “N’aies pas peur, Yoyo,” she said, “on t’amène à l’hôpital.” Mahatma knelt to help. He pressed a handkerchief against the man’s bleeding scalp.
“Courage, frère,” Mahatma told the man, who moved his lips but made no sound. Mahatma bent closer.
“Enchanté de te connaître,” Yoyo whispered before he lost consciousness. With Helen’s help, Mahatma carried the African up the hill. They stopped at the first house. Mahatma called an ambulance. After it took Yoyo and Helen away, he returned to the field to search for his notepad. By this time a television crew had arrived, but the demonstrators had fled and all that was left to film was debris on the ground. Mahatma couldn’t find his notepad. He used a spare one and tried to interview a cop, who told him to screw off. Mahatma asked where his superior was. The cop wouldn’t talk to him; he merely pointed across the field. There was a clutch of police cars on the far side. Mahatma found MacGrearicque in a cruiser and asked whether the police had used unreasonable force.
“Unreasonable force? We did what was necessary to stop that violence. Try being a cop in a mob of thugs. It’s no tea party. There were people throwing rocks, swinging sticks, ganging up on officers; now let me ask you, what do you do, tuck in your tail or defend yourself?”
“How many people have you arrested?”
“Don’t know.”
“Fifty? A hundred?”
“You think we had an army down here? Thirty—maybe.”
“I saw one officer…”
“I don’t care! You fucking reporters just see what you want to.” MacGrearicque rolled up his car window and drove off. There was nobody left to interview. Goyette had disappeared. So had Corbett. A police officer inspected a few sheets of paper in the mud. He found a megaphone at the base of a tumbled stepladder and carried them both to his vehicle. Mahatma climbed the northwest bank of the park, passing a muddied figure on a bench.
“Stop! Call me a taxi! Please! I need help!” Mahatma whirled around and stared into the bloodied face of Provincial Court Judge Melvyn Hill. The judge was filthy. Swollen lips slurred his speech. Blood dribbled from his cheek.
Mahatma asked, “Should I take you to the hospital?”
“No. Call me a cab.”
When the driver came, he looked at Melvyn Hill and shook his head. “Uhn-uh,” the cabbie told Mahatma. “I don’t take drunks.”
“He’s not a drunk. He’s injured.”
“This ain’t the Good Samaritan service.”
“He can pay,” Mahatma said.
“Someone stole my wallet,” the judge said.
The driver started rolling up his window. Mahatma said, “I’m your fare and I’m bringing him along. Where do you live, Judge?” Mahatma helped Melvyn Hill into the back seat of the cab, then got in beside him and sighed, recalling everything he had seen: the cop falling on Jake Corbett, the whiteness of bone breaking Yoyo’s skin, Hanna Masson saying her daughters thought she was crazy, demonstrators egging the building, cops flailing at demonstrators, people swinging placards at cops, cops swinging billysticks, protestors kicking free. He felt tired of it all. To date, reporting had involved mirroring events and repeating what others had said. This time he had to be analytic and draw conclusions. And without his notepad.
“What’s the matter, son? Aren’t you going to ask me anything?”
The voice startled Mahatma. “I didn’t think you recognized me.”
“What do you take me for, Mahatma Grafton? A fool? What are you going to write this time? That a taxi driver mistook me for a drunk?”
“I won’t write anything about you.”
“Well, you can quote me on this: the police really lost their cool, and there is no excuse for that.” Mahatma wrote down the quote, drew a line across the page and set down his pen. He wouldn’t push the judge into an interview. But the judge said, “Quote me on this too—” Under the line he had just drawn, Mahatma wrote “Melvyn Hill” in his notepad and began scribbling as the judge spoke. “My Sunday stroll was interrupted by gross mayhem at Polonia Park. The demonstrators were ruffians and fools, but I have never seen police behave so badly in all my life.”
The judge fingered the cut on his cheek. “You know who gave me this? A police officer. I saw the police chase adults into the park. I saw police club people without provocation. I was knocked down by one and nearly trampled by demonstrators. I don’t agree with the French activists, but the police used too much force.” The taxi stopped by a house on Craig Street. Judge Hill had one leg out the door when he handed Mahatma a muddied notepad.
“I found this. You might need it.”
Mahatma entered the newsroom with blood on his jacket, a twig in his hair and mud streaking his face.
Betts asked, “You were there?” Mahatma nodded. “Good. What’s your lead going to be?”
“Give me some time, will you?”
“Never mind. I was there. With Van Wuyss. A clutch of loonies threw eggs at us. Did you see those crazy demonstrators?”
“Some.”
“Good. Make that your lead.”
Mahatma didn’t argue. But he didn’t agree, either.
Within two hours, the temperature dropped ten degrees. Mahatma noticed the stiff north wind as he left the newsroom to conduct some interviews. He drove a company car to the Accidental Dog and Grill. Frank, the owner, was suspicious of Mahatma at first, but then fell all over him when he learned Mahatma was a reporter. Mahatma took the wobbly steps upstairs. Jake Corbett lay supine on his bed, feet raised on a rolled blanket, sweating. He lifted a hand a few inches off his bed.
“How’re you doing, Jake?”
“Not so good, Mr. Grafton.”
There was no place for Mahatma to sit. Books, documents, legal statutes, tracts, newspaper clippings and encyclopaediae were strewn on the window ledge, the dresser, the chair, the bed and even on the floor. Leaning against a wall, Mahatma took notes about what had happened to Corbett. The potato in his pocket. The African with two bananas. Everything. Mahatma wondered how much to believe. Corbett was clearly inventing parts of it. For example, he claimed that the African had written about him for a foreign newspaper. Corbett also said a bearded man had taken pictures of police beating him.
“I’ll look into it,” Mahatma said. “Did the cops arrest you?”
“They took me in. But they didn’t do anything. Some guy said ‘not you again’ and let me go.” Mahatma prepared to leave. “And Mr. Grafton?”
“Yes.”
“I want my money back!”
“What money?”
“My $602.38 overpayment deduction money. You want my lawyer’s phone number? We’re gonna take those welfare people to court!”
There were few reporting tasks Mahatma hated more than sneaking into hospitals. He was sure that nurses saw reporters as vultures and, to a degree, he agreed. Today, however, the task seemed justifiable. Yoyo was not critically injured. And Mahatma needed a separate account of police brutality at the park.
Yoyo was propped up in bed, his head bandaged. His eyes latched onto Mahatma. “You’re a good man,” Yoyo said. “I want to thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” Mahatma said. “How’s the pain?”
“They have given me pills. The white man has pills for everything. The thing that has always confused me is, how does that pill know where you need it? How does it know your head is hurt? Could it not go where it isn’t needed? The wrong leg, for example?”
Mahatma laughed. “What did they do to you?”
“They operated on the arm. Now they’re watching my concussion. But let’s not worry about that. For a long time, I have wanted to meet you. You are responsible for Cameroon’s interest in the famous Jake Corbett.”
“Corbett? Famous?”
“I have written of him several times since you reported his arrest outside City Hall.”
“You’ve written?”
“For La Voix de Yaoundé, in Cameroon.”
Mahatma laughed. Jake Corbett, famous in Cameroon? It seemed an absurdity. “Could you answer a few questions about Corbett?”
“Most certainly.”
Aside from confirming that he and Corbett had shared a banana in the park, Yoyo said he had seen the cop fall on Corbett’s legs, and he had seen Goyette snapping pictures at the demonstration. Finally, Yoyo described how his bone was broken. Mahatma wished the little man well and hurried out.
Georges Goyette had a black eye and a fat lip. He ushered Mahatma in with a swat on the back. “Anglos, anglos! You don’t come to parties. You never drop by to say hello. You just come for business.”
Mahatma smiled. “Describe what you saw at the demonstration.”
“I would have had the pictures to prove it, if a cop hadn’t belted me and snatched my camera.”
“I’m surprised you let that happen.”
“He got a hand from his partner.”
“You were taking pictures?”
“Yes. I got them hitting Corbett on the head. I got them clubbing Yoyo’s arm. Pauvre gars. He has had it rough in Canada. Did you know that he hasn’t been eating?”
“No. I just met him, actually. What do you mean, not eating?”
“He has no money. I learned today his landlady won’t feed him. But he came here believing she would provide all his meals.”
Mahatma couldn’t afford to get off track. “What happened between him and the cops?” Goyette confirmed what Yoyo had said. “And then?”
“Then two cops laid into me.” Goyette fingered his puffy face. “They knocked me about, then stole my camera.”
“Did they charge you?”
“Participating in a riot. I go to court next week.”
“Naw. Torn clothes. Sore cheek. Sore chin. Black eye.”
“How many were charged?”
“Hey man,” Goyette said, “they didn’t give me a press kit. But there were a lot of us in the paddywagon.”
“You regret staging the demonstration?”
“No! We’ve got a right to protest. And the cops have no business beating up on us.”
Mahatma asked about the young men in army fatigues who had disrupted the demonstration. Goyette said, “Nobody knows who they were.” When Mahatma had to leave, Georges said, “I guess I’ll see you next time there’s an airplane crash or something.”
Mahatma stopped next at Helen Savoie’s home in St. Boniface. “I’m writing about the demo for tomorrow’s paper. Can you tell me what happened to Yoyo?” She complied, concisely. When she was done, Mahatma asked, “By the way, what were you doing there with him?”
“He’s a friend. We met in the park. I had no idea that the demonstration would end up there.”
“Alors,” Mahatma said, “tu parles français après tout?”
“Et oui,” she said. “One day, I’ll tell you about that.”
Mahatma worked alone in the newsroom. He felt good. He felt he was doing something worthwhile, something that wouldn’t be reported if not for him. He wrote the main story about the demo, and two sidebars.
The Manitoba Provincial Police acted with savagery and brutality yesterday in quashing a riot outside the Department of Francophone Affairs, according to Provincial Court Judge Melvyn Hill.
“The police had no business clubbing people,” the judge told The Herald yesterday.
Fourteen demonstrators were charged with participating in a riot after counter-demonstrators and police broke up the Franco-Manitoban rally.
Seven police officers and a number of protestors were injured, including a foreign journalist hospitalized after a police officer clubbed him with a billystick.
In an interview, Crime Supt. Patrick MacGrearicque conceded that “the officers really lost their cool and there is no excuse for that.” Still, MacGrearicque insisted that his men had no choice but to crack down on violent demonstrators…
Ben made Mahatma a potato omelette, spiced with Tabasco sauce he claimed to have discovered in Spain. “Come off it, abuelo,” Mahatma said, “Spaniards wouldn’t touch Tabasco sauce if you paid ’em. They wimp out on spices.”
Ben pulled a long face. “Why is a boy of your education using a term like ‘wimp out’?”
“I said it for your benefit, abuelo.”
“Hush up and eat your eggs.” Mahatma did that. But Ben objected to his shovelling food into his mouth, with his back hunched and his elbows on the table. “I hope you don’t eat like that in public, son. People will think you were raised in the street.”
“The son of a communist is raised in a chateau?”
“I’ll chateau you. And I’m not a communist.”
“You’re not?”
“Old men like me have no time for -ists and -ites. Socialists, communists, Trotskyites, Troglodites—humphh! They could save us all a lot of earaches by dropping their hot air and saying what they mean!” Ben stole a spoonful of his son’s omelette, then asked, “So, how was the demonstration?”
“Pretty rough.”
“Was your friend Goyette arrested?”
Mahatma looked up, surprised. “Yeah. And charged with participating in a riot.”
Ben whistled. “And your favourite judge? I hear he was knocked around a bit.”
“You heard?”
“I still get around.”
“You were going to tell me about him someday.”
“Soon, son. Soon.”
Mahatma Grafton was awakened by the morning radio news: “Police Crime Superintendent Patrick MacGrearicque has reacted angrily to suggestions that his officers used violence to quell a demonstration yesterday. He dismissed The Winnipeg Herald’s claim that police clubbed protestors outside the Department of Francophone Affairs. And he was outraged by a quote that had him criticizing his own officers for losing control at the riot.”
Mahatma groaned. Had he misquoted MacGrearicque? He couldn’t have. What, exactly, had he written? He rolled out of bed, dressed, threw on his coat and hurried out to a newspaper stand. There, he saw MacGrearicque quoted, saying his officers “had really lost their cool and there’s no excuse for that.” Mahatma remembered having written it, but now he knew it was wrong. Or was it possible that MacGrearicque had said it? He rushed home to consult his notebook.
While Mahatma was flipping through it at the kitchen table, Ben joined him. He asked, “You haven’t eaten yet?”
“I’m in deep shit.”
“Meaning?”
“I misquoted a cop in a big story in today’s paper. Melvyn Hill blasted them for losing their cool at the riot, and I attributed his comments to this big-shot cop who’s gonna want my head.”
“You misquoted a cop?”
“Yes.”
“Without malice?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he may want to burn your hide, but he can’t kill you.”
“My story is discredited now.”
“Just stand up and say, ‘Folks, it was my fault and I’m sorry.’ That’ll take the sting out of the harshest critic.”
“But what about the rest of the story?”
“Is it important to you?”
“Yes!” Mahatma surprised himself by the vehemence of his answer.
“Then check all your facts, be sure the rest of the story is watertight, and stand by it.”
“I’d better get to work, Dad.”
“Keep your chin up, son. You didn’t beat anybody up, you know. The cops did.”
When Mahatma checked his stories in the paper, there were no other errors. He noted with relief that The Herald had downplayed his work. Only the first six inches of his main story made it onto page one, in one short column under the fold. Inside, the story and sidebars ran on page eleven. They had reservations about the story. Ordinarily such news would have been the line story on page one. Mahatma showered and dressed, choosing to wear a jacket and tie—items he normally left in the closet. Ben touched his shoulder as he was running a pick through his hair.
“Son, I’ve made waffles. They’re on the table. Eat them. African warriors never set out on an empty stomach.”
Winter had returned to Winnipeg. Wind bit Mahatma’s face as he trudged north on Lipton Street to catch the Portage bus.
In the newsroom, people avoided him. Everybody seemed to know something he didn’t. Finally, Chuck Maxwell slid into place next to him.
“I screwed up, Chuck. I misquoted MacGrearicque.”
“Was it your only mistake?”
“Yeah.”
“Then hang tough. You oughta see some of the doozies I’ve fallen into, over the years.”
“So what’s going to happen?”
“Don’t you know about the second run?”
The second and final edition of the newspaper rolled off the presses around 9:00 a.m. It had the broadest circulation of all editions and was delivered to Winnipeg homes in the afternoon. Running fresh news out of eastern Canada, Europe and the Middle East, it also carried the stamp of Lyndon Van Wuyss, who arrived at work each morning to order some article replaced or rewritten.
Mahatma asked, “What about it?”
“Betts pulled your stories.”
“Pulled?”
“The works. He wrote a three-paragraph blurb on the front page, saying there had been a row between police and demonstrators near the consulate, saying how many people had been arrested and what the charges were.”
“Jesus.”
“He came in here swearing like a trooper. Saying he was going to can your ass. Saying he had told you how to write that story.”
“So where is Betts?”
“He’s out right now.”
Mahatma checked his mailbox: no pink slip awaited him. He flicked on a computer and opened his electronic mailbox: no nasty note there. He wrote one to Betts, explaining the misquote. Having no instructions to the contrary, Mahatma went to the daily press conference at the cop shop.
Officers in the building scowled at him. A magistrate who had provided him with court information shook a finger “tsk tsk” from a distance. Mahatma went into the detective division and waited. He was five minutes early. Randa, the secretary, raised her made-up eyes at Mahatma. “MacGrearicque is pissed at you, Hat. If I were you I’d boot it.”
“Thanks for the advice. But I’ll stick around.” Mahatma flipped through The Winnipeg Star. No mention of the demonstration. He scanned the crime pages, where Edward Slade usually had a column. “Edward Slade returns from holidays tomorrow,” said a boxed message near the bottom of the page. A crowd burst through the doors. MacGrearicque, who glared at Mahatma, was followed by Bob Stone, Susan Starr, Edward Slade and three other reporters. All but Slade jabbed microphones in Mahatma’s face.
“Do you stand by your articles today?”
“I unintentionally misquoted Superintendent MacGrearicque, and I apologize for that honest mistake. But I stand by the rest of the story.”
“Why were the stories pulled from your second edition?”
“Ask my editors.”
“And the rumours about you being pulled from the crime beat?”
“I don’t know anything about it. Now if you don’t mind,” he said, pushing the mikes away, “I want to attend the news conference.”
Mahatma entered MacGrearicque’s office with Edward Slade following behind. “Fuck ’em, Mahatma. They’re amateurs.”
MacGrearicque excused himself for a few minutes.
“So you missed the demo?” Mahatma whispered to Slade. He wished he had squared off against Slade yesterday. Then at least one other paper would have corroborated his story.
“I was off yesterday. Last day of holidays. Too bad about your error. Cops love misquotes. Gives ’em a chance to dump all over us. Don’t worry, though. These things happen. You’ll be back after your suspension.”
“Suspension?”
“Didn’t you know?”
“No. Or that I’m to be pulled from the cop beat.”
“Well, you are.”
“Where are the rumours coming from?”
“You know Superintendent Butters? Vice squad? Short, fat little guy? He’s your boss’ brother-in-law.”
“Van Wuyss’?”
“You’ve got it. He called some journalists into his office this morning. Not me, mind you. They hate The Star.” He laughed a coarse, but likeable, laugh. “Almost as much as they hate The Herald. But I don’t care that he didn’t call me. I wouldn’t print that bullshit. I’m no goddamn flak.”
Behind him, Bob said, “Ah, shut up, Slade!”
“So Butters told them I’m getting yanked off cops?”
“And suspended.”
“How long?”
“Two weeks.”
Just then, MacGrearicque came back. He made an oblique remark about Mahatma as if he weren’t there. So this is the game, Mahatma thought. They’ve decided not to recognize my presence. He tested his theory at the end of the news conference. “Do you have something to say to me?” he asked.
MacGrearicque nodded at a buddy at the door. “Hey, Tom, do you see anybody here?”
“No, I don’t see anybody there.”
“Neither do I. Coffee?”
Heeding the summons to the managing editor’s office,
Mahatma considered his situation. He didn’t have the best job in the country. But as long as he was doing it, he may as well do it properly. He wouldn’t back down. He had made an error. But that was no reason to throw up his arms.
Lyndon Van Wuyss laid it out for him. “Look, Mahatma, you’ve been a good reporter. And that’s why we’re not canning you over this error—only suspending you.”
“Okay. But why did you pull the stories?”
“You have admitted to a major error. The police say the story is biased and inaccurate. We have your word against theirs, but your word has been tainted. It’s been an embarrassment to The Herald and it would embarrass us further to play up a story that we may have already blown out of proportion.”
Mahatma, going into the office, had planned to remain silent and dignified. But, as the M.E. spoke, Mahatma felt his skin prickle. He was angry. “I saw people beaten. I have to write that.”
“It’s your word against theirs. Unless you have proof, we’re dropping the story. Also, I have no choice but to suspend you for two weeks. And when you come back, you’re off the crime beat. You’re going to ethnic affairs.”
Mahatma stormed out of the office. People stared at him as he left. They had never seen him angry before. He wondered if he had ever been angry before. He felt good. Clean.
Ben Grafton stood at the window of his Lipton Street bungalow, watching his son walk up the steps. “What will you cover when you go back?”
“Ethnic relations!” Mahatma said. “Can you believe it?”
“That’s not so bad,” Ben said. “Don’t think of it as a demotion. Think of it as a chance to write about something new. They’re not telling you what to write, are they?”
“Cross that bridge when you reach it. Worry if you’re still stuck on the beat in two years. But you won’t even be at The Herald in two years. Cheer up, son. I’ll treat you to a meal at Mrs. Lipton’s.”
“Okay,” Mahatma said. “And while we’re at it, why don’t you tell me that story of yours about Melvyn Hill?”
“All right.”
Mrs. Lipton’s was a health-food restaurant with four small rooms and a billboard covered with flyers pushing acupuncture, holistic medicine, yoga, feminist theory and a male awareness encounter group. Ben guided Mahatma to a table. “Here we can talk in peace.”
“Abuelo, have you ever looked at the junk on the walls here?”
“Doesn’t bother me. What’s wrong with health nuts preaching to each other? At least they don’t promote racism or warfare.”
“It’s still propaganda!”
“No more than those Block Parents signs on street lamps and in house windows.”
“Block Parents?”
“Yes. If two of these Block Parents saw a black stranger talking to their kid in the street, they’d panic. But if it were some white stranger, they’d think he was some fellow needing directions. There’s a kernel of racism in that Block Parents business. If they want to call themselves Black Parents, that’s another thing!”
Mahatma laughed. “You’re crazy!” They ordered and their soup came soon after.
“Do you have everything you need?” Ben asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. Because this is going to take a while. I’m about to take you way back in time.”
“Right, right,” Mahatma said. “You were born here in 1908 and your parents came from Alberta one year earlier.”
“Who’s telling this story?”
Ben began, “In 1937, there were so few coloured people in Winnipeg that most knew each other. Many roomed off Main Street, near the Canadian Transcontinental Railway station, and everyone noticed a new man when he showed up looking for work.
“One Friday afternoon in June, Harry Carson, another railway porter, showed up at my room and asked, ‘You hear about that Grenadian kid?’
“He was talking about an island boy who’d had the audacity to ask for the manager of a bank that morning, seeking employment as a clerk. Harry and I shook our heads.
“All through the next week, Harry kept bringing me news. The upstart, whose name was Melvyn Hill, tried two more banks, the City Hall, two mining companies and The Winnipeg Herald, spreading word of his high school diploma.
“Finally, Harry asked me, ‘Who does this boy think he is, Ben?’
“I said I didn’t know, but I wished him luck.
“‘Ain’t no luck gonna get that boy a white man’s job.’
“I left town on a run down east and back. Two nights on the train plus one in Toronto, shining shoes, carrying luggage, making beds, mopping floors, dusting windows, keeping out of trouble, you know. Trouble, in those days, meant instant dismissal. There was an old porter used to say, ‘Trouble’s like air coming tru the winda. You can’t shut the winda and you can’t stop the draught; you just step aside so you don’t catch cold.’
“In Toronto, I spent the night with a cousin to avoid the bunk-bed flophouse the company ran on Huron Street. When I got back I learned from the inspector that the company had just trained Melvyn Hill.
“‘We’ll put him in your car on the next trip to Toronto,’ the inspector told me. ‘Show him the ropes. Let me know how he does.’
“Melvyn Hill had piano fingers. That was the first thing I noticed: no blisters, no calluses. He was short and had little meat on him and was neither photo handsome nor fighting ugly. Small eyes that hardly blinked. Chin that stuck out. And dark skin. Not high yellow. Not brown, like mine. This baby was black.
“Though I didn’t speak to Hill except when necessary, I was glad when the trip ended. He hardly spoke during the entire trip, made a fuss about cleaning toilets, refused to eat with other porters and went out alone on his night off in Toronto.”
Ben had eaten his soup and he was fussing with a glass of water.
“Hill was made a full-time porter at a salary of eighty-seven dollars a month, plus tips. They put him on the spare board, meaning that he didn’t work a regular train run, but filled in for others here and there. Weeks passed before I saw him again. But I heard Harry muttering about him from time to time. ‘He acts like he knows it all. He thinks he’s better than us.’
“Almost a year passed. One day while Harry and I were sitting on a window ledge upstairs in the Porters’ Club, I saw a middle-aged coloured man with a serious, dignified face walking our way. Pressed grey suit. Polished shoes. With him, a woman who was also well dressed. A white woman, one hundred percent white. And that wasn’t all. Two boys toddled behind them. They had straight, dark hair. The younger one’s skin was very light. Almost white. The boys wore yarmulkes, which I saw as the family crossed Main at Sutherland, walking north.
“Harry and I thought they were quite a sight. Neither of us heard the footsteps on the stairs, and suddenly I found myself face to face with the coloured man in the suit. For a moment I didn’t know what to say. The man stood tall and with perfect posture. His eyes were light brown and his greying hair, curled and cropped close to his head, was clipped above his large ears. He was in his mid-forties. Behind us, the room had fallen silent. The man said he was looking for me. Said he had recently been to porters’ training school, and was supposed to start Monday in my car. He introduced himself as Alvin James.”
Mahatma tapped his fork on the table. “Alvin James? Aren’t we getting off track here, abuelo?”
“Patience. Alvin James was the first black man to graduate from the University of Manitoba with a Master’s degree in sciences. Also, he had converted to Judaism because his wife was a Ukrainian Jew. That’s why we called him ‘the Rabbi.’
It wasn’t meant to be derogatory. Quite the contrary. Even though he was educated and had tried to get other jobs, all he could find was porter.
“Of course, the other porters held him in awe. Some went to him with questions. One asked him to help fill out an income tax form. Alvin James complied. Another two porters had him settle a dispute. All this time, Melvyn Hill was running to Toronto and back. So for more than a year, Melvyn, Harry, Alvin and I worked the same train down east and back.
“Melvyn pestered Alvin James all the time with questions about books and university. He even started dressing like the man, always in a jacket and tie.
“Hill was so enamoured that he told us a story about Alvin James. Apparently, the Rabbi had found twenty dollars in the bedding of a passenger and had jumped off the train at White River, Ontario, to give it back. Harry Carson said the Rabbi was a plain fool, giving up good money. But Melvyn said it showed that Alvin James had class. And that Negroes would never get ahead by dishonest means.
“A couple of weeks later, the passenger wrote a letter to the superintendent, praising Jamesand enclosing a hundred-dollar bill. Here’s the stinger. Alvin James refused that too. Though he did suggest the hundred be used to buy new mattresses for the company’s flophouse on Huron Street in Toronto. The superintendent lost his temper when he heard that. Alvin didn’t get the hundred, and the flophouse stayed the way it was.”
Ben Grafton was starting on his meal now, an omelette with mushrooms and tomatoes. “Now we jump to 1940 when everyone was talking about enlisting. Well, just about everyone. Alvin was too old to go to war. And Harry wanted nothing to do with it. He said, ‘White people wanna kill each other, they don’t need my help. Anyway, I got myself a good job.’
“Melvyn applied to the Air Force, did not hear back, tried again three months later, and was told the Air Force was filled up. He applied once more and was contacted shortly thereafter for testing. Melvyn became an Air Force man. They wouldn’t let him fly a plane, navigate, operate guns or aim bombs, but they let him do tarmac duty for two years. Then they taught him how to service aircraft. He stayed on ground crews in Canada until 1944 and finally made it overseas.
“I became an Army private, went overseas in ’44. You know all this. When we got back in ’46, we found that job doors didn’t swing any wider than before the war. We got our old jobs back. Before we had a chance to see any of our old buddies, the Rabbi died. You should understand that I had just come back from a war that I was sure would kill me. Melvyn, ten years younger than me, was exhausted from the war. Neither of us could accept the news of the Rabbi’s death. We’d seen all kinds survive in Europe. Why that man, of all people? He was a good man.
“Harry Carson was too upset to work the trip back to Winnipeg. In Sudbury, a doctor had to shoot tranks into his butt. He was a mess all the way home. When the train carrying the Rabbi’s body got back to Winnipeg, we learned that he’d died in a fire at that flophouse. The worst part was that the company blamed him for the fire.”
Ben stopped and fingered the napkin beside his plate. His omelette was only half eaten. When Mahatma coughed into his hand, Ben roused himself and went on.
“We went to a shiva, a Jewish wake that lasts seven days, in the Rabbi’s home. I had my only suit pressed. We passed a hat and in two hours collected one hundred dollars. That was a lot of money in those days. Later, we heard the Canadian Transcontinental had offered the Rabbi’s widow only fifty. At her house on Bannerman, we met John Novak and the Rabbi’s widow, Deanna, and her two boys, now about ten and twelve years old. I was fascinated by their pigmentation. Peter, the older one, was brown-skinned, but I might not have guessed that Alvin, the ten-year-old, was born of a Negro father. Alvin Jr. seemed almost as light as his mother.
“I gave John Novak the envelope from the porters. He was impressed. He steered me toward two chairs in a corner and told me, ‘The company says the porters had been drinking and partying and that Alvin had been smoking in bed.’
“He knew, like I did, that Alvin didn’t smoke. He wanted to know why, if there was a party going on, only Alvin got killed. How come he was the only person in the house?
“I told him what I could. That the flophouse had two rooms upstairs, each with six bunk-beds, but that the company never filled the place. Porters resented staying in bunk-beds while white train crews slept in hotels. I hated the place and usually stayed with my cousin. Most porters avoided the place. Slept with relatives, girlfriends, whatever.
“The Rabbi stayed there out of principle. He said nobody would end segregation if porters avoided the place. He said black people had to fill that place up and keep filling it until someone took notice. But the porters wouldn’t listen. It’s true that the men partied there, sometimes. About a year before, some of the boys had a real shindig there. They brought girls in and tomcatted and drank until neighbours called the police.
“After that, the doors were locked every night at nine-thirty. They came early in the morning to let you out. It was stupid but the company wouldn’t do a thing about it. But Alvin kept staying there. He wouldn’t give up. And that flophouse, that dignity cost him his life.
“He was the only man in that house. And even though firemen axed down the door, they were too late. They found him right there, dead on the floor.”
Ben looked up at Mahatma. “I told all this to Novak in so many words. It was at the funeral, remember, and I didn’t know that he was a lawyer, or that he would soon earn a seat on City Council and later become Winnipeg’s first communist mayor. I didn’t know that Novak had contacts with reporters and civil rights groups across the country. Or that he would come after all us porters to testify about that flophouse and get even with the company. All of us except Melvyn Hill, that is. He wanted to get ahead and he knew that testifying against the company could hurt his chances. He told us, ‘I’m going to climb the ladder, make something of myself. You should do the same.’
“‘Nobody gave me no ladder,’ Harry said.
“‘Then make your own,’ Melvyn said.
“We argued with him and told him he was being a fool and an insult to his race. He said he was going to law school and would become a judge and one day we’d see who was the fool.
“I’ve never seen Harry get so mad. His voice sunk down as low as a gravel pit, and he said, ‘You could live like Methuselah for a thousand years, but still you’d never be no judge!’
“‘There’s no point talking to you!’
“Harry snared Melvyn’s collar. ‘You know something, boy? Your shit smell just like mine.’
“Melvyn wriggled free. ‘You’re disgusting.’
“Soon after that Hill quit the railroad and went back to school.”
Mahatma sank back in his chair. He let out a long sigh. His work, the long hours put into the Polonia Park story, the tension stemming from his suspension and now Ben’s description of his railway life had exhausted him. He thought again of Melvyn Hill bloodied in Polonia Park.
“So he finally went to school?”
“And made judge,” Ben said. “I never thought he’d do it.”
“Do you see him much now?”
“From time to time.”
“And where’s Harry?”
“Still hanging around the Porters’ Club. It has changed names and it has a café upstairs, now. He runs it.”
“When did he retire?”
“Years ago, son, just like me.”