Kanata (14 page)

McIlvoy remembered going to the house when Macdonald's wife, Isabella, was alive. She had an undiagnosed feminine malady that she combated with opium mixed with wine, and spent days in a state of nervous narcotic bliss. She would smile glassily at him and the two would wait for John A. to return, making strained conversation. “How was the law today?” she would ask him. “Is good still good and bad still bad?”

“I suppose.”

“That's a Christian comfort,” she said with her weak smile. All of her facial expressions had a peculiar weakness, as if she embarked on them—smile, frown, curiosity—but failed to arrive there, giving up before they took shape. It left the impression of a fearful blankness within her.

They would sit, Isabella sipping her medicine, McIlvoy counting the slow minutes until Macdonald's arrival. She and Macdonald had had a child that died at the age of thirteen months, and that grief sat between them always, McIlvoy supposed. They bore it in their way, each to his own
medicine, though Macdonald would abandon drink for weeks on end without comment. Cartier had had a child who died at the same age, a curious coincidence. McIlvoy wondered if this somehow bound the two politicians, who on the surface cared little for one another.

McIlvoy trudged through the wet snow and finally reached Macdonald's modest home, which seemed out of keeping with his stature. “Do you know how indebted I am, McIlvoy?” he had once asked when nearing the end of a dreadful binge, a phase that always featured a large number of rhetorical questions. His response had been, “Neither do I, thank God.”

Yet his energy was heroic. McIlvoy had seen him work through the night with few ill effects, and then deliver a rousing two-hour speech without notes. There was a genius to Macdonald, messy and turbulent, occasionally contrary, but a genius nonetheless. Perhaps that was the nature of genius; it was necessarily coupled with mess and tragedy. His mind was admirable. McIlvoy hoped this would be enough.

He pulled the heavy knocker back and let it fall on the oak door. After a minute the door opened and Macdonald stood there, tall, almost gaunt, his untamed hair listing to one side, his large nose a web of veins, resembling a (not too) miniature street map.

“McIlvoy. Good good. I'd almost abandoned hope. Come in.”

I
t was August when they left for Charlottetown on board the
Queen Victoria
, a serviceable steamer. McIlvoy had personally supervised the loading of $13,000 worth of champagne,
though he was against this luxury for several reasons. One was mere superstition: Preparing to celebrate an event that had not taken place and may not take place was bad luck. To convince the colonies, which were prosperous, or felt they were prosperous (which amounted to the same thing), to join in a federation, one that delivered benefits but also required sacrifice, would be no easy task. The second worry, of course, was that Macdonald and McGee would go through much of the supply before the ship reached Charlottetown. And there was the ominous coincidence of thirteen. Had that cursed number not been unlucky enough for Macdonald and Cartier? Perhaps they felt that between them they had exhausted its ill luck.

This infernal quadrangle. Brown, publisher of the
Globe
newspaper, hated Macdonald because he was a Conservative and a drunk. He hated Cartier because he was French and Catholic (and he disapproved of Cartier's arrangement with Luce Cuvillier, which he took as a valid impeachment of the Catholic faith). And he hated McGee because he was Irish, Catholic, and a drunk. Macdonald in turn hated Brown, whom he accused of being a self-righteous liberal, was wary of Cartier, and saw in McGee both an ally and a rival. Cartier, who had taken other transport from Quebec, a mercy, thought he was surrounded by English conspirators. Which was largely true. McGee dreamed of a land occupied by people like himself, poets and talkers, a private nationalism.

Macdonald surveyed his supporting cast, as he considered them, as they sat on the deck playing backgammon, idly chatting about whom they anticipated as allies and who would oppose union.

When they arrived at Charlottetown, the harbour was empty. The stillness was unsettling. They walked through
deserted streets. Brown and McGee went to the hotel, but McIlvoy and Macdonald continued through the empty town, seeking the cause for this desertion.

“This isn't auspicious for our federation, McIlvoy,” Macdonald said, the sound of their heels echoing off the walls of the buildings. At the edge of town they saw a large field. There was a massive tent set up and a banner that read,
SLAYMAKER AND NICHOLS OLYMPIC CIRCUS
. Outside the tent a giant in a striped suit paced stiffly, his acromegalic head topped by a tiny hat. A horse pranced, led by a woman in a shining dress. An elephant was guided carefully by a man in a purple suit. The elephant had a huge top hat that was attached with a rope tied under its chin, giving it a look of human melancholia. In a cage on wheels was a lion, old and scrofulous, lazily waving at flies with its tail.

They approached the tent and looked inside. What appeared to be most of the townspeople were there, enthralled. They were all staring up, and McIlvoy followed their gaze. A man was walking on a tightrope at the highest reaches of the tent. He held a long pole that jutted out on each side at right angles to the rope, and on his back he carried another man, who held something that McIlvoy couldn't make out. This strange apparition moved tentatively, balanced by the pole that bobbed up and down. There was a moment when the acrobat almost lost his footing, and the crowd gasped as one. McIlvoy wondered if it had been calculated. The tent was humid and close and smelled of animal dung and sawdust. McIlvoy estimated the distance from the rope to the ground to be thirty-five feet.

A mustachioed man in a red jacket stood in the centre of a black ring describing the peril that these two suspended men were in. “The Great Blondin faces a two-hundred-foot
fall onto the hard, fatal ground,” he said. “If the man he is carrying so much as sneezes, if his leg becomes itchy and he reaches to scratch it, it will be enough, good people of Charlottetown, to cause instant death.” The pair on the rope got to the midway point and stopped, wavering slightly. The man on Blondin's back gave something to Blondin, who now had the long pole balanced on the rope itself. The man on top produced a small pan, and a small pot of cooking oil that he set aflame. He handed both of these to Blondin, then theatrically searched his pockets and produced three eggs, which he broke into the pan before throwing the shells over his shoulder. “What is this?” the ringleader boomed. “Faced with the most dangerous stroll on God's earth, they have decided
it is tea time
.
They are
, and I find this impossible to believe,
cooking an omelette!
Suspended halfway to heaven,
they are taking their supper!
You will
never
see anything as amazing as this!” McIlvoy watched as they did, indeed, make an omelette, and then ate it. He looked at Macdonald, who was staring at this curious feat without expression, one performer coldly assessing another.

T
he following afternoon, Macdonald stood at the pulpit and addressed six hundred of Charlottetown's quality in St.

Jude's Church. An appropriate venue, McIlvoy thought; Macdonald was a preacher. At least on the issue of confederation. The audience was dressed in its finery, and McIlvoy detected a strain of defiance in the set of their faces and rigid postures. Sitting defiantly on hard wooden pews, they were unconvinced, perhaps inconvincible.

“You are content,” Macdonald said to the assembled. “I see that contentment in your faces, in your homes and in
your streets. You have reason to be content. You are prosperous. An enviable state.” McIlvoy noted that when Macdonald spoke publicly he seemed to undergo physical change, becoming almost handsome. His face, which could look like a gathering storm, or the wreckage of that storm, or a startled bird, took on an august cast. His features had the authority of his words. “It is a wonderful thing to be prosperous. To be content.” McIlvoy knew his rhythms, knew how he would use that prosperity as a cudgel, prodding them with such skill that they wouldn't know they were being herded to the slaughterhouse. He spoke for an hour and in the course of that hour, McIlvoy watched the audience relax in their seats, leaning forward slightly, their faces hanging in anticipation, almost swaying to his message, which was: You have built something marvellous but it can easily be lost. Confederation wasn't a way of improving their lot but of keeping what they had built. He made it clear that he needed them, needed their solid citizenry, their moral decency, their guidance and purpose. What Macdonald actually thought of these people was anyone's guess; he hadn't visited any of the homes he had praised. He was a curious combination of elitist and populist. Perhaps you needed to be to become a successful politician. But by the end of the sermon, they were swaying to the sound of salvation: The union would save them from the Americans, the British, the French, the Indians, the devil, and themselves.

I
n the evening there was a grand ball and McIlvoy was seated between a local butcher, a large man, prosperous it appeared, and his equally large wife, safely out of conversational distance of anyone appealing. Across from him was a
man who owned a funeral parlour, a growing business in the New World. The food at least was excellent—pheasant and venison and jellied tongue, roasted potatoes and parsnips—and the wine was plentiful. McIlvoy's masters were all at separate tables, among different crowds, a strategic measure for them to talk to as many people as possible, and relief from the simmering animus that lingered after their days on the boat. They had had enough of one another. Across the room he could see McGee sitting between what appeared to be a mother and her grown daughter. McGee, the Irish raconteur, would be telling them a story in his fluid style, some story that had a hint of intrigue and innuendo, but not enough to offend them. Just the right degree of sauciness to make them feel sophisticated, as if McGee had recognized in them a kinship. McGee's large head seemed to float as it bobbed with his story. As dinner wore on, as conversation with the butcher came to its dismal, tapering conclusion (“Most people don't understand the beauty of the pig”), McIlvoy could see McGee's head getting heavier, bobbing more slowly now, as if his small body had suddenly realized what a weight that large head was. It was evident from this distance of some twenty yards that he was quite drunk. Partway through dinner McGee stood up to excuse himself, and his feet searched the marble floor like a blind man at a precipice. He moved with mechanical steps out of the ballroom, listing to one side, fighting to remain upright. A swirling darkness, McIlvoy guessed, was descending upon him, and he was fighting unconsciousness. McIlvoy prayed he would get to his room unharmed, and relatively unseen. His dinner partners would pass along this bit of news, gleefully to be sure, but he seemed to be escaping without too much notice.
Though he didn't escape Brown's critical eye. The man looked up from his dinner and watched McGee's progress as a chemist observes a failed experiment.

The dinner conversation was painful, though less painful than the dancing that followed. McIlvoy had no choice but to ask the butcher's wife, and he steered her around the floor like a river barge. Then the funeral director's wife, who was thin and dour and danced to the rapid fiddles as if every movement was a separate sin. Surprisingly graceful, Macdonald waltzed gaily with an attractive woman of perhaps twenty-five years, his long legs moving them both in an effortless glide.

This gaiety went on for several hours. McIlvoy was tired, grievously so, but felt duty bound to remain to the end, aware that there might be some mess to contend with.

It was well past midnight and the room was more than half empty. Macdonald stood at his table, laughing uproariously, very drunk. Earlier McIlvoy had seen him grab the coattails of Charlottetown's mayor and pull them hard, a schoolboy prank, then laugh at this wit. He now saw Macdonald pick up a piece of cake and throw it at a local judge, who laughed along with him. This begat cake throwing from several others and ended with Macdonald sitting on the marble floor, having slipped on cake he had thrown himself, his wineglass shattered beside him, screaming at the judge—“You pusillanimous pisspot! You cake-eating harlot! Shitbird!”—and laughing so hard he began to choke, his stork legs kicking, his face the colour of a cranberry. The floor around him was littered with bottles and food and pieces of clothing that had been torn off in sport.

McIlvoy went to Macdonald and helped him to his feet, patting his back and suggesting that it was time to say goodnight. Macdonald went with him, wobbling toward his
room. Cartier, the French fornicator as Brown called him, had left much earlier, and was in his room, his head no doubt resting on the naked breasts of Luce Cuvillier. McGee was unconscious in his clothes after charming then surely offending his dinner companions. And now Macdonald was being led away like a wartime casualty. McIlvoy saw Brown staring after them with an expression of Protestant disgust. From these flawed vessels, McIlvoy thought, a country will be born.

Oh, benighted land.

In the morning, he brought Macdonald tea and toast. He drank the tea and ignored the toast. “Only the innocent eat breakfast,” Macdonald said, pouring more tea. “I gather the evening was quite a success.”

After Charlottetown they went to Quebec and repeated the performance, which went on for days. Dinners, balls, drunkenness, apologies, beseechings, threats, logic, noble words, foul deeds. Macdonald, the only constitutional lawyer among them—another source of irritation for Brown—tinkered with the founding blueprint daily and in all manner of temperament, a country mapped in whiskied elation and dark suffering, in the optimism of morning and the dread of night. The nation would contain all of this, as all nations do.