Kanata (13 page)

But the Americans have to conquer their own territory first.

Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief, is travelling the U.S., trying to unite the Indians into one vast confederacy, a political and military force, a million warriors that could challenge Napoleon himself. Tecumseh is tall and well formed and a natural orator. He scours the country, going to the Wyandots, Delaware, Kickapoo, Seneca, Cherokee, Cheyenne, to the Mandans. He gathers the leaders of a dozen nations, chiefs who are streaked in vermillion, caked in blue clay, tattooed with battle scenes, enemies themselves but standing uncertainly together to hear Tecumseh's message: The white man will not be satisfied until he has all the land between the rising and the setting sun.

Tecumseh has a brother, a half-brother, Tenskwatawa, who spent the first part of his life in alcoholic despair. Picture him once more sprawled in a glade, his head bitten by alcohol made from potatoes, coloured with tea, and drunk from a molasses jar. He is instinctively searching for the swaying images that herald his greatness, that soothe his terrors, strengthen the hand that holds the bow, returns the eye that has been gouged out with an arrow, and, finally and most comfortingly, reassembles the bones of his mother, adding flesh, eyes, and the soft hand that pushes the damp hair away from his forehead as the fever rages. But that isn't the dream that arrives. Instead there's a new dream: black smoke drifts skyward, a thousand fires joined, and a white army rides across the plain where nothing lives, the water brown and dead, the sun the colour of mud, a yellow gas lifting off the rock. The army approaches, a million, more, so white they shine even under the dull sun, naked save for rifles, skeletal, the smell of burning metal in their noses, blood in their brains, united in a single scream.

When Tenskwatawa wakes up it's morning. He tells his brother of his vision, and then he tells everyone, a story that grows until there is a second vision that attaches itself to the first: a green perfect land where Indians sit at a table that stretches to sunrise in a feast with no end. He calls himself “The Prophet,” and the name sticks. He shuns alcohol, and starts talking about a world where guns and whites are banished, where the Indians live as they have for millennia.

The Prophet wears a silver whistle in his hair, an amulet below his nose, has the moustache of a Frenchman, and his one useless eye is half-closed in a permanent droop that gives him a look of constant boredom. He follows in Tecumseh's wake, preaching a return to the Great Spirit, and he accuses doubters of witchcraft. In a Delaware village an eighty-year-old woman mocks his mystic words and the red silk scarf he uses to tie back his hair. He accuses her of being a witch and orders her roasted over a low fire. To his surprise, the village carries out his order. For a day she screams, naked and blackened, and each scream confirms his power. The Americans, he tells his followers, grew from the scum of the Great Water when it was troubled by the Evil Spirit. It was that spirit that found its way into the old woman: It's to blame for her death.

Michael looked at Billy. This was his history. A part of it anyway. If he didn't wake up, this was what he was, this accumulation of events.

W
illiam H. Harrison has a vision too: the West as empire. He controls millions of acres of land and sees the power of Tecumseh and the Prophet growing, threatening his dream. He rides out to the Delawares and denounces the Prophet as false. Have you seen his divinity? he asks the chief and his council. Ask him to alter the course of the moon, to make the rivers stop, to make the dead rise, the sun stand still.

The Prophet hears of this challenge and announces that he will in fact make the sun stand still. The crowd in Greenville that day is large, waiting for the miracle. The Prophet stands and points upward, then raises his other arm and closes his eye. Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. The crowd is silent, their collective anticipation straining.

What happens? The sun disappears.

The Prophet feels the sudden shade and keeps his eye shut and calls out to the Great Spirit in a new language, alien syllables that come out in a high voice. The sun returns and the crowd lets out its breath. So it's true. He has the power. Who can dispute this? The Great Spirit has sent him. Perhaps the Great Spirit has arrived. Tenskwatawa looks over his crowd as the moon wanders from its brief eclipse of the sun and the noise recedes across the plain.

H
arrison is looking for a place to strike in his campaign to make the West safe for settlement. And what better place than Prophetstown? It's here that the politician and his mystic brother live, the centre of this new religion. Harrison is a noble-looking man, a view he asserts before the mirror most mornings. He has a Napoleonic haircut, a high-collared uniform with gold braids, and with three thousand men, he rides in and razes Prophetstown, killing whatever is in their path. But neither Tecumseh nor the Prophet is among the bodies that are strewn like bloody toys over the prairie.

You could say that this was the first battle in the War of 1812, that unimaginatively named war where the Indians were used as a tactic, a bluff. The Canadian commander tells the American
commander: You and I are civilized men schooled in the rules of war, but these savages under my command, well, I can't control them once the fighting starts. God have mercy on you. It worked at Fort Detroit, where Tecumseh teamed up with the British commander Isaac Brock and the Americans surrendered to avoid a massacre.

But now Tecumseh is on his way to Fort Malden on the Detroit River to join with British general Henry Procter, a fastidious man and reluctant leader. Tecumseh has a thousand warriors drawn from a dozen nations, feathered, painted in yellow and black and red, decorated with shells and silver and ornamental scars drawn with their own knives. They wait at Fort Malden for Harrison and his three thousand Americans. But Procter decides to retreat in the face of this threat.

“You are a fat animal that carries its tail upon its back as it is fleeing,” Tecumseh tells him.

“It is tactical,” Procter says, his red coat shining in the autumn sun.

“Leave us your arms and ammunition that you may run faster. We will stay.”

“Bloody savages,” Procter says, speaking dreamily as if to a third party, some neutral agent who can empathize with him. He tells Tecumseh, “You don't understand war, only killing.”

“You don't understand that war is only killing.”

Procter retreats to the Thames River and fails to assess the terrain, to gain advantage over Harrison, who is two days behind. His thoughts are scattered. He resents this war. To be in Europe, where the great battles are fought, where the glory lies.

His army is no happier than he is. They think Procter a plump fool, unable to define the war. It seems like someone else's fight, and they turn and run after the first volley is fired.

Tecumseh stands, but half of his men have also deserted, gone back to their respective nations, the autumn hunting season, and the
comforting fiction that their world will endure.

Swarmed by Americans in the woods by the Thames, Tecumseh is shot through the chest. His body lies in a pleasant clearing near an oak grove, his skin carved off by souvenir hunters who sell the strips as razor strops. Flies congregate on the red mass. More than sixty men claim to have killed Tecumseh, a figure that grows over the years as neither his body nor his death is authenticated. Some are merely tavern drunks, vividly describing the great chief begging for his life; others use his death for political gain. Harrison rides Tecumseh all the way to the White House and becomes president.

After the victory, Harrison is filled with renewed purpose and his army marches on toward Upper Canada. But winter has come early, as it did for Napoleon. Supplies are scarce. The men trudge through drifts for two days, hungry, before turning back, defeated by the land and the snow.

Tecumseh is a martyr now and Tenskwatawa tries to use his brother to rally the Indians. I will cook their hearts, he tells the diminishing crowds. They used my brother's skin to sharpen their knives and we will feast on their hearts. Their blood will darken the rivers.

But this is the thing about leaders. Tecumseh filled the Indians with a sense of possibility; his half-brother, a one-eyed dandy with a flair for cruelty and the temper of an adolescent, doesn't have the same power. (Tenskwatawa screamed constantly as a baby, and was originally named—so many names ago—Lalawethika, the Noisemaker.) He fills them with doubt. The dream of an Indian Nation dies with Tecumseh, the prospect of empire gone.

M
ichael stared at Billy's face, which was neither slack nor set in any specific expression but occupied some middle territory, a mask that defended what lay behind it. His pale green cotton hospital gown was almost transparent in its thinness, the result of hundreds of industrial washings. How much information was getting through, and what, if anything, would be retained?

This was, Michael assumed, the only news he was getting. Perhaps it was all being retained, as it didn't have to compete with books, TV, a mother's nagging, or annoying song lyrics that stuck to the brain like gum. These lectures were his only narrative.

Countries are like marriages, Michael told him. They are born in negotiation and remain an ongoing negotiation. They are unresolved, irresolvable. The next few decades were uneventful (like so many marriages). Then we had the Upper and Lower Canada Rebellions. Eventually the Americans descended into civil war, slaughtering one another with much more appetite and purpose than they showed in 1812. We returned to fighting ourselves, the most obvious enemy.

1

J
OHN
A. M
ACDONALD,
O
TTAWA,
1864

James McIlvoy woke in the grey light of his cramped room silently cursing his masters, the familiar salute of most mornings. The litany began, as it usually did, with the fact that Macdonald was a bulb-nosed drunk. Then D'Arcy McGee, as Irish as death, a reformed Fenian (though the most eloquent man in Canada, McIlvoy grudgingly conceded), all five foot three of him, face like a monkey and a poet into the bargain. In Quebec there was George-Étienne Cartier, French and Catholic, flaws enough for any man, having an affair of the heart with the pants-wearing, cheroot-smoking, aptly named Luce Cuvillier, a poorly held secret, though Ottawa was a city that had yet to develop
many secrets and suffered from the lack of mystery. And George Brown (whom he always saved for last), the obstinate, self-righteous saint of the newspaper business.

McIlvoy found his clothes and put them on, shivering. This country was no place for civilized men. This country was in fact no country. He could see why his masters (as he had come to call them) wanted to create one. It was increasingly clear that Britain was tiring of these colonies. You could sense it in their manner, read it in their editorials, hear it in the speeches of Westminster. Their North American holdings were both difficult and expensive to administer, and almost impossible to defend, and it wasn't clear that the people were even prepared to defend themselves. The country's riches were subtle. To be rid of us, McIlvoy thought, to be rid of the cost of us at least, would be a relief.

There were other reasons for the colonies to band together. To the south, the United States, with its itch for empire—that impulse that sat in the nation's soul, inalienable and God-granted—had come north before and would come again. The British North American colonies needed to unite to protect themselves from their friends.

McIlvoy had documents to prepare for Macdonald, eight hours' work, probably more. It was one thing for them to dream up a country, but you needed field soldiers to actually carry it out. McIlvoy was one of those soldiers, fetching documents, preparing reports, finding intelligence on a variety of subjects, poring over constitutional law.

He ate a hasty breakfast of tea and toast, put on his thin winter coat and walked through the small drifts of snow, his boots wet before he reached the library, the wind moving through his clothes. The library was poorly lit, and cold enough that he kept his coat on.

It took until nightfall to find and digest all that Macdonald wanted, most of it obscure points of law. He had worked straight through, with only a short break to eat a meat pie, a lunch he immediately regretted. (McGee had told him they were made with dogs and he didn't know if the man was serious or not. It was difficult to tell with McGee. At any rate it was inside him now, dog or not. Or horse. Or worse.) McIlvoy bundled the documents together with string and put them inside his leather satchel and went out into the inhospitable evening. Macdonald would want these straight away. It would be almost eight by the time he got to Macdonald's home, and it would be an act of God if the man were sober.