Kanata (16 page)

The .32-calibre bullet went into the back of his neck and exited his mouth, sending his false teeth past Mrs. Trotter's distorted face and landing with a clatter in the hallway. McGee stumbled and turned and fell on his back in the fresh snow, his arms angled out, legs spread-eagled, his white hat, surprisingly, still wedged onto his head.

M
acdonald woke up to frantic knocking at his front door and received the news through a haze. He threw on his overcoat, got in the carriage, and sped across Sapper's Bridge to Mrs. Trotter's. McGee was still lying in the snow, the blood on his dark face darkening it further.

Macdonald knelt down beside him, removed the white top hat, and pulled McGee's head onto his lap. He looked at the diminutive body, almost childlike in death. His cane was lying
beside him, and Macdonald stared at it. He thought about his brother James Shaw, whom he hadn't thought of in years. Macdonald was seven, James Shaw five, and they were taken to a Kingston tavern by a family friend named Kennedy who had been hired to mind them. Kennedy forced gin on them and then drank heavily himself. John grabbed his brother's hand and fled the tavern, heading for home. Kennedy lurched after them like an ogre from a children's book, weaving down the street, his face black with drink and rage. John pulled his brother along, hoping to reach their house, but James Shaw tripped and Kennedy was on him, drunkenly hammering the boy with his cane. John's cries were for nothing. Kennedy stood there, a drunken beast, as James Shaw convulsed on the ground. Hours later, his brother was dead.

The anger in this world, Macdonald thought, though he supposed he would have to include his own. A world filled with murderous thoughts. He had called McGee a brute, though not to his face, and used him to court the Catholic vote. The only man his equal in eloquence, and perhaps in drink, and in truth, it was McGee who had dreamed the nation, a rambling poetic construct to be sure, but here was the author, dead from an assassin's bullet. Macdonald stared into the simian face that had been caricatured a hundred times as an Irish ape in the newspapers and cleaned the blood from it with the tail of his nightshirt.

With the help of another man, he carried McGee into Mrs. Trotter's parlour, cradling his bloody head. They laid himon the couch, and Macdonald took off McGee's boots and had Mrs. Trotter fetch his carpet slippers and put them on McGee's feet. Macdonald wept uncontrollably for fifteen minutes, then composed himself and summoned the lawyer within. He asked Mrs. Trotter what she had seen.

“I opened the door,” she said, her face still ghostly. “It was late but I stay up late, not one for sleeping my life away. And Mr. McGee, he was often out late.” She gave Macdonald a complicit look that he ignored. It had been necessary on occasion to help McGee up the stairs. Sometimes she had to take his boots and hat off after he collapsed onto the bed unconscious.

“I heard his key turn in the lock and there he was, it was awful, he was shot just as the door opened. I heard the noise and there was blood coming out of his mouth and he fell.”

“Did you see who fired the gun?”

“No, I just saw something slip away into the night, like a shadow of the devil. And then poor Mr. McGee laid out just like you found him. He was full of stories, how he made me laugh.”

Macdonald talked to three men who had been on Sparks Street but they had little to tell him. Surely the work of Fenians. The country's first political assassination. A baptism in blood. He telegraphed the police, who arrived at 4
A.M
.

A
man was hanged for McGee's murder, a suspected Fenian, perhaps the wrong man, but the new Dominion needed to act with authority. Five thousand people turned out to watch James Patrick Whelan swing. He proclaimed his innocence on the gallows and asked that God bless Ireland.

McGee's funeral was held in Montreal, and McIlvoy attended with Macdonald. There was a sea of keening black, the largest crowd the city had yet produced, and Macdonald's grief poured out and joined the deluge.

M
acdonald's government was like Macdonald himself, ruthlessly managed, with extended moments of chaos that threatened to unseat it. One of the questions he had to deal with was the North West. One quarter of the continent was still owned by the Hudson's Bay Company. Five million square miles. The Russians had just sold Alaska to the Americans for $7.2 million. God knew what the Americans would pay for Rupert's Land. McIlvoy had heard the figure $40 million.

“Brown believes the North West is our birthright,” Macdonald told McIlvoy. “That alone would be reason enough to abandon the territory to the Indians. McGee, bless his dead Irish heart, romanticized it, as he did everything. For myself, I see endless and endlessly difficult space. However, if we don't claim it, the Americans surely will. We are bound to take it. The British government will ease our way, I suspect, push us, even, toward the arrangement.” The two men were eating lunch. Outside was the sunshine of May, one of the beautiful months.

“The North West presents as many problems as opportunities,” Macdonald said. “And there are the Indians as well. A burden.”

Macdonald looked up briefly, and McIlvoy stared with him. It was a familiar rhetorical tic, looking heavenward for a moment while he marshalled his arguments. But Macdonald's face looked suddenly stricken, frozen into a frightful mask. Then he collapsed like a pile of dry sticks falling off the back of a wagon, and lay there motionless.

McIlvoy dropped to his knee and listened for his heartbeat, which was still present. He stood and yelled to the parliamentary guard for help, and two uniformed men came and hovered beside McIlvoy. “Place the prime minister on
the chesterfield,” McIlvoy said, and they picked him up awkwardly, aided by a third guard who helped shore up Macdonald's slumping body. He was carried to the East Block and laid on a cot. McIlvoy called for Dr. Grant and waited nervously. Macdonald seemed to be conscious, but in a state where he recognized nothing. Only a soft gasp came from him, then his eyes shut and McIlvoy once more listened for a heartbeat, comforted by its muffled sound.

Grant examined the unconscious Macdonald and pronounced that the problem was gallstones. He recommended rest, an obvious prescription since Macdonald appeared capable of nothing else. Agnes was summoned and stayed beside him as the hours stretched into days. He came in and out of consciousness, but didn't speak. After four days he looked like death, having taken no food and only what little water could be placed on his lips. He hadn't left the East Block and it was assumed by almost all that he would die there. His presence had taken on the macabre cast of a head of state laid out for viewing. It needed only a grieving public to complete the picture. Agnes wept for hours on end. She finally poured some whisky on his chest and rubbed it, not knowing what else to do. She poured more onto her hands and caressed his face, lightly marking the rugged contours, and pushing back his damp, unbrushed hair at the temples. Macdonald's eyes opened.

“Do that again,” he whispered softly. “It seems to do me good.”

His full recovery took several months. Lying in the East Block, Macdonald requested oysters. They had curative properties, he had been told, and Dr. Grant allowed him half an oyster at each meal, saying it would be dangerous to indulge himself.

“Sir John, the hopes of Canada depend on you,” Grant told him.

“It seems strange,” Macdonald said, “that the hopes of Canada should depend on half an oyster.”

When he was sufficiently recovered, Macdonald spread out a map of the North West on the large table in the room he was occupying. It was an uncredited version of David Thompson's map, his signature errors in evidence. McIlvoy stood nearby, nominally as a political aide, but more like a nurse.

“Maps create reality, McIlvoy,” Macdonald said. “You see what is there, and it ceases to be imagined. I spent some time in the British Museum examining maps. They are extraordinary things. Have you ever seen Champlain's maps?” As usual, Macdonald wasn't expecting an answer, though McIlvoy had in fact seen them. The detail was indeed exquisite, made with primitive means, yet surprisingly accurate. “What maps do is dispel fear,” Macdonald said. “They are replaced by new fears, of course. The unknown becomes known and soon becomes a commodity. Once it is a commodity, there is the question of who will buy it, and what will they do with it. Others will want it, as they always have. Champlain was the first cartographer of Canadian reality, his maps the beautiful templates.” Macdonald took a large sip of his drink. “Have you heard of the Italian priest Francesco Bressani? A Jesuit. He drew a map in 1657, a map that shows Indians praying to God, of course, but also hunters, animals, houses, plants, and the peaceful, productive Hurons. All of that. Bressani lived with the Hurons but was captured by the Iroquois and creatively tortured for two months, burned, beaten, and mutilated daily with the persistent genius of men who understand pain, whose own
lives are defined by it. His map was drawn with a hand that had only a single finger left, the others lost to the knives of his torturers.” Macdonald stared out the windows, down to the city below, Ottawa long asleep. “Maps can tell you a great deal.”

4

L
OUIS
R
IEL,
Q
UEBEC,
1877

The North West was his mother and God his father. At the top of Mount Washington, God appeared to him in a cloud of fire, as He had to Moses, and told him, “Rise, Louis David Riel, you have a mission to accomplish for the benefit of humanity.”

The name David wasn't his own, but had been granted by Him. The name of a king. The expectations were great. But what would he accomplish in here? What could be accomplished in such a place, a storage shed for the mad? Within these stone walls were the weak minded, the imbecilic and the alcoholic, as well as criminals, masturbators, and drooling enthusiasts. The doctor was a Methodist who felt dancing was the devil's pastime, yet he allowed it
at the Beauport Lunatic Asylum. He organized balls for the inmates. What grotesque sport. Twitching like dying animals, or gliding in and out of dreams, falling onto the hard floor and staring into the next world or foaming in this one. Did he think this would exorcise their demons, or did he think they were already lost to the devil? Riel wasn't lost. God still whispered to him.

Riel examined the walls of his cell. The stone was cold against his skin. His clothes were in the corner, ripped to pieces. His iron cot torn apart, the bars used to smash the walls, sashes, and ventilator. From the fevered blows against the stone a light dust covered the floor. He examined his naked body, its impressive bulk, as white as alabaster. Had the Philistines come to strip Saul? Perhaps not. He had done it himself. Yesterday, or was it this morning? The doctor had said he had delusions of grandeur. He was the Messiah of the New World, a secret Jew, and he had drowned his old soul in the Mississippi River and would lead his people out of the desert.

“Are you conscious of the times?” the doctor had asked him.

Conscious of the times? How could he not be? He
was
the times. To the south John Brown was trying to free the slaves. There was blood and revolution. Fenian raiders. Everywhere some form of madness. Here the Metis were Israelites persecuted by Egypt. After Riel set his people free he would appoint Archbishop Bourget to be Pope of the New World and move the seat of the Holy Roman Empire to Montreal.

Even a fool could see God's hand in this. The signs had come early. Riel returned to the West in 1867—the year the country was born—to find a plague of grasshoppers, surely a judgment on that misguided creation. They had come in a
dark cloud that stretched across the horizon. It looked like a thunderstorm but didn't sound like one. As the dark mass drew nearer there was an ominous sound, like the mechanics of a music box, whirring, a sound that grew louder until they arrived like stinging hail. The grasshoppers ate everything. They were in chamber pots and pantries and shoes, and they hit the windows with a violence that sounded like gunfire. Riel walked by the banks of the Red River, where dead insects drifted like snow two feet deep against the willows, a fruity deathly smell rising from them.

God cannot create a tribe without locating it, Riel thought. We are not birds. The land was theirs, it belonged to the Metis who had tilled it. God had intended the land to be theirs and had given them warm summers and delivered good harvests. The year the Dominion of Canada was born, He sent a plague of locusts. What else would arrive? Surely He would deliver victory as well.

Riel saw himself as a bull, a red bull, and he roared like one. He was solitary, brutishly strong, a prophet. He saw the light of civilization grow from the Orient, the Euphrates, Palestine, and Rome. It was the New World's turn.

“Mr. David.” It was the voice of Beaupré, the orderly. “Your dinner.” Beaupré pushed the tin plate through the opening. “You've made another mess, Mr. David.”