McLEISH WAS A SCOTS, AND HATED THE UPPER CLASSES of Britain. Lord Halifax’s assertion that the lower classes should go to school because England needed more butlers was never lost on him. Except for the fact that he was much closer to Lord Halifax than most others here. He prided himself on his position just as Halifax, his brilliance, as Halifax, his versatility, as Halifax. He did not think others deserved what he had worked for, like Halifax.
And he was, with his great beard and red hair, every bit as protective, about his position and who had rights at the university and who should not enjoy those rights. But to tell him this would make him howl. He did not like Albert because after so much work, first in Glasgow, then in Manchester, then in Belfast, then here, with the underclasses (which is a term he himself used) he didn’t believe Albert. He thought he was a squeamish momma’s boy. He even called him a puke to his face one time.
And too, he had a trait that was very widespread among professors: he was petty and jealous. He was furious that beautiful Clara Bell, who sat on the board of governors, did not respond to him, and his flirting, with her husband a cripple.
So the idea of this meeting this day, that had finally come to fruition, of the group interested in supporting the First Nations and their claims to unceded territories, was remarkable in this fact: McLeish had organized it, and here Albert was.
Because it was a meeting to generate white support no First Nations were there. One had been invited, a Mr. Roderick Hammerstone—who they had heard had tried to commandeer the horse, but no one knew really who he was. Nor did he find his way there.
It had white people, and white women, accusing white people, mainly white men. It talked about the slave trade, talked about Indigenous suffering, and talked about standing up for rights of visible minorities and starting a rainbow coalition, of women and African-Canadians, gays and First Nations. (As if these people would forever get along.)
McLeish read part of his article from the Glasgow Herald about suffering single mothers in 1950s Scotland. His voice trembled in self-reverence. A student of his spoke about the deplorable idea of home children sent to our shores just a short hundred years before. They spoke of teenage pregnancy, incest and the AIDS epidemic, the treatment of gays by the religious right. And the demonic Catholics. And all or most of this, as Tracy McCaustere, with her head shaved, her quite beautiful angelic face complemented with large, dark eyes, said, was somehow linked to the Raskin Company and what they had done here.
And there was no need to speak of the right to do something; it was a moral obligation to do something. And sitting there with Sackville—not directly beside her, they never did so, but close to her—was Professor Raskin who, it was long noted, had taken welfare rather than his uncle’s money, though McLeish believed he wouldn’t be there except for his name.
“If it wasn’t for his name he wouldn’t be here.”
But Albert, having heard of this, spoke to it, forcefully.
“I am here because of my conscience and for no other reason. I have more right to be here than anyone else. I have been trying through back channels for years to get my uncles to do the right thing.” Here he looked about, especially at Tracy McCaustere, hoping she would nod, and she did. “Two years ago I started a business with a man here, but when I realized he too was taking lumber from unceded Mi’kmaq land, I am now in the process of terminating the arrangement.”
He looked at McLeish and added, “We have MP Lampkey shouting off in Ottawa, but nothing is being done. Nothing. What voice is needed here, more than any other, is a voice from their own family—is my voice.”
This penitent revelation moved many a person.
It was suddenly mentioned that he had a lawsuit started against a man who was using part of Good Friday Mountain as his own that the First Nations were concerned about, that this man had tried to run over some First Nations men with his horse, and Professor Raskin was now taking court action.
Not knowing this was going to be revealed—Tracy McCaustere revealed it—Albert suddenly looked put out, sad, and determined all at once, and angry as well, and people nodded and didn’t meet his eyes as he glared.
“Exactly,” McLeish said, in his deep, unpleasant Scottish brogue, after a suitable silence. “Exactly. And let me tell you, anyone who is at this moment prejudiced or intolerant of others, no matter who they are, better leave this room. I have had enough of that in my lifetime, with the fuckin English.”
Ms. Sackville gave a little start, glared a bit, and was silent.
No one left the room, though some did look at each other. McLeish was an old-time socialist, drearily leftist, and prided himself on the mean intolerance for cant that was supposedly a part of the jovial working classes. He came from that school, as did his father and grandfather, but the world had gone on. So the old-time labour unionist was suffering under the pale of young men and women fraught with egocentric self-interest, modified sexuality and self righteous expressions of victimhood and bigotry. And none could now stop this onslaught into the abyss, and politicians from all walks of life would go along with it signalling their virtue and myopic struggles, and people like McLeish would be now tossed aside. And this committee meeting for social justice and equality, so obscure as never to be mentioned but by a few in this university, the university obscure in itself and most professors longing to be somewhere else—what was happening would in fact be an indication of many things to come.
No one spoke as McLeish took the floor and talked about great strides being made to be inclusive, but one could not be inclusive if one had any feelings of bigotry or superiority in their hearts.
“I am not saying that Albert’s uncles are the most responsible. They are unwitting dupes of a system they profited from. This is a systemic racism that cannot be cured in an instant. But I say it starts here, and now.” He looked quickly at Sackville, hoping she would agree. She did, but this was not what he really wished to talk about. But he couldn’t talk about unions and boots and shovels, because not one of them had ever worn boots or picked up a shovel. So he talked of systemic racism and sexism. And because of the women present, sexism mainly. He forgot his own peccadilloes at this moment. His red beard shone under the fluorescent lights. No one said anything for a while.
“Racism and sexism go hand in hand,” a young female student said.
“Yes,” answered a boy notable for being a rugby player, looking around for approval, his cheeks fat and well fed.
“Yes,” said Albert. “The person I worked with and signed on to help with money was unfortunately both, a racist and a sexist to his wife.”
One man sat listening to them in the farthest back corner, speechless for a long time. He simply now and then looked out the dark window at the darkness. He had come here knowing they had invited Roderick Hammerstone and was hoping he would show up—to show them what had happened to the child Roderick. What fetal alcohol syndrome actually did. What the world, what Mel himself, had done to his beautiful sister, and what Byron Raskin had tried to prevent. This was his way as an honest man to try and pay a debt.
Then someone made a joke about Peterson, and his father Oscar, and a few guffawed. The rugby player guffawed the most, and shook his head and looked around. Professor Dykes—who had taken many down to Washington to protest, now blind, sitting with long, stringy white hair, and a white cane, which he at times lifted—asked people to speak louder please.
But then some realized what had been said was in bad taste.
The man at the very back, the silent witness who had come alone, finally did speak when Oscar and Torry were mentioned. People had to turn in their seats to listen. And his face was in shadow because the row of lights above his head weren’t on.
“I’ve known Torry Peterson since he was a boy. I worked with him, I like him, he would do anything for anyone. I don’t think he was trying to run over them, I think he was trying to go home. I think he believed the wood was his—it’s that simple. I believe he is caught up in something he doesn’t understand.”
“Oh well, he did run them down,” McLeish said, turning toward him. “Whether he wanted to run them out or not is beside the point.”
“No. The horse bolted. Torry was the one who had his logs spilled over the road.”
“It is not his logs,” a young dark-haired woman said.
“How do you know? He was the one who in innocence paid for them. In innocence he tried to start a business. The land deed was legitimate as far as he knew. He never had a business before—he was doing something he had never done. He was even talked into doing it by others. The land might be in dispute, but he had a right to believe he had bought it in good faith.”
He spoke very quietly and people tried to figure out who he was.
“Yes—and he wanted to take over their ridge,” a young woman lashed out, disgusted.
“Where are you from, ma’am?”
Some of the people tittered at the word ma’am. They did not know old-age etiquette still existed among good people.
“Halifax, Nova Scotia.”
“Then you were never up on the ridge, you know nothing of his work. No First Nations man was ever up on that part of the ridge until Clement Ricer sold it off to Torry Peterson. I helped Torry map out what he wanted and what he could buy—because I know the treaties here too.”
The blind Professor Dykes was noticeable because of his serpentine smile, his eyes turned inward so they were white, and his long white hair falling over the corduroy jacket he always wore.
“Haah,” he said. “Haah,” and everyone looked his way. Faye Sackville looked his way as well, with a particular interest, strangely waiting for him to say more. Since he did not she finally turned her attention back to those conversing.
The one defending Torrent, the person they did not know, continued, his voice still very quiet.
“How many here have been on the reserve? How many of you gave five truckloads of oil to the reserve last winter? Oh yes, the Raskin twins in their eighties did. Let me ask this—have you ever spent a weekend there, seen the desolation and disaster among the families? The fathers too drunk to walk? No, it is not their fault. They have suffered enough. They have suffered too much, they have tried to fit into a world that has scorned them,. Their world exploited and a new world has to come—but it is only in their power to correct. It is not in the white man’s power, not in a young girl’s from Halifax who arrived here last month. And asking for more land around Riley Brook or more governmental payouts, for a ridge they don’t care about, won’t do it.”
“That is the white man’s fault,” the dark-haired woman said. “That’s why it’s systemic.” (She had just learned that word.)
“In the past, yes. Not now. Don’t demand from others, do for yourself.”
This man was Gordon Hammerstone, a First Nations man, an outcast who told his people if they wanted to be successful stop asking only for land and start demanding education for their children. He said: “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.”
His face was toughened by this terribly uneven struggle, and there was no woman or man in this room who had ever come close to that.
“You sound terribly upset—maybe upset because the Indian people are beginning, just beginning, to show their mettle,” the young woman said, smiling triumphantly, as young privileged women were often accustomed to doing.
“Yes,” another young woman said, wearing black with a red balaclava around her neck, and black tights with big green sneakers. “Yes, you just don’t consider them as people.”
“Racist! Racist!” came the shouts from all sides. “Racist! Racist!” came three young women’s almost gleefully hysterical shouts.
Gordon left and continued his myriad search for his nephew, continued his dramatic and lonely quest to honour his hidden lonely commitment for a person of his blood, his even greater commitment to his own people no matter the consequences.
A possibility of endless virtues and vibrant obligations, they sat at night, bivouacked near Riley Brook in the summer, with a few tents and transistor radios, barbecues and coolers. These were old issues, and old wounds, and it did not matter what else was offered, for they now wanted all things on Good Friday theirs. And this concern in demonstrations and truck burnings and standing up to the police was slowly approaching, masticating like a beast whose time comes round at last, the frozen gates of Raskin works, where the two old men sat playing checkers in the spacious, glorious mahogany room that held the narwhal tusk. After years of being who they were, they now awaited the mail from Ottawa to set them free.
The mail that could not come.
“King me, Chester. King me now.”
“You forgot to king me.”
“Did I?”
“Yes, you did. I’m a king as well.”
“We did all we could, goddamn it.”
This is what the two old men had said when they pushed the reporter a month before. And now all eyes were on the conflagration soon to erupt.
“They have shown complete lack of moral credibility—a dearth of ethical integrity,” the reporter did report.
“What’s dearth?” Dexter asked.
“Lack thereof,” Lester, their butler, or handyman, said.
“Ahh,” Chester said, “that’s what that word is.”
Gordon did not find Roderick. He had been in jail but they had let him out at eight the morning previous to the evening meeting Gordon had attended. Gordon was fraught with worry, terrified his nephew would do something so unthinking that he, Gordon, would never forgive himself for being unable to protect him from the ruthless demons in his way. That is what this machination came down to: the dread of his nephew, unable to know right from wrong, being channelled by the demons in other people’s souls. He drove his old bicycle on the streets of Arron Cove all the way to the crossroad where Oscar Peterson lived. He rode his bike on a lonely trek, knocking on doors and asking people if they had seen five-foot-two little crazy-eyed Roderick in the last few days. But no one had.
At a certain point a car passed by, racing over the hill toward Oscar’s trailer. It was a stolen car. A little red Honda Henrietta Saffy had taken to pick up her new friend Roderick Hammerstone who had phoned her from the centre snack bar.
“Hey,” Roderick said, as they flew by Gordon, “there’s my uncle. Henrietta, we’ll have to do something for him special too. Okay, Henrietta? Okay, okay?”
“Okay, my boy—just don’t be so antsy. I’ve gotta get this car back before Miss Prissy Cunt misses it.”
And Roderick, his hair mussed up and his eyes shining, and a brand-new Team Canada cap in his hand that Henrietta had just bought him, and a chocolate bar, and a new package of smokes, and his torn sneakers showing half his dirty toes, laughed and nodded and said: “Oh boy.”
The old car rattled and Roderick, his little imp-like head seen out the window by passing cars, yelled, “Houston, we have a problem!” and laughed.
“Get your fuckin head in the car, Rocket Man,” Henrietta said.
And they drove past Oscar’s, around the turn and across the bridge.
The car was returned before Eva even knew it was gone.