I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (13 page)

I had no more entertaining stories to offer them, so I found an old newspaper and hid myself behind it. From the waitress who'd wished me good luck the day before I ordered the Sunday hangover special – eggs, bacon, and hash browns.

She said her name was Mary. I asked if she knew Monique Joseph. She said they were in high school together.

“I need to talk to her, without her parents.”

Mary flicked a look about. “Leave me your phone number.” She strolled off and I went back to the paper. Ranger 4 had crashed into the moon; I felt a kinship to that rocket. Five thousand more American advisers heading to Vietnam. Castro selling prisoners from the Bay of Pigs botch-up back to the Yanks. And, locally, enhancing my hometown's stuffy reputation, a girl sent home from high school for wearing a back-combed bouffant.

When Mary returned with the food, she picked up my business card from under the salt shaker. “I'll see what I can do, Mr. Beauchamp.”

After breakfast I wandered into the souvenir shop with its traditional cedar-root baskets, cattail mats, and carvings. There were several shawls and blankets tagged with the name Celia Swift – Gabriel's mother – and directions to her home outlet.

The small log house of Bill and Celia Swift was a couple of miles from Cheekye, just off the road, with an artisan sign out front and a workshop at the back. A DeSoto in the driveway on blocks, the hood open.

There was no doubt that the sour-looking long-haired man sitting on the stoop was Bill Swift – he had a stump leg. I parked behind the old car, hailed him, paused to pat a couple of snuffling dogs, and went up and introduced myself.

“Yep, I know who you are.” He didn't offer his hand. He was working on a broken wheelbarrow, a scatter of bolts and nuts arrayed beside his crutch, a mickey of rye just visible beneath the stoop, as if secreted there. The front door was open, the interior tidy and clean, Native prints and masks on the wall, a crucifix.

I got down on my haunches, eye to eye with Bill. He was gaunt, with a full head of dark hair, and I could see traces of the handsomeness Gabriel had inherited.

I expressed the hope he and his wife were well on this unexpectedly fine day. No response. I told him I'd seen Gabriel two nights ago and that he was in good health and spirits. A shrug. I expressed a resolve to do everything in my power to get him out of this.

He snorted. “They're going to put a noose around his neck.”

“I very much doubt that.” With as much confidence as I could pretend.

“He'll be in a white man's court, with a white judge, white jury, white prosecutor, white cops at every door, and he'll have a white lawyer who don't look like he even shaves yet, and he'll get white man's justice. He'll hang.” His voice rising with every word.

He reached back for his bottle, took a slug from it, made a face, and returned to the wheelbarrow.

“Juries may not convict where there's a reasonable doubt.” That sounded lame even to my ears.

“White man's bullshit. Gabriel's been set up to go down, young fella. I been there, I done time, I know the white man's rules. I went to the white man's school; I fought in the war for the white man; I fished, I logged, I worked in the mill for the white man.
See this?” – gesturing at the leg that wasn't there – “Crushed by a tree. An Indian's leg ain't worth shit in the white man's gyppo camps – they gave me a two thousand lump settlement.”

He took a swig from his bottle, then another, as if fuelling up for more rhetoric. Then he shouted, “Hey!” as the bottle was snatched away.

“He doesn't want to hear your cynical talk.” Celia Swift was standing behind him, a stout, thick-shouldered woman wearing a smock daubed with paint. “Take that thing to the workshop, where you got some proper tools.” He picked up his crutch and limped off, dragging the barrow.

“I don't know how we can help you, Mr. Beauchamp.” She looked stiff, anxious. “Gabriel is in the Lord's hands.”

I thought of saying it was my job to be his saviour and that Jesus, for all his worthiness, had not trained in Canadian criminal law. But I retreated to safety, asking if I might see some of the traditional weaving for which she was known.

She took me to the back entrance of the workshop, where we stepped around Bill, sitting on the steps and once more working morosely at his barrow. He spoke without looking up. “Wasting your time. They already decided he's guilty. It's all fixed.”

Celia led me past an array of tools, then into a workspace featuring a rugged old loom, a wooden work chair, a hand-woven basket filled with wool. Photos of elder women on the walls, working traditional two-bar looms. A lamp, a barrel stove wasting its heat, the back door wide open. Near the main entrance was a show area for customers. A dozen garments, of finer quality than those displayed at the Big Chief Drive-in, were hung up for viewing: elaborate dresses, woollen robes and blankets. Long shavings of yellow cedar bark woven with red cedar strips in zigzag patterns, a colourful medley of natural dyes from roots, leaves, and berries. Her main customers, she said, were agents of well-to-do collectors of aboriginal artifacts.

“Highway robbers,” Bill called out. “They squeeze you, buy on the cheap, and jack the price up ten times.”

She continued to ignore him while letting me try on a replica nobility robe, traditionally worn, she said, by those of high rank. I was taken by it; its fur trim gave it a look of majesty. Celia was proud of her work, and she finally relaxed enough to talk about Gabriel.

I asked her where his cabin was, and she walked me outside to an overlook.

“Way back in there. You have to hike half a mile.” A twin track descended to a creek and gushing cataracts, a motorbike trail going up the other side.

“Did you see him that day, a week ago Saturday?”

“No one saw him but maybe Doug Wall, and he's a lying man. I didn't see Monique neither, though she was always sneaking up there on weekends. I caught them once, sinning.”

She could not imagine Gabriel committing the substantially more horrible sin of murder, especially of a man so admired. I expected some grief over her son's plight, but she was composed, dry-eyed.
They definitely lost the ability to love
.

As we returned to the workshop there came a moment of bitterness. “Top of his class. Then he took up with atheists.” She didn't expand on that.

Bill finally had his barrow assembled and was at the woodshed, filling it. “That professor fella's still alive,” he called. “He faked his death to get out of some kind of shit he was in.”

That seemed as far-fetched as any theory I'd heard. The Dermot Mulligan I knew wouldn't stand by and let Gabriel be tried for murder.

From “Where the Squamish River Flows,”
A Thirst for Justice
, © W. Chance

LET US EXAMINE BEAUCHAMP'S CLAIM, oft articulated, that he harboured no prejudice against the First Nations peoples, or against those of colour generally. That would be to deny his parents' influence, and while he masked his internalized conservatism by rebelling against their stodgy, almost Victorian value set, surely many of their biases remained at least skin deep, like warts and moles.

Dr. Thomas Beauchamp, head of the
UBC
Library, was the lesser of the parental evils: a dour, critical man whose favourite pastime was to correct others' grammar – often rudely – or their literary quotes and historical references. Thomas boasted that he'd never voted in his life, never encountered a politician who wasn't a self-serving fool.

Dr. Mavis Beauchamp was one of those obsessive anti-communists who began to take control of the political debate in the 1950s, a decade infamous for America's spy trials and congressional hearings. She was rare among academics in supporting the Social Credit Party, a right-wing outfit born of a discredited economics theory. She decried “socialist tyrants” such as T.C. Douglas, who in her view sought to impose universal health care against the will of the people.

So let us not pretend that our subject had somehow undergone some holy cleansing of illiberal views. The record says otherwise. In the election of 1958, at twenty-one, Beauchamp actively campaigned for the Progressive Conservatives, and his sympathies for the forces of the status quo remained with him through 1962 and for many years after. As a criminal lawyer, Beauchamp was committed to prevailing concepts of civil liberties, but it was only
in the mid-nineties, after he fell helplessly into the orbit of Margaret Blake, that the socio-political reformation of Arthur Beauchamp began.
^*

T
hough the sun was creeping westward, it was unseasonably warm at seven-thirty, and folks were out for Sunday evening strolls in shorts and sun tops. My Bug wove through the West End's vast thicket of low-rise apartments and rooming houses, up Haro Street, and into the alley. I hadn't eaten since my hangover special and was looking forward to a meaty feed at a nearby Greek restaurant. I had earned that, and a flagon of retsina, after a weekend of unstinting effort and far more loss than profit.

As I pulled in, Crazy Craznik was on his back porch twiddling the dials of a shortwave radio. Ira Lavitch appeared at an upstairs window, then came racing down.

“You look ready to rack out, man.” He helped me unload my gear. “Where you been, the upper Amazon?”

I was an unshaven, unshowered mess, and no doubt smelled.

“I hate to ask, Stretch, but can I borrow your jitney? I slept in, I'm broke for cab fare, and it's hootenanny night. Lawonda's holding the fort.”

“I'm not going anywhere.” I tossed him the keys, then displayed the nobility robe I'd bought from Celia Swift.

“Out of sight,” Ira said.

“What?”

“Means gorgeous.”

“A traditional Salish garment, my good man, reserved for those of the highest rank.” I hung it loosely over my shoulders, and indeed I felt distinctive in it with its colourful rectangular patterns and trim of tiny seashells and animal fur. It smelled of the forest.

Craznik was watching me with suspicion. A voice was blaring from his radio, a Slavic language.

“He's receiving coded instructions from the Serbian Christian Patriotic Guard,” Ira said. “Plans proceed apace to assassinate the Jew Lavitch. Thanks, man, for the loaner.”

I waved off his offer to help me haul my things upstairs. As I lugged them past Craznik he turned down his radio. “What is it you wear?”

“A traditional robe of the Coast Salish peoples.”

“You don't look good as Indian. No more phone – I am not message boy.”

“Who called?”

“Your mother, two times.”

At the door to my suite I dropped my things and searched vainly for my keys. It came to my overburdened mind that the key to the flat was on the ring I'd given Ira. I wasn't sure if I could brave pulling the landlord away from his shortwave. Why was Mother calling so insistently?

Then I remembered. Dinner. Professor Winkle …

After paying off my taxi driver, I raced up the stone walkway to the colonnaded veranda, then braked to take a peek between the dining room curtains. Four persons and one empty chair around the table, on which the cook was setting a platter of roast beef. Mother was looking aggrieved but Professor Winkle was expounding, being jolly, well into the wine. Attire, as always at a Beauchamp dinner, was semi-formal.

For some reason – maybe boredom – Winnifred Winkle chose that moment to glance out the window. Presumably jarred by the sight of a tall, bedraggled man in an Indian robe, she shrieked wildly and pointed. Three shocked expressions quickly mutated into smiling embarrassment, a searing look from Mother.

I calmed myself with steady breathing as I shrugged off my pack, slipped out of my dirty boots, and entered. My old slippers were in the foyer – my parents continued to keep traces of me, like talismans. Past the hallway antiques I went, toward the dining room with its faux Tudor arches and art, nearly bumping into the exiting cook.